Diderot and the Encyclopædists (Vol. 1 of 2)
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Title: Diderot and the Encyclopædists (Vol. 1 of 2)
Author: John Morley
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DIDEROT
AND
THE ENCYCLOPÆDISTS
BY JOHN MORLEY
VOL. I.
LONDON
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1905
_First published elsewhere_
_New Edition 1886. Reprinted 1891, 1897, 1905_
PREFACE.
The present work closes a series of studies on the literary preparation
for the French Revolution. It differs from the companion volumes on
Voltaire and Rousseau, in being much more fully descriptive. In the case
of those two famous writers, every educated reader knows more or less of
their performances. Of Diderot and his circle, such knowledge cannot be
taken for granted, and I have therefore thought it best to occupy a
considerable space, which I hope that those who do me the honour to read
these pages will not find excessive, with what is little more than
transcript or analysis. Such a method will at least enable the reader to
see what those ideas really were, which the social and economic
condition of France on the eve of the convulsion made so welcome to men.
The shortcomings of the encyclopædic group are obvious enough. They have
lately been emphasised in the ingenious and one-sided exaggerations of
that brilliant man of letters, Mr. Taine. The social significance and
the positive quality of much of their writing is more easily missed, and
this side of their work it has been one of my principal objects, alike
in the case of Voltaire, of Rousseau, and of Diderot, to bring into the
prominence that it deserves in the history of opinion.
The edition of Diderot's works to which the references are made, is that
in twenty volumes by the late Mr. Assézat and Mr. Maurice Tourneux. The
only other serious book on Diderot with which I am acquainted is
Rosenkranz's valuable _Diderot's Leben_, published in 1866, and
abounding in full and patient knowledge. Of the numerous criticisms on
Diderot by Raumer, Arndt, Hettner, Damiron, Bersot, and above all by Mr.
Carlyle, I need not make more particular mention.
_May, 1878._
NOTE.
Since the following pages were printed, an American
correspondent writes to me with reference to the dialogue
between Franklin and Raynal, mentioned on page 218, Vol.
II.:--"I have now before me Volume IV. of the _American Law
Journal_, printed at Philadelphia in the year 1813, and at
page 458 find in full, 'The Speech of Miss Polly Baker,
delivered before a court of judicature in _Connecticut_, where
she was prosecuted.'" Raynal, therefore, would have been right
if instead of Massachusetts he had said Connecticut; and
either Franklin told an untruth, or else Silas Deane.
_September, 1878._
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
CHAPTER I.
PRELIMINARY.
The Church in the middle of the century
New phase in the revolt
The Encyclopædia, its symbol
End of the reaction against the Encyclopædia
Diderot's position in the movement
CHAPTER II.
YOUTH.
Birth and birthplace (1713)
His family
Men of letters in Paris
Diderot joins their company
His life in Paris: his friendly character
Stories of his good-nature
His tolerance for social reprobates
His literary struggles
Marriage (1743)
CHAPTER III.
EARLY WRITINGS.
Diderot's mismanagement of his own talents
Apart from this, a great talker rather than a great writer
A man of the Socratic type
Hack-work for the booksellers
The Philosophical Thoughts (1746)
Shaftesbury's influence
Scope of the Philosophical Thoughts
On the Sufficiency of Natural Religion (1747)
Explanation of the attraction of Natural Religion
Police supervision over men of letters
Two pictures of the literary hack
Seizure of the Sceptic's Walk (1747)
Its drift
A volume of stories (1748)
Diderot's view of the fate and character of women
CHAPTER IV.
THE NEW PHILOSOPHY.
Voltaire's account of Cheselden's operation
Diderot publishes the Letter on the Blind (1749)
Its significance
Condillac and Diderot
Account of the Letter on the Blind
The pith of it, an application of Relativity to the conception
of God
Saunderson of Cambridge
Argument assigned to him
Curious anticipation of a famous modern hypothesis
Voltaire's criticism
Effect of Diderot's philosophic position on the system
of the Church
Not merely a dispute in metaphysics
Illustration of Diderot's practical originality
Points of literary interest
The Letter on Deaf Mutes (1751)
Condillac's Statue
Diderot imprisoned at Vincennes (1749)
Rousseau's visit to him
Breach with Madame de Puisieux
Diderot released from captivity
CHAPTER V.
THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA.
(1) ITS HISTORY.
Previous examples of the Encyclopædic idea
True parentage of Diderot's Encyclopædia
Origin of the undertaking
Co-operation of D'Alembert: his history and character
Diderot and D'Alembert on the function of literature
Presiding characteristic of the Encyclopædia
Its more eminent contributors
The unsought volunteers
Voltaire's share in it
Its compliance with reigning prejudice
Its aim, not literature but life
Publication of first and second volumes (1751-52)
Affair of De Prades
Diderot's vindication of him (1752)
Marks rupture between the Philosophers and the Jansenists
Royal decree suppressing first two volumes (1752)
Failure of the Jesuits to carry on the work
Four more volumes published
The seventh volume (1757)
Arouses violent hostility
The storm made fiercer by Helvétius's _L'Esprit_
Proceedings against the Encyclopædia
Their significance
They also mark singular reaction within the school of
Illumination
Retirement of D'Alembert
Diderot continues the work alone for seven years
His harassing mortifications
The Encyclopædia at Versailles
Reproduction and imitations
Diderot's payment
(2) GENERAL CONTENTS.
Transformation of a speculative into a social attack
Circumstances of practical opportuneness
Broad features of Encyclopædic revolution
Positive spirit of the Encyclopædia
Why we call it the organ of a political work
Articles on Agriculture
On the _Gabelle_ and the _Taille_
On Privilege
On the _Corveée_
On the Militia
On Endowments, Fairs, and Industrial Guilds
On Game and the Chase
Enthusiasm for the details of industry
Meaning of the importance assigned to industry and science
Intellectual side of the change
Attitude of the Encyclopædia to religion
Diderot's intention under this head
How far the scheme fulfilled his intention
The Preliminary Discourse
Recognition of the value of discussion
And of toleration
(3) DIDEROT'S CONTRIBUTIONS.
Their immense confusion
Constant insinuation of sound doctrines
And of practical suggestions
Diderot not always above literary trifling
No taste for barren erudition
On Montaigne and Bayle
Occasional bursts of moralising
Varying attitude as to theology
The practical arts
Second-hand sources
Inconsistencies
Treatment of metaphysics
On Spinosa
On Leibnitz
On Liberty
Astonishing self-contradiction
Political articles
On the mechanism of government
Anticipation of Cobdenic ideas
Conclusion
CHAPTER VI.
SOCIAL LIFE (1759-1770).
Diderot's relations with Madame Voland
His letters to her
His Regrets on My Old Dressing-gown
Domestic discomfort
His indomitable industry
Life at Grandval
Meditations on human existence
Interest in the casuistry of human feeling
Various sayings
A point in rhetoric
Holbach's impressions of England
Two cases of conscience
A story of human wickedness
Method and Genius: an Apologue
Conversation
Annihilation
Characteristic of the century
Diderot's inexhaustible friendliness
The Abbé Monnier
Mademoiselle Jodin
Landois
Rousseau
Grimm
Diderot's money affairs
Succour rendered by Catherine of Russia
French booksellers in the eighteenth century
Dialogue between Diderot and D'Alembert
English opinion on Diderot's circle
CHAPTER VII.
THE STAGE.
In what sense Diderot the greatest genius of the century
Mark of his theory of the drama
Diderot's influence on Lessing
His play, _The Natural Son_ (1757)
Its quality illustrated
His sense of the importance of pantomime
The dialogues appended to _The Natural Son_
His second play, _The Father of the Family_ (1758)
One radical error of his dramatic doctrine
Modest opinion of his own experiments
His admiration for Terence
Diderot translates Moore's _Gamester_
On Shakespeare
The Paradox on the Player
Account of Garrick
On the truth of the stage
His condemnation of the French classic stage
The foundations of dramatic art
Diderot claims to have created a new kind of drama
No Diderotian school
Why the Encyclopædists could not replace the classic
drama
The great drama of the eighteenth century
CHAPTER VIII.
"RAMEAU'S NEPHEW."
The mood that inspired this composition
History of the text
Various accounts of the design of _Rameau's Nephew_
Juvenal's Parasite
Lucian
Diderot's picture of his original
Not without imaginative strokes
More than a literary diversion
Sarcasms on Palissot
The musical controversy
DIDEROT.
CHAPTER I.
PRELIMINARY.
There was a moment in the last century when the Gallican church hoped
for a return of internal union and prosperity. This brief era of hope
coincided almost exactly with the middle of the century. Voltaire was in
exile at Berlin. The author of the Persian Letters and the Spirit of
Laws was old and near his end. Rousseau was copying music in a garret.
The Encyclopædia was looked for, but only as a literary project of some
associated booksellers. The Jansenists, who had been so many in number
and so firm in spirit five-and-twenty years earlier, had now sunk to a
small minority of the French clergy. The great ecclesiastical body at
length offered an unbroken front to its rivals, the great judicial
bodies. A patriotic minister was indeed audacious enough to propose a
tax upon ecclesiastical property, but the Church fought the battle and
won. Troops had just been despatched to hunt and scatter the Protestants
of the desert, and bigots exulted in the thought of pastors swinging on
gibbets, and heretical congregations fleeing for their lives before the
fire of orthodox musketry. The house of Austria had been forced to
suffer spoliation at the hands of the infidel Frederick, but all the
world was well aware that the haughty and devout Empress-Queen would
seize a speedy opportunity of taking a crushing vengeance; France would
this time be on the side of righteousness and truth. For the moment a
churchman might be pardoned if he thought that superstition, ignorance,
abusive privilege, and cruelty were on the eve of the smoothest and most
triumphant days that they had known since the Reformation.
We now know how illusory this sanguine anticipation was destined to
prove, and how promptly. In little more than forty years after the
triumphant enforcement of the odious system of confessional
certificates, then the crowning event of ecclesiastical supremacy, Paris
saw the Feast of the Supreme Being, and the adoration of the Goddess of
Reason. The Church had scarcely begun to dream before she was rudely and
peremptorily awakened. She found herself confronted by the most
energetic, hardy, and successful assailants whom the spirit of progress
ever inspired. Compared with the new attack, Jansenism was no more than
a trifling episode in a family quarrel. Thomists and Molinists became as
good as confederates, and Quietism barely seemed a heresy. In every age,
even in the very depth of the times of faith, there had arisen
disturbers of the intellectual peace. Almost each century after the
resettlement of Europe by Charlemagne had procured some individual, or
some little group, who had ventured to question this or that article of
the ecclesiastical creed, to whom broken glimpses of new truth had come,
and who had borne witness against the error or inconsistency or
inadequateness of old ways of thinking. The questions which presented
themselves to the acuter minds of a hundred years ago, were present to
the acuter minds who lived hundreds of years before that. The more
deeply we penetrate into the history of opinion, the more strongly are
we tempted to believe that in the great matters of speculation no
question is altogether new, and hardly any answer is altogether new. But
the Church had known how to deal with intellectual insurgents, from
Abelard in the twelfth century down to Giordano Bruno and Vanini in the
seventeenth. They were isolated; they were for the most part submissive;
and if they were not, the arm of the Church was very long and her grasp
mortal. And all these meritorious precursors were made weak by one
cardinal defect, for which no gifts of intellectual acuteness could
compensate. They had the scientific idea, but they lacked the social
idea. They could have set opinion right about the efficacy of the
syllogism, and the virtue of entities and quiddities. They could have
taught Europe earlier than the Church allowed it to learn that the sun
does not go round the earth, and that it is the earth which goes round
the sun. But they were wholly unfitted to deal with the prodigious
difficulties of moral and social direction. This function, so
immeasurably more important than the mere discovery of any number of
physical relations, it was the glory of the Church to have discharged
for some centuries with as much success as the conditions permitted. We
are told indeed by writers ignorant alike of human history and human
nature, that only physical science can improve the social condition of
man. The common sense of the world always rejects this gross fallacy.
The acquiescence for so many centuries in the power of the great
directing organisation of Western Europe, notwithstanding its
intellectual inadequateness, was the decisive expression of that
rejection.
After the middle of the last century the insurrection against the
pretensions of the Church and against the doctrines of Christianity was
marked in one of its most important phases by a new and most significant
feature. In this phase it was animated at once by the scientific idea
and by the social idea. It was an advance both in knowledge and in moral
motive. It rested on a conception which was crude and imperfect enough,
but which was still almost, like the great ecclesiastical conception
itself, a conception of life as a whole. Morality, positive law, social
order, economics, the nature and limits of human knowledge, the
constitution of the physical universe, had one by one disengaged
themselves from theological explanations. The final philosophical
movement of the century in France, which was represented by Diderot,
now tended to a new social synthesis resting on a purely positive basis.
If this movement had only added to its other contents the historic idea,
its destination would have been effectually reached. As it was, its
leaders surveyed the entire field with as much accuracy and with as wide
a range as their instruments allowed, and they scattered over the world
a set of ideas which at once entered into energetic rivalry with the
ancient scheme of authority. The great symbol of this new
comprehensiveness in the insurrection was the Encyclopædia.
The Encyclopædia was virtually a protest against the old organisation,
no less than against the old doctrine. Broadly stated, the great central
moral of it all was this: that human nature is good, that the world is
capable of being made a desirable abiding-place, and that the evil of
the world is the fruit of bad education and bad institutions. This
cheerful doctrine now strikes on the ear as a commonplace and a truism.
A hundred years ago in France it was a wonderful gospel, and the
beginning of a new dispensation. It was the great counter-principle to
asceticism in life and morals, to formalism in art, to absolutism in the
social ordering, to obscurantism in thought. Every social improvement
since has been the outcome of that doctrine in one form or another. The
conviction that the character and lot of man are indefinitely modifiable
for good, was the indispensable antecedent to any general and energetic
endeavour to modify the conditions that surround him. The omnipotence
of early instruction, of laws, of the method of social order, over the
infinitely plastic impulses of the human creature--this was the maxim
which brought men of such widely different temperament and leanings to
the common enterprise. Everybody can see what wide and deep-reaching
bearings such a doctrine possessed; how it raised all the questions
connected with psychology and the formation of character; how it went
down to the very foundation of morals; into what fresh and unwelcome
sunlight it brought the articles of the old theology; with what new
importance it clothed all the relations of real knowledge and the
practical arts; what intense interest it lent to every detail of
economics and legislation and government.
The deadly chagrin with which churchmen saw the encyclopedic fabric
rising was very natural. The teaching of the Church paints man as fallen
and depraved. The new secular knowledge clashed at a thousand points,
alike in letter and in spirit, with the old sacred lore. Even where it
did not clash, its vitality of interest and attraction drove the older
lore into neglected shade. To stir men's vivid curiosity and hope about
the earth was to make their care much less absorbing about the kingdom
of heaven. To awaken in them the spirit of social improvement was ruin
to the most scandalous and crying social abuse then existing. The old
spiritual power had lost its instinct, once so keen and effective, of
wise direction. Instead of being the guide and corrector of the organs
of the temporal power, it was the worst of their accomplices. The
Encyclopædia was an informal, transitory, and provisional organisation
of the new spiritual power. The school of which it was the great
expounder achieved a supreme control over opinion by the only title to
which control belongs: a more penetrating eye for social exigencies and
for the means of satisfying them.
Our veteran humorist told us long ago in his whimsical way that the
importance of the Acts of the French Philosophes recorded in whole acres
of typography is fast exhausting itself, that the famed Encyclopædical
Tree has borne no fruit, and that Diderot the great has contracted into
Diderot the easily measurable. The humoristic method is a potent
instrument for working such contractions and expansions at will. The
greatest of men are measurable enough, if you choose to set up a
standard that is half transcendental and half cynical. A saner and more
patient criticism measures the conspicuous figures of the past
differently. It seeks their relations to the great forward movements of
the world, and asks to what quarter of the heavens their faces were set,
whether towards the east where the new light dawns, or towards the west
after the old light has sunk irrevocably down. Above all, a saner
criticism bids us remember that pioneers in the progressive way are
rare, their lives rude and sorely tried, and their services to mankind
beyond price. "Diderot is Diderot," wrote one greater than Carlyle: "a
peculiar individuality; whoever holds him or his doings cheaply is a
Philistine, and the name of them is legion. Men know neither from God,
nor from Nature, nor from their fellows, how to receive with gratitude
what is valuable beyond appraisement" (_Goethe_). An intense
Philistinism underlay the great spiritual reaction that followed the
Revolution, and not even such of its apostles as Wordsworth and Carlyle
wholly escaped the taint.
Forty years ago, when Carlyle wrote, it might really seem to a
prejudiced observer as if the encyclopædic tree had borne no fruit. Even
then, and even when the critic happened to be a devotee of the sterile
transcendentalism then in vogue, one might have expected some
recognition of the fact that the seed of all the great improvements
bestowed on France by the Revolution, in spite of the woful evils which
followed in its train, had been sown by the Encyclopædists. But now that
the last vapours of the transcendental reaction are clearing away, we
see that the movement initiated by the Encyclopædia is again in full
progress. Materialistic solutions in the science of man, humanitarian
ends in legislation, naturalism in art, active faith in the
improvableness of institutions--all these are once more the marks of
speculation and the guiding ideas of practical energy. The philosophical
parenthesis is at an end. The interruption of eighty years counts for no
more than the twinkling of an eye in the history of the transformation
of the basis of thought. And the interruption has for the present come
to a close. Europe again sees the old enemies face to face; the Church,
and a Social Philosophy slowly labouring to build her foundations in
positive science. It cannot be other than interesting to examine the
aims, the instruments, and the degree of success of those who a century
ago saw most comprehensively how profound and far-reaching a
metamorphosis awaited the thought of the Western world. We shall do this
most properly in connection with Diderot.
Whether we accept or question Comte's strong description of Diderot as
the greatest genius of the eighteenth century, it is at least undeniable
that he was the one member of the great party of illumination with a
real title to the name of thinker. Voltaire and Rousseau were the heads
of two important schools, and each of them set deep and unmistakable
marks both on the opinion and the events of the century. It would not be
difficult to show that their influence was wider than that of the
philosopher who discerned the inadequateness of both. But Rousseau was
moved by passion and sentiment; Voltaire was only the master of a
brilliant and penetrating rationalism. Diderot alone of this famous trio
had in his mind the idea of scientific method; alone showed any feeling
for a doctrine, and for large organic and constructive conceptions. He
had the rare faculty of true philosophic meditation. Though immeasurably
inferior both to Voltaire and Rousseau in gifts of literary expression,
he was as far their superior in breadth and reality of artistic
principle. He was the originator of a natural, realistic, and
sympathetic school of literary criticism. He aspired to impose new forms
upon the drama. Both in imaginative creation and in criticism, his work
was a constant appeal from the artificial conventions of the classic
schools to the actualities of common life. The same spirit united with
the tendency of his philosophy to place him among the very few men who
have been great and genuine observers of human nature and human
existence. So singular and widely active a genius may well interest us,
even apart from the important place that he holds in the history of
literature and opinion.
CHAPTER II.
YOUTH.
Denis Diderot was born at Langres in 1713, being thus a few months
younger than Rousseau (1712), nearly twenty years younger than Voltaire
(1694), nearly two years younger than Hume (1711), and eleven years
older than Kant (1724). His stock was ancient and of good repute. The
family had been engaged in the great local industry, the manufacture of
cutlery, for no less than two centuries in direct line. Diderot liked to
dwell on the historic prowess of his town, from the days of Julius
Cæsar and the old Lingones and Sabinus, down to the time of the Great
Monarch. With the taste of his generation for tracing moral qualities to
a climatic source, he explained a certain vivacity and mobility in the
people of his district by the great frequency and violence of its
atmospheric changes from hot to cold, from calm to storm, from rain to
sunshine. "Thus they learn from earliest infancy to turn to every wind.
