The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  Free-thinkers—and free-livers—betrayed a marked predilection for China:

  Vossius apportait un traité de la Chine

  Où cette nation paraît plus que divine.

  In it he said that the only aristocracy recognized by the Chinese was the aristocracy of letters; that they cherished the memory only of those princes who had been lovers of justice and of peace; that the Emperor’s counsellors and favourites, philosophers all of them, reproved their master with as much freedom as that with which the prophets of old had been wont to admonish the Kings of Judaea. Had they neglected to do so they would have incurred the censure and indignation of the people. La Mothe Le Vayer is reported to have refrained with the utmost difficulty from crying, Sancte Confuci, ora pro nobis! but that was before he had read the works of the Chinese philosopher. When they got to know him better, when they came to take part in the dispute about ceremonies, two points clearly emerged: one was that the Chinese civilization was admirable, the other was that it was fundamentally pagan. What a windfall for the freethinkers, and how they made the most of it!

  In the political sphere, for example: The Chinese know nothing of Revelation; they assign to the intrinsic power of matter everything that we attribute to the power of the spirit, the existence of which they deny, as something beyond the limits of possibility. They are blind, and perhaps stubborn. But this they have been for four or five thousand years, and neither their ignorance nor their stubbornness has robbed their political organization of a single one of those wonderful benefits which every reasonable man looks for, and should naturally derive, from a human society: amenities, plenty, the practice of the useful arts, the pursuit of learning, peace and security.[9]

  In matters of religion: it is a matter for astonishment that, among the divers religions of the world, only a single one has been found which, rejecting alike the supernatural and the bugbears of superstitious terror, which are supposed to be such powerful agents in regulating human conduct, only one, I repeat, has been found whose principles are based solely on the necessity of man’s obedience to nature.[10]

  The Chinese are atheists, not in a negative sense, after the manner of the savage races of America, but conscious, deliberate atheists. They are pious—and they are Spinozists!

  So far as I can judge the sentiments of the educated Chinese, in the light of accounts brought home by travellers, and particularly by Fr. Gobien in his Histoire de l’Edit de l’Empereur de la Chine en faveur de la religion chrétienne, it appears to me that they are all in agreement with Spinoza in holding that there is no other reality in the universe save that Matter to which Spinoza applies the name of God, and Straton that of Nature.[11]

  The Kindly Savage, the Wise Egyptian, the Mohammedan Arab, the Turkish, or the Persian, Satirist—all these were highly diverting and most welcome to those who were looking for a new order of things. But still more popular than any of these was the Chinese sage.

  Those who travel in European countries are for the most part sober-minded observers enough; travellers in America, Africa or Asia, fired by the spirit of adventure, or by greed, or by zeal, are considerably more excitable; while those who travel in the Land of Make-Believe know no restraint at all.

  There are plenty of these latter, and the difficulty is to know which to choose. Are we to accompany Jacques Sadeur to those far-off lands in the South where he dwelt for five-and-thirty years or more? Shall we set sail with Captain Siden to the land where the Severambes dwell? Shall we fare to that island of Calejava where the inhabitants are all models of good sense? Or shall we land on that other isle, the isle of Naudeley, where they are all models of good behaviour? Shall we entertain ourselves with the story of the adventures of Jacques Massé? They are a long way from being works of art, these imaginary narratives. The heroes we are invited to meet are appallingly long-winded gentlemen, who are not shy of treating you to elaborate harangues and ponderous digressions. Their style is lumbering and pedestrian. Wrapt up in themselves, they inflict on you the most minutely detailed catalogue of all the knowledge they possess, the relentless recital of all their virtues. The authors of these works are usually just rolling-stones, or deserters from another camp, who load their pages with statements of the views and opinions which have earned them the reprobation of their former comrades. As for the rest, they are ordinary, bourgeois folk endeavouring to escape from their repressions and indulging in visions of the might-have-been.

