Later polemic works, inspired by those above noticed, reproduce some of their arguments, but with an advance in literary skill, as in the anonymous Bon Sens given forth (1772) by Diderot and d’Holbach as the work of Jean Meslier, but really an independent compilation, embodying other arguments with his, and putting the whole with a concision and brilliancy to which he could make no approach. Prémontval, a bad writer,111 contrives nonetheless to say many pungent things of a deistic order in his Diogène de d’Alembert, and, following Marie Huber, puts forward the formula of religion versus theology, which has done so much duty in the nineteenth century. Of the whole literature it is not too much to say that it covered cogently most of the important grounds of latter-day debate, from the questions of revelation and the doctrine of torments to the bases of ethics and the problem of deity; and it would be hard to show that the nineteenth century has handled the main issues with more sincerity, lucidity, or logic than were attained by Frenchmen in the eighteenth. To-day, no doubt, in the light of a century and a-half of scientific, historic, and philosophic accumulation, the rationalist case is put with more profundity and accuracy by many writers than it could be in the eighteenth century. But we have to weigh the freethinkers of that age against their opponents, and the French performers against those of other countries, to make a fair estimate. When this is done their credit is safe. When German and other writers say with Tholuck that “unbelief entered Germany not by the weapons of mere wit and scoffing as in France; it grounded itself on learned research,”112 they merely prove their ignorance of French culture-history. An abundance of learned research in France preceded the triumphant campaign of Voltaire, who did most of the witty writing on the subject; and whose light artillery was to the last reinforced by the heavier guns of d’Holbach. It is only in the analysis of the historical problem by the newer tests of anthropology and hierology, and in the light of latterly discovered documents, that our generation has made much advance on the strenuous pioneers of the age of Voltaire. And even in the field of anthropology the sound thinking of Fontenelle and De Brosses long preceded any equally valid work by rationalists in Germany; though Spencer of Cambridge had preceded them in his work of constructive orthodoxy.
15. Though the bibliographers claim to have traced the authorship in most cases, such works were in the first instance generally published anonymously,113 as were those of Voltaire, d’Holbach, and the leading freethinkers; and the clerical policy of suppression had the result of leaving them generally unanswered, save in anonymous writings, when they nevertheless got into private circulation. It was generally impolitic that an official answer should appear to a book which was officially held not to exist; so that the orthodox defence was long confined mainly to the classic performances of Pascal, Bossuet, Huet, Fénelon, and some outsiders such as the Protestant Abbadie, who settled first in Berlin and later in London. The polemic of every one of the writers named is a work of ability; even that of Abbadie (Traité de la Vérité de la religion chrétienne, 1684), though now little known, was in its day much esteemed.114 In the age of Louis XIV those classic answers to unbelief were by believers held to be conclusive; and thus far the French defence was certainly more thorough and philosophical than the English. But French freethought, which in Herbert’s day had given the lead to English, now drew new energy from the English growth; and the general arguments of the old apologists did not explicitly meet the new attack. Their books having been written to meet the mostly unpublished objections of previous generations, the Church through its chosen policy had the air of utter inability to confute the newer propaganda, though some apologetic treatises of fair power did appear, in particular those of the Abbé Bergier.115 By the avowal of a Christian historian, “So low had the talents of the once illustrious Church of France fallen that in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Christianity itself was assailed, not one champion of note appeared in its ranks; and when the convocation of the clergy, in 1770, published their famous anathema against the dangers of unbelief, and offered rewards for the best essays in defence of the Christian faith, the productions called forth were so despicable that they sensibly injured the cause of religion.”116
The freethinking attack, in fact, had now become overwhelming. After the suppression of the Jesuit Order (1764)117 the press grew practically more and more free; and when, after the accession of Pope Clement XIV (1769), the freethinking books circulated with less and less restraint, Bergier extended his attack on deism, and deists and clerics joined in answering the atheistic Système de la Nature of d’Holbach. But by this time the deistic books were legion, and the political battle over the taxation of Church property had become the more pressing problem, especially seeing that the mass of the people remained conforming. The manifesto of the clergy in 1770 was accompanied by an address to the king “On the evil results of liberty of thought and printing,” following up a previous appeal by the pope;118 and in consideration of the donation by the clergy of sixteen million livres the Government recommended the Parlement of Paris to proceed against impious books. There seems accordingly to have been some hindrance to publication for a year or two; but in 1772 appeared the Bon Sens of d’Holbach and Diderot; and there was no further serious check, the Jesuits being disbanded by the pope in 1773.