The man of Langres has a head on his shoulders like the weathercock at
the top of the church spire. It is never fixed at one point; if it
returns to the point it has left, it is not to stop there. With an
amazing rapidity in their movements, their desires, their plans, their
fancies, their ideas, they are cumbrous in speech. For myself, I belong
to my country side." This was thoroughly true. He inherited all the
versatility of his compatriots, all their swift impetuosity, and
something of their want of dexterity in expression.
His father was one of the bravest, most upright, most patient, most
sensible of men. Diderot never ceased to regret that the old man's
portrait had not been taken with his apron on, his spectacles pushed up,
and a hand on the grinder's wheel. After his death, none of his
neighbours could speak of him to his son without tears in their eyes.
Diderot, wild and irregular as were his earlier days, had always a true
affection for his father. "One of the sweetest moments of my life," he
once said, "was more than thirty years ago, and I remember it as if it
were yesterday, when my father saw me coming home from school, my arms
laden with the prizes I had carried off, and my shoulders burdened with
the wreaths they had given me, which were too big for my brow and had
slipped over my head. As soon as he caught sight of me some way off, he
threw down his work, hurried to the door to meet me, and fell a-weeping.
It is a fine sight--a grave and sterling man melted to tears."[1] Of his
mother we know less. He had a sister, who seems to have possessed the
rough material of his own qualities. He describes her as "lively,
active, cheerful, decided, prompt to take offence, slow to come round
again, without much care for present or future, never willing to be
imposed on by people or circumstance; free in her ways, still more free
in her talk; she is a sort of Diogenes in petticoats.... She is the most
original and the most strongly-marked creature I know; she is goodness
itself, but with a peculiar physiognomy."[2] His only brother showed
some of the same native stuff, but of thinner and sourer quality. He
became an abbé and a saint, peevish, umbrageous, and as excessively
devout as his more famous brother was excessively the opposite. "He
would have been a good friend and a good brother," wrote Diderot, "if
religion had not bidden him trample under foot such poor weaknesses as
these. He is a good Christian, who proves to me every minute of the day
how much better it would be to be a good man. He shows that what they
call evangelical perfection is only the mischievous art of stifling
nature, which would most likely have spoken as lustily in him as in
me."[3]
Diderot, like so many others of the eighteenth-century reformers, was a
pupil of the Jesuits. An ardent, impetuous, over-genial temperament was
the cause of frequent irregularities in conduct. But his quick and
active understanding overcame all obstacles. His teachers, ever wisely
on the alert for superior capacity, hoped to enlist his talents in the
Order. Either they or he planned his escape from home, but his father
got to hear of it. "My grandfather," says Diderot's daughter, "kept the
profoundest silence, but as he went off to bed took with him the keys of
the yard door." When he heard his son going downstairs, he presented
himself before him, and asked whither he was bound at twelve o'clock at
night. "To Paris," replied the youth, "where I am to join the Jesuits."
"That will not be to-night; but your wishes shall be fulfilled. First
let us have our sleep." The next morning his father took two places in
the coach, and carried him to Paris to the Collége d'Harcourt. He made
all the arrangements, and wished his son good-bye. But the good man
loved the boy too dearly to leave him without being quite at ease how he
would fare; he had the patience to remain a whole fortnight, killing the
time and half dead of weariness in an inn, without ever seeing the one
object of his stay. At the end of the fortnight he went to the college,
and Diderot used many a time to say that such a mark of tenderness and
goodness would have made him go to the other end of the world if his
father had required it. "My friend," said his father, "I am come to see
if you are well, if you are satisfied with your superiors, with your
food, with your companions, and with yourself. If you are not well or
not happy, we will go back together to your mother. If you had rather
stay where you are, I am come to give you a word, to embrace you, and to
leave you my blessing." The boy declared he was perfectly happy; and the
principal pronounced him an excellent scholar, though already promising
to be a troublesome one.[4]
After a couple of years the young Diderot, like other sons of Adam, had
to think of earning his bread. The usual struggle followed between
youthful genius and old prudence. His father, who was a man of
substance, gave him his choice between medicine and law. Law he refused
because he did not choose to spend his days in doing other people's
business; and medicine, because he had no turn for killing. His father
resolutely declined to let him have more money on these terms, and
Diderot was thrown on his wits.
The man of letters shortly before the middle of the century was as much
an outcast and a beggar in Paris as he was in London. Voltaire, Gray,
and Richardson were perhaps the only three conspicuous writers of the
time, who had never known what it was to want a meal or to go without a
shirt. But then none of the three depended on his pen for his
livelihood. Every other man of that day whose writings have delighted
and instructed the world since, had begun his career, and more than one
of them continued and ended it, as a drudge and a vagabond. Fielding and
Collins, Goldsmith and Johnson, in England; Goldoni in Italy;
Vauvenargues, Marmontel, Rousseau, in France; Winckelmann and Lessing in
Germany, had all alike been doubtful of dinner, and trembled about a
night's lodging. They all knew the life of mean hazard, sorry shift,
and petty expedient again and again renewed. It is sorrowful to think
how many of the compositions of that time that do most to soothe and
elevate some of the best hours of our lives, were written by men with
aching hearts, in the midst of haggard perplexities. The man of letters,
as distinguished alike from the old-fashioned scholar and the systematic
thinker, now first became a distinctly marked type. Macaulay has
contrasted the misery of the Grub Street hack of Johnson's time, with
the honours accorded to men like Prior and Addison at an earlier date,
and the solid sums paid by booksellers to the authors of our own day.
But these brilliant passages hardly go lower than the surface of the
great change. Its significance lay quite apart from the prices paid for
books. The all-important fact about the men of letters in France was
that they constituted a new order, that their rise signified the
transfer of the spiritual power from ecclesiastical hands, and that,
while they were the organs of a new function, they associated it with a
new substitute for doctrine. These men were not only the pupils of the
Jesuits; they were also their immediate successors as the teachers, the
guides, and the directors of society. For two hundred years the
followers of Ignatius had taken the intellectual and moral control of
Catholic communities out of the failing hands of the Popes and the
secular clergy. Their own hour had now struck. The rationalistic
historian has seldom done justice to the services which this great
Order rendered to European civilisation. The immorality of many of their
maxims, their too frequent connivance at political wrong for the sake of
power, their inflexible malice against opponents, and the cupidity and
obstructiveness of the years of their decrepitude, have blinded us to
the many meritorious pages of the Jesuit chronicle. Even men like
Diderot and Voltaire, whose lives were for years made bitter by Jesuit
machinations, gave many signs that they recognised the aid which had
been rendered by their old masters to the cultivation and enlightenment
of Europe. It was from the Jesuit fathers that the men of letters whom
they trained, acquired that practical and social habit of mind which
made the world and its daily interests so real to them. It was perhaps
also his Jesuit preceptors whom the man of letters had to blame for a
certain want of rigour and exactitude on the side of morality.
What was this new order which thus struggled into existence, which so
speedily made itself felt, and at length so completely succeeded in
seizing the lapsed inheritance of the old spiritual organisation? Who is
this man of letters? A satirist may easily describe him in epigrams of
cheap irony; the pedant of the colleges may see in him a frivolous and
shallow profaner of the mysteries of learning; the intellectual coxcomb
who nurses his own dainty wits in critical sterility, despises him as
Sir Piercie Shafton would have despised Lord Lindsay of the Byres. This
notwithstanding, the man of letters has his work to do in the critical
period of social transition. He is to be distinguished from the great
systematic thinker, as well as from the great imaginative creator. He is
borne on the wings neither of a broad philosophic conception nor of a
lofty poetic conception. He is only the propagator of portions of such a
conception, and of the minor ideas which they suggest. Unlike the Jesuit
father whom he replaced, he has no organic doctrine, no historic
tradition, no effective discipline, and no definite, comprehensive,
far-reaching, concentrated aim. The characteristic of his activity is
dispersiveness. Its distinction is to popularise such detached ideas as
society is in a condition to assimilate; to interest men in these ideas
by dressing them up in varied forms of the literary art; to guide men
through them by judging, empirically and unconnectedly, each case of
conduct, of policy, or of new opinion as it arises. We have no wish to
exalt the office. On the contrary, I accept the maxim of that deep
observer who warned us that "the mania for isolation is the plague of
the human throng, and to be strong we must march together. You only
obtain anything by developing the spirit of discipline among men."[5]
But there are ages of criticism when discipline is impossible, and the
evils of isolation are less than the evils of rash and premature
organisation. Fontenelle was the first and in some respects the greatest
type of this important class. He was sceptical, learned, ingenious,
eloquent. He stretched hands (1657-1757) from the famous quarrel between
Ancients and Moderns down to the Encyclopædia, and from Bossuet and
Corneille down to Jean Jacques and Diderot. When he was born, the man of
letters did not exist. When he died, the man of letters was the most
conspicuous personage in France. But when Diderot first began to roam
about the streets of Paris, this enormous change was not yet complete.
For some ten years (1734-1744) Diderot's history is the old tale of
hardship and chance; of fine constancy and excellent faith, not wholly
free from an occasional stroke of rascality. For a time he earned a
little money by teaching. If the pupil happened to be quick and docile,
he grudged no labour, and was content with any fee or none. If the pupil
happened to be dull, Diderot never came again, and preferred going
supperless to bed. His employers paid him as they chose, in shirts, in a
chair or a table, in books, in money, and sometimes they never paid him
at all. The prodigious exuberance of his nature inspired him with a
sovereign indifference to material details. From the beginning he
belonged to those to whom it comes by nature to count life more than
meat, and the body than raiment. The outward things of existence were
to him really outward. They never vexed or absorbed his days and nights,
nor overcame his vigorous constitutional instinct for the true
proportions of external circumstance. He was of the humour of the old
philosopher who, when he heard that all his worldly goods had been lost
in a shipwreck, only made for answer, _Jubet me fortuna expeditius
philosophari_. Once he had the good hap to be appointed tutor to the
sons of a man of wealth. He performed his duties zealously, he was well
housed and well fed, and he gave the fullest satisfaction to his
employer. At the end of three months the mechanical toil had grown
unbearable to him. The father of his pupils offered him any terms if he
would remain. "Look at me, sir," replied the tutor; "my face is as
yellow as a lemon. I am making men of your children, but each day I am
becoming a child with them. I am a thousand times too rich and too
comfortable in your house; leave it I must. What I want is not to live
better, but to avoid dying." Again he plunged from comfort into the life
of the garret. If he met any old friend from Langres, he borrowed, and
the honest father repaid the loan. His mother's savings were brought to
him by a faithful creature who had long served in their house, and who
now more than once trudged all the way from home on this errand, and
added her own humble earnings to the little stock. Many a time the hours
went very slowly for the necessitous man. One Shrove Tuesday he rose in
the morning, and found his pockets empty even of so much as a
halfpenny. His friends had not invited him to join their squalid
Bohemian revels. Hunger and thoughts of old Shrovetide merriment and
feasting in the far-off home made work impossible. He hastened out of
doors and walked about all day visiting such public sights as were open
to the penniless. When he returned to his garret at night, his landlady
found him in a swoon, and with the compassion of a good soul she forced
him to share her supper. "That day," Diderot used to tell his children
in later years, "I promised myself that if ever happier times should
come, and ever I should have anything, I would never refuse help to any
living creature, nor ever condemn him to the misery of such a day as
that."[6] And the real interest of the story lies in the fact that no
oath was ever more faithfully kept. There is no greater test of the
essential richness of a man's nature than that this squalid adversity,
not of the sentimental introspective kind but hard and grinding, and not
even kept in countenance by respectability, fails to make him a savage
or a miser or a misanthrope.
Diderot had his bitter moments. He knew the gloom and despondency that
have their inevitable hour in every solitary and unordered life. But the
fits did not last. They left no sour sediment, and this is the sign of
health in temperament, provided it be not due to mere callousness. From
that horrible quality Diderot assuredly was the furthest removed of any
one of his time. Now and always he walked with a certain large
carelessness of spirit. He measured life with a roving and liberal eye.
Circumstance and conventions, the words under which men hide things, the
oracles of common acceptance, the infinitely diversified properties of
human character, the many complexities of our conduct and destiny--all
these he watched playing freely around him, and he felt no haste to
compress his experience into maxims and system. He was absolutely
uncramped by any of the formal mannerisms of the spirit. He was wholly
uncorrupted by the affectation of culture with which the great Goethe
infected part of the world a generation later. His own life was never
made the centre of the world. Self-development and self-idealisation as
ends in themselves would have struck Diderot as effeminate drolleries.
The daily and hourly interrogation of experience for the sake of
building up the fabric of his own character in this wise or that, would
have been incomprehensible and a little odious to him in theory, and
impossible as a matter of practice. In the midst of all the hardships of
his younger time, as afterwards in the midst of crushing Herculean
taskwork, he was saved from moral ruin by the inexhaustible geniality
and expansiveness of his affections. Nor did he narrow their play by
looking only to the external forms of human relation. To Diderot it came
easily to act on a principle which most of us only accept in words: he
looked not to what people said, nor even to what they did, but wholly
to what they were.
Those whom he had once found reason to love and esteem might do him many
an ill turn, without any fear of estranging him. Any one can measure
character by conduct. It is a harder thing to be willing, in cases that
touch our own interests, to interpret conduct by previous knowledge of
character. His father, for instance, might easily have spared money
enough to save him from the harassing privations of Bohemian life in
Paris. A less full-blooded and generous person than Diderot would have
resented the stoutness of the old man's persistency. Diderot on the
contrary felt and delighted to feel, that this conflict of wills was a
mere accident which left undisturbed the reality of old love. "The first
few years of my life in Paris," he once told an acquaintance, "had been
rather irregular; my behaviour was enough to irritate my father, without
there being any need to make it worse by exaggeration. Still calumny was
not wanting. People told him--well what did they not tell him? An
opportunity for going to see him presented itself. I did not give it two
thoughts. I set out full of confidence in his goodness. I thought that
he would see me, that I should throw myself into his arms, that we
should both of us shed tears, and that all would be forgotten. I thought
rightly."[7] We may be sure of a stoutness of native stuff in any stock
where so much tenacity united with such fine confidence on one side,
and such generous love on the other. It is a commonplace how much waste
would be avoided in human life if men would more freely allow their
vision to pierce in this way through the distorting veils of egoism, to
the reality of sentiment and motive and relationship.
Throughout his life Diderot was blessed with that divine gift of pity,
which one that has it could hardly be willing to barter for the
understanding of an Aristotle. Nor was it of the sentimental type proper
for fine ladies. One of his friends had an aversion for women with
child. "What monstrous sentiment!" Diderot wrote; "for my part, that
condition has always touched me. I cannot see a woman of the common
people so, without a tender commiseration."[8] And Diderot had delicacy
and respect in his pity. He tells a story in one of his letters of a
poor woman who had suffered some wrong from a priest; she had not money
enough to resort to law, until a friend of Diderot took her part. The
suit was gained; but when the moment came for execution, the priest had
vanished with all his goods. The woman came to thank her protector, and
to regret the loss he had suffered. "As she chatted, she pulled a shabby
snuff-box out of her pocket, and gathered up with the tip of her finger
what little snuff remained at the bottom: her benefactor says to her
'Ah, ah! you have no more snuff; give me your box, and I will fill it.'
He took the box and put into it a couple of louis, which he covered up
with snuff. Now there's an action thoroughly to my taste, and to yours
too! Give, but, if you can, spare to the poor the shame of holding out a
hand."[9] And the important thing, as we have said, is that Diderot was
as good as his sentiment. Unlike most of the fine talkers of that day,
to him these homely and considerate emotions were the most real part of
life. Nobody in the world was ever more eager to give succour to others,
nor more careless of his own ease.
One singular story of Diderot's heedlessness about himself has often
been told before, but we shall be none the worse in an egoistic world
for hearing it told again. There came to him one morning a young man,
bringing a manuscript in his hand. He begged Diderot to do him the
favour of reading it, and to make any remarks he might think useful on
the margin. Diderot found it to be a bitter satire upon his own person
and writings. On the young man's return, Diderot asked him his grounds
for making such an attack. "I am without bread," the satirist answered,
"and I hoped you might perhaps give me a few crowns not to print it."
Diderot at once forgot everything in pity for the starving scribbler. "I
will tell you a way of making more than that by it. The brother of the
Duke of Orleans is one of the pious, and he hates me. Dedicate your
satire to him, get it bound with his arms on the cover; take it to him
some fine morning, and you will certainly get assistance from him."
"But I don't know the prince, and the dedicatory epistle embarrasses
me." "Sit down," said Diderot, "and I will write one for you." The
dedication was written, the author carried it to the prince, and
received a handsome fee.[10]
Marmontel assures us that never was Diderot seen to such advantage as
when an author consulted him about a work. "You should have seen him,"
he says, "take hold of the subject, pierce to the bottom of it, and at a
single glance discover of what riches and of what beauty it was
susceptible. If he saw that the author missed the right track, instead
of listening to the reading, he at once worked up in his head all that
the author had left crude and imperfect. Was it a play, he threw new
scenes into it, new incidents, new strokes of character; and thinking
that he had actually heard all that he had dreamed, he extolled to the
skies the work that had just been read to him, and in which, when it saw
the light, we found hardly anything that he had quoted from it.... He
who was one of the most enlightened men of the century, was also one of
the most amiable; and in everything that touched moral goodness, when he
spoke of it freely, I cannot express the charm of his eloquence. His
whole soul was in his eyes and on his lips; never did a countenance
better depict the goodness of the heart."[11] Morellet is equally loud
in praise, not only of Diderot's conversation, its brilliance, its
vivacity, its fertility, its suggestiveness, its sincerity, but also
his facility and indulgence to all who sought him, and of the
sympathetic readiness with which he gave the very best of himself to
others.[12]
It is needless to say that such a temper was constantly abused.
Three-fourths of Diderot's life were reckoned by his family to have been
given up to people who had need of his purse, his knowledge, or his good
offices. His daughter compares his library to a shop crowded by a
succession of customers, but the customers took whatever wares they
sought, not by purchase, but by way of free gift. Luckily for Diderot,
he was thus generous by temperament, and not because he expected
gratitude. Any necessitous knave with the gift of tears and the mask of
sensibility could dupe and prey upon him. In one case he had taken a
great deal of trouble for one of these needy and importunate clients;
had given him money and advice, and had devoted much time to serve him.