  The recipe is always the same. It invariably begins with a reference to some manuscript which has been carefully handed down, or else miraculously brought to light. How is it that this sort of thing never loses its fascination for story-writers? They all use it unblushingly, one after another, as if they had each hit on something entirely new. This precious document relates the adventures of some enterprising hero who braves the perils of the deep, suffers shipwreck, is washed ashore, and finds himself in some quite unknown land, preferably in the southern hemisphere. Now comes the main point, the real business of the whole affair, which is a voluminous account of the land on which he finds himself, a land never before heard of, a land of which the geographers had no inkling. The author borrows freely from previous Utopias, as well as from the narratives of those who have travelled in distant countries. Some further touches, generally rather absurd, and a few bordering on the indecent, are dragged in. For example, Jacques Seden is a hermaphrodite, which is just as well for him, because the country in which he finds himself is inhabited exclusively by hermaphrodites who look on normally formed people as monstrosities and forthwith put them to death. But such tit-bits are merely frills, embroidery; the essential part of the scheme is to get oneself transported by some means or other to an imaginary land, and there to hold an enquiry into the religious, political and social conditions of the old world; to demonstrate that Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, are barbarous and irrational; that governments in general and monarchical governments in particular are iniquitous and hateful; that society ought to be rebuilt from top to bottom. When all this has been duly performed, it only remains for the hero to get himself back to Europe, and there give up the ghost.

  What is particularly noticeable in these tales is the passion for destruction that runs through them all. Not a tradition which escapes challenge, not an idea, however familiar, which is not assailed; not an authority that is allowed to stand. Institutions of every kind are demolished, and negation is the order of the day. Elderly sages put in an appearance at convenient junctures to preach lay sermons, in place of duly ordained ministers of religion. They descant in glowing terms of incorruptible republics, of tolerant oligarchies, of peace induced by persuasion, of religion without a priesthood, without churches, and of work so innocent of drudgery that it becomes a pleasure. They hold forth about the wisdom that prevails in their land, admirable land, where the very name and notion of sin are forgotten. They dogmatize against dogma. There comes a flash of the imaginative here and there to bring back the atmosphere of adventure, or a “spicy” jest to put the reader in a cheerful frame of mind; so, at least, the author hopes. Then, off he starts again, showing how weary, stale, flat and irrational is our ordinary, workaday mode of life, following up all this with a dazzling account of the happy times enjoyed by the people of that Never-never Land.

  Still more striking is the ascendancy of the geometrical spirit. Everything must be tape-measured. Everything must be arranged according to number and dimension, codified and card-indexed. Authors catch the craze. It enters into their dreams and colours their wildest imaginings. Fearsome and tyrannical is this mania for uniformity. It affects every department of life; even language, everyday speech, feels the effects of its influence. We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us. Housing, too, must be strictly rationalized. There are groups called Sézains. Each sézain comprises sixteen districts, each district contains twenty-five houses; there are four rooms to each house; each room holds four people; that’s how a State should be run. That’s or
ganization. Streets laid out on a regular, uniform plan; big square buildings, all of a size, all of a pattern. That’s town planning, if you like! Gardens all the same size, and all perfect rectangles, with trees planted in rows arranged according to the relative beauty or utility of the trees themselves. Ah, what heavenly gardens! With figures you can prove anything, even the impossibility of the resurrection of the body. Imagine a country with 41,600 villages; each village contains 22 families, and each family consists of 9 persons; total, 8,236,000 inhabitants, representing 10,400,000 cubic feet of flesh. This formidable mass doubles itself every sixty years. Calculate what that would come to in ten thousand years: a mountain immeasurably bigger than the earth itself; therefore the resurrection of the body is impossible. Mountains are irritating, irregular things to look at, and irregularity offends the eye. So what do these southerners do? They level them.

