THE ENCYCLOPEDIA
There are three different schools of statesmanship. The first one teaches
a doctrine which reads somewhat as follows: “Our planet is inhabited by
poor benighted creatures who are unable to think for themselves, who
suffer mental agonies whenever they are obliged to make an independent
decision and who therefore can be led astray by the first ward-heeler
that comes along. Not only is it better for the world at large that these
‘herd people’ be ruled by some one who knows his own mind, but they
themselves, too, are infinitely happier when they do not have to bother
about parliaments and ballot-boxes and can devote all their time to their
work-shops, their children, their flivvers and their vegetable gardens.”
The disciples of this school become emperors, sultans, sachems, sheiks
and archbishops and they rarely regard labor unions as an essential part
of civilization. They work hard and build roads, barracks, cathedrals and
jails.
The adherents of the second school of political thought argue as follows:
“The average man is God’s noblest invention. He is a sovereign in his own
right, unsurpassed in wisdom, prudence and the loftiness of his motives.
He is perfectly capable of looking after his own interests, but those
committees through which he tries to rule the universe are proverbially
slow when it comes to handling delicate affairs of state. Therefore, the
masses ought to leave all executive business to a few trusted friends
who are not hampered by the immediate necessity of making a living and
who can devote all their time to the happiness of the people.”
Needless to say the apostles of this glorious ideal are the logical
candidates for the job of oligarch, dictator, first consul and Lord
protector.
They work hard and build roads and barracks, but the cathedrals they turn
into jails.
But there is a third group of people. They contemplate man with the
sober eye of science and accept him as he is. They appreciate his good
qualities, they understand his limitations. They are convinced from a
long observation of past events that the average citizen, when not under
the influence of passion or self-interest, tries really very hard to do
what is right. But they make themselves no false illusions. They know
that the natural process of growth is exceedingly slow, that it would be
as futile to try and hasten the tides or the seasons as the growth of
human intelligence. They are rarely invited to assume the government of
a state, but whenever they have a chance to put their ideas into action,
they build roads, improve the jails and spend the rest of the available
funds upon schools and universities. For they are such incorrigible
optimists that they believe that education of the right sort will
gradually rid this world of most of its ancient evils and is therefore a
thing that ought to be encouraged at all costs.
And as a final step towards the fulfillment of this ideal, they usually
write an encyclopedia.
Like so many other things that give evidence of great wisdom and profound
patience, the encyclopedia-habit took its origin in China. The Chinese
Emperor K’ang-hi tried to make his subjects happy with an encyclopedia in
five thousand and twenty volumes.
Pliny, who introduced encyclopedias in the west, was contented with
thirty-seven books.
The first fifteen hundred years of the Christian era produced nothing of
the slightest value along this line of enlightenment. A fellow-countryman
of Saint Augustine, the African Felix Capella, wasted a great many years
of his life composing something which he held to be a veritable treasure
house of miscellaneous knowledge. In order that people might the more
easily retain the many interesting facts which he presented to them, he
used poetry. This terrible mass of misinformation was duly learned by
heart by eighteen successive generations of medieval children and was
held by them to be the last word in the fields of literature, music and
science.
Two hundred years later a bishop of Sevilla by the name of Isidore wrote
an entirely new encyclopedia and after that, the output increased at the
regular rate of two for every hundred years. What has become of them
all, I do not know. The book-worm (most useful of domestic animals) has
possibly acted as our deliverer. If all these volumes had been allowed to
survive, there would not be room for anything else on this earth.
When at last during the first half of the eighteenth century, Europe
experienced a tremendous outbreak of intellectual curiosity, the
purveyors of encyclopedias entered into a veritable Paradise. Such books,
then as now, were usually compiled by very poor scholars who could live
on eight dollars a week and whose personal services counted for less
than the money spent upon paper and ink. England especially was a great
country for this sort of literature and so it was quite natural that John
Mills, a Britisher who lived in Paris, should think of translating the
successful “Universal Dictionary” of Ephraim Chambers into the French
language that he might peddle his product among the subjects of good
King Louis and grow rich. For this purpose he associated himself with a
German professor and then approached Lebreton, the king’s printer, to do
the actual publishing. To make a long story short, Lebreton, who saw a
chance to make a small fortune, deliberately swindled his partner and as
soon as he had frozen Mills and the Teuton doctor out of the enterprise,
continued to publish the pirated edition on his own account. He called
the forthcoming work the “Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Universel des Arts
et des Sciences” and issued a series of beautiful prospectuses with such
a tremendous selling appeal that the list of subscribers was soon filled.
