HELVETIUS.
Before proceeding to the closing chapter of Diderot's life, I propose to
give a short account of three remarkable books, of all of which he was
commonly regarded as the inspirer, which were all certainly the direct
and natural work of the Encyclopaedic school, and which all play a
striking part in the intellectual commotions of the century.
The great attack on the Encyclopaedia was made, as we have already seen,
in 1758, after the publication of the seventh volume. The same
prosecution levelled an angrier blow at Helvetius's famous treatise,
_L'Esprit_. It is not too much to say, that of all the proscribed books
of the century, that excited the keenest resentment. This arose partly
because it came earliest in the literature of attack. It was an
audacious surprise. The censor who had allowed it to pass the ordeal of
official approval was cashiered, and the author was dismissed from an
honorary post in the Queen's household.[97] The indictment described the
book as "the code of the most hateful and infamous passions," as a
collection into one cover of everything that impiety could imagine,
calculated to engender hatred against Christianity and Catholicism. The
court condemned the book to be burnt, and, as if to show that the motive
was not mere discontent with Helvetius's paradoxes, the same fire
consumed Voltaire's fine poem on Natural Religion. Less prejudiced
authorities thought nearly as ill of the book, as the lawyers of the
parliament and the doctors of the Sorbonne had thought. Rousseau
pronounced it detestable, wrote notes in refutation of its principles,
and was inspired by hatred of its doctrine to compose some of the most
fervid pages in the Savoyard Vicar's glowing Profession of Faith.[98]
Even Diderot, though his friendly feeling for the writer and his general
leaning to speculative hardihood warped his judgment so far as to make
him rank _L'Esprit_ along with Montesquieu's _Spirit of Laws_, and
Buffon's _Natural History_, among the great books of the century, still
perceived and showed that the whole fabric rested on a foundation of
paradox, and that, though there might be many truths of detail in the
book, very many of its general principles are false.[99] Turgot
described it as a book of philosophy without logic, literature without
taste, and morality without goodness.[100]
[97] Barbier, vii. 137.
[98] _Oeuv._, xii. 301.
[99] _Ib._ ii. 267-274.
[100] _Ib._ ii. 795.
In the same weighty piece of criticism, which contains in two or three
pages so much permanently valuable truth, Turgot proceeds:--"When people
wish to attack intolerance and injustice, it is essential in the first
place to rest upon just ideas, for inquisitors have an interest in being
intolerant, and viziers and subviziers have an interest in maintaining
all the abuses of the government. As they are the strongest, you only
give them a good excuse by sounding the tocsin against them right and
left. I hate despotism as much as most people; but it is not by
declamations that despotism ought to be attacked. And even in despotism
there are degrees; there is a multitude of abuses in despotism, in which
the princes themselves have no interest; there are others which they
only allow themselves to practise, because public opinion is not yet
fixed as to their injustice, and their mischievous consequences. People
deserve far better from a nation for attacking these abuses with
clearness, with courage, and above all by interesting the sentiment of
humanity, than for any amount of eloquent reproach. Where there is no
insult, there is seldom any offence.... There is no form of government
without certain drawbacks, which the governments themselves would fain
have it in their power to remedy, or without abuses which they nearly
all intend to repress at least at some future day. We may therefore
serve them all by treating questions of the public good in a calm and
solid style; not coldly, still less with extravagance, but with that
interesting warmth which springs from a profound feeling for justice and
love of order."[101]
[101] _Oeuv._, ii. 795-798.
Of course it is a question whether, even in 1758, a generation before
the convulsion, it was possible for the French monarchy spontaneously to
work out the long list of indispensable improvements; still, at that
date, Turgot might be excused for thinking that the progress which he
desired might be attained without the violence to which Helvetius's
diatribes so unmistakably pointed. His words, in any case, are worth
quoting for their own grave and universal sense, and because they place
us exactly at the point of view for regarding _L'Esprit_ rightly. He
seizes on its political aspect, its assault on government, and the
social ordering of the time, as containing the book's real drift. In
this, as in the rest of the destructive literature of the first sixty
years of the century, the church was no doubt that part of the social
foundations against which the assault was most direct and most
vindictive, and it was the church, in the case of Helvetius's book, that
first took alarm. Indeed, we may say that, from the very nature of
things, in whatever direction the revolutionary host moved, they were
sure to find themselves confronted by the church. It lay across the
track of light at every point. Voltaire pierced its dogma. Rousseau
shamed its irreligious temper. Diderot brought into relief the vicious
absoluteness of its philosophy. Then came Helvetius and Holbach, not
merely with criticism, but with substitutes. Holbach brought a new dogma
of the universe, matter and motion, and fortuitous shapes. Helvetius
brought a theory of human character, and a new analysis of
morals--interest the basis of justice, pleasure the true interpretation
of interest, and character the creature of education and laws.
