The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  In bringing about the reign of happiness on earth there was a particular virtue that was called on to play its part; and it was a new virtue.

  Up to now, it had not been a virtue at all, but, on the contrary, a sign of weakness, not to say of cowardice. To tolerate all sorts of opinions; to tolerate my brother’s ideas, even if he has gone completely astray and is well on the road to perdition; to tolerate false prophets and liars—you might as well confess straight out that you are in league with error and deceit. . . . Is it not a man’s bounden duty to open the eyes of those who are walking in wilful blindness; to bring back those who have wandered from the path? No doubt we should not ride rough-shod over other men’s consciences; but ought we to leave them to their fate, we who know that there is but one truth, and that upon the knowledge of it depends our eternal salvation? Duty and charity alike forbid us to be tolerant. That being so, the tolerationists, as they are called, must be none other than Socinians in disguise, the sort of people who would obliterate the marks by which the True Church is to be recognized, people who would admit all manner of heretics into the true fold; sceptics who profess religious indifferentism, rebels, freethinkers. Tolerant, Bossuet and his like could never be, nor yet a Pellisson, not even when he was discussing with Leibniz how to persuade the Protestants to turn again towards Rome. “It is my belief”, he said in-a letter he wrote to Leibniz in 1692, “that these Socinians, as they are called, and, with them, all who go by the name of Deists and Spinozists, are largely responsible for spreading this idea, which we may describe as the error of errors, since it accommodates itself to all the others. Fearing that they would not be borne with, that the law of the land would be set in motion against them, they tried to establish the principle that everything should be put up with. Hence this doctrine of toleration, as it is called; hence—and this is something newer still—the intolerance of which they accuse the Church of Rome.”

  Wasted words! A change was coming about; he knew it, he felt it in his bones. And so, indeed, it was. Slowly, laboriously, with efforts year after year continued, toleration contrived at last to change its recognition-sign and, instead of a vice, became a virtue. It was a bone of contention in two different fields of debate, the political and the religious. Yes, said the one, the King of France is perfectly within his rights in using force to compel the recusants to abandon the error of their ways; the Dutch magistrates have a perfect right to dismiss and imprison all those who, refusing to recognize any authority in the sphere of ideas, disturb the peace and threaten the existence of the State. The King of England has the right to outlaw those terrible Catholics, who will always insist on upholding the supremacy of Rome over the civil power. No, said the other side; men cannot and should not interfere with the workings of conscience, because that is a matter which concerns man and his Maker alone. A genuinely Christian soul knows that persecution is as contrary to the true spirit of the Gospel, as darkness is to light. Therefore, a Christian monarch should show tolerance to all his subjects so long as they duly respect his political authority. Such a ruler, said the Protestant historians, was William of Orange. “Whereupon, he said that he was a Protestant, and that, as such, he could undertake to support none but the reformed religion; then he went on to say that he did not know what exactly was meant by the word heretic, nor how far its application was to be extended, but he added that, so far as he himself was concerned, he would never allow anyone to be persecuted for his religion, would never attempt to convert anyone otherwise than by persuasion, in accordance with the spirit of the Gospel.”[5] To the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes he took care to reply, in 1690, with the Toleration Act.

  In the religious field, the controversy was still more lively. As far back as 1670, the Pastor d’Huisseau raised the signal when he called on the sects to lay down their arms and agree on a creed so comprehensive that it would embrace all mankind. It was the occasion of one of Jurieu’s earliest outbursts. He tells us that, to confute d’Huisseau, he wrote his Examen du Livre de la Réunion ou Traité de la Tolérance en matière de religion: “Clearly, hatred for this ignoble toleration of heresy is a long-standing disease with me, which time has aggravated still more.” The struggle had continued with added intensity in the land of the Refugees. Arguments were discharged from side to side, but they did not always hit the mark; treatise followed treatise in endless succession. The leading lights among the pastors, Henri Basnage de Beauval, Gédéon Huet, Élie Saurin were for showing that intolerance and not tolerance was the sin; and if they excluded the Catholics—as in fact they did—from their scheme of universal benevolence, even as William III had excluded them from his Toleration Act, they at least found allies among some Dutchmen of sagacity and learning, such as Gilbert Cuper, Adrian Paets, Noodt, all of them faithful to the free traditions of their country. Thus, one and all addressed themselves to the difficult task of bringing a new virtue to birth. Sometimes there were storