HOLBACH'S SYSTEM OF NATURE.
The _System of Nature_ was published in 1770, eight years before the
death of Voltaire and of Rousseau, and it gathered up all the scattered
explosives of the criticism of the century into one thundering engine of
revolt and destruction. It professed to be the posthumous work of
Mirabaud, who had been secretary to the Academy. This was one of the
common literary frauds of the time. Its real author was Holbach. It is
too systematic and coherently compacted to be the design of more than
one man, and it is too systematic also for that one man to have been
Diderot, as has been so often assumed. At the same time there are good
reasons for believing that not only much of its thought, but some of the
pages, were the direct work of Diderot. The latest editor of the
heedless philosopher has certainly done right in placing among his
miscellanea the declamatory apostrophe which sums up the teachings of
this remorseless book. The rumour imputing the authorship to Diderot was
so common, and Diderot himself was so disquieted by it, that he actually
hastened away from Paris to his native Langres and to the Baths of
Bourbonne, in order to be ready to cross the frontier at the first hint
of a warrant being out against him.[136] Diderot has recorded his
admiration of his friend's work. "I am disgusted," he said, "with the
modern fashion of mixing up incredulity and superstition. What I like is
a philosophy that is clear, definite, and frank, such as you have in the
_System of Nature_. The author is not an atheist in one page, and a
deist in another. His philosophy is all of one piece."[137]
[136] _Oeuv._, xvii. 329.
[137] _Ib._ ii. 398.
No book has ever produced a more widespread shock. Everybody insisted on
reading it, and almost everybody was terrified. It suddenly revealed to
men, like the blaze of lightning to one faring through darkness, the
formidable shapes, the unfamiliar sky, the sinister landscape, into
which the wanderings of the last fifty years had brought them
unsuspecting. They had had half a century of such sharp intellectual
delight as had not been known throughout any great society in Europe
since the death of Michael Angelo, and had perhaps north of the Alps
never been known at all. And now it seemed to many of them, as they
turned over the pages of Holbach's book, as if they stood face to face
with the devil of the mediaeval legend, come to claim their souls. Satire
of Job and David, banter about Joshua's massacres and Solomon's
concubines, invective against blind pastors of blinder flocks, zeal to
place Newton on the throne of Descartes and Locke upon the pedestal of
Malebranche, wishes that the last Jansenist might be strangled in the
bowels of the last Jesuit--all this had given zest and savour to life.
In the midst of their high feast, Holbach pointed to the finger of their
own divinity, Reason, writing on the wall the appalling judgments that
there is no God; that the universe is only matter in spontaneous
movement; and, most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls
die with the death of the body, as music dies when the strings are
broken.
Galiani, the witty Neapolitan, who had so many good friends in the
philosophic circle, anticipated the well-known phrase of a writer of our
own day. "The author of the _System of Nature_," he said, "is the Abbe
Terrai of metaphysics: he makes deductions, suspensions of payment, and
causes the very Bankruptcy of knowledge, of pleasure, and of the human
mind. But you will tell me that, after all, there were too many rotten
securities; that the account was too heavily overdrawn; that there was
too much worthless paper on the market. That is true, too, and that is
why the crisis has come."[138] Goethe, then a student at Strasburg, has
told us what horror and alarm the _System of Nature_ brought into the
circle there. "But we could not conceive," he says, "how such a book
could be dangerous. It came to us so gray, so Cimmerian, so corpse-like,
that we could hardly endure its presence; we shuddered before it as if
it had been a spectre. It struck us as the very quintessence of musty
age, savourless, repugnant."[139]
[138] _Corresp. de Galiani_, i. 142.
[139] _Wahrheit und Dichtung_, bk. xi.
If this was the light in which the book appeared to the young man who
was soon to be the centre of German literature, the brilliant veteran
who had for two generations been the centre of the literature of France
was both shocked by the audacity of the new treatise, and alarmed at the
peril in which it involved the whole Encyclopaedic brotherhood, with the
Patriarch at their head. Voltaire had no sooner read the _System of
Nature_ than he at once snatched up his ever-ready pen and plunged into
refutation.[140] At the same time he took care that the right persons
should hear what he had done. He wrote to his old patron and friend
Richelieu, that it would be a great kindness if he would let the King
know that the abused Voltaire had written an answer to the book that all
the world was talking about. I think, he says, that it is always a good
thing to uphold the doctrine of the existence of a God who punishes and
rewards; society has need of such an opinion. There is a curious
disinterestedness in the notion of Lewis the Fifteenth and Richelieu,
two of the wickedest men of their time, being anxious for the
demonstration of a _Dieu vengeur_. Voltaire at least had a very keen
sense of the meaning of a court that rewarded and punished. The author
of the _System of Nature_, he wrote to Grimm, ought to have felt that he
was undoing his friends, and making them hateful in the eyes of the king
and the court.[141] This came true in the case of the great
philosopher-king himself. Frederick of Prussia was offended by a book
which spared political superstitions as little as theological dogma, and
treated kings as boldly as it treated priests. Though keenly occupied in
watching the war then waging between Russia and Turkey, and already
revolving the partition of Poland, he found time to compose a defence of
theism. 'Tis a good sign, Voltaire said to him, when a king and a plain
man think alike: their interests are often so hostile, that when their
ideas do agree, they must certainly be right.[142]
[140] See the article _Dieu_ in the _Dict. Philosophique_.
[141] Voltaire's _Corr._, Nov. 1, 1770.
[142] July 27, 1770.
The philosophic meaning of Holbach's propositions was never really
seized by Voltaire. He is, as has been justly said, the representative
of ordinary common sense which, with all its declamations and its
appeals to the feelings, is wholly without weight or significance as
against a philosophic way of considering things, however humble the
philosophy may be.[143] He hardly took more pains to understand Holbach
than Johnson took to understand Berkeley. In truth it was a
characteristic of Voltaire always to take the social, rather than the
philosophic view of the great issues of the theistic controversy. One
day, when present at a discussion as to the existence of a deity, in
which the negative was being defended with much vivacity, he astonished
the company by ordering the servants to leave the room, and then
proceeding to lock the door. "Gentlemen," he explained, "I do not wish
my valet to cut my throat to-morrow morning." It was not the truth of
the theistic belief in itself that Voltaire prized, but its supposed
utility as an assistant to the police. D'Alembert, on the other hand,
viewed the dispute as a matter of disinterested speculation. "As for the
existence of a supreme intelligence," he wrote to Frederick the Great,
"I think that those who deny it advance far more than they can prove,
and scepticism is the only reasonable course." He goes on to say,
however, that experience invincibly proves both the materiality of the
soul, and a material deity--like that which Mr. Mill did not
repudiate--of limited powers, and dependent on fixed conditions.[144]
[143] Lange's _Gesch. d. Materialismus_, i. 369; where the author
shows how entirely Voltaire failed to touch Holbach's position as to
the meaning of Order in the universe.
[144] _Oeuv._, v. 296, 303, etc.
Let us now turn to the book itself. And first, as to its author. The
reader of the _New Heloisa_ will remember that the heroine, after her
repentance and her marriage, has only one chagrin in the world; that is
the blank disbelief of her husband in the two great mysteries of a
Supreme Being and another world. Wolmar, the husband, has always been
supposed to stand for Rousseau's version of Holbach, and Holbach would
hardly have complained of the portrait. The Wolmar of the novel is
benevolent, active, patient, tranquil, friendly, and trustful. The
nicely combined conjunction of the play of circumstance with the action
of men pleases him, just as the fine symmetry of a statue or the
skilful contrivance of dramatic effects would please him. If he has any
dominant passion, it is a passion for observation; he delights in
reading the hearts of men.[145]
[145] _Nouvelle Heloise_, IV. xii.
