HELVETIUS, HOLBACH AND CHASTELLUX.
There are two books issuing so directly from what may be called the
orthodox school of Philosophers, and so closely connected with the
"Encyclopaedia" and its authors, that they should be noticed next to the
great compilation itself. One of them has already been mentioned. It
bears the untranslatable title "De l'Esprit," a word which in this
simple and unmodified form means exactly neither wit nor spirit, but
something between the two and different from either.
The author, Helvetius, was one of those clever men whose ambition it is
to shine. The son of a fashionable physician, he had made a fortune as a
farmer of the revenue. He had been addicted, in his youth, to the
pursuit of women and of literature, and had subsequently shown
moderation in leaving his lucrative office and the dissipations of the
town and retiring into the country with a charming wife. For eight
months in the year they lived at Vore, not unvisited by Philosophers;
for four they kept open house in Paris. Both were good natured,
charitable, and benevolent. Among the Philosophers Helvetius held the
place of the rich and clever worldling, so often found in literary
circles.
The treatise "De l'Esprit" has for its object the setting forth of the
doctrine of utility in its extreme form. As a preliminary argument all
the operations of the mind are reduced to sensation. "When by a
succession of my ideas, or by the vibration which certain sounds cause
in the organ of my ears, I recall the image of an oak, then my interior
organs must necessarily be nearly in the same situation as they were at
the sight of that oak. Now this situation of the organs must necessarily
produce a sensation; it is, therefore, evident that memory is sensation.
"Having stated this principle, I say further that it is in the capacity
which we have of perceiving the resemblances or the differences, the
agreement or the disagreement, which different objects have with each
other, that all the operations of the mind consist. Now this capacity is
nothing else than physical sensibility; therefore everything is reduced
to sensation."
Utility, according to Helvetius, is the foundation of all our moral
feelings. Each person praises as just in others only those actions which
are useful to himself; every nation or society praises what is useful to
it in its corporate capacity. "If a judge acquits a guilty man, if a
minister of state promotes an unworthy one, each is just, according to
the man protected. But if the judge punishes, or the minister refuses,
they will always be unjust in the eyes of the criminal and of the
unsuccessful."... "The Christians who justly spoke of the cruelties
practiced on them by the pagans as barbarity and crime, did they not
give the name of zeal to the cruelties which they, in their turn,
practiced on these same pagans?" As the physical world is subject to
laws of motion, so is the moral world to those of interest. All men
alike strive after their own happiness. It is the diversity of passions
and tastes, some of which are in accordance with the public interest and
others in opposition to it, which form our virtues and our vices. We
should, therefore, not despise the wicked, but pity them, and thank
heaven that it has given us none of those tastes and passions which
would have obliged us to seek our happiness in other people's
misfortunes. This opinion, although extravagantly stated, was, as we
have seen, but the caricature of the doctrine of utility, as taught by
Locke and held by his followers.
Helvetius took great pains to make the treatment of his theme
interesting. He labored long over every chapter. His pages overflow with
anecdotes, with sneers at monks, and with excuses for lust. They show
the belief in the omnipotence of legislation which was common in his
day. A large space is devoted to minimizing the natural inequality of
mankind, and attributing the differences observable among men to chance
or to education. If Galileo had not happened to be walking in a garden
in Florence where certain workmen asked him a question about a pump, he
would not, according to Helvetius, have discovered the weight of the
atmosphere. It was the fall of the apple which gave Newton his theory of
gravitation. Such puerilities as these disgust us in the book; yet the
theory that greatness is but the result of an inconsiderable accident,
was not unnatural in one who had probably hit on an idea which struck
him as telling, and believed that he had thereby achieved greatness.
[Footnote: Helvetius, i. 130, 183; ii. 7, and passim. For Helvetius, see
Nouvelle Biographie universelle. Morley, Diderot, ii. 141. Grimm, iv.