The English view that French orthodoxy made a “bad” defence to the freethinking attack as compared with what was done in England (Sir J. F. Stephen, Horæ Sabbaticæ, 2nd. ser. p. 281; Alison, as cited above) proceeds on some misconception of the circumstances, which, as has been shown, were substantially different in the two countries. Could the English clergy have resorted to official suppression of deistic literature, they too would doubtless have done so. Swift and Berkeley bitterly desired to. But the view that the English defence was relatively “good,” and that Butler’s in particular was decisive, is also, as we have seen, fallacious. In Sir Leslie Stephen’s analysis, as apart from his preamble, the orthodox defence is exhibited as generally weak, and often absurd. Nothing could be more futile than the three “Pastoral Letters” published by the Bishop of London (1728, 1730, 1731) as counterblasts to the freethinking books of this period. In France the defence began sooner, and was more profound and even more methodical. Pascal at least went deeper, and Bossuet (in his Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle) more widely, into certain inward and outward problems of the controversy than did any of the English apologists; Huet produced, in his Demonstratio Evangelica, one of the most methodical of all the defensive treatises of the time; Abbadie, as before noted, gave great satisfaction, and certainly grappled zealously with Hobbes and Spinoza; Allix, though no great dialectician, gave a lead to English apologetics against the deists (above, p. 97), and was even adapted by Paley; and Fénelon, though his Traité de l’Existence et des Attributs de Dieu (1712) and Lettres sur la Religion (1716) are not very powerful processes of reasoning, contributed through his reproduced conversations (1710) with Ramsay a set of arguments at least as plausible as anything on the English side, and, what is more notable, marked by an amenity which almost no English apologist attained.
The ground had been thus very fully covered by the defence in France before the main battle in England began; and when a new French campaign commenced with Voltaire, the defence against that incomparable attack, so far as the system allowed of any, was probably as good as it could have been made in England, save insofar as the Protestants gave up modern miracles, while most of the Catholics claimed them for their Church. Counterblasts such as the essay of Linguet, Le Fanatisme des Philosophes (1764), were but general indictments of rationalism; and other apologetic treatises, as we saw, handled only the most prominent books on the other side. It should be noted, too, that as late as 1764 the police made it almost impossible to obtain in Paris works of Voltaire recently printed in Holland (Grimm, vii, 123, 133, 434). But, as Paley admitted with reference to Gibbon (“Who can refute a sneer?”), the new attack was in any case very hard to meet. A sneer is not hard to refute when it is unfounded, inasmuch as it implies a proposition, which can be rebutted or turned by another sneer. The Anglican Church had been well enough pleased by the polemic sneers of Swift and Berkeley; but the other side had the heavier guns, and of the mass of defences produced in England nothing remains save in the neat compilation of Paley. Alison’s whole avowal might equally well apply to anything produced in England as against Voltaire. The skeptical line of argument for faith had been already employed by Huet and Pascal and Fénelon, with visibly small success; Berkeley had achieved nothing with it as against English deism; and Butler had no such effect in his day in England as to induce French Catholics to use him. (He does not appear to have been translated into French till 1821.)
An Oratorian priest, again, translated the anti-deistic essays of President Forbes; and the Pensées Theologiques relatives aux erreurs du temps of Père Jamin (1768; 4e édit. 1773) were thought worthy of being translated into German, poor as they were. With their empty affirmation of authority they suggest so much blank cartridge, which could avail nothing with thinking men; and here doubtless the English defence makes a better impression. But, on the other hand, Voltaire circulated widely in England, and was no better answered there than in France. His attack was, in truth, at many points peculiarly baffling, were it only by its inimitable wit. The English replies to Spinoza, again, were as entirely inefficient or deficient as the French; the only intelligent English answers to Hume on Miracles (the replies on other issues were of no account) made use of the French investigations of the Jansenist miracles; and the replies to Gibbon were in general ignominious failures.