All this seems to have been as true of the real Holbach as of the
imaginary Wolmar. We have already seen him as the intimate friend and
constant host of Diderot. He was one of the best-informed men of his
time (1723-89). He had an excellent library, a collection of pictures,
and a valuable cabinet of natural history; and his poorer friends were
as freely welcome to the use of all of them as the richest. His manners
were cheerful, courteous, and easy; he was a model of simplicity, and
kindliness was written on every feature. His hospitality won him the
well-known nickname of the maitre d'hotel of philosophy, and his house
was jestingly called the Cafe de l'Europe. On Sundays and Thursdays,
without prejudice to other days, from ten to a score of men of letters
and eminent foreign visitors, including Hume, Wilkes, Shelburne,
Garrick, Franklin, Priestley, used to gather round his good dishes and
excellent wine. It was noted, as a mark of the attractiveness of the
company, that the guests, who came at two in the afternoon, constantly
remained until as late as seven and eight in the evening. To one of
those guests, who afterwards became the powerful enemy of the
Encyclopaedic group, the gaiety, the irreverence, the hardihood of
speculation and audacity of discourse, were all as gall and wormwood.
Rousseau found their atheistic sallies offensive beyond endurance. Their
hard rationalism was odious to the great emotional dreamer, and after he
had quarrelled with them all, he transformed his own impressions of the
dreariness of atheism into the passionate complaint of Julie. "Conceive
the torment of living in retirement with the man who shares our
existence, and yet cannot share the hope that makes existence dear; of
never being able with him either to bless the works of God, or to speak
of the happy future that is promised us by the goodness of God; of
seeing him, while doing good on every side, still insensible to
everything that makes the delight of doing good; of watching him, by the
most bizarre of contradictions, think with the impious, and yet live
like a Christian. Think of Julie walking with her husband; the one
admiring in the rich and splendid robe of the earth the handiwork and
the bounteous gifts of the author of the universe; the other seeing
nothing in it all save a fortuitous combination, the product of blind
force! Alas! she cries, the great spectacle of nature, for us so
glorious, so animated, is dead in the eyes of the unhappy Wolmar, and in
that great harmony of being where all speaks of God in accents so mild
and so persuasive, he only perceives eternal silence."[146]
[146] _Nouvelle Heloise_, V. v.
Yet it is fair to the author of this most eloquent Ignoratio Elenchi, to
notice that he honestly fulfilled the object with which he professed to
set out--namely, to show to both the religious and philosophical
parties that their adversaries were capable of leading upright, useful,
and magnanimous lives. Whether he would have painted the imaginary
Wolmar so favourably if he could have foreseen what kind of book the
real Holbach had in his desk, is perhaps doubtful. For Holbach's
opinions looked more formidable and sombre in the cold deliberateness of
print than they had sounded amid the interruptions of lively discourse.
* * * * *
It is needless to say, to begin with, that the writer has the most
marked of the philosophic defects of the school of the century. Perhaps
we might put it more broadly, and call the disregard of historic opinion
the natural defect of all materialistic speculation from Epicurus
downwards.[147] Like all others of his school, Holbach has no perception
nor sense of the necessity of an explanation how the mental world came
to be what it is, nor how men came to think and believe what they do
think and believe. He gives them what he deems unanswerable reasons for
changing their convictions, but he never dreams of asking himself in
what elements of human character the older convictions had their root,
and from what fitness for the conduct of life they drew the current of
their sap. Yet unless this aspect of things had been well considered,
his unanswerable reasons were sure to fall wide of the mark. Opinions,
as men began to remember, after social movement had thrown the logical
century into discredit, have a history as well as a logic. They are
bound up with a hundred transmitted prepossessions, and they have become
identified with a hundred social customs that are the most dearly
cherished parts of men's lives. Nature had as much to do with the
darkness of yesterday as with the light of to-day; she is as much the
accomplice of superstition as she is the oracle of reason. It was
because they forgot all this that Holbach's school now seem so shallow
and superficial. The whole past was one long working of the mystery of
iniquity. "The sum of the woes of the human race was not diminished--on
the contrary, it was increased by its religions, by its governments, by
its opinions, in a word, by all the institutions that _it was led to
adopt_ on the plea of ameliorating its lot."[148] _On lui fit adopter!_
But who were the _on_, and how did they work? With what instruments and
what fulcrum? Never was the convenience of this famous abstract
substantive more fatally abused. And if religion, government, and
opinion had all aggravated the miseries of the human race, what had
lessened them? For the Encyclopaedic school never attempted, as Rousseau
did, to deny that the world had, as a matter of fact, advanced towards
happiness. It was because the Holbachians looked on mankind as slaves
held in an unaccountable bondage, which they must necessarily be eager
to throw off, that their movement, after doing at the Revolution a
certain amount of good in a bad way, led at last to a mischievous
reaction in favour of Catholicism.
[147] See Lange, i. 85.
[148] _Syst. de la Nat._, I. xvi.
Far more immediately significant than the philosophy of the _System of
Nature_ were the violence, directness, and pertinacity of its assault
upon political government. Voltaire, as has so often been noticed, had
always abstained from meddling with either the theory or the practical
abuses of the national administration. All his shafts had been levelled
at ecclesiastical superstition. Rousseau, indeed, had begun the most
famous of his political speculations by crying that man, who was born
free, is now everywhere in chains. But Rousseau was vague, abstract, and
sentimental. In the _System of Nature_ we have a clear presage of the
trenchant and imperious invective which, twenty years after its
publication, rang in all men's ears from the gardens of the Palais Royal
and the benches of the Jacobins' Hall. The writer has plainly made up
his mind that the time has at last come for dropping all the discreet
machinery of apologue and parable, and giving to his words the edge of a
sharpened sword. The vague disguises of political speculation, and the
mannered reservations of a Utopia or New Atlantis, are exchanged for a
passionate, biting, and loudly practical indictment. All over the world
men are under the yoke of masters who neglect the instruction of their
people, or only seek to cheat and deceive them. The sovereigns in every
part of the globe are unjust, incapable, made effeminate by luxury,
corrupted by flattery, depraved by license and impunity, destitute of
talent, manners, or virtue. Indifferent to their duties, which they
usually know nothing about, they are scarcely concerned for a single
moment of the day with the well-being of their people; their whole
attention is absorbed by useless wars, or by the desire to find at each
instant new means of gratifying their insatiable rapacity. The state of
society is a state of war between the sovereign and all the rest of its
members. In every country alike the morality of the people is wholly
neglected, and the one care of the government is to render them timorous
and wretched. The common man desires no more than bread; he wins it by
the sweat of his brow; joyfully would he eat it, if the injustice of the
government did not make it bitter in his mouth. By the insanity of
governments, those who are swimming in plenty, without being any the
happier for it, yet wring from the tiller of the soil the very fruits
that his arms have won from it. Injustice, by reducing indigence to
despair, drives it to seek in crime resources against the woes of life.
An iniquitous government breeds despair in men's souls; its vexations
depopulate the land, the fields remain untilled, famine, contagion, and
pestilence stalk over the earth. Then, embittered by misery, men's minds
begin to ferment and effervesce, and what inevitably follows is the
overthrow of a realm.[149]
[149] _Syst. de la Nat._, I. xiv., xvi., etc. etc.
