THE FRENCH ILLUMINATION.
In the last decade of the seventeenth century France had yielded the
leadership in philosophy to England. Whereas Hobbes had in Paris imbibed
the spirit of the Galilean and Cartesian inquiry, while Bacon, Locke, and
even Hume had also visited France with advantage, now French thinkers take
the watchword from the English. Montesquieu and Voltaire, returning from
England in the same year (1729), acquaint their countrymen with the ideas
of Locke and his contemporaries. These are eagerly caught up; are, step
by step, and with the logical courage characteristic of the French mind,
developed to their extreme conclusions; and, at the same time, spread
abroad in this heightened form among the people beyond the circles of the
learned, nay, even beyond the educated classes. The English temperament is
favorable neither to this advance to extreme revolutionary inferences nor
to this propagandist tendency. Locke combines a rationalistic ethics with
his semi-sensational theory of knowledge; Newton is far from finding in his
mechanical physics a danger for religious beliefs; the deists treat the
additions of positive religion rather as superfluous ballast than as
hateful unreason; Bolingbroke wishes at least to conceal from the people
the illuminating principles which he offers to the higher classes. Such
halting where farther progress threatens to become dangerous to moral
interests does more honor to the moral, than to the logical, character of
the philosopher. But with the transfer of these ideas to France, the wall
of separation is broken down between the theory of knowledge and the theory
of ethics, between natural philosophy and the philosophy of religion;
sensationalism forces its way from the region of theory into the sphere
of practice, and the mechanical theory is transformed from a principal
of physical interpretation into a metaphysical view of the world of an
atheistical character. Naturalism is everywhere determined to have its
own: if knowledge comes from the senses, then morality must be rooted
in self-interest; whoever confines natural science to the search for
mechanical causes must not postulate an intelligent Power working from
design, even to explain the origin of things and the beginning of
motion--has no right to speak of a free will, an immortal soul, and a deity
who has created the world. Further, as Bayle's proof that the dogmas of
the Church were in all points contradictory to reason had, contrary to its
author's own wishes, exerted an influence hostile to religion, and as,
moreover, the political and social conditions of the time incited to revolt
and to a break with all existing institutions, the philosophical ideas from
over the Channel and the condition of things at home alike pressed toward
a revolutionary intensification of modern principles, which found
comprehensive expression in the atheists' Bible, the _System of Nature_ of
Baron Holbach, 1770. The movement begins in the middle of the thirties,
when Montesquieu commences to naturalize Locke's political views in France,
and Voltaire does the same service for Locke's theory of knowledge,
and Newton's natural philosophy, which had already been commended by
Maupertuis. The year 1748, the year also of Hume's _Essay_, brings
Montesquieu's chief work and La Mettrie's _Man a Machine_. While the
_Encyclopedia_, the herald of the Illumination, begun in 1751, is advancing
to its completion (1772, or rather 1780), Condillac (1754) and Bonnet
(1755) develop theoretical sensationalism, and Helvetius (_On Mind_,
1758; in the same year, D'Alembert's _Elements of Philosophy_) practical
sensationalism. Rousseau, engaged in authorship from 1751 and a contributor
to the _Encyclopedia_ until 1757 comes into prominence, 1762, with his two
chief works, _Emile_ and the _Social Contract_. Parallel with these we
find interesting phenomena in the field of political economy: Morelly's
communistic _Code of Nature_ (1755), the works of Quesnay (1758), the
leader of the physiocrats, and those of Turgot, 1774.
Our discussion takes up, first, the introduction and popularization of
English ideas; then, the further development of these into a consistent
sensationalism, into the morality of interest, and into materialism;
finally, the reaction against the illumination of the understanding in
Rousseau's philosophy of feeling.[1]
[Footnote 1: On the whole chapter cf. Damiron, _Mémoires pour Servir à
l'Histoire de la Philosophie au XVIII. Siécle_, 3 vols., 1858-64; and
John Morley's _Voltaire_, 1872 [1886], _Rousseau_, 1873 [1886], and
_Diderot and the Encyclopedists_, 1878 [new ed., 1886].]
1. %The Entrance of English Doctrines%.
Montesquieu[1] (1689-1755) made Locke's doctrine of constitutional
monarchy and the division of powers (pp. 179-180), with which he joins the
historical point of view of Bodin and the naturalistic positions of the
time, the common property of the cultivated world. Laws must be adapted to
the character and spirit of the nation; the spirit of the people, again,
is the result of nature, of the past, of manners, of religion, and of
political institutions. Nature has bestowed many gifts on the Southern
peoples, but few on those of the North; hence the latter need freedom,
while the former readily dispense with it. Warm climates produce greater
sensibility and passionateness, cold ones, muscular vigor and industry; in
the temperate zones nations are less constant in their habits, their vices,
and their virtues. The laws of religion concern man as man, those of the
state concern him as a citizen; the former have for their object the moral
good of the individual, the latter, the welfare of society; the first aim
at immutable, the second at mutable good. Laws and manners are closely
interrelated. Right is older than the state, and the law of justice holds
even in the state of nature; but in order to assure peace positive right is
required in three forms, international, political, and civil.
[Footnote 1: Montesquieu, _Persian Letters_, 1721; _Considerations on
the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and of their Decadence_, 1734;
_Spirit of Laws_, 1748.]
Each of the four political forms has a passion for its underlying
principle: despotism has fear; monarchy, honor (personal and class
prejudice); aristocracy, the moderation of the nobility; democracy,
political virtue, which subordinates personal to general welfare, and
especially the inclination to equality and frugality. While republics are
destroyed by extravagance, lust, and self-seeking, a monarchy can dispense
with civil virtue, patriotism, and moral disinterestedness, since in it
false honor, luxury, and wantonness subserve the public good. Great states
tend toward despotism; smaller ones toward aristocracy, or a democratic
republicanism; for those of medium size monarchy, which is intermediate
between the two former, is the best form of constitution. Although
Montesquieu, in his _Lettres Persanes_, shows himself enthusiastic for the
federal republics of Switzerland and the Netherlands, his opinions are
different after his return from England, and in his _Esprit des Lois_ he
praises the English form of government as the ideal of civil liberty.
