The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  Bossuet was less demonstrative, and kept his feelings far more to himself. Had he wounded Leibniz, when he charged him with heresy and contumacy? And did Leibniz grieve at such a verdict? If so, he, too, was grieved; but, said he, Leibniz would have been the first to blame me had I shilly-shallied and beaten about the bush when what he demanded was that people should speak their minds and say exactly what they meant. There was a blend of humility and bluntness in the way he replied to his adversary’s reproaches: “If you will be good enough to point out just where you consider my answers have fallen short of your requirements, I will undertake to give you full satisfaction, looking neither to the right nor to the left, but going ahead with all the candour you could look for from a man whose joy in collaborating with so able and conscientious a colleague in the task of healing, if it may be, the wounds inflicted on the Church by so lamentable a schism, can never be exceeded”.

  Leibniz had a new idea. He thought it would be good thing to get Bishop Spinola to draw up a memorandum setting forth the Protestant point of view, while he himself would be responsible for another explaining the Catholic position. The proposal did not commend itself to Bossuet. Truth was not double faced. Truth is one and immutable. Truth is eternal. He holds to the rule which had nourished him, mind and soul, which had been his guide all through his life: cling only to that which abideth.

  With less regret, but without rancour, without bitterness, he beheld the disappearance of a mirage which had never wholly captured his imagination. In his case it was the religious sense that triumphed over the political. To abandon the project of reunion was to rob Europe of all hope of that spiritual peace whereof she had never stood more desperately in need. But if reunion was to be attained only at the cost of conceding that the Catholic Church was fallible, that there had been occasions when she had condemned and excommunicated without just cause, that she had sometimes contradicted her own enunciations and varied her teaching—if this was the price to be paid, it was too high, for it meant undermining the Church’s very foundations. Suffer but one solitary breach to be made in the breastwork of authority, and all the heresies would enter through it one after another, and the Temple of Truth would be laid in ruins. Between these alternatives Bossuet had to choose, and choose he did: If perforce it must be so then let the schismatics abide in their error, but let the Church continue to flourish even as an immemorial tree that has but shed a withered branch.

  It is time, now, to ring down the curtain. He has outlived his destiny and the burden of the years is heavy upon him. The people who should have stood by him in his hour of need, desert him. He suffers agony from the gravel. He groans and cries aloud with the pain of it. No sooner, however, does his malady give him a little respite, than he orders his litter, takes the road again, and repairs once more to the King, from whom in the days of old he had always drawn new strength and courage; but now the King himself is going downhill. Besides, he cannot work miracles. He cannot restore their vanished youth to folk with one foot in the grave.

  Bracing himself up against the pain that was racking him, “hardly able to keep on his legs”, he was a pathetic figure as he tried to make obeisance to his sovereign. He was continually to be seen at Versailles. The courtiers laughed at the broken-down grand old man, a little ludicrous now, and something of a trial. “Has he made up his mind to die at Court?” said the somewhat heartless Madame de Maintenon, under her breath. In 1703, at the procession of the Assumption, in which he would insist on taking part, he presented a sorry spectacle. His friends were grief-stricken, the general public deplored the sight and the older Court habitués laughed at it. “Bear up, M. de Meaux”, Madame de Maintenon kept saying all along the route, “we shall get there.” “Poor Monsieur de Meaux!” said some, and others, “He managed very well”. But the comment of the majority was, “Why doesn’t he go and die in his own house?”[7]

  It fared no better with Leibniz. He went on dreaming his dreams. China must be converted, not by showing the Chinese they were wrong, but by bringing out the analogies between their religion and our own, by delving right down to the basic, underlying unity of the human spirit. But he came up against reality, and the experience undeceived him; for reality is not a thing you can mould to suit your own ideas, it is not something the mind can shape as it thinks it will. It is proof against all such attempts. There is no characteristic you can declare to be universal; no union possible among the Churches. Vain projects, all of them! Empty, elusive dreams! Fontenelle, describing him to the Académie des Sciences, portrays him as a triumphant figure, “something like those dexterous charioteers of old, who could drive as many as eight horses abreast, he can do the like with all the sciences”. That was Leibniz the scientist; but there was also Leibniz the man: “At home, he was monarch of all he surveyed; he always took his meals alone. He had no stated times for them, and no domestic staff. He sent out to a cook-shop for something to eat and took whatever was going. Very often he slept the night in his chair, and woke up none the less refreshed at seven or eight in the morning. He worked without intermission, and for months at a stretch he allowed himself no break.” The older he got the truer this became of him. He is alone now; the great and the powerful on whose support he had counted have deserted him. When, in June, 1714, the Elector of Hanover became King of England, he had no use for the services of this sick and aged man. As he attended no place of worship and never took the Sacrament, he was looked on as an unbeliever, and the pastors turned their backs on him. He died on the 14th November, 1716. He was buried quietly, no funeral procession, no mourners, no one to pay him the tribute of a tear. “You would have thought it was a felon they were burying, instead of a man who had been an ornament to his country.”