If France had been prosperous, all this would have passed for the empty
declamation of an excited man of letters. As it was, such declamation
only described, in language as accurate as it was violent and stinging,
the real position of the country. In the urgency of a present material
distress, men were not over-careful that the basis of the indictment
should be laid in the principles of a sound historical philosophy of
society. We can hardly wonder at it. What is interesting, and what we do
not notice earlier in the century, is that in the _System of Nature_ the
revolt against the impotence of society, and the revolt against the
omnipotence of God, made a firm coalition. That coalition came to a
bloody end for the time, four-and-twenty years after Holbach's book
proclaimed it, when the Committee of Public Safety despatched Hebert,
and better men than Hebert, to the guillotine for being atheists.
Atheism, as Robespierre assured them, was aristocratic.
Holbach's work may be said to spring from the doctrine that the social
deliverance of man depends on his intellectual deliverance, and that the
key to his intellectual deliverance is only to be found in the
substitution of Naturalism for Theism. What he means by Naturalism we
shall proceed shortly to explain. The style, we may remark,
notwithstanding the energy and coherence of the thought, is often
diffuse and declamatory. Some one said of the _System of Nature_, that
it contained at least four times too many words. Yet Voltaire, while
professing extreme dislike of its doctrine, admitted that the writer had
somehow caught the ear of the learned, of the ignorant, and of women.
"He is often clear," said Voltaire, "and sometimes eloquent, yet he may
justly be reproached with declamation, with repeating himself, and with
contradicting himself, like all the rest of them."[150] Galiani made an
over-subtle criticism on it, when he complained of the want of coolness
and self-possession in the style, and then said that it looked as if the
writer were pressed less to persuade other people than to persuade
himself. This was a crude impression. Nobody can have any doubt of the
writer's profound sincerity, or of his earnest desire to make
proselytes. He knows his own mind, and hammers his doctrines out with a
hard and iterative stroke that hits its mark. Yet his literary tone, in
spite of its declamatory pitch, not seldom sinks into a drone. Holbach's
contemporaries were in too fierce contact with the tusks and hooked
claws of the Church, to have any mind for the rhythm of a champion's
sentences or the turn of his periods. But now that the efforts of the
heterodox have taught the Churches to be better Christians than they
were a hundred years ago, we can afford to admit that Holbach is hardly
more captivating in style, and not always more edifying in temper, than
some of the Christian Fathers themselves.
[150] _Dict. Phil._, s. v. Dieu, Sec. 4.
What then is the system of Nature, and what is that Naturalism which is
to replace the current faith in the deities outside of observable
nature? The writer makes no pretence of feeling a tentative way towards
an answer. From the very outset his spirit is that of dogmatic
confidence. He is less a seeker than an expounder; less a philosopher
than a preacher; and he boldly dismisses proof in favour of exhortation.
"Let man cease to search outside the world in which he dwells for beings
who may procure him a happiness that nature refuses to grant; let him
study that nature, let him learn her laws, and contemplate the energy
and the unchanging fixity with which she acts; let him apply his
discoveries to his own felicity, and submit in silence to laws from
which nothing can withdraw him; let him consent to ignore the causes,
surrounded as they are for him by an impenetrable veil; let him undergo
without a murmur the decrees of universal force."
_Science derived from experience is the source of all wise action._ It
is physical science (_la physique_), and experience, that man ought to
consult in religion, morals, legislature, as well as in knowledge and
the arts. It is by our senses that we are bound to universal nature; it
is by our senses that we discover her secrets. The moment that we first
experience them we fall into a void where our imagination leads us
endlessly astray.
_Movement is what establishes relations between our organs and external
objects._ Every object has laws of movement that are peculiar to itself.
Everything in the universe is in movement; no part of nature is really
at rest.[151]
[151] Holbach confesses his obligation on this head to Toland's
_Letters to Serena_ (1704).
_Whence does nature receive this movement?_ From herself, since she is
the great whole, outside of which consequently nothing can exist. Motion
is a fashion of being which flows necessarily from the essence of
matter; matter moves by its own energy; its motion is due to forces
inherent in it; the variety of its movements, and of the phenomena
resulting from them, comes from variation of the properties, the
qualities, the combinations, originally found in the different primitive
matters of which nature is the assemblage.
_Whence came matter?_ Matter has existed from all eternity, and a motion
is one of the inherent and constitutive qualities of matter; motion also
has existed from eternity.
_The abstract idea of matter must be decomposed._ Instead of regarding
matter as a unique existence, rude, passive, incapable of moving itself,
of combining itself, we ought to look upon it as a Kind of existence, of
which the various individual members comprising the Kind, in spite of
their having some common properties, such as extension, divisibility,
figure, etc., still ought not to be ranged in a single class, nor
comprised in a single denomination.
_What is nature's process? Continual movement._ From the stone which is
formed in the bowels of the earth by the intimate combination, as they
approach one another, of analogous and similar molecules, up to the sun,
that vast reservoir of heated particles that gives light to the
firmament; from the numb oyster up to man--we observe an uninterrupted
progression, a perpetual chain of combination and movements, from which
there result beings that only differ among one another by the variety of
their elementary matters, and of the combination and proportion of these
elements. From this variety springs an infinite diversity of ways of
existing and acting. In generation, nutrition, preservation, we can see
nothing but different sorts of matter differently combined, each of them
endowed with its own movements, each of them regulated by fixed laws
that cause them to undergo the necessary changes.
Let us notice here three of the author's definitions. (1.) _Motion is an
effort, by which a body changes or tends to change its place._ (2.) Of
the ultimate composition of Matter, Holbach says nothing definite,
though he assumes molecular movement as its first law. He contents
himself, properly enough perhaps in view of the destination of his
treatise, with a definition "relatively to us." Relatively to us, then,
_Matter in general is all that affects our senses in any fashion
whatever; and the qualities that we attribute to different kinds of
matter, are founded on the different impressions that they produce on
us_. (3.) "When I say that Nature produces an effect, I do not mean to
personify this Nature, which is an abstraction; I mean that the effect
of which I am speaking is the necessary result of the properties of some
one of those beings that compose the great whole under our eyes. Thus,
when I say that Nature intends man to work for his own happiness, I mean
by this that it is of the essence of a being who feels, thinks, wills,
and acts, to work for his own happiness. By Essence I mean that which
constitutes a being what it is, the sum of its properties, or the
qualities according to which it exists and acts as it does."
_All phenomena are necessary._ No creature in the universe, in its
circumstances and according to its given property, can act otherwise
than as it does act. Fire necessarily burns whatever combustible matter
comes within the sphere of its action. Man necessarily desires what
either is, or seems to be, conducive to his comfort and wellbeing. There
is no independent energy, no isolated cause, no detached activity, in a
universe where all beings are incessantly acting on one another, and
which is itself only one eternal round of movement, imparted and
undergone, according to necessary laws. In a storm of dust raised by a
whirlwind, in the most violent tempest that agitates the ocean, not a
single molecule of dust or of water finds its place by _chance_; or is
without an adequate cause for occupying the precise point where it is
found. So, again, in the terrible convulsions that sometimes overthrow
empires, there is not a single action, word, thought, volition, or
passion in a single agent of such a revolution, whether he be a
destroyer or a victim, which is not necessary, which does not act
precisely as it must act, and which does not infallibly produce the
effects that it is bound to produce, conformably to the place occupied
by the given agent in the moral whirlwind.[152]
[152] Almost the very words of this passage are to be found in
Diderot. See above, vol. i. p. 237.
