The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  Thenceforward all established values are upset. Men had always taken themselves as their starting point, their transitory appearance, their habits, their failings, their faults, their vices, and by a ridiculous twist of their complacent imagination had made themselves a god in their own image—greedy, selfish, open to flattery, vindictive, cruel. But he, Spinoza, took quite a different line; he started with God, and into that rational God he reintegrated man. Man was no longer an imperium in imperio; he was merged henceforth in the universal order. By the same token the problem of evil no longer presented itself. “All that is, is for the same reason, a necessary expression of the divine essence; every force that acts is, in the measure in which it acts, a manifestation of the divine power; wherefore, God being absolute good, each creature has as much right as power, every deed, being attached by the same bond of necessity to the being of God, is fulfilled with the like lawfulness.”[20]

  The problem of freedom presented itself otherwise; of the liberty of indifference there could no longer be any question, but only of the progressive assimilation of the thought to a substance which understands that it is no longer pre-ordained to act save through itself. A man is a slave when he is powerless to govern and restrain his passions; but, an inclination ceasing to be passive as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it, man becomes free when he is capable of directing and controlling his bodily appetites as his understanding directs, and of subordinating them to the love of God.

  The pursuit of happiness also took on another significance, and, changing its road, at length reached its goal. Happiness does not consist in the gratification of the passions, as some grosser natures, who do not aspire to the loftier heights of knowledge, believe to be the case. Neither is it the renunciation of all the pleasures of this world in expectation of a paradise to come as, under one form or another, the various religions suppose. Happiness consists in understanding truth; in adherence to the laws of the universal order, and in the consciousness, in one’s own particular instance, of having done so. In his own case Spinoza believes that he has attained that happy state, which is the bringer of peace; he looks with compassion on poor, erring humanity, and he points out the practical effect which his philosophy is bound to have on the conduct of life:

  “I. According to this theory, we act only through the will of God, we share in the divine nature, and this participation increases as our actions approach perfection, and our knowledge of God grows more complete. Such a doctrine, in addition to bringing perfect tranquillity to the mind, has this further advantage, in that it shows us wherein our sovereign felicity consists, that is to say, in the knowledge of God, which knowledge leads us to act only as love and our duty towards God may direct. II. Our system . . . teaches us to await, and to bear with equanimity, whatever of good or of ill fortune may have in store for us. The truth is that all things are brought to pass by God’s eternal law with the same absolute necessity as that which ordains that the sum of the three angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles. III. Another respect in which our system is beneficial to social life is that it teaches us to refrain from hatred or contempt, and to make no man a target for mockery, envy, or wrath. Furthermore, it teaches every man to be content with what he has, and to render aid to others, not from a womanish sense of pity, nor from partiality, nor from superstition, but solely because his reason bids him.”[21]

  He who ensures for himself a place in heaven is no longer the god-fearing man who cleanses himself from the stain of original sin and wins his way aloft by his good works—not he, but the Sage, the philosopher:

  “The principles I have laid down bring out clearly the lofty character of the Philosopher. . . . It is hardly possible that his spirit should be troubled. Possessing by virtue of a kind of eternal necessity knowledge of himself, of God and of things in general he never ceases to be, and true peace of the spirit is his for all eternity.”[22]

  But the wisdom he has in mind is no cheap, commonplace brand, easily acquired, but something that surpasses the stoicism of the Stoics themselves. Harmonious, and not to be won without a struggle, it is worthy to rival Christianity. And so we might have looked for a grand intellectual trial of strength between the two opposing champions, the Christian and the Sage. If, as has been truly pointed out, Pascal’s Pensées and Spinoza’s Ethics furnish “the most perfect description of the goals towards which the two ideals, religion on the one hand, philosophy on the other, respectively direct their efforts,”[23] what a noble contest we might have witnessed between these two conceptions of life, these two attitudes of mind, these rival sovereignties.

  But Pascal, as we have already remarked, had no disciples, and Baruch Spinoza, as an architect of ideas, was not, for the time being at any rate, sufficiently understood. He will have his revenge later on. The time will come when the German metaphysicians will take their cue from him, and when the appearance of the Ethics will be looked back upon as one of the great landmarks in the history of the West.[24] But we had not arrived at that point in 1677. The time was not ripe. The nutriment was too strong. If the Tractatus was better understood than the Ethics, it would have been on its negative side, as an instrument of destruction.