80. Morellet, i. 71, 140. Morellet represents himself as a tame cat in
Helvetius's house. Marmontel, ii. 115 (liv. vi.) an excellent
description. Compare Locke, i. 261, ii. 97. The doctrine of utility is
probably nearly as old as philosophy itself. It has been well suggested
that although not the ultimate motive of virtue, utility may be the test
of morals. It was, in a measure, Helvetius that inspired Bentham.
Morley, Diderot, ii. 154.]
Helvetius had endeavored to carry the doctrines of the French followers
of Locke to their last logical conclusions, but the successful
accomplishment of that task was reserved for a stronger and steadier
hand than his. Baron Holbach was an amiable and good man, the constant
friend of the Encyclopaedists. At his house they often met, so that it
came to be known among them as the Café de l'Europe, and its master as
the "maître d'hôtel" of Philosophy. But these nicknames were used in
good part. Holbach had none of the flippancy of Helvetius. His book, the
"System of Nature," is a solemn, earnest argument, proceeding from a
clear brain and a pure heart. Our nature may revolt at his theories, but
we cannot question his honesty or his benevolence. The book, published,
as the fashion was, under a false name, yet expresses the inmost
convictions of the writer.[Footnote: The name assumed was that of
Mirabaud, once secretary to the Academy, who had died before the book
appeared. See Morley, _Diderot_, ii. 173, as to the authorship of
the _System of Nature_. It has sometimes been attributed to
Diderot, but it seems clear from internal evidence that Diderot could
not have written it. The style and the thought are both too compact to
proceed from that diffuse thinker and writer. But Diderot, who had great
influence on many men, may have suggested some of the ideas.]
"Men," he says, "will always make mistakes, when they abandon experience
for systems born of the imagination." Man exists in nature and can
imagine nothing outside of nature. Let him, therefore, cease to seek
beyond the world he inhabits for beings which shall procure for him that
happiness which nature refuses to give him. "Man is a being purely
physical. Moral man is but that being considered from a certain point of
view, that is to say, relatively to some of his ways of acting, due to
his particular organization." All human actions, visible and invisible,
are the necessary consequences of man's mechanism, and of the impulsions
which it receives from surrounding entities.
The universe is made up of matter and motion, cause and effect. Nature
is the great whole, resulting from the assemblage of different matters,
combinations, and motions. By motion only do we know the existence and
properties of other beings and distinguish them from each other. There
is continual action and reaction in all things. Love and hate in men are
like attraction and repulsion in physics, with causes more obscure. All
beings, organic and inorganic, tend to self-preservation. This tendency
in man is called self-love.
There is in reality no order nor disorder, since all things are
necessary. It is only in our minds that there exists the model of what
we call order; like other abstract ideas, it corresponds to nothing
outside of ourselves. Order is no more than the faculty of coordinating
ourselves with the beings that surround us, or with the whole of which
we form a part. But if we wish to apply the word to nature, it may stand
for a succession of actions or motions which we suppose to contribute to
a given end. We call beings intelligent when they are organized like
ourselves, and can act toward an end which we understand.
No two beings are exactly alike; differences, whether called physical or
moral, being the result of their bodily qualities. These differences are
the cause and the support of human society. If all men were alike they
would not need each other. It is a mistake to complain of this
inequality, by which we are put under the fortunate necessity of
combining. In coming together men have made an explicit or implied
compact, by which they have bound themselves to render mutual services
and not to injure each other. But as each man's nature leads him to seek
to satisfy his own passions or caprices without regard to others, law
was established to bring him back to his duty. This law is the sum of
the wills of the society, united to fix the conduct of its members, or
to direct their actions towards the common aim of the association. For
convenience, certain citizens are made executors of the popular will,
and are called monarchs, magistrates, or representatives, according to
the form of the government. But that form may be changed, and all the
powers of all persons under it revoked, at the will of the society
itself, by which and for which all government is established. Laws, to
be just, must have for their invariable end the general interests of
society; they must procure for the greatest number of citizens the
advantages for which those citizens have combined. A society whose
chiefs and whose laws do not benefit its members loses all rights over
them. Chiefs who do harm to any society lose the right to command it. By
not applying these maxims the nations are made unhappy. By the
imprudence of nations, and by the craft of those to whom power had been
entrusted, sovereigns have become absolute masters. They have claimed to
hold their powers from Heaven and not to be responsible to any one on
earth. Hence politics have become corrupt and no more than a form of
brigandage. Man unrestrained soon turns to evil. Only by fear can
society control the passions of its rulers. It must, therefore, confer
but limited powers on any one of them, and divide those forces which, if
united, would necessarily crush it.[Footnote: Holbach is clearly
indebted both to Rousseau and to Montesquieu.]