Political freedom consists in liberty to do (not what we wish, but) what
we ought, or in doing that which the laws allow. Such lawful freedom is
possible only where the constitution of the state and criminal legislation
inspire the citizen with a sense of security. In order to prevent misuse of
the supreme power, the different authorities in the state must be divided
so that they shall hold one another in check. In particular Montesquieu
demands for the judicial power absolute independence of the executive power
(which Locke had termed the federative) as well as of the legislative
power. The last belongs to parliament, which includes in its two houses an
aristocratic and a democratic element.
Voltaire[1] (1694-1778)--he himself had made this anagram from his name,
Arouet l(e) j(eune)--seemed by his many-sided receptivity almost made to be
the interpreter of English ideas; in the words of Windelband, he "combines
Newton's mechanical philosophy of nature, Locke's noëtical empiricism, and
Shaftesbury's moral philosophy under the deistic point of view." The
same qualities which made him the first journalist, enabled him to free
philosophy from its scholastic garb, and, by concentrating it on the
problems which press most upon the lay mind (God, freedom, immortality),
to make it a living force among the people. His superficiality, as Erdmann
acutely remarks, was his strength. True religion, so reason teaches us,
consists in loving God and in being just and forbearing to our fellow-men
as to our brothers; morality is so natural and necessary that it is no
wonder that all philosophers since Zoroaster have inculcated the same
principles. The less of dogma the better the religion; atheism is not
so bad as superstition, which teaches men to commit crimes with an easy
conscience. He considered it the chief mission of his life to destroy these
two miserable errors. He endeavored to controvert atheism by rational
arguments, while with passionate hatred and contemptuous wit he attacked
positive Christianity and his persecutors, the priesthood. The existence
of God is for him not merely a moral postulate, but a result of scientific
reasoning. One of his famous sayings was: "If God did not exist it would be
necessary to invent him; but all nature cries out to us that he exists." He
defends immortality in spite of theoretical difficulties, because of its
practical necessity; his attitude toward the freedom of the will, which
he had energetically defended in the beginning, grows constantly more
skeptical with increasing age. His position in regard to the question
of evil experiences a similar change--the Lisbon earthquake made him an
opponent of optimism, though he had previously favored it.
[Footnote 1: David Friedrich Strauss, _Voltaire, sechs Vorträge_, 1870.]
%2. Theoretical and Practical Sensationalism.%
We turn next from the popular introduction and dissemination of Locke's
doctrines, which left their contents unchanged, to their principiant
development by the French sensationalists. Condillac (1715-80) always
thinks of his work as a completion of Locke's, whose _Essay_ he held not to
have gone down to the final root of the cognitive process. Locke did not
go far enough, Condillac thinks, in his rejection of innate elements; he
failed to trace out the origin of perception, reflection, cognition, and
volition, as also the relation between the external senses, the internal
sense, and the combining intellect, which he discussed as separate sources,
the two former of particular, and the last of complex, ideas; in short,
he omitted to inquire into the origin of the first function of the soul.
Berkeley was right in feeling that a simplification was needed here; but by
erroneously reducing outer perception to inner perception, he reached the
absurd conclusion of denying the external world. The true course is just
the opposite of this--the one already taken by the Bishop of Cork, Peter
Browne (died 1735; _The Procedure, Extent, and Limits of the Human
Understanding_, 1728): understanding and reflection must be reduced to
sensation. All psychical functions are transformed sensations. The soul has
only one original faculty, that of sensation; all the others, theoretical
and practical alike, are acquired, _i.e._, they have gradually developed
from the former. Condillac is related to Locke as Fichte to Kant; in
the former case the transition is mediated by Browne, in the latter
by Reinhold. Each crowns the work of his predecessor with a unifying
conclusion; each demands and offers a genetic psychology which finds the
origin of all the spiritual functions--from sensation and feelings of
pleasure and pain up to rational cognition and moral will--in a single
fundamental power of the soul. But there is a great difference, materially
as well as formally, between these kindred undertakings, a difference
corresponding to that between Locke's empiricism and Kant's idealism.
The idea of ends, which controls the course of thought in Fichte as in
Leibnitz, is entirely lacking in Condillac; that which is first in time,
sensation, is for the Science of Knowledge and the Monadology only the
beginning, not the essence, of psychical activity, while Condillac makes
no distinction between beginning and ground, but expressly identifies
_principe_ and _commencement_. With Fichte and Leibnitz sensation is
immature thought, with Condillac thought is refined sensation. The former
teach a teleological, the latter a mechanical mono-dynamism. The Science
of Knowledge, moreover, makes a very serious task of the deduction of the
particular psychical functions from the original power, while Condillac
takes it extraordinarily easy. Good illustrations of his way of effacing
distinctions instead of explaining them are given by such monotonously
recurring phrases as memory is "nothing but" modified sensation; comparison
and simultaneous attention to two ideas "are the same thing"; sensation
"gradually becomes" comparison and judgment; reflection is "in its origin"
attention itself; speech, thought, and the formation of general notions
are "at bottom the same"; the passions are "only" various kinds of desire;
understanding and will spring "from one root," etc.