Finally, though the deeper reasonings of Diderot were over the heads alike of the French and the English clergy, the Système de la Nature of d’Holbach was met skilfully enough at many points by G. J. Holland (1772), who, though not a Frenchman, wrote excellent French, and supplied for French readers a very respectable rejoinder;119 whereas in England there was practically none. In this case, of course, the defence was deistic; as was that of Voltaire, who criticized d’Holbach as Bolingbroke attacked Spinoza and Hobbes. But the Examen du Matérialisme of the Abbé Bergier (1771), who was a member of the Academy of Sciences, was at least as good as anything that could then have been done in the Church of England; and the same may be said of his reply to Fréret’s (really Burigny’s) Examen. It is certainly poor enough; but Bishop Watson used some of its arguments for his reply to Paine. Broadly speaking, as we have said, much more of French than of English intelligence had been turned to the dispute in the third quarter of the century. In England, political and industrial discussion relieved the pressure on creed; in France, before the Revolution, the whole habit of absolutism tended to restrict discussion to questions of creed; and the attack would in any case have had the best of it, because it embodied all the critical forces hitherto available. The controversy thus went much further than the pre-Humian issues raised in England; and the English orthodoxy of the end of the century was, in comparison, intellectually as weak as politically and socially it was strong. In France, from the first, the greater intellectual freedom in social intercourse, exemplified in the readiness of women to declare themselves freethinkers (cp. Jamin, as cited, ch. xix, § 1), would have made the task of the apologists harder even had they been more competent.
16. Above the scattered band of minor combatants rises a group of writers of special power, several of whom, without equalling Voltaire in ubiquity of influence, rivalled him in intellectual power and industry. The names of Diderot, D’Holbach, D’Alembert, Helvétius, and Condorcet are among the first in literary France of the generation before the Revolution; after them come Volney and Dupuis; and in touch with the whole series stands the line of great mathematicians and physicists (to which also belongs D’Alembert), Laplace, Lagrange, Lalande, Delambre. When to these we add the names of Montesquieu, Buffon, Chamfort, Rivarol, Vauvenargues; of the materialists La Mettrie and Cabanis; of the philosophers Condillac and Destutt de Tracy; of the historian Raynal; of the poet André Chénier; of the politicians Turgot, Mirabeau, Danton, Desmoulins, Robespierre—all (save perhaps Raynal) deists or else pantheists or atheists—it becomes clear that the intelligence of France was predominantly rationalistic before the Revolution, though the mass of the nation certainly was not.
It is necessary to deprecate Mr. Lecky’s statement (Rationalism in Europe, i, 176) that “Raynal has taken, with Diderot, a place in French literature which is probably permanent”—an estimate as far astray as the declaration on the same page that the English deists are buried in “unbroken silence.” Raynal’s vogue in his day was indeed immense (cp. Morley, Diderot, ch. xv); and Edmond Scherer (Études sur la litt. du 18e Siècle, 1891, pp. 277–78) held that Raynal’s Histoire philosophique des deux Indes had had more influence on the French Revolution than even Rousseau’s Contrat Social. But the book has long been discredited (cp. Scherer, pp. 275–76). A biographical Dictionary of 1844 spoke of it as “cet ouvrage ampoulé qu’on ne lit pas aujourd’hui.” Although the first edition (1770) passed the censure only by means of bribery, and the second (1780) was publicly burned, and its author forced to leave France, he was said to reject, in religion, “only the pope, hell, and monks” (Scherer, p. 286); and most of the anti-religious declamation in the first edition of the Histoire is said to be from the pen of Diderot, who wrote it very much at random, at Raynal’s request.
No list of orthodox names remotely comparable with these can be drawn from the literature of France, or indeed of any other country of that time. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), the one other pre-eminent figure, though not an anti-Christian propagandist, is distinctly on the side of deism. In the Contrat Social,120 writing with express approbation of Hobbes, he declares that “the Christian law is at bottom more injurious than useful to the sound constitution of the State”; and even the famous Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar in the Émile is anti-revelationist, and practically anti-clerical. He was accordingly anathematized by the Sorbonne, which found in Émile nineteen heresies; the book was seized and burned both at Paris and at Geneva within a few weeks of its appearance,121 and the author decreed to be arrested; even the Contrat Social was seized and its vendors imprisoned. All the while he had maintained in Émile doctrines of the usefulness of religious delusion and fanaticism. Still, although his temperamental way of regarding things has a clear affinity with some later religious philosophy of a more systematic sort, he undoubtedly made for freethought as well as for the revolutionary spirit in general. Thus the cause of Christianity stood almost denuded of intellectually eminent adherents in the France of 1789; for even among the writers who had dealt with public questions without discussing religion, or who had criticized Rousseau and the philosophes—as the Abbés Mably, Morellet, Millot—the tone was essentially rationalistic.