To press such positions as these, was to recast the whole body of
opinions on which society rested. As the church was the organ of the old
opinions, Helvetius's book was instantly seized by the ecclesiastical
authorities in accordance with a perfectly right instinct, and was made
the occasion for the first violent raid upon a wholesale scale. When,
however, we look beyond the smoke of the ecclesiastical battle, and
weigh _L'Esprit_ itself on its own merits, we see quite plainly that
Helvetius was thinking less of the theological disputes of the day than
of bringing the philosophy of sensation, the philosophy of Locke and
Condillac, into the political field, and of deriving from it new
standards and new forces for social reconstruction. And in spite of its
shallowness and paradoxes, his book did contain the one principle on
which, if it had been generally accepted, the inevitable transition
might have taken place without a Reign of Terror.
It was commonly said, by his enemies and by his alarmed friends, that
vanity and a restless overweening desire for notoriety was the inspiring
motive of Helvetius. He came from a German stock. His great-grandfather
settled in Holland, where he cured his patients by cunning elixirs, by
the powder of ground stag's horn, and the subtle virtues of crocodiles'
teeth. His grandfather went to push his fortunes in Paris, where he
persuaded the public to accept the healing properties of ipecacuanha,
and Lewis XIV. (1689) gave him a short patent for that drug.[102] The
medical tradition of the family was maintained in a third generation,
for Helvetius's father was one of the physicians of the Queen, and on
one occasion performed the doubtful service to humanity of saving the
life of Lewis XV. Helvetius, who was born in 1715, turned aside from the
calling of his ancestors, and by means of the favour which his father
enjoyed at court, obtained a position as farmer-general. This at once
made him a wealthy man, but wealth was not enough to satisfy him without
fame. He made attempts in various directions, in each case following the
current of popularity for the hour. Maupertuis was the hero of a day,
and Helvetius accordingly applied himself to become a geometer.
Voltaire's brilliant success brought poetry into fashion, and so
Helvetius wrote half a dozen long cantos on Happiness. Montesquieu
caught and held the ear of the town by _The Spirit of Laws_ (1748), and
Helvetius was acute enough to perceive that speculation upon society
would be the great durable interest of his time.[103] He at once set to
work, and this time he set to work without hurry. In 1751 he threw up
his place as farmer-general, and with it an income of between two or
three thousand pounds a year,[104] and he then devoted himself for the
next seven years to the concoction of a work that was designed to bring
him immortal glory. "Helvetius sweated a long time to write a single
chapter," if we may believe one of his intimates. He would compose and
recompose a passage a score of times. More facile writers looked at him
with amazement in his country-house, ruminating for whole mornings on a
single page, and pacing his room for hours to kindle his ideas, or to
strike out some curious form of expression.[105] The circle of his
friends in Paris amused themselves in watching his attempts to force the
conversation into the channel of the question that happened to occupy
him for the moment. They gave him the satisfaction of discussion, and
then they drew him to express his own views. "Then," says Marmontel, "he
threw himself into the subject with warmth--as simple, as natural, as
sincere as he is systematic and sophistic in his works. Nothing is less
like the ingenuousness of his character and ordinary life, than the
artificial and premeditated simplicity of his works. Helvetius was the
very opposite in his character of what he professes to believe; he was
liberal, generous, unostentatious, and benevolent."[106]
[102] See Jal's _Dict. Crit._, p. 676. There is a comparison in
_L'Esprit_, which we may assume to have been due to family
reminiscence: "Like those Physicians who, in their jealousy of the
discovery of the emetic, abused the credulity of a few prelates, to
excommunicate a remedy of which the service is so prompt and so
salutary," etc.--ii. 23.
[103] Hume, however, tells a story to the effect that Helvetius
tried to dissuade Montesquieu from publishing his great book, as
being altogether unworthy of his previous reputation.
[104] Barbier v. 57.
[105] Morellet, i. 71.
[106] Marmontel, ii, 116.
As it happens, there is a very different picture in one of Diderot's
writings. While Diderot was on a journey he fell in with a lady who
knew Helvetius's country. "She told us that the philosopher at his
country seat was the unhappiest of men. He is surrounded by peasants and
by neighbours who hate him. They break the windows of his mansion; they
ravage his property at night; they cut his trees, and break down his
fences. He dares not sally out to shoot a rabbit without an escort. You
will ask me why all this? It comes of an unbridled jealousy about his
game. His predecessors kept the estate in order with a couple of men and
a couple of guns. Helvetius has four-and-twenty, and yet he cannot guard
his property. The men have a small premium for every poacher that they
catch, and they resort to every possible vexation in order to multiply
their sorry profit. They are, for that matter, no better than so many
poachers who draw wages. The border of his woods was peopled with the
unfortunate wretches who had been driven from their homes into pitiful
hovels. It is these repeated acts of tyranny that have raised up against
him enemies of every kind, and all the more insolent, as Madame N. said,
for having found out that the good philosopher is a trifle
pusillanimous. I cannot see what he has gained by such a way of managing
his property; he is alone on it, he is hated, he is in a constant state
of fright. Ah, how much wiser our good Madame Geoffrin, when she said of
a trial that tormented her: 'Finish my case. They want my money? I have
some; give them money. And what can I do better with money than buy
tranquillity with it?' In Helvetius's place, I should have said: 'They
kill a few hares, or a few rabbits; let them kill. The poor creatures
have no shelter save my woods, let them remain there.'"[107]
[107] Voyage a Bourbonne. _Oeuv._, xvii. 344.