  These ideas of Spinoza—what crowds of people attacked them without knowing what they were about, without studying them, without so much as troubling to glance at them! Even among those who did make some sort of an effort, how many had a sufficient grasp of them to discuss them intelligently, to do anything more than utter vain words of protestation! The Cartesians at any rate, his intellectual kinsfolk, would, one might have thought, have given him a hospitable reception. But no, it was precisely those ideas which made them so uncomfortable and caused them to shut the door in his face. They found this cousin of theirs too embarrassing by half, and blushed for him. More vigorously than Bekker, the author of le Monde enchanté , who repudiated him, more trenchantly than Jean Le Clerc who dubbed him “the most notorious atheist of our day”, Malebranche refused to have anything whatever to do with him, vehemently denying a charge which his adversaries took a malicious delight in laying at his door, and from which his friends thought it incumbent on them to defend him. On at least two occasions, in 1683, in his Méditations chrétiennes, and again in 1685, in his Entretiens sur la métaphysique et sur la religion, he speaks of the injustice done, not only to his religion but to his philosophy, by people who likened his ideas to those professed by “the wretched Spinoza”.

  Bayle was obsessed by Spinoza. He frequently refers to him by name. Time and time again, when disinterring some bygone heresy, he remarked on the resemblance it bore to the views of Spinoza. He could not help admiring the man, the man who did not willingly brook interference in matters of conscience, who had had the courage to express freely and openly what he thought and believed, and who, having lived a worthy life, had departed from it without recanting. To have been the first to reduce atheism to a system, to have given it definite doctrinal form, to have integrated and inter-related its several parts, after the manner of the geometricians, all this was by no means calculated to evoke Pierre Bayle’s disapproval. Far from it. Still there was one point in Spinoza’s metaphysic which did repel him. If he describes his teaching as the most monstrous hypothesis anyone could possibly imagine, the most irrational, the most diametrically opposed to the clearest deductions of human reason, it was not that he was trying to give that teaching a wider currency while pretending to denounce it. His antagonism was sincere; it crops up too often to be regarded as a ruse, as a move in the game. Not so; his wrath, his indignation were thoroughly genuine. He himself was profoundly preoccupied with the problem of evil. Nothing had ever been more present to his mind, but, of all the solutions ever dreamt of, Spinoza’s struck him as the worst. What! Are we to regard the Infinite as producing within himself all the follies, all the aberrations, all the crimes of the human race? He is to be not only the cause efficient, but the passive subject thereof. He is to mingle with them in the most intimate u
nion the mind can conceive. For it is a penetrative union, or rather it is an actual identity, since the mode is not really distinct from the substance modified. “That men should hate one another, that they should spring out of a thicket and murder one another, that they should range themselves in armies to butcher one another, that the victors should sometimes make a meal off the vanquished—all that one can understand because men are, we suppose, different from one another, and because ‘What is yours’ and ‘What is mine’ excite warring passions among them. But if men are but modes of one and the same being, if the God that changes himself into a Turk is one and the same as the God that changes himself into an Hungarian, then, that there should be wars and battles between them, is the most outrageous idea ever thought of, surpassing the wildest ravings of the craziest brain that ever found a home in a madhouse.”[25]

  If we look about for a philosopher capable of standing up to Spinoza on equal terms, capable of understanding his Ethics and of countering his ideas with a reasoned refutation based on a philosophy of his own, we shall find but one, and he was Leibniz. The Tractatus, however, was another matter; no need to be terribly learned to understand that, at least the gist of it, and to quarry it for stones to throw at the Bible, and at the royal power. Hence, in defiance of the censorship, masquerading under borrowed names, the wide circulation it attained; hence, the bitter criticisms it provoked; hence, too, and in freedom-loving Holland, its denunciation to the authorities, and its formal condemnation.

  This explains the widely divergent estimates that have come down to us regarding the nature and scope of his influence. Arnauld has it that the freethinking school got all their ideas from Spinoza. Jurieu retorted that not ten unbelievers in a million ever so much as heard of him. Dubos declares that to read Spinoza, and to get at his meaning, one must have a vast deal of stamina; that is why your freethinker makes the most of this world, without troubling himself about the next, or about Spinoza. Fénelon is of the same opinion; whoever may have been the freethinkers’ favourite author in his day, he gives us plainly to understand that it was not Spinoza. On the other hand we find Père Lamy declaring that the number of Spinoza’s followers increases every day: many are the members of the younger generation that have had their heads turned by his erroneous teaching; someone who ought to know what is going on in the world has told him so for a fact. Contradictory witnesses, and all of them telling the truth. Of disciples, in the strict sense of the word, Spinoza had scarcely any, outside Holland and Germany. “Very few people are suspected of sharing his doctrines and of those, few have seriously studied them, and of those who have, fewer still have grasped his meaning and not been put off by the obscurities and incomprehensible abstractions which they are called upon to encounter. But the truth of the matter is this: by and large, everyone who has little religion in him, or none at all, and doesn’t much care who knows it, is dubbed a Spinozist.”[26]

  He betook himself to the freethinkers to fire their audacity and urge them to revolt. And he betook himself to the Italian unbelievers; for such there were; you get a hint of him in the pages of a rebel like Count Alberto di Passerano who attacked religion and the political power of Rome. He provided weapons for the German school of unbelief, Mathias Knutsen and his band of Conscienciari, F. W. Stosch and the rest of them, as well as for the English Deists, Shaftesbury, Collins, Tindal, and, most blatant and conspicuous of them all, John Toland.

