Category Archives: Philosophy

VOLTAIRE: Voltaire and Rousseau

March 22, 2022 – 3:21 PM

Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter V Section 9 from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The  contents are from the 1933 reprint of this book by TIME INCORPORATED by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.

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IX. Voltaire and Rousseau

Voltaire was so engrossed in the struggle against ecclesiastical tyranny that during the later decades of his life he was compelled almost to withdraw from the war on political corruption and oppression. “Politics is not in my line: I have always confined myself to doing my little best to make men less foolish and more honorable.” He knew how complex a matter political philosophy can become, and he shed his certainties as he grew. “I am tired of all these people who govern states from the recesses of their garrets”; “these legislators who rule the world at two cents a sheet; … unable to govern their wives or their households they take great pleasure in regulating the universe.” It is impossible to settle these matters with simple and general formulae, or by dividing all people into fools and knaves on the one hand, and on the other, ourselves. “Truth has not the name of a party”; and he writes to Vauvenargues: “It is the duty of a man like you to have preferences, but not exclusions.”

Voltaire was so engrossed in the struggle against ecclesiastical tyranny that during the later decades of his life he was compelled almost to withdraw from the war on political corruption and oppression. 

Being rich, he inclines towards conservatism, for no worse reason than that which impels the hungry man to call for a change. His panacea is the spread of property: ownership gives personality and an uplifting pride. “The spirit of property doubles a man’s strength. It is certain that the possessor of an estate will cultivate his own inheritance better than that of another.”

Being rich, Voltaire inclines towards conservatism.

He refuses to excite himself about forms of government. Theoretically he prefers a republic, but he knows its flaws: it permits factions which, if they do not bring on civil war, at least destroy national unity; it is suited only to small states protected by geographical situation, and as yet unspoiled and untorn with wealth; in general “men are rarely worthy to govern themselves.” Republics are transient at best; they are the first form of society, arising from the union of families; the American Indians lived in tribal republics, and Africa is full of such democracies. But differentiation of economic status puts an end to these egalitarian governments; and differentiation is the inevitable accompaniment of development. ”Which.is better,” he asks, “a monarchy or a republic?”—and he replies: “For four thousand years this question has been tossed about. Ask the rich for an answer—they all want aristocracy. Ask the people—they want democracy. Only the monarchs want monarchy. How then has it come about that almost the entire earth is governed by monarchs? Ask the rats who proposed to hang a bell about the neck of the cat.” But when a correspondent argues that monarchy is the best form of government he answers: “Provided Marcus Aurelius is monarch; for otherwise, what difference does it make to a poor man whether he is devoured by a lion or by a hundred rats?”

Voltaire refuses to excite himself about forms of government. Theoretically he prefers a republic, but he knows its flaws. In general “men are rarely worthy to govern themselves.” 

Likewise, he is almost indifferent to nationalities, like a traveled man; he has hardly any patriotism in the usual sense of that word. Patriotism commonly means, he says, that one hates every country but one’s own. If a man wishes his country to prosper, but never at the expense of other countries, he is at the same time an intelligent patriot and a citizen of the universe. Like a “good European” he praises England’s literature and Prussia’s king while France is at war with both England and Prussia. So long as nations make a practice of war, he says, there is not much to choose among them.

Patriotism commonly means, Voltaire says, that one hates every country but one’s own. 

For he hates war above all else. “War is the greatest of all crimes; and yet there is no aggressor who does not color his crime with the pretext of justice.” “It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” He has a terrible “General Reflection on Man,” at the end of the article on “Man” in the Dictionary:

Twenty years are required to bring man from the state of a plant, in which he exists in the womb of his mother, and from the state of an animal, which is his condition in infancy, to a state in which the maturity of reason begins to make itself felt. Thirty centuries are necessary in which to discover even a little of his structure. An eternity would be required to know anything of his soul. But one moment suffices in which to kill him. 

Voltaire hates war above all else. 

Does he therefore think of revolution as a remedy? No. For first of all, he distrusts the people: ”When the people undertake to reason, all is lost.” The great majority are always too busy to perceive the truth until change has made the truth an error; and their intellectual history is merely the replacement of one myth by another. ”When an old error is established, politics uses it as a morsel which the people have put into their own mouths, until another superstition comes along to destroy this one, and politics profits from the second error as it did from the first.” And then again, inequality is written into the very structure of society, and can hardly be eradicated while men are men and life is a struggle. “Those who say that all men are equal speak the greatest truth if they mean that all men have an equal right to liberty, to the possession of their goods, and to the protection of the laws”; but “equality is at once the most natural and the most chimerical thing in the world: natural when it is limited to rights, unnatural when it attempts to level goods and powers.” “Not all citizens can be equally strong; but they can all be equally free; it is this which the English have won. … To be free is to be subject to nothing but the laws.” This was the note of the liberals, of Turgot and Condorcet and Mirabeau and the other followers of Voltaire who hoped to make a peaceful revolution; it could not quite satisfy the oppressed, who called not so much for liberty as for equality, equality even at the cost of liberty. Rousseau, voice of the common man, sensitive to the class distinctions which met him at every turn, demanded a leveling; and when the Revolution fell into the hands of his followers, Marat and Robespierre, equality had its turn, and liberty was guillotined.

Voltaire and his followers hoped for a peaceful revolution. Their note was, “Not all citizens can be equally strong; but they can all be equally free; it is this which the English have won. … To be free is to be subject to nothing but the laws.” 

Voltaire was skeptical of Utopias to be fashioned by human legislators who would create a brand new world out of their imaginations. Society is a growth in time, not a syllogism in logic; and when the past is put out through the door it comes in at the window. The problem is to show precisely by what changes we can diminish misery and injustice in the world in which we actually live. In the “Historical Eulogy of Reason,” Truth, the daughter of Reason, voices her joy at the accession of Louis XVI, and her expectation of great reforms; to which Reason replies: “My daughter, you know well that I too desire these things, and more. But all this requires time and thought. I am always happy when, amid many disappointments, I obtain some of the amelioration I longed for.” Yet Voltaire too rejoiced when Turgot came to power, and wrote: “We are in the golden age up to our necks!” —now would come the reforms he had advocated: juries, abolition of the tithe, an exemption of the poor from all taxes, etc. And had he not written that famous letter?—

Everything that I see appears to be throwing broadcast the seed of a revolution which must some day inevitably come, but which I shall not have the pleasure of witnessing. The French always come late to things, but they do come at last. Light extends so from neighbor to neighbor, that there will be a splendid outburst on the first occasion; and then there will be a rare commotion! The young are fortunate; they will see fine things.

Voltaire happily expected a peaceful revolution when Turgot, in 1774, was put in control of finances by Louis XVI. He knew that changes will take place, but slowly.

Yet he did not quite realize what was happening about him; and he never for a moment supposed that in this “splendid outburst” all France would accept enthusiastically the philosophy of this queer Jean Jacques Rousseau who, from Geneva and Paris, was thrilling the world with sentimental romances and revolutionary pamphlets. The complex soul of France seemed to have divided itself into these two men, so different and yet so French. Nietzsche speaks of “la gaya scienza, the light feet, wit, fire, grace, strong logic, arrogant intellectuality, the dance of the stars”—surely he was thinking of Voltaire. Now beside Voltaire put Rousseau: all heat and fantasy, a man with noble and jejune visions, the idol of la bourgeoise gentile-femme, announcing like Pascal that the heart has its reasons which the head can never understand. 

Voltaire did not quite realize that the people of France will opt for a philosophy that was all heat and fantasy and asserted that the heart has its reasons which the head can never understand. This was the philosophy of Rousseau.

In these two men we see again the old clash between intellect and instinct. Voltaire believed in reason always: “we can, by speech and pen, make men more enlightened and better.” Rousseau had little faith in reason; he desired action; the risks of revolution did not frighten him; he relied on the sentiment of brotherhood to re-unite the social elements scattered by turmoil and the uprooting of ancient habits. Let laws be removed, and men would pass into a reign of equality and justice. When he sent to Voltaire his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, with its arguments against civilization, letters, and science, and for a return to the natural condition as seen in savages and animals, Voltaire replied: “I have received, sir, your new book against the human species, and I thank you for it. … No one has ever been so witty as you are in trying to turn us into brutes; to read your book makes one long to go on all fours. As, however, it is now some sixty years since I gave up the practice, I feel that it is unfortunately impossible for me to resume it.” He was chagrined to see Rousseau’s passion for savagery continue into the Social Contract: “Ah, Monsieur,” he writes to M. Bordes, “you see now that Jean Jacques resembles a philosopher as a monkey resembles a man.” He is the “dog of Diogenes gone mad.” Yet he attacked the Swiss authorities for burning the book, holding to his famous principle: “I do not agree with a word that you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” And when Rousseau was fleeing from a hundred enemies Voltaire sent him a cordial invitation to come and stay with him at Les Délices. What a spectacle that would have been! 

In Voltaire and Rousseau we see again the old clash between intellect and instinct. Voltaire believed in reason always; but Rousseau had little faith in reason; he desired action. In spite of his disagreement, Voltaire respected Rousseau’s right to speak what he believed in.

Voltaire was convinced that all this denunciation of civilization was boyish nonsense; that man was incomparably better off under civilization than under savagery; he informs Rousseau that man is by nature a beast of prey, and that civilized society means a chaining of this beast, a mitigation of his brutality, and the possibility of the development, through social order, of the intellect and its joys. He agrees that things are bad: “A government in which it is permitted a certain class of men to say, ‘Let those pay taxes who work; we should not pay, because we do not work,’ is no better than a government of Hottentots.” Paris has its redeeming features, even amidst its corruption. In “The World as It Goes,” Voltaire tells how an angel sent Babouc to report on whether the city of Persepolis should be destroyed; Babouc goes, and is horrified with the vices he discovers; but after a time “he began to grow fond of a city the inhabitants of which were polite, affable and beneficent, though they were fickle, slanderous and vain. He was much afraid that Persepolis would be condemned. He was even afraid to give in his account. This he did, however, in the following manner. He caused a little statue, composed of different metals, of earth and of stones (the most precious and the most vile) to be cast by one of the best founders of the city, and carried it to the angel. ‘Wilt thou break,’ said he, ‘this pretty statue ‘because it is not wholly composed of gold and diamonds?'” The angel resolved to think no more of destroying Persepolis, but to leave “the world as it goes.” After all, when one tries to change institutions without having changed the nature of men, that unchanged nature will soon resurrect those institutions. 

Voltaire didn’t agree with Rousseau’s denunciation of civilization. He informs Rousseau that man is by nature a beast of prey, and that civilized society means a chaining of this beast. After all, when one tries to change institutions without having changed the nature of men, that unchanged nature will soon resurrect those institutions. 

Here was the old vicious circle; men form institutions, and institutions form men; where could change break into this ring? Voltaire and the liberals thought that intellect could break the ring by educating and changing men, slowly and peacefully; Rousseau and the radicals felt that the ring could be broken only by instinctive and passionate action that would break down the old institutions and build, at the dictates of the heart, new ones under which liberty, equality and fraternity would reign. Perhaps the truth lay above the divided camps: that instinct must destroy the old, but that only intellect can build the new. Certainly the seeds of reaction lay fertile in the radicalism of Rousseau: for instinct and sentiment are ultimately loyal to the ancient past which has begotten them, and to which they are stereotyped adaptations: after the catharsis of revolution the needs of the heart would recall supernatural religion and the “good old days” of routine and peace; after Rousseau would come Chateaubriand, and De Staël, and De Maistre, and Kant. 

Perhaps the truth lay above the divided camps: that instinct must destroy the old, but that only intellect can build the new. 

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VOLTAIRE: Écrasez l’Infame

March 21, 2022 – 5:41 PM

Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter V Section 8 from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The  contents are from the 1933 reprint of this book by TIME INCORPORATED by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.

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VIII. Écrasez l’Infame

Under ordinary circumstances it is probable that Voltaire would never have passed out of the philosophic calm of this courteous skepticism to the arduous controversies of his later years. The aristocratic circles in which he moved agreed so readily with his point of view that there was no incentive to polemics; even the priests smiled with him over the difficulties of the faith, and cardinals considered whether, after all, they might not yet make him into a good Capuchin. What were the events that turned him from the polite persiflage of agnosticism to a bitter anti-clericalism which admitted no compromise, but waged relentless war to “crush the infamy” of ecclesiasticism?

In his later years, Voltaire turned from the polite persiflage of agnosticism to a bitter anti-clericalism, which admitted no compromise.

Not far from Ferney lay Toulouse, the seventh city of France. In Voltaire’s day the Catholic clergy enjoyed absolute sovereignty there; the city commemorated with frescoes the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (an edict which had given freedom of worship to Protestants), and celebrated as a great feast the day of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. No Protestant in Toulouse could be a lawyer, or a physician, or an apothecary, or a grocer, or a book-seller, or a printer; nor could a Catholic keep a Protestant servant or clerk—in 1748 a woman had been fined 3000 francs for using a Protestant midwife. 

There was extreme discrimination of Protestants by Catholics in the city of Toulouse.

Now it happened that Jean Calas, a Protestant of Toulouse, had a daughter who became a Catholic, and a son who hanged himself, presumably because of disappointment in business. There was a law in Toulouse that every suicide should be placed naked on a hurdle, with face down, drawn thus through the streets, and then hanged on a gibbet. The father, to avert this, asked his relatives and his friends to testify to a natural death. In consequence, rumor began to talk of murder, and to hint that the father had killed the son to prevent his imminent conversion to Catholicism. Calas was arrested, put to the torture, and died soon after (1761). His family, ruined and hunted, fled to Ferney, and sought the aid of Voltaire. He took them into his home, comforted them, and marveled at the story of medieval persecution which they told. 