On the other hand, there are well-attested stories of Helvetius's
munificence. There is one remarkable testimony to his wide renown for
good-nature. After the younger Pretender had been driven out of France,
he had special reasons on some occasion for visiting Paris. He wrote to
Helvetius that he had heard of him as a man of the greatest probity and
honour in France, and that to Helvetius, therefore, he would trust
himself. Helvetius did not refuse the dangerous compliment, and he
concealed the prince for two years in his house.[108] He was as
benevolent where his vanity was less pleasantly flattered. More than one
man of letters, including Marivaux, was indebted to him for a yearly
pension, and his house was as open to the philosophic tribe as
Holbach's. Morellet has told us that the conversation was not so good
and so consecutive as it was at the Baron's. "The mistress of the house,
drawing to her side the people who pleased her best, and not choosing
the worst of the company, rather broke the party up. She was no fonder
of philosophy than Madame Holbach was fond of it; but the latter, by
remaining in a corner without saying a word, or else chatting in a low
voice with her friends, was in nobody's way; whereas Madame Helvetius,
with her beauty, her originality, and her piquant turn of nature, threw
out anything like philosophic discussion. Helvetius had not the art of
sustaining or animating it. He used to take one of us to a window, open
some question that he had in hand, and try to draw out either some
argument for his own view or some objection to it, for he was always
composing his book in society. Or more frequently still, he would go out
shortly after dinner to the opera or elsewhere, leaving his wife to do
the honours of the house."[109] In spite of all this, Helvetius's social
popularity became considerable. This, however, followed his attainment
of celebrity, for when _L'Esprit_ was published, Diderot scarcely met
him twice in a year, and D'Alembert's acquaintance with him was of the
slightest. And there must, we should suppose, have been some difficulty
in cordially admitting even a penitent member of the abhorred class of
farmers-general among the esoteric group of the philosophic opposition.
There was much point in Turgot's contemptuous question, why he should be
thankful to a declaimer like Helvetius, who showers vehement insults and
biting sarcasms on governments in general, and then makes it his
business to send to Frederick the Great a whole colony of revenue
clerks. It was the stringent proceedings against his book that brought
to Helvetius both vogue with the public and sympathy from the
Encyclopaedic circle.
[108] Burton's _Hume_, ii. 464.
[109] Morellet, i. 141. A peculiarly graphic account of Madame
Helvetius in her later years is to be found in Mrs. Adam's
_Letters_, quoted in Parton's _Life of Franklin_, ii. 429.
To us it is interesting to know that Helvetius had a great admiration
for England. Holbach, as we have already seen (above, vol. i. p. 270),
did not share this, and he explained his friend's enthusiasm by the
assumption that what Helvetius really saw in our free land was the
persecution that his book had drawn upon him in France.[110] Horace
Walpole, in one of his letters, announced to Sir Horace Mann that
Helvetius was coming to England, bringing two Miss Helvetiuses with
fifty thousand pounds a-piece, to bestow on two immaculate members of
our most august and incorruptible senate, if he could find two in this
virtuous age who would condescend to accept his money. "Well," he adds,
in a spirit of sensible protest against these unprofitable international
comparisons, "we may be dupes to French follies, but they are ten times
greater fools to be the dupes of our virtues."[111] Gibbon met Helvetius
(1763), and found him a sensible man, an agreeable companion, and the
worthiest creature in the world, besides the merits of having a pretty
wife and a hundred thousand livres a year. Warburton was invited to dine
with him at Lord Mansfield's, but he could not bring himself to
countenance a professed patron of atheism, a rascal, and a
scoundrel.[112]
[110] _Oeuv._, xix. 187.
[111] _Corresp._, iv. 119.
[112] Walpole's _Corresp._, iv. 217.
Let us turn to the book which had the honour of bringing all this
censure upon its author. Whether vanity was or was not Helvetius's
motive, the vanity of an author has never accounted for the interest of
his public, and we may be sure that neither those who approved, nor
those who abhorred, would have been so deeply and so universally
stirred, unless they had felt that he touched great questions at the
very quick. And, first, let a word be said as to the form of his book.