The demand for a single fundamental psychical power comes from Descartes,
and Condillac does not hesitate to retain the word _penser_ itself as a
general designation for all mental functions. Similarly he holds fast to
the dualism between extension and sensation as reciprocally incompatible
properties, opposes the soul as the "simple" subject of thought to
"divisible" matter, and sees in the affections of the bodily organs merely
the "occasions" on which the soul of itself alone exercises its sensitive
activity. Even freedom--the supremacy of thought over the passions--is
maintained, in striking contrast to the whole tendency of his doctrine and
to the openly announced principle, that pleasure controls the attention and
governs all our actions. He has just as little intention of doubting the
existence of God. All is dependent on God. He is our lawgiver; it is in
virtue of his wisdom that from small beginnings--perception and need--the
most splendid results, science and morality, are developed under the hands
of man. Whoever undertakes to complain that He has concealed from us the
nature of things and granted us to know relations alone, forgets that we
need no more than this. We do not exist in order to know; to live is to
enjoy.
The theme of the _Treatise on the Sensations_, 1754, is: Memory,
comparison, judgment, abstraction, and reflection (in a word, cognition)
are nothing but different forms of attention; similarly the emotions, the
appetites, and the will, nothing but modifications of desire; while both
alike take their origin in sensation. Sensation is the sole source and the
sole content of the life of the mind as a whole. To prove these positions
Condillac makes use of the fiction of a statue, in which one sense awakes
after another, first the lowest of the senses, smell, and last the most
valuable, the sense of touch, which compels us (by its perception of
density or resistance) to project our sensations, and thus wakes in us the
idea of an external world. In themselves sensations are merely subjective
states, modes of our own being; without the sense of touch we would ascribe
odor, sound, and color to ourselves. Condillac distinguishes between
sensation and _ideas_ in a twofold sense, as mere ideas (the memory or
imagination of something not present), and as ideas of objective things
(the image, representative of a body); this latter sense is meant when he
says, touch sensations only are also ideas.
For the details of the deduction, which often makes very happy use of a
rich store of psychological material, the reader must be referred to the
more extended expositions. Here we can only cite as examples the chief
among the genetic definitions. Perceptions (impressions) and consciousness
are the same thing under different names. A lively sensation, in which the
mind is entirely occupied, becomes attention, without the necessity of
assuming an additional special faculty in the mind. Attention, by its
retentive effect on the sensation, becomes memory. Double attention--to
a new sensation, and to the lingering trace of the previous one--is
comparison; the recognition of a relation (resemblance or difference)
between two ideas is judgment; the separation of an idea from another
naturally connected with it, by the aid of voluntary linguistic symbols,
is abstraction; a series of judgments is reflection; and the sum total of
inner phenomena, that wherein ideas succeed one another, the ego or person.
All truths concern relations among ideas. The tactual idea of solidity
accustoms us to project the sensations of the other senses also, to
transfer them thither where they are not; hence arise the ideas of our
body, of external objects, and of space. If we perceive several such
projected qualities together, we refer them to a substratum--substance,
which we know to exist, although not what it is. By force we mean the
unknown, but indubitably existent, cause of motion.
There are no indifferent mental states; every sensation is accompanied by
pleasure or pain. Joy and pain give the determining law for the operation
of our faculties. The soul dwells longer on agreeable sensations; without
interest, ideas would pass away like shadows. The remembrance of past
impressions more agreeable than the present ones is need; from this
springs desire (_désir_) then the emotions of love, hate, hope, fear, and
astonishment; finally, the will as an unconditional desire accompanied by
the thought of its possible fulfillment. All inclinations, good and bad
alike, spring from self-love. The predicates "good" and "beautiful"
denote the pleasure-giving qualities of things, the former, that which is
agreeable to smell and taste (and the passions), the latter, that which
pleases sight, hearing, feeling (and the intellect). Morality is the
conformity of our actions to laws, which men have established by convention
with mutual obligations. In this way the good, which at first was the
servant of the passions, becomes their lord.
Man's superiority to the brute depends on the greater perfection of his
sense of touch; on the greater variety of his wants and his associations
of ideas; on the idea of death, which leads him to seek not merely the
avoidance of pain but also self-preservation; and the possession of
language. Without denomination no abstractions, no thought, no handing
down of knowledge. Although all that is mental has its origin, in the last
analysis, in simple sensations, its development requires emancipation from
the sensuous, and language is the means for freeing ourselves from the
pressure of sensations by the generalization and combination of ideas.
A more moderate representative of sensationalism was Charles Bonnet, who
later exercised a considerable influence in Germany, especially until
Tetens (1720-93; _Essay in Psychology, or Considerations on the Operations
of the Soul_, 1755; _Analytical Essay on the Faculties of the Soul_, 1760;
_Philosophical Palingenesis, or Ideas on the Past and the Future of Living
Beings_, 1769, including a defense of Christianity; _Collected Works_,
1779). Sensations, to which he, too, reduces all mental life, are, in his
view, reactions of the immaterial soul to sense stimuli, which operate
merely as occasional causes. On the other hand, he emphasizes more strongly
than Condillac the dependence of psychical phenomena on physiological
conditions, and endeavors to show definite brain vibrations as the basis
not only of habit, memory, and the association of ideas, but also of
the higher mental operations. In harmony with these views he adheres to
determinism, and finds the motive of all endeavor: in self-love, and
its ultimate aim in happiness. To the latter the hope of immortality is
indispensable. The link between Bonnet's theory of the thoroughgoing
dependence of the soul on the body and his orthodox convictions, is formed
by his idea of an imperishable ethereal body, which enables the soul in the
life to come to remember its life on earth and, after the dissolution of
the present material body, to acquire a new one. Animals as well as men
share in the continuance of existence and the transition to a higher stage.
The material earnestness of these thinkers is in sharp contrast to the
superficial and frivolous manner in which Helvetius (1715-71) carries out
sensationalism in the sphere of ethics. His chief work, _On Mind_, came out
in 1758; and a year after his death, the work _On Man, his Intellectual
Faculties and his Education_. The search for pleasure or self-love is, as
Helvetius thinks he has discovered for the first time,[1] the only motive
of action; the laws of interest reign in the moral world as the laws of
motion in the physical world; justice and love for our neighbors are
based on utility; we seek friends in order to be amused, aided, and, in
misfortune, compassionated by them; the philanthropist and the monster both
seek only their own pleasure.
