THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA.
The history of the encyclopædic conception of human knowledge is a much
more interesting and important object of inquiry than a list of the
various encyclopædic enterprises to be found in the annals of
literature. Yet it is proper here to mention some of the attempts in
this direction, which preceded our memorable book of the eighteenth
century. It is to Aristotle, no doubt, that we must look for the first
glimpse of the idea that human knowledge is a totality, whose parts are
all closely and organically connected with one another. But the idea
that only dawned in that gigantic understanding was lost for many
centuries. The compilations of Pliny are not in a right sense
encyclopædic, being presided over by no definite idea of informing
order. It was not until the later middle age that any attempt was made
to present knowledge as a whole. Albertus Magnus, "the ape of Aristotle"
(1193-1280), left for a season the three great questions of the
existence of universals, of the modes of the existence of species and
genus, and of their place in or out of the bosom of the individuals,
and executed a compilation of such physical facts as had been then
discovered.[90] A more distinctly encyclopædic work was the book of
Vincent de Beauvais (_d._ 1264), called _Speculum naturale, morale,
doctrinale, et historiale_--a compilation from Aquinas in some parts,
and from Aristotle in others. Hallam mentions three other compilations
of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and observes that their
laborious authors did not much improve the materials which they had
amassed in their studies, though they sometimes arranged them
conveniently. In the mediæval period, as he remarks, the want of
capacity to discern probable truths was a very great drawback from the
value of their compilations.[91]
Far the most striking production of the thirteenth century in this kind
was the _Opus Majus_ of Roger Bacon (1267), of which it has been said
that it is at once the Encyclopædia and the Novum Organum of that
age;[92] at once a summary of knowledge, and the suggestion of a truer
method. This, however, was merely the introductory sketch to a vaster
encyclopædic work, the _Compendium Philosophiæ_, which was not
perfected. "In common with minds of great and comprehensive grasp, his
vivid perception of the intimate relationship of the different parts of
philosophy, and his desire to raise himself from the dead level of
every individual science, induced Bacon to grasp at and embrace the
whole."[93] In truth, the encyclopædic spirit was in the air throughout
the thirteenth century. It was the century of books bearing the
significant titles of Summa, or Universitas, or Speculum.
The same spirit revived towards the middle of the sixteenth century. In
1541 a book was published at Basel by one Ringelberg, which first took
the name of Cyclopædia, that has since then become so familiar a word in
Western Europe. This was followed within sixty years by several other
works of the same kind. The movement reached its height in a book which
remained the best in its order for a century. A German, one J.H. Alsted
(1588-1638), published in 1620 an _Encyclopædia scientiarum omnium_. A
hundred years later the illustrious Leibnitz pronounced it a worthy task
to perfect and amend Alsted's book. What was wanting to the excellent
man, he said, was neither labour nor judgment, but material, and the
good fortune of such days as ours. And Leibnitz wrote a paper of
suggestions for its extension and improvement.[94] Alsted's Encyclopædia
is of course written in Latin, and he prefixes to it by way of motto the
celebrated lines in which Lucretius declares that nothing is sweeter
than to dwell apart in the serene temples of the wise. Though he informs
us in the preface that his object was to trace the outlines of the
great "latifundium regni philosophici" in a single syntagma, yet he
really does no more than arrange a number of separate treatises or
manuals, and even dictionaries, within the limits of a couple of folios.
As is natural to the spirit of the age in which he wrote, great
predominance is given to the verbal sciences of grammar, rhetoric, and
formal logic, and a verbal or logical division regulates the
distribution of the matter, rather than a scientific regard for its
objective relations.
For the true parentage, however, of the Encyclopædia of Diderot and
D'Alembert, it is unnecessary to prolong this list. It was Francis
Bacon's idea of the systematic classification of knowledge which
inspired Diderot, and guided his hand throughout. "If we emerge from
this vast operation," he wrote in the Prospectus, "our principal debt
will be to the chancellor Bacon, who sketched the plan of a universal
dictionary of sciences and arts at a time when there were not, so to
say, either arts or sciences." This sense of profound and devoted
obligation was shared by D'Alembert, and was expressed a hundred times
in the course of the work. No more striking panegyric has ever been
passed upon our immortal countryman than is to be found in the
Preliminary Discourse.[95] The French Encyclopædia was the direct fruit
of Bacon's magnificent conceptions. And if the efficient origin of the
Encyclopædia was English, so did the occasion rise in England also.
In 1727 Ephraim Chambers, a Westmoreland Quaker, published in London
two folios, entitled, a Cyclopædia or Universal Dictionary of the Arts
and Sciences. The idea of it was broad and excellent. "Our view," says
Chambers, "was to consider the several matters, not only in themselves,
but relatively, or as they respect each other; both to treat them as so
many wholes, and as so many parts of some greater whole." The compiler
lacked the grasp necessary to realise this laudable purpose. The book
has, however, the merit of conciseness, and is a singular monument of
literary industry, for it was entirely compiled by Chambers himself. It
had a great success, and though its price was high (four guineas), it
ran through five editions in eighteen years. On the whole, however, it
is meagre, and more like a dictionary than an encyclopædia, such as
Alsted's for instance.
Some fifteen years after the publication of Chambers's Cyclopædia, an
Englishman (Mills) and a German (Sellius) went to Le Breton with a
project for its translation into French. The bookseller obtained the
requisite privilege from the government, but he obtained it for himself,
and not for the projectors. This trick led to a quarrel, and before it
was settled the German died and the Englishman returned to his own
country. They left the translation behind them duly executed.[96] Le
Breton then carried the undertaking to a certain abbé, Gua de Malves.
Gua de Malves (_b._ 1712) seems to have been a man of a busy and
ingenious mind. He was the translator of Berkeley's _Hylas and
Philonous_, of Anson's Voyages, and of various English tracts on
currency and political economy. It is said that he first suggested the
idea of a cyclopædia on a fuller plan,[97] but we have no evidence of
this. In any case, the project made no advance in his hands. The
embarrassed bookseller next applied to Diderot, who was then much in
need of work that should bring him bread. His fertile and energetic
intelligence transformed the scheme. By an admirable intuition, he
divined the opportunity which would be given by the encyclopædic form,
of gathering up into a whole all that new thought and modern knowledge,
which existed as yet in unsystematic and uninterpreted fragments. His
enthusiasm fired Le Breton. It was resolved to make Chambers's work a
mere starting-point for a new enterprise of far wider scope.
"The old and learned D'Aguesseau," says Michelet, "notwithstanding the
pitiable, the wretched sides of his character, had two lofty sides, his
reform of the laws, and a personal passion, the taste and urgent need of
universality, a certain encyclopædic sense. A young man came to him one
day, a man of letters living by his pen, and somewhat under a cloud for
one or two hazardous books that lack of bread had driven him to write.
Yet this stranger of dubious repute wrought a miracle. With
bewilderment the old sage listened to him unrolling the gigantic scheme
of a book that should be all books. On his lips, sciences were light and
life. It was more than speech, it was creation. One would have said that
he had made these sciences, and was still at work, adding, extending,
fertilising, ever engendering. The effect was incredible. D'Aguesseau, a
moment above himself, forgot the old man, received the infection of
genius, and became great with the greatness of the other. He had faith
in the young man, and protected the Encyclopædia."[98]
A fresh privilege was procured (Jan. 21, 1746), and as Le Breton's
capital was insufficient for a project of this magnitude, he invited
three other booksellers to join him, retaining a half share for himself,
and allotting the other moiety to them. As Le Breton was not strong
enough to bear the material burdens of producing a work on so gigantic a
scale as was now proposed, so Diderot felt himself unequal to the task
of arranging and supervising every department of a book that was to
include the whole circle of the sciences. He was not skilled enough in
mathematics, nor in physics, which were then for the most part
mathematically conceived. For that province, he associated with himself
as an editorial colleague one of the most conspicuous and active members
of the philosophical party. Of this eminent man, whose relations with
Diderot were for some years so intimate, it is proper that we should say
something.
D'Alembert was the natural son of Madame de Tencin, by whom he had been
barbarously exposed immediately after his birth. "The true ancestors of
a man of genius," says Condorcet finely upon this circumstance, "are the
masters who have gone before him, and his true descendants are disciples
that are worthy of him." He was discovered on a November night in the
year 1717, by the beadle, in a nearly dying condition on the steps of
the church of St. John the Round, from which he afterwards took his
Christian name. An honest woman of the common people, with that personal
devotion which is less rare among the poor than among the rich, took
charge of the foundling. The father, who was an officer of artillery and
brother of Destouches, the author of some poor comedies, by and by
advanced the small sums required to pay for the boy's schooling.
D'Alembert proved a brilliant student. Unlike nearly every other member
of the encyclopædic party, he was a pupil not of the Jesuits but of
their rivals. The Jansenists recognised the keenness and force of their
pupil, and hoped that they had discovered a new Pascal. But he was less
docile than his great predecessor in their ranks. When his studies were
completed, he devoted himself to geometry, for which he had a passion
that nothing could extinguish. For the old monastic vow of poverty,
chastity, and obedience, he adopted the manlier substitute of poverty,
truth, and liberty--the worthy device of every man of letters. When he
awoke in the morning, he thought with delight of the work that had been
begun the previous day and would occupy the day before him. In the
necessary intervals of his meditations, he recalled the lively pleasure
that he felt at the play: at the play between the acts, he thought of
the still greater pleasure that was promised to him by the work of the
morrow. His mathematical labours led to valuable results in the
principles of equilibrium and the movement of fluids, in a new calculus,
and in a new solution of the problem of the precession of the
equinoxes.[99]
These contributions to what was then the most popular of the sciences
brought him fame, and fame brought him its usual distractions. As soon
as a writer has shown himself the possessor of gifts that may be of
value to society, then society straightway sets to work to seduce and
hinder him from diligently exercising them. D'Alembert resisted these
influences steadfastly. His means were very limited, yet he could never
be induced to increase them at the cost either of his social
independence or of his scientific pursuits. He lived for forty years
under the humble roof of the poor woman who had treated him as a son.