Government influences alike, and necessarily, the physical and moral
welfare of nations. As its care produces labor, activity, abundance, and
health, its neglect and its injustice produce indolence, discouragement,
famine, contagion, vices, and crimes. It can bring to light, or can
smother talents, skill, and virtue. In fact the government, distributing
rank, wealth, rewards and punishments; master of the things in which men
have learned from childhood to place their happiness, acquires a
necessary influence on their conduct, inflames their passions, turns
them as it will, modifies and settles their manners and customs.
[Footnote: _Moeurs_, a word for which we have no exact equivalent.
It includes the idea of morals as well as that of customs.] These are,
in whole nations, as in individuals, but the conduct, or general system
of will and action which necessarily results from their education, their
government, their laws, their religious opinions, their wise or foolish
institutions. In short, manners and customs are the habits of nations;
good when they produce solid and true happiness for society, and
detestable in the eyes of reason, in spite of the sanction of laws,
usage, religion, public opinion or example, when they have the support
only of habit and prejudice, which seldom consult experience and good
sense. No action is so abominable that it is not, or has not been,
approved by some nation. Parricide, infanticide, theft, usurpation,
cruelty, intolerance, prostitution, have been allowed and even
considered meritorious by some of the peoples of the earth. Religion
especially has consecrated the most revolting and unreasonable customs.
The cause of the wickedness and corruption of men is that nowhere are
they governed according to their nature. Men are bad, not because they
are born bad, but because they are made so. The great and powerful
safely crush the poor and unfortunate, who try, at the risk of their
lives, to return the evil they have suffered. The poor attack openly, or
in secret, that unjust society which gives all to some of its children
and takes all from others.
The rights of a man over his fellows can be founded only on the
happiness which he procures for them, or for which he gives them cause
to hope. No mortal receives from nature the right to command. The
authority which the father exercises over his family is founded on the
advantages which he is supposed to bestow upon it. Ranks in political
society have their basis in real or imaginary utility. The rich man has
rights over the poor man solely by virtue of the well-being which he may
bestow upon him. Genius, talents, art, and skill have claims only on
account of the pleasant and useful things with which they furnish
society. To be virtuous is to make people happy.
A society enjoys all the happiness of which it is capable when the
greater number of its members is fed, clothed, and lodged; when most men
can, without excessive labor, satisfy the cravings of nature. Men's
imagination should be satisfied when they are sure that the fruits of
their labor cannot be taken from them, and that they are working for
themselves. Beyond this all is superfluity, and it is foolish that a
whole nation should sweat to give luxuries to a few persons who can
never be content because their imaginations have become boundless.
Religion is a delusion. The soul, born with the body, is childish in
children, adult in manhood, grows old with advancing years. It is vain
to suppose that the soul survives the body. To die is to think, to feel,
to enjoy, to suffer, no more. Let us reflect on death, not to encourage
fear and melancholy, but to accustom ourselves to look at it with
peaceful eyes, and to throw off the false terror with which the enemies
of our peace try to inspire us.
Utility is the touchstone of systems, opinions, and actions; it is the
measure of our very love of truth. The most useful truths are the most
admired; we call those truths great which most concern the human race;
those futile which concern only a few men whose ideas we do not share.