  The dream: for one brief moment it seemed as if the union of the Churches was at last within reach, a moment such as hardly occurs once in a hundred years. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened”, said Leibniz, in a letter he wrote to Madame de Brinon on the 29th September, 1691. “The Emperor is favourably disposed; Pope Innocent XI and a number of Cardinals, Generals of Monastic Orders, the Maître du Sacré Palais, and many grave theologians, having carefully considered the matter, have expressed themselves in the most encouraging terms. I have seen the actual letter that was written by the late Père Noyelles, General of the Jesuits, and nothing could be more explicit. It is no exaggeration to say that if the King of France and the prelates and theologians who have his ear in these matters were to take concerted action the thing would not be merely feasible, it would be as good as done.” So the union is imminent. Catholicity is setting its house in order, Teuton and Latin are winning back their spiritual communion, Dutch and English, duly following suit, find their way back to the Church, a Church both Roman and Reformed, and Christians, one and all, present a solid front to the forces that threaten the destruction of their faith.

  Such was the dream. Now for the reality. Catholics and Protestants will not come to terms; the psychological moment has gone by; the most able and well-meaning of men has failed in his task, the enemies of the Christian faith rejoice and exult. Ah, what ruin! Ah, what havoc!

  Instead of the God of Israel, Isaac and Jacob, we are offered an Abstraction, none other than the Law of the Universe, or, maybe, the Universe itself. This new God can work no miracles; miracles would only show him to be a victim of caprice, or perhaps at war with himself, and, far from confirming his existence, would confirm the contrary. Authority is not, tradition is a delusion, universal consent cannot be guaranteed, and even if it could, what was to prove that it, too, was not contaminated with error? The Law of Moses is not a law dictated on Mount Sinai by God himself and taken down then and there in its entirety. It is a human law which still betrays the handiwork of the various peoples by whom it was handed down to the Hebrews, of the Egyptians in particular. The Bible is a book just like any other book, it is full of alterations and perhaps second thoughts; scrolls joined together by unskilled hands, the careless work of rude, untutored folk,
who paid no heed to dates and sometimes mistook the beginning for the end. There was nothing divine about it. Still less was the Monarchy divine. The right of subjects to rise up against their King had been proclaimed far and wide, and when Louis XIV quitted this earthly scene, it looked as if the process were complete.

  Never, it is certain, had the beliefs and ideas on which society had so long reposed been laid open to so fierce an attack, Christianity in particular. Swift,[8] in 1717, indulges in one of his characteristic bouts of irony. It is dangerous, he says, it is imprudent, to oppose the abolition of Christianity at a time when all parties are unanimously set on its annihilation, as is clearly manifested by their speeches, their writings and their deeds. To defend it, to suggest that its abolition might not be unattended by inconveniences, and that possibly it might not produce all the good effects expected of it, would be a line of action that only a perverted mind would pursue. Swift’s sally reflects the misgivings entertained by Christian folk, particularly when they came to realize the results of the demolition that had been going on for years, not on a small scale and hugger-mugger, but wholesale and in broad daylight.

  However, Europe has no taste for ruins; she only puts up with them as a passing fancy, making garden-ornaments of them, for example. And even then, their real purpose is to serve as a sort of foil or contrast, to set off the living green of the trees, and the passionate outpouring of bud and blossom. The most advanced unbelievers among the thinkers with whom we have been dealing, called a halt when they came face to face with the Nihilism to which their scepticism seemed about to lead them. Not theirs “the perfect balance between the Will and the Understanding,” which Pyrrho held to be the essence of wisdom and well-being.[9] If their understanding sometimes presented the contra in a more favourable light than the pro, their will had by no means resigned its functions. They declared that they were only pulling down the old edifice to replace it with a new one, whereof they had drawn the plans, laid the foundations and built the walls; and that, even while the work of demolition had actually been going on. Pull down, and at the same time build up, that was the order of the day. If we would complete our estimate of the men whose lot was cast in those most critical times, we must study them at their task of reconstruction, and to that we shall now address ourselves.

  [1]Jean Baruzi, Leibniz (La pensée chrétienne), pp. 10-12.

  [2]We shall have occasion to revert to this philosophy in Part IV of the present work, chap. V.

  [3]Préface à la Monadologie, 1881.

  [4]Lord Perth to Bossuet, 12 November, 1685.

  [5]Seconde instruction pastorale sur les promesses de Jésus-Christ à son Église (1701). Ed. Lachat, vol. XVII, p. 239.

  [6]Letter, 17 January, 1692.

  [7]V. Giraud, Bossuet, 1930, p. 139.

  [8]J. Swift, An argument to prove that the abolishing of Christianity in England may, as things now stand, be attended with some inconveniencies, and perhaps not produce those many good effects proposed thereby, written in the year 1708.