_Order and disorder are abstract terms, and can have no existence in a
Nature, where all is necessary and follows constant laws._ Order is
nothing more than necessity viewed relatively to the succession of
actions. Disorder in the case of any being is nothing more than its
passage to a new order; to a succession of movements and actions of a
different sort from those of which the given being was previously
susceptible. Hence there can never be either monsters or prodigies,
either marvels or miracles, in nature. By the same reasoning, we have no
right to divide the workings of nature into those of Intelligence and
those of Chance. Where all is necessary, Chance can mean nothing save
the limitation of man's knowledge.
The writer next has a group of chapters (vi.-x.) on Man, his
composition, relations, and destiny. The chief propositions are in
rigorous accord with the general conceptions that have already been set
forth. All that man does, and all that passes in him, are effects of the
energy that is common to him with the other beings known to us. But,
before a true and comprehensive idea of the unity of nature was possible
to him, he was so seized by the variety and complication of his organism
and its movements that it never came into his mind to realise that they
existed in a chain of material necessity, binding him fast to all other
forces and modes of being. Men think that they remedy their ignorance of
things by inventing words; so they explained the working of matter, in
man's case, by associating with matter a hypothetical substance, which
is in truth much less intelligible than matter itself. They regarded
themselves as double; a compound of matter and something else
miraculously united with it, to which they give the name of _mind_ or
_soul_, and then they proudly looked on themselves as beings apart from
the rest of creation. In plain truth, Mind is only an _occult force_,
invented to explain occult qualities and actions, and really explaining
nothing. By Mind they mean no more than the unknown cause of phenomena
that they cannot explain naturally, just as the Red Indians believed
that it was spirits who produced the terrible effects of gunpowder, and
just as the ignorant of our own day believe in angels and demons. How
can we figure to ourselves a form of being, which, though not matter,
still acts on matter, without having points of contact or analogy with
it; and on the other hand itself receives the impulsions of matter,
through the material organs that warn it of the presence of external
objects? How can we conceive the union of body and soul, and how can
this material body enclose, bind, constrain, determine a fugitive form
of being, that escapes every sense? To resolve these difficulties by
calling them mysteries, and to set them down as the effects of the
omnipotence of a Being still more inconceivable than the human Soul
itself, is merely a confession of absolute ignorance.
It is worth noticing that with the characteristic readiness of the
French materialist school to turn metaphysical and psychological
discussion to practical uses, Holbach discerned the immense new field
which the materialist account of mind opened to the physician. "If
people consulted experience instead of prejudice, medicine would furnish
morality with the key of the human heart; and in curing the body, it
would be often assured of curing the mind too.... The dogma of the
spirituality of the soul has turned morality into a conjectural science,
which does not in the least help us to understand the true way of acting
on men's motives.... Man will always be a mystery for those who insist
on regarding him with the prejudiced eyes of theology, and on
attributing his actions to a principle of which they can never have any
clear ideas" (ch. ix.). It is certainly true as a historical fact that
the rational treatment of insane persons, and the rational view of
certain kinds of crime, were due to men like Pinel, trained in the
materialistic school of the eighteenth century. And it was clearly
impossible that the great and humane reforms in this field could have
taken place before the decisive decay of theology. Theology assumes
perversity as the natural condition of the human heart, and could only
regard insanity as an intolerable exaggeration of this perversity.
Secondly, the absolute independence of mind and body which theology
brought into such overwhelming relief naturally excluded the notion
that, by dealing with the body, you might be doing something to heal the
mind. Perhaps we are now in some danger of overlooking the potency of
the converse illustration of what Holbach says: namely, the efficacy of
mental remedies or preventives in the case of bodily disease.
If you complain--to resume our exposition--that the mechanism is not
sufficient to explain the principle of the movements and faculties of
the soul, the answer is, that it is in the same case with all the bodies
in nature. In them the simplest movements, the most ordinary phenomena,
the commonest actions, are inexplicable mysteries, whose first
principles are for ever sealed to us. How shall we flatter ourselves
that we know the first principle of gravity, by virtue of which a stone
falls? What do we know of the mechanism that produces the attraction of
some substances, and the repulsion of others? But surely the
incomprehensibility of natural effects is no reason for assigning to
them a cause that is still more incomprehensible than any of those
within our cognisance.
It is not given to man to know everything; it is not given to him to
know his own origin, nor to penetrate into the essence of things, nor to
mount up to the first principle of things. What is given to him is to
have reason, to have good faith, to concede frankly that he is ignorant
of what he cannot know, and not to supplement his lack of certainty by
words that are unintelligible, and suppositions that are absurd.
Suns go out and planets perish; new suns are kindled, and new planets
revolve in new paths; and man--infinitely small portion of a globe that
is itself only a small point in immensity--dreams that it is for him
that the universe has been made, imagines that he must be the confidant
of nature, and proudly flatters himself that he must be eternal! O man,
wilt thou never conceive that thou art but an insect of a day? All
changes in the universe; nature contains not a form that is constant;
and yet thou wouldst claim that thy species can never disappear, and
must be excepted from the great universal law of incessant change!
We may pause for a moment to notice how, in their deliberate humiliation
of the alleged pride of man, the orthodox theologian and the atheistic
Holbach use precisely the same language. But the rebuke of the latter
was sincere; it was indispensable in order to prepare men's minds for
the conception of the universe as a whole. With the theologian the
rebuke has now become little more than a hollow shift, in order to
insinuate the miracle of Grace. The preacher of Naturalism replaces a
futile vanity in being the end and object of the creation, by a fruitful
reverence for the supremacy of human reason, and a right sense of the
value of its discreet and disciplined use. The theologian restores this
absurd and misleading egoism of the race, by representing the Creator as
above all else concerned to work miracles for the salvation of a
creature whose understanding is at once pitifully weak and odiously
perverse, and whose heart is from the beginning wicked, corrupt, and
given over to reprobation. The difference is plainly enormous. The
theologian discourages men; they are to wait for the miracle of
conversion, inert or desperate. The naturalist arouses them; he supplies
them with the most powerful of motives for the energetic use of the most
powerful of their endowments. "Men would always have Grace," says
Holbach, with excellent sense, "if they were well educated and well
governed." And he exclaims on the strange morality of those who
attribute all moral evil to Original Sin, and all the good that we do to
Grace. "No wonder," he says, "that a morality founded on hypotheses so
ridiculous should prove to be of no efficacy."[153]
[153] Ch. xi.
This brings us to Holbach's treatment of Morals. The moment had come to
France, which was reached at an earlier period in English speculation,
when the negative course of thought in metaphysics drove men to consider
the basis of ethics. How were right and wrong to hold their own against
the new mechanical conception of the Universe? The same question is
again urgent in men's minds, because the Darwinian hypothesis, and the
mass of evidence for it, have again given a tremendous shake to
theological conceptions, and startled men into a sense of the
precariousness of the official foundations of virtue and duty.
Holbach begins by a most unflinching exposure of the inconsistency with
all that we know of nature, of the mysterious theory of Free Will. This
remains one of the most effective parts of the book, and perhaps the
work has never been done with a firmer hand. The conclusion is
expressed with a decisiveness that almost seems crude. There is declared
to be no difference between a man who throws himself out of the window
and the man whom I throw out, except this, that the impulse acting on
the second comes from without, and that the impulse determining the fall
of the first comes from within his own mechanism. You have only to get
down to the motive, and you will invariably find that the motive is
beyond the actor's own power or reach. The inexorable logic with which
the author presses the Free-Willer from one retreat to another, and from
shift to shift, leaves his adversary at last exactly as naked and
defenceless before Holbach's vigorous and thoroughly realised Naturalism
as the same adversary must always be before Jonathan Edwards's vigorous
theism. "The system of man's liberty," Holbach says (II. ii.), with some
pungency, "seems only to have been invented in order to put him in a
position to offend his God, and so to justify God in all the evil that
he inflicted on man, for having used the freedom which was so
disastrously conferred upon him."
If man be not free, what right have we to punish those who cannot help
committing bad actions, or to reward others who cannot help committing
good actions? Holbach gives to this and the various other ways of
describing fatalism as dangerous to society, the proper and perfectly
adequate answer. He turns to the quality of the action, and connects
with that the social attitude of praise and blame. Merit and demerit
are associated with conduct, according as it is thought to affect the
common welfare advantageously or the reverse. My indignation and my
approval are as necessary as the acts that excite these sentiments. My
feelings are neither more nor less spontaneous than the deciding motives
of the actor. Whatever be the necessitating cause of our actions, I have
a right to do my best by praise and blame, by reward and punishment, to
strengthen or to weaken, to prolong or to divert, the motives that are
the antecedents of the action; exactly as I have a right to dam up a
stream, or to divert its course, or otherwise deal with it to suit my
own convenience. Penal laws, for instance, are ways of offering to men
strong motives, to weigh in the scale against the temptation of an
immediate personal gratification. Holbach does not make it quite
distinct that the object of penal legislation is in some cases to give
the offender, as well as other people, a strong reason for thinking
twice before he repeats the offence; yet in other cases, where the
punishment is capital, the legislation does not aim at influencing the
mind of the offender at all, but the minds of other people only. This is
only a side illustration of a common weakness in most arguments on this
subject. A thorough vindication of the penal laws, on the principles of
a systematic fatalism, can only be successful, if we think less of the
wrongdoer in any given case, than of affecting general motives, and
building up a right habit of avoiding or accepting certain classes of
action.
The writer then justly connects his scientific necessarianism in
philosophy with humanity in punishment. He protests against excessive
cruelty in the infliction of legal penalties, and especially against the
use of torture, on two grounds; first, that experience demonstrates the
uselessness of these superfluous rigours; and, second, that the habit of
witnessing atrocious punishments familiarises both criminals and others
with the idea of cruelty. The acquiescence of Paris for a few months in
the cruelties of the Terror was no doubt due, on Holbach's perfectly
sound principle, to the far worse cruelties with which the laws had
daily made Paris familiar down to the last years of the monarchy. And
Holbach was justified in expecting a greater degree of charitable and
considerate judgment from the establishment in men's minds of a
Necessarian theory. We are no longer vindictive against the individual
doer; we wax energetic against the defective training and the
institutions which allowed wrong motives to weigh more heavily with him
than right ones. Punishment on the theory of necessity ought always to
go with prevention, and is valued just because it is a force on
prevention, and not merely an element in retribution.
Holbach answers effectively enough the common objection that his
fatalism would plunge men's souls into apathy. If all is necessary, why
shall I not let things go, and myself remain quiet? As if we _could_
stay our hands from action, if our feelings were trained to proper
sensibility and sympathy. As if it were possible for a man of tender
disposition not to interest himself keenly in all that concerns the lot
of his fellow-creatures. How does our knowledge that death is necessary
prevent us from deploring the loss of a beloved one? How does my
consciousness that it is the inevitable property of fire to burn,
prevent me from using all my efforts to avert a conflagration?
Finally, when people urge that the doctrine of necessity degrades man by
reducing him to a machine, and likening him to some growth of abject
vegetation, they are merely using a kind of language that was invented
in ignorance of what constitutes the true dignity of man. What is nature
itself but a vast machine, in which our human species is no more than
one weak spring? The good man is a machine whose springs are adapted so
to fulfil their functions as to produce beneficent results for his
fellows. How could such an instrument not be an object of respect and
affection and gratitude?
In closing this part of Holbach's book, while not dissenting from his
conclusions, we will only remark how little conscious he seems of the
degree to which he empties the notions of praise and blame of the very
essence of their old contents. It is not a modification, but the
substitution of a new meaning under the old names. Praise in its new
sense of admiration for useful and pleasure-giving conduct or motive, is
as powerful a force and as adequate an incentive to good conduct and
good motives, as praise in the old sense of admiration for a deliberate
and voluntary exercise of a free-acting will. But the two senses are
different. The old ethical association is transformed into something
which usage and the requirements of social self-preservation must make
equally potent, but which is not the same. If Holbach and others who
hold necessarian opinions were to perceive this more frankly, and to
work it out fully, they would prevent a confusion that is very
unfavourable to them in the minds of most of those whom they wish to
persuade. It is easy to see that the work next to be done in the region
of morals, is the readjustment of the ethical phraseology of the
volitional stage, to fit the ideas proper to the stage in which man has
become as definitely the object of science as any of the other phenomena
of the universe.
The chapter (xiii.) on the Immortality of the Soul examines this
memorable growth of human belief with great vigour, and a most
destructive penetration. As we have seen, the author repudiates the
theory of a double energy in man, one material and the other spiritual,
just as he afterwards repudiates the analogous hypothesis of a double
energy in nature, one of the two being due to a spiritual mover outside
of the external phenomena of the universe. Consistently with this
renunciation of a separate spiritual energy in man, Holbach will listen
to no talk of a spiritual energy surviving the destruction of the
mechanical framework. To say that the soul will feel, think, enjoy,
suffer, after the death of the body, is to pretend that a clock broken
into a thousand pieces can continue to strike or to mark the hours. And
having emphatically proclaimed his own refusal to share the common
belief, he proceeds with good success to carry the war into the country
of those who profess that belief, and defend it as the safeguard of
society. We need not go through his positions. They are substantially
those which are familiar to everybody who has read the Third Book of
Lucretius's poem, and remembers those magnificent passages which are not
more admirable in their philosophy than they are noble and moving in
their poetic expression:--
Nam veluti pueri trepidant atque omnia caecis
In tenebris metuunt, sic nos in luce timemus
Interdum, nilo quae sunt metuenda magis quam
Quae pueri in tenebris pavitant finguntque futura.
Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest
Non radii solis neque lucida tela diei
Discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque.
And so forth, down to the exquisite lines--
"Jam jam non domus accipiet te laeta, neque uxoi
Optima nec dulces occurrent oscula nati
Praeripere, et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent.
Non poteris factis florentibus esse, tuisque
Praesidium. Misero misere," aiunt, "omnia ademit
Una dies infesta tibi tot praemia vitae."
Illud in his rebus non addunt, "nec tibi earum
Jam desiderium rerum super insidet una."
Quod bene si videant animo dictisque sequantur,
Dissolvant animi magno se angore metuque.
"Tu quidem ut es leto sopitus, sic eris aevi
Quod superest cunctis privatu' doloribus aegris:
At nos horrifico cinefactum te prope busto
Insatiabiliter deflevimus, aeternumque
Nulla dies nobis maerorem e pectore demet."
Illud ab hoc igitur quaerendum est, quid sit amari
Tanto opere, ad somnum si res redit atque quietem,
Cur quisquam aeterno possit tabescere luctu.
We may regret that Holbach, in dealing with these solemn and touching
things, should have been so devoid of historic spirit as to buffet
David, Mahomet, Chrysostom, and other holy personages, as superstitious
brigands. And we may believe that he has certainly been too sweeping in
denying any deterrent efficacy whatever to the fires of hell. But where
Holbach found one person in 1770, he would find a thousand in 1880, to
agree with him, that it is possible to think of commendations and
inducements to virtue, that shall be at least as efficacious as the
fiction of eternal torment, without being as cruel, as wicked, as
infamous to the gods, and as degrading to men.
