FELICITÉ ROBERT, Abbé de, was the son of a wealthy shipowner, and born at St Malo in 1782. In the social troubles of the time, his education was neglected; but learning the rudiments of Latin from his brother, he picked up the remainder as best he could, and with marvellous rapidity. At the house of an uncle, whither he was sent when about twelve years of age, he read philosophy and romance at will, until his mind, deepening in emotional and religious fervour, recoiled from all mercantile pursuits. In 1807 he became teacher of mathematics in the college of his native town, where his family had considerable influence. His first work, Réflexions sur l'État de l'Eglise en France, pendant le 18e Siècle (pub. 1808), was mainly directed against the philosophy which he had so eagerly explored and devoured in his youth, and the baneful effects of which were felt everywhere in the religion of his country. Lamennais took the tonsure in 1811, but he was not ordained priest till 1816, having been banished during the Hundred Days for a violent pamphlet written against Napoleon I., and been compelled to earn his bread as usher in a school near London. His greatest work, the Essai sur l'Indifférence en Matière de Religion, was published soon after his return to France, and procured him the offer of a cardinal's hat from Pope Leo XII. It was his last service of faith to the Church of Rome. His love of civil liberty hurried him soon after into conflict with it, and his next volume, touching the relation of religion to civil and political order, subjected the "Second Bossuet" to a fine from the Cour Correctionelle. This did not, however, deter him from pushing on to a solution of the problem, always a favourite one with the laity of France, how civil liberty can consist with religious despotism. A journal, called L'Accusé, was started to enforce his views, and for its vigorous and intrepid thinking, as well as its pure and eloquent style, it soon became a favourite with the democracy of the capital. With every one who had agitated the same question before, Lamennais was found to have rushed from the idolatry of absolute power to the idolatry of absolute individual independence. The complete separation of the temporal from the spiritual power he proclaimed as the only resting-place for his faith; universal suffrage as the only guarantee of his freedom. An encyclical letter from the Pope in September 1832, scattered the coterie of his admirers, who chose to be catholic rather than liberal; and the journal was allowed to drop, towards the close of that year. In 1834 he published his Paroles d'un Croyant, which was condemned almost immediately after by Gregory XVI. Undeterred, Lamennais continued his labours, and while the liberal party in the church contented themselves with enforcing the claims of science and the freedom of literature in the milder pages of the Unicité Catholique, his pen was busy in the cause of revolution, with all the ardour of a man who felt that the bridge was broken down behind him. On his deathbed he resisted all the efforts used to make him retract, and chose to die unreconciled to the church (February 27, 1854). At his own request, no religious rites were performed at his grave. Certain papers, which he earnestly desired to be published, were detained by his relatives in their zeal for the church, but have recently been handed over to the person named for their publication. The spirit of Lamennais' philosophy is essentially ecclesiastical. He followed the path which M. de Maistre had opened up, stepping on a prostrate philosophy in the hope of substituting faith for knowledge, and authority for investigation. In the church of all ages, he finds the one great channel through which God has communicated truth to his creatures. To justify a retreat into this last sanctuary of philosophic despair, it is necessary to make good a thorough philosophic scepticism. This he makes a show of doing on philosophical grounds, but in reality wielding only a passionate misanthropy and mysticism, which can gain only the broken and dispirited in the pursuit of knowledge. Like all who have laboured in the same path, Lamennais seems to have been unconscious of the circle in which he was whirled, and blind to the principle, that philosophically to establish universal scepticism is equally valid to establish a scepticism against scepticism, as to establish a scepticism against philosophy itself. Having abandoned a criterion of truth for the individual, his only resort is to seek it in the race; and in the history of the human family there is but one unchanging element of truth,—one school of verity where doubt does not enter,—viz., the church. With the patriarchs, the palladium of truth was deposited, and the sacred treasure has been preserved by the Jews, to become, under the Christian dispensation, the exclusive property of the Catholic priesthood. The popedom is the living centre of universal consent. Although this is really a theology, it has been by Lamennais beautifully arrayed in the philosophic dress. This is the only secret of its influence. Lamennais may be said to have furnished the most powerful refutation of his scheme, when he advocated the independence of the clergy, and died a martyr to the truth of his own personal convictions. In his political struggles his philosophy vanished, and passed into the hands of De Bonald, Ballanche, and others of the same school, who have sought to seize on some primeval faith, and disentangle it from the doubts and questionings of a personal philosophy. His published works not already mentioned are—Les Affaires de Rome, 1836; Le Livre du Peuple, 1837; Le Pays et la Gouvernement, 1840; De la Religion, 1841; Le Guide du Premier Age, 1846; Une Voix de Prison, 1846; Les Conseils de l'Abbé Lamennais au Peuple, 1849; and Les Esquisses d'une Philosophie, 4 vols. 1840-46. The Paroles d'un Croyant have been translated into English.