"You will never be anything better than a philosopher," she used to cry
reproachfully, "and what is a philosopher? 'Tis a madman who torments
himself all his life, that people may talk about him when he is dead."
D'Alembert zealously adhered to his destination. Frederick the Great
vainly tempted him by an offer of the succession to Maupertuis as
president of the Academy of Berlin. Although, however, he declined to
accept the post, he enjoyed all its authority and prerogative. Frederick
always consulted him in filling up vacancies and making appointments. It
is a magnanimous trait in D'Alembert's history that he should have
procured for Lagrange a position and livelihood at Berlin, warmly
commending him as a man of rare and superior genius, although Lagrange
had vigorously opposed some of his own mathematical theories. Ten years
after Frederick's offer, the other great potentate of the north,
Catherine of Russia, besought him to undertake the education of the
young grand duke, her son. But neither urgent flatteries and
solicitations under the imperial hand, nor the munificent offer of a
hundred thousand francs a year, availed to draw him away from his
independence and his friends. The great Frederick used to compare him to
one of those oriental monarchs, who cherish a strict seclusion in order
to enhance their importance and majesty. He did not refuse a pension of
some fifty pounds a year from Berlin, and the same amount was bestowed
upon him from the privy purse at Versailles. He received a small annual
sum in addition from the Academy.
Though the mathematical sciences remained the objects of his special
study, D'Alembert was as free as the other great men of the encyclopædic
school from the narrowness of the pure specialist. He naturally reminds
us of the remarkable saying imputed to Leibnitz, that he only attributed
importance to science, because it enabled him to speak with authority in
philosophy and religion. His correspondence with Voltaire, extending
over the third quarter of the century, is the most instructive record
that we possess of the many-sided doings of that busy time. His series
of _éloges_ on the academicians who died between 1700 and 1772 is one of
the most interesting works in the department of literary history. He
paid the keenest attention to the great and difficult art of writing.
Translations from Tacitus, Bacon, and Addison, show his industry in a
useful practice. A long collection of synonyms bears witness to his fine
discrimination in the use of words. And the clearness, precision, and
reserved energy of his own prose mark the success of the pains that he
took with style. He knew the secret. Have lofty sentiments, he said, and
your manner of writing will be firm and noble.[100] Yet he did not
ignore the other side and half of the truth, which is expressed in the
saying of another important writer of that day--By taking trouble to
speak with precision, one gains the habit of thinking rightly
(_Condillac_).
Like so many others to whom literature owes much, D'Alembert was all his
life fighting against bad health. Like Voltaire and Rousseau, he was
born dying, and he remained delicate and valetudinarian to the end. He
had the mental infirmities belonging to his temperament. He was
restless, impatient, mobile, susceptible of irritation. When the young
Mademoiselle Phlipon, in after years famous as wife of the virtuous
Roland, was taken to a sitting of the Academy, she was curious to see
the author of the Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopædia, but his
small face and sharp thin voice made her reflect with some
disappointment, that the writings of a philosopher are better to know
than his mask.[101] In everything except zeal for light and
emancipation, D'Alembert was the opposite of Diderot. Where Diderot was
exuberant, prodigal, and disordered, D'Alembert was a precisian.
Difference of temperament, however, did not prevent their friendship
from being for many years cordial and intimate. When the Encyclopædia
was planned, it was to D'Alembert, as we have said, that Diderot turned
for aid in the mathematical sciences, where his own knowledge was not
sufficiently full nor well grounded. They were in strong and singular
agreement in their idea of the proper place and function of the man of
letters. One of the most striking facts about their alliance, and one
of the most important facts in the history of the Encyclopædia, is that
henceforth the profession of letters became at once definite and
independent. Diderot and D'Alembert both of them remained poor, but they
were never hangers-on. They did not look to patrons, nor did they bound
their vision by Versailles. They were the first to assert the lawful
authority of the new priesthood. They revolted deliberately and in set
form against the old system of suitorship and protection. "Happy are men
of letters," wrote D'Alembert, "if they recognise at last that the
surest way of making themselves respectable is to live united and almost
shut up among themselves; that by this union they will come, without any
trouble, to give the law to the rest of the nation in all affairs of
taste and philosophy; that the true esteem is that which is awarded by
men who are themselves worthy of esteem.... As if the art of instructing
and enlightening men were not, after the too rare art of good
government, the noblest portion and gift in human reach."[102]
This consciousness of the power and exaltation of their calling, which
men of letters now acquired, is much more than the superficial fact
which it may at first seem to be. It marked the rise of a new teaching
order and the supersession of the old. The highest moral ideas now
belonged no longer to the clergy, but to the writers; no longer to
official Catholicism, but to that fertilising medley of new notions
about human knowledge and human society which then went by the name of
philosophy. What is striking is that the ideas sown by philosophy became
eventually the source of higher life in Catholicism. If the church of
the revolution showed something that we may justly admire, it was
because the encyclopædic band had involuntarily and inevitably imparted
a measure of their own clearsightedness, fortitude, moral energy, and
spirit of social improvement, to a church which was, when they began
their work, an abominable burden on the spiritual life of the nation. If
the Catholicism of Chateaubriand, of Lamennais, of Montalembert, was a
different thing from the Catholicism of a Dubois, or a Rohan, from the
vile corruptions of the Jesuits and the grovelling superstitions of the
later Jansenists, it was the execrated freethinkers whom the church and
mankind had to thank for the change. The most enlightened Catholic of
to-day ought to admit that Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, were the true
reformers of his creed. They supplied it with ideas which saved it from
becoming finally a curse to civilisation. It was no Christian prelate,
but Diderot who burst the bonds of a paralysing dogma by the
magnificent cry, _Détruisez ces enceintes qui rétrécissent vos idées!
Elargissez Dieu!_[103] We see the same phenomenon in our own day. The
Christian churches are assimilating as rapidly as their formula will
permit, the new light and the more generous moral ideas and the higher
spirituality of teachers who have abandoned all churches, and who are
systematically denounced as enemies of the souls of men. _Sic vos non
vobis mellificatis apes!_ These transformations of religion by leavening
elements contributed from a foreign doctrine, are the most interesting
process in the history of truth.
The Encyclopædia became a powerful engine for aiding such a
transformation. Because it was this, and because it rallied all that was
then best in France round the standard of light and social hope, we
ought hardly to grudge time or pains to its history. For it was not
merely in the field of religious ideas that the Encyclopædists led
France in a new way. They affected the national life on every side,
pressing forward with enlightened principles in all the branches of
material and political organisation. Their union in a great
philosophical band gave an impressive significance to their work. The
collection within a single set of volumes of a body of new truths,
relating to so many of the main interests of men, invested the book and
its writers with an aspect of universality, of collective and organic
doctrine, which the writers themselves would without doubt have
disowned, and which it is easy to dissolve by tests of logic. But the
popular impression that the Encyclopædists constituted a single body
with a common doctrine and a common aim was practically sound. Comte has
pointed out with admirable clearness the merit of the conception of an
encyclopædic workshop.[104] It united the members of rival destructive
schools in a great constructive task. It furnished a rallying-point for
efforts otherwise the most divergent. Their influence was precisely what
it would have been, if popular impressions had been literally true.
Diderot and D'Alembert did their best to heighten this feeling. They
missed no occasion of fixing a sentiment of co-operation and fellowship.
They spoke of their dictionary as the transactions of an Academy.[105]
Each writer was answerable for his own contribution, but he was in the
position of a member of some learned corporation. To every volume, until
the great crisis of 1759, was prefixed a list of those who had
contributed to it. If a colleague died, the public was informed of the
loss that the work had sustained, and his services were worthily
commemorated in a formal _éloge_.[106] Feuds, epigrams, and offences
were not absent, but on the whole there was steadfast and generous
fraternity.
As Voltaire eloquently said, officers of war by land and by sea,
magistrates, physicians who knew nature, men of letters whose taste
purified knowledge, geometers, physicists, all united in a work that was
as useful as it was laborious, without any view of interest, without
even seeking fame, as many of them concealed their names; finally
without any common understanding and agreement, and therefore without
anything of the spirit of party.[107] Turning over the pages on which
the list of writers is inscribed, we find in one place or another nearly
every name that has helped to make the literature of the time famous.
Montesquieu, who died in the beginning of 1755, left behind him the
unfinished fragment of an article on Taste, and it may be noticed in
passing that our good-natured Diderot was the only man of letters who
attended the remains of the illustrious writer to the grave.[108] The
article itself, though no more than a fragment, has all the charms of
Montesquieu's delightful style; it is serious without pedantry, graceful
without levity, and is rich in observations that are precise and pointed
without the vice of emphasis. The great Turgot, diligently solicitous
for the success of every enterprise that promised to improve human
happiness by adding to knowledge and spreading enlightenment, wrote some
of the most valuable articles that the work contained, and his
discussion of Endowments perhaps still remains the weightiest
contribution to that important subject. Oddly enough, he was one of the
very few writers who refused to sign his name to his
contributions.[109] His assistance only ceased when he perceived that
the scheme was being coloured by that spirit of sect, which he always
counted the worst enemy of the spirit of truth.[110] Jean Jacques
Rousseau, who had just won a singular reputation by his paradoxes on
natural equality and the corruptions of civilisation, furnished the
articles on music in the first half dozen volumes. They were not free
from mistakes, but his colleagues chivalrously defended him by the plea
of careless printing or indifferent copying.[111] The stately Buffon
very early in the history of the Encyclopædia sent them an article upon
Nature, and the editors made haste to announce to their subscribers the
advent of so superb a colleague.[112] The articles on natural history,
however, were left by Buffon in his usual majestic fashion to his
faithful lieutenant and squire-at-arms, Daubenton. And even his own
article seems not to have been printed. Before the eleventh volume
appeared, terrible storms had arisen, not a few of the shipmen had
parted company, and Buffon may well have been one of them. Certainly the
article on Nature, as it stands, can hardly be his.