From his attack on Immortality, Holbach naturally turns with new energy,
as do all who have passed beyond that belief, to the improvement of the
education, the laws, the institutions, which are to strengthen and
implant the true motives for turning men away from wrong and inspiring
them to right. He draws a stern and prolonged indictment against the
kings of the earth, in words that we have already quoted above, as
unjust, incapable, depraved by license and impunity. One passage in this
chapter is the scripture of a terrible prophecy, the very handwriting on
the wall, which was to be so accurately fulfilled almost in the lifetime
of the writer:--"The state of society is now a state of war of the
Sovereign against all, and of each of its members against the other. Man
is bad, not because he was born bad, but because he is made so; the
great and the powerful crush with impunity the needy and the
unfortunate, and these in turn seek to repay all the ill that has been
done to them. They openly or privily attack a native land that is a
cruel stepmother to them; she gives all to some of her children, while
others she strips of all. Sorely they punish her for her partiality;
they show her that the motives borrowed from another life are powerless
against the passions and the bitter wrath engendered by a corrupt
administration in the life here; and that all the terror of the
punishments of this world is impotent against necessity, against
criminal habits, against a dangerous organisation that no education has
ever been applied to correct" (ch. xiv.). In another place: "A society
enjoys all the happiness of which it is susceptible so soon as the
greater number of its members are fed, clothed, housed; are able, in a
word, without an excessive toil, to satisfy the wants that nature has
made necessities to them. Their imagination is content so soon as they
have the assurance that no force can ravish from them the fruits of
their industry, and that they labour for themselves. By a sequence of
human madness, whole nations are forced to labour, to sweat, to water
the earth with their tears, merely to keep up the luxury, the fancies,
the corruption of a handful of insensates, a few useless creatures. So
have religious and political errors changed the universe into a valley
of tears." This is an incessant refrain that sounds with hoarse
ground-tone under all the ethics and the metaphysics of the book. There
are scores of pages in which the same idea is worked out with a sombre
vehemence, that makes us feel as if Robespierre were already haranguing
in the National Assembly, Camille Desmoulins declaiming in the gardens
of the Palais Royal, and Danton thundering at the Club of the
Cordeliers. We already watch the smoke of the flaming chateaux, going up
like a savoury and righteous sacrifice to the heavens.
From this point to the end of the first part of the book, it is not so
much philosophy as the literature of a political revolution. There is a
curious parenthesis in vindication not only of a contempt for death, but
even of suicide; the writer pointing out with some malice that Samson,
Eleazar, and other worthies caused their own death, and that Jesus
Christ himself, if really the Son of God, dying of his own free grace,
was a suicide, to say nothing of the various ascetic penitents who have
killed themselves by inches.[154] "The fear of death, after all," he
says, summing up his case, "will only make cowards; the fear of its
alleged consequences will only make fanatics or melancholy pietists, as
useless to themselves as to others. Death is a resource that we do ill
to take away from oppressed virtue, reduced, as many a time it is, by
the injustice of men to desperation." This was the doctrine in which the
revolutionary generation were brought up, and the readiness with which
men in those days inflicted death on themselves and on others showed how
profoundly it had entered their souls.[155] We think, as we read, of
Vergniaud and Condorcet carrying their doses of poison, of Barbaroux
with his pistol, and Valaze with his knife, of Roland walking forth from
Rouen among the trees on the Paris road, and there driving a cane-sword
into his breast, as calmly as if he had been throwing off a useless
vesture.
[154] This is not original in Holbach. Diderot's article on Suicide
in the Encyclopaedia (_Oeuv._, xvii. 235) contains the usual
arguments of the Church against suicide, with some casuistic
illustrations, but it also contains an account of Dr. Donne's
vindication of Suicide, called _Bia-thanatos_, 1651, in which these
remarks of Holbach occur verbatim. Hallam found Donne's book so dull
and pedantic that he declares no one would be induced to kill
himself by reading such a book unless he were threatened with
another volume.
[155] Hume's suppressed Essay on Suicide (see the edition by Mr.
Green and Mr. Grose, 1875, vol. ii. 405) is a much more exhaustive
argument than Holbach's, though the language of the two pieces is
sometimes curiously alike. Rousseau in this, as in so many other
moralities--marriage, for instance--was on the side of the Church,
only allowing suicide where a man happens to be stricken by a
painful and incurable disease. See the two famous letters in the
_New Heloisa_, Pt. iii. 21, 22.
Holbach has been accused of reducing virtue to a far-sighted
egoism,[156] and detached and crude propositions may be quoted, that
perhaps give a literal warrant for the charge. Nominally he bases
morality on happiness, but his real base is the happiness of the
greatest number. To borrow Mr. Sidgwick's classification, Holbach is a
universalistic and not an egoistic Hedonist. The spirit of what he says
is, in fact, not individualist but social. "The good man is he to whom
true ideas have shown his own interest or his own happiness to lie in
such a way of acting, that others are forced to love and approve for
their own interest.... It is man who is most necessary to the well-being
of man.... Merit and virtue are founded on the nature of man, on his
needs.... It is by virtue that we are able to earn the goodwill, the
confidence, the esteem, of all those with whom we have relations; in a
word, no man can be happy alone.... To be virtuous is to place one's
interest in what accords with the interest of others; it is to enjoy the
benefits and the delights that one is the means of diffusing among
them.... The sentiments of self-love become a hundred times more
delicious when we see them shared by all those with whom our destiny
binds us. The habit of virtue excites wants within us that only virtue
can satisfy; thus it is that virtue is ever its own recompense, and pays
itself with the blessings that it procures for others" (ch. xv.)
[156] Taine's _Ancien Regime_, p. 287.
Surely it is a childish or pedantic misinterpretation to represent this
as egoism, whether armed or not with keen sight; and still worse to talk
of it as over-throwing the barriers that keep in the throng of selfish
appetites. "Every citizen should be made to feel that the section of
which he is a member is a Whole, that cannot subsist and be happy
without virtue; experience should teach him at every moment that the
wellbeing of the members can only result from that of the whole body"
(ch. xv.) To say of such a doctrine as this, that it is to invite every
individual to make himself happy after his own will and fashion, and to
pull down the barriers of the selfish appetites, is the very absurdity
of philosophic prejudice. It is for us to look at Holbach's ethical
doctrine in its widest practical application, and if we place ourselves
at a social point of view, we cannot but perceive that the principle
laid down in the words that we have just quoted, was the indispensable
weapon against the anti-social selfishness of the oppressive privileged
class. These words represent the ethical side of every popular and
democratic movement. You may class Holbach's morality as the morality of
self-interest, if you please; but its true base lay in social sympathy.