Grimm was certainly right in saying that a man must be without taste or
sense to find either the morality or the colouring of Diderot in
_L'Esprit_. It is tolerably clear that Helvetius had the example of
Fontenelle before his eyes--Fontenelle, who had taught astronomical
systems in the forms of elegant literature, and of whom it was said that
_il nous enjole a la verite_, he coaxes us to the truth. _L'Esprit_ is
perhaps the most readable book upon morals that ever was written, for
persons who do not care that what they read shall be scientifically
true. Hume, who, by the way, had been invited by Helvetius to translate
the book into English, wrote to Adam Smith that it was worth reading,
not for its philosophy, which he did not highly value, but for its
agreeable composition.[113] Helvetius intended that it should be this,
and accordingly he stuffed it with stories and anecdotes. Many of them
are very poor, many are inapposite, some are not very decent, others are
spoiled in telling, but still stories and anecdotes they remain, and
they carry a light-minded reader more or less easily from page to page
and chapter to chapter. But an ingenuous student of ethics who should
take Helvetius seriously, could hardly be reconciled by lively anecdotes
to what, in his particular formula, seems a most depressing doctrine.
Madame Roland read the celebrated book in her romantic girlhood, and her
impression may be taken for that of most generous natures. "Helvetius
made me wretched: he annihilated the most ravishing illusions; he showed
me everywhere repulsive self-interest. Yet what sagacity!" she
continues. "I persuaded myself that Helvetius painted men such as they
had become in the corruption of society: I judged that it was good to
feed one's self on such an author, in order to be able to frequent what
is called the world, without being its dupe. But I took good care not to
adopt his principles, merely in order to know man properly so-called. I
felt myself capable of a generosity which he never recognises. With what
delight I confronted his theories with the great traits in history, and
the virtues of the heroes that history has immortalised."[114]
[113] Burton, ii. 57.
[114] _Oeuv. de Mdme. Roland_, i. 108.
We have ventured to say that _L'Esprit_ contained the one principle
capable of supplying such a system of thinking about society as would
have taught the French of that time in what direction to look for
reforms. There is probably no instance in literature of a writer coming
so close to a decisive body of salutary truth, and then losing himself
in the by-ways of the most repulsive paradox that a perverse ingenuity
could devise. We are able to measure how grievous was this miscarriage
by reflecting that the same instrument which Helvetius actually held in
his hand, but did not know how to use, was taken from him by a man of
genius in another country, and made to produce reforms that saved
England from a convulsion. Nobody pretends that Helvetius discovered
Utilitarianism. Hume's name, for instance, occurs too often in his pages
for even the author himself to have dreamed that his principle of
utility was a new invention of his own. It would, as Mill has said,
imply ignorance of the history of philosophy and of general literature
not to be aware that in all ages of philosophy one of its schools has
been utilitarian, not only from the time of Epicurus, but long before.
But what is certain, and what would of itself be enough to entitle
Helvetius to consideration, is that from Helvetius the idea of general
utility as the foundation of morality was derived by that strong and
powerful English thinker, who made utilitarianism the great reforming
force of legislation and the foundation of jurisprudence. Bentham
himself distinctly avowed the source of his inspiration.[115]
[115] "To that book [_L'Esprit_], Mr. Bentham has often been heard
to say, he stood indebted for no small portion of the zeal and
ardour with which he advocated his happiness-producing theory. It
was from thence he took encouragement ... it was there he learned to
persevere," etc. etc.--_Deontology_, i. 296.
A fatal discredit fastened upon a book which yet had in it so much of
the root of the matter, from the unfortunate circumstance that
Helvetius tacked the principle of utility on to the very crudest farrago
to be found in the literature of psychology. What happened, then, was
that Rousseau swept into the field with a hollow version of a philosophy
of reform, so eloquently, loftily, and powerfully enforced as to carry
all before it. The democracy of sentimentalism took the place that ought
to have been filled in the literature of revolutionary preparation by
the democracy of utility. Rousseau's fiction of the Sovereignty of the
People was an arbitrary and intrinsically sterile rendering of the real
truth in Helvetius's ill-starred book.
To establish the proper dependence of laws upon one another, says
Helvetius, "it is indispensable to be able to refer them all to a single
principle, such as that of _the Utility of the Public, that is to say,
of the greatest number of men submitted to the same form of government:
a principle of which no one realises the whole extent and fertility; a
principle that contains all Morality and Legislation_."[116]
[116] _Disc._ ii. chap. xvii.
A man is just when all his actions tend to the public good. "To be
virtuous, it is necessary to unite nobleness of soul with an enlightened
understanding. Whoever combines these gifts conducts himself by _the
compass of public utility_. This utility is the principle of all human
virtues, and the foundation of all legislations. It ought to inspire the
legislator, and to force the nations to submit to his laws."[117]
[117] _Ib._ ii. 6.
The principle of public utility is invariable, though it is pliable in
its application to all the different positions in which, in their
succession, a nation may find itself.[118]
[118] _Disc._ ii. 17.
The public interest is that of the greatest number, and this is the
foundation on which the principles of sound morality ought invariably to
rest.[119]
[119] _Ib._ ii. chap. xxiii.