The doctrine of utility is combined with that of necessity. Most of the
French Philosophers were necessarians, but Holbach expressed the
doctrine in a more extreme form than the others. Will, according to him,
is a modification of the brain by which it is disposed, or prepared, to
set our other organs in motion. The will is necessarily determined by
the quality and pleasantness of the ideas which act upon it.
Deliberation is the oscillation of the will when moved in different
directions by opposing forces; determination is the final prevalence of
one force over the other. There is no difference between the man who
throws himself out of a window and the man who is thrown out, except
that the impulse on the latter comes from something outside of himself,
and that of the former from something within his own mechanism.
[Footnote: Chaudon, the Benedictine, probably the cleverest of the
clerical writers of the time, thus attacks the doctrine of necessity, as
set forth by Holbach. The author of the _System_ has certainly
given out very fine maxims of morality, very pathetic exhortations to
virtue; but with his principles this can be but a joke. It is an
absurdity, like that of a man who, recognizing that his watch was only a
machine, should not fail to exhort it every day to prevent its getting
out of order. Grosse, Diet. d'antiphilosophisme, 923. Holbach would
probably have replied that he was necessarily obliged to exhort, and
that Chaudon was fatally forced to answer.]
Nature has made men neither good nor bad; it has made them machines. Man
is virtuous only in obedience to the call of interest. Morals are
founded on our approbation of those actions which are advantageous to
the race. When good actions benefit others and not ourselves our
approbation of them is similar to the admiration we feel for a fine
picture belonging to some one else. The good man is he whose true ideas
have shown him that his happiness lies in a line of conduct which others
are forced by their own interests to like and approve. By virtue we
acquire the good will of our neighbors, and no man can be happy without
it. Our self-love becomes a hundred times more delightful when to it is
joined the love of others for us. Let us remember that the most
impracticable of all designs is that of being happy alone.
To this point in his argument Holbach had only repeated with strength,
clearness and consistency what the school of the Philosophers from
Voltaire to Helvetius had either affirmed or hinted. In his second
volume, however, he boldly cut loose from his predecessors and avowed
his disbelief in any God. Voltaire and Rousseau were theists, with
different sorts of faith, and the Philosophers, although treating all
churches, and especially all priests, with contempt, had retained, at
least in speech, some remnant of theism. But Holbach declared that God
was an illusion, devised by the fears and the ignorance of mankind. "The
idea of Divinity," he says, "always awakens afflicting ideas in our
minds. "By the word "God" men mean the most hidden or remote cause; they
use the word only when the chain of material and known causes ceases to
be visible to them. It is a vague name which they apply to a cause short
of which their indolence, or the limits of their knowledge, forces them
to stop. Men found nature deaf to their cries; they therefore imagined
an intelligent master over it, hoping that he would listen to them.
This theme is elaborated by Holbach throughout his second volume. Here
as elsewhere he writes with seriousness and conviction, although some of
his logical positions are assailable. Never before in France had
materialism, necessarianism and atheism been so clearly and forcibly
expounded. The very Philosophers were alarmed. Voltaire hastened to
write an article on God so unconvincing, that it can hardly have
convinced himself. It amounts to little more than an argument that God
is the most probable of hypotheses, and it admits that there may be two
or several gods as well as one. It is not unlikely that Voltaire thought
it necessary for his peace in the world to protest against so outspoken
a book as the "System of Nature."
The true answer to Holbach is to be found in a different order of ideas
from any that Voltaire was prepared to accept. Yet Locke might have
taught him that if there is no logical reason to believe in the
existence of mind, there is as little to believe in the existence of
matter. Experience might have shown him that men do not always seek the
thing which they believe most useful to themselves. The old and favorite
doctrine of utility labors under the disadvantage that it has never
shown, nor ever can show, an adequate reason why any man should care for
another or for the race. And as for the existence of God,--that can no
more be proved by argument than the existence of matter, mind, or the
_non-ego_.