  A queer personage indeed, this John Toland! He had got drunk on “reason”; it had gone to his head. Christianity not mysterious was his war-cry, in the book that made him famous in 1696. “No mystery about Christianity”, he gave out, and that for the plain and sufficient reason that there are no mysteries, they simply don’t exist. Mystery—the very word is pagan, like so many others we have clung to. It either means a superstition of some sort, and should be stamped out, or it denotes some problem by which we are temporarily baffled, but must sooner or later resolve. Either Christianity is reason, and is part and parcel of the universal order, sloughing off all that is extraneous thereto—tradition, dogmas, rites, creed, faith; or else it could not exist, since nothing in the world can be above reason, or contrary to it.

  John Toland was not an unlettered individual. He had taken his M.A. at Glasgow; he had studied at Edinburgh, Leyden and Oxford. He had delved into ancient history, only to discover that it was one colossal imposture and that its chroniclers were, one and all, a pack of deceivers. The Scriptures he had gone into, only to inform us that they were apocryphal, and that the so-called miracles they recorded were susceptible of a perfectly natural explanation, laying about him right and left, slashing, dashing, foaming at the mouth, trumping up all manner of things and, altogether, making confusion worse confounded. He acquainted himself with polite letters, poetry, great oratory, only to report that the utterances of the sanctified humbugs of every religion were merely their way of deceiving people, and leading them by the nose. He was a born mischief-maker and scandalmonger, puffed up with vanity, fond of creating an uproar, very cock-a-hoop when fortune favoured, yet not averse to being pelted at because the brick-bats at least made a clatter about him as they fell.

  But in this John Toland, whose iconoclastic energy lent vigour to the activities we have just enumerated, we must not expect to find originality. Time and again, as we read him, we catch echoes of Fontenelle and Bayle, of Bekker and Van Dale, of Hobbes and Spinoza. Moreover, if we were in any doubt about the matter, the overt quotations he makes from these authors would satisfy us that the similarity of ideas was not fortuitous, but the result of conscious plagiarism. His head was crammed with things he had read, and the ideas of his predecessors keep cropping up in little shreds and patches in everything he wrote. No; for originality in the man we shall look in vain, but what we shall find in him is a sort of morbid mental excitement, uncontrollable rage: the explosion of feelings long dammed up by Irish Catholicism and English Puritanism, to say nothing of respect for common decency—all these shackles one day burst asunder and the report sounded like a mighty shout of defiance.

  John Toland was born in Ireland, a Catholic. Subsequently, he turned Protestant. He declared, with a self-satisfied toss of the head, that, from his cradle upwards, he had been nourished in an atmosphere of superstition and idolatry, but that his own reasoning, certain friends abetting, had been the auspicious means that had led to his conversion. When he was but a lad of sixteen, he had been as full of zeal against the Papists as ever he had been since. And that zeal of his was not only anti-Papal, but anti-Anglican, in fact “anti” any religious body which might have made an effort, however slight, to curb that exasperated spirit of his, or raised a finger against his ideas of freedom, ideas that refused to brook so much as the shadow of a yoke. After the successful appearance of his Christianity not mysterious, he went across to Ireland, there to bask in the sunshine of his scandalous reputation, to show off his eloquence in the various cafés and, generally, to cut a dash. But his luck was out. No one would look at him. Everywhere he was snubbed, cold-shouldered, shown the door. He was regarded as a sort of lower animal; beyond the pale. Molyneux, the mathematician, to whom Locke had recommended him when he first began to attract attention, wrote to the philosopher telling him about his downfall. “Mr. Toland has at last been driven to quit the country. Poor fellow, his own untactful behaviour made him so universally disliked that it was risky to be known to have exchanged a single word with him. And so everybody who valued his reputation gave him a wide berth. At last, according to what I heard, he was actually going hungry; and no one would have him at his table. When the modest sum he brought over with him was all spent, I am told he was reduced to going round borrowing half-crowns from all and sundry. They say he had not the wherewithal to pay his barber, his tailor or his landlady. To complete his discomfiture, Parliament condemned his book and gave orders for it to be burned by the public hangman. After that, he disappeared from these parts, and no one knows where he has made for.”

  This stat
e of outlawry explains to some extent his mental attitude. The touch of the aristocrat, of good breeding you find in the French “libertin”; the purely intellectual make-up of a Bayle; the dignified bearing of a Spinoza are all very foreign to the character of Toland. His dream was to become the founder of a religion, a sort of Mahomet; but he lacked the power and prestige. Yet what a hater he was, using all the resources of a ready tongue and a nimble wit to envenom his vituperations. And how he loathed priests, every single one of them, from the tribe of Levi onwards; for the Levites, too, were tricksters, nothing more nor less. On the priesthood he poured forth all the vials of his wrath. He denounced them for liars and malefactors; he was anti-clerical to the marrow of his bones.