The Calas family was subjected to medieval persecution in Toulouse for being Protestants. They sought the aid of Voltaire.

About the same time (1762) came the death of Elizabeth Sirvens; again rumor charged that she had been pushed into a well just as she was about to announce her conversion to Catholicism. That a timid minority of Protestants would hardly dare to behave in this way was a rational consideration, and therefore out of the purview of rumor.—In 1765 a young man by the name of La Barre, aged sixteen, was arrested on the charge of having mutilated crucifixes. Subjected to torture, he confessed his guilt; his head was cut off, and his body was flung into the flames, while the crowd applauded. A copy of Voltaire’s Philosophic Dictionary, which had been found on the lad, was burned with him. 

More atrocities were committed by Catholics on Protestants.

For almost the first time in his life, Voltaire became a thoroughly serious man. When d’Alembert, disgusted equally with state, church and people, wrote that hereafter he would merely mock at everything, Voltaire answered, “This is not a time for jesting; wit does not harmonize with massacres. … Is this the country of philosophy and pleasure? It is rather the country of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.” It was with Voltaire now as with Zola and Anatole France in the case of Dreyfus; this tyrannous injustice lifted him up; he ceased to be merely a man of letters, and became a man of action too; he laid aside philosophy for war, or rather turned his philosophy into relentless dynamite. ”During this time not a smile escaped me without my reproaching myself for it as for a crime.” It was now that he adopted his famous motto, Écrasez l’Infame [crush the infamous], and stirred the soul of France against the abuses of the church. He began to pour forth such intellectual fire and brimstone as melted mitres and sceptres, broke the power of the priesthood in France, and helped to overthrow a throne. He sent out a call to his friends and followers, summoning them to battle: “Come, brave Diderot, intrepid d’Alembert, ally yourselves; … overwhelm the fanatics and the knaves, destroy the insipid declamations, the miserable sophistries, the lying history, … the absurdities without number; do not let those who have sense be subjected to those who have none; and the generation which is being born will owe to us its reason and its liberty.”

Voltaire took this situation seriously and began to pour forth such intellectual fire and brimstone as melted mitres and sceptres, broke the power of the priesthood in France, and helped to overthrow a throne.

Just at this crisis an effort was made to buy him off; through Mme. de Pompadour he received an offer of a cardinal’s hat as the reward of reconciliation with the Church. As if the rule of a few tongue-tied bishops could interest a man who was the undisputed sovereign of the world of intellect! Voltaire refused; and like another Cato, began to end all his letters with “Crush the infamy.” He sent out his Treatise on Toleration: he said he would have borne with the absurdities of dogma had the clergy lived up to their sermons and had they tolerated differences; but “subtleties of which not a trace can be found in the Gospels are the source of the bloody quarrels of Christian history.” “The man who says to me, ‘Believe as I do, or God will damn you,’ will presently say, ‘Believe as I do, or I shall assassinate you.'” “By what right could a being created free force another to think like himself?” “A fanaticism composed of superstition and ignorance has been the sickness of all the centuries.” No such perpetual peace as the Abbé de St.-Pierre had pleaded for could ever be realized unless men learned to tolerate one another’s philosophic, political and religious differences. The very first step towards social health was the destruction of the ecclesiastical power in which intolerance had its root. 

Voltaire sent out his Treatise on Toleration: he said he would have borne with the absurdities of dogma had the clergy lived up to their sermons and had they tolerated differences.

The Treatise on Toleration was followed up with a Niagara of pamphlets, histories, dialogues, letters, catechisms, diatribes, squibs, sermons, verses, tales, fables, commentaries and essays, under Voltaire’s own name and under a hundred pseudonyms—“the most astonishing pell-mell of propaganda ever put out by one man.” Never was philosophy phrased so clearly, and with such life; Voltaire writes so well that one does not realize that he is writing philosophy. He said of himself, over-modestly, “I express myself clearly enough: I am like the little brooks, which are transparent because they are not deep.” And so he was read; soon everybody, even the clergy, had his, pamphlets; of some of them 300,000 copies were sold, though readers were far fewer then than now; nothing like it had ever been seen in the history of literature. “Big books,” he said, “are out of fashion.” And so he sent forth his little soldiers, week after week, month after month, resolute and tireless, surprising the world with the fertility of his thought and the magnificent energy of his seventy years. As Helvetius put it, Voltaire had crossed the Rubicon, and stood before Rome.

It was followed up with a Niagara of pamphlets, histories, dialogues, letters, etc. and he was read. Voltaire writes so well that one does not realize that he is writing philosophy. 

He began with a “higher criticism” of the authenticity and reliability of the Bible; he takes much of his material from Spinoza, more of it from the English Deists, most of it from the Critical Dictionary of Bayle (1647-1706); but how brilliant and fiery their material becomes in his hands! One pamphlet is called “The Questions of Zapata,” a candidate for the priesthood; Zapata asks, innocently, “How shall we proceed to show that the Jews, whom we burn by the hundred, were for four thousand years the chosen people of God?” [Voltaire himself was something of an anti-Semite, chiefly because of his not quite admirable dealings with the financiers.]—and he goes on with questions which lay bare the inconsistencies of narrative and chronology in the Old Testament. “When two Councils anathematize each other, as has often happened,. which of them is infallible?” At last, “Zapata, receiving no answer, took to preaching God in all simplicity. He announced to men the common Father, the rewarder, punisher, and pardoner. He extricated the truth from the lies, and separated religion from fanaticism; he taught and practiced virtue. He was gentle, kindly, and modest; and he was burned at Valladolid in the year of grace 1631.”

Voltaire begins with a “higher criticism” of the authenticity and reliability of the Bible, and he goes on with questions which lay bare the inconsistencies of narrative and chronology in the Old Testament.

Under the article on “Prophecy” in the Philosophic Dictionary, he quotes Rabbin Isaac’s Bulwark of Faith against the application of Hebrew prophecies to Jesus, and then goes on, ironically: “Thus these blind interpreters of their own religion and their own language, combated with the Church, and obstinately maintained that this prophecy cannot in any manner regard Jesus Christ.” Those were dangerous days, in which one was compelled to say what one meant without saying it, and the shortest line to one’s purpose was anything but straight. Voltaire likes to trace Christian dogmas and rites to Greece, Egypt and India, and thinks that these adaptations were not the least cause of the success of Christianity in the ancient world. Under the article on “Religion” he asks, slyly, “After our own holy religion, which doubtless is the only good one, what religion would be the least objectionable?”—and he proceeds to describe a faith and worship directly opposed to the Catholicism of his day. “Christianity must be divine,” he says, in one of his most unmeasured sallies, “since it has lasted 1,700 years despite the fact that it is so full of Villainy and nonsense.” He shows how almost all ancient peoples had similar myths, and hastily concludes that the myths are thereby proved to have been the inventions of priests: “the first divine was the first rogue who met the first fool.” However, it is not religion itself which he attributes to the priests, but theology. It is slight differences in theology that have caused so many bitter disputes and religious wars. “It is not the ordinary people … who have raised these ridiculous and fatal quarrels, the sources of so many horrors. … Men fed by your labors in a comfortable idleness, enriched by your sweat and your misery, struggled for partisans and slaves; they inspired you with a destructive fanaticism, that they might be your masters; they made you superstitious not that you might fear God but that you might fear them.”