Helvetius and Holbach had worked out the theories of the school to their
last philosophical conclusion. A younger writer in the last years of the
reign of Louis XV. was to furnish the complete application of them. The
Chevalier de Chastellux is well known in America by the book of travels
which he wrote when he accompanied the Marquis of Rochambeau in the
Revolutionary War. Chastellux was just then at the height of his
reputation. He had published in 1772 a book which, although now almost
forgotten, is still interesting as a link between the thought of the
last century and that of a large school of thinkers to-day. The title is
"Of Public Felicity, or considerations on the fate of men in the
different Epochs of History," and the motto is _Nil Desperandum_.
"So many people have written the history of men," says Chastellux; "will
not that of humanity be read with pleasure?" And again: "Several authors
have carefully examined if such a Nation were more religious, more
sober, more war-like than another; none has yet sought to discover which
was the happiest."
The object of inquiry being thus indicated, it becomes of the first
importance to consider what test of happiness Chastellux will propose.
He leaves us in no doubt on this point. "A happy nation is not one which
lives with little; the Goths and Vandals lived with little, and they
sought abundance in other regions. A happy nation is not one which is
hardened to trouble and labor; the Goths and Vandals were hardened to
labor, and they sought elsewhere for softness and rest. A happy nation
is not one which is strongest in battle; it fights only to obtain peace
and the commodities of life. A happy nation is one which enjoys ease and
liberty, which is attached to its possessions, and, above all things,
which does not desire to change its condition." And in another place he
asks, what are some of the indications, the symptoms of public felicity.
Two of them, he says, are naturally presented: agriculture and
population. "I name agriculture before population," he continues,
"because if it happens that a nation which is not numerous cultivates
carefully a great quantity of land, it will result that this nation
consumes much, and adds to the food necessary to life the ease and
commodity which make its happiness. If, on the other hand, the increase
of the people is in proportion to that of the agriculture, what can we
conclude except that this multiplication of the human race, as of all
other species, comes solely from its well-being. Agriculture is,
therefore, an indication of the happiness of the nations anterior and
preferable to population." The most certain indication of felicity is a
large proportional consumption of products; a high rate of living. The
marvelous and even the sublime are to be dreaded; but "all that
multiplies men in the nations, and harvests on the surface of the earth,
is good in itself, is good above all things, and preferable to all that
seems fine in the eyes of prejudice."[Footnote: Chastellux finds it
hard to stick quite close to his definition of felicity. Of the English
he says, "Such are the true advantages of this nation; which, joined to
the safety of its property and the inestimable privilege of depending
only on the law, would make it the happiest on earth, if its climate,
its ancient manners and customs, and its frequent revolutions had not
turned it toward discontent and melancholy. But these considerations do
not belong to our subject." ii. 144.]
And as material good is the only good, so it is in modern times and in
civilized countries that the highest point reached by humanity is to be
found. "If wisdom be the art of happy living; if philosophy be truly the
love of wisdom, as its name alone would give us to understand, the
Greeks were never philosophers."
To show that modern nations are increasing the ease and comfort of life
to a point unknown before is no difficult task. Chastellux enumerates
the discoveries of physical science, and touches on the achievements of
learning and the arts, then calls on his readers to look on all these
but as payments on account in the progress of our knowledge; as so much
of the road already passed in the vast course of the human mind. Here we
have the truly modern ideal of progress; the end of government the
greatest happiness of the greatest number, and happiness dependent
merely on material conditions. Morals under this system are but a branch
of medicine. Religion is an old-fashioned prejudice. Let us push on and
unite the world in one great, comfortable, well-fed family. Such is the
last practical advice of the French Philosophic school of the eighteenth
century and of its unconscious followers in this. If the conclusion does
not satisfy the highest aspirations of the human race, that is perhaps
because of some flaw in the premises.