At the end of their last interview Diderot escorts his departing friend
to the head of the staircase. The grateful client then asks him whether
he knows natural history. "Well, not much," Diderot replies; "I know an
aloe from a lettuce, and a pigeon from a humming-bird." "Do you know
about the _Formica leo?_ No? Well, it is a little insect that is
wonderfully industrious; it hollows out in the ground a hole shaped like
a funnel, it covers the surface with a light fine sand, it attracts
other insects, it takes them, it sucks them dry, and then it says to
them, 'M. Diderot, I have the honour to wish you good day.'"[13]
Yet insolence and ingratitude made no difference to Diderot. His ear
always remained as open to every tale of distress, his sensibility
always as quickly touched, his time, money, and service always as
profusely bestowed. I know not whether to say that this was made more,
or that it was made less, of a virtue by his excess of tolerance for
social castaways and reprobates. Our rough mode of branding a man as bad
revolted him. The common appetite for constituting ourselves public
prosecutors for the universe, was to him one of the worst of human
weaknesses. "You know," he used to say, "all the impetuosity of the
passions; you have weighed all circumstance in your everlasting balance;
you pass sentence on the goodness or the badness of creatures; you set
up rewards and penalties among matters which have no proportion nor
relation with one another. Are you sure that you have never committed
wrong acts, for which you pardoned yourselves because their object was
so slight, though at bottom they implied more wickedness than a crime
prompted by misery or fury? Even magistrates, supported by experience,
by the law, by conventions which force them sometimes to give judgment
against the testimony of their own conscience, still tremble as they
pronounce the doom of the accused. And since when has it been lawful for
the same person to be at once judge and informer?"[14]
Such reasoned leniency is the noblest of traits in a man. "I am more
affected," he said, in words of which better men that Diderot might
often be reminded, "by the charms of virtue than by the deformity of
vice. I turn mildly away from the bad, and I fly to embrace the good. If
there is in a work, in a character, in a painting, in a statue, a single
fine bit, then on that my eyes fasten; I see only that: that is all I
remember; the rest is as good as forgotten."[15]
This is the secret of a rare and admirable temperament. It carried
Diderot well through the trial and ordeal of the ragged apprenticeship
of letters. What to other men comes by culture, came to him by inborn
force and natural capaciousness. We do not know in what way Diderot
trained and nourished his understanding. The annotations to his
translation of Shaftesbury, as well as his earliest original pieces,
show that he had read Montaigne and Pascal, and not only read but
meditated on them with an independent mind. They show also that he had
been impressed by the Civitas Dei of Augustine, and had at least dipped
into Terence and Horace, Cicero and Tacitus. His subsequent writings
prove that, like the other men of letters of his day, he found in our
own literature the chief external stimulant to thought. Above all, he
was impressed by the magnificent ideas of the illustrious Bacon, and
these ideas were the direct source of the great undertaking of Diderot's
life. He is said to have read little and to have meditated much--the
right process for the few men of his potent stamp. The work which he had
to do for bread was of the kind that crushes anything short of the
strongest faculty. He composed sermons. A missionary once ordered
half-a-dozen of them for consumption in the Portuguese colonies, and
paid him fifty crowns apiece, which Diderot counted far from the worst
bargain of his life. All this was beggarly toil for a man of genius, but
Diderot never took the trouble to think of himself as a man of genius,
and was quite content with life as it came. If he found himself
absolutely without food and without pence, he began moodily to think of
abandoning his books and his pen, and of complying with the wishes of
his father. A line of Homer, an idea from the Principia, an interesting
problem in algebra or geometry, was enough to restore the eternally
invincible spell of knowledge. And no sooner was this commanding
interest touched, than the cloud of uncomfortable circumstance vanished
from before the sun, and calm and serenity filled his spirit.
Montesquieu used to declare that he had never known a chagrin which half
an hour of a book was not able to dispel. Diderot had the same fortunate
temper.
Yet Diderot was not essentially a man of books. He never fell into the
characteristic weakness of the follower of letters, by treating books as
ends in themselves, or placing literature before life. Character,
passion, circumstance, the real tragi-comedy, not its printed shadow
and image, engrossed him. He was in this respect more of the temper of
Rousseau, than he was like Voltaire or Fontenelle. "Abstraction made,"
he used to say, "of my existence and of the happiness of my fellows,
what does the rest of nature matter to me?" Yet, as we see, nobody that
ever lived was more interested in knowledge. His biographer and disciple
remarked the contrast in him between his ardent impetuous disposition
and enthusiasm, and his spirit of close unwearied observation. _Faire le
bien, connaître le vrai_, was his formula for the perfect life, and
defined the only distinction that he cared to recognise between one man
and another. And the only motive he ever admitted as reasonable for
seeking truth, was as a means of doing good. So strong was his sense of
practical life, in the midst of incessant theorising.
* * * * *
At the moment when he had most difficulty in procuring a little bread
each day for himself, Diderot conceived a violent passion for a
seamstress, Antoinnette Champion by name, who happened to live in his
neighbourhood. He instantly became importunate for marriage. The mother
long protested with prudent vigour against a young man of such
headstrong impetuosity, who did nothing and who had nothing, save the
art of making speeches that turned her daughter's head. At length the
young man's golden tongue won the mother as it had won the daughter. It
was agreed that his wishes should be crowned, if he could procure the
consent of his family. Diderot fared eagerly and with a sanguine heart
to Langres. His father supposed that he had seen the evil of his ways,
and was come at last to continue the honest tradition of their name.
When the son disclosed the object of his visit, he was treated as a
madman and threatened with malediction. Without a word of remonstrance
he started back one day for Paris. Madame Champion warned him that his
project must now be for ever at an end. Such unflinching resoluteness is
often the last preliminary before surrender. Diderot fell ill. The two
women could not bear to think of him lying sick in a room no better than
a dog-kennel, without broths and tisanes, lonely and sorrowful. They
hastened to nurse him, and when he got well, what he thought the great
object of his life was reached. He and his adored were married
(1743).[16] As has been said, "Choice in marriage is a great match of
cajolery between purpose and invisible hazard: deep criticism of a game
of pure chance is time wasted." In Diderot's case destiny was hostile.
His wife was over thirty. She was dutiful, sage, and pious. She had
plenty of that devotion which in small things women so seldom lack.
While her husband went to dine out, she remained at home to dine and
sup on dry bread, and was pleased to think that the next day she would
double the little ordinary for him. Coffee was too dear to be a
household luxury, so every day she handed him a few halfpence to have
his cup, and to watch the chess-players at the Café de la Régence. When
after a year or two she went to make her peace with her father-in-law at
Langres, she wound her way round the old man's heart by her affectionate
caresses, her respect, her ready industry in the household, her piety,
her simplicity. It is, however, unfortunately possible for even the best
women to manifest their goodness, their prudence, their devotion, in
forms that exasperate. Perhaps it was so here. Diderot at fifty was an
orderly and steadfast person, but at thirty the blood of vagabondage was
still hot within him. He needed in his companion a robust patience, to
match his own too robust activity. One may suppose that if Mirabeau had
married Hannah More, the union would have turned out ill, and Diderot's
marriage was unluckily of such a type. His wife's narrow pieties and
homely solicitudes fretted him. He had not learned to count the cost of
deranging the fragile sympathy of the hearth. While his wife was away on
her visit to his family, he formed a connection with a woman (Madame
Puisieux) who seems to have been as bad and selfish as his wife was the
opposite. She was the authoress of some literary pieces, which the world
willingly and speedily let die; but even very moderate pretensions to
_bel-esprit_ may have seemed wonderfully refreshing to a man wearied to
death by the illiterate stupidity of his daily companion.[17] This
lasted some three or four years down to 1749. As we shall see, he
discovered the infidelity of his mistress and broke with her. But by
this time his wife's virtues seem to have gone a little sour, as
disregarded prudence and thwarted piety are so apt to do. It was too
late now to knit up again the ravelled threads of domestic concord.
During a second absence of his wife in Champagne (1754), he formed a new
attachment to the daughter of a financier's widow (Mdlle. Voland). This
lasted to the end of the lady's days (1783 or 1784).
There is probably nothing very profitable to be said about all this
domestic disorder. We do not know enough of the circumstances to be sure
of allotting censure in exact and rightful measure. We have to remember
that such irregularities were in the manners of the time. To connect
them by way of effect with the new opinions in religion, would be as
impertinent as to trace the immoralities of Dubois or Lewis the
Fifteenth or the Cardinal de Rohan to the old opinions.
CHAPTER III.
EARLY WRITINGS.
La Rochefoucauld, expressing a commonplace with the penetrative
terseness that made him a master of the apophthegm, pronounced it "not
to be enough to have great qualities: a man must have the economy of
them." Or, as another writer says: "Empire in this world belongs not so
much to wits, to talents, and to industry, as to a certain skilful
economy and to the continual management that a man has the art of
applying to all his other gifts."[18] Notwithstanding the peril that
haunts superlative propositions, we are inclined to say that Diderot is
the most striking illustration of this that the history of letters or
speculation has to furnish. If there are many who have missed the mark
which they or kindly intimates thought them certain of attaining, this
is mostly not for want of economy, but for want of the great qualities
which were imputed to them by mistake. To be mediocre, to be sterile, to
be futile, are the three fatal endings of many superbly announced
potentialities. Such an end nearly always comes of exaggerated faculty,
rather than of bad administration of natural gifts. In Diderot were
splendid talents. It was the art of prudent stewardship that lay beyond
his reach. Hence this singular fact, that he perhaps alone in literature
has left a name of almost the first eminence, and impressed his
greatness upon men of the strongest and most different intelligence, and
yet never produced a masterpiece; many a fine page, as Marmontel said,
but no one fine work.
No man that ever wrote was more wholly free from that unquiet
self-consciousness which too often makes literary genius pitiful or
odious in the flesh. He put on no airs of pretended resignation to
inferior production, with bursting hints of the vast superiorities that
unfriendly circumstance locked up within him. Yet on one occasion, and
only on one, so far as evidence remains, he indulged a natural regret.
"And so," he wrote when revising the last sheets of the Encyclopædia
(July 25, 1765), "in eight or ten days I shall see the end of an
undertaking that has occupied me for twenty years; that has not made my
fortune by a long way; that has exposed me many a time to the risk of
having to quit my country or lose my freedom; and that has consumed a
life that I might have made both more useful and more glorious. The
sacrifice of talent to need would be less common, if it were only a
question of self. One could easily resolve rather to drink water and eat
dry crusts and follow the bidding of one's genius in a garret. But for a
woman and for children, what can one not resolve? If I sought to make
myself of some account in their eyes, I would not say--I have worked
thirty years for you: I would say--I have for you renounced for thirty
years the vocation of my nature; I have preferred to renounce my tastes
in doing what was useful for you, instead of what was agreeable to
myself. That is your real obligation to me, and of that you never
think."[19]
It is a question, nevertheless, whether Diderot would have achieved
masterpieces, even if the pressure of housekeeping had never driven him
to seek bread where he could find it. Indeed it is hardly a question.
His genius was spacious and original, but it was too dispersive, too
facile of diversion, too little disciplined, for the prolonged effort of
combination which is indispensable to the greater constructions whether
of philosophy or art. The excellent talent of economy and administration
had been denied him; that thrift of faculty, which accumulates store and
force for concentrated occasions. He was not encyclopædic by accident,
nor merely from external necessity. The quality of rapid movement,
impetuous fancy, versatile idea, which he traced to the climate of his
birthplace, marked him from the first for an encyclopædic or some such
task. His interest was nearly as promptly and vehemently kindled in one
subject as in another; he was always boldly tentative, always fresh and
vigorous in suggestion, always instant in search. But this multiplicity
of active excitements--and with Diderot every interest rose to the
warmth of excitement--was even more hostile to masterpieces than were
the exigencies of a livelihood. It was not unpardonable in a moment of
exhaustion and chagrin to fancy that he had offered up the treasures of
his genius to the dull gods of the hearth. But if he had been childless
and unwedded, the result would have been the same. He is the munificent
prodigal of letters, always believing his substance inexhaustible, never
placing a limit to his fancies nor a bound to his outlay. "It is not
they who rob me of my life," he wrote; "it is I who give it to them. And
what can I do better than accord a portion of it to him who esteems me
enough to solicit such a gift? I shall get no praise for it, 'tis true,
either now while I am here, nor when I shall exist no longer; but I
shall esteem myself for it, and people will love me all the better for
it. 'Tis no bad exchange, that of benevolence, against a celebrity that
one does not always win, and that nobody wins without a drawback. I have
never once regretted the time that I have given to others; I can
scarcely say as much for; the time that I have used for myself."[20]
Remembering how uniformly men of letters take themselves somewhat too
seriously, we may be sorry that this unique figure among them, who was
in other respects constituted to be so considerable and so effective,
did not take himself seriously enough.
Apart from his moral inaptitude for the monumental achievements of
authorship, Diderot was endowed with the gifts of the talker rather than
with those of the writer. Like Dr. Johnson, he was a great converser
rather than the author of great books. If we turn to his writings, we
are at some loss to understand the secret of his reputation. They are
too often declamatory, ill-compacted, broken by frequent apostrophes,
ungainly, dislocated, and rambling. He has been described by a
consummate judge as the most German of all the French. And his style is
deeply marked by that want of feeling for the exquisite, that dulness of
edge, that bluntness of stroke, which is the common note of all German
literature, save a little of the very highest. In conversation we do not
insist on constant precision of phrase, nor on elaborate sustension of
argument. Apostrophe is made natural by the semi-dramatic quality of the
situation. Even vehement hyperbole, which is nearly always a
disfigurement in written prose, may become impressive or delightful,
when it harmonises with the voice, the glance, the gesture of a fervid
and exuberant converser. Hence Diderot's personality invested his talk,
as happened in the case of Johnson and of Coleridge, with an imposing
interest and a power of inspiration which we should never comprehend
from the mere perusal of his writings.
His admirers declared his head to be the ideal head of an Aristotle or a
Plato. His brow was wide, lofty, open, gently rounded. The arch of the
eyebrow was full of delicacy; the nose of masculine beauty; the
habitual expression of the eyes kindly and sympathetic, but as he grew
heated in talk, they sparkled like fire; the curves of the mouth bespoke
an interesting mixture of finesse, grace, and geniality. His bearing was
nonchalant enough, but there was naturally in the carriage of his head,
especially when he talked with action, much dignity, energy, and
nobleness. It seemed as if enthusiasm were the natural condition for his
voice, for his spirit, for every feature. He was only truly Diderot when
his thoughts had transported him beyond himself. His ideas were stronger
than himself; they swept him along without the power either to stay or
to guide their movement. "When I recall Diderot," wrote one of his
friends, "the immense variety of his ideas, the amazing multiplicity of
his knowledge, the rapid flight, the warmth, the impetuous tumult of his
imagination, all the charm and all the disorder of his conversation, I
venture to liken his character to nature herself, exactly as he used to
conceive her--rich, fertile, abounding in germs of every sort, gentle
and fierce, simple and majestic, worthy and sublime, but without any
dominating principle, without a master and without a God."[21] Grétry,
the musical composer, declares that Diderot was one of the rare men who
had the art of blowing the spark of genius into flame; the first
impulses stirred by his glowing imagination were of inspiration
divine.[22]
Marmontel warns us that he who only knows Diderot in his writings, does
not know him at all. We should have listened to his persuasive
eloquence, and seen his face aglow with the fire of enthusiasm. It was
when he grew animated in talk, and let all the abundance of his ideas
flow freely from the source, that he became truly ravishing. In his
writings, says Marmontel with obvious truth, he never had the art of
forming a whole, and this was because that first process of arranging
everything in its place was too slow and too tiresome for him. The want
of ensemble vanished in the free and varied course of conversation.[23]
We have to remember then that Diderot was in this respect of the
Socratic type, though he was unlike Socrates, in being the disseminator
of positive and constructive ideas. His personality exerted a decisive
force and influence. In reading the testimony of his friends, we think
of the young Aristides saying to Socrates: "I always made progress
whenever I was in your neighbourhood, even if I were only in the same
house, without being in the same room; but my advancement was greater if
I were in the same room with you, and greater still if I could keep my
eyes fixed upon you."[24] It has been well said that Diderot, like
Socrates, had about him a something dæmonic. He was possessed, and so
had the first secret of possessing others. But then to reach excellence
in literature, one must also have self-possession; a double current of
impulse and deliberation; a free stream of ideas spontaneously obeying a
sense or order, harmony, and form. Eloquence in the informal discourse
of the parlour or the country walk did not mean in Diderot's case the
empty fluency and nugatory emphasis of the ordinary talker of
reputation. It must have been both pregnant and copious; declamatory in
form, but fresh and substantial in matter; excursive in arrangement, but
forcible and pointed in intention. No doubt, if he was a sage, he was
sometimes a sage in a frenzy. He would wind up a peroration by dashing
his nightcap passionately against the wall, by way of clencher to the
argument. Yet this impetuosity, this turn for declamation, did not
hinder his talk from being directly instructive. Younger men of the most
various type, from Morellet down to Joubert, men quite competent to
detect mere bombast or ardent vagueness, were held captive by the
cogency of his understanding. His writings have none of this compulsion.
We see the flame, but through a veil of interfused smoke. The expression
is not obscure, but it is awkward; not exactly prolix, but heavy,
overcharged, and opaque. We miss the vivid precision and the high
spirits of Voltaire, the glow and the brooding sonorousness of Rousseau,
the pomp of Buffon. To Diderot we go not for charm of style, but for a
store of fertile ideas, for some striking studies of human life, and for
a vigorous and singular personality.
Diderot's knowledge of our language now did him good service. One of
the details of the method by which he taught himself English is curious.
Instead of using an Anglo-French dictionary, he always used one in
Anglo-Latin. The sense of a Latin or Greek word, he said, is better
established, more surely fixed, more definite, less liable to capricious
peculiarities of convention, than the vernacular words which the whim or
ignorance of the lexicographer may choose. The reader composes his own
vocabulary, and gains both correctness and energy.[25] However this may
be, his knowledge of English was more accurate than is possessed by most
French writers of our own day. Diderot's first work for the booksellers
after his marriage seems to have been a translation in three volumes of
Stanyan's History of Greece. For this, to the amazement of his wife, he
got a hundred crowns. About the same time (1745) he published Principles
of Moral Philosophy, or an Essay of Mr. S. on Merit and Virtue. The
initial stands for Shaftesbury, and the book translated was his Inquiry
concerning Virtue and Merit.
Towards the same time, again, Diderot probably made acquaintance with
Madame de Puisieux, of whom it has been said with too patent humour that
she was without either the virtue or the merit on which her admirer had
just been declaiming. We are told that it was her need of money which
inspired him with his first original work. As his daughter's memoir,
from which the tale comes, is swarming with blunders, this may not be
more true than some of her other statements. All that we know of
Diderot's sense and sincerity entitles him to the benefit of the doubt.
The Philosophical Thoughts (1746) are a continuation of the vein of the
annotations on the Essay. He is said to have thrown these reflections
together between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Nor is there anything
incredible in such rapid production, when we remember the sweeping
impetuosity with which he flung himself into all that he undertook. The
Thoughts are evidently the fruits of long meditation, and the literary
arrangement of them may well have been an easy task. They are a robuster
development of the scepticism which was the less important side of
Shaftesbury. The parliament of Paris ordered the book to be burnt along
with some others (July 7, 1746), partly because they were heterodox,
partly because the practice of publishing books without official leave
was gaining an unprecedented height of license.[26] This was Diderot's
first experience of that hand of authority, which was for thirty years
to surround him with mortification and torment. But the disapproval of
authority did not check the circulation or influence of the Thoughts.
They were translated into German and Italian, and were honoured by a
shower of hostile criticism. In France they were often reprinted, and
even in our own day they are said not wholly to have lost their vogue
as a short manual of scepticism.[27]
The historians of literature too often write as if a book were the cause
or the controlling force of controversies in which it is really only a
symbol, or a proclamation of feelings already in men's minds. We should
never occupy ourselves in tracing the thread of a set of opinions,
without trying to recognise the movement of living men and concrete
circumstance that accompanied and caused the progress of thought. In
watching how the beacon-fire flamed from height to height--
[Greek: phaos de têlepompon ouk ênaineto
phroura, prosaithrizousa pompimonphloga--]
we should not forget that its source and reference lie in action, in the
motion and stirring of confused hosts and multitudes of men. A book,
after all, is only the mouthpiece of its author, and the author being
human is moved and drawn by the events that occur under his eye. It was
not merely because Bacon and Hobbes and Locke had written certain books,
that Voltaire and Diderot became free-thinkers and assailed the church.