In the supplementary volumes, which appeared in 1776--ten years after
the completion of the original undertaking--two new labourers came into
the vineyard, whose names add fresh lustre and give still more serious
value to the work. One of these was the prince of the physiologists of
the eighteenth century, the great Haller, who contributed an elaborate
history of those who had been his predecessors in unfolding the
intricate mechanism of the human frame, and analysing its marvels of
complex function. The other was the austere and generous Condorcet. Ever
loyal to good causes, and resolute against despairing of the human
commonwealth, he began in the pages of the Encyclopædia a career that
was brilliant with good promise and high hopes, and ended in the grim
hall of the Convention and a nobly tragic death amid the red storm of
the Terror.
Among the lesser stars in the encyclopædic firmament are some whose
names ought not to be wholly omitted. Forbonnais, one of the most
instructive economic writers of the century, contributed articles to the
early volumes, which were afterwards republished in his Elements of
Commerce.[113] The light-hearted Marmontel wrote cheerful articles on
Comedy, Eloges, Eclogues, Glory, and other matters of literature and
taste. Quesnai, the eminent founder of the economic sect, dealt with two
agricultural subjects, and reproduced both his theoretical paradoxes,
and his admirable practical maxims, on the material prosperity of
nations. Holbach, not yet author of the memorable System of Nature,
compiled a vast number of the articles on chemistry and mineralogy,
chiefly and avowedly from German sources, he being the only writer of
the band with a mastery of a language which was at that moment hardly
more essential to culture than Russian is now. The name of Duclos should
not be passed over, in the list of the foremost men who helped to raise
the encyclopædic monument. He was one of the shrewdest and most vigorous
intelligences of the time, being in the front rank of men of the second
order. His quality was coarse, but this was only the effect of a
thoroughly penetrating and masculine understanding. His articles in the
Encyclopædia (_Déclamation des Anciens_, _Etiquette_, etc.) are not very
remarkable; but the reflections on conduct which he styled
_Considérations sur les Moeurs de ce Siécle_ (1750), though rather
hard in tone, abound in an acuteness, a breadth, a soundness of
perception that entitle the book to the rare distinction, among the
writings of moralists and social observers, of still being worth
reading. Morellet wrote upon some of the subjects of theology, and his
contributions are remarkable as being the chief examples in the record
of the encyclopædic body of a distinctly and deliberately historic
treatment of religion. "I let people see," he wrote many years after,
"that in such a collection as the Encyclopædia we ought to treat the
history and experience of the dogmas and discipline of the Christian,
exactly like those of the religion of Brahma or Mahomet."[114] This sage
and philosophic principle enabled him to write the article, Fils de Dieu
(vol. vi.), without sliding into Arian, Nestorian, Socinian, or other
heretical view on that fantastic theme. We need not linger over the
names of other writers, who indeed are now little more than mere shadows
of names, such as La Condamine, a scientific traveller of fame and merit
in his day and generation; of Du Marsais, the poverty-stricken and
unlucky scholar who wrote articles on grammar; of the President Des
Brosses, who was unfortunate enough to be in the right in a quarrel
about money with Voltaire, and who has since been better known to
readers through the fury of the provoked patriarch, than through his own
meritorious contributions to the early history of civilisation.
The name of one faithful worker in the building of this new Jerusalem
ought not to be omitted, though his writings were _multa non multum_.
The Chevalier de Jaucourt (1704-1779), as his title shows, was the
younger son of a noble house. He studied at Geneva, Cambridge, and
Leyden, and published in 1734 a useful account of the life and writings
of Leibnitz. When the Encyclopædia was projected, his services were at
once secured, and he became its slave from the beginning of A to the end
of Z. He wrote articles in his own special subjects of natural history
and physical science, but he was always ready to lend his help in other
departments, in writing, rewriting, reading, correcting, and all those
other humbler necessities of editorship of which the inconsiderate
reader knows little and thinks less. Jaucourt revelled in this drudgery.
God made him for grinding articles, said Diderot. For six or seven
years, he wrote one day, Jaucourt has been in the middle of half a dozen
secretaries, reading, dictating, slaving, for thirteen or fourteen hours
a day, and he is not tired of it even now. When he was told that the
work must positively be brought to an end, his countenance fell, and the
prospect of release from such happy bondage filled his heart with
desolation.[115] "If," says Diderot in the preface to the eighth volume
(1765), "we have raised a shout of joy like the sailor when he espies
land after a sombre night that has kept him midway between sky and
flood, it is to M. de Jaucourt that we are indebted for it. What has he
not done for us, especially in these latter times? With what constancy
has he not refused all the solicitations, whether of friendship or of
authority, that sought to take him away from us? Never has sacrifice of
repose, of health, of interest been more absolute and more entire."[116]
These modest and unwearying helpers in good works ought not to be wholly
forgotten, in a commemoration of more far-shining names.
Besides those who were known to the conductors of the Encyclopædia, was
a host of unsought volunteers. "The further we proceed," the editors
announced in the preface to the sixth volume (1756), "the more are we
sensible of the increase both in matter and in number of those who are
good enough to second our efforts." They received many articles on the
same subject. They were constantly embarrassed by an emulation which,
however flattering as a testimony to their work, obliged them to make a
difficult choice, or to lose a good article, or to sacrifice one of
their regular contributors, or to offend some influential newcomer.
Every one who had a new idea in his head, or what he thought a new idea,
sent them an article upon it. Men who were priests or pastors by
profession and unbelievers in their hearts, sent them sheaves of
articles in which they permitted themselves the delicious luxury of
saying a little of what they thought. Women, too, pressed into the great
work. Unknown ladies volunteered sprightly explanations of the
technicalities of costume, from the falbala which adorned the bottom of
their skirts, up to that little knot of riband in the hair, which had
come to replace the old appalling edifice of ten stories high, in
hierarchic succession of duchess, solitary, musketeer, crescent,
firmament, tenth heaven, and mouse.[117] The oldest contributor was
Lenglet du Fresnoy, whose book on the Method of Studying History is
still known to those who have examined the development of men's ideas
about the relations of the present to the past. Lenglet was born in
1674. The youngest of the band was Condorcet, who was born nearly
seventy years later (1743). One veteran, Morellet, who had been, the
schoolmate of Turgot and Loménie de Brienne, lived to think of many
things more urgent than Faith, Fils de Dieu, and Fundamentals. He
survived the Revolution, the Terror, the Empire, Waterloo, the
Restoration, and died in 1819, within sight of the Holy Alliance and the
Peterloo massacre. From the birth of Lenglet to the death of
Morellet--what an arc of the circle of western experience!
No one will ask whether the keen eye, and stimulating word, and helpful
hand of Voltaire were wanting to an enterprise which was to awaken men
to new love of tolerance, enlightenment, charity, and justice. Voltaire
was playing the refractory courtier at Potsdam when the first two
volumes appeared. With characteristic vehemence, he instantly pronounced
it a work which should be the glory of France, and the shame of its
persecutors. Diderot and D'Alembert were raising an immortal edifice,
and he would gladly furnish them with a little stone here or there,
which they might find convenient to stuff into some corner or crevice in
the wall. He was incessant in his industry. Unlike those feebler and
more consequential spirits, the _petits-maîtres_ of thought, by whom
editors are harassed and hindered, this great writer was as willing to
undertake small subjects as large ones, and to submit to all the
mutilations and modifications which the exigencies of the work and the
difficulties of its conductors recommended to them.[118] As the
structure progresses, his enthusiasm waxes warmer. Diderot and his
colleague are cutting their wings for a flight to posterity. They are
Atlas and Hercules bearing a world upon their shoulders. It is the
greatest work in the world; it is a superb pyramid; its printing-office
is the office for the instruction of the human race; and so forth, in
every phrase of stimulating sympathy and energetic interest. Nor does
his sympathy blind him to faults of execution. Voltaire's good sense and
sound judgment were as much at the service of his friends in warning
them of shortcomings, as in eulogising what they achieved. And he had
good faith enough to complain to his friends, instead of complaining of
them. In one place he tells them, what is perfectly true, that their
journeymen are far too declamatory, and too much addicted to substitute
vague and puerile dissertations for that solid instruction which is what
the reader of an Encyclopædia seeks. In another he remonstrates against
certain frivolous affectations, and some of the coxcombries of literary
modishness. Everywhere he recommends them to insist on a firm and
distinct method in their contributors--etymologies, definitions,
examples, reasons, clearness, brevity. "You are badly seconded," he
writes; "there are bad soldiers in the army of a great general."[119] "I
am sorry to see that the writer of the article _Hell_ declares that
hell was a point in the doctrine of Moses; now by all the devils that is
not true. Why lie about it? Hell is an excellent thing, to be sure, but
it is evident that Moses did not know it. 'Tis this world that is
hell."[120]
D'Alembert in reply always admitted the blemishes for which the
patriarch and master reproached them, but urged various pleas in
extenuation. He explains that Diderot is not always the master, either
to reject or to prune the articles that are offered to him.[121] A
writer who happened to be useful for many excellent articles would
insist as the price of good work that they should find room for his bad
work also; and so forth. "No doubt we have bad articles in theology and
metaphysics, but with theologians for censors, and a privilege, I defy
you to make them any better. There are other articles that are less
exposed to the daylight, and in them all is repaired. Time will enable
people to distinguish what we have thought from what we have said."[122]
This last is a bitter and humiliating word, but before any man hastens
to cast a stone, let him first make sure that his own life is free from
every trace of hypocritical conformity and mendacious compliance.