According to Voltaire, Catholicism of his day was the opposite of Jesus’s Christianity of the ancient world. The Christian priests had invented their own theology. It is slight differences in theology that have caused so many bitter disputes and religious wars.

Let it not be supposed from all this that Voltaire was quite without religion. He decisively rejects atheism; so much so that some of the Encyclopedists turned against him, saying, “Voltaire is a bigot, he believes in God.” In “The Ignorant Philosopher” he reasons towards Spinozist pantheism, but then recoils from it as almost atheism. He writes to Diderot: 

I confess that I am not at all of the opinion of Saunderson, who denies a God, because he was born sightless. I am, perhaps, mistaken; but in his place I should recognize a great Intelligence who had given me so many substitutes for sight; and perceiving, on reflection, the wonderful relations between all things, I should have suspected a Workman infinitely able. If it is very presumptuous to divine ‘What He is, and why He has made everything that exists, so it seems to me very presumptuous to deny that He exists. I am exceedingly anxious to meet and talk with you, whether you think yourself one of His works, or a particle drawn, of necessity, from eternal and necessary matter. Whatever you are, you are a worthy part of that great whole which I do not understand.

Voltaire did not deny God. He hoped that he could understand God better.

To Holbach he points out that the very title of his book, the System of Nature, indicates a divine organizing intelligence. On the other hand he stoutly denies miracles and the supernatural efficacy of prayer: 

I was at the gate of the convent when Sister Fessue said to Sister Confite: “Providence takes a visible care of me; you know how I love my sparrow; he would have been dead if I had not said nine Ave-Marias to obtain his cure.” … A metaphysician said to her: “Sister, there, is nothing so good as Ave-Marias, especially when a girl pronounces them in Latin in the suburbs of Paris; but I cannot believe that God has occupied himself so much with your sparrow, pretty as it is; I pray you to believe that he has other things to attend to. …” Sister Fessue: “Sir, this discourse savors of heresy. My confessor … will infer that you do not believe in Providence.” Metaphysician: ” I believe in a general Providence, dear Sister, which has laid down from all eternity the law which governs all things, like light from the sun; but I believe not that a particular Providence changes the economy of the world for your sparrow.”

To Voltaire, the system of nature indicated a divine organizing intelligence. But he stoutly denied miracles and the supernatural efficacy of prayer.

“His Sacred Majesty, Chance, decides everything.” True prayer lies not in asking for a violation of natural law but in the acceptance of natural law as the unchangeable will of God.

Similarly, he denies free will. As to the soul he is an agnostic: “Four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is.” Being an old man, he would like to believe in immortality, but he finds it difficult. 

Nobody thinks of giving an immortal soul to the flea; why then to an elephant, or a monkey, or my valet? … A child dies in its mother’s womb, just at the moment when it has received a soul. Will it rise again foetus, or boy, or man? To rise again—to be the same person that you were—you must have your memory perfectly fresh and present; for it is memory that makes your identity. It your memory be lost, how will you be the same man? … Why do mankind flatter themselves that they alone are gifted with a spiritual and immortal principle? … Perhaps from their inordinate vanity. I am persuaded that if a peacock could speak he would boast of his soul, and would affirm that it inhabited his magnificent tail.

Voltaire has good logic because he doubts when there is lack of clarity. He recognizes anomalies. Therefore, he denies free will. As to the soul he is an agnostic.

And in this earlier mood he rejects also the view that belief in immortality is necessary for morality: the ancient Hebrews were without it, just when they were the “chosen people”; and Spinoza was a paragon of morality. 

In later days he changed his mind. He came to feel that belief in God has little moral value unless accompanied by belief in an immortality of punishment and reward. Perhaps, “for the common people (la canaille) a rewarding and avenging God” is necessary. Bayle had asked, If a society of atheists could subsist?—Voltaire answers, “Yes, if they are also philosophers.” But men are seldom philosophers; “if there is a hamlet, to be good it must have a religion.” “I want my lawyer, my tailor, and my wife to believe in God,” says “A” in “A, B, C”; “so, I imagine, I shall be less robbed and less deceived.” “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.” “I begin to put more store on happiness and life than on truth”;—a remarkable anticipation, in the midst of the Enlightenment, of the very doctrine with which Immanuel Kant was later to combat the Enlightenment. He defends himself gently against his friends the atheists; he addresses Holbach in the article on “God;’ in the Dictionary: 

You yourself say that belief in God … has kept some men from crime; this alone suffices me. When this belief prevents even ten assassinations, ten calumnies, I hold that all the world should embrace it. Religion, you say, has produced countless misfortunes; say rather the superstition which reigns on our unhappy globe. This is the cruelest enemy of the pure worship due to the Supreme Being. Let us detest this monster which has always torn the bosom of its mother; those who, combat it are the benefactors of the human race; it is a serpent which chokes religion in its embrace; we must crush its head without wounding the mother whom it devours.” 

Voltaire favors a religion without superstition, a religion that brings understanding and happiness.

This distinction between superstition and religion is fundamental with him. He accepts gladly the theology of the Sermon on the Mount, and acclaims Jesus in tributes which could hardly be matched even with the pages of saintly ecstasy. He pictures Christ among the sages, weeping over the crimes that have been committed in his name. At last he built his own church, with the dedication, “Deo erexit Voltaire” [“God raised Voltaire”]; the only church in Europe, he said, that was erected to God. He addresses to God a magnificent prayer; and in the article “Theist” he expounds his faith finally and clearly:

The theist is a man firmly persuaded of the existence of a supreme being as good as he is powerful, who has formed all things … ; who punishes, without cruelty, all crimes, and recompenses with goodness all virtuous actions. … Re-united in this principle with the rest of the universe, he does not join any of the sects which all contradict one another. His religion is the most ancient and the most widespread; for the simple worship of a God preceded all the systems of the world. He speaks a language which all peoples understand, while they do not understand one another. He has brothers from Pekin to Cayenne, and he counts all the sages for his fellows. He believes that religion consists neither in the opinions of an unintelligible metaphysic, nor in vain shows, but in worship and in justice. To do good is his worship, to submit to God is his creed. The Mohammedan cries out to him, “Beware if you fail to make the pilgrimage to Mecca!”—the priest says to him, “Curses on you if you do not make the trip to Notre Dame de Lorette!” He laughs at Lorette and at Mecca: but he succors the indigent and defends the oppressed. 

Voltaire believes in a just and compassionate God. He call God a Supreme Being but it is not defined by any priest. It is how a person sees it. A person may see God as the laws of nature.

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VOLTAIRE: The Encyclopedia and the Philosophic Dictionary

March 21, 2022 – 10:01 AM

Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter V Section 7 from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The  contents are from the 1933 reprint of this book by TIME INCORPORATED by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.