  [9]Moreri, Dictionnaire, art. Pyrrhon.

  PART THREE

  The Task of Reconstruction

  I

  LOCKE’S EMPIRICISM

  So the great quest had to be started all over again; the human caravan must needs set forth once more, this time along a new road, and heading for a different goal.

  To begin with, and most important of all, it must keep clear of Pyrrhonism, a thing which filled even Bayle himself with dread. To be continually arguing about everything under the sun, and then do no more than suspend judgment, means in the end complete inaction, the immobility of death. Pyrrhonism, a useful ally in restoring to the mind its freedom of choice, now looked as if it were going to annihilate the Will, and, with it, the possibility of choosing at all. This was no time for logic-chopping, for weighing the nicely calculated less or more, but for striking out promptly and resolutely for the far-off horizon of Happiness.

  Fontenelle explained to his pupil, the marquise, one night when they were contemplating the stars together, that Philosophy was based on two things; one, that we had enquiring minds, the other, that we had very short sight. The result was that philosophers spent their time disbelieving what they did see, and trying to guess at what they didn’t; an impossible state of affairs. Far better do the exact opposite; not bother our heads about what we don’t see, but trust firmly to what we do. A philosophy that answered both these needs would be an immense boon to the human race. It would preserve them from doubt.

  At this point it was that Locke came in.

  And he came in the nick of time, like a bringer of good things, because he invested “the fact” with its due status and its sovereign dignity. In speaking of facts, we do not mean the facts of history. They had been shown up, discredited, done with. There was no going back on that; their fate had been sealed once for all. When one tried to bring to light the facts of history, facts engulfed in the dead, irrevocable past, they came wrenched from their context, misinterpreted, warped, and bestained with lies. No sensible people could put any trust in them. What was needed was a different sort of certitude from that, and it was John Locke who supplied it.

  Locke it was who turned the attention of thinkers to psychological truths, truths present in the mind, living, constant and indefectible. In this domain, not only is reason, however doubting it may be, forced to accept some elementary data on which criticism has no hold, but, more than that, it delights to discover, what had hitherto been hidden from it, namely, the conditions of its own functioning. And so the rationalists accept an alliance which keeps them on the hither side of scepticism; the eighteenth century, in so far as it has its roots in the seventeenth, is rationalistic in essence and empirical by consent.

  Locke seemed expressly designed to play the part of the ideal philosopher. In the first place, he was an Englishman; consequently he thought deeply about things. Secondly, he did not limit himself to metaphysics, but made a study of the empirical sciences, notably medicine. Before turning his attention to the mind, he had made some acquaintance with the body; a salutary precaution which the unpractical were wont to neglect. He had had some experience of public affairs. As secretary and confidential agent to Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury, sharing his downfall, seeking refuge in Holland, and returning in triumph with William of Orange, he had been one of those who had borne a hand in building the new England, the invincible England. Very wisely, he had contented himself with playing second fiddle, and from his vantage-ground, a trifle to the rear, he studied with observant eye the wiles and manoeuvres of his fellow mortals. Delicate, of uncertain health, he had not flung himself into the mêlée of affairs with the zest which takes such complete possession of the more robust; he had kept himself a little in reserve, as one who wanted to ponder on things a little more deeply. His travels had endowed him with ease and flexibility of manner; he had sojourned long in our southern districts, studying at close range those odd, but by no means unlikeable folk, the French; what their national customs were, what they fed on, what line their thinkers took, and what those who were not thinkers did for a living, how they produced those delicious things that England had not, namely, oil and wine, and why there was distress among the peasantry. In Paris he had made friends with medical men, astronomers and learned people of every kind, with all manner of restless and enquiring spirits. But Holland must have profited him still more, if it be true that the best of all schools is the rude school of exile. Driven from his native land, wandering from city to city in the country where he had found asylum, hob-nobbing with pastors, dissenters and the heterodox in general, it was as if he had gone back to school for an intellectual refresher course. Finally, he became a teacher himself, which is but another way of learning, and his pupil was none other than the son of Shaftesbury, his patron, who was soon to conquer a place of his own among the leaders of the new philosophy. Without a trace of pedantry or self-conceit, perfectly natural and, save for an occasional display of temper, as likeable in life
as he was in everything he wrote, endowed with a sort of inborn distinction, John Locke was decidedly a gentleman. There was nothing of the learned professor in imposing academicals about Locke; he had not the necessary lung power to hold forth, ore rotundo, from the professorial chair; he spoke easily, quietly, and at length, in a style suited to the ordinary men and women of the world. The time had come when the real philosophers were to be found in the ranks of the laity and, with rare exceptions, few were recruited from among the pastors or the monsignori, from the professors of the Sorbonne or the Sapienza. They mingled with the world, the better to direct it.