Condorcet seems to make the only remark that is worth making, when he
says that the true shame and disgrace of these dissemblings lay not with
the writers, whose only other alternative was to leave the stagnation
of opinion undisturbed, but with the ecclesiastics and ministers whose
tyranny made dissimulation necessary. And the veil imposed by authority
did not really serve any purpose of concealment. Every reader was let
into the secret of the writer's true opinion of the old mysteries, by
means of a piquant phrase, an adroit parallel, a significant reference,
an equivocal word of dubious panegyric. Diderot openly explains this in
the pages of the Encyclopædia itself. "In all cases," he says, "where a
national prejudice would seem to deserve respect, the particular article
ought to set it respectfully forth, with its whole procession of
attractions and probabilities. But the edifice of mud ought to be
overthrown and an unprofitable heap of dust scattered to the wind, by
references to articles in which solid principles serve as a base for the
opposite truths. This way of undeceiving men operates promptly on minds
of the right stamp, and it operates infallibly and without any
troublesome consequences, secretly and without disturbance, on minds of
every description."[123] "Our fanatics feel the blows," cried D'Alembert
complacently, "though they are sorely puzzled to tell from which side
they come."[124]
It is one of the most deplorable things in the history of literature to
see a man endowed with Diderot's generous conceptions and high social
aims, forced to stoop to these odious economies. In reading his
Prospectus, and still more directly in his article,
_Encyclopédie_, we are struck by the beneficence and breadth of the
great designs which inspire and support him. The Encyclopædia, it has
been said, was no peaceful storehouse in which scholars and thinkers of
all kinds could survey the riches they had acquired; it was a gigantic
siege-engine and armoury of weapons of attack.[125] This is only true in
a limited sense of one part of the work, and that not the most important
part. Such a judgment is only possible for one who has not studied the
book itself, or else who is ignorant of the social requirements of
France at the time. We shall show this presently in detail. Meanwhile it
is enough to make two observations. The implements which the
circumstances of the time made it necessary to use as weapons of attack,
were equally fitted for the acquisition in a happier season of those
treasures of thought and knowledge which are the object of disinterested
research. And what is still more important, we have to observe that it
was the characteristic note and signal glory of the French revolutionary
school, to subordinate mere knowledge to the practical work of raising
society up from the corruption and paralysis to which it had been
brought by the double action of civil and ecclesiastical authority. The
efforts of the Encyclopædists were not disinterested in the sense of
being vague blows in the air. Their aim was not theory but practice, not
literature but life. The Encyclopædists were no doubt all men of battle,
and some of them were hardly more than mere partisans.
But Diderot at least had constantly in mind the great work which
remained after the battle should be won. He was profoundly conscious
that the mere accumulation of knowledge of the directly physical facts
of the universe would take men a very short way towards reconstruction.
And he struck the key-note in such admirable passages as this: "One
consideration especially that we ought never to lose from sight is that,
if we ever banish a man, or the thinking and contemplative being, from
above the surface of the earth, this pathetic and sublime spectacle of
nature becomes no more than a scene of melancholy and silence. The
universe is dumb; the darkness and silence of the night take possession
of it.... It is the presence of man that gives its interest to the
existence of other beings; and what better object can we set before
ourselves in the history of these beings, than to accept such a
consideration? Why shall we not introduce man into our work in the same
place which he holds in the universe? Why shall we not make him a common
centre? Is there in infinite space any other point from which we can
with greater advantage draw those immense lines that we propose to
extend to all other points? What a vivid and softening reaction must
result between man and the beings by whom he is surrounded?... Man is the
single term from which we ought to set out, and to which we ought to
trace all back, if we would please, interest, touch, even in the most
arid reflections and the driest details. If you take away my own
existence and the happiness of my fellows, of what concern to me is all
the rest of nature."[126]
In this we hear the voice of the new time, as we do in his exclamation
that the perfection of an Encyclopædia is the work of centuries;
centuries had to elapse before the foundations could be laid; centuries
would have to elapse before its completion: "_mais à la posérité, et_ À
L'ÊTRE QUI NE MEURT POINT!"[127] These exalted ideas were not a
substitute for arduous labour. In all that Diderot writes upon his
magnificent undertaking, we are struck by his singular union of common
sense with elevation, of simplicity with grasp, of suppleness with
strength, of modesty with hopeful confidence. On occasions that would
have tempted a man of less sincerity and less seriousness to bombast and
inflation, his sense of the unavoidable imperfections of so vast a work
always makes itself felt through his pride in its lofty aim and
beneficent design. The weight of the burden steadied him, and the
anxiety of the honest and laborious craftsman mastered the impulses of
rhetoric.
Before going further into the general contents of the Encyclopædia, we
shall briefly describe the extraordinary succession of obstacles and
embarrassments against which its intrepid conductor was compelled to
fight his way. The project was fully conceived and its details worked
out between 1745 and 1748. The Encyclopedia was announced in 1750, in a
Prospectus of which Diderot was the author. At length in 1751 the first
volume of the work itself was given to the public, followed by the
second in January 1752. The clerical party at once discerned what
tremendous fortifications, with how deadly an armament, were rising up
in face of their camp. The Jesuits had always been jealous of an
enterprise in which they had not been invited to take a part. They had
expected at least to have the control of the articles on theology. They
now were bent on taking the work into their own hands, and orthodoxy
hastily set all the machinery of its ally, authority, in vigorous
motion.
The first attack was indirect. An abbé de Prades sustained a certain
thesis in an official exercise at the Sorbonne, and Diderot was
suspected, without good reason, of being its true author. An examination
of its propositions was ordered. It was pronounced pernicious,
dangerous, and tending to deism, chiefly on account of some too
suggestive comparisons between the miraculous healings in the New
Testament, and those ascribed in the more ancient legend to Æsculapius.
Other grounds of vehement objection were found in the writer's
maintenance of the Lockian theory of the origin of our ideas. To deny
the innateness of ideas was roundly asserted to be materialism and
atheism. The abbé de Prades was condemned, and deprived of his license
(Jan 27, 1752). As he was known to be a friend of Diderot, and was
suspected of being the writer of articles on theology in the
Encyclopædia, the design of the Jesuit cabal in ruining De Prades was
to discredit the new undertaking, and to induce the government to
prohibit it. Their next step was to procure a pastoral from the
archbishop of Paris. This document not only condemned the heretical
propositions of De Prades, but referred in sombre terms to unnamed works
teeming with error and impiety. Every one understood the reference, and
among its effects was an extension of the vogue and notoriety of the
Encyclopædia.[128] The Jesuits were not allowed to retain a monopoly of
persecuting zeal, and the Jansenists refused to be left behind in the
race of hypocritical intrigue. The bishop of Auxerre, who belonged to
this party, followed his brother prelate of Paris in a more direct
attack, in which he included not only the Encyclopædia, but
Montesquieu and Buffon. De Prades took to flight. D'Alembert commended
him to Voltaire, then at Berlin. The king was absent, but Voltaire gave
royal protection to the fugitive until Frederick's return. De Prades was
then at once taken into favour and appointed reader to the king. He
proved but a poor martyr, however, for he afterwards retracted his
heresies, got a benefice, and was put into prison by Frederick for
giving information to his French countrymen during the Seven Years'
War.[129] Unfortunately neither orthodoxy nor heterodoxy has any
exclusive patent for monopoly of rascals.
Meanwhile Diderot wrote on his behalf an energetic and dignified reply
to the aggressive pastoral. This apology is not such a masterpiece of
eloquence as the magnificent letter addressed by Rousseau ten years
later to the archbishop of Paris, after the pastoral against Emilius.
But Diderot's vindication of De Prades is firm, moderate, and closely
argumentative. The piece is worth turning to in our own day, when great
dignitaries of the churches too often show the same ignorance, the same
temerity, and the same reckless want of charity, as the bishop of
Auxerre showed a hundred and twenty years ago. They resort to the very
same fallacies by way of shield against scientific truths or
philosophical speculations that happen not to be easily reconcilable
with their official opinions. "I know nothing so indecent," says
Diderot, "and nothing so injurious to religion as these vague
declamations of theologians against reason. One would suppose, to hear
them, that men could only enter into the bosom of Christianity as a herd
of cattle enter into a stable; and that we must renounce our common
sense either to embrace our religion or to remain in it.... Such
principles as yours are made to frighten small souls; everything alarms
them, because they perceive clearly the consequences of nothing; they
set up connections among things which have nothing to do with one
another; they spy danger in any method of arguing which is strange to
them; they float at hazard between truths and prejudices which they
never distinguish, and to which they are equally attached; and all
their life is passed in crying out either miracle or impiety." In an
eloquent peroration, which is not more eloquent than it is instructive,
De Prades is made to turn round on his Jansenist censor, and reproach
him with the disturbance with which the intestine rivalries of Jansenist
and Jesuit had afflicted the faithful. "It is the abominable testimony
of your convulsions," he cries, "that has overthrown the testimony of
miracles. It is the fatuous audacity with which your fanatics have
confronted persecution, that has annihilated the evidence of the
martyrs. It is your declamations against sovereign pontiffs, against
bishops, against all the orders of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, that
have covered priest, altar, and creed with opprobrium. If the pope, the
bishops, the priests, the simple faithful, the whole church, if its
mysteries, its sacraments, its temples, its ceremonies, have fallen into
contempt, yours, yours, is the handiwork."[130]
Bourdaloue more than half a century before had taunted the free-thinkers
of his day with falseness and inconsistency in taking sides with the
Jansenists, whose superstitions they notoriously held in open contempt.