[Footnote 1: In reality not only English moralists, but also some among his
countrymen, had anticipated him in the position that all actions proceed
from selfishness, and that virtue is merely a refined egoism. Thus La
Rochefoucauld in his _Maxims (Réflexions, ou Sentences et Maximes Morales_,
1665), La Bruyère _(Les Charactères et les Moeurs de ce Siécle_, 1687), and
La Mettrie (of. pp, 251-253).]
Helvetius draws the proof for these positions from Condillac. Recollection
and judgment are sensation. The soul is originally nothing more than the
capacity for sensation; it receives the stimulus to its development from
self-love, _i.e._, from powerful passions such as the love of fame, on the
one hand, and, on the other, from hatred of _ennui_, which induces man to
overcome the indolence natural to him and to submit himself to the irksome
effort of attention--without passion he would remain stupid. The sum of
ideas collected in him is called intellect. All distinctions among men
are acquired, and concern the intellect only, not the soul: that which is
innate--sensibility and self-love--is the same in all; differences arise
only through external circumstances, through education. Man is the pupil of
all that environs him, of his situation and his chance experience. The most
important instrument in education is the law; the function of the lawgiver
is to connect public and personal welfare by means of rewards and
punishments, and thus to elevate morality. A man is called virtuous when
his stronger passions harmonize with the general interest. Unfortunately
the virtues of prejudice, which do not contribute to the public good, are
more honored among most nations than the political virtues, to which alone
real merit belongs. And self-interest is always the one motive to just and
generous action; we serve only our own interests in furthering the welfare
of the community. As the promulgator of these doctrines was himself a kind
and generous man, Rousseau could make to him the apt reply: You endeavor in
vain to degrade yourself below your own level; your spirit gives evidence
against your principles; your benevolent heart discredits your doctrines.
The morality of enlightened self-love or "intelligent self-interest"
appears in a milder form in Maupertuis (_Works_, 1752), and Frederick the
Great,[1] to the latter of whom D'Alembert objected by letter that interest
could never generate the sense of duty and reverence for the law.
[Footnote 1: _Essay on Self-love as a Principle of Morals_, 1770, printed
in the proceedings of the Academy of Sciences. Cf. on Frederick, Ed.
Zeller, 1886.]
%3. Skepticism and Materialism.%
The ideas thus far developed move in a direction whose further pursuit
inevitably issues in materialism. Diderot, the editor of the _Encyclopedia
of the Sciences, Arts, and Trades_ (1751-72), which gathered all the
currents of the Illumination into one great stream and carried them to the
open sea of popular culture, reflects in his intellectual development
the dialectical movement from deism through skepticism to atheism and
materialism, and was a co-laborer in the work which brought the whole
movement to a conclusion, Holbach's _System of Nature_. Two decades,
however, before the latter work, the outcome of a long development of
thought, appeared, the physician La Mettrie[1] (1709-51) had promulgated
materialism, though rather in an anthropological form than as a
world-system, and with cynical satisfaction in the violation of traditional
beliefs--in his _Natural History of the Soul_, 1745, in a disguised form,
and, undisguised, in his _Man a Machine_, 1748--and at the same time
(_Anti-Seneca, or Discourse on Happiness_, 1748) had sketched out for
Helvetius the outlines of the sensationalistic morality of interest. While
ill with a violent fever he observed the influence of the heightened
circulation of the blood on his mental tone, and inferred that thought is
the result of the bodily organization. The soul can only be known from the
body. The senses, the best philosophers, teach us that matter is never
without form and motion; and whether all matter is sentient or not,
certainly all that is sentient is material, and every part of the organism
contains a vital principle (the heart of a frog beats for an hour after
its removal from the body; the parts of cut-up polyps grow into perfect
animals). All ideas come from without, from the senses; without
sense-impressions no ideas, without education, few ideas, the mind of a man
grown up in isolation remains entirely undeveloped; and since the soul is
entirely dependent on the bodily organs, along with which it originates,
grows, and declines, it is subject to mortality. Not only animals, as
Descartes has shown, but men, who differ from the brutes only in degree,
are mere machines; by the soul we mean that part of the body which thinks,
and the brain has fine muscles for thinking as the leg its coarse ones for
walking.
[Footnote 1: La Mettrie was born at St. Malo, and educated in Paris, and in
Leyden under Boerhave; he died in Berlin, whither Frederick the Great
had called him after he had been driven out of his native land and from
Holland. On La Mettrie cf. Lange, _History of Materialism_, vol. ii. pp.
49-91; and DuBois-Reymond's Address, 1875.]
If man is nothing but body, there is no other pleasure than that of the
body. There is a difference, however, between sensuous pleasure, which is
intense and brief, and intellectual pleasure, which is calm and lasting.
The educated man will prefer the latter, and find in it a higher and more
noble happiness; but nature has been just enough to grant the common
multitude, in the coarser pleasures, a more easily attainable happiness.
Enjoy the moment, till the farce of life is ended! Virtue exists only in
society, which restrains from evil by its laws, and incites to good by
rousing the love of honor. The good man, who subordinates his own welfare
to that of society, acts under the same necessity as the evil-doer; hence
repentance and pangs of conscience, which increase the amount of pain
in the world, but are incapable of effecting amendment, are useless and
reprehensible: the criminal is an ill man, and must not be more harshly
punished than the safety of society requires. Materialism humanizes and
exercises a tranquilizing influence on the mind, as the religious view of
the world, with its incitement to hatred, disturbs it; materialism frees
us from the sense of guilt and responsibility, and from the fear of future
suffering. A state composed of atheists, is not only possible, as Bayle
argued, but it would be the happiest of all states.