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VII. The Encyclopedia and the Philosophic Dictionary

The popularity of so irreverent a book as Candide gives us some sense of the spirit of the age. The lordly culture of Louis XIV’s time, despite the massive bishops who spoke so eloquent a part in it, had learned to smile at dogma and tradition. The failure of the Reformation to capture France had left for Frenchmen no half-way house between infallibility and infidelity; and while the intellect of Germany and England moved leisurely in the lines of religious evolution, the mind of France leaped from the hot faith which had massacred the Huguenots to the cold hostility with which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach and Diderot turned upon the religion of their fathers. Let us look for a moment at the intelleetual environment in which the later Voltaire moved and had his being. 

In the 17th century, France moved rapidly from hot faith of Christendom to cold hostility of scientific materialism.

La Mettrie (1709-61) was an army physician who had lost his post by writing a Naturtal History of the Soul, and had won exile by a work called Man a Machine. He had taken refuge at the court of Frederick, who was himself something of an advanced thinker and was resolved to have the very latest culture from Paris. La Mettrie took up the idea of mechanism where the frightened Descartes, like a boy who has burned his fingers, had dropped it; and announced boldly that all the world, not excepting man, was a machine. The soul is material, and matter is soulful; but whatever they are they act upon each other, and grow and decay with each other in a way that leaves no doubt of their essential similarity and interdependence. If the soul is pure spirit, how can enthusiasm warm the body, or fever in the body disturb the processes of the mind? All organisms have evolved out of one original germ, through the reciprocal action of organism and environment. The reason why animals have intelligence, and plants none, is that animals move about for their food, while plants take what comes to them. Man has the highest intelligence because he has the greatest wants and the widest mobility; “beings without wants are also without mind.” 

The emerging idea was that the soul is material, and matter is soulful; but whatever they are they act upon each other, and grow and decay with each other in a way that leaves no doubt of their essential similarity and interdependence. 

Though La Mettrie was exiled for these opinions, Helvetius (1715-71), who took them as the basis of his book On Man, became one of the richest men in France, and rose to position and honor. Here we have the ethic, as in La Mettrie the metaphysic, of atheism. All action is dictated by egoism, self-love; “even the hero follows the feeling which for him is associated with the greatest pleasure”; and “virtue is egoism furnished with a spy-glass.” Conscience is not the voice of God, but the fear of the police; it is the deposit left in us from the stream of prohibitions poured over the growing soul by parents and teachers and press. Morality must be founded not on theology but on sociology; the changing needs of society, and not any unchanging revelation or dogma, must determine the good. 

Here we have the ethic of atheism. All action is dictated by egoism, self-love. Conscience is not the voice of God, but the fear of the police. Morality must be founded not on theology but on sociology.

The greatest figure in this group was Denis Diderot (1713-84). His ideas were expressed in various fragments from his own pen, and in the System of Nature of Baron d’Holbach (1723-89), whose salon was the centre of Diderot’s circle. “If we go back to the beginning,” says Holbach, “we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm or deceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them; and that custom respects and tyranny supports them in order to make the blindness of men serve its own interests.” Belief in God, said Diderot, is bound up with submission to autocracy; the two rise and fall together; and “men will never be free till the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” The earth will come into its own only when heaven is destroyed. Materialism may be an over-simplification of the world—all matter is probably instinct with life, and it is impossible to reduce the unity of consciousness to matter and motion; but materialism is a good weapon against the Church, and must be used till a better one is found. Meanwhile one must spread knowledge and encourage industry; industry will make for peace, and knowledge will make a new and natural morality. 

Here is the thinking that belief in God is bound up with submission to autocracy; the two rise and fall together. All matter is probably instinct with life, and it is impossible to reduce the unity of consciousness to matter and motion. Industry will make for peace, and knowledge will make a new and natural morality. 

These are the ideas which Diderot and d’Alembert labored to disseminate through the great Encyclopedie which they issued, volume by volume, from 1752 to 1772. The Church had the first volumes suppressed; and as the opposition increased, Diderot’s comrades abandoned him; but he worked on angrily, invigorated by his rage. “I know nothing so indecent,” he said, “as these vague declamations of the theologians against reason. To hear them one would suppose that men could not enter into the bosom of Christianity except as a herd of cattle enters a stable.” It was, as Paine put it, the age of reason; these men never doubted that the intellect was the ultimate human test of all truth and all good. Let reason be freed, they said, and it would in a few generations build Utopia. Diderot did not suspect that the erotic and neurotic Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), whom he had just introduced to Paris, was carrying in his head, or in his heart, the seeds of a revolution against this enthronement of reason; a revolution which, armed with the impressive obscurities of Immanuel Kant, would soon capture every citadel of philosophy. 

It was the age of reason; these men never doubted that the intellect was the ultimate human test of all truth and all good.

Naturally enough, Voltaire, who was interested in everything, and had a hand in every fight, was caught up for a time in the circle of the Encyclopedists; they were glad to call him their leader; and he was not averse to their incense, though some of their ideas needed a little pruning. They asked him to write articles for their great undertaking, and he responded with a facility and fertility which delighted them. When he had finished this work he set about making an encyclopedia of his own, which he called a Philosophic Dictionary; with unprecedented audacity he took subject after subject as the alphabet suggested them, and poured out under each heading part of his inexhaustible resources of knowledge and wisdom. Imagine a man writing on everything, and producing a classic none the less; the most readable and sparkling of Voltaire’s works aside from his romances; every article a model of brevity, clarity, and wit. “Some men can be prolix in one small volume; Voltaire is terse through a hundred.” Here at last Voltaire proves that he is a philosopher. 

Voltaire was caught up for a time in the circle of the Encyclopedists. When he had finished this work he set about making an encyclopedia of his own, which he called a Philosophic Dictionary.

He begins, like Bacon, Descartes and Locke and all the moderns, with doubt and a (supposedly) clean slate. “I have taken as my patron saint St. Thomas of Didymus, who always insisted on an examination with his own hands.” He thanks Bayle for having taught him the art of doubt. He rejects all systems, and suspects that “every chief of a sect in philosophy has been a little of a quack.” “The further I go, the more I am confirmed in the idea that systems of metaphysics are for philosophers what novels are for women.” It is only charlatans who are certain. We know nothing of first principles. It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God formed the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will. Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” “I do not know how I was made, and how I was born. I did not know at all, during a quarter of my life, the causes of what I saw, or heard, or felt. … I have seen that which is called matter, both as the star Sirius, and as the smallest atom which can be perceived with the microscope; and I do not know what this matter is.”

Voltaire begins, like Bacon, Descartes and Locke and all the moderns, with doubt and a (supposedly) clean slate. “Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” “I have seen that which is called matter… and I do not know what this matter is.”

He tells a story of “The Good Brahmin,” who says, “I wish I had never been born!” 

“Why so?” said I. 