To proclaim happiness as the test of virtue was to develop the doctrine
of naturalism; for happiness is the outcome of a conformity to the
natural condition of things. On the other hand, to insist that virtue
lies in promoting the happiness of the body social as a whole, was to
preach the most sovereign of all truths, in a state of things where the
body social as a whole was kept distracted and miserable by the
selfishness of a scanty few of its members. The Church, nominally built
upon the morality of the Golden Rule, was perverted into being the great
organ of sinister self-interest. The Atheists, apparently formulating
the morality of the Epicureans, were in effect the teachers of public
spirit and beneficence. And, taught in such circumstances, public
spirit could only mean revolution. We may doubt whether Holbach had
thought out the very different questions that may be fused under the
easy phrase of a basis for morals. What are the sanctions of moral
precepts? Why ought each to seek the happiness of all? What is the mark
of the difference between right and wrong? What is the foundation of
Conscience, or that habit of mind which makes right as such seem
preferable to wrong? Clearly these are all entirely separate topics. Yet
Holbach, it is obvious, had not divided them in his own mind, and he
seems to think that one and the same answer will serve for what he
mistook for one and the same question. He found it enough to say that
every individual wishes to be happy, and that he cannot be happy unless
he is on good terms with his neighbours; this reciprocity of needs and
services he called the basis of morals. For a rough and common-sense
view of the matter, such as Holbach sought to impress on his readers,
this perhaps will do very well; but it is not the product of accurate
and scientific thinking.
It is not necessary, again, to point out how Holbach, while expounding
the System of Nature, left out of sight the great natural process by
which the moral acquisition of one generation becomes the starting-point
of further acquisitions in the next. He forgot the stages. He talks of
Man as if all the races and eras of man were alike, and also as if each
individual deliberately worked out sums in happiness on his own
account. It would not only have been more true, according to modern
opinions, but more in accordance with Holbach's own view of necessity,
and of the irremovable chain that binds a man's conduct fast to a series
of conditions that existed before he was born, if he had recognised
conscience, moral preferences, interest in the public good, and all that
he called the basis of morals, as coming to a man with the rest of the
apparatus that the past imposes on the present, and not as due to any
process of personal calculation.
Holbach had not clearly thought out the growth, the changes, varieties,
and transformations among moral ideals. He was, of course, far too much
in the full current of the eighteenth century not to feel that
exultation in life and its most exuberant manifestations, which the
conventional moralists of the theological schools had set down and
proscribed as worldliness and fleshliness. "_Action_," he says in this
very chapter; "_action is the true element of the human mind_; no sooner
does man cease to act, than he falls into pain and weariness of spirit."
No doubt this is too absolutely stated, if we are to take some millions
of orientals into our account of the human mind, but it has been true of
the nations of the west. Yet the recognition of this law did not prevent
the writer from occasionally falling into some of the old canting
commonplaces about people being happiest who have fewest wants. As if,
on the contrary, that action which he describes as the true element of
man, were not directly connected with the incessant multiplication of
wants. We may take this, however, as a casual lapse into the common form
of moralists of ascetic ages. In substance the _System of Nature_ is
essentially a protest against ascetic and quietist ideals.
* * * * *
The second half of the _System of Nature_ treats of the Deity; the
proofs of his existence; his attributes; the manner in which he
influences the happiness of men. What is remarkable is that here we have
an onslaught, not merely on the Church with its overgrowth of abuses,
nor on Christianity with its overgrowth of superstitions, but on that
great conception which is enthroned on unseen heights far above any
Church and any form of Christianity. It is theism, in its purest as in
its impurest shape, that the writer condemns. No more elaborate,
trenchant, and unflinching attack on the very fundamental propositions
of theology, natural or revealed, is to be found in literature. Pure
rationalism has nothing to add to this destructive onslaught. The tone
is not truly philosophic, because the writer habitually regards the
notion of a God as an abnormal and morbid excrescence, and not as a
natural growth in human development. He takes no trouble, and it would
have been an incredible departure from the mental fashion of the time if
he had taken any trouble, to explain theology, or to penetrate behind
its forms to those needs, aspirations, and qualities of human
constitution in which theology had its best justification, if not its
earliest source. He regards it as an enemy to be mercilessly routed,
not as a force with which he has to make his account. Still, as a piece
of rough and remorseless polemic, the second part of the _System of
Nature_ remains full of remarkable energy and power. The most eager
Nescient or Denier to be found in the ranks of the assailants of
theology in our own day is timorous and moderate compared with this
direct and on-pressing swordsman. And the attack, on its own purely
rationalistic ground, is thoroughly comprehensive. It is not made on an
outwork here, or an outwork there; it encircles the whole compass of the
defence. The conception of God is examined and resisted from every
possible side--cosmological, ethical, metaphysical. To say that the
argument is one-sided, is only to say that it is an attack. But the fact
that the writer omits the contributions made under the temporal shelter
of theology to morality and civilisation, does not alter the other fact
that he states with unsurpassed vigour all that can be said against the
intellectual absurdities and moral obliquities that theology has
nourished and approved, and only too firmly planted.
Of the elaborate examination of the proofs of the existence of a God
adduced by Descartes, Samuel Clarke, Malebranche, and Newton (ch. iv.
and v.), we need only say that its whole force might have been summed up
in the single proposition that the author once for all repudiates any _a
priori_ basis for any beliefs whatever. It would have been sufficient
for philosophic purposes if he had contented himself with justifying
and establishing that position. The fabric of orthodox demonstration
would have fallen to the ground after the destruction of its
foundations. Holbach rejected the whole _a priori_ system; it was a
matter of course therefore that he rejected each one of the twelve
propositions which Clarke had invented by the _a priori_ method. Holbach
held that experience is the source and limit of knowledge, reasoning,
and belief, and rejected as a fantastic impertinence of dreamy
metaphysicians the assumption that our conceptions measure the
necessities of objective existence. From that point of view, merely to
state was to empty of all demonstrating quality such assertions as that
something has existed from all eternity; an independent and immutable
Being has existed from all eternity; this immutable and independent
Being exists by himself, and is incomprehensible; the Being existing
necessarily is necessarily single and unique--and so forth. Even if we
accept this _a priori_ method, and accept the first assumption that
something must have existed from all eternity, it was open to Holbach to
say, as Locke said on setting himself to examine Descartes' proof of a
God: "I found that, by it, senseless matter might be the first eternal
being and cause of all things, as well as an immaterial intelligent
spirit." But what we feel is that the whole controversy is being
conducted between two disputants on two different planes of thought,
between two creatures dwelling in different elements. To apply to
Clarke's propositions, or to the slightly different propositions of
Malebranche, the test of experience, to measure them by the principle of
relativity, must be fatal in the minds of such persons as already accept
experience as the only right test in such a matter. It is exactly as if
the action of an Italian opera should be criticised in the light of the
conditions of real life: the whole performance must in an instant figure
as an absurdity. No partisan of the lyric drama would consent to have it
so judged, and the philosophic partisans of theology would perhaps have
been wiser to keep clear of pretensions to _prove_ their master thesis.
They might have been content to keep it as an emotional creation, an
imaginative hypothesis, a noble simplification of the chimeras of the
primitive consciousness of the race.
As it was, neither side could be convinced by the other, for they had no
common criterion. They had hardly even a common language. The only
effect of Holbach's blows was to persuade the bystanders who thronged
round the lists in that eager time, that the so-called proofs with which
the high philosophic names were associated, were only proofs to those
who accepted a way of thinking which it was the very characteristic of
that age decisively to reject. The controversial force of this part of
the attack simply lay in the piercing thoroughness with which the
irreconcilable discrepancies between the seventeenth century notion of
demonstration, and that notion in the eighteenth, were forced upon the
reader's attention.