Among the editors of the _Encyclopedia_, the mathematician D'Alembert
_(Elements of Philosophy_, 1758) remained loyal to skeptical views. Neither
matter nor spirit is in its essence knowable; the world is probably quite
different from our sensuous conception of it. As Diderot (1713-84), and
the _Encyclopedia_ with him, advanced from skepticism to materialism,
D'Alembert retired from the editorial board (1757), after Rousseau, also,
had separated himself from the Encyclopedists. Diderot[1] was the leading
spirit in the second half of the eighteenth century, as Voltaire in the
first half. His lively and many-sided receptivity, active industry, clever
and combative eloquence, and enthusiastic disposition qualified him for
this rôle beyond all his contemporaries, who testify that they owe even
more to his stimulating conversation than to his writings. He commenced by
bringing Shaftesbury's _Inquiry into Virtue and Merit_ to the notice of
his countrymen; and then turned his sword, on the one hand, against the
atheists, to refute whom, he thought, a single glance into the microscope
was sufficient, and, on the other, against the traditional belief in a
God of anger and revenge, who takes pleasure in bathing in the tears of
mankind. Then followed a period of skepticism, which is well illustrated by
the prayer in the _Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature_, 1754: O God!
I do not know whether thou art, but I will guide my thoughts and actions
as though thou didst see me think and act, etc. Under the influence
of Holbach's circle he finally reached (in the _Conversation between
D'Alembert and Diderot_, and _D'Alembert's Dream_, written in 1769, but not
published until 1830, in vol. iv. of the _Mémoires, Correspondance, et
Ouvrages Inédits de Diderot_) the position of naturalistic monism--there
exists but one great individual, the All. Though he had formerly
distinguished thinking substance from material substance, and had based the
immortality of the soul on the unity of sensation and the unity of the ego,
he now makes sensation a universal and essential property of matter
(_la pierre sent_), declares the talk about the simplicity of the
soul metaphysico-theological nonsense, calls the brain a self-playing
instrument, ridicules self-esteem, shame, and repentance as the absurd
folly of a being that imputes to itself merit or demerit for necessary
actions, and recognizes no other immortality than that of posthumous fame.
But even amid these extreme conclusions, his enthusiasm for virtue remains
too intense to allow him to assent to the audacious theories of La Mettrie
and Helvetius.
[Footnote 1: _Works_ in twenty-two vols., Paris, Brière, 1821; latest
edition, 1875 _seq_. Cf. on Diderot the fine work by Karl Rosenkranz,
_Diderots Leben und Werke_, 1866.]
French natural science also tended toward materialism. Buffon _(Natural
History_, 1749 _seq_) endeavors to facilitate the mechanical explanation
of the phenomena of life by the assumption of living molecules, from
which visible organisms are built up. Robinet (_On Nature_, 1761 _seq_.),
availing himself of Spinozistic and Leibnitzian conceptions, goes still
further, in that he endows every particle of matter with sensation, looks
on the whole world as a succession of living beings with increasing
mentality, and subjects the interaction of the material and psychical sides
of the individual, as well as the relation of pleasure and pain in the
universe, to a law of harmonious compensation.
The _System of Nature_, 1770, which bore on its title page the name of
Mirabaud, who had died 1760, proceeded from the company of freethinkers
accustomed to meet in the hospitable house of Baron von Holbach (died
1789), a native of the Palatinate. Its real author was Holbach himself,
although his friends Diderot, Naigeon, Lagrange, the mathematician, and the
clever Grimm (died 1807) seem to have co-operated in the preparation
of certain sections. The cumbrous seriousness and the dry tone of this
systematic combination of the radical ideas which the century had produced,
were no doubt the chief causes of its unsympathetic reception by the
public. Similarly unsuccessful was the popular account of materialism with
which Holbach followed it, in 1772, and Helvetius's excerpts from the
_System of Nature_, 1774.
Holbach applies himself to the despiritualization of nature and the
destruction of religious prejudices with sincere faith in the sacred
mission of unbelief--the happiness of humanity depends on atheism. "O
Nature, sovereign of all beings, and ye her daughters, Virtue, Reason, and
Truth, be forever our only divinities." What has made virtue so difficult
and so rare? Religion, which divides men instead of uniting them. What has
so long delayed the illumination of the reason, and the discovery of truth?
Religion with its mischievous errors, God, spirit, freedom, immortality.
Immortality exists only in the memory of later generations; man is the
creature of a day; nothing is permanent but the great whole of nature and
the eternal law of universal change. Can a clock broken into a thousand
pieces continue to mark the hours? The senseless doctrine of freedom was
invented only to solve the senseless problem of the justification of God in
view of the existence of evil. Man is at every moment of his life a passive
instrument in the hands of necessity; the universe is an immeasurable
and uninterrupted chain of actions and reactions, an eternal round of
interchanging motions, ruled by laws, a change in which would at once alter
the nature of all things. The most fatal error is the idea of human and
divine spirits, which has been advanced by philosophers and adopted with
applause by fools. The opinion that man is divided into two substances is
based on the fact that, of the changes in our body, we directly perceive
only the external molar movements, while, on the other hand, the inner
motions of the invisible molecules are known only by their effects. These
latter have been ascribed to the mind, which, moreover, we have adorned
with properties whose emptiness is manifested by the fact that they are all
mere negations of that which we know. Experience reveals to us only the
extended, the corporeal, the divisible--but the mind is to be the opposite
of all three, yet at the same time to possess the power (how, no man can
tell) of acting on that which is material and of being acted upon by it.
In thus dividing himself into body and soul, man has in reality only
distinguished between his brain and himself. Man is a purely physical
being. All so-called spiritual phenomena are functions of the brain,
special cases of the operation of the universal forces of nature. Thought
and volition are sensation, sensation is motion. The moving forces in the
moral world are the same as those in the physical world; in the latter they
are called attraction and repulsion, in the former, love and hate;
that which the moralist terms self-love is the same instinct of
self-preservation which is familiar in physics as the force of inertia.