The motive for the alliance was tolerably obvious. The Jansenists, apart
from their theology, were above all else the representatives of
opposition to authority. It was for this that Lewis XIV. counted them
worse than atheists. The Jesuits, it has been well said in keeping down
their enemies by force, became the partisans of absolute government,
and upheld it on every occasion. The Jansenists, after they had been
crushed by violence, began to feel to what excesses power might be
brought. From being speculative enemies to freedom as a theory, they
became, through the education of persecution, the partisans of freedom
in practice. The quarrel of Molinists and Jansenists, from a question of
theology, grew into a question of human liberty.[131]
Circumstances had now changed. The free-thinkers were becoming strong
enough to represent opposition to authority on their own principles and
in their own persons. Diderot's vigorous remonstrance with the bishop of
Auxerre incidentally marks for us the definite rupture of philosophic
sympathy for the Jansenist champions. "It is your disputatiousness," he
said, "which within the last forty years has made far more unbelievers
than all the productions of philosophy." As we cannot too clearly
realise, it was the flagrant social incompetence of the church which
brought what they called Philosophy, that is to say Liberalism, into
vogue and power. Locke's Essay had been translated in 1700, but it had
made no mark, and as late as 1725 the first edition of the translation
remained unsold. It was the weakness and unsightly decrepitude of the
ecclesiastics which opened the way for the thinkers.
This victory, however, was not yet. Diderot had still a dismal
wilderness to traverse. He was not without secret friends even in the
camp of his enemies.
After his reply to Peré Berthier's attack on the Prospectus, he
received an anonymous letter to the effect that if he wished to avenge
himself on the Jesuits, there were both important documents and money at
his command. Diderot replied that he was in no want of money, and that
he had no time to spare for Jesuit documents.[132] He trusted to reason.
Neither reason nor eloquence availed against the credit at court of the
ecclesiastical cabal. The sale of the second volume of the Encyclopædia
was stopped by orders which Malesherbes was reluctantly compelled to
issue. A decree of the king's council (Feb. 7, 1752) suppressed both
volumes, as containing maxims hostile to the royal authority and to
religion. The publishers were forbidden to reprint them, and the
booksellers were forbidden to deliver any copies that might still be in
hand. The decree, however, contained no prohibition of the continuance
of the work. It was probably not meant to do anything more serious than
to pacify the Jesuits, and lend an apparent justification to the
officious pastorals of the great prelates. Some even thought that the
aim of the government was to forestall severer proceedings on the part
of the parliament of lawyers;[133] for corporations of lawyers have
seldom been less bigoted or obstructive than corporations of churchmen.
Nor were lawyers and priests the only foes. Even the base and despicable
jealousies of booksellers counted for something in the storm.[134]
A curious triumph awaited the harassed Diderot.
He was compelled, under pain of a second incarceration, to hand over to
the authorities all the papers, proof-sheets, and plates in his
possession. The Jesuit cabal supposed that if they could obtain the
materials for the future volumes, they could easily arrange and
manipulate them to suit their own purposes. Their ignorance and
presumption were speedily confounded. In taking Diderot's papers, they
had forgotten, as Grimm says, to take his head and his genius: they had
forgotten to ask him for a key to articles which, so far from
understanding, they with some confusion vainly strove even to decipher.
The government was obliged (May 1752) to appeal to Diderot and
D'Alembert to resume a work for which their enemies had thus proved
themselves incompetent. Yet, by one of the meannesses of decaying
authority, the decree of three months before was left suspended over
their heads.[135]
The third volume of the Encyclopædia appeared in the autumn of 1753.
D'Alembert prefixed an introduction, vindicating himself and his
colleague with a manliness, a sincerity, a gravity, a fire, that are
admirable and touching. "What," he concluded, "can malignity henceforth
devise against two men of letters, trained long since by their
meditations to fear neither injustice nor poverty; who having learnt by
a long and mournful experience, not to despise, but to mistrust and
dread men, have the courage to love them, and the prudence to flee
them?... After having been the stormy and painful occupation of the
most precious years of our life, this work will perhaps be the solace of
its close. May it, when both we and our enemies alike have ceased to
exist, be a durable monument of the good intention of the one, and the
injustice of the other.... Let us remember the fable of Bocalina: 'A
traveller was disturbed by the importunate chirrupings of the
grasshoppers; he would fain have slain them every one, but only got
belated and missed his way; he need only have fared peacefully on his
road, and the grasshoppers would have died of themselves before the end
of a week.'"[136] A volume was now produced in each year, until the
autumn of 1757 and the issue of the seventh volume. This brought the
work down to Gyromancy and Gythiuin. Then there arose storms and
divisions which marked a memorable epoch alike in the history of the
book, in the life of Diderot and others, and in the thought of the
century. The progress of the work in popularity during the five years
between 1752 and 1757 had been steady and unbroken. The original
subscribers were barely two thousand. When the fourth volume appeared,
there were three thousand. The seventh volume found nearly a thousand
more.[137] Such prodigious success wrought the chagrin of the party of
superstition to fever heat. As each annual volume came from the press
and found a wider circle of readers than its predecessor, their malice
and irritation waxed a degree more intense. They scattered malignant
rumours abroad; they showered pamphlets; no imputation was too odious or
too ridiculous for them. Diderot, D'Alembert, Voltaire, Rousseau,
Buffon, were declared to have organised a league of writers, with the
deliberate purpose of attacking the public tranquillity and overthrowing
society. They were denounced as heads of a formal conspiracy, a
clandestine association, a midnight band, united in a horrible community
of pestilent opinions and sombre interests.
In the seventh volume an article appeared which made the ferment angrier
than it had ever been. D'Alembert had lately been the guest of Voltaire
at Ferney, whence he had made frequent visits to Geneva. In his
intercourse with the ministers of that famous city, he came to the
conclusion that their religious opinions were really Socinian, and when
he wrote the article on Geneva he stated this. He stated it in such a
way as to make their heterodox opinions a credit to Genevese pastors,
because he associated disbelief in the divinity of Jesus Christ, in
mysteries of faith, and in eternal punishment, with a practical life of
admirable simplicity, purity, and tolerance. Each line of this eulogy on
the Socinian preachers of Geneva, veiled a burning and contemptuous
reproach against the cruel and darkened spirit of the churchmen in
France. Jesuit and Jansenist, loose abbès and debauched prelates, felt
the quivering of the arrow in the quick, as they read that the morals of
the Genevese pastors were exemplary; that they did not pass their lives
in furious disputes upon unintelligible points; that they brought no
indecent and persecuting accusation against one another before the civil
magistrate. There was gall and wormwood to the orthodox bigot in the
harmless statement that "Hell, which is one of the principal articles of
our belief, has ceased to be one with many of the ministers of Geneva;
it would be, according to them, a great insult to the divinity, to
imagine that this Being, so full of justice and goodness, is capable of
punishing our faults by an eternity of torment: they explain in as good
a sense as they can the formal passages of Scripture which are contrary
to their opinion, declaring that we ought never in the sacred books to
take anything literally, that seems to wound humanity and reason." And
we may be sure that D'Alembert was thinking less of the consistory and
the great council of Geneva, than of the priests and the parliament of
Paris, when he praised the Protestant pastors, not only for their
tolerance, but for confining themselves within their proper functions,
and for being the first to set an example of submission to the
magistrates and the laws. The intention of this elaborate and, reasoned
account of the creed and practice of a handful of preachers in a
heretical town, could not be mistaken by those at whom it was directed.
It produced in the black ranks of official orthodoxy fully as angry a
shock as its writer could have designed.
The church had not yet, we must remember, borrowed the principles of
humanity and tolerance from atheists. It was not the comparatively
purified Christian doctrine of our own time with which the
Encyclopædists did battle, but an organised corporation, with
exceptional tribunals, with special material privileges, with dungeons
and chains at their disposal. We have to realise that official religion
was then a strange union of Byzantine decrepitude, with the energetic
ferocity of the Holy Office. Within five years of this indirect plea of
D'Alembert for tolerance and humanity, Calas was murdered by the
orthodoxy of Toulouse. Nearly ten years later (1766), we find Lewis XV.,
with the steam of the Parc aux Cerfs about him, rewarded by the loyal
acclamations of a Parisian crowd, for descending from his carriage as a
priest passed bearing the sacrament, and prostrating himself in the mud
before the holy symbol.[138] In the same year the youth La Barre was
first tortured, then beheaded, then burnt, for some presumed disrespect
to the same holy symbol--then become the hateful ensign of human
degradation, of fanatical cruelty, of rancorous superstition. Yet I
should be sorry to be unjust. It is to be said that even in these bad
days when religion meant cruelty and cabal, the one or two men who
boldly withstood to the face the king and the Pompadour for the vileness
of their lives, were priests of the church.