"So long," it has been said, "as a Bossuet, a Fénelon, an Arnauld, a
Nicole, were alive, Bayle made few proselytes; the elevation of Dubois
and its consequences multiplied unbelievers and indifferents."[28]
The force of speculative literature always hangs on practical
opportuneness. The economic evils of monasticism, the increasing
flagrancy and grossness of superstition, the aggressive factiousness of
the ecclesiastics, the cruelty of bigoted tribunals--these things
disgusted and wearied the more enlightened spirits, and the English
philosophy only held out an inspiring intellectual alternative.[29]
Nor was it accident that drew Diderot's attention to Shaftesbury, rather
than to any other of our writers. That author's essay on Enthusiasm had
been suggested by the extravagances of the French prophets, poor
fanatics from the Cevennes, who had fled to London after the revocation
of the edict of Nantes, and whose paroxysms of religious hysteria at
length brought them into trouble with the authorities (1707). Paris saw
an outbreak of the same kind of ecstasy, though on a much more
formidable scale, among the Jansenist fanatics, from 1727 down to 1758,
or later. Some of the best attested miracles in the whole history of the
supernatural were wrought at the tomb of the Jansenist deacon,
Paris.[30] The works of faith exalted multitudes into convulsive
transports; men and women underwent the most cruel tortures, in the hope
of securing a descent upon them of the divine grace. The sober citizen,
whose journal is so useful a guide to domestic events in France from the
Regency to the Peace of 1763, tells us the effect of this hideous
revival upon public sentiment. People began to see, he says, what they
were to think of the miracles of antiquity. The more they went into
these matters, whether miracles or prophecies, the more obscurity they
discovered in the one, the more doubt about the other. Who could tell
that they had not been accredited and established in remote times with
as little foundation as what was then passing under men's very eyes?
Just in the same way, the violent and prolonged debates, the intrigue,
the tergiversation, which attended the acceptance of the famous Bull
Unigenitus, taught shrewd observers how it is that religions establish
themselves. They also taught how little respect is due in our minds and
consciences to the great points which the universal church claims to
have decided.[31]
These are the circumstances which explain the rude and vigorous
scepticism of Diderot's first performances. And they explain the
influence of Shaftesbury over him. Neither Diderot nor his
contemporaries were ready at once to plunge into the broader and firmer
negation to which they afterwards committed themselves. No doubt some of
the politeness which he shows to Christianity, both in the notes to his
translation of Shaftesbury, and in his own Philosophic Thoughts, is no
more than an ironical deference to established prejudices. The notes to
the Essay on Merit and Virtue show that Diderot, like all the other
French revolters against established prejudice, had been deeply
influenced by the shrewd-witted Montaigne. But the ardour of the
disciple pressed objections home with a trenchancy that is very unlike
the sage distillations of the master. It was from Shaftesbury, however,
that he borrowed common sense as a philosophic principle. Shaftesbury
had indirectly drawn it from Locke, and through Hutcheson it became the
source and sponsor of the Scottish philosophy of that century. This was
a weapon exactly adapted for dealing with a theology that was
discredited in the eyes of all cool observers by the hysterical
extravagances of one set of religionists, and the factious pretensions
of their rivals. And no other weapon was at hand. The historic or
critical method of investigation was impossible, for the age did not
possess the requisite learning. The indirect attack from the side of
physical science was equally impossible. The bearing of Newton's great
discovery on the current conceptions of the Creator and the supposed
system of the divine government, was not yet fully realised. The other
scientific ideas which have since made the old hypothesis less credible,
were not at that time even conceived.
Diderot did indeed perceive even so early as this that the controversy
was passing from the metaphysicians to the physicists. Though he for the
moment misinterpreted the ultimate direction of the effect of
experimental discovery, he discerned its potency in the field of
theological discussion. "It is not from the hands of the metaphysician,"
he said, "that atheism has received the weightiest strokes. The sublime
meditations of Malebranche and Descartes were less calculated to shake
materialism than a single observation of Malpighi's. If this dangerous
hypothesis is tottering in our days, it is to experimental physics that
such a result is due. It is only in the works of Newton, of
Muschenbroek, of Hartzoeker, and of Nieuwentit, that people have found
satisfactory proofs of the existence of a being of sovereign
intelligence. Thanks to the works of these great men, the world is no
longer a god; it is a machine with its cords, its pulleys, its springs,
its weights."[32] In other words, Diderot had as yet not made his way
beyond the halting-place which has been the favourite goal of English
physicists from Newton down to Faraday.[33] Consistent materialism had
not yet established itself in his mind. Meanwhile he laid about him with
his common sense, just as Voltaire did, though Diderot has more
weightiness of manner. If his use of the weapon cannot be regarded as a
decisive settlement of the true issues, we have to remember that he
himself became aware in a very short time of its inadequateness, and
proceeded to the discussion, as we shall presently see, from another
side.
The scope of the Philosophical Thoughts, and the attitude of Diderot's
mind when they were written, may be shown in a few brief passages. The
opening words point to the significance of the new time in one
direction, and they are the key-note to Diderot's whole character.
"People are for ever declaiming against the passions; they set down to
them all the pains that man endures, and quite forget that they are also
the source of all his pleasures. It is regarded as an affront to reason
if one dares to say a word in favour of its rivals. Yet it is only
passions, and strong passions, that can raise the soul to great things.
Sober passions produce only the commonplace. Deadened passions degrade
men of extraordinary quality. Constraint annihilates the greatness and
energy of nature. See that tree; 'tis to the luxury of its branches that
you owe the freshness and the wide-spreading breadth of its shade, which
you may enjoy till winter comes to despoil it of its leafy tresses. An
end to all excellence in poetry, in painting, in music, as soon as
superstition has once wrought upon human temperament the effect of old
age! It is the very climax of madness to propose to oneself the ruin of
the passions. A fine design truly in your pietist, to torment himself
like a convict in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing;
and he would end by becoming a true monster, if he were to succeed!"[34]
Many years afterwards he wrote in the same sense to Madame Voland. "I
have ever been the apologist of strong passions; they alone move me.
Whether they inspire me with admiration or horror, I feel vehemently. If
atrocious deeds that dishonour our nature are due to them, it is by them
also that we are borne to the marvellous endeavour that elevates it. The
man of mediocre passion lives and dies like the brute." And so forth,
until the writer is carried to the perplexing position that "if we were
bound to choose between Racine, a bad husband, a bad father, a false
friend, and a sublime poet, and Racine, good father, good husband, good
friend, and dull worthy man, I hold to the first. Of Racine, the bad
man, what remains? Nothing. Of Racine, the man of genius? The work is
eternal."[35] Without attempting to solve this problem in casuistry, we
recognise Diderot's mood, and the hatred with which it would be sure to
inspire him for the starved and mutilated passions of the Christian
type. The humility, chastity, obedience, indolent solitude, which had
for centuries been glorified by the Church, were monstrous to this
vehement and energetic spirit. The church had placed heroism in
effacement. Diderot, borne to the other extreme, left out even
discipline. To turn from his maxims on the foundation of conduct, to his
maxims on opinion. As we have said, his attitude is that of the
sceptic:--
What has never been put in question, has not been proved. What people
have not examined without prepossessions, they have not examined
thoroughly. Scepticism is the touchstone. (§ 31.)
Incredulity is sometimes the vice of a fool, and credulity the defect of
a man of intelligence. The latter sees far into the immensity of the
Possible; the former scarcely sees anything possible beyond the Actual.
Perhaps this is what produces the timidity of the one, and the temerity
of the other.
A demi-scepticism is the mark of a feeble understanding. It reveals a
pusillanimous reasoner, who suffers himself to be alarmed by
consequences; a superstitious creature, who thinks he is honouring God
by the fetters which he imposes on his reason; a kind of unbeliever who
is afraid of unmasking himself to himself. For if truth has nothing to
lose by examination, as is the demi-sceptic's conviction, what does he
think in the bottom of his heart of those privileged notions which he
fears to sound, and which are placed in one of the recesses of his
brain, as in a sanctuary to which he dares not draw nigh? (§ 34.)
Scepticism does not suit everybody. It supposes profound and impartial
examination. He who doubts because he does not know the grounds of
credibility, is no better than an ignoramus. The true sceptic has
counted and weighed the reasons. But it is no light matter to weigh
arguments. Who of us knows their value with any nicety? Every mind has
its own telescope. An objection that disappears in your eyes, is a
colossus in mine: you find an argument trivial that to me is
overwhelming.... If then it is so difficult to weigh reasons, and if
there are no questions which have not two sides, and nearly always in
equal measure, how come we to decide with such rapidity? (§ 24.)
When the pious cry out against scepticism, it seems to me that they do
not understand their own interest, or else that they are inconsistent.
If it is certain that a true faith to be embraced, and a false faith to
be abandoned, need only to be thoroughly known, then surely it must be
highly desirable that universal doubt should spread over the surface of
the earth, and that all nations should consent to have the truth of
their religions examined. Our missionaries would find a good half of
their work done for them. (§ 36.)
One thing to be remembered is that Diderot, like Vauvenargues, Voltaire,
Condorcet, always had Pascal in his mind when dealing with apologetics.
They all recognised in him a thinker with a love of truth, as
distinguished from the mere priest, Catholic, Anglican, Brahman, or
another. "Pascal," says Diderot, "was upright, but he was timid and
inclined to credulity. An elegant writer and a profound reasoner, he
would doubtless have enlightened the world, if Providence had not
abandoned him to people who sacrificed his talents to their own
antipathies. How much to be regretted, that he did not leave to the
theologians of his time the task of settling their own differences; that
he did not give himself up to the search for truth, without reserve and
without the fear of offending God by using all the intelligence that God
had given him. How much to be regretted that he took for masters men who
were not worthy to be his disciples, and was foolish enough to think
Arnauld, De Sacy, and Nicole, better men than himself." (§ 14.) The
Philosophic Thoughts are designed for an answer in form to the more
famous Thoughts of this champion of popular theology. The first of the
following extracts, for instance, recalls a memorable illustration of
Pascal's sublime pessimism. A few passages will illustrate sufficiently
the line of argument which led the foremost men at the opening of the
philosophic revolution to reject the pretensions of Christianity:--
What voices! what cries! what groans! Who is it that has shut up in
dungeons all these piteous souls? What crimes have the poor wretches
committed? Who condemns them to such torments? _The God whom they have
offended_. Who then is this God? _A God full of goodness_. But would a
God full of goodness take delight in bathing himself in tears? If
criminals had to calm the furies of a tyrant, what would they do
more?... There are people of whom we ought not to say that they fear
God, but that they are horribly afraid of him.... Judging from the
picture they paint of the Supreme Being, from his wrath, from the rigour
of his vengeance, from certain comparisons expressive of the ratio
between those whom he leaves to perish and those to whom he deigns to
stretch out a hand, the most upright soul would be tempted to wish that
such a being did not exist. (§§ 7-9.)
You present to an unbeliever a volume of writings of which you claim to
show him the divinity. But, before going into your proofs, he will be
sure to put some questions about your collection. Has it always been the
same? Why is it less ample now than it was some centuries ago? By what
right have they banished this work or that, which another sect reveres,
and preserved this or that, which the other has repudiated?... You only
answer all these difficulties by the avowal that the first foundations
of the faith are purely human; that the choice between the manuscripts,
the restoration of passages, finally the collection, has been made
according to rules of criticism. Well, I do not refuse to concede to the
divinity of the sacred books a degree of faith proportioned to the
certainty of these rules. (§ 59.)
People agree that it is of the last importance to employ none but solid
arguments for the defence of a creed. Yet they would gladly persecute
those who attempt to cry down the bad arguments. What then, is it not
enough to be a Christian? Am I also to be one upon wrong grounds? (§57.)
The less probability a fact has, the more does the testimony of history
lose its weight. I should have no difficulty in believing a single
honest man who should tell me that the king had just won a complete
victory over the allies. But if all Paris were to assure me that a dead
man had come to life again, I should not believe a word of it. That a
historian should impose upon us, or that a whole people should be
mistaken--there is no miracle in that. (§46.)
What is God? A question that we put to children, and that philosophers
have much trouble to answer. We know the age at which a child ought to
learn to read, to sing, to dance, to begin Latin or geometry. It is only
in religion that you take no account of his capacity. He scarcely hears
what you say, before he is asked, What is God? It is at the same
instant, from the same lips, that he learns that there are ghosts,
goblins, were-wolves--and a God. (§25.)
The diversity of religious opinions has led the deists to invent an
argument that is perhaps more singular than sound. Cicero, having to
prove that the Romans were the most warlike people in the world,
adroitly draws this conclusion from the lips of their rivals. Gauls, to
whom if to any, do you yield the palm for courage? To the Romans.
Parthians, after you, who are the bravest of men? The Romans. Africans,
whom would you fear, if you were to fear any? The Romans. Let us
interrogate the religionists in this fashion, say the deists. Chinese,
what religion would be the best, if your own were not the best?
Naturalism. Mussulmans, what faith would you embrace, if you abjured
Mahomet? Naturalism. Christians, what is the true religion, if it be not
Christianity? Judaism. But you, O Jews, what is the true religion, if
Judaism be false? Naturalism. Now those, continues Cicero, to whom the
second place is awarded by unanimous consent, and who do not in turn
concede the first place to any--it is those who incontestably deserve
that place. (§62.)
* * * * *
In all this we notice one constant characteristic of the eighteenth
century controversy about revealed religion. The assailant demands of
the defender an answer to all the intellectual or logical objections
that could possibly be raised by one who had never been a Christian, and
who refused to become a Christian until these objections could be met.
No account is taken of the mental conditions by which a creed is
engendered and limited; nor of the train of historic circumstance which
prepares men to receive it. The modern apologist escapes by explaining
religion; the apologist of a hundred years ago was required to prove it.
The end of such a method was inevitably a negation. The objective
propositions of a creed with supernatural pretensions can never be
demonstrated from natural or rationalistic premisses. And if they could
be so demonstrated, it would only be on grounds that are equally good
for some other creeds with the same pretensions. The sceptic was left
triumphantly weighing one revealed system against another in an equal
balance.[36]
The position of the writer of the Philosophical Thoughts is distinctly
theistic. Yet there is at least one striking passage to show how
forcibly some of the arguments on the other side impressed him. "I
open," says Diderot, "the pages of a celebrated professor, and I
read--'Atheists, I concede to you that movement is essential to matter;
what conclusion do you draw from that? That the world results from the
fortuitous concourse of atoms? You might as well say that Homer's Iliad,
or Voltaire's Henriade, is a result of the fortuitous concourse of
written characters.' Now for my part, I should be very sorry to use that
reasoning to an atheist; the comparison would give him a very easy game
to play. According to the laws of the analysis of chances, he would say
to me, I ought not to be surprised that a thing comes to pass when it is
possible, and the difficulty of the event is compensated by the number
of throws. There is a certain number of throws in which I would safely
back myself to bring 100,000 sixes at once with 100,000 dice. Whatever
the definite number of the letters with which I am invited fortuitously
to produce the Iliad, there is a certain definite number of throws which
would make the proposal advantageous for me; nay, my advantage would be
infinite if the quantity of throws accorded to me were infinite. Now,
you grant to me that matter exists from all eternity, and that movement
is essential to it. In return for this concession, I will suppose with
you that the world has no limits; that the multitude of atoms is
infinite, and that this order, which astonishes you, nowhere contradicts
itself. Well, from these reciprocal admissions there follows nothing
else unless it be this, that the possibility of engendering the universe
fortuitously is very small, but that the number of throws is infinite,
or in other words, that _the difficulty of the event is more than
sufficiently compensated by the multitude of the throws. Therefore, if
anything ought to be repugnant to reason, it is the supposition
that,--matter being in motion from all eternity, and there being perhaps
in the infinite number of possible combinations an infinite number of
admirable arrangements,--none of these admirable arrangements would have
been met with, out of the infinite multitude of all those which_ matter
successively took on. Therefore the mind ought to be more astonished at
the hypothetical duration of chaos."_[37] (§ 21.)
In a short continuation of the Philosophical Thoughts entitled On the
Sufficiency of Natural Religion, Diderot took the next step, and turned
towards that faith which the votaries of each creed allow to be the best
after their own. Even here he is still in the atmosphere of negation. He
desires no more than to show that revealed religion confers no
advantages which are not already secured by natural religion. "The
revealed law contains no moral precept which I do not find recommended
and practised under the law of nature; therefore it has taught us
nothing new upon morality. The revealed law has brought us no new truth;
for what is a truth but a proposition referring to an object, conceived
in terms which present clear ideas to me, and the connection of which
with one another is intelligible to me? Now revealed religion has
introduced no such propositions to us. What it has added to the natural
law consists of five or six propositions which are not a whit more
intelligible to me than if they were expressed in ancient Carthaginian,
inasmuch as the ideas represented by the terms, and the connection among
these ideas, escape me entirely."[38]
There is no sign in this piece that Diderot had examined the positive
grounds of natural religion, or that he was ready with any adequate
answer to the argument which Butler had brought forward in the previous
decade of the century. We do not see that he is aware as yet of there
being as valid objections on his own sceptical principles to the alleged
data of naturalistic deism, as to the pretensions of a supernatural
religion. He was content with Shaftesbury's position.
Shaftesbury's influence on Diderot was permanent. It did not long remain
so full and entire as it was now in the sphere of religious belief, but
the traces of it never disappeared from his notions on morals and art.
Shaftesbury's cheerfulness and geniality in philosophising were
thoroughly sympathetic to Diderot. The optimistic harmony which the
English philosopher, coming after Leibnitz, assumed as the
starting-point of his ethical and religious ideas, was not only highly
congenial to Diderot's sanguine temperament; it was a most attractive
way of escape from the disorderly and confused theological wilderness of
sin, asceticism, miracle, and the other monkeries. This naturalistic
religion may seem a very unsafe and comfortless halting-place to us. But
to men who heard of religion only in connection with the Bull Unigenitus
and confessional certificates, with some act of intolerance or cruelty,
with futile disputes about grace and the Five Propositions, the
naturalism which Shaftesbury taught in prose and Pope versified was like
the dawn after the foulness of night. Those who wished to soften the
inhuman rigour of the criminal procedure of the time[39] used to appeal
from customary ordinances and written laws to the law natural. The law
natural was announced to have preceded any law of human devising. In the
same way, those who wished to disperse the darkness of unintelligible
dogmas and degraded ecclesiastical usages, appealed to the simplicity,
light, and purity of that natural religion which was supposed to have
been overlaid and depraved by the special superstitions of the different
communities of the world.
"Pope's Essay on Man," wrote Voltaire after his return from England
(1728), "seems to me the finest didactic poem, the most useful, the most
sublime, that was ever written in any tongue. 'Tis true the whole
substance of it is to be found in Shaftesbury's Characteristics, and I
do not know why Pope gives all the honour of it to Bolingbroke, without
saying a word of the celebrated Shaftesbury, the pupil of Locke."[40]
The ground of this enthusiastic appreciation of the English naturalism
was not merely that it made morality independent of religion, which
Shaftesbury took great pains to do. It also identified religion with all
that is beautiful and harmonious in the universal scheme. It surrounded
the new faith with a pure and lofty poetry, that enabled it to confront
the old on more than equal terms of dignity and elevation. Shaftesbury,
and Diderot after him, ennobled human nature by placing the principle of
virtue, the sense of goodness, within the breast of man. Diderot held to
this idea throughout, as we shall see. That he did so explains a kind of
phraseology about virtue and morality in his letters to Madame Voland
and elsewhere, which would otherwise sound disagreeably like cant.