As man has doubled himself, so also he has doubled nature. Evil gave the
first impulse to the formation of the idea of God, pain and ignorance have
been the parents of superstition; our sufferings were ascribed to unknown
powers, of which we were in fear, but which, at the same time, we hoped to
propitiate by prayer and sacrifice. The wise turned with their worship and
reverence toward a more worthy object, to the great All; and, in fact, if
we seek to give the word God a tenable meaning, it signifies active nature.
The error lay in the dualistic view, in the distinction between nature and
itself, _i.e._ its activity, and in the belief that the explanation of
motion required a separate immaterial Mover. This assumption is, in the
first place, false, for since the All is the complex of all that exists
there can be nothing outside it; motion follows from the existence of the
universe as necessarily as its other properties; the world does not receive
it from without, but imparts it to itself by its own power. In the second
place the assumption is useless; it explains nothing, but confuses the
problems of natural science to the point of insolubility. In the third
place it is self-contradictory, for after theology has removed the Deity
as far away from man as possible, by means of the negative metaphysical
predicates, it finds itself necessitated to bring the two together again
through the moral attributes--which are neither compatible with one another
nor with the meta-physical--and crowns the absurdity by the assurance that
we can please God by believing that which is incomprehensible. Finally, the
assumption is dangerous; it draws men away from the present, disturbs their
peace and enjoyment, stirs up hatred, and thus makes happiness and morality
impossible. If, then, utility is the criterion of truth, theism--even in
the mild form of deism--is proven erroneous by its disastrous consequences.
All error is bane.
Matter and motion are alike eternal. Nature is an active, self-moving,
living whole, an endless chain of causes and effects. All is in unceasing
motion, all is cause (nothing is dead, nothing rests), all is effect (there
is no spontaneous motion, none directed to an end). Order and disorder are
not in nature, but only in our understanding; they are abstract ideas to
denote that which is conformable to our nature and that which is contrary
to it. The end of the All is itself alone, is life, activity; the universal
goal of particular beings, like that of the universe, is the conservation
of being.
Anthropology is for Holbach essentially reduced to two problems, the
deduction of thought from motion, and of morality from the physical
tendency to self-preservation. The forces of the soul are no other than
those of the body. All mental faculties develop from sensation; sensations
are motions in the brain which reveal to us motions without the brain. All
the passions may be reduced to love and hate, desire and aversion, and
depend upon temperament, on the individual mixture of the fluid parts.
Virtue is the equilibrium of the fluids. All human actions proceed from
interest. Good and bad men are distinguished only by their organizations,
and by the ideas they form concerning happiness. With the same necessity
as that of the act itself, follow the love or contempt of fellow-men,
the pleasure of self-esteem and the pain of repentance (regret for evil
consequences, hence no evidence of freedom). Neither responsibility nor
punishment is done away with by this necessity--have we not the right to
protect ourselves against the stream which damages our fields, by building
dikes and altering its course? The end of endeavor is permanent happiness,
and this can be attained through virtue alone. The passions which are
useful to society compel the affection and approval of our fellows. In
order to interest others in our welfare we must interest ourselves in
theirs--nothing is more indispensable to man than man. The clever man acts
morally, interest binds us to the good; love for others means love for the
means to our own happiness. Virtue is the art of making ourselves happy
through the happiness of others. Nature itself chastises immorality, since
she makes the intemperate unhappy. Religion has hindered the recognition of
these rules, has misunderstood the diseases of the soul, and applied false
and ineffective remedies; the renunciation which she requires is opposed to
human nature. The true moralist recognizes in medicine the key to the human
heart; he will cure the mind through the body, control the passions and
hold them in check by other passions instead of by sermons, and will teach
men that the surest road to personal ends is to labor for the public good.
Illumination is the way to virtue and to happiness.
Volney (Chasseboeuf, died 1820; _Catechism of the French Citizen_, 1793,
later under the title _Natural Law or Physical Principles of Morals deduced
front the Organization of Man and of the Universe_; further, _The Ruins;
Complete Works_, 1821) belongs among the moralists of self-love, although,
besides the egoistic interests, he takes account of the natural sympathetic
impulses also. This is still more the case with Condorcet (_Sketch of
an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind_, 1794), who was
influenced alike by Condillac and by Turgot, and who defends a tendency
toward universal perfection both in the individual and in the race. Besides
the selfish affections, which are directed as much to the injury as to the
support of others, there lies in the organization of man a force which
steadily tends toward the good, in the form of underived feelings of
sympathy and benevolence, from which moral self-judgment is developed by
the aid of reflection. The aim of true ethics and social art is not to make
the "great" virtues universal, but to make them needless; the nearer the
nations approximate to mental and moral perfection, the less they stand in
need of these--happy the people in which good deeds are so customary that
scarcely an opportunity is left for heroism. The chief instrument for the
moral cultivation of the people is the development of the reason, the
conscience, and the benevolent affections. Habituation to deeds of kindness
is a source of pure and inexhaustible happiness. Sympathy with the good of
others must be so cultivated that the sacrifice of personal enjoyment will
be a sweeter joy than the pleasure itself. Let the child early learn to
enjoy the delight of loving and of being loved. We must, finally, strive
toward the gradual diminution of the inequalities of capacity, of property,
and between ruler and ruled, for to abolish them is impossible.
Of the remaining philosophers of the revolutionary period mention may be
made of the physician Cabanis _(Relations of the Physical and the Moral in
Man, 1799)_, and Destutt de Tracy _(Elements of Ideology, 1801 seq.)_. The
former is a materialist in psychology (the nerves are the man, ideas are
secretions of the brain), considers consciousness a property of organic
matter (the soul is not a being, but a faculty), and makes moral sympathy
develop out of the animal instincts of preservation and nourishment.