D'Alembert's article hardly goes beyond what to us seem the axioms of
all men of sense. We must remember the time. Even members of the
philosophic party itself, like Grimm, thought the article misplaced and
hardy.[139] The Genevese ministers indignantly repudiated the compliment
of Socinianism, and the eulogy of being rather less irrational than
their neighbours. Voltaire read and read again with delight, and plied
the writer with reiterated exhortations in every key, not to allow
himself to be driven from the great work by the raging of the heathen
and the vain imaginings of the people.[140]
While the storm seemed to be at its height, an incident occurred which
let loose a new flood of violent passion. Helvétius published that
memorable book in which he was thought to have told all the world its
own secret. His _De l'Esprit_ came out in 1758.[141] It provoked a
general insurrection of public opinion. The devout and the heedless
agreed in denouncing it as scandalous, licentious, impious, and pregnant
with peril. The philosophic party felt that their ally had dealt a sore
blow to liberty of thought and the free expression of opinion.
"Philosophy," said Grimm, by philosophy, as I have said, meaning
Liberalism, "will long feel the effect of the rising of opinion which
this author has caused by his book; and for having described too freely
a morality that is bad and false in itself, M. Helvétius will have to
reproach himself with all the restraints that are now sure to be imposed
on the few men of lofty genius who still are left to us, whose destiny
was to enlighten their fellows, and to spread truth over the
earth."[142]
At the beginning of 1759 the procureur-général laid an information
before the court against Helvétius's book, against half a dozen minor
publications, and finally against the Encyclopædia. The _De l'Esprit_
was alleged to be a mere abridgment of the Encyclopædia, and the
Encyclopædia was denounced as being the opprobrium of the nation by its
impious maxims and its hostility to morals and religion. The court
appointed nine commissaries to examine the seven volumes, suspending
their further sale or delivery in the meanwhile. When the commissaries
sent in their report a month later, the parliament was dissatisfied
with its tenour, and appointed four new examiners, two of them being
theologians and two of them lawyers. Before the new censors had time to
do their work, the Council of State interposed with an arbitrary decree
(March 1759) suppressing the privilege which had been conceded in 1746;
prohibiting the sale of the seven volumes already printed, and the
printing of any future volumes under pain of exemplary punishment.[143]
The motive for this intervention has never been made plain. One view is
that the king's government resented the action of the law courts, and
that the royal decree was only an episode in the quarrel then raging
between the crown and the parliaments. Another opinion is that
Malesherbes or Choiseul was anxious to please the dauphin and the
Jesuit party at Versailles. The most probable explanation is that the
authorities were eager to silence one at least of the three elements of
opposition, the Jansenists, the lawyers, and the philosophers,--who
were then distracting the realm. The two former were beyond their
direct reach. They threw themselves upon the foe who happened to be
most accessible.
The government, however, had no intention of finally exterminating an
enemy who might at some future day happen to be a convenient ally. They
encouraged or repressed the philosophers according to the political
calculations of the moment, sometimes according to the caprices of the
king's mistress, or even a minister's mistress. When the clergy braved
the royal authority, the hardiest productions were received with
indulgence. If the government were reduced to satisfy the clergy, then
even the very commonplaces of the new philosophy became ground for
accusation. The Encyclopædia was naturally exposed in a special degree
to such alternations of favour and suspicion.[144] The crisis of 1759
furnishes a curious illustration of this. As we have seen, in the spring
of that year the privilege was withdrawn from the four associated
booksellers, and the continuance of the work strictly prohibited. Yet
the printing was not suspended for a week. Fifty compositors were busily
setting up a book which the ordinance of the government had decisively
forbidden under heavy penalties.
The same kind of connivance was practised to the advantage of other
branches of the opposition. Thirty years before this, the organ of the
Jansenist party was peremptorily suppressed. The police instituted a
rigorous search, and seized the very presses on which the Nouvelles
Ecclésiastiques was being printed. But the journal continued to appear,
and was circulated, just as regularly as before.[145]
The history of the policy of authority towards the Encyclopædia is only
one episode in the great lesson of the reign of Lewis XV. It was long a
common mistake to think of this king's system of government as violent
and tyrannical. In truth, its failure and confusion resulted less from
the arbitrariness of its procedure, than from the hopeless absence of
tenacity, conviction, and consistency in the substance and direction of
its objects. And this, again, was the result partly of the complex and
intractable nature of the opposition with which successive ministers had
to deal, and partly of the overpowering strength of those Asiatic maxims
of government which Richelieu and Lewis XIV. had invested with such
ruinous prestige. The impatience and charlatanry of emotional or
pseudo-scientific admirers of a personal system blind them to the
permanent truth, of which the succession of the decrepitude of Lewis XV.
to the strength of his great-grandfather, and of the decrepitude of
Napoleon III. to the strength of his uncle, are only illustrations.
The true interest of all these details about a mere book lies in the
immense significance of the movement of political ideas and forces to
which they belong. The true interest of all history lies in the
spectacle which it furnishes of the growth and dissolution, the shock
and the transformation, incessantly at work among the great groups of
human conceptions. The decree against the Encyclopædia marks the central
moment of a collision between two antagonistic conceptions which
disputed, and in France still dispute, with one another the shaping and
control of institutions. One of these ideas is the exclusion of
political authority from the sphere and function of directing opinion;
it implies the absolute secularisation of government. The rival idea
prompted the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the dragonnades, the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and all the other acts of the same
policy, which not only deprived France of thousands of the most
conscientious and most ingenious of her sons, but warped and corrupted
the integrity of the national conscience. It is natural that we should
feel anger at the arbitrary attempt to arrest Diderot's courageous and
enlightened undertaking. Yet in truth it was only the customary
inference from an accepted principle, that it is the business or the
right of governments to guide thought and regulate its expression. The
Jesuits acted on this theory, and resorted to repressive power and the
secular arm whenever they could. The Jansenists repudiated the
principle, but eagerly practised it whenever the turn of intrigue gave
them the chance.
An extraordinary and unforeseen circumstance changed the external
bearings of this critical conflict of ideas. The conception of the
duties of the temporal authority in the spiritual sphere had been
associated hitherto with Catholic doctrine. The decay of that doctrine
was rapidly discrediting the conception allied with it. But the movement
was interrupted. And it was interrupted by a man who suddenly stepped
out from the ranks of the Encyclopædists themselves. Rousseau from his
solitary cottage at Montmorency (1758) fulminated the celebrated letter
to D'Alembert on Stage Plays. The article on Geneva in the seventh
volume of the Encyclopædia had not only praised the pastors for their
unbelief; it also assailed the time-honoured doctrine of the churches
that the theatre is an institution from hell and an invention of devils.
D'Alembert paid a compliment to his patriarch and master at Ferney, as
well as shot a bolt at his ecclesiastical foes in Paris, by urging the
people of Geneva to shake off irrational prejudices and straightway to
set up a playhouse. Rousseau had long been brooding over certain private
grievances of his own against Diderot; the dreary story has been told by
me before, and happily need not be repeated.[146] He took the occasion
of D'Alembert's mischievous suggestion to his native Geneva, not merely
to denounce the drama with all the force and eloquence at his command,
but formally to declare the breach between himself and Diderot. From
this moment he treated the Holbachians--so he contemptuously styled the
Encyclopædists--as enemies of the human race and disseminators of the
deadliest poisons.
This was no mere quarrel of rival authors. It marked a fundamental
divergence in thought, and proclaimed the beginning of a disastrous
reaction in the very heart of the school of illumination. Among the most
conspicuous elements of the reaction were these: the subordination of
reason to emotion; the displacement of industry, science, energetic and
many-sided ingenuity, by dreamy indolence; and finally, what brings us
back to our starting-point, the suppression of opinions deemed to be
anti-social by the secular arm. The old idea was brought back in a new
dress; the absolutist conception of the function of authority,
associated with a theistic doctrine. Unfortunately for France,
Rousseau's idea prospered, and ended by vanquishing its antagonist. The
reason is plain. Rousseau's idea exactly fitted in with the political
traditions and institutions of the country. It was more easily and
directly compatible than was the contending idea, with that temper and
set of men's minds which tradition and institutions had fixed so
disastrously deep in the national character.
The crisis of 1758-59, then, is a date of the highest importance. It
marks a collision between the old principle of Lewis XIV., of the
Bartholomew Massacre, of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the
new rationalistic principle of spiritual emancipation. The old principle
was decrepit, it was no longer able to maintain itself; the hounds were
furious, but their fury was toothless. Before the new principle could
achieve mastery, Rousseau had made mastery impossible. Two men came into
the world at this very moment, whom destiny made incarnations of the
discordant principles. Danton and Robespierre were both born in 1759.