  When the mind has drunk deep of that sort of thing, the awakening, the return to concrete reality, is a rude experience. Perhaps, however, we ought to have put it that it was concrete reality that was forced willy-nilly into a sort of geometrical strait-jacket. The coming of Christ, because it staggered the reason, was pronounced a myth; similarly the Bible, because it sometimes puzzled the mind, was declared to be untrue. Real wisdom rejects all but the self-evident. Of all the inventors of Utopias, the one who thought the deepest and searched the longest, Tyssot de Patot, the author of Voyages et Aventures de Jacques Massé (1710), writes in his letters: “For so many years now I have been treading the broad, well-lit thoroughfares of geometry, that it pains me to think of the dark and narrow alley-ways of religion. . . . I must insist, everywhere and always, that a thing should be evident, or at least possible.”[12]

  These are the kind of books in which you will find a deal of rubbish mixed up with a number of miscellaneous but useful odds and ends; in which you will find some ideas very rough-hewn, but very vehement; and sentiments clumsily stated but dynamic. They presage the coming not only of Swift, Voltaire, Rousseau, but of the Jacobins, of Robespierre.

  Travel: that did not as yet connote the sensitive soul setting forth in search of dazzling scenes of beauty, wandering under the varying skies of divers lands, essaying to record its own sensations. If it was not that, it meant at all events comparing manners and customs, rules of life, philosophies, religions; arriving at some notion of the relative; discussing; doubting. Among those who wandered up and down the earth in order to bring home tidings of the great unknown, there was more than one free-thinker.

  To read these travellers’ tales was a form of escapism. It took one away from a world of intellectual stability into a world of movement and flux. What a host of ideas, hesitant, tentative, were evoked by getting to know something about the Empire of China or the Kingdom of the Great Mogul. As one pondered on these warring dogmas, every one of which claimed to be the vehicle of the one and only Truth; on these divers civilizations, each one of which boasted that it, and it alone, was perfect—what a School for Sceptics was there! “Blind are they, and ignorant of life, who suppose that Europe is self-sufficing; that she has nothing to ask from her neighbours. . . . There is no doubt that if she could open up communications with the Australians she would become a vastly different place from what she is to-day.” Europe did not open up communications with the Australians; but, of all those regions which competed for her attention, she responded most readily to the East. It was an East gravely distorted by the European view of it; nevertheless, it retained enough of its original impressiveness to loom forth as a vast agglomeration of non-Christian values, a huge block of humanity which had constructed its moral system, its concept of truth, on lines peculiarly its own. This was one of the reasons why the conscience of the old Europe was stirred and perplexed, and why, seeking to be thrown into confusion, it obtained what it sought.[13]

  [1]Trotti de la Chétardie, Instructions pour un jeune Seigneur, ou l’idée du galant homme, Paris, 1683, p. 68.

  [2]Giovanni Paolo Marana, Lettre d’un Sicilien à l’un de ses amis, concernant une agréable critique de Paris et des Français, 1700 et 1710.

  [3]Gregorio Leti, Historia e memorie sopra la vita di O. Cromvele, Amsterdam, 1692. French translation 1694; reprinted 1793, p. 46.

  [4]For the effects of travel on the mind in the times immediately preceding those with which we are here concerned, see Henri Busson’s La pensée religieuse française de Charron à Pascal, 1933, p. 284.

  [5]Essay upon Heroick Virtue. In the Miscellanea of 1690.

  [6]Pensées sur la Comète, 1683, ch. XIV, LXXIII, LXXXIX, CXXIX, CLXV; and passim.

  [7]See below, Part I, chap. II.

  [8]Preface to Journal du Voyage du chevalier Chardin en Perse, 1686.

  [9]Boulainvilliers, La Vie de Mahomed, 1730, p. 180–181.

  [10]Boulainvilliers, Réfutation des erreurs de Spinoza, 1731, p. 303.

  [11]Collins, Letter to Dodwell on the immortality of the soul, London, 1769, p. 289.

  [12]Tyssot de Patot, Lettres choisies, 1727, L. 67.

  [13]Gabriel de Foigny, La Terre austra e connue, 1676, chap XI.