Then he hired himself a professor of philosophy in the Collège de France
to act as his editor-in-chief, bought a lot of paper and awaited results.
Unfortunately, the work of writing an encyclopedia did not prove as
simple as Lebreton had thought. The professor produced notes but no
articles, the subscribers loudly clamored for Volume I and everything was
in great disorder.
In this emergency Lebreton remembered that a “Universal Dictionary of
Medicine” which had appeared only a few months before had been very
favorably received. He sent for the editor of this medical handbook and
hired him on the spot. And so it happened that a mere encyclopedia became
the “Encyclopédie.” For the new editor was no one less than Denis Diderot
and the work which was to have been a hack job became one of the most
important contributions of the eighteenth century towards the sum total
of human enlightenment.
Diderot at that time was thirty-seven years old and his life had been
neither easy nor happy. He had refused to do what all respectable young
Frenchmen were supposed to do and go to a university. Instead, as soon
as he could get away from his Jesuit teachers, he had proceeded to Paris
to become a man of letters. After a short period of starvation (acting
upon the principle that two can go hungry just as cheaply as one) he
had married a lady who proved to be a terribly pious woman and an
uncompromising shrew, a combination which is by no means as rare as some
people seem to believe. But as he was obliged to support her, he had been
forced to take all sorts of odd jobs and to compile all sorts of books
from “Inquiries concerning Virtue and Merit” to a rather disreputable
rehash of Boccaccio’s “Decameron.” In his heart, however, this pupil of
Bayle remained faithful to his liberal ideals. Soon the government (after
the fashion of governments during times of stress) discovered that this
inoffensive looking young author maintained grave doubts about the story
of creation as rendered in the first chapter of Genesis and otherwise was
considerable of a heretic. In consequence whereof Diderot was conducted
to the prison of Vincennes and there held under lock and key for almost
three months.
It was after his release from jail that he entered the service of
Lebreton. Diderot was one of the most eloquent men of his time. He saw
the chance of a lifetime in the enterprise of which he was to be the
head. A mere rehash of Chambers’ old material seemed entirely beneath his
dignity. It was an era of tremendous mental activity. Very well! Let the
Encyclopedia of Lebreton contain the latest word upon every conceivable
subject and let the articles be written by the foremost authorities in
every line of human endeavor.
Diderot was so full of enthusiasm that he actually persuaded Lebreton to
give him full command and unlimited time. Then he made up a tentative
list of his coöperators, took a large sheet of foolscap and began, “A:
the first letter of the alphabet, etc., etc.”
Twenty years later he reached the Z and the job was done. Rarely,
however, has a man worked under such tremendous disadvantages. Lebreton
had increased his original capital when he hired Diderot, but he never
paid his editor more than five hundred dollars per year. And as for the
other people who were supposed to lend their assistance, well, we all
know how those things are. They were either busy just then, or they
would do it next month, or they had to go to the country to see their
grandmother. With the result that Diderot was obliged to do most of the
work himself while smarting under the abuse that was heaped upon him by
the officials of both the Church and the State.
Today copies of his Encyclopedia are quite rare. Not because so many
people want them but because so many people are glad to get rid of
them. The book which a century and a half ago was howled down as a
manifestation of a pernicious radicalism reads today like a dull and
harmless tract on the feeding of babies. But to the more conservative
element among the clergy of the eighteenth century, it sounded like a
clarion call of destruction, anarchy, atheism and chaos.