“Because,” he replied, “I have been studying these forty years, and I find that it has been so much time lost. … I believe that I am composed of matter, but I have never been able to satisfy myself what it is that produces thought. I am even ignorant whether my understanding is a simple faculty like that of walking or digesting, or if I think with my head in the same manner as I take hold of a thing with my hands. … I talk a great deal, and when I have done speaking I remain confounded and ashamed of what I have said.”

The same day I had a conversation with an old woman, his neighbor. I asked her if she had ever been unhappy for not understanding how her soul was made? She did not even comprehend my question. She had not, for the briefest moment in her life, had a thought about these subjects with which the good Brahmin had so tormented himself. She believed in the bottom of her heart in the metamorphoses of Vishnu, and provided she could get some of the sacred water of the Ganges in which to make her ablutions, she thought herself the happiest of women. Struck with the happiness of this poor creature, I returned to my philosopher, whom. I thus addressed: 

“Are you not ashamed to be thus miserable when, not fifty yards from you, there is an old automaton who thinks of nothing and lives contented?” 

”You are right,” he replied. “I have said to myself a thousand times that I should be happy if I were but as ignorant as my oId neighbor; and yet it is a happiness which I do not desire.” 

This reply of the Brahmin made a greater impression on me than anything that had passed.

Even if Philosophy should end in the total doubt of Montaigne’s “Que sais-je?” [What do I know?] It is man’s greatest adventure, and his noblest. Let us learn to be content with modest advances in knowledge, rather than be forever weaving new systems out of our mendacious imagination. 

The above paragraph needs to read repeatedly until fully understood.

We must not say, Let us begin by inventing principles whereby we may be able to explain everything; rather we must say, Let us make an exact analysis of the matter, and then we shall try to see, with much diffidence, if it fits in with any principle. … The Chancellor Bacon had shown the road which science might follow. … But then Descartes appeared and did just the contrary of what he should have done: instead of studying nature, he wished to divine her. … This best of mathematicians made onIy romances in philosophy. … It is given us to calculate, to weigh, to measure, to observe; this is natural philosophy; almost all the rest is chimera.

I love Voltaire.

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VOLTAIRE: Ferney: Candide

March 20, 2022 – 3:40 PM

Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter V Section 6 from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The  contents are from the 1933 reprint of this book by TIME INCORPORATED by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.

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VI. Ferney: Candide

Lea Délices had been a temporary home, a centre from which Voltaire might prospect to find a shelter of more permanence. He found it in 1758 at Ferney, just inside the Swiss line near France; here he would be secure from the French power, 

and yet near to French refuge if the Swiss Government should trouble him. This last change ended his Wanderjahre. His fitful runnings to and fro had not been all the result of nervous restlessness; they had reflected, too, his ubiquitous insecurity from persecution; only at sixty-four did he find a house that could be also his home. There is a passage at the end of one of his tales, “The Travels of Scarmentado,” which almost applies to its author: “As I had now seen all that was rare or beautiful on earth, I resolved for the future to see nothing but my own home; I took a wife, and soon suspected that she deceived me; but notwithstanding this doubt I still found that of all conditions of life this was much the happiest.'” He had no wife, but he had a niece—which is better for a man of genius. ”We never hear of his wishing to be in Paris. … There can be no doubt that this wise exile prolonged his days.”

At the age of sixty-four, Voltaire finally settled at Ferney, just inside the Swiss line near France, where he felt more secure. 

He was happy in his garden, planting fruit trees which he did not expect to see flourish in his lifetime. When an admirer praised the work he had done for posterity he answered, ”Yes, I have planted 4000 trees.” He had a kind word for everybody, but could be forced to sharper speech. One day he asked a visitor whence he came. “From Mr. Haller’s.” ”He is a great man,” said Voltaire; “a great poet, a great naturalist; a great philosopher, almost a universal genius.” “What you say, sir, is the more admirable, as Mr. Haller does not do you the same justice.” “Ah,” said Voltaire, “perhaps we are both mistaken.”

Votaire had a kind word for everybody, but could be forced to sharper speech.

Ferney now become the intellectual capital of the world; every learned man or enlightened ruler of the day paid his court either in person or by correspondence. Here came sceptical priests, liberal aristocrats, and learned ladies; here came Gibbon and Boswell from England; here came d’Alembert, Helvetius, and the other rebels of the Enlightenment; and countless others; At last the entertainment of this endless stream of visitors proved too expensive even for Voltaire; he complained that he was becoming the hotel-keeper for all Europe. To one acquaintance who announced that he had come to stay for six weeks, Voltaire said: ”What is the difference between you and Don Quixote? He mistook inns for chateaux, and you mistake this chateau for an inn.” “God preserve me from my friends,” he concluded; “I will take care of my enemies myself.” 

Ferney now become the intellectual capital of the world; every learned man or enlightened ruler of the day paid his court either in person or by correspondence.

Add to this perpetual hospitality, the largest correspondence the world has ever seen, and the most brilliant. Letters came from all sorts and conditions of men: a burgomaster wrote from Germany asking “in confidence whether there is a God or not,” and begging Voltaire to answer by return post; Gustavus III of Sweden was elated by the thought that Voltaire sometimes glanced at the North, and told him that this was their greatest encouragement to do their best up there; Christian VII of Denmark apologized for not establishing at once all reforms; Catherine II of Russia sent him beautiful presents, wrote frequently, and haped he would not consider her importunate. Even Frederick, after a year of doldrums returned to the fold, and resumed his correspondence with the King of Ferney. 

“You have done me great wrongs,” he wrote. “I have forgiven them all, and I even wish to forget them. But if you had not had to do with a madman in love with your noble genius, you would not have gotten off so well. … Do you want sweet things? Very well; I will tell you some truths. I esteem in you the finest genius that the ages have borne; I admire your poetry, I love your prose. … Never has an author before you had a tact so keen, a taste so sure and delicate. You are charming in conversation; you know how to amuse and instruct at the same time. You are the most seductive being that I know, capable of making yourself loved by all the world when you choose. You have such graces of mind that you can offend and yet at the same time deserve the indulgence of those who know you. In short, you would be perfect if you were not a man.”

Letters came from all sorts and conditions of men. Even Frederick, after a year of doldrums returned to the fold, and resumed his correspondence with Voltaire. 

Who would have expected so gay a host to become the exponent of pessimism? In youth, as a reveler in Paris’s salons, he had seen the sunnier side of life, despite the Bastille; and yet even in those careless days he had rebelled against the unnatural optimism. to which Leibnitz had given currency. To an ardent young man who had attacked him in print, and had contended with Leibnitz that this is “the best of all possible worlds,” Voltaire wrote, “I am pleased to hear, sir, that you have written a little book against me. You do me too much honor. … When you have shown, in verse or otherwise, why so many men cut their throats in the best of all possible worlds, I shall be exceedingly obliged to you. I await your arguments, your verses, and your abuse; and assure you from the bottom of my heart that neither of us knows anything about the matter. I have the honor to be,” etc. 