These extracts, and extracts in the same sense might easily be
multiplied, show us the basis on which Helvetius believed himself to be
building. Why did Bentham raise upon it a fabric of such value to
mankind, while Helvetius covered it with useless paradox? The answer is
that Bentham approached the subject from the side of a practical lawyer,
and proceeded to map out the motives and the actions of men in a
systematic and objective classification, to which the principle of
utility gave him the key. Helvetius, on the other hand, instead of
working out the principle, that actions are good or bad according as
they do or do not serve the public interest of the greatest number,
contented himself with reiterating in as many ways as possible the
proposition that self-love fixes our measure of virtue. The next thing
to do, after settling utility as the standard of virtue, and defining
interest as a term applied to whatever can procure us pleasures and
deliver us from pains,[120] was clearly to do what Bentham did,--to
marshal pleasures and pains in logical array. Instead of this,
Helvetius, starting from the proposition that "to judge is to feel,"
launched out into a complete theory of human character, which laboured
under at least two fatal defects. First, it had no root in a
contemplation of the march of collective humanity, and second, it
considered only the purely egoistic impulses, to the exclusion of the
opposite half of human tendencies. Apart from these radical
deficiencies, Helvetius fell headlong into a fallacy which has been
common enough among the assailants of the principle of utility; namely,
of confounding the standard of conduct with its motive, and insisting
that because utility is the test of virtue, therefore the prospect of
self-gratification is the only inducement that makes men prefer virtue
to vice.
[120] _Ib._ ii. 1, _note_ (_b_).
This was what Madame du Deffand called telling everybody's secret. We
approve conduct in proportion as it conduces to our interest.
Friendship, _esprit-de-corps_, patriotism, humanity, are names for
qualities that we prize more or less highly in proportion as they come
more or less close to our own happiness; and the scale of our
preferences is in the inverse ratio of the number of those who benefit
by the given act. If it affects the whole of humanity or of our country,
our approval is less warmly stirred than if it were an act specially
devoted to our own exclusive advantage. If you want therefore to reach
men, and to shape their conduct for the public good, you must affect
them through their pleasures and pains.
To this position, which roused a universal indignation that amazed the
author, there is no doubt a true side. It is worth remembering, for
instance, that all penal legislation, in so far as deterrent and not
merely vindictive, assumes in all who come whether actually or
potentially within its sphere, the very doctrine that covered Helvetius
with odium. And there is more to be said than this. As M. Charles Comte
has expressed it: If the strength with which we resent injury were not
in the ratio of the personal risk that we run, we should hardly have the
means of self-preservation; and if the acts which injure the whole of
humanity gave us pain equal to that of acts that injure us directly, we
should be of all beings the most miserable, for we should be incessantly
tormented by conduct that we should be powerless to turn aside. And
again, if the benefits of which we are personally the object did not
inspire in us a more lively gratitude than those which we spread over
all mankind, we should probably experience few preferences, and extend
few preferences to others, and in that case egoism would grow to its
most overwhelming proportions.[121]
[121] _Traite de Legislation_, i. 243.
This aspect of Helvetius's doctrine, however, is one of those truths
which is only valid when taken in connection with a whole group of
different truths, and it was exactly that way of asserting a position,
in itself neither indefensible nor unmeaning, which left the position
open to irresistible attack. Helvetius's errors had various roots, and
may be set forth in as many ways. The most general account of it is that
even if he had insisted on making Self-love the strongest ingredient in
our judgment of conduct, he ought at least to have given some place to
Sympathy. For, though it is possible to contend that sympathy is only an
indirect kind of self-love, or a shadow cast by self-love, still it is
self-love so transformed as to imply a wholly different set of
convictions, and to require a different name.
_L'Esprit_ is one of the most striking instances in literature of the
importance of care in choosing the right way of presenting a theory to
the world. It seems as if Helvetius had taken pains to surround his
doctrine with everything that was most likely to warn men away from it.
For example, he begins a chapter of cardinal importance with the
proposition that personal interest is the only motive that could impel a
man to generous actions. "It is as impossible for him to love good for
good's sake as evil for the sake of evil." The rest of the chapter
consists of illustrations of this; and what does the reader suppose that
they are? The first is Brutus, of all the people in the world. He
sacrificed his son for the salvation of Rome, because his passion for
his country was stronger than his passion as a father; and this passion
for his country, "enlightening him as to the public interest," made him
see what a service his rigorous example would be to the state. The other
instances of the chapter point the same moral, that true virtue consists
in suppressing inducements to gratify domestic or friendly feeling, when
that gratification is hostile to the common weal.[122]
[122] _Disc._ ii. 5.