It has been justly enough argued, concerning Rousseau (see below, p. 287), that the generation of the Revolution made him its prophet in his own despite, and that had he lived twenty years longer he would have been its vehement adversary. But this does not alter the facts as to his influence. A great writer of emotional genius, like Rousseau, inevitably impels men beyond the range of his own ideals, as in recent times Ruskin and Tolstoy, both anti-Socialists, have led thousands towards Socialism. In his own generation and the next, Rousseau counted essentially for criticism of the existing order; and it was the revolutionaries, never the conservatives, who acclaimed him. De Tocqueville (Hist. philos. du règne de Louis XV, 1849, i, 33) speaks of his “impiété dogmatique.” Martin du Theil, in his J. J. Rousseau apologiste de la religion chrétienne (2e édit. 1840), makes out his case by identifying emotional deism with Christianity, as did Rousseau himself when he insisted that “the true Christianity is only natural religion well explained.” Rousseau’s praise of the gospel and of the character of Jesus was such as many deists acquiesced in. Similar language, in the mouth of Matthew Arnold, gave rather more offence to Gladstone, as a believing Christian, than did the language of simple unbelief; and a recent Christian polemist, at the close of a copious monograph, has repudiated the association of Rousseau with the faith (see J. F. Nourrisson, J. J. Rousseau et le Rousseauisme, 1903, p. 497 sq.). What is true of him is that he was more religiously a theist than Voltaire, whose impeachment of Providence in the poem on the Earthquake of Lisbon he sought strenuously though not very persuasively to refute in a letter to the author. But, with all his manifold inconsistencies, which may be worked down to the neurosis so painfully manifest in his life and in his relations to his contemporaries, he never writes as a believer in the dogmas of Christianity or in the principle of revelation; and it was as a deist that he was recognized by his Christian contemporaries. A demi-Christian is all that Michelet will call him. His compatriot the Swiss pastor Roustan, located in London, directed against him his Offrande aux Autels et à la Patrie, ou Défense du Christianisme (1764), regarding him as an assailant. The work of the Abbé Bergier, Le Déisme refuté par lui-même (1765, and later), takes the form of letters addressed to Rousseau, and is throughout an attack on his works, especially the Émile. When, therefore, Buckle (1-vol. ed. p. 475) speaks of him as not having attacked Christianity, and Lord Morley (Rousseau, ch. xiv) treats him as creating a religious reaction against the deists, they do not fully represent his influence on his time. As we have seen, he stimulated Voltaire to new audacities by his example.
17. An interlude in the critical campaign, little noticed at the time, developed importance a generation later. In 1753 Jean Astruc, doctor of medicine, published after long hesitation his Conjectures on the original documents which Moses seems to have used in composing the book of Genesis. Only in respect of his flash of insight into the composite structure of the Pentateuch was Astruc a freethinker. His hesitation to publish was due to his fear that les pretendus esprits forts might make a bad use of his work; and he was quite satisfied that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch as it stands. The denial of that authorship, implied in the criticisms of Hobbes and Spinoza, he described as “the disease of the last century.” This attitude may explain the lack of interest in Astruc’s work shown by the freethinkers of the time.122 Nonetheless, by his perception of the clue given by the narrative use of the two names Yahweh and Elohim in Genesis, he laid a new foundation of the Higher Criticism of the Bible in modern times, advancing alike on Spinoza and on Simon. For freethought he had “builded better than he knew.”