Finally, Shaftesbury's peculiar attribution of beauty to morality, his
reference of ethical matters to a kind of taste, the tolerably equal
importance attributed by him to a sense of beauty and to the moral
sense, all impressed Diderot with a mark that was not effaced. In the
text of the Inquiry the author pronounces it a childish affectation in
the eyes of any man who weighs things maturely to deny that there is in
moral beings, just as in corporeal objects, a true and essential beauty,
a real sublime. The eagerness with which Diderot seized on this idea
from the first, is shown in the declamatory foot-note which he here
appends to his original.[41] It was the source, by a process of
inverted application, of that ethical colouring in his criticisms on art
which made them so new and so interesting, because it carried æsthetic
beyond technicalities, and associated it with the real impulses and
circumstances of human life.[42]
One of Diderot's writings composed about our present date (1747), the
Promenade du Sceptique, did not see the light until after his death. His
daughter tells us that a police agent came one day to the house, and
proceeded to search the author's room. He found a manuscript, said,
"Good, that is what I am looking for," thrust it into his pocket, and
went away. Diderot did his best to recover his piece, but never
succeeded.[43] A copy of it came into the hands of Naigeon, and it seems
to have been retained by Malesherbes, the director of the press, out of
goodwill to the author. If it had been printed, it would certainly have
cost him a sojourn in Vincennes.
We have at first some difficulty in realising how he police could know
the contents of an obscure author's desk. For one thing we have to
remember that Paris, though it had been enormously increased in the days
of Law and the System (1719-20), was still of a comparatively manageable
size. In 1720, though the population of the whole realm was only
fourteen or fifteen millions, that of Paris had reached no less a figure
than a million and a half. After the explosion of the System, its
artificial expansion naturally came to an end. By the middle of the
century the highest estimate of the population does not make it much
more than eight hundred thousand.[44] This, unlike the socially
unwholesome and monstrous agglomerations of Paris or London in our own
time, was a population over which police supervision might be made
tolerably effective. It was more like a very large provincial town.
Again, the inhabitants were marked off into groups or worlds with a
definiteness that is now no longer possible. One-fifth of the
population, for instance, consisted of domestic servants.[45] There were
between twenty-eight and thirty thousand professional beggars.[46] The
legal circle was large, and was deeply engrossed by its own interests
and troubles. The world of authorship, though extremely noisy and
profoundly important, still made only a small group. One effect of a
censorship is to produce much gossip and whispering about suspected
productions before they see the light, and these whispers let the police
into as many secrets as they choose to know.
In Diderot's case, his unsuspecting good-nature to all comers made his
affairs accessible enough. His house was the resort of all the starving
hacks in Paris, and he has left us more than one graphic picture of the
literary drudge of that time. He writes, for instance, about a poor
devil to whom he had given a manuscript to copy. "The time for which he
had promised it to me expired, and as my man did not appear, I became
uneasy, and started in search of him. I found him in a hole about as big
as my fist, almost pitch-dark, without the smallest scrap of curtain or
hanging to cover the nakedness of his walls, a couple of straw-bottomed
chairs, a truckle-bed with a quilt riddled by the moths, a box in the
corner of the chimney and rags of every sort stuck upon it, a small tin
lamp to which a bottle served as support, and on a shelf some dozen
first-rate books. I sat talking there for three-quarters of an hour. My
man was as bare as a worm, lean, black, dry, but perfectly serene. He
said nothing, but munched his crust of bread with good appetite, and
bestowed a caress from time to time on his beloved, on the miserable
bedstead that took up two-thirds of his room. If I had never learnt
before that happiness resides in the soul, my Epictetus of Hyacinth
Street would have taught it me right thoroughly."[47]
The history of one of these ragged clients is to our point. "Among
those," he wrote to Madame Voland,[48] "whom chance and misery sent to
my address was one Glénat, who knew mathematics, wrote a good hand, and
was in want of bread. I did all I could to extricate him from his
embarrassments. I went begging for customers for him on every side. If
he came at meal-times, I would not let him go; if he lacked shoes, I
gave him them; now and then I slipped a shilling into his hands as well.
he had the air of the worthiest man in the world, and he even bore his
neediness with a certain gaiety that used to amuse me. I was fond of
chatting with him; he seemed to set little store by fortune, fame, and
most of the other things that charm or dazzle us in life. Seven or eight
days ago Damilaville wrote to send this man to him, for one of his
friends who had a manuscript for him to copy. I send him; the manuscript
is entrusted to him--a work on religion and government. I do not know
how it came about, but that manuscript is now in the hands of the
lieutenant of police. Damilaville gives me word of this. I hasten to my
friend Glénat, to warn him to count no more upon me. 'And why am I not
to count upon you?' 'Because you are a marked man. The police have their
eyes upon you and 'tis impossible to send work to you.' 'But, my dear
sir, there's no risk, so long as you entrust nothing reprehensible to my
hands. The police only come here when they scent game. I cannot tell how
they do it, but they are never mistaken.' 'Ah well, I at any rate know
how it is, and you have let me see much more in the matter than I
ever expected to learn from you,' and with that I turn my back on my
rascal." Diderot having occasion to visit the lieutenant of police,
introduced the matter, and could not withhold an energetic remonstrance
against such an odious abuse of a man's kindness of heart, as the
introduction of spies to his fireside. M. de Sartine laughed and Diderot
took his leave, vowing that all the wretches who should come to him for
the future, with cuffs dirty and torn, with holes in their stockings and
holes in their shoes, with hair all unkempt, in shabby overcoats with
many rents, or scanty black suits with starting seams, with all the
tones and looks of distressed worth, would henceforth seem to him no
better than police emissaries and scoundrels set to spy on him. The vow,
we may be sure, was soon forgotten, but the story shows how seriously in
one respect the man of letters in France was worse off than his brother
in England.
The world would have suffered no irreparable loss if the police had
thrown the Sceptic's Walk into the fire. It is an allegory designed to
contrast the life of religion, the life of philosophy, and the life of
sensual pleasure. Of all forms of composition, an allegory most depends
for its success upon the rapidity of the writer's eye for new
felicities. Accuracy, verisimilitude, sustention, count for nothing in
comparison with imaginative adroitness and variety. Bunyan had such an
eye, and so, with infinitely more vivacity, had Voltaire. Diderot had
not the deep sincerity or realism of conviction of the one; nor had he
the inimitable power of throwing himself into a fancy, that was
possessed by the other. He was the least agile, the least felicitous,
the least ready, of composers. His allegory of the avenue of thorns, the
avenue of chestnut-trees, and the avenue of flowers, is an allegory,
unskilful, obvious, poor, and not any more amusing than if it's matter
had been set forth without any attempt at fanciful decoration. The
blinded saints among the thorns, and the voluptuous sinners among the
flowers, are rather mechanical figures. The translation into the dialect
required by the allegorical situation, of a sceptic's aversion for gross
superstition on the one hand, and for gross hedonism on the other, is
forced and wooden. The most interesting of the three sections is the
second, containing a discussion in which the respective parts are taken
by a deist, a pantheist, a subjective idealist, a sceptic, and an
atheist. The allegory falls into the background, and we have a plain
statement of some of the objections that may be made by the sceptical
atheist both to revelation and to natural religion. A starry sky calls
forth the usual glorification of the maker of so much beauty. "That is
all imagination," rejoins the atheist. "It is mere presumption. We have
before us an unknown machine, on which certain observations have been
made. Ignorant people who have only examined a single wheel of it, of
which they hardly know more than a tooth or two, form conjectures upon
the way in which their cogs fit in with a hundred thousand other wheels.
And then to finish like artisans, they label the work with the name of
it's author."
The defender justifies this by the argument from a repeater-watch, of
which Paley and others have made so much use. We at once ascribe the
structure and movement of a repeater-watch to intelligent creation.
"No--things are not equal," says the atheist. "You are comparing a
finished work, whose origin and manufacture we know, to an infinite
piece of complexity, whose beginnings, whose present condition, and
whose end are all alike unknown, and about whose author you have nothing
better than guesses."
But does not its structure announce an author? "No; you do not see who
nor what he is. Who told you that the order you admire here belies
itself nowhere else? Are you allowed to conclude from a point in space
to infinite space? You pile a vast piece of ground with earth-heaps
thrown here or there by chance, but among which the worm and the ant
find convenient dwelling-places enough. What would you think of these
insects, if, reasoning after your fashion, they fell into raptures over
the intelligence of the gardener who had arranged all these materials so
delightfully for their convenience?"[49]
In this rudimentary form the chief speaker presses some of the
objections to optimistic deism from the point of view of the fixed
limitations, the inevitable relativity, of human knowledge. This kind of
objection had been more pithily expressed by Pascal long before, in the
famous article of his Thoughts, on the difficulty of demonstrating the
existence of a deity by light of nature.[50] Diderot's argument does not
extend to dogmatic denial. It only shows that the deist is exposed to an
attack from the same sceptical armoury from which he had drawn his own
weapons for attacking revelation. It is impossible to tell how far
Diderot went at this moment. The trenchancy with which his atheist urges
his reasoning, proves that the writer was fully alive to its force. On
the other hand, the atheist is left in the midst of a catastrophe. On
his return home, he finds his children murdered, his house pillaged, and
his wife carried off. And we are told that he could not complain on his
own principles.
If the absence of witnesses allowed the robber to commit his crime with
impunity, why should he not? Again, there is a passage in which the
writer seems to be speaking his own opinions. An interlocutor maintains
the importance of keeping the people in bondage to certain prejudices.
"What prejudices? If a man once admits the existence of a God, the
reality of moral good and evil, the immortality of the soul, future
rewards and punishments, what need has he of prejudices? Supposing him
initiated in all the mysteries of transubstantiation, consubstantiation,
the Trinity, hypostatical union, predestination, incarnation, and the
rest, will he be any the better citizen?"[51]
In truth, Diderot's mind was at this time floating in an atmosphere of
rationalistic negation, and the moral of his piece, as he hints, points
first to the extravagance of Catholicism, next to the vanity of the
pleasures of the world, and lastly, to the unfathomable uncertainty of
philosophy. Still, we may discern a significant leaning towards the
theory of the eternity of matter, which has arranged itself and assumed
variety of form by virtue of its inherent quality of motion.[52]
It is a characteristic and displeasing mark of the time that Diderot in
the midst of these serious speculations, should have set himself (1748)
to the composition of a story in the kind which the author of the _Sofa_
had made highly popular. The mechanism of this deplorable piece is more
grossly disgusting--I mean æsthetically, not morally--than anything to
be found elsewhere in the too voluminous library of impure literature.
The idea would seem to have been borrowed from one of the old
Fabliaux.[53] But what is tolerable in the quaint and _naïf_ verse of
the twelfth or thirteenth century, becomes shocking when deliberately
rendered by a grave man into bald unblushing prose of the eighteenth.
The humour, the rich sparkle, the wit, the merry _gaillardise_, have all
vanished; we are left with the vapid dregs of an obscene anachronism.
Mr. Carlyle, who knows how to be manly in these matters, and affects
none of the hypocritical airs of our conventional criticism, yet has not
more energetically than truly pronounced this "the beastliest of all
past, present, or future dull novels." As "the next mortal creature,
even a Reviewer, again compelled to glance into that book," I have felt
the propriety of our humorist's injunction to such a one, "to bathe
himself in running water, put on change of raiment, and be unclean until
the even." Diderot himself, as might have been expected, soon had the
grace to repent him of this shameful book, and could never hear it
mentioned without a very lively embarrassment.[54]
As I have said before,[55] it was such books as this, as Crébillon's
novels, as Duclos's Confessions du Comte X., and the dissoluteness of
manners indicated by them, which invested Rousseau's New Heloïsa
(1761) with its delightful and irresistible fascinations. Having
pointed out elsewhere the significance of the licentiousness from
which the philosophic party did not escape untainted,[56] I need not
here do more than make two short remarks. First, the corruption which
had seized the court after the death of Lewis XIV. in the course of a
few years had reached the middle class in the town. The loosening of
social fibre, caused by the insenate speculation at the time of Law,
no doubt furthered the spread of demoralisation. Second, the reaction
against the Church involved among its other elements a passionate
contempt for all asceticism. This happened to fall in with the
general relaxation of morals that followed Lewis's gloomy rigour.
Consequently even men of pure life, like Condorcet, carried the
theoretical protest against asceticism so far as to vindicate the
practical immorality of the time. This is one of those enormous
drawbacks that people seldom take into account when they are
enumerating the blessings of superstition. Mediæval superstition had
produced some advantages, but now came the set-off. Durable morality
had been associated with a transitory religious faith. The faith fell
into intellectual discredit, and sexual morality shared its decline
for a short season. This must always be the natural consequence of
building sound ethics on the shifting sands and rotting foundations
of theology.
Such literature as these tales of Diderot's, was the mirror both of the
ordinary practical sentiment and the philosophic theory. A nation pays
dearly for one of those outbreaks, when they happen to stamp themselves
in a literary form that endures. There are those who hold that Louvet's
Faublas is to this day a powerful agent in the depravation of the youth
of France. Diderot, however, had not the most characteristic virtues of
French writing; he was no master in the art of the _naïf_, nor in
delicate malice, nor in sprightly cynicism. His book, consequently, has
not lived, and we need not waste more words upon it. _Chaque esprit a sa
lie_, wrote one who for a while had sat at Diderot's feet;[57] and we
may dismiss this tale as the lees of Diderot's strong, careless,
sensualised understanding. He was afterwards the author of a work, La
Religieuse, on which the superficial critic may easily pour out the
vials of affected wrath. There, however, he was executing a profound
pathological study in a serious spirit. If the subject is horrible, we
have to blame the composition of human character, or the mischievousness
of a human institution. La Religieuse is no continuation of the vein of
defilement which began and ended with the story of 1748--a story which
is one among so many illustrations of Guizot's saying about the
eighteenth century, that it was the most tempting and seductive of all
centuries, for it promised full satisfaction at once to all the
greatnesses of humanity and to all its weaknesses. Hettner quotes a
passage from the minor writings of Niebuhr, in which the historian
compares Diderot with Petronius, as having both of them been honest and
well-intentioned men, who in shameless times were carried towards
cynicism by their deep contempt for the prevailing vice. "If Diderot
were alive now," says Niebuhr, "and if Petronius had only lived in the
fourth instead of the third century, then the painting of obscenity
would have been odious to them, and the inducement to it infinitely
smaller."[58] There is no trace in Diderot of this deep contempt for the
viciousness of his time. All that can be said is that he did not escape
it in his earlier years, in spite of the natural wholesomeness and
rectitude of his character.
It is worthy of remark that the dissoluteness of the middle portion of
the century was not associated with the cynical and contemptuous view
about women that usually goes with relaxed morality. There was a more or
less distinct consciousness of a truth which has ever since grown into
clearer prominence with the advance of thought since the Revolution. It
is that the sphere and destiny of women are among the three or four
foremost questions in social improvement. This is now perceived on all
sides, profound as are the differences of opinion upon the proper
solution of the problem. A hundred years ago this perception was vague
and indefinite, but there was an unmistakable apprehension that the
Catholic ideal of womanhood was no more adequate to the facts of life,
than Catholic views about science, or property, or labour, or political
order and authority.
Diderot has left some curious and striking reflections upon the fate and
character of women. He gives no signs of feeling after social
reorganisation; he only speaks as one brooding in uneasy meditation over
a very mournful perplexity. There is no sentimentalising, after the
fashion of Jean Jacques. He does not neglect the plain physical facts,
about which it is so difficult in an age of morbid reserve to speak with
freedom, yet about which it is fatal to be silent. He indulged in none
of those mischievous flatteries of women, which satisfy narrow
observers, or coxcombs, or the uxorious. "Never forget," he said, "that
for lack of reflection and principles, nothing penetrates down to a
certain profoundness of conviction in the understanding of women. The
ideas of justice, virtue, vice, goodness, badness, float on the surface
of their souls. They have preserved self-love and personal interest with
all the energy of nature. Although more civilized than we are outwardly,
they have remained true savages inwardly.... It is in the passion of
love, the access of jealousy, the transports of maternal tenderness, the
instants of superstition, the way in which they show epidemic and
popular notions, that women amaze us; fair as the seraphin of Klopstock,
terrible as the fiends of Milton.... The distractions of a busy and
contentious life break up our passions. A woman, on the contrary, broods
over her passions; they are a fixed point on which her idleness or the
frivolity of her duties holds her attention fast.... Impenetrable in
dissimulation, cruel in vengeance, tenacious in their designs, without
scruples about the means of success, animated by a deep and secret
hatred against the despotism of man--it seems as if there were among
them a sort of league, such as exists among the priests of all
nations.... The symbol of women in general is that of the Apocalypse, on
the front of which is inscribed _Mystery_.... If we have more reason
than women have, they have far more instinct than we have."[59] All this
was said in no bitterness, but in the spirit of the strong observer.
Cynical bitterness is as misplaced as frivolous adulation. Diderot had a
deep pity for women. Their physical weaknesses moved him to compassion.
To these are added the burden of their maternal function, and the burden
of unequal laws. "The moment which shall deliver the girl from
subjection to her parents is come; her imagination opens to a future
thronged by chimæras; her heart swims in secret delight. Rejoice while
thou canst, luckless creature! Time would have weakened the tyranny that
thou hast left; time will strengthen the tyranny that awaits thee. They
choose a husband for her. She becomes a mother. It is in anguish, at the
peril of their lives, at the cost of their charms, often to the damage
of their health, that they give birth to their little ones. The organs
that mark their sex are subject to two incurable maladies. There is,
perhaps, no joy comparable to that of the mother as she looks on her
first-born; but the moment is dearly bought. Time advances, beauty
passes; there come the years of neglect, of spleen, of weariness. 'Tis
in pain that Nature disposes them for maternity; in pain and illness,
dangerous and prolonged, she brings maternity to its close. What is a
woman after that? Neglected by her husband, left by her children, a
nullity in society, then piety becomes her one and last resource. In
nearly every part of the world, the cruelty of the civil laws against
women is added to the cruelty of Nature. They have been treated like
weak-minded children. There is no sort of vexation which, among
civilised peoples, man cannot inflict upon woman with impunity."[60]
The thought went no further, in Diderot's mind, than this pathetic
ejaculation. He left it to the next generation, to Condorcet and others,
to attack the problem practically; effectively to assert the true theory
that we must look to social emancipation in women, and moral discipline
in men, to redress the physical disadvantages. Meanwhile Diderot
deserves credit for treating the position and character of women in a
civilised society with a sense of reality; and for throwing aside those
faded gallantries of poetic and literary convention, that screen a broad
and dolorous gulf.
CHAPTER IV.
THE NEW PHILOSOPHY.
It is a common prejudice to treat Voltaire as if he had done nothing
save write the Pucelle and mock at Habakkuk. Every serious and
instructed student knows better. Voltaire's popularisation of the
philosophy of Newton (1738) was a stimulus of the greatest importance to
new thought in France. In a chapter of this work he had explained with
his usual matchless terseness and lucidity Berkeley's theory of vision.
The principle of this theory is, as every one knows, that figures,
magnitudes, situations, distances, are not sensations but inferences;
they are not the immediate revelations of sight, but the products of
association and intellectual construction; they are not directly judged
by vision, but by imagination and experience. If this be so, neither
situation, nor distance, nor magnitude, nor figure, would be at once
discerned by one born blind, supposing him suddenly to receive sight.
Voltaire then describes the results of the operation performed by
Cheselden (1728) on a lad who had been blind from his birth. This
experiment was believed to confirm all that Locke and Berkeley had
foreseen, for it was long before the patient could distinguish objects
by size, distance, or shape.[61] Condillac had renewed the interest
which Voltaire had first kindled in the subject, by referring to
Cheselden's experiment in his first work, which was published in
1746.[62]
It happened that in 1748 Réaumur couched the eyes of a girl who had been
born blind. Diderot sought to be admitted to the operation, but the
favour was denied him, and he expressed his resentment in terms which,
as we shall see, cost him very dear. As he could not witness the
experiment, he began to meditate upon the subject, and the result was
the _Letter on the Blind for the Use of those who See_. published in
1749--the date, it may be observed in passing, of another very important
work in the development of materialistic speculation, David Hartley's
_Observations on man, his frame, his duty, and his expectations_.