Of course, the usual attempts were made to denounce the editor-in-chief
as an enemy of society and religion, a loose reprobate who believed
neither in God, home or the sanctity of the family ties. But the Paris
of the year 1770 was still an overgrown village where every one knew
every one else. And Diderot, who not only claimed that the purpose of
life was “to do good and to find the truth,” but who actually lived up
to this motto, who kept open house for all those who were hungry, who
labored twenty hours a day for the sake of humanity and asked nothing in
return but a bed, a writing desk and a pad of paper, this simple-minded,
hard-working fellow was so shining an example of those virtues in which
the prelates and the monarchs of that day were so conspicuously lacking,
that it was not easy to attack him from that particular angle. And
so the authorities contented themselves with making his life just as
unpleasant as they possibly could by a continual system of espionage,
by everlastingly snooping around the office, by raiding Diderot’s home,
by confiscating his notes and occasionally by suppressing the work
altogether.
These obstructive methods, however, could not dampen his enthusiasm. At
last the work was finished and the “Encyclopédie” actually accomplished
what Diderot had expected of it—it became the rallying point for all
those who in one way or another felt the spirit of the new age and who
knew that the world was desperately in need of a general overhauling.
It may seem that I have dragged the figure of the editor slightly out of
the true perspective.
Who, after all, was this Denis Diderot, who wore a shabby coat, counted
himself happy when his rich and brilliant friend, the Baron D’Holbach,
invited him to a square meal once a week, and who was more than satisfied
when four thousand copies of his book were actually sold? He lived at the
same time as Rousseau and D’Alembert and Turgot and Helvétius and Volney
and Condorcet and a score of others, all of whom gained a much greater
personal renown than he did. But without the Encyclopédie these good
people would never have been able to exercise the influence they did.
It was more than a book, it was a social and economic program. It told
what the leading minds of the day were actually thinking. It contained a
concrete statement of those ideas that soon were to dominate the entire
world. It was a decisive moment in the history of the human race.
France had reached a point where those who had eyes to see and ears to
hear knew that something drastic must be done to avoid an immediate
catastrophe, while those who had eyes to see and ears to hear yet refused
to use them, maintained with an equal display of stubborn energy that
peace and order could only be maintained by a strict enforcement of a
set of antiquated laws that belonged to the era of the Merovingians. For
the moment, those two parties were so evenly balanced that everything
remained as it had always been and this led to strange complications.
The same France which on one side of the ocean played such a conspicuous
rôle as the defender of liberty and freedom and addressed the most
affectionate letters to Monsieur Georges Washington (who was a Free
Mason) and arranged delightful week-end parties for Monsieur le Ministre,
Benjamin Franklin, who was what his neighbors used to call a “sceptic”
and what we call a plain atheist, this country on the other side of
the broad Atlantic stood revealed as the most vindictive enemy of all
forms of spiritual progress and only showed her sense of democracy in
the complete impartiality with which she condemned both philosopher and
peasant to a life of drudgery and privation.
Eventually all this was changed.
But it was changed in a way which no one had been able to foresee. For
the struggle that was to remove the spiritual and social handicaps of all
those who were born outside the royal purple was not fought by the slaves
themselves. It was the work of a small group of disinterested citizens
whom the Protestants, in their heart of hearts, hated quite as bitterly
as their Catholic oppressors and who could count upon no other reward
than that which is said to await all honest men in Heaven.
The men who during the eighteenth century defended the cause of tolerance
rarely belonged to any particular denomination. For the sake of personal
convenience they sometimes went through certain outward motions of
religious conformity which kept the gendarmes away from their writing
desks. But as far as their inner life was concerned, they might just as
well have lived in Athens in the fourth century B.C. or in China in the
days of Confucius.
They were often most regrettably lacking in a certain reverence for
various things which most of their contemporaries held in great respect
and which they themselves regarded as harmless but childish survivals of
a bygone day.
They took little stock in that ancient national history which the
western world, for some curious reason, had picked out from among all
Babylonian and Assyrian and Egyptian and Hittite and Chaldean records and
had accepted as a guide-book of morals and customs. But true disciples
of their great master, Socrates, they listened only to the inner voice
of their own conscience and regardless of consequences, they lived
fearlessly in a world that had long since been surrendered to the timid.