18. In the select Parisian arena of the Académie, the intellectual movement of the age is as it were dramatized; and there more clearly than in the literary record we can trace the struggle of opinions, from the admission of Voltaire (1746) onwards. In the old days the Académie had been rather the home of convention, royalism, and orthodoxy than of ideas, though before Voltaire there were some freethinking members of the lesser Académies, notably Boindin.123 The admission of Montesquieu (1728), after much opposition from the court, preludes a new era; and from the entrance of Voltaire, fourteen years after his first attempt,124 the atmosphere begins perceptibly to change. When, in 1727, the academician Bonamy had read a memoir On the character and the paganism of the emperor Julian, partly vindicating him against the aspersions of the Christian Fathers, the Academy feared to print the paper, though its author was a devout Catholic.125 When the Abbé La Bletterie, also orthodox, read to the Academy portions of his Vie de Julien, the members were not now scandalized, though the Abbé’s Jansenism moved the King to veto his nomination. So, when Blanchard in 1735 read a memoir on Les exorcismes magiques there was much trepidation among the members, and again the Secretary inserted merely an analysis, concluding with the words of Philetas, “Believe and fear God; beware of questioning.”126 Even such a play of criticism as the challenging of the early history of Rome by Lévesque de Pouilly (brother of Lévesque de Burigny) in a dissertation before the Académie in 1722, roused the fears and the resentment of the orthodox; the Abbé Sallier, in undertaking to refute him, insinuated that he had shown a spirit which might be dangerous to other beliefs; and whispers of atheism passed among the academicians.127 Pouilly, who had been made a freethinker by English contacts, went again to England later, and spent his last years at Rheims.128 His thesis was much more powerfully sustained in 1738 by Beaufort, in the famous dissertation Sur l’incertitude des cinq premiers siècles de l’histoire romaine; but Beaufort was of a refugee-Huguenot stock; his book was published, under his initials, at Utrecht; and not till 1753 did the Académie award him a medal—on the score of an earlier treatise. And in 1748 the Religio veterum Persarum of the English Orientalist Hyde, published as long before as 1700, found a vehement assailant within the Academy in the Abbé Foucher, who saw danger in a favourable view of any heathen religion.
Yet even in the time of Louis XIV the Abbé Mongault, tutor of the son of the Regent, and noted alike for his private freethinking and for the rigid orthodoxy which he instilled into his pupil, treated the historic subject of the divine honours rendered to Roman governors with such latitude as to elicit from Fréret, in his éloge of Mongault, the remark that the tutor had reserved to himself a liberty of thought which he doubtless felt to be dangerous in a prince.129 And after 1750 the old order can be seen passing away. D’Argenson notes in his diary in 1754: “I observe in the Académie de belles-lettres, of which I am a member, that there begins to be a decided stir against the priests. It began to show itself at the death of Boindin, to whom our bigots refused a service at the Oratory and a public commemoration. Our deist philosophers were shocked, and ever since, at each election, they are on guard against the priests and the bigots. Nowhere is this division so marked, and it begins to bear fruits.”130 The old statesman indicates his own sympathies by adding: “Why has a bad name been made of the title of deist? It is that of those who have true religion in their hearts, and who have abjured a superstition that is destructive to the whole world.” It was in this year that D’Alembert, who took nearly as much pains to stay out as Voltaire had done to enter,131 was elected a member; and with two leading encyclopédistes in the forty, and a friendly abbé (Duclos) in the secretaryship (1755), and another zealous freethinker, Lévesque de Burigny, admitted in 1756,132 the fortunes of freethought were visibly rising. Its influence was thrown on the side of the academic orator Thomas, a sincere believer but a hater of all persecution, and as such offensive to the Church party.133
19. In 1759 there came a check. The Encyclopédie, which had been allowed to resume publication after its first suppression in 1752, was again stopped; and the battle between philosophes and fanatics, dramatized for the time being in Palissot’s comedy Les Philosophes and in Voltaire’s rejoinder to Fréron, L’Écossaise, came to be fought out in the Academy itself. The poet Lefranc de Pompignan,134 elected in 1759 without any opposition from the freethinkers, had in his youth translated Pope’s “Deist’s Prayer,” and had suffered for it to the extent of being deprived by D’Aguesseau of his official charge135 for six months. With such a past, with a keen concern for status, and with a character that did not stick at tergiversation, Pompignan saw fit to signalize his election by making his discours de réception (March, 1760) a violent attack on the whole philosophic school, which, in his conclusion, he declared to be undermining “equally the throne and the altar.” The academicians heard him out in perfect silence, leaving it to the few pietists among the audience to applaud; but as soon as the reports reached Ferney there began the vengeance of Voltaire. First came a leaflet of stinging sentences, each beginning with Quand: “When one has translated and even exaggerated the ‘Deist’s Prayer’ composed by Pope ...,” and so on. The maddened Pompignan addressed a fatuous memorial to the King (who notoriously hated the philosophes, and had assented only under petticoat influence to Voltaire’s election136); and, presuming to print it without the usual official sanction, suffered at the hands of Malesherbes the blow of having the printer’s plant smashed. Other combatants entered the fray. Voltaire’s leaflet “les quand” was followed by “les si, les pour, les qui, les quoi, les car, les ah!”