It may be true that the ultimate step in a strictly logical analysis
reduces the devotion of the hero or the martyr to a deliberate
preference for the course least painful to himself, because religion or
patriotism or inborn magnanimity have made self-sacrifice the least
painful course to him. But to call this heroic mood by the name of
self-love, is to single out what is absolutely the most unimportant
element in the transaction, and to insist on thrusting it under the
onlooker's eye as the vital part of the matter. And it involves the most
perverse kind of distortion. For the whole issue and difference between
the virtuous man and the vicious man turns, not at all upon the fact
that each behaves in the way that habit has made least painful to him,
but upon the fact that habit has made selfishness painful to the first,
and self-sacrifice painful to the second; that self-love has become in
the first case transformed into an overwhelming interest in the good of
others, and in the second not so. Was there ever a greater perversity
than to talk of self-interest, when you mean beneficence, or than to
insist that because beneficence has become bound up with a man's
self-love, therefore beneficence _is_ nothing but self-love in disguise?
As if the fruit or the flower not only depends on a root as one of the
conditions among others of its development, but is itself actually the
root! Apart from the error in logic, what an error in rhetoric, to
single out the formula best calculated to fill a doctrine with odious
associations, and then to make that formula the most prominent feature
in the exposition. Without any gain in clearness or definiteness or
firmness, the reader is deliberately misled towards a form that is
exactly the opposite of that which Helvetius desired him to accept.
In other ways Helvetius takes trouble to wound the generous sensibility
and affront the sense of his public. Nothing can be at once more
scandalously cynical and more crude than a passage intended to show
that, if we examine the conduct of women of disorderly life from the
political point of view, they are in some respects extremely useful to
the public. That desire to please, which makes such a woman go to the
draper, the milliner, and the dressmaker, draws an infinite number of
workmen from indigence. The virtuous women, by giving alms to mendicants
and criminals, are far less wisely advised by their religious directors
than the other women by their desire to please; the latter nourish
useful citizens, while the former, who at the best are useless, are
often even downright enemies to the nation.[123] All this is only a
wordy transcript of Mandeville's coarse sentences about "the sensual
courtier that sets no limits to his luxury, and the fickle strumpet that
invents new fashions every week." We cannot wonder that all people who
were capable either of generous feeling or comprehensive thinking turned
aside even from truth, when it was mixed in this amalgam of destructive
sophistry and cynical illustration.
[123] _Disc._ ii. 15.
We can believe how the magnanimous youth of Madame Roland and others
was discouraged by pages sown with mean anecdote. Helvetius tells us,
with genuine zest, of Parmenio saying to Philotas at the court of
Alexander the Great--"My son, make thyself small before Alexander;
contrive for him now and again the pleasure of setting thee right; and
remember that it is only to thy seeming inferiority that thou wilt owe
his friendship." The King of Portugal charged a certain courtier to draw
up a despatch on an affair with which he had himself dealt. Comparing
the two despatches, the King found the courtier's much the better of the
two: the courtier makes a profound reverence, and hastens to take leave
of his friends: "_It is all over with me_," he said, "_the King has
found out that I have more brains than he has_."[124] Only mediocrity
succeeds in the world. "Sir," said a father to his son, "you are getting
on in the world, and you suppose you must be a person of great merit. To
lower your pride, know to what qualities you owe this success: you were
born without vices, without virtues, without character; your knowledge
is scanty, your intelligence is narrow. Ah, what claims you have, my
son, to the goodwill of the world."[125]
[124] See Diderot's truer version, _Oeuv._, ii. 482.
[125] _Disc._ iv. 13, etc.
It lies beyond the limits of our task to enter into a discussion of
Helvetius's transgressions in the region of speculative ethics, from any
dogmatic point of view. Their nature is tolerably clear. Helvetius
looked at man individually, as if each of us came into the world naked
of all antecedent predispositions, and independent of the medium around
us. Next, he did not see that virtue, justice, and the other great words
of moral science denote qualities that are directly related to the
fundamental constitution of human character. As Diderot said,[126] he
never perceived it to be possible to find in our natural requirements,
in our existence, in our organisation, in our sensibility, a fixed base
for the idea of what is just and unjust, virtuous and vicious. He clung
to the facts that showed the thousand different shapes in which justice
and injustice clothed themselves; but he closed his eyes on the nature
of man, in which he would have recognised their character and origin.
Again, although his book was expressly written to show that only good
laws can form virtuous men, and that all the art of the legislator
consists in forcing men, through the sentiment of self-love, to be just
to one another,[127] yet Helvetius does not perceive the difficulty of
assuming in the moralising legislator a suppression of self-love which
he will not concede to the rest of mankind. The crucial problem of
political constitutions is to counteract the selfishness of a governing
class. Helvetius vaulted over this difficulty by imputing to a
legislator that very quality of disinterestedness whose absence in the
bulk of the human race he made the fulcrum of his whole moral
system.[128]
[126] _Oeuv._, ii. 270.
[127] _Disc._ ii. 24.
[128] As Mr. Henry Sidgwick has put this:--"Even the indefatigable
patience and inexhaustible ingenuity of Bentham will hardly succeed
in defeating the sinister conspiracy of self-preferences. In fact,
unless a little more sociality is allowed to an average human being,
the problem of combining these egoists into an organisation for
promoting their common happiness, is like the old task of making
ropes of sand. The difficulty that Hobbes vainly tried to settle
summarily by absolute despotism, is hardly to be overcome by the
democratic artifices of his more inventive successor."