Diderot seems to have had a biblical presentiment, says Michelet. "We
feel that he saw, beyond Rousseau, something sinister, a spectre of the
future. Diderot-Danton already looks in the face of
Rousseau-Robespierre."[147]
A more vexatious incident now befell the all-daring, all-enduring
Diderot, than either the decree of the Council or the schism of the
heresiarch at Montmorency. D'Alembert declared his intention of
abandoning the work, and urged his colleague to do the same. His letters
to Voltaire show intelligibly enough how he brought himself to this
resolution. "I am worn out," he says, "with the affronts and vexations
of every kind that this work draws down upon us. The hateful and even
infamous satires which they print against us, and which are not only
tolerated, but protected, authorised, applauded, nay, actually commanded
by the people with power in their hands; the sermons, or rather the
tocsins that are rung against us at Versailles in the presence of the
king, _nemine reclamante_; the new intolerable inquisition that they are
bent on practising against the Encyclopædia, by giving us new censors
who are more absurd and more intractable than could be found at Goa;
all these reasons, joined to some others, drive me to give up this
accursed work once for all." He cared nothing for libels or stinging
pamphlets in themselves, but libels permitted or ordered by those who
could instantly have suppressed them, were a different thing, especially
when they vomited forth the vilest personalities. He admitted that there
were other reasons why he was bent on retiring, and it would appear that
one of these reasons was dissatisfaction with the financial arrangements
of the booksellers.[148]
Voltaire for some time remonstrated against this retreat before the
hated _Infâme_. At length his opinion came round to D'Alembert's
reiterated assertions of the shame and baseness of men of letters
subjecting themselves to the humiliating yoke of ministers, priests, and
police. Voltaire wrote to Diderot, protesting that before all things it
was necessary to present a firm front to the foe; it would be atrocious
weakness to continue the work after D'Alembert had quitted it; it was
monstrous that such a genius as Diderot should make himself the slave of
booksellers and the victim of fanatics. Must this dictionary, he asked,
which is a hundred times more useful than Bayle's, be fettered with the
superstition which it should annihilate; must they make terms with
scoundrels who keep terms with none; could the enemies of reason, the
persecutors of philosophers, the assassins of our kings, still dare to
lift up their voices in such a century as that? "Men are on the eve of a
great revolution in the human mind, and it is you to whom they are most
of all indebted for it."[149]
More than once Voltaire entreated Diderot to finish his work in a
foreign country where his hands would be free. "No," said Diderot in a
reply of pathetic energy; "to abandon the work is turning our back upon
the breach, and to do precisely what the villains who persecute us
desire. If you knew with what joy they have learnt D'Alembert's
desertion! It is not for us to wait until the government have punished
the brigands to whom they have given us up. Is it for us to complain,
when they associate with us in their insults men who are so much better
than ever we shall be? What ought we to do then? Do what becomes men of
courage,--despise our foes, follow them up, and take advantage, as we
have done, of the feebleness of our censors. If D'Alembert resumes, and
we complete our work, is not that vengeance enough?... After all this,
you will believe that I cling at any price to the Encyclopædia, and you
will be mistaken. My dear master, I am over forty. I am tired out with
tricks and shufflings. I cry from morning till night for rest, rest; and
scarcely a day passes when I am not tempted to go and live in obscurity
and die in peace in the depths of my old country. There comes a time
when all ashes are mingled. Then what will it boot me to have been
Voltaire or Diderot, or whether it is your three syllables or my three
syllables that survive? One must work, one must be useful, one owes an
account of one's gifts, etcetera, etcetera. Be useful to men! Is it
quite clear that one does more than amuse them, and that there is much
difference between the philosopher and the flute-player? They listen to
one or the other with pleasure or disdain, and remain what they were.
The Athenians were never wickeder than in the time of Socrates, and
perhaps all that they owe to his existence is a crime the more. That
there is more spleen than good sense in all this, I admit--and back I go
to the Encyclopædia."[150]
Thus for seven years the labour of conducting the vast enterprise fell
upon Diderot alone. He had not only to write articles upon the most
exhausting and various kinds of subjects; he had also to distribute
topics among his writers, to shape their manuscripts, to correct
proof-sheets, to supervise the preparation of the engravings, to write
the text explanatory of them, and all this amid constant apprehension
and alarm from the government and the police. He would have been free
from persecution at Lausanne or at Leyden. The two great sovereigns of
the north who thought it part of the trade of a king to patronise the
new philosophy, offered him shelter at Petersburg or Berlin.[151]
But how could he transport to the banks of the Neva or the Spree his
fifty skilled compositors, his crafty engravers on copper-plate, and all
the host of his industrial army? How could he find in those
half-barbarous lands the looms and engines and thousand cunning
implements and marvellous processes which he had under his eye and ready
to his hand in France? And so he held fast to his post on the fifth
floor of the house in the Rue Saint Benoît, a standing marvel to the
world of letters for all time.
As his toil was drawing to a close, he suddenly received the most
mortifying of all the blows that were struck at him in the course of his
prolonged, hazardous, and tormenting adventure. After the interruption
in 1759, it was resolved to bring out the ten volumes which were still
wanting, in a single issue. Le Breton was entrusted with the business of
printing them. The manuscript was set in type, Diderot corrected the
proof-sheets, saw the revises, and returned each sheet duly marked with
his signature for the press. At this point the nefarious operation of Le
Breton began. He and his foreman took possession of the sheets, and
proceeded to retrench, cut out, and suppress every passage, line, or
phrase, that appeared to them to be likely to provoke clamour or the
anger of the government. They thus, of their own brute authority,
reduced most of the best articles to the condition of fragments
mutilated and despoiled of all that had been most valuable in them. The
miscreants did not even trouble themselves to secure any appearance of
order or continuity in these mangled skeletons of articles. Their
murderous work done, they sent the pages to the press, and to make the
mischief beyond remedy, they committed all the original manuscripts and
proof-sheets to the flames. One day, when the printing was nearly
completed (1764), Diderot having occasion to consult an article under
the letter S, found it entirely spoiled. He stood confounded. An
instant's thought revealed the printer's atrocity. He eagerly turned to
the articles on which he and his subordinates had taken most pains, and
found everywhere the same ravages and disorder. "The discovery," says
Grimm, "threw him into a state of frenzy and despair which I shall never
forget."[152] He wept tears of rage and torment in the presence of the
criminal himself, and before wife and children and sympathising
domestics. For weeks he could neither eat nor sleep. "For years," he
cried to Le Breton, "you have been basely cheating me. You have
massacred, or got a brute beast to massacre, the work of twenty good men
who have devoted to you their time, their talents, their vigils, from
love of right and truth, from the simple hope of seeing their ideas
given to the public, and reaping from them a little consideration richly
earned, which your injustice and thanklessness have now stolen from them
for ever.... You and your book will be dragged through the mire; you
will henceforth be cited as a man who has been guilty of an act of
treachery, an act of vile hardihood, to which nothing that has ever
happened in this world can be compared. Then you will be able to judge
your panic terror, and the cowardly counsels of those barbarous
Ostrogoths and stupid Vandals who helped you in the havoc you have
made."[153]
Yet he remained undaunted to the very last. His first movement to throw
up the work, and denounce Le Breton's outrage to the subscribers and the
world, was controlled. His labour had lost its charm. The monument was
disfigured and defaced. He never forgot the horrible chagrin, and he
never forgave the ignoble author of it. But the last stone was at length
laid. In 1765 the subscribers received the concluding ten volumes of
letterpress. The eleven volumes of plates were not completed until 1772.
The copies bore Neufchâtel on the title-page, and were distributed
privately. The clergy in their assembly at once levelled a decree at the
new book. The parliament quashed this, not from love of the book, but
from hatred of the clergy. The government, however, ordered all who
possessed the Encyclopædia to deliver it over forthwith to the police.
Eventually the copies were returned to their owners with some petty
curtailments.
Voltaire has left us a vivacious picture of authority in grave
consultation over the great engine of destruction. With that we may
conclude our account of its strange eventful history.
A servant of Lewis xv. told me that one day the king his
master supping at Trianon with a small party, the talk
happened to turn first upon the chase, and next on gunpowder.
Some one said that the best powder was made of equal parts of
saltpetre, of sulphur, and of charcoal. The Duke de la
Vallière, better informed, maintained that to make good
gunpowder you required one part of sulphur and one of charcoal
to five parts of saltpetre.
"It is curious," said the Duke de Nivernois, "that we should
amuse ourselves every day in killing partridges at Versailles,
and sometimes in killing men or getting ourselves killed on
the frontier, without knowing exactly how the killing is
done."
"Alas," said Madame de Pompadour, "we are all reduced to that
about everything in the world: I don't know how they compound
the rouge that I put on my cheeks, and I should be vastly
puzzled if they were to ask me how they make my silk
stockings."
"'Tis a pity, then," said the Duke de la Vallière, "that his
Majesty should have confiscated our Encyclopædias, which cost
us a hundred pistoles apiece: we should soon find there an
answer to all our difficulties."
The king justified the confiscation: he had been warned that
one-and-twenty folios, that were to be found on the
dressing-tables of all the ladies, were the most dangerous
thing in all the world for the kingdom of France; and he meant
to find out for himself whether this were true or not, before
letting people read the book. When supper was over, he sent
three lackeys for the book, and they returned each with a good
deal of difficulty carrying seven volumes.
It was then seen from the article _Powder_ that the Duke de la
Vallière was right; and then Madame de Pompadour learnt the
difference between the old rouge of Spain, with which the
ladies of Madrid coloured their faces, and the rouge of the
ladies of Paris. She knew that the Greek and Roman ladies
were painted with the purple that came from the _murex_, and
that therefore our scarlet is the purple of the ancients; that
there was more saffron in the rouge of Spain, and more
cochineal in that of France.
She saw how they made her stockings by loom; and the machine
transported her with amazement.
Everyone threw himself on the volumes like the daughters of
Lycomedes on the ornaments of Ulysses; every one immediately
found all he sought. Those who were at law were surprised to
see their affair decided. The king read all about the rights
of his crown. "But upon my word," he said, "I can't tell why
they spoke so ill of this book." "Do you not see, sire," said
the Duke de Nivernois, "it is because the book is so good;
people never cry out against what is mediocre or common in
anything. If women seek to throw ridicule on a new arrival,
she is sure to be prettier than they are."
All this time they kept on turning over the leaves; and the
Count de C---- said aloud--"Sire, how happy you are, that
under your reign men should be found capable of understanding
all the arts and transmitting them to posterity. Everything is
here, from the way to make a pin down to the art of casting
and pointing your guns; from the infinitely little up to the
infinitely great. Thank God for having brought into the world
in your kingdom the men who have done such good work for the
whole universe. Other nations must either buy the
Encyclopædia, or else they must pirate it. Take all my
property if you will, but give me back my Encyclopædia."