—by him or others—and the master-mocker produced in swift succession three satires in verse,137 all accompanied by murderous prose annotations. The speedy result was Pompignan’s retirement into provincial life. He could not face the merciless hail of rejoinders; and when at his death, twenty-five years later, the Abbé Maury had to pronounce his éloge, the mention of his famous humiliation was hardly tempered by compassion.138
20. Voltaire could not compass, as he for a time schemed, the election of Diderot; but other philosophes of less note entered from time to time;139 Marmontel was elected in 1763; and when in 1764 the Academy’s prize for poetry was given to Chamfort for a piece which savoured of what were then called “the detestable principles of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Helvétius,” and in 1768 its prize for eloquence went to the same writer, the society as a whole had acquired a certain character for impiety.140 In 1767 there had occurred the famous ecclesiastical explosion over Marmontel’s philosophic romance Bélisaire, a performance in which it is somewhat difficult to-day to detect any exciting quality. It was by a chapter in praise of toleration that the “universal and mediocre Marmontel”141 secured from the Sorbonne the finest advertisement ever given to a work of fiction, the ecclesiastics of the old school being still too thoroughly steeped in the past to realize that a gospel of persecution was a bad warcry for a religion that was being more and more put on the defensive. Only an angry fear before the rising flood of unlicensed literature, combining with the long-baffled desire to strike some blow at freethinking, could have moved the Sorbonne to select for censure the duly licensed work142 of a popular academician and novelist; and it should be remembered that it was at a time of great activity in the unlicensed production of freethinking literature that the attack was made. The blow recoiled signally. The book was of course promptly translated into all the languages of Europe, selling by tens of thousands;143 and two sovereigns took occasion to give it their express approval. These were the Empress Catherine (who caused the book to be translated by members of her court while she was making a tour of her empire, she herself taking a chapter), and the Empress Maria-Theresa. From Catherine, herself a freethinker, the approbation might have been expected; but the known orthodoxy and austerity of Maria-Theresa made her support the more telling. In France a small literary tempest raged for a year. Marmontel published his correspondence with the syndic of the Sorbonne and with Voltaire; and in all there appeared some dozen documents pro and con, among them an anonymous satire by Turgot, Les xxxvii verités opposées aux xxxvii impiétés de Bélisaire, “Par un Bachelier Ubiquiste,”144 which, with the contributions of Voltaire, gave the victim very much the best of the battle.
21. Alongside of the more strictly literary or humanist movement, too, there went on one of a scientific kind, which divided into two lines, a speculative and a practical. On the former the freelance philosopher Julien Offray la Mettrie gave a powerful initial push by his materialistic theses, in which a medical knowledge that for the time was advanced is applied with a very keen if unsystematic reasoning faculty to the primary problem of mind and body; and others after him continued the impulse. La Mettrie produced his Natural History of the Mind in 1745;145 and in 1746 appeared the Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge of the Abbé Condillac, both essentially rationalistic and anti-theological works, though differing in their psychological positions, Condillac being a non-materialist, though a strong upholder of “sensism.” La Mettrie followed up his doctrine with the more definitely materialistic but less heedfully planned works, L’Homme Plante and L’Homme Machine (1748), the second of which, published at Leyden146 and wickedly dedicated to the pious Baron von Haller, was burned by order of the magistrates, its author being at the same time expelled from Holland. Both books are remarkable for their originality of thought, biological and ethical. Though La Mettrie professed to think the “greatest degree of probability” was in favour of the existence of a personal God,147 his other writings gave small support to the hypothesis; and even in putting it he rejects any inference as to worship. And he goes on to quote very placidly an atheist who insists that only an atheistic world can attain to happiness. It is notable that he, the typical materialist of his age, seems to have been one of its kindliest men, by the consent of all who knew him,148 though heedless in his life to the point of ending it by eating a monstrous meal out of bravado.