De Tracy, also, derives all psychical activity from organization and
sensation. His doctrine of the will, though but briefly sketched, is
interesting. The desires have a passive and an active side (corresponding
to the twofold action of the nerves, on themselves and on the muscles); on
the one hand, they are feelings of pleasure or pain, and on the other, they
lead us to action--will is need, and, at the same time, the source of
the means for satisfying this need. Both these feelings and the external
movements are probably based upon unconscious organic motions. The will is
rightly identified with the personality, it is the ego itself, the totality
of the physico-psychical life of man attaining to self-consciousness. The
inner or organic life consists in the self-preserving functions of the
individual, the outer or animal life, in the functions of relation (of
sense, of motion, of speech, of reproduction); individual interests are
rooted in the former, sympathy in the latter. The primal good is freedom,
or the power to do what we will; the highest thing in life is love. In
order to be happy we must avoid punishment, blame, and pangs of conscience.
%4. Rousseau's Conflict with the Illumination.%
The Genevese, Jean Jacques Rousseau[1] (1712-78), stands in a similar
relation of opposition to the French Illumination as the Scottish School to
the English, and Herder and Jacobi to the German. He points us away from
the cold sophistical inferences of the understanding to the immediate
conviction of feeling; from the imaginations of science to the unerring
voice of the heart and the conscience; from the artificial conditions of
culture to healthy nature. The vaunted Illumination is not the lever of
progress, but the source of all degeneration; morality does not rest on the
shrewd calculation of self-interest, but on original social and sympathetic
instincts (love for the good is just as natural to the human heart as
self-love; enthusiasm for virtue has nothing to do with our interest; what
would it mean to give up one's life for the sake of advantage?); the truths
of religion are not objects of thought, but of pious feeling.
[Footnote 1: Cf. Brockerhoff, Leipsic, 1863-74; L. Moreau, Paris, 1870.]
Rousseau commenced his career as an author with the _Discourse on the
Sciences and the Arts_, 1750 (the discussion of a prize question, crowned
by the Academy of Dijon), which he describes as entirely pernicious, and
the _Discourse on the Origin and the Bases of the Inequality among Men_,
1753. By nature man is innocent and good, becoming evil only in society.
Reflection, civilization, and egoism are unnatural. In the happy state of
nature pity and innocent self-love (_amour de soi_) ruled, and the
latter was first corrupted by the reason into the artificial feeling of
selfishness (_amour propre_) in the course of social development--thinking
man is a degenerate animal. Property has divided men into rich and poor;
the magistracy, into strong and weak; arbitrary power, into masters and
slaves. Wealth generated luxury with its artificial delights of science and
the theater, which make us more unhappy and evil than we otherwise are;
science, the child of vice, becomes in turn the mother of new vices. All
nature, all that is characteristic, all that is good, has disappeared with
advancing culture; the only relief from the universal degeneracy is to be
hoped for from a return to nature on the part of the individual and society
alike--from education and a state conformed to nature. The novel _Emile_ is
devoted to the pedagogical, and the _Social Contract, or the Principles of
Political Law_, to the political problem. Both appeared in 1762, followed
two years later by the _Letters from the Mountain_, a defense against the
attacks of the clergy. In these later writings Rousseau's naturalistic
hatred of reason appears essentially softened.
Social order is a sacred right, which forms the basis of all others. It
does not proceed, however, from nature--no man has natural power over his
fellows, and might confers no right--consequently it rests on a contract.
Not, however, on a contract between ruler and people. The act by which the
people chooses a king is preceded by the act in virtue of which it is a
people. In the social contract each devotes himself with his powers and his
goods to the community, in order to gain the protection of the latter.
With this act the spiritual body politic comes into being, and attains its
unity, its ego, its will. The sum of the members is called the people; each
member, as a participant in the sovereignty, citizen, and, as bound to
obedience to the law, subject. The individual loses his natural freedom,
receiving in exchange the liberty of a citizen, which is limited by the
general will, and, in addition, property rights in all that he possesses,
equality before the law, and moral freedom, which first really makes him
master of himself. The impulse of mere desire is slavery, obedience to
self-imposed law, freedom. The sovereign is the people, law the general
popular will directed to the common good, the supreme goods, "freedom and
equality," the chief objects of legislation. The lawgiving power is the
moral will of the body politic, the government (magistracy, prince) its
executive physical power; the former is its heart, the latter its brain.
Rousseau calls the government the middle term between the head of the state
and the individual, or between the citizen as lawgiver and as subject--the
sovereign (the people) commands, the government executes, the subject
obeys. The act by which the people submits itself to its head is not a
contract, but merely a mandate; whenever it chooses it can limit, alter, or
entirely recall the delegated power. In order to security against illegal
encroachments on the part of the government, Rousseau recommends regular
assemblies of the people, in which, under suspension of governmental
authority, the confirmation, abrogation, or alteration of the constitution
shall be determined upon. Even the establishment of the articles of social
belief falls to the sovereign people. The essential difference between
Rousseau's theory of the state and that of Locke and Montesquieu consists
in his rejection of the division of powers and of representation by
delegates, hence in its unlimited democratic character. A generation after
it was given to the world, the French Revolution made the attempt to
translate it into practice. "The masses carried out what Rousseau himself
had thought, it is true, but never willed" (Windelband).
Rousseau's theory of education is closely allied to Locke's (cf. above),
whose leading idea--the development of individuality--was entirely in
harmony with the subjectivism of the philosopher of feeling. Posterity has
not found it a difficult task to free the sound kernel therein from the
husks of exaggeration and idiosyncrasy which surrounded it. Among the
latter belong the preference of bodily over intellectual development, and
the unlimited faith in the goodness of human nature. Exercise the body, the
organs, the senses of the pupil, and keep his soul unemployed as long as
possible; for the first, take care only that his mind be kept free from
error and his heart from vice. In order to secure complete freedom from
disturbance in this development, it is advisable to isolate the child from
society, nay, even from the family, and to bring him up in retirement under
the guidance of a private tutor.