  II

  THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH

  THOSE writers of the old school, those beloved Classics! What wonderful models they were! Whenever they took it upon them to write, and whatever they wrote, the result was always some work of outstanding nobility. In the sphere of philosophy, they had bequeathed to the world a moral system to which Christianity had but to add the crowning touches. On the field of battle, they had borne themselves like heroes; not story-book heroes, such as Roland and Amadis, but heroes of real flesh and blood. And so, in literature, in philosophy, and in the art of life, we could scarcely do other than mould ourselves on their example.

  Then all of a sudden (so, at least, the thing appeared) a number of impious creatures arrived on the scene, uttering the rankest blasphemies; these were “the Moderns”, who overturned the altars of the ancient gods. And behold! the word itself, the mere word modern, had suddenly become a sort of wonder-working shibboleth, a magic formula which robbed the past of all its power. At first, people were “modern” timidly, half-heartedly. After a while, they came to look on it as a feather in their cap, and bragged about it, trailing their coats. The past, with all its mighty dead, was set at nought. The great thing now was to feel the insolent rapture of youth, to drink deep of its vivifying spirit, to make the most of the day while the day lasted, though the night was bound to come. Better stake all on the present, and leave eternity to take care of itself. Like Marivaux’s Trivelin, people came to think that to have four thousand years on your shoulders was nothing to be proud of, but, on the contrary, an intolerable burden. A new superstition, a new fetish, came into being, and we have not rid ourselves of it even yet. Novelty, which in the nature of things must be perishable, fleeting, has assumed such overwhelming importance in our eyes, that, if it is absent, nothing else avails; if it is present, nothing else is needed. If we would escape the reproach of nullity, if we would avoid being objects of ridicule, if we would save ourselves from utter boredom, we have to be constantly more and more advanced, in art, in morals, in politics, in ideas, and now, such is our nature, all we care about, all that matters to us, is the shock of wonderment and surprise.[1]

  The Past abandoned; the Present enthroned in its place! Yet another transition! How are we to account for it? How came it that a whole section of Europe’s intelligentsia suddenly dropped the cult of antiquity, which the Renaissance and the classical age had so consistently professed? The famous battle between the Ancients and the Moderns, which is commonly advanced in explanation of the phenomenon, is, in fact, but a symptom of it. Its root-cause is for us to discover.

  In their inmost consciousness, men had come to look on history as a very broken reed. The very notion of historicity was tending to disappear. If, now, men turned their backs on the past, it was because they thought it something evanescent, Protean, something impossible to grasp and retain, something inherently and inveteratel
y deceptive. People no longer trusted those who professed to understand and interpret it. Those who pretended to do so deceived either themselves or their readers. A sort of landslide had taken place, and in its track, in what remained after its passage, nothing was to be seen for certain but what immediately confronted the eye, that is to say the “here and now”—in other words, the Present. Henceforth, all the alluring visions lay in front, and not behind.

  It was the modern historians who first came under the suspicion of not being the surest of guides. There were a good many of them: Mézeray, Fr. Maimbourg, Varillas, Vertot, Saint-Réal, Fr. Daniel, and that Fr. Buffier who packed up kings, queens, treaties, battles, empires, provinces, cities, in little tuneful rhymes, for people to learn by heart. And Laurence Eachard; Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon; Abel Boyer; and, best known of them all, Gilbert Burnet. There was Antonio de Solis who, in 1684, enriched the literature of Spain with a brilliant History of the Conquest of Mexico. And many others besides these, who yearn to be called back from the world of shadows, but who cannot, in common fairness, be adjudged worthy of that privilege. Differ as they might among themselves, there were, nevertheless, some points on which they were all agreed: History is a school of morals, a sovereign court of justice, a stage of honour for good rulers, a place of retribution for bad ones. She enables you to gain an insight into the human character, for she is “a spiritual anatomy of human action”. But first and foremost, history is an art. To quote the words of M. Cordemoy, tutor to the Dauphin, “A man is far better employed in effectively displaying the facts of history, than in digging out the evidence for them. It is better for him to aim at infusing beauty, power, precision and brevity into his composition, than at acquiring a reputation for factual infallibility in everything he writes”.