The conventional denunciation of La Mettrie (endorsed by Lord Morley, Voltaire, p. 122) proceeds ostensibly upon those of his writings in which he discussed sexual questions with absolute scientific freedom. He, however, insisted that his theoretic discussion had nothing whatever to do with his practice; and there is no evidence that he lived otherwise than as most men did in his age, and ours. Still, the severe censure passed on him by Diderot (Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, ed. 1782, ii, 22–24) seems to convict him of at least levity of character. Voltaire several times holds the same tone. But Diderot writes so angrily that his verdict incurs suspicion.
As Lange notes, there has been much loose generalization as to the place and bearing of La Mettrie in the history of French thought. Hettner, who apparently had not thought it worth while to read him, has ascribed his mental movement to the influence of Diderot’s Pensées philosophiques (1746), whereas it had begun in his own Histoire naturelle de l’âme, published a year before. La Mettrie’s originality and influence in general have been underestimated as a result of the hostility set up by disparagement of his character. The idea of a fundamental unity of type in nature—an idea underlying all the successive steps of Lamarck, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Goethe, and others, towards the complete conception of evolution—is set forth by him in L’Homme Plante in 1748, the year in which appeared De Maillet’s Telliamed. Buffon follows in time as in thought, only beginning his great work in 1749; Maupertuis, with his pseudonymous dissertation on the Universal system of Nature, applies La Mettrie’s conception in 1751; and Diderot’s Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature, stimulated by Maupertuis, appeared only in 1754. La Mettrie proceeded from the classification of Linnæus, but did not there find his idea. In the words of Lange, “these forgotten writings are in nowise so empty and superficial as is commonly assumed.” Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 328–29. Lange seems to have been the first to make a judicial study of La Mettrie’s work, as distinguished from the scandals about his character.
22. A more general influence, naturally, attached to the simple concrete handling of scientific problems. The interest in such questions, noticeable in England at the Restoration and radiating thence, is seen widely diffused in France after the publication of Fontenelle’s Entretiens, and thenceforward it rapidly strengthens. Barren theological disputations set men not merely against theology, but upon the study of Nature, where real knowledge was visibly possible. To a certain extent the study took openly heretical lines. The Abbé Lenglet du Fresnoy, who was four times imprisoned in the Bastille, supplied material of which D’Argens made much use, tending to overthrow the Biblical chronology and to discredit the story of the Flood.149 Benoît de Maillet (1656–1738), who had been for fifteen years inspector of the French establishments in Egypt and Barbary, left for posthumous publication (1748) a work of which the first title was an anagram of his name, Telliamed, ou Entretiens d’un philosophe indien avec un missionaire français. Of this treatise the thesis is that the shell deposits in the Alps and elsewhere showed the sea to have been where land now was; and that the rocks were gradually deposited in their different kinds in the fashion in which even now are being formed mud, sand, and shingle. De Maillet had thus anticipated the central conception of modern geology, albeit retaining many traditional delusions. His abstention from publication during his lifetime testifies to his sense of the danger he underwent, the treatise having been printed by him only in 1735, at the age of seventy-nine; and not till ten years after his death was it given to the world, with “a preface and dedication so worded as, in case of necessity, to give the printer a fair chance of falling back on the excuse that the work was intended for a mere jeu d’esprit.”150
The thesis was adopted, indeed plagiarized,151 by Mirabaud in his Le Monde, son origine et son antiquité (1751). Strangely enough, Voltaire refused to be convinced, and offered amazing suggestions as to the possible deposit of shells by pilgrims.152 It is not unlikely that it was Voltaire’s opposition rather than any orthodox argumentation that retarded in France the acceptance of an evolutionary view of the origin of the earth and of life. It probably had a more practical effect on scientific thought in England153—at least as regards geology: its speculations on the modification of species, which loosely but noticeably anticipate some of the inferences of Darwin, found no acceptance anywhere till Lamarck. In the opinion of Huxley, the speculations of Robinet, in the next generation, “are rather behind than in advance of those of De Maillet”;154 and it may be added that the former, with his pet theory that all Nature is “animated,” and that the stars and planets have the faculty of reproducing themselves like animals, wandered as far from sound bases as De Maillet ever did. The very form of De Maillet’s work, indeed, was not favourable to its serious acceptance; and in his case, as in those of so many pioneers of new ideas, errors and extravagances and oversights in regard to matters of detail went to justify “practical” men in dismissing novel speculations. Needless to say, the common run of scientific men remained largely under the influence of religious presuppositions in science even when they had turned their backs on the Church. Nonetheless, on all sides the study of natural fact began to play its part in breaking down the dominion of creed. Even in hidebound Protestant Switzerland, the sheer ennui of Puritanism is seen driving the descendants of the Huguenot refugees to the physical sciences for an interest and an occupation, before any freethinking can safely be avowed; and in France, as Buckle has shown in abundant detail, the study of the physical sciences became for many years before the Revolution almost a fashionable mania. And at the start the Church had contrived that such study should rank as unbelief, and so make unbelievers.