Diderot's real disappointment at not being admitted to the operation was
slight. In a vigorous passage he shows the difficulties in the way of
conducting such an experiment under the conditions necessary to make it
conclusive. To prepare the born-blind to answer philosophical
interrogatories truly, and then to put these interrogatories rightly,
would have been a feat, he declares, not unworthy of the united talents
of Newton, Descartes, Locke, and Leibnitz. Unless the patient were
placed in such conditions as this, Diderot thinks there would be more
profit in questioning a blind person of good sense, than in the answers
of an uneducated person receiving sight for the first time under
abnormal and bewildering circumstances.[63] In this he was undoubtedly
right. If the experiment could be prepared under the delicate conditions
proper to make it demonstrative evidence, it would be final. But the
experiment had certainly not been so prepared in his time, and probably
never will be.[64]
Read in the light of the rich and elaborate speculative literature which
England is producing in our own day, Diderot's once famous Letter on the
Blind seems both crude and loose in its thinking. Yet considering the
state of philosophy in France at the time of its appearance, we are
struck by the acuteness, the good sense, and the originality of many of
its positions. It was the first effective introduction into France of
these great and fundamental principles; that all knowledge is relative
to our intelligence, that thought is not the measure of existence, nor
the conceivableness of a proposition the test of its truth, and that our
experience is not the limit to the possibilities of things. That is an
impatient criticism which dismisses the French philosophers with some
light word as radically shallow and impotent. Diderot grasped the
doctrine of Relativity in some of the most important and far-reaching of
all its bearings. The fact that he and his allies used the doctrine as a
weapon of combat against the standing organisation, is exactly what
makes their history worth writing about. The standing organisation was
the antagonistic doctrine incarnate. It made anthropomorphism and the
absolute the very base and spring alike of individual and of social
life. No growth was possible until this speculative base had been
transformed. Hence the profound significance of what looks like a mere
discussion of one of the minor problems of metaphysics. Diderot was not
the first to discover Relativity, nor did he establish it; but it was he
who introduced it into the literature of his country at the moment when
circumstances were ripe for it.
Condillac, as we have said, had published his first work, the Essay on
the Origin of Human Knowledge, three years before (1746). This was a
simple and undeveloped rendering of the doctrine of Locke, that the
ultimate source of our notions lies in impressions made upon the senses,
shaped and combined by reflection. It was not until 1754 that Condillac
published his more celebrated treatise on the Sensations, in which he
advanced a stride beyond Locke, and instead of tracing our notions to
the double source of sensation and reflection, maintained that
reflection itself is nothing but sensation "differently transformed." In
the first book, again, he had disputed Berkeley's theory of vision: in
the second, he gave a reasoned adhesion to it. Now Diderot and Condillac
had first been brought together by Rousseau, when all three were needy
wanderers about the streets of Paris. They used to dine together once a
week at a tavern, and it was Diderot who persuaded a bookseller to give
Condillac a hundred crowns for his first manuscript. "The Paris
booksellers," says Rousseau, "are very arrogant and harsh to beginners;
and metaphysics, then extremely little in fashion, did not offer a very
particularly attractive subject."[65] The constant intercourse between
Diderot and Condillac in the interval between the two works of the great
apostle of Sensationalism, may well account for the remarkable
development in doctrine. This is one of the many examples of the share
of Diderot's energetic and stimulating intelligence, in directing and
nourishing the movement of the time, its errors and precipitancies
included. On the other hand, the share of Condillac in providing a text
for Diderot's first considerable performance, is equally evident.
The Letter on the Blind is an inquiry how far a modification of the five
senses, such as the congenital absence of one of them, would involve a
corresponding modification of the ordinary notions acquired by men who
are normally endowed in their capacity for sensation. It considers the
Intellect in a case where it is deprived of one of the senses. The
writer opens with an account of a visit made by himself and some friends
to a man born blind at Puisaux, a place seventy miles from Paris. They
asked him in what way he thought of the eyes. "They are an organ on
which the air produces the same effect as my stick upon my hand." A
mirror he described "as a machine which sets things in relief away from
themselves, if they are properly placed in relation to it." This
conception had formed itself in his mind in the following way. The blind
man only knows objects by touch. He is aware, on the testimony of
others, that we know objects by sight as he knows them by touch; he can
form no other notion. He is aware, again, that a man cannot see his own
face, though he can touch it. Sight, then, he concludes, is a sort of
touch, which only extends to objects different from our own visage, and
remote from us. Now touch only conveys to him the idea of relief. A
mirror, therefore, must be a machine which sets us in relief out of
ourselves. How many philosophers, cries Diderot, have employed less
subtlety to reach notions just as untrue?
The born-blind had a memory for sound in a surprising degree, and
countenances do not present more diversity to us than he observed in
voices. The voice has for such persons an infinite number of delicate
shades that escape us, because we have not the same reason for
attention that the blind have. The help that our senses lend to one
another, is an obstacle to their perfection.
The blind man said he should have been tempted to regard persons endowed
with sight as superior intelligences, if he had not found out a hundred
times how inferior we are in other respects. How do we know--Diderot
reflects upon this--that all the animals do not reason in the same way,
and look upon themselves as our equals or superiors, notwithstanding our
more complex and efficient intelligence? They may accord to us a reason
with which we should still have much need of their instinct while they
claim to be endowed with an instinct which enables them to do very well
without our reason.
When asked whether he should be glad to have sight, the born-blind
replied that, apart from curiosity, he would be just as well pleased to
have long arms: his hands would tell him what is going on in the moon,
better than our eyes or telescopes; and the eyes cease to see earlier
than the hands lose the sense of touch. It would therefore be just as
good to perfect in him the organ that he had, as to confer upon him
another which he had not. This is untrue. No conceivable perfection of
touch would reveal phenomena of light, and the longest arms must leave
those phenomena undisclosed.
After recounting various other peculiarities of thought, Diderot notices
that the blind man attaches slight importance to the sense of shame. He
would hardly understand the utility of clothes, for instance, except as
a protection against cold. He frankly told his philosophising visitors
that he could not see why one part of the body should be covered rather
than another. "I have never doubted," says Diderot, "that the state of
our organs and senses has much influence both on our metaphysics and our
morality." This, I may observe, does not in the least show that in a
society of human beings, not blind, but endowed with vision, the sense
of physical shame is a mere prejudice of which philosophy will rid us.
The fact that a blind man discerns no ill in nakedness, has no bearing
on the value or naturalness of shame among people with eyes. And
moreover, the fact that delicacy or shame is not a universal human
impulse, but is established, and its scope defined, by a varying
etiquette, does not in the least affect the utility or wisdom of such an
artificial establishment and definition. The grounds of delicacy, though
connected with the senses, are fixed by considerations that spring from
the social reason. It seems to be true, as Diderot says, that the
born-blind are at first without physical delicacy; because delicacy has
its root in the consciousness that we are observed, while the born-blind
are not conscious that they are observed. It is found that one of the
most important parts of their education is to impress this knowledge
upon them.[66]
But the artificiality of a moral acquisition is obviously no test of
its worth, nor of the reasons for preserving it. Diderot exclaims, "Ah,
madam, how different is the morality of a blind man from ours; and how
the morality of the deaf would differ from that of the blind; and if a
being should have a sense more than we have, how wofully imperfect would
he find our morality!" This is plainly a crude and erroneous way of
illustrating the important truth of the strict relativity of ethical
standards and maxims. Diderot speaks as if they were relative simply and
solely to our five wits, and would vary with them only. Everybody now
has learnt that morality depends not merely on the five wits, but on the
mental constitution within, and on the social conditions without. It is
to these rather than to the number of our senses, that moral ideas are
relative.
Passing over various other remarks, we come to those pages in the Letter
which apply the principle of relativity to the master-conception of God.
Diderot's argument on this point naturally drew keener attention than
the more disinterestedly scientific parts of his contribution. People
were not strongly agitated by the question whether a blind man who had
learned to distinguish a sphere from a cube by touch, would instantly
identify each of them if he received sight.[67]
The question whether a blind man has as good reasons for believing in
the existence of a God as a man with sight can find, was of more vivid
interest. As a matter of fact, Diderot's treatment of the narrower
question (pp. 324, etc.) is more closely coherent than his treatment of
the wider one, for the simple reason that the special limitation of
experience in the born-blind cannot fairly be made to yield any decisive
evidence on the great, the insoluble enigma.
Here, as in the other part of his essay, Diderot followed the method of
interrogating the blind themselves. In this instance, he turned to the
most extraordinary example in history, of intellectual mastery and
scientific penetration in one who practically belonged to the class of
the born-blind; and this too in dealing with subjects where sight might
be thought most indispensable. From 1711 to 1739 one of the professors
of mathematics at Cambridge was Nicholas Saunderson, who had lost his
sight before he was twelve months old. He was a man of striking mental
vigour, an original and efficient teacher, and the author of a book upon
algebra which was considered meritorious in its day. His knowledge of
optics was highly remarkable. He had distinct ideas of perspective, of
the projections of the sphere, and of the forms assumed by plane or
solid figures in certain positions. For performing computations he
devised a machine of great ingenuity, which also served the purpose,
with certain modifications, of representing geometrical diagrams. In
religion he was a sceptic or something more, and in his last hours
Diderot supposes him to have engaged in a discussion with a minister of
religion, upon the arguments for the existence of a deity drawn from
final causes. This discussion Diderot professes to reproduce, and he
makes Saunderson discourse with much eloquence and some pathos.
By one of those mystifications which make the French polemical
literature of the eighteenth century the despair of bibliographers,
Diderot cites as his authority a _Life of Saunderson_, by Dr. Inchlif.
He sets forth the title with great circumstantiality, but no such book
exists or ever did exist. The Royal Society of London, however, took the
jest of fathering atheism on one of its members in bad part, and Diderot
was systematically excluded from the honour of admission to that learned
body, as he was excluded all his life from the French Academy.
The reasoning which Diderot puts into the professor's mouth is at first
a fervid enlargement of the text, that the argument drawn from the
wonders of nature is very weak evidence for blind men. Our power of
creating new objects, so to speak, by means of a little mirror, is far
more incomprehensible to them, than the stars which they have been
condemned never to behold. The luminous ball that moves from east to
west through the heavens, is a less astonishing thing to them than the
fire on the hearth which they can lessen or augment at pleasure.[68]
"Why talk to me," says Saunderson, "of all that fine spectacle which has
never been made for me? I have been condemned to pass my life in
darkness; and you cite marvels that I cannot understand, and that are
only evidence for you and for those who see as you do. If you want me to
believe in God, you must make me touch him." The minister replied that
the sense of touch ought to be enough to reveal the divinity to him in
the admirable mechanism of his organs. To this, Saunderson:--"I repeat,
all that is not as fine for me as it is for you. But the animal
mechanism, even were it as perfect as you pretend, and as I daresay it
is--what has it in common with a Being of sovereign intelligence? If it
fills you with astonishment, that is perhaps because you are in the
habit of treating as a prodigy anything that strikes you as being beyond
your own strength. I have been myself so often an object of admiration
for you, that I have a poor opinion of what surprises you. I have
attracted people from all parts of England, who could not conceive by
what means I could work at geometry. Well, you must agree that such
persons had not very exact notions about the possibility of things. Is a
phenomenon in our notions beyond the power of man? Then we instantly
say--_'Tis the handiwork of a God_. Nothing short of that can content
our vanity. Why can we not contrive to throw into our talk less pride
and more philosophy? If nature offers us some knot that is hard to
untie, let us leave it for what it is; do not let us employ for cutting
it the hand of a Being, who then immediately becomes in turn a new knot
for us, and a knot harder to untie than the first. An Indian tells you
that our globe is suspended in the air on the back of an elephant. And
the elephant! It stands on a tortoise. And the tortoise? what sustains
that?... You pity the Indian: and yet one might very well say to you as
to him--Mr. Holmes, my good friend, confess your ignorance, and spare me
elephant and tortoise."[69]
The minister very naturally then falls back upon good authority, and
asks Saunderson to take the word of Newton, Clarke, and Leibnitz. The
blind man answers that though the actual state of the universe may be
the illustration of a marvellous and admirable order, still Newton,
Clarke, and Leibnitz must leave him freedom of opinion as to its earlier
states. And then he foreshadows in a really singular and remarkable way
that theory which is believed to be the great triumph of scientific
discovery, and which is certainly the great stimulus to speculation, in
our own time. As to anterior states "you have no witnesses to confront
with me, and your eyes give you no help. Imagine, if you choose, that
the order which strikes you so profoundly has subsisted from the
beginning. But leave me free to think that it has done no such thing,
and that if we went back to the birth of things and scenes, and
perceived matter in motion and chaos slowly disentangling itself, we
should come across a whole multitude of shapeless creatures, instead of
a very few creatures highly organised. If I have no objection to make to
what you say about the present condition of things, I may at least
question you as to their past condition. I may at least ask of you, for
example, who told you--you and Leibnitz and Clarke and Newton--that in
the first instances of the formation of animals, some were not without
heads and others without feet? I may maintain that these had no
stomachs, and those no intestines; that some to whom a stomach, a
palate, and teeth seemed to promise permanence, came to an end through
some fault of heart or lungs; that the monsters annihilated one another
in succession, that all the faulty (_vicieuses_) combinations of matter
disappeared, and that _those only survived whose mechanism implied no
important mis-adaptation_ (contradiction), _and who had the power of
supporting and perpetuating themselves_.
"On this hypothesis, if the first man had happened to have his larynx
closed, or had not found suitable food, or had been defective in the
parts of generation, or had failed to find a mate, then what would have
become of the human race? It would have been still enfolded in the
general depuration of the universe; and that arrogant being who calls
himself Man, dissolved and scattered among the molecules of matter,
would perhaps have remained for all time hidden in the number of mere
possibilities.
"If shapeless creatures had never existed, you would not fail to insist
that none will ever appear, and that I am throwing myself headlong into
chimerical hypotheses. But the order is not even now so perfect, but
that monstrous products appear from time to time."[70]
We have here a distinct enough conception, though in an exceedingly
undigested shape, first, of incessant Variability in organisms as an
actual circumstance, which we may see exemplified in its extreme form in
the monstrous deviations of structure that occur from time to time
before our own eyes; second, of Adaptation to environment as the
determining condition of Survival among the forms that present
themselves. Even as a bald and unsustained guess, this was an effective
side-blow at the doctrine of final causes--a doctrine, as has been often
remarked, which does not survive, in any given set of phenomena, the
reduction of these phenomena to terms of matter and motion.
"I conjecture then," continues Saunderson, enlarging the idea of the
possibilities of matter and motion, "that in the beginning when matter
in fermentation gradually brought our universe bursting into being,
blind creatures like myself were very common. But why should I not
believe of worlds what I believe of animals? How many worlds, mutilated
and imperfect, were peradventure dispersed, then re-formed, and are
again dispersing at each moment of time in those far-off spaces which I
cannot touch and you cannot behold, but where motion combines and will
continue to combine masses of matter, until they have chanced on some
arrangement in which they may finally persevere! O philosophers,
transport yourselves with me on to the confines of the universe, beyond
the point where I feel, and you see, organised beings; gaze over that
new ocean, and seek across its lawless, aimless heavings some vestiges
of that intelligent Being whose wisdom strikes you with such wonder
here!
"What is this world? A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions.
All these revolutions show a continual tendency to destruction; a swift
succession of beings who follow one another, press forward, and vanish;
a fleeting symmetry; the order of a moment. I reproached you just now
with estimating the perfection of things by your own capacity; and I
might accuse you here of measuring its duration by the length of your
own days. You judge of the continuous existence of the world, as an
ephemeral insect might judge of yours. The world is eternal for you, as
you are eternal to the being that lives but for one instant. Yet the
insect is the more reasonable of the two. For what a prodigious
succession of ephemeral generations attests your eternity! What an
immeasurable tradition! Yet shall we all pass away, without the
possibility of assigning either the real extension that we filled in
space, or the precise time that we shall have endured. Time, matter,
space--all, it may be, are no more than a point."[71]
Diderot sent a copy of his work to Voltaire. The poet replied with his
usual playful politeness, but declared his dissent from Saunderson, "who
denied God, because he happened to have been born blind."[72] More
pretentious, and infinitely less acute critics than Voltaire, have fixed
on the same point in the argument and met it by the same answer; namely,
that, blind as he was, Saunderson ought to have recognised an
intelligent Being who had provided him with so many substitutes for
sight; he ought to have inferred a skilful demiurgus from those ordered
relations in the universe, which Thought, independently of Vision, might
well have disclosed to him. In truth, this is not the centre of the
whole argument. When Saunderson implies that he could only admit a God
on condition that he could touch him, he makes a single sense the
channel of all possible ideas, and the arbiter of all reasoned
combinations of ideas. This is absurd, and Diderot, as we have seen,
rapidly passed away from that to the real strength of the position. All
the rest of the contention against final causes would have come just as
fitly from the lips of a man with vision, as from Saunderson. The
hypothetical inference of a deity from the marvels of adaptation to be
found in the universe is unjustified, among other reasons, because it
ignores or leaves unexplained the marvels of mis-adaptation in the
universe. It makes absolute through eternity a hypothesis which can at
its best only be true relatively--not merely to the number of our
senses, but--to a few partially chosen phenomena of our own little day.
It explains a few striking facts; it leaves wholly unexplained a far
greater number of equally striking facts, even if it be not directly
contradicted by them. It is the invention of an imaginary agency to
account for the scanty successes of creation, and an attribution to that
agency of the kind of motives that might have animated a benevolent
European living in the eighteenth century. It leaves wholly unaccounted
for the prodigious host of monstrous or imperfect organisms, and the
appalling law of merciless and incessant destruction.
To us this is the familiar discussion of the day. But let us return to
the starting-point of this chapter. In France a hundred and twenty years
ago it was the first opening of a decisive breach in the walls that had
sheltered the men of Western Europe against outer desolation for some
fifteen centuries or more. The completeness of Catholicism, as a
self-containing system of life and thought, is now harder for
Protestants or Sceptics to realise, than any other fact in the whole
history of human society. Catholicism was not only an institution, nor
only a religious faith; it was also a philosophy and a systematised
theory of the universe. The Church during its best age directed the
moral relations of individual men, and attempted, more or less
successfully, to humanise the relations of communities. It satisfied or
stimulated the affections by its exaltation of the Virgin Mary as a
supreme object of worship; it nourished the imagination on polytheistic
legends of saints and martyrs; it stirred the religious emotions by
touching and impressive rites; it surrounded its members with emblems of
a special and invincible protection. Catholicism, we have again and
again to repeat, claimed to deal with life as a whole, and to leave no
province of nature, no faculty of man, no need of intelligence or
spirit, uncomprehended. But we must not forget that, though this
prodigious system had its root in the affections and sympathies of human
nature, it was also fenced round by a theory of metaphysic. It rested
upon authority and tradition, but it also sought an expression in an
intellectual philosophy of things. The essence of this philosophy was to
make man the final cause of the universe. Its interpretation of the
world was absolute; its conception of the Creator was absolute; its
account of our intellectual impressions, of our moral rules, of our
spiritual ideals, made them all absolute. Now Diderot, when he wrote the
Letter on the Blind, perceived that mere rationalistic attacks upon the
sacred books, upon the miracles, upon the moral types, of Catholicism,
could only be partially effective for destruction, and could have no
effect at all in replacing the old ways of thinking by others of more
solid truth. The attack must begin in philosophy. The first fruitful
process must consist in shifting the point of view, in enlarging the
range of the facts to be considered, in pressing the relativity of our
ideas, in freeing ourselves from the tyranny of anthropomorphism.