As the Swiss republican spoke in Rousseau's politics, so his religious
theories[1] betray the Genevan Calvinist. "The Savoyard Vicar's Profession
of Faith" (in _Emile_) proclaims deism as a religion of feeling. The
rational proofs brought forward for the existence of God--from the motion
of matter in itself at rest, and from the finality of the world--are only
designed, as he declares by letter, to confute the materialists, and derive
their impregnability entirely from the inner evidence of feeling, which
amid the vacillation of the reason _pro_ and _con_ gives the final
decision.
[Footnote 1: Cf. Ch. Borgeaud, _Rousseaus Religionsphilosophie_, Geneva and
Leipsic, 1883.]
If we limit our inquiry to that which is alone of importance for us, and
rely on the evidence of feeling, it cannot be doubted that I myself exist
and feel; that there exists an external world which affects me; that
thought, comparison or judgment concerning relations is different from
sensation or the perception of objects--for the latter is a passive,
but the former an active process; that I myself produce the activity of
attention or consideration; that, consequently, I am not merely a sensitive
or passive, but also an active or intelligent being. The freedom of my
thought and action guarantees to me the immateriality of my soul, and is
that which distinguishes me from the brute. The life of the soul after
the decay of the body is assured to me by the fact that in this world the
wicked triumphs, while the good are oppressed. The favored position which
man occupies in the scale of beings--he is able to look over the universe
and to reverence its author, to recognize order and beauty, to love the
good and to do it; and shall he, then, compare himself to the brute?--fills
me with emotion and gratitude to the benevolent Creator, who existed before
all things, and who will exist when they all shall have vanished away,
to whom all truths are one single idea, all places a point, all times a
moment. The _how_ of freedom, of eternity, of creation, of the action of
my will upon matter, etc., is, indeed, incomprehensible to me, but _that_
these are so, my feeling makes me certain. The worthiest employment of
my reason is to annihilate itself before God. "The more I strive to
contemplate his infinite essence the less do I conceive it. But it is, and
that suffices me. The less I conceive it, the more I adore."
In the depths of my heart I find the rules for my conduct engraved by
nature in ineffaceable characters. Everything is good that I feel to be so.
The conscience is the most enlightened of all philosophers, and as safe
a guide for the soul as instinct for the body. The infallibility of its
judgment is evidenced by the agreement of different peoples; amid the
surprising differences of manners you will everywhere find the same ideas
of justice, the same notions of good and evil. Show me a land where it is
a crime to keep one's word, to be merciful, benevolent, magnanimous, where
the upright man is despised and the faithless honored! Conscience enjoins
the limitation of our desires to the degree to which we are capable of
satisfying them, but not their complete suppression--all passions are good
when we control them, all evil when they control us.
In the second part of the "Profession du Foi du Vicaire Savoyard" Rousseau
turns from his attacks on sensationalism, materialism, atheism, and the
morality of interest, to the criticism of revelation. Why, in addition to
natural religion, with its three fundamental doctrines, God, freedom, and
immortality, should other special doctrines be necessary, which rather
confuse than clear up our ideas of the Great Being, which exact from us
the acceptance of absurdities, and make men proud, intolerant, and
cruel--whereas God requires from us no other service than that of the
heart? Every religion is good in which men serve God in a befitting manner.
If God had prescribed one single religion for us, he would have provided
it with infallible marks of its unique authenticity. The authority of the
fathers and the priesthood is not decisive, for every religion claims to be
revealed and alone true; the Mohammedan has the same right as the Christian
to adhere to the religion of his fathers. Since all revelation comes down
to us by human tradition, reason alone can be the judge of its divinity.
The careful examination of the documents, which are written in ancient
languages, would require an amount of learning which could not possibly be
a condition of salvation and acceptance with God. Miracles and prophecy are
not conclusive, for how are we to distinguish the true among them from
the false? If we turn from the external to the internal criteria of the
doctrines themselves, even here no decision can be reached between the
reasons _pro_ and _con_ (the author puts the former into the mouth of a
believer, and the latter into that of a rationalist); even if the former
outweighed the latter, the difficulty would still remain of reconciling it
with God's goodness and justice that the gospel has not reached so many of
mankind, and of explaining how those to whom the divinity of Christ is
now proclaimed can convince themselves of it, while his contemporaries
misjudged and crucified him. In my opinion, I am incapable of fathoming the
truth of the Christian religion and its value to those who confess it. The
investigation of the reason ends in "reverential doubt": I neither accept
revelation nor reject it, but I reject the obligation to accept it. My
heart, however, judges otherwise than the reflection of my intellect; for
this the sacred majesty and exalted simplicity of the Scriptures are a most
cogent proof that they are more than human, and that He whose history they
contain is more than man. The touching grace and profound wisdom of his
words, the gentleness of his conduct, the loftiness of his maxims, his
mastery over his passions, abundantly prove that he was neither an
enthusiast nor an ambitious sectary. Socrates lived and died like a
philosopher, Jesus like a God. The virtues of justice, patriotism, and
moderation taught by Socrates, had been exercised by the great men of
Greece before he inculcated them. But whence could Jesus derive in his time
and country that lofty morality which he alone taught and exemplified?
Things of this sort are not invented. The inventor of such deeds would
be more wonderful than the doer of them. Thus again, in the question of
revealed religion, the voice of the heart triumphs over the doubts of the
reason, as, in the question of natural religion, it had done over the
objections of opponents. It is true, however, that this enthusiasm is
paid not to the current Christianity of the priests, but to I the real
Christianity of the gospel.
Rousseau was the conscience of France, which rebelled against the negations
and the bald emptiness of the materialistic and atheistic doctrines. By
vindicating with fervid eloquence the participation of the whole man in
the highest questions, in opposition to the one-sided illumination of the
understanding, he became a pre-Kantian defender of the faith of practical
reason. His emphatic summons aroused a loud and lasting echo, especially in
Germany, in the hearts of Goethe, Kant, and Fichte.