When Buffon155 in 1749–50 published his Histoire Naturelle, the delight which was given to most readers by its finished style was paralleled by the wrath which its Théorie de la Terre aroused among the clergy. After much discussion Buffon received early in 1751 from the Sorbonne an official letter specifying as reprehensible in his book fourteen propositions which he was invited to retract. He stoically obeyed in a declaration to the effect that he had “no intention to contradict the text of Scripture,” and that he believed “most firmly all there related about the creation,” adding: “I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth.”156 Still he was attacked as an unbeliever by the Bishop of Auxerre in that prelate’s pastoral against the thesis of de Prades.157 During the rest of his life he outwardly conformed to religious usage, but all men knew that in his heart he believed what he had written; and the memory of the affront that the Church had thus put upon so honoured a student helped to identify her cause no less with ignorance than with insolence and oppression. For all such insults, and for the long roll of her cruelties, the Church was soon to pay a tremendous penalty.
23. But science, like theology, had its schisms, and the rationalizing camp had its own strifes. Maupertuis, for instance, is remembered mainly as one of the victims of the mockery of Voltaire (which he well earned by his own antagonism at the court of Frederick); yet he was really an energetic man of science, and had preceded Voltaire in setting up in France the Newtonian against the Cartesian physics. In his System of Nature158 (not to be confused with the later work of d’Holbach under the same title) he in 1751 propounded a new version of the hylozoisms of ancient Greece; developed the idea of an underlying unity in the forms of natural life, already propounded by La Mettrie in his L’Homme Plante; connected it with Leibnitz’s formula of the economy of nature (“minimum of action”—the germ of the modern “line of least resistance”), and at the same time anticipated some of the special philosophic positions of Kant.159 Diderot, impressed by but professedly dissenting from Maupertuis’s Système in his Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature (1754), promptly pointed out that the conception of a primordially vitalized atom excluded that of a Creator, and for his own part thereafter took that standpoint.160
In 1754 came the Traité des Sensations of Condillac, in which is most systematically developed the physio-psychological conception of man as an “animated statue,” of which the thought is wholly conditioned by the senses. The mode of approach had been laid down before by La Mettrie, by Diderot, and by Buffon; and Condillac is rather a developer and systematizer than an originator;161 but in this case the process of unification was to the full as important as the first steps;162 and Condillac has an importance which is latterly being rediscovered by the school of Spencer on the one hand and by that of James on the other. Condillac, commonly termed a materialist, no more held the legendary materialistic view than any other so named; and the same may be said of the next figure in the “materialistic” series, J. B. Robinet, a Frenchman settled at Amsterdam, after having been, it is said, a Jesuit. His Nature (4 vols. 1761–1768) is a remarkable attempt to reach a strictly naturalistic conception of things.163 But he is a theorist, not an investigator. Even in his fixed idea that the universe is an “animal” he had perhaps a premonition of the modern discovery of the immense diffusion of bacterial life; but he seems to have had more deriders than disciples. He founds at once on Descartes and on Leibnitz, but in his Philosophical Considerations on the natural gradation of living forms (1768) he definitely sets aside theism as illusory, and puts ethics on a strictly scientific and human footing,164 extending the arguments of Hume and Hutcheson somewhat on the lines of Mandeville.165 On another line of reasoning a similar application of Mandeville’s thesis had already been made by Helvétius in his Traité de l’Esprit166 (1758), a work which excited a hostility now difficult to understand, but still reflected in censures no less surprising.