Persecution and disillusionment had worn down his faith in life; and his experiences at Berlin and Frankfort had taken the edge from his hope. But both faith and hope suffered most when, in November, 1755, came the news of the awful earthquake at Lisbon, in which 80,000 people had been killed. The quake had come on All Saints’ Day; the churches had been crowded with worshippers; and death, finding its enemies in close formation, had reaped a rich harvest. Voltaire was shocked into seriousness and raged when he heard that the French Clergy were explaining the disaster as a punishment for the sins of the people of Lisbon. He broke forth in a passionate poem in which he gave vigorous expression to the old dilemma: Either God can prevent evil and he will not; or he wishes to prevent it and he cannot. He was not satisfied with Spinoza’s answer that good and evil are human terms, inapplicable to the universe, and that our tragedies are trivial things in the perspective of eternity. 

I am a puny part of the great whole.
Yes; but all animals condemned to live,
All sentient things, born by the same stern law, 
Suffer like me, and like me also die.
The vulture fastens on his timid prey,
And stabs with bloody beak the quivering limbs: 
All’s well, it seems, for it. But in a while
An eagle tears the vulture into shreds;
The eagle is transfixed by shafts of man;
The man, prone in the dust of battlefields, 
Mingling his blood with dying fellow men, 
Becomes in turn the food of ravenous birds. 
Thus the whole world in every member groans, 
All born for torment and for mutual death. 
And o’er this ghastly chaos you would say 
The ills of each make up the good of all!
What blessedness! And as, with quaking voice, 
Mortal and pitiful ye cry, “All’s well,” 
The universe belies you, and your heart
Refutes a hundred times your mind’s conceit. …

What is the verdict of the vastest mind?
Silence: the book of fate is closed to us.
Man is a stranger to his own research;
He knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes. 
Tormented atoms in a bed of mud, 
Devoured by death, a mockery of fate;
But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes, 
Guided by thoughts, have measured the faint stars. 
Our being mingles with the infinite;
Ourselves we never see, or come to know.
This world, this theatre of pride and wrong, 
Swarms with sick fools who talk of happiness. …

Once did I sing, in less lugubrious tone,
The sunny ways of pleasure’s general rule;
The times have changed, and, taught by growing age, 
And sharing of the frailty of mankind,
Seeking a light amid the deepening gloom,
I can but suffer, and will not repine.

Voltaire became more pessimistic as he aged. Persecution and disillusionment had worn down his faith in life

A few months later the Seven Years’ War broke out; Voltaire looked upon it as madness and suicide, the devastation of Europe to settle whether England or France should win “a few acres of snow” in Canada. On the top of this came a public reply, by Jean Jacques Rousseau, to the poem on Lisbon. Man himself was to be blamed for the disaster, said Rousseau; if we lived out in the fields, and not in the towns, we should not be killed on so large a scale; if we lived under the sky, and not in houses, houses would not fall upon us. Voltaire was amazed at the popularity won by this profound theodicy; and angry that his name should be dragged into the dust by such a Quixote, he turned upon Rousseau “that most terrible of all the intellectual weapons ever wielded by man, the mockery of Voltaire.” In three days, in 1759, he wrote Candide. 

Voltaire was aghast at the tragedies unfolding in Europe and the justifications provided for them.

Never was pessimism so gaily argued; never was man made to laugh so heartily while learning that this is a world of woe. And seldom has a story been told with such simple and hidden art; it is pure narrative and dialogue; no descriptions pad it out; and the action is riotously rapid. “In Voltaire’s fingers,” said Anatole France, “the pen runs and laughs.” It is perhaps the finest short story in all literature. 

Candide, as his name indicates, is a simple and honest lad, son of the great Baron of Thunder-Ten-Trockh of Westphalia, and pupil of the learned Pangloss. 

Pangloss was professor of metaphysicotheologicocosmonigology. … “It is demonstrable,” said he, “that all is necessarily for the best end. Observe that the nose has been formed to bear spectacles … legs were visibly designed for stockings … stones were designed to construct castles … pigs were made so that we might have pork all the year round. Consequently, they who assert that all is well have said a foolish thing; they should have said all is for the best.” 

While Pangloss is discoursing, the castle is attacked by the Bulgarian army, and Candide is captured and turned into a soldier.

He was made to wheel about to the right and to the left, to draw his rammer, to return his rammer, to present, to fire, to march. … He resolved, one fine day in spring, to go for a walk, marching straight before him, believing that it was a privilege of the human as well as the animal species to make use of their legs as they pleased. He had advanced two leagues when he was overtaken by four heroes six feet tall, who bound him and carried him to a dungeon. He was asked which he would like the best, to be whipped six and thirty times through all the regiment, or to receive at once two balls of lead in his brain. He vainly said that human will is free, and that he chose neither the one nor the other. He was forced to make a choice; he determined, in virtue of that gift of God called liberty, to run the gauntlet six-and-thirty times. He bore this twice.

Candide escapes, takes passage to Lisbon, and on board ship meets Professor Pangloss, who tells how the Baron and Baroness were murdered and the castle destroyed. “All this,” he concludes, “was indispensable; for private misfortune makes the general good, so that the more private misfortunes there are, the greater is the general good.” They arrive in Lisbon just in time to be caught in the earthquake. After it is over they tell each other their adventures and sufferings; whereupon an old servant assures them that their misfortunes are as nothing compared with her own. “A hundred times I was on the point of killing myself, but I loved life. This ridiculous foible is perhaps one of our most fatal characteristics; for is there anything more absurd than to wish to carry continually a burden which one can always throw down?” Or, as another character expresses it, “All things considered, the life of a gondolier is preferable to that of a doge; but I believe the difference is so trifling that it is not worth the trouble of examining.”

The urge to survive is perhaps one of our most fatal characteristics, a foible.

Candide, fleeing from the Inquisition, goes to Paraguay; “there the Jesuit Fathers possess all, and the people nothing; it is a masterpiece of reason and justice.” In a Dutch colony. he comes upon a negro with one hand, one leg, and a rag for clothing. “When we work at the sugar canes,” the slave explains, “and the mill snatches hold of a finger, they cut off a hand; and when we try to run away, they cut off a leg. … This is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe.” Candide finds much loose gold in the unexplored interior; he returns to the coast and hires a vessel to take him to France; but the skipper sails off with the gold and leaves Candide philosophizing on the wharf. With what little remains to him, Candide purchases a passage on a ship bound for Bordeaux; and on board strikes up a conversation with an old sage, Martin. 

“Do you believe,” said Candide, “that men have always massacred one another as they do today, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites and fools?” 

“Do you believe,” said Martin, “that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they have found them?” 

”Without doubt,” said Candide. 

“Well, then,” said Martin, ”if hawks have always had the same character, why should you imagine that men have changed theirs?” . 

“Oh!” said Candide, “there is a vast deal of difference, for free will—“ 

And reasoning thus they arrived at Bordeaux.