Into this field of criticism it is not, I repeat, our present business
minutely to enter. The only question for us, attempting to study the
history of opinion, is what Helvetius meant by his paradoxes, and how
they came into his mind. No serious writer, least of all a Frenchman in
the eighteenth century, ever sets out with anything but such an
intention for good, as is capable of respectable expression. And we ask
ourselves what good end Helvetius proposed to himself. Of what was he
thinking when he perpetrated so singular a misconstruction of his own
meaning as that inversion of beneficence into self-love of which we have
spoken? We can only explain it in one way. In saying that it is
impossible to love good for good's sake, Helvetius was thinking of the
theologians. Their doctrine that man is predisposed to love evil for
evil's sake, removes conduct from the sphere of rational motive, as
evinced in the ordinary course of human experience. Helvetius met this
by contending that both in good and bad conduct men are influenced by
their interest and not by mystic and innate predisposition either to
good or to evil. He sought to bring morals and human conduct out of the
region of arbitrary and superstitious assumption, into the sphere of
observation. He thought he was pursuing a scientific, as opposed to a
theological spirit, by placing interest at the foundation of conduct,
both as matter of fact and of what ought to be the fact, instead of
placing there the love of God, or the action of grace, or the authority
of the Church.
We may even say that Helvetius shows a positive side, which is wanting
in the more imposing names of the century. Here, for instance, is a
passage which in spite of its inadequateness of expression, contains an
unmistakable germ of true historical appreciation:--"However stupid we
may suppose the Peoples to be, it is certain that, being enlightened by
their interests, it was not without motives that they adopted the
customs that we find established among some of them. The bizarre nature
of these customs is connected, then, with the diversity of interests
among these Peoples. In fact, if they have always understood, in a
confused way, by the name of virtue the desire of public happiness; if
they have in consequence given the name of good to actions that are
useful to the country; and if the idea of utility has always been
privately associated with the idea of virtue, then we may be sure that
their most ridiculous, and even their most cruel, customs have always
had for their foundation the real or seeming utility of the public
good."[129]
[129] _Disc._ ii. 13.
If we contrast this with the universal fashion among Helvetius's
friends, of denouncing the greater portion of the past history of the
race, we cannot but see that, crude as is the language of such a
passage, it contains the all-important doctrine which Voltaire,
Rousseau, and Diderot alike ignored, that the phenomena of the conduct
of mankind, even in its most barbarous phases, are capable of an
intelligible explanation, in terms of motive that shall be related to
their intellectual forms, exactly as the motives of the most polished
society are related to the intellectual forms of such a society. There
are not many passages in all the scores of volumes written in France in
the eighteenth century on the origin of society where there is such an
approach as this to the modern view.
Helvetius's position was that of a man searching for a new basis for
morals. It was hardly possible for any one in that century to look to
religion for such a base, and least of all was it possible to Helvetius.
"It is fanaticism," he says in an elaborately wrought passage, "that
puts arms into the hands of Christian princes; it orders Catholics to
massacre heretics; it brings out upon the earth again those tortures
that were invented by such monsters as Phalaris, as Busiris, as Nero; in
Spain it piles and lights up the fires of the Inquisition, while the
pious Spaniards leave their ports and sail across distant seas, to plant
the Cross and spread desolation in America. Turn your eyes to north or
south, to east or west; on every side you see the consecrated knife of
Religion raised against the breasts of women, of children, of old men,
and the earth all smoking with the blood of victims immolated to false
gods or to the Supreme Being, and presenting one vast, sickening,
horrible charnel-house of intolerance. Now what virtuous man, what
Christian, if his tender soul is filled with the divine unction that
exhales from the maxims of the Gospel, if he is sensible of the cries of
the unhappy and the outcast, and has sometimes wiped away their
tears--what man could fail at such a sight to be touched with compassion
for humanity, and would not use all his endeavour to found probity, not
on principles so worthy of respect as those of religion, but on
principles less easily abused, such as those of personal interest would
be?"[130]
[130] _Disc._ ii. 24.
This, then, is the point best worth seizing in a criticism of Helvetius.
The direction of morality by religion had proved a failure. Helvetius,
as the organ of reaction against asceticism and against mysticism,
appealed to positive experience, and to men's innate tendency to seek
what is pleasurable and to avoid what is painful. The scientific
imperfection of his attempt is plain; but that, at any rate, is what the
attempt signified in his own mind.
