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.