"Yet they say," replied the king, "that there are many faults
in this work, necessary and admirable as it is."
"Sire," said the Count de C----, "there were at your supper
two ragouts which were failures; we left them uneaten, and yet
we had excellent cheer. Would you have had them throw all the
supper out of the window because of those two ragouts?..."
Envy and Ignorance did not count themselves beaten; the two
immortal sisters continued their cries, their cabals, their
persecutions. What happened? Foreigners brought out four
editions of this French book which in France was proscribed,
and they gained about 1,800,000 crowns.[154]
In a monotonous world it is a pity to spoil a striking effect, yet one
must be vigilant. It has escaped the attention of writers who have
reproduced this lively scene, that Madame de Pompadour was dead before
the volumes containing Powder and Rouge were born. The twenty-one
volumes were not published until 1765, and she died in the spring of the
previous year. But the substance of the story is probably true, though
Voltaire has only made a slip in a name.
As to the reference with which Voltaire impatiently concludes, we have
to remember that the work was being printed at Geneva as it came out in
Paris. It was afterwards reprinted as a whole both at Geneva (1777) and
at Lausanne (1778). An edition appeared at Leghorn in 1770, and another
at Lucca in 1771. Immediately after the completion of the Encyclopædia
there began to appear volumes of selections from it. The compilers of
these anthologies (for instance of an _Esprit de l'Encydopédie_
published at Geneva in 1768) were free from all intention of
proselytising. They meant only to turn a more or less honest penny by
serving up in neat duodecimos the liveliest, most curious, and most
amusing pieces to be found in the immense mass of the folios of the
original.
The Encyclopædia of Diderot, though not itself the most prodigious
achievement on which French booksellers may pride themselves, yet
inspired that achievement. In 1782 Panckoucke--a familiar name in the
correspondence of Voltaire and the Voltairean family--conceived the plan
of a Methodical Encyclopædia. This colossal work, which really consists
of a collection of special cyclopædias for each of the special sciences,
was not completed until 1832, and comprises one hundred and sixty-six
volumes of text, with a score more volumes of plates. It has no unity of
doctrine, no equal application of any set of philosophic principles, and
no definite social aim. The only encyclopædia since 1772 with which I am
acquainted, that is planned with a view to the presentation of a general
body of doctrine, is the unfinished Encyclopédie Nuevelle of Pìerre
Leroux and Jean Reynaud. This work was intended to apply the socialistic
and spiritualistic ideas of its authors over the whole field of
knowledge and speculation. The result is that it furnishes only a series
of dissertations, and is not an encyclopædia in the ordinary sense.[155]
The booksellers at first spoke of the Encyclopædia as an affair of two
million livres. It appeared, however that its cost did not go much
beyond one million one hundred and forty thousand livres. The gross
return was calculated to be nearly twice as much. The price to the
subscriber of the seven volumes up to 1757, of the ten volumes issued in
1765, and of the eleven volumes of plates completed in 1772, amounted to
nine hundred and eighty livres,[156] or about forty-three pounds
sterling of that date, equivalent in value to more than three times the
sum in money of to-day.
The payment received by Diderot is a little doubtful, and the terms were
evidently changed from time to time. His average salary, after
D'Alembert had quitted him, seems to have amounted to about three
thousand livres, or one hundred and thirty pounds sterling, per annum.
This coincides with Grimm's statement that the total sum received by
Diderot was sixty thousand livres, or about two thousand six hundred
pounds sterling.[157] And to think, cried Voltaire, when he heard of
Diderot's humble wage, that an army contractor makes twenty thousand
livres a day! Voltaire himself had made a profit of more than half a
million livres by a share in an army contract in the war of 1734, and
his yearly income derived from such gains and their prudent investment
was as high as seventy thousand livres, representing in value a sum not
far short of ten thousand pounds a year of our present money.
II.
All writers on the movement of illumination in France in the eighteenth
century, call our attention to the quick transformation, which took
place after the middle of the century, of a speculative or philosophical
agitation into a political or social one. Readers often find some
difficulty in understanding plainly how or why this metamorphosis was
brought about. The metaphysical question which men were then so fond of
discussing, whether matter can think, appears very far removed indeed
from the sphere of political conceptions. The psychological question
whether our ideas are innate, or are solely given to us by experience
through the sensations, may strike the publicist as having the least
possible to do with the type of a government or the aims of a community.
Yet it is really the conclusions to which men come in this region, that
determine the quality of the civil sentiment and the significance of
political organisation. The theological doctors who persecuted De Prades
for suggestions of Locke's psychology, and for high treason against
Cartesianism, were guided by a right instinct of self-preservation. De
Maistre, by far the most acute and penetrating of the Catholic school,
was never more clear-sighted than when he made a vigorous and deliberate
onslaught upon Bacon, the centre of his movement against revolutionary
principles.[158]
As we have said before, the immediate force of speculative literature
hangs on practical opportuneness. It was not merely because Bacon and
Hobbes and Locke had written certain books, that the Encyclopædists, who
took up their philosophic succession, inevitably became a powerful
political party, and multiplied their adherents in an increasing
proportion as the years went on. From various circumstances the attack
acquired a significance and a weight in France which it had never
possessed in England. For one thing, physical science had in the
interval taken immense strides. This both dwarfed the sovereignty of
theology and theological metaphysics, and indirectly disposed men's
minds for non-theological theories of moral as well as of physical
phenomena. In France, again, the objects of the attack were inelastic
and unyielding. Political speculation in England followed, and did not
precede, political innovation and reform. In France its light played
round institutions which were too deeply rooted in absolutism and
privilege to be capable of substantial modification. Deism was
comparatively impotent against the Church of England, first, because it
was an intellectual movement, and not a social one; second, because the
constitutional doctrines of the church were flexible. Deism in the hands
of its French propagators became connected with social liberalism,
because the Catholic church in those days was identified with all the
ideas of repression. And the tendencies of deism in France grew more
violently destructive, not only because religious superstition was
grosser, but because that superstition was incorporated in a strong and
inexpansible social structure.
"It would be a mistake," wrote that sagacious and well-informed
observer, D'Argenson, so early as 1753, "to attribute the loss of
religion in France to the English philosophy, which has not gained more
than a hundred philosophers or so in Paris, instead of setting it down
to the hatred against the priests, which goes to the very last extreme.
All minds are turning to discontent and disobedience, and everything is
on the high road to a great revolution, both in religion and in
government. And it will be a very different thing to that rude
Reformation, a medley of superstition and freedom, which came to us from
Germany in the sixteenth century! As our nation and our century are
enlightened in so very different a fashion, they will go whither they
ought to go; they will banish every priest, all priesthood, all
revelation, all mystery." This, however, only represents the destructive
side of the vast change which D'Argenson then foresaw, six-and-thirty
years before its consummation. That change had also a constructive side.
If one of its elements was hate, another and more important element was
hope. This constructive and reforming spirit which made its way in the
intelligence of the leading men in France from 1750 to 1789, was
represented in the encyclopædic confederation, and embodied in their
forty folios. And, to return to our first point, it was directly and
inseparably associated with the philosophy of Bacon and Locke. What is
the connection between their speculations and a vehement and energetic
spirit of social reform? We have no space here to do more than barely
hint the line of answer.
The broad features of the speculative revolution of which the
Encyclopædia was the outcome, lie on the surface of its pages and cannot
be mistaken. The transition from Descartes to Newton meant the definite
substitution of observation for hypothesis. The exaltation of Bacon
meant the advance from supernatural explanations to explanations from
experience. The acceptance and development of the Lockian psychology
meant the reference of our ideas to bodily sensations, and led men by
what they thought a tolerably direct path to the identification of mind
with functions of matter. We need not here discuss the philosophical
truth or adequateness of these ways of considering the origin and nature
of knowledge, or the composition of human character. All that now
concerns us is to mark their tendency. That tendency clearly is to expel
Magic as the decisive influence among us, in favour of ordered relations
of cause and effect, only to be discovered by intelligent search. The
universe began to be more directly conceived as a group of phenomena
that are capable of rational and connected explanation. Then, the wider
the area of law, the greater is man's consciousness of his power of
controlling forces, and securing the results that he desires. Objective
interests and their conditions acquire an increasing preponderance in
his mind. On the other hand, as the limits of science expand, so do the
limits of nescience become more definite. The more we know of the
universal order, the more are we persuaded, however gradually and
insensibly, that certain matters which men believed themselves to know
outside of this phenomenal order, are in truth inaccessible by those
instruments of experience and observation to which we are indebted for
other knowledge. Hence, a natural inclination to devote our faculty to
the forces within our control, and to withdraw it from vain industry
about forces--if they be forces--which are beyond our control and beyond
our apprehension. Thus man becomes the centre of the world to himself,
nature his servant and minister, human society the field of his
interests and his exertions. The sensational psychology, again, whether
scientifically defensible or not, clearly tends to heighten our idea of
the power of education and institutions upon character. The more vividly
we realise the share of external impressions in making men what they
are, the more ready we shall be to concern ourselves with external
conditions and their improvement. The introduction of the positive
spirit into the observation of the facts of society was not to be
expected until the Cartesian philosophy, with its reliance on
inexplicable intuitions and its exaggeration of the method of
hypothesis, had been laid aside.
Diderot struck a key-note of difference between the old Catholic spirit
and the new social spirit, between quietist superstition and energetic
science, in the casual sentence in his article on alms-houses and
hospitals: "_It would be far more important to work at the prevention of
misery, than to multiply places of refuge for the miserable_."