The same feeling for social reform inspired the second great paradox of
_L'Esprit_. This is to the effect that of all the sources of
intellectual difference between one man and another, organisation is the
least influential. Intellectual differences are due to diversity of
circumstance and to variety in education. It is not felicity of
organisation that makes a great man. There is nobody, in whom passion,
interest, education, and favourable chance, could not have surmounted
all the obstacles of an unpromising nature; and there is no great man
who, in the absence of passion, interest, education, and certain
chances, would not have been a blockhead, in spite of his happier
organisation. It is only in the moral region that we ought to seek the
true cause of inequality of intellect. Genius is no singular gift of
nature. Genius is common; it is only the circumstances proper to develop
it that are rare. The man of genius is simply the product of the
circumstances in which he is placed. The inequality in intelligence
(_esprit_) that we observe among men, depends on the government under
which they live, on the times in which their destiny has fallen, on the
education that they have received, on the strength of their desire to
achieve distinction, and finally on the greatness and fecundity of the
ideas which they happen to make the object of their meditations.[131]
[131] _Disc._ iii.
Here again it would be easy to show how many qualifications are needed
to rectify this egregious overstatement of propositions that in
themselves contain the germ of a wholesome doctrine. Diderot pointed out
some of the principal causes of Helvetius's errors, summing them up
thus: "The whole of this third discourse seems to imply a false
calculation, into which the author has failed to introduce all the
elements that have a right to be there, and to estimate the elements
that are there at their right value. He has not seen the insurmountable
barrier that separates a man destined by nature for a given function,
from a man who only brings to that function industry, interest, and
attention."[132] In a work published after his death (1774), and
entitled _De l'Homme_, Helvetius re-stated at greater length, and with a
variety of new illustrations, this exaggerated position. Diderot wrote
an elaborate series of minute notes in refutation of it, taking each
chapter point by point, and his notes are full of acute and vigorous
criticism.[133] Every reader will perceive the kind of answers to which
the proposition that character is independent of organisation lies open.
Yet here, as in his paradox about self-love, Helvetius was looking, and
looking, moreover, in the right direction, for a rational principle of
moral judgment, moral education, and moral improvement. Of the two
propositions, though equally erroneous in theory, it was certainly less
mischievous in practice to pronounce education and institutions to be
stronger than original predisposition than to pronounce organisation to
be stronger than education and institutions. It was all-important at
that moment in France to draw people's attention to the influence of
institutions on character; to do that was both to give one of the best
reasons for a reform in French institutions, and also to point to the
spirit in which such a reform should be undertaken. If Helvetius had
contented himself with saying that, whatever may be the force of
organisation in exceptional natures, yet in persons of average
organisation these predispositions are capable of being indefinitely
modified by education, by laws, and by institutions, then he would not
only have said what could not be disproved, but he would have said as
much as his own object required. William Godwin drew one of the most
important chapters of his once famous treatise on _Political Justice_
from Helvetius, but what Helvetius exaggerated into a paradox which
nobody in his senses could seriously accept, Godwin expressed as a
rational half-truth, without which no reformer in education or
institutions could fairly think it worth while to set to work.[134]
[132] _Oeuv._ ii. 271.
[133] _Ib._ ii. 275-456.
[134] _Political Justice_, bk. i. chap. iv.--"_The characters of men
originate in their external circumstances._"
The reader of Benjamin Constant's _Adolphe_, that sombre little study of
a miserable passion, may sometimes be reminded of Helvetius. It begins
with the dry surprise of youth at the opening world, for we need time,
he says, to accustom ourselves to the human race, such as affectation,
vanity, cowardice, interest have made it. Then we soon learn only to be
surprised at our old surprise; we find ourselves very well off in our
new conditions, just as we come to breathe freely in a crowded theatre,
though on entering it we were almost stifled. Yet the author of this
parching sketch of the distractions of an egoism that just fell short
of being complete, suddenly flashes on us the unexpected but penetrating
and radiant moral, _La grande question dans la vie, c'est la douleur que
l'on cause_--the great question in life is the pain that we strike into
the lives of others. We are not seldom refreshed, when in the midst of
Helvetius's narrowest grooves, by some similar breath from the wider
air. Among the host of sayings, true, false, trivial, profound, which
are scattered over the pages of Helvetius, is one subtle and
far-reaching sentence, which made a strong impression upon Bentham. "_In
order to love mankind_," he writes, "_we must expect little from them_."
This might, on the lips of a cynic, serve for a formula of that kind of
misanthropy which is not more unamiable than it is unscientific. But in
the mouth of Helvetius it was a plea for considerateness, for
indulgence, and, above all, it was meant for an inducement to patience
and sustained endeavour in all dealings with masses of men in society.
"Every man," he says, "so long as his passions do not obscure his
reason, will always be the more indulgent in proportion as he is
enlightened." He knows that men are what they must be, that all hatred
against them is unjust, that a fool produces follies just as a wild
shrub produces sour berries, that to insult him is to reproach the oak
for bearing acorns instead of olives.[135] All this is as wise and
humane as words can be so, and it really represents the aim and temper
of Helvetius's teaching. Unfortunately for him and for his generation,
his grasp was feeble and unsteady. He had not the gift of accurate
thinking, and his book is in consequence that which, of all the books of
the eighteenth century, unites most of wholesome truth with most of
repellent error.
[135] _Disc._ ii. 10.