One other remark may be made. Whatever we may think of the success of
the author's assault on the theistic hypothesis of the universe, it is
impossible to deny that he at least succeeds in repelling the various
assaults levelled on what is vulgarly termed atheism. He rightly urges
the unreasonableness of taxing those who have formed to themselves
intelligible notions of the moving power of the universe, with denying
the existence of such a power; the absurdity of charging the very men
who found everything that comes to pass in the world on fixed and
constant laws, with attributing everything to chance. If by Atheist, he
says, you mean a man who would deny the existence of a force inherent in
matter, and without which you cannot conceive nature, and if to this
moving force you give the name of God, then an Atheist would be a
madman. Holbach then describes the sense in which Atheists both exist
and, as he thinks, may well justify their existence. Their qualities are
as follows: To be guided only by experience and the testimony of their
senses, and to perceive nothing in nature except matter, essentially
active and mobile and capable of producing all the beings that we see;
to forego all search for a chimerical cause, and not to mistake for
better knowledge of the moving force of the universe, merely a separate
attribution of it to a Being placed outside of the great whole; to
confess in good faith that their mind can neither conceive nor reconcile
the negative attributes and theological abstractions with the human and
moral qualities that are ascribed to the Divinity.
The chapter (ix.) on the superiority of Naturalism over Theism as a
basis for the most wholesome kind of Morality, is still worth reading by
men in search of weapons against the presumptuous commonplaces of the
pulpit. In this sphere Holbach is as earnest and severe as the most
rigorous moralist that ever wrote. People who talk of the moral levity
of the destructive literature of the eighteenth century would be
astonished, if they could bring themselves to read the books about which
they talk, by the elevation of the _System of Nature_. The writer points
out the necessarily evil influence upon morals of a Book popularly taken
to be inspired, in which the Divinity is represented as now prescribing
virtue, but now again prescribing crime and absurdity; who is sometimes
the friend, and sometimes the enemy, of the human race; who is sometimes
pictured as reasonable, just, and beneficent, and at other times as
insensate: unjust, capricious, and despotic. Such divinities, and the
priests of such divinities, are incapable of being the models, types,
and arbiters of virtue and righteousness. No; we must seek a base for
morality in the necessity of things. Whatever the Cause that placed man
in the abode in which he dwells, and endowed him with his
faculties--whether we regard the human species as the work of Nature, or
of some intelligent Being distinct from Nature--the existence of man,
such as we see him to be, is a fact. We see in him a being who feels,
thinks, has intelligence, has self-love, who strives to make life
agreeable to himself, and who lives in society with beings like
himself; beings whom by his conduct he may make his friends or his
enemies. It is on these universal sentiments that you ought to base
morality, which is nothing more nor less than the science of the duties
of man living in society. The moment you attempt to find a base for
morals outside of human nature, you go wrong; no other is solid and
sure. The aid of the so-called sanctions of theology is not only
needless, but mischievous. The alliance of the realities of duty with
theological phantoms exposes duty to the same ruin which daylight brings
to the superstition that has been associated with duty. It sets up the
arbitrary demands of a varying something, named Piety, in place of the
plain requirements of Right. As for saying that without God man cannot
have moral sentiments, or, in other words, cannot distinguish between
vice and virtue, it is as if one said that, without the idea of God, man
would not feel the necessity of eating and drinking.
The writer then breaks out into a long and sustained contrast, from
which we may make a short extract to illustrate the heat to which the
battle had now come:
"Nature invites man to love himself, incessantly to augment the sum of
his happiness: Religion orders him to love only a formidable God who is
worthy of hatred; to detest and despise himself, and to sacrifice to his
terrible idol the sweetest and most lawful pleasures. Nature bids man
consult his reason, and take it for his guide: Religion teaches him that
this reason is corrupted, that it is a faithless, truthless guide,
implanted by a treacherous God, to mislead his creatures. Nature tells
man to seek light, to search for the truth: Religion enjoins upon him to
examine nothing, to remain in ignorance. Nature says to man: 'Cherish
glory, labour to win esteem, be active, courageous, industrious:'
Religion says to him: 'Be humble, abject, pusillanimous, live in
retreat, busy thyself in prayer, meditation, devout rites; be useless to
thyself, and do nothing for others.' Nature proposes for her model, men
endowed with noble, energetic, beneficent souls, who have usefully
served their fellow-citizens: Religion makes a show and a boast of the
abject spirits, the pious enthusiasts, the phrenetic penitents, the vile
fanatics, who for their ridiculous opinions have troubled empires....
Nature tells children to honour, to love, to hearken to their parents,
to be the stay and support of their old age: Religion bids them prefer
the oracle of their God, and to trample father and mother under foot,
when divine interests are concerned. Nature commands the perverse man to
blush for his vices, for his shameless desires, his crimes: Religion
says to the most corrupt: 'Fear to kindle the wrath of a God whom thou
knowest not: but if against his laws thou hast committed crime, remember
that he is easy to appease and of great mercy: go to his temple, humble
thyself at the feet of his ministers, expiate thy misdeeds by
sacrifices, offerings, prayers; these will wash away thy stain in the
eyes of the Eternal.'"
Of course, philosophical criticism would have much to say about this
glowing mass of furious propositions; for the first voice of Nature
hardly whispers into the ear of the primitive man all these high and
generous promptings. But if by Nature we here understand the
Encyclopaedists, and by Religion the Catholic Church in France at that
moment, then Holbach's fiery antitheses are a tolerably fair account of
the matter. And the political side of the indictment was hardly less
just, though its hardihood appalled men like Voltaire.
"Nature says to man, 'Thou art free, and no power on earth can lawfully
strip thee of thy rights:' Religion cries to him that he is a slave
condemned by God to groan under the rod of God's representatives. Nature
bids man to love the country that gave him birth, to serve it with all
loyalty, to bind his interests to hers against every hand that might be
raised upon her: Religion commands him to obey without a murmur the
tyrants that oppress his country, to take their part against her, to
chain his fellow-citizens under their lawless caprices. Yet if the
Sovereign be not devoted enough to his priests, Religion instantly
changes her tone; she incites the subjects to rebellion, she makes
resistance a duty, she cries aloud that we must obey God rather than
man.... If the nature of man were consulted on Politics, which
supernatural ideas have so shamefully depraved, it would contribute far
more than all the religion in the world to make communities happy,
powerful, and prosperous under reasonable authority.... This nature
would teach princes that they are men and not gods; that they are
citizens charged by their fellow-citizens with watching over the safety
of all.... Instead of attributing to the divine vengeance all the wars,
the famines, the plagues that lay nations low, would it not have been
more useful to show them that such calamities are due to the passions,
the indolence, the tyranny of their princes, who sacrifice the nations
to their hideous delirium? Natural evils demand natural remedies; ought
not experience, therefore, long ago to have undeceived mortals as to
those supernatural remedies, those expiations, prayers, sacrifices,
fastings, processions, that all the peoples of the earth have so vainly
opposed to the woes that overwhelmed them?... Let us recognise the plain
truth, then, that it is these supernatural ideas that have obscured
morality, corrupted politics, hindered the advance of the sciences, and
extinguished happiness and peace even in the very heart of man."
* * * * *
Holbach was a vigorous propagandist. Two years after the appearance of
his master-work he drew up its chief propositions in a short and popular
volume, called _Good sense; or Natural Ideas opposed to Supernatural_.
His zeal led him to write and circulate a vast number of other tractates
and short volumes, the bare list of which would fill several of these
pages, all inciting their readers to an intellectual revolt against the
reigning system in Church and State. He lived to get a glimpse of the
very edge and sharp bend of the great cataract. He died in the spring of
1789. If he had only lived five years longer, he would have seen the
great church of Notre Dame solemnly consecrated by legislative decree to
the worship of Reason, bishops publicly trampling on crosier and ring
amid universal applause, and vast crowds exulting in processions whose
hero was an ass crowned with a mitre.