We cannot follow Candide through the rest of his adventures, which form a rollicking commentary on the difficulties of medieval theology and Leibnitzian optimism. After suffering a variety of evils among a variety of men, Candide settles down as a farmer in Turkey; and the story ends with a final dialogue between master and pupil: 

Pangloss sometimes said to Candide: 

“There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle; … if you had not been put into the Inquisition; if you had not walked over America; … if you had not lost all your gold; … you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts.” 

“All that is very well,” answered Candide; ”but let us cultivate our garden.” 

Candide attacks the passivity inspired by Leibniz’s philosophy of optimism through the character Pangloss’s frequent refrain that circumstances are the “best of all possible worlds”.

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VOLTAIRE: Les Délices: The Essay on Morals

March 20, 2022 – 7:04 AM

Reference: The Story of Philosophy

This paper presents Chapter V Section 5 from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The  contents are from the 1933 reprint of this book by TIME INCORPORATED by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc.

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.

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V. Les Délices: The Essay on Morals

What was the cause of his new exile? That he had published in Berlin “the most ambitious, the most voluminous, the most characteristic, and the most daring of his works.” Its title was no small part of it: Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des Nations, et sur les principaux faits de l’histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à Louis XIII—an Essay on the Morals and the Spirit of the Nations from Charlemagne to Louis XIII. He had begun it at Cirey for Mme. du Chatelet, spurred on to the task by her denunciation of history as she is writ. 

Voltaire was exiled for publishing his Essay on Morals in Berlin.

It is “an old almanac,” she had said. “What does it matter to me, a Frenchwoman living on my estate, to know that Egil succeeded Haquin in Sweden, and that Ottoman was the son of Ortogrul? I have read with pleasure the history of the Greeks and the Romans; they offered me certain pictures which attracted me. But I have never yet been able to finish any long history of our modern nations. I can see scarcely anything in them but confusion; a host of minute events without connection or sequence, a thousand battles which settled nothing. I renounced a study which overwhelms the mind without illuminating it.” 

At Cirey, Mme. du Chatelet had denounced history as it is written, and this spurred Voltaire to write this essay.

Voltaire had agreed; he had made his Ingenu say, “History is nothing more than a picture of crimes and misfortunes”; and he was to write to Horace Walpole (July 15, l768): “Truly the history of the Yorkists and Lancastrians, and many others, is much like reading the history of highway robbers.” But he had expressed to Mme. du Chatelet the hope that a way out might lie in applying philosophy to history, and endeavoring to trace, beneath the flux of political events, the history of the human mind. “Only philosophers should write history,” he said. “In all nations, history is disfigured by fable, till at last philosophy comes to enlighten man; and when it does finally arrive in the midst of this darkness, it finds the human mind so blinded by centuries of error, that it can hardly undeceive it; it finds ceremonies, facts and monuments, heaped up to prove lies.” “History,” he concludes, “is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead”; we transform the past to suit our wishes for the future, and in the upshot “history proves that anything can be proved by history.” 

These remarks on history by Voltaire are brilliant. He saw history distorted by man to suit his wishes for the future.

He worked like a miner to find in this “Mississippi of falsehoods” the grains of truth about the real history of mankind. Year after year he gave himself to preparatory studies: a History of Russia, a History of Charles XII, The Age of Louis XIV, and The Age of Louis XIII; and through these tasks he developed in himself that unflagging intellectual conscience which enslaves a man to make a genius. “The Jesuit Père Daniel, who produced. a History of France, had placed before him in the Royal Library of Paris 1200 volumes of documents and manuscripts; spent an hour or so looking through them; and then, turning to Father Tournemine, the former teacher of Voltaire, dismissed the matter by declaring that all this material was ‘useless old paper which he had no need of for the purpose of writing his history.'”  Not so Voltaire: he read everything on his subject that he could lay his hands on; he pored over hundreds of volumes of memoirs; he wrote hundreds of letters to survivors of famous events; and even after publishing his works he continued to study, and improved every edition. 

Voltaire was very meticulous in studying in detail, the subject he was writing on.

But this gathering of material was only preparatory; what was needed was a new method of selection and arrangement. Mere facts would not do—even if, as so seldom happens, they were facts. “Details that lead to nothing are to history what baggage is to an army, impedimenta; we must look at things in the large, for the very reason that the human mind is so small, and sinks under the weight of minutiae.” “Facts'” should be collected by annalists and arranged in some kind of historical dictionary where one might find them at need, as one finds words. What Voltaire sought was a unifying principle by which the whole history of civilization in Europe could be woven on one thread; and he was convinced that this thread was the history of culture. He was resolved that, his history should deal, not with kings but with movements, forces, and masses; not with nations but with the human race; not with wars but with the march of the human mind. “Battles and revolutions are the smallest part of the plan; squadrons and battalions conquering or being conquered, towns taken and retaken, are common to ‘all history. … Take away the arts and the progress of the mind, and you will find nothing” in any age ”remarkable enough to attract the attention of posterity.” “I wish to write a history not of wars, but of society; and to ascertain how men lived in the interior of their families, and what were the arts which they commonly cultivated. … My object is the history of the human mind, and not a mere detail of petty facts; nor am I concerned with the history of great lords …; but I want to know what were the steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilization.” This rejection of Kings from history was part of that democratic uprising which at last rejected them from government; the Essai sur les Moeurs began the dethronement of the Bourbons. 

What Voltaire sought was a unifying principle by which the whole history of civilization in Europe could be woven on one thread; and he was convinced that this thread was the history of culture.

And so he produced the first philosophy of history—the first systematic attempt to trace the streams of natural causation in the development of the European mind; it was to be expected that such an experiment should follow upon the abandonment of supernatural explanations: history could not come into its own until theology gave way. According to Buckle, Voltaire’s book laid the basis of modern historical science; Gibbon, Niebuhr, Buckle and Grote were his grateful debtors and followers; he was the caput Nili of them all, and is still unsurpassed in the field which he first explored. 

Voltaire’s book laid the basis of modern historical science. History could not come into its own until theology gave way.

But why did his greatest book bring him exile? Because, by telling the truth, it offended everybody. It especially enraged the clergy by taking the view later developed by Gibbon, that the rapid conquest of paganism by Christianity had disintegrated Rome from within and prepared it to fall an easy victim to the invading and immigrating barbarians. It enraged them further by giving much less space than usual to Judea and Christendom, and by speaking of China, India and Persia, and of their faiths, with the impartiality of a Martian; in this new perspective a vast and novel world was revealed; every dogma faded into relativity; the endless East took on something of the proportions given it by geography; Europe suddenly became conscious of itself as the experimental peninsula of a continent and a culture greater than its own. How could it forgive a European for so unpatriotic a revelation? The King decreed that this Frenchman who dared to think of himself as a man first and a Frenchman afterward should never put foot upon the soil of France again. 

Voltaire’s greatest book bring him exile because by telling the truth, it offended everybody. In this new perspective a vast and novel world was revealed; every dogma faded into relativity; the endless East took on something of the proportions given it by geography…

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