This brilliant and beautiful name has been sometimes honored, and
sometimes disgraced; like that of poet, mathematician, monk, priest, and
everything dependent on opinion. Domitian banished the philosophers, and
Lucian derided them. But what sort of philosophers and mathematicians
were they whom the monster Domitian exiled? They were jugglers with
their cups and balls; the calculators of horoscopes, fortune-tellers,
miserable peddling Jews, who composed philtres and talismans; gentry who
had special and sovereign power over evil spirits, who evoked them from
their infernal habitations, made them take possession of the bodies of
men and women by certain words or signs, and dislodged them by other
words or signs.
And what were the philosophers that Lucian held up to public ridicule?
They were the dregs of the human race. They were a set of profligate
beggars incapable of applying to any useful profession or occupation;
men perfectly resembling the "Poor Devil," who has been described to us
with so much both of truth and humor; men who are undecided whether to
wear a livery, or to write the almanac of the "_Annus Mirabilis,_" the
marvellous year; whether to work on reviews, or on roads; whether to
turn soldiers or priests; who in the meantime frequent the
coffee-houses, to give their opinion upon the last new piece, upon God,
upon being in general, and the various modes of being; who will then
borrow your money, and immediately go away and write a libel against you
in conjunction with the barrister Marchand, or the creature called
Chaudon, or the equally despicable wretch called Bonneval.
It was not from such a school that the Ciceros, the Atticuses, the
Epictetuses, the Trajans, Adrians, Antonines, and Julians proceeded. It
was not such a school that formed a king of Prussia, who has composed as
many philosophical treatises as he has gained battles, and who has
levelled with the dust as many prejudices as enemies.
A victorious empress, at whose name the Ottomans tremble, and who so
gloriously rules an empire more extensive than that of Rome, would never
have been a great legistratrix, had she not been a philosopher. Every
northern prince is so, and the North puts the South to absolute shame.
If the confederates of Poland had only a very small share of philosophy,
they would not expose their country, their estates, and their houses, to
pillage; they would not drench their territory in blood; they would not
obstinately and wantonly reduce themselves to being the most miserable
of mankind; they would listen to the voice of their philosophic king,
who has given so many noble proofs and so many admirable lessons of
moderation and prudence in vain.
The great Julian was a philosopher when he wrote to his ministers and
pontiffs his exquisite letters abounding in clemency and wisdom, which
all men of judgment and feeling highly admire, even at the present day,
however sincerely they may condemn his errors.
Constantine was not a philosopher when he assassinated his relations,
his son and his wife, and when, reeking with the blood of his family, he
swore that God had sent to him the "_Labarum_" in the clouds. It is a
long bound that carries us from Constantine to Charles IX., and Henry
III., kings of one of the fifty great provinces of the Roman Empire. But
if these kings had been philosophers, one would not have been guilty of
the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the other would not have made
scandalous processions, nor have been reduced to the necessity of
assassinating the duke of Guise and the cardinal, his brother, and at
length have been assassinated himself by a young Jacobin, for the love
of God and of the holy church.
If Louis the Just, the thirteenth monarch of that name, had been a
philosopher, he would not have permitted the virtuous de Thou and the
innocent Marshal de Marillac to have been dragged to the scaffold; he
would not have suffered his mother to perish with hunger at Cologne; and
his reign would not have been an uninterrupted succession of intestine
discords and calamities.
Compare with those princes, thus ignorant, superstitious, cruel, and
enslaved by their own passions or those of their ministers, such a man
as Montaigne, or Charron, or the Chancellor de l'Hôpital, or the
historian de Thou, or la Mothe Le Vayer, or a Locke, a Shaftesbury, a
Sidney, or a Herbert; and say whether you would rather be governed by
those sovereigns or by these sages.
When I speak of philosophers I do not mean the coarse and brutal cynics
who appear desirous of being apes of Diogenes, but the men who imitate
Plato and Cicero. As for you, voluptuous courtiers, and you also, men of
petty minds, invested with a petty employment which confers on you a
petty authority in a petty country, who uniformly exclaim against and
abuse philosophy, proceed as long as you please with your invective
railing. I consider you as the Nomentanuses inveighing against Horace;
and the Cotins attempting to cry down Boileau.