Hobbes's witty definition of the papacy as the ghost of the old Roman
Empire sitting enthroned on the grave thereof, may tempt us to forget
the all-important truth that the basis of the power of the ghost was
essentially different from that of the dissolved body. The Empire was a
political organisation, resting on military force. The Church was a
social organisation, made vital by a conviction. The greatest fact in
the intellectual history of the eighteenth century is the decisive
revolution that overtook that sustaining conviction. The movement and
the men whom we are studying owe all their interest to the share that
they had in this immense task. The central conception, that the universe
was called into existence only to further its Creator's purpose towards
man, became incredible. This absolute proposition was slowly displaced
by notions of the limitation of human faculties, and of the
comparatively small portion of the whole cosmos or chaos to which we
have reason to believe that these faculties give us access. To
substitute this relative point of view for the absolute, was the
all-important preliminary to the effectual breaking up of the great
Catholic construction.
What seems to careless observers a mere metaphysical dispute was in
truth, and still is, the decisive quarter of the great battle between
theology and a philosophy reconcilable with science. When the Catholic
reaction set in, Joseph de Maistre, by far its acutest champion in the
region of philosophy, at once made it his first business to attack the
principle of relativity with all his force of dialectic, and to
reinstate absolute modes of thinking, and the absolute quality of
Catholic propositions about religion, knowledge, and government.[73] Yet
neither he nor any one else on his side has ever effectively shaken the
solid argument which Diderot fancifully illustrated in the following
passage from his reply to Voltaire's letter of thanks for the opuscule:
"This marvellous order and these wondrous adaptations, what am I to
think of them? That they are metaphysical entities only existing in your
own mind. You cover a vast piece of ground with a mass of ruins falling
hither or thither at hazard; amid these the worm and the ant find
commodious shelter enough. What would you say of these insects, if they
were to take for real and final entities the relations of the places
which they inhabit to their organisation, and then fall into ecstasies
over the beauty of their subterranean architecture, and the wonderfully
superior intelligence of the gardener who arranges things so
conveniently for them?"[74] This is the notion which Voltaire himself
three years afterwards illustrated in the witty fancies of
_Micromégas_. The little animalcule in the square cap, who makes the
giant laugh in a Homeric manner by its inflated account of itself as the
final cause of the universe, is the type of the philosophy on which
Catholicism is based.
In the same letter Diderot avows his dissent--hypocritically, we find
reason for suspecting--from Saunderson's conclusion. "It is commonly in
the night-time," he says, "that the mists arise which obscure in me the
existence of God; the rising of the sun never fails to scatter them. But
then the darkness is ever-enduring for the blind, and the sun only rises
for those who see." Diderot's denial of atheism seems more than
suspicious, when one finds him taking so much pains to make out
Saunderson's case for him, when he urges the argument following, for
instance: "If there had never existed any but material beings, there
would never have been spiritual beings; for then the spiritual beings
would either have given themselves existence, or else would have
received it from the material beings. But if there had never existed any
but spiritual beings, you will see that there would never have been
material beings. Right philosophy only allows me to suppose in things
what I can distinctly perceive in them. Now I perceive no other
faculties distinctly in the mind except those of willing and thinking,
and I no more conceive that thought and will can act on material beings
or on nothing, than I can conceive material beings or nothing acting on
spiritual beings." And he winds up his letter thus: "It is very
important not to take hemlock for parsley; but not important at all to
believe or to disbelieve in God. The world, said Montaigne, is a
tennis-ball that he has given to philosophers to toss hither and
thither; and I would say nearly as much of the Deity himself."[75]
In concluding our account of this piece, we may mention that Diderot
threw out a hint, which is a good illustration of the alert and
practically helpful way in which his mind was always seeking new ideas.
We have common signs, he said, appealing to the eye, namely, written
characters, and others appealing to the ear, namely, articulate sounds;
we have none appealing to touch. "For want of such a language,
communication is entirely broken between us and those who are born deaf,
dumb, and blind. They grow, but they remain in a state of imbecility.
Perhaps they would acquire ideas, if we made ourselves understood by
them from childhood in a fixed, determinate, constant, and uniform
manner; in short, if we traced on their hand the same characters that we
trace upon paper, and invariably attached the same significance to
them."[76] The patient benevolence and ingenuity of Dr. Howe of Boston
has realised in our own day the value of Diderot's suggestion.
One or two trifling points of literary interest may be noticed in the
Letter on the Blind. Diderot refers to "the ingenious expression of an
English geometer that _God geometrises_" (p. 294). He is unaware
apparently of the tradition which attributes the expression to Plato,
though it is not found in Plato's writings. Plutarch, I believe, is the
first person who mentions the saying, and discusses what Plato exactly
meant by it. In truth, it is one of that large class of dicta which look
more ingenious than they are true. There is a fine Latin passage by
Barrow on the mighty geometry of the universe, and the reader of the
_Religio Medici_ (p. 42) may remember that Sir Thomas Browne pronounces
God to be "like a skilful geometrician."
An odd coincidence of simile is worth mentioning. Diderot says "that
great services are like large pieces of money, that we have seldom any
occasion to use. Small attentions are a current coin that we always
carry in our hands." This is curiously like the saying in the _Tatler_
that "A man endowed with great perfections without good breeding is like
one who has his pockets full of gold, but wants change for his ordinary
occasions." Yet if Diderot had read the _Tatler_, he would certainly
have referred to the story in No. 55, how William Jones of Newington,
born blind, was brought to sight at the age of twenty--a story told in a
manner after Diderot's own heart.
II.
It is proper in this place to mention a short philosophic piece which
Diderot wrote in 1751, his _Letter on the Deaf and Dumb for the Use of
those who Hear and Talk_. This is not, like the Letter on the Blind,
the examination of a case of the Intellect deprived of one or more of
the senses. It is substantially a fragment, and a very important
fragment, on Æsthetics, and as such there will be something to say about
it in another chapter. But there are, perhaps, one or two points at
which the Letter on the Deaf and Dumb touches the line of thought of the
Letter on the Blind.
The Letter opens on the question of the origin and limits of inversion
in language. This at once leads to a discussion of the natural order of
ideas and expressions, and that original order, says Diderot, we can
only ascertain by a study of the language of gesture. Such a study can
be pursued either in assiduous conversation with one who has been deaf
and dumb from birth, or by the experiment of a _muet de convention_, a
man who foregoes the use of articulate sounds for the sake of experiment
as to the process of the formation of language. Generalising this idea,
Diderot proceeds to consider man as distributed into as many distinct
and separate beings as he has senses. "My idea would be to decompose a
man, so to speak, and to examine what he derives from each of the senses
with which he is endowed. I have sometimes amused myself with this kind
of metaphysical anatomy; and I found that of all the senses, the eye was
the most superficial; the ear, the proudest; smell, the most voluptuous;
taste, the most superstitious and the most inconstant; touch, the
profoundest and the most of a philosopher. It would be amusing to get
together a society, each member of which should have no more than one
sense; there can be no doubt that they would all treat one another as
out of their wits."
This is interesting, because it was said at the time to be the source of
one of the most famous fancies in the philosophical literature of the
century, the Statue in Condillac's Treatise on the Sensations. Condillac
imagined a statue organised like a man, but each sense unfolding itself
singly, at the will of an eternal arbiter. The philosopher first admits
the exercise of smell to his Frankenstein, and enumerates the mental
faculties which might be expected to be set in operation under the
changing impressions made upon that one sense. The other senses are
imparted to it in turn, one by one, each adding a new group of ideas to
the previous stock, until at length the mental equipment is complete.
We may see the extent of the resemblance between Condillac's Statue and
Diderot's _muet de convention_, but Diderot at least is free from the
charge of borrowing. Condillac's book was published three years (1754)
after the Letter on the Deaf and Dumb, and he afterwards wrote a
pamphlet defending himself from the charge of having taken the fancy of
his Statue from Diderot; nor, for that matter, did Diderot ever make
sign or claim in the matter. We have already spoken of the relations
between the two philosophers, and though it is a mistake to describe
Diderot as one of Condillac's most celebrated pupils,[77] yet there is
just as little reason to invert the connection, or to doubt Condillac's
own assertion that the Statue was suggested to him by Mademoiselle
Ferrand, that remarkable woman to whose stimulating and directing
influence he always professed such deep obligation. Attention has been
called to the fact that in 1671 a Parisian bookseller published a Latin
version of a much more intelligent and scientific fancy than the
Statue--the _Philosophus Autodidactus_ of the Arabian, Ibn Tophail. This
was a romance, in which a human being is suckled by a gazelle on a
desert island in the tropics, and grows up in the manner of some
Robinson Crusoe with a turn for psychological speculation, and gradually
becomes conscious, through observation, of the peculiar properties
belonging to his senses.[78]
Of the part of the Letter that concerns gesture, one can only say that
it appears astonishingly crude to those who know the progress that has
been made since Diderot's time in collecting and generalising the
curious groups of fact connected with gesture-language. We can imagine
the eager interest that Diderot would have had in such curious
observations as that gesture-language has something like a definite
syntax; that it furnishes no means of distinguishing causation from
sequence or simultaneity; that savages can understand and be understood
with ease and certainty in a deaf-and-dumb school.[79] Diderot was acute
enough to see that the questions of language could only be solved, not
by the old metaphysical methods, but experientially. For the
experiential method in this matter the time was not ripe. It was no
wonder, then, that after a few pages, he broke away and hastened to
æsthetics.
III.
Penalties on the publication of heretical opinion did not cease in
England with the disappearance of the Licensing Act. But they were at
least inflicted by law. It was the Court of King's Bench which, in 1730,
visited Woolston with fine and imprisonment, after all the forms of a
prosecution had been duly gone through. It was no Bishop's court nor
Star Chamber, much less a warrant signed by George the Third or by Bute,
which in 1762 condemned Peter Annet to the pillory and the gaol for his
Free Inquirer. The only evil which overtook Mandeville for his Fable of
the Bees was to be harmlessly presented (1723) as a public nuisance by
the Grand Jury of Middlesex. We may contrast with this the state of
things which prepared a revolution in France.
One morning in July, 1749--almost exactly forty years before that July
of '89, so memorable in the annals of arbitrary government and state
prisons--a commissary of police and three attendants came to Diderot's
house, made a vigorous scrutiny of his papers, and then produced a
warrant for his detention. The philosopher, without any ado, told his
wife not to expect him home for dinner, stepped into the chaise, and
was driven off with his escort to Vincennes. His real offence was a
light sneer in the Letter on the Blind at the mistress of a
minister.[80] The atheistical substance of the essay, however, apart
from the pique of a favourite, would have given sufficiently good
grounds for a prosecution in England, and in France for that vile
substitute for prosecution, the _lettre-decachet_. And there happened to
be special causes for harshness towards the press at this moment. Verses
had been published satirising the king and his manner of life in bitter
terms, and a stern raid was made upon all the scribblers in Paris. At
the court there had just taken place one of those reactions in favour of
the ecclesiastical party, which for thirty years in the court history
alternated so frequently with movements in the opposite direction. The
gossip of the town set down Diderot's imprisonment to a satire against
the Jesuits, of which he was wrongly supposed to be the author.[81] It
is not worth while to seek far for a reason, when authority was as able
and as ready to thrust men into gaol for a bad reason as for a good one.
The writer or the printer of a philosophical treatise was at this moment
looked upon in France much as a magistrate now looks on the wretch who
vends infamous prints.
The lieutenant of police (Berryer) treated the miserable author with
additional severity, for stubbornly refusing to give up the name of the
printer. Diderot was well aware that the printer would be sent to the
galleys for life, if the lieutenant of police could once lay hands upon
him. This personage, we may mention, was afterwards raised to the
dignified office of keeper of the seals, as a reward for his industry
and skill in providing victims for the royal seraglio at Versailles.[82]
The man who had ventured to use his mind, was thrown into the dungeon at
Vincennes by the man who played spy and pander for the Pompadour. The
official record of a dialogue between Berryer and Denis Diderot, "of the
Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion," is a singular piece of
reading, if we remember that the prisoner's answers were made, "after
oath taken by the respondent to speak and answer the truth."
"Interrogated if he has not composed a work entitled _Letters on the
Blind_.
"Answered no.
"Interrogated by whom he had caused said work to be printed.
"Answered that he had not caused the said work to be printed.
"Interrogated if he knows the name of the author of the said work.
"Answered that he knows nothing about it.
"Interrogated whether he has not had said work in manuscript in his
possession before it was printed.
"Answered that he had not had the said manuscript in his possession
before or after it was printed.
"Interrogated whether he has not composed a work which appeared some
years ago, entitled _Philosophic Thoughts_.
"Answered no."
And so, after a dozen more replies of equal veracity, on reading being
made to the respondent of the present interrogatory, Diderot "said that
the answers contain the truth, persisted in them, and signed," as
witness his hand. A sorrowful picture, indeed, of the plight of an
apostle of a new doctrine. On the other hand, the apostle of the new
doctrine was perhaps good enough for the preachers of the old. Two years
before this, the priest of the church of Saint Médard had thought it
worth while to turn spy and informer. This is the report which the base
creature sent to the lieutenant of police (1747):--
"Diderot, a man of no profession, living, etc., is a young man
who plays the free-thinker, and glories in impiety. He is the
author of several works of philosophy, in which he attacks
religion. His talk is like his books. He is busy at the
composition of one now, which is very dangerous."
The priest's delation was confirmed presently by a still lower agent of
authority, who, in bad grammar and bad spelling, describes "this wretch
Diderot as a very dangerous man, who speaks of the holy mysteries of
our religion with contempt; who corrupts manners, and who says that when
he comes to the last moment of his life, he will have to do like others,
will confess, and will receive what we call our God, but it will only be
for the sake of his family."[83]
All these things had prepared an unfriendly fate for Diderot when his
time at last came, as it came to most of his friends. For a month he was
cut off from the outer world. His only company was the _Paradise Lost_,
which he happened to have in his pocket at the moment of his arrest. He
compounded an ink for himself, by scraping the slate at the side of his
window, grinding it very fine, and mixing with wine in a broken glass. A
toothpick, found by happy accident in the pocket of his waistcoat,
served him for pen, and the fly-leaves and margins of the Milton made a
repository for his thoughts. With a simple but very characteristic
interest in others who might be as unfortunate as himself, he wrote upon
the walls of his prison his short recipe for writing materials.[84]
Diderot might easily have been buried here for months or even years.
But, as it happened, the governor of Vincennes was a kinsman of
Voltaire's divine Emily, the Marquise du Châtelet. When Voltaire, who
was then at Luneville, heard of Diderot's ill-fortune, he proclaimed as
usual his detestation of a land where bigots can shut up philosophers
under lock and key, and as usual he at once set to work to lessen the
wrong. Madame du Châtelet was made to write to the governor, praying him
to soften the imprisonment of Socrates-Diderot as much as he could.[85]
It was the last of her good deeds, for she died in circumstances of
grotesque tragedy in the following month (Sept. 1749), and her husband,
her son, Voltaire, and Saint Lambert alternately consoled and reproached
one another over her grave. Diderot meanwhile had the benefit of her
intervention. He was transferred from the dungeon to the château, was
allowed to wander about the park on his parole, and to receive visits
from his friends. One of the most impulsive of these friends was Jean
Jacques. Their first meeting after Diderot's imprisonment has been,
described by Rousseau himself, in terms at which the phlegmatic will
smile--not wisely, for the manner of expressing emotion, like all else,
is relative. "After three or four centuries of impatience, I flew into
the arms of my friend. O indescribable moment! He, was not alone;
D'Alembert and the treasurer of the Sainte Chapelle were with him. As I
went in, I saw no one but himself. With a single hound and a cry, I
pressed his face close to mine, I clasped him tightly in my arms,
without speaking to him save by my tears and sobs; I was choking with
tenderness and joy."[86] After this Rousseau used to walk over to see
him two or three times a week. It was during one of these walks on a hot
summer afternoon, that he first thought of that memorable literary
effort, the essay against civilisation. He sank down at the foot of a
tree, and feverishly wrote a page or two to show to his friend. He tells
us that but for Diderot's encouragement he should hardly have executed
his design. There is a story that it was Diderot who first suggested to
Rousseau to affirm that arts and sciences had corrupted manners. There
is no violent improbability in this. Diderot, for all the robustness and
penetration of his judgment, was yet often borne by his natural
impetuosity towards the region of paradox. His own curious and bold
_Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville_ is entirely in the vein of
Rousseau's discourse on the superiority of primitive over civilised
life. "Prodigious sibyl of the eighteenth century," cries Michelet, "the
mighty magician Diderot! He breathed out one day a breath; lo, there
sprang up a man--Rousseau."[87] It is hard to believe that such an
astonishing genius for literature as Rousseau's could have lain
concealed, after he had once inhaled the vivifying air of Paris. Yet the
fire and inspiring energy of Diderot may well have been the quickening
accident that brought his genius into productive life. All the testimony
goes to show that it was so. Whether, however, Diderot is really
responsible for the perverse direction of Rousseau's argument is a
question of fact, and the evidence is not decisive.[88] It would be an
odd example of that giant's nonchalance which is always so amazing in
Diderot, if he really instigated the most eloquent and passionate writer
then alive to denounce art and science as the scourge of mankind, at the
very moment when he was himself straining his whole effort to spread the
arts and sciences, and to cover them with glory in men's eyes.
Among Diderot's other visitors was Madame de Puisieux. One day she came
clad in gay apparel, bound for a merry-making at a neighbouring village.
Diderot, conceiving jealous doubts of her fidelity, received assurance
that she would be solitary and companionless at the feast, thinking
mournfully of her persecuted philosopher lying in prison. She forgot
that one of the parents of philosophy is curiosity, and that Diderot had
trained himself in the school of the sceptics. That evening he scaled
the walls of the park of Vincennes, flew to the scene of the festival,
and there found what he had expected. In vain for her had he written
upon virtue and merit, and the unhallowed friendship came to an end.
After three months of captivity, Diderot was released. The booksellers
who were interested in the Encyclopædia were importunate with the
authorities to restore its head and chief to an enterprise that stirred
universal curiosity.[89] For the first volume of that famous work was
now almost ready to appear, and expectation was keen. The idea of the
book had occurred to Diderot in 1745, and from 1745 to 1765 it was the
absorbing occupation of his life. Of the value and significance of the
conception underlying this immense operation, I shall speak in the next
chapter. There also I shall describe its history. The circumstances
under which these five-and-thirty volumes were given to the world mark
Diderot for one of the few true heroes of literature. They called into
play some of the most admirable of human qualities. They required a
laboriousness as steady and as prolonged, a wariness as alert, a grasp
of plan as firm, a fortitude as patient, unvarying, and unshaken, as men
are accustomed to applaud in the engineer who constructs some vast and
difficult work, or the commander who directs a hardy and dangerous
expedition.
CHAPTER V.
THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA.
The history of the encyclopædic conception of human knowledge is a much
more interesting and important object of inquiry than a list of the
various encyclopædic enterprises to be found in the annals of
literature. Yet it is proper here to mention some of the attempts in
this direction, which preceded our memorable book of the eighteenth
century. It is to Aristotle, no doubt, that we must look for the first
glimpse of the idea that human knowledge is a totality, whose parts are
all closely and organically connected with one another. But the idea
that only dawned in that gigantic understanding was lost for many
centuries. The compilations of Pliny are not in a right sense
encyclopædic, being presided over by no definite idea of informing
order. It was not until the later middle age that any attempt was made
to present knowledge as a whole. Albertus Magnus, "the ape of Aristotle"
(1193-1280), left for a season the three great questions of the
existence of universals, of the modes of the existence of species and
genus, and of their place in or out of the bosom of the individuals,
and executed a compilation of such physical facts as had been then
discovered.[90] A more distinctly encyclopædic work was the book of
Vincent de Beauvais (_d._ 1264), called _Speculum naturale, morale,
doctrinale, et historiale_--a compilation from Aquinas in some parts,
and from Aristotle in others. Hallam mentions three other compilations
of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and observes that their
laborious authors did not much improve the materials which they had
amassed in their studies, though they sometimes arranged them
conveniently. In the mediæval period, as he remarks, the want of
capacity to discern probable truths was a very great drawback from the
value of their compilations.[91]
Far the most striking production of the thirteenth century in this kind
was the _Opus Majus_ of Roger Bacon (1267), of which it has been said
that it is at once the Encyclopædia and the Novum Organum of that
age;[92] at once a summary of knowledge, and the suggestion of a truer
method. This, however, was merely the introductory sketch to a vaster
encyclopædic work, the _Compendium Philosophiæ_, which was not
perfected. "In common with minds of great and comprehensive grasp, his
vivid perception of the intimate relationship of the different parts of
philosophy, and his desire to raise himself from the dead level of
every individual science, induced Bacon to grasp at and embrace the
whole."[93] In truth, the encyclopædic spirit was in the air throughout
the thirteenth century. It was the century of books bearing the
significant titles of Summa, or Universitas, or Speculum.
The same spirit revived towards the middle of the sixteenth century. In
1541 a book was published at Basel by one Ringelberg, which first took
the name of Cyclopædia, that has since then become so familiar a word in
Western Europe. This was followed within sixty years by several other
works of the same kind. The movement reached its height in a book which
remained the best in its order for a century. A German, one J.H. Alsted
(1588-1638), published in 1620 an _Encyclopædia scientiarum omnium_. A
hundred years later the illustrious Leibnitz pronounced it a worthy task
to perfect and amend Alsted's book. What was wanting to the excellent
man, he said, was neither labour nor judgment, but material, and the
good fortune of such days as ours. And Leibnitz wrote a paper of
suggestions for its extension and improvement.[94] Alsted's Encyclopædia
is of course written in Latin, and he prefixes to it by way of motto the
celebrated lines in which Lucretius declares that nothing is sweeter
than to dwell apart in the serene temples of the wise. Though he informs
us in the preface that his object was to trace the outlines of the
great "latifundium regni philosophici" in a single syntagma, yet he
really does no more than arrange a number of separate treatises or
manuals, and even dictionaries, within the limits of a couple of folios.
As is natural to the spirit of the age in which he wrote, great
predominance is given to the verbal sciences of grammar, rhetoric, and
formal logic, and a verbal or logical division regulates the
distribution of the matter, rather than a scientific regard for its
objective relations.
For the true parentage, however, of the Encyclopædia of Diderot and
D'Alembert, it is unnecessary to prolong this list. It was Francis
Bacon's idea of the systematic classification of knowledge which
inspired Diderot, and guided his hand throughout. "If we emerge from
this vast operation," he wrote in the Prospectus, "our principal debt
will be to the chancellor Bacon, who sketched the plan of a universal
dictionary of sciences and arts at a time when there were not, so to
say, either arts or sciences." This sense of profound and devoted
obligation was shared by D'Alembert, and was expressed a hundred times
in the course of the work. No more striking panegyric has ever been
passed upon our immortal countryman than is to be found in the
Preliminary Discourse.[95] The French Encyclopædia was the direct fruit
of Bacon's magnificent conceptions. And if the efficient origin of the
Encyclopædia was English, so did the occasion rise in England also.
In 1727 Ephraim Chambers, a Westmoreland Quaker, published in London
two folios, entitled, a Cyclopædia or Universal Dictionary of the Arts
and Sciences. The idea of it was broad and excellent. "Our view," says
Chambers, "was to consider the several matters, not only in themselves,
but relatively, or as they respect each other; both to treat them as so
many wholes, and as so many parts of some greater whole." The compiler
lacked the grasp necessary to realise this laudable purpose. The book
has, however, the merit of conciseness, and is a singular monument of
literary industry, for it was entirely compiled by Chambers himself. It
had a great success, and though its price was high (four guineas), it
ran through five editions in eighteen years. On the whole, however, it
is meagre, and more like a dictionary than an encyclopædia, such as
Alsted's for instance.
Some fifteen years after the publication of Chambers's Cyclopædia, an
Englishman (Mills) and a German (Sellius) went to Le Breton with a
project for its translation into French. The bookseller obtained the
requisite privilege from the government, but he obtained it for himself,
and not for the projectors. This trick led to a quarrel, and before it
was settled the German died and the Englishman returned to his own
country. They left the translation behind them duly executed.[96] Le
Breton then carried the undertaking to a certain abbé, Gua de Malves.
Gua de Malves (_b._ 1712) seems to have been a man of a busy and
ingenious mind. He was the translator of Berkeley's _Hylas and
Philonous_, of Anson's Voyages, and of various English tracts on
currency and political economy. It is said that he first suggested the
idea of a cyclopædia on a fuller plan,[97] but we have no evidence of
this. In any case, the project made no advance in his hands. The
embarrassed bookseller next applied to Diderot, who was then much in
need of work that should bring him bread. His fertile and energetic
intelligence transformed the scheme. By an admirable intuition, he
divined the opportunity which would be given by the encyclopædic form,
of gathering up into a whole all that new thought and modern knowledge,
which existed as yet in unsystematic and uninterpreted fragments. His
enthusiasm fired Le Breton. It was resolved to make Chambers's work a
mere starting-point for a new enterprise of far wider scope.
"The old and learned D'Aguesseau," says Michelet, "notwithstanding the
pitiable, the wretched sides of his character, had two lofty sides, his
reform of the laws, and a personal passion, the taste and urgent need of
universality, a certain encyclopædic sense. A young man came to him one
day, a man of letters living by his pen, and somewhat under a cloud for
one or two hazardous books that lack of bread had driven him to write.
Yet this stranger of dubious repute wrought a miracle. With
bewilderment the old sage listened to him unrolling the gigantic scheme
of a book that should be all books. On his lips, sciences were light and
life. It was more than speech, it was creation. One would have said that
he had made these sciences, and was still at work, adding, extending,
fertilising, ever engendering. The effect was incredible. D'Aguesseau, a
moment above himself, forgot the old man, received the infection of
genius, and became great with the greatness of the other. He had faith
in the young man, and protected the Encyclopædia."[98]
A fresh privilege was procured (Jan. 21, 1746), and as Le Breton's
capital was insufficient for a project of this magnitude, he invited
three other booksellers to join him, retaining a half share for himself,
and allotting the other moiety to them. As Le Breton was not strong
enough to bear the material burdens of producing a work on so gigantic a
scale as was now proposed, so Diderot felt himself unequal to the task
of arranging and supervising every department of a book that was to
include the whole circle of the sciences. He was not skilled enough in
mathematics, nor in physics, which were then for the most part
mathematically conceived. For that province, he associated with himself
as an editorial colleague one of the most conspicuous and active members
of the philosophical party. Of this eminent man, whose relations with
Diderot were for some years so intimate, it is proper that we should say
something.
D'Alembert was the natural son of Madame de Tencin, by whom he had been
barbarously exposed immediately after his birth. "The true ancestors of
a man of genius," says Condorcet finely upon this circumstance, "are the
masters who have gone before him, and his true descendants are disciples
that are worthy of him." He was discovered on a November night in the
year 1717, by the beadle, in a nearly dying condition on the steps of
the church of St. John the Round, from which he afterwards took his
Christian name. An honest woman of the common people, with that personal
devotion which is less rare among the poor than among the rich, took
charge of the foundling. The father, who was an officer of artillery and
brother of Destouches, the author of some poor comedies, by and by
advanced the small sums required to pay for the boy's schooling.
D'Alembert proved a brilliant student. Unlike nearly every other member
of the encyclopædic party, he was a pupil not of the Jesuits but of
their rivals. The Jansenists recognised the keenness and force of their
pupil, and hoped that they had discovered a new Pascal. But he was less
docile than his great predecessor in their ranks. When his studies were
completed, he devoted himself to geometry, for which he had a passion
that nothing could extinguish. For the old monastic vow of poverty,
chastity, and obedience, he adopted the manlier substitute of poverty,
truth, and liberty--the worthy device of every man of letters. When he
awoke in the morning, he thought with delight of the work that had been
begun the previous day and would occupy the day before him. In the
necessary intervals of his meditations, he recalled the lively pleasure
that he felt at the play: at the play between the acts, he thought of
the still greater pleasure that was promised to him by the work of the
morrow. His mathematical labours led to valuable results in the
principles of equilibrium and the movement of fluids, in a new calculus,
and in a new solution of the problem of the precession of the
equinoxes.[99]
These contributions to what was then the most popular of the sciences
brought him fame, and fame brought him its usual distractions. As soon
as a writer has shown himself the possessor of gifts that may be of
value to society, then society straightway sets to work to seduce and
hinder him from diligently exercising them. D'Alembert resisted these
influences steadfastly. His means were very limited, yet he could never
be induced to increase them at the cost either of his social
independence or of his scientific pursuits. He lived for forty years
under the humble roof of the poor woman who had treated him as a son.
"You will never be anything better than a philosopher," she used to cry
reproachfully, "and what is a philosopher? 'Tis a madman who torments
himself all his life, that people may talk about him when he is dead."
D'Alembert zealously adhered to his destination. Frederick the Great
vainly tempted him by an offer of the succession to Maupertuis as
president of the Academy of Berlin. Although, however, he declined to
accept the post, he enjoyed all its authority and prerogative. Frederick
always consulted him in filling up vacancies and making appointments. It
is a magnanimous trait in D'Alembert's history that he should have
procured for Lagrange a position and livelihood at Berlin, warmly
commending him as a man of rare and superior genius, although Lagrange
had vigorously opposed some of his own mathematical theories. Ten years
after Frederick's offer, the other great potentate of the north,
Catherine of Russia, besought him to undertake the education of the
young grand duke, her son. But neither urgent flatteries and
solicitations under the imperial hand, nor the munificent offer of a
hundred thousand francs a year, availed to draw him away from his
independence and his friends. The great Frederick used to compare him to
one of those oriental monarchs, who cherish a strict seclusion in order
to enhance their importance and majesty. He did not refuse a pension of
some fifty pounds a year from Berlin, and the same amount was bestowed
upon him from the privy purse at Versailles. He received a small annual
sum in addition from the Academy.
Though the mathematical sciences remained the objects of his special
study, D'Alembert was as free as the other great men of the encyclopædic
school from the narrowness of the pure specialist. He naturally reminds
us of the remarkable saying imputed to Leibnitz, that he only attributed
importance to science, because it enabled him to speak with authority in
philosophy and religion. His correspondence with Voltaire, extending
over the third quarter of the century, is the most instructive record
that we possess of the many-sided doings of that busy time. His series
of _éloges_ on the academicians who died between 1700 and 1772 is one of
the most interesting works in the department of literary history. He
paid the keenest attention to the great and difficult art of writing.
Translations from Tacitus, Bacon, and Addison, show his industry in a
useful practice. A long collection of synonyms bears witness to his fine
discrimination in the use of words. And the clearness, precision, and
reserved energy of his own prose mark the success of the pains that he
took with style. He knew the secret. Have lofty sentiments, he said, and
your manner of writing will be firm and noble.[100] Yet he did not
ignore the other side and half of the truth, which is expressed in the
saying of another important writer of that day--By taking trouble to
speak with precision, one gains the habit of thinking rightly
(_Condillac_).
Like so many others to whom literature owes much, D'Alembert was all his
life fighting against bad health. Like Voltaire and Rousseau, he was
born dying, and he remained delicate and valetudinarian to the end. He
had the mental infirmities belonging to his temperament. He was
restless, impatient, mobile, susceptible of irritation. When the young
Mademoiselle Phlipon, in after years famous as wife of the virtuous
Roland, was taken to a sitting of the Academy, she was curious to see
the author of the Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopædia, but his
small face and sharp thin voice made her reflect with some
disappointment, that the writings of a philosopher are better to know
than his mask.[101] In everything except zeal for light and
emancipation, D'Alembert was the opposite of Diderot. Where Diderot was
exuberant, prodigal, and disordered, D'Alembert was a precisian.
Difference of temperament, however, did not prevent their friendship
from being for many years cordial and intimate. When the Encyclopædia
was planned, it was to D'Alembert, as we have said, that Diderot turned
for aid in the mathematical sciences, where his own knowledge was not
sufficiently full nor well grounded. They were in strong and singular
agreement in their idea of the proper place and function of the man of
letters. One of the most striking facts about their alliance, and one
of the most important facts in the history of the Encyclopædia, is that
henceforth the profession of letters became at once definite and
independent. Diderot and D'Alembert both of them remained poor, but they
were never hangers-on. They did not look to patrons, nor did they bound
their vision by Versailles. They were the first to assert the lawful
authority of the new priesthood. They revolted deliberately and in set
form against the old system of suitorship and protection. "Happy are men
of letters," wrote D'Alembert, "if they recognise at last that the
surest way of making themselves respectable is to live united and almost
shut up among themselves; that by this union they will come, without any
trouble, to give the law to the rest of the nation in all affairs of
taste and philosophy; that the true esteem is that which is awarded by
men who are themselves worthy of esteem.... As if the art of instructing
and enlightening men were not, after the too rare art of good
government, the noblest portion and gift in human reach."[102]
This consciousness of the power and exaltation of their calling, which
men of letters now acquired, is much more than the superficial fact
which it may at first seem to be. It marked the rise of a new teaching
order and the supersession of the old. The highest moral ideas now
belonged no longer to the clergy, but to the writers; no longer to
official Catholicism, but to that fertilising medley of new notions
about human knowledge and human society which then went by the name of
philosophy. What is striking is that the ideas sown by philosophy became
eventually the source of higher life in Catholicism. If the church of
the revolution showed something that we may justly admire, it was
because the encyclopædic band had involuntarily and inevitably imparted
a measure of their own clearsightedness, fortitude, moral energy, and
spirit of social improvement, to a church which was, when they began
their work, an abominable burden on the spiritual life of the nation. If
the Catholicism of Chateaubriand, of Lamennais, of Montalembert, was a
different thing from the Catholicism of a Dubois, or a Rohan, from the
vile corruptions of the Jesuits and the grovelling superstitions of the
later Jansenists, it was the execrated freethinkers whom the church and
mankind had to thank for the change. The most enlightened Catholic of
to-day ought to admit that Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, were the true
reformers of his creed. They supplied it with ideas which saved it from
becoming finally a curse to civilisation. It was no Christian prelate,
but Diderot who burst the bonds of a paralysing dogma by the
magnificent cry, _Détruisez ces enceintes qui rétrécissent vos idées!
Elargissez Dieu!_[103] We see the same phenomenon in our own day. The
Christian churches are assimilating as rapidly as their formula will
permit, the new light and the more generous moral ideas and the higher
spirituality of teachers who have abandoned all churches, and who are
systematically denounced as enemies of the souls of men. _Sic vos non
vobis mellificatis apes!_ These transformations of religion by leavening
elements contributed from a foreign doctrine, are the most interesting
process in the history of truth.
The Encyclopædia became a powerful engine for aiding such a
transformation. Because it was this, and because it rallied all that was
then best in France round the standard of light and social hope, we
ought hardly to grudge time or pains to its history. For it was not
merely in the field of religious ideas that the Encyclopædists led
France in a new way. They affected the national life on every side,
pressing forward with enlightened principles in all the branches of
material and political organisation. Their union in a great
philosophical band gave an impressive significance to their work. The
collection within a single set of volumes of a body of new truths,
relating to so many of the main interests of men, invested the book and
its writers with an aspect of universality, of collective and organic
doctrine, which the writers themselves would without doubt have
disowned, and which it is easy to dissolve by tests of logic. But the
popular impression that the Encyclopædists constituted a single body
with a common doctrine and a common aim was practically sound. Comte has
pointed out with admirable clearness the merit of the conception of an
encyclopædic workshop.[104] It united the members of rival destructive
schools in a great constructive task. It furnished a rallying-point for
efforts otherwise the most divergent. Their influence was precisely what
it would have been, if popular impressions had been literally true.
Diderot and D'Alembert did their best to heighten this feeling. They
missed no occasion of fixing a sentiment of co-operation and fellowship.
They spoke of their dictionary as the transactions of an Academy.[105]
Each writer was answerable for his own contribution, but he was in the
position of a member of some learned corporation. To every volume, until
the great crisis of 1759, was prefixed a list of those who had
contributed to it. If a colleague died, the public was informed of the
loss that the work had sustained, and his services were worthily
commemorated in a formal _éloge_.[106] Feuds, epigrams, and offences
were not absent, but on the whole there was steadfast and generous
fraternity.
As Voltaire eloquently said, officers of war by land and by sea,
magistrates, physicians who knew nature, men of letters whose taste
purified knowledge, geometers, physicists, all united in a work that was
as useful as it was laborious, without any view of interest, without
even seeking fame, as many of them concealed their names; finally
without any common understanding and agreement, and therefore without
anything of the spirit of party.[107] Turning over the pages on which
the list of writers is inscribed, we find in one place or another nearly
every name that has helped to make the literature of the time famous.
Montesquieu, who died in the beginning of 1755, left behind him the
unfinished fragment of an article on Taste, and it may be noticed in
passing that our good-natured Diderot was the only man of letters who
attended the remains of the illustrious writer to the grave.[108] The
article itself, though no more than a fragment, has all the charms of
Montesquieu's delightful style; it is serious without pedantry, graceful
without levity, and is rich in observations that are precise and pointed
without the vice of emphasis. The great Turgot, diligently solicitous
for the success of every enterprise that promised to improve human
happiness by adding to knowledge and spreading enlightenment, wrote some
of the most valuable articles that the work contained, and his
discussion of Endowments perhaps still remains the weightiest
contribution to that important subject. Oddly enough, he was one of the
very few writers who refused to sign his name to his
contributions.[109] His assistance only ceased when he perceived that
the scheme was being coloured by that spirit of sect, which he always
counted the worst enemy of the spirit of truth.[110] Jean Jacques
Rousseau, who had just won a singular reputation by his paradoxes on
natural equality and the corruptions of civilisation, furnished the
articles on music in the first half dozen volumes. They were not free
from mistakes, but his colleagues chivalrously defended him by the plea
of careless printing or indifferent copying.[111] The stately Buffon
very early in the history of the Encyclopædia sent them an article upon
Nature, and the editors made haste to announce to their subscribers the
advent of so superb a colleague.[112] The articles on natural history,
however, were left by Buffon in his usual majestic fashion to his
faithful lieutenant and squire-at-arms, Daubenton. And even his own
article seems not to have been printed. Before the eleventh volume
appeared, terrible storms had arisen, not a few of the shipmen had
parted company, and Buffon may well have been one of them. Certainly the
article on Nature, as it stands, can hardly be his.
In the supplementary volumes, which appeared in 1776--ten years after
the completion of the original undertaking--two new labourers came into
the vineyard, whose names add fresh lustre and give still more serious
value to the work. One of these was the prince of the physiologists of
the eighteenth century, the great Haller, who contributed an elaborate
history of those who had been his predecessors in unfolding the
intricate mechanism of the human frame, and analysing its marvels of
complex function. The other was the austere and generous Condorcet. Ever
loyal to good causes, and resolute against despairing of the human
commonwealth, he began in the pages of the Encyclopædia a career that
was brilliant with good promise and high hopes, and ended in the grim
hall of the Convention and a nobly tragic death amid the red storm of
the Terror.
Among the lesser stars in the encyclopædic firmament are some whose
names ought not to be wholly omitted. Forbonnais, one of the most
instructive economic writers of the century, contributed articles to the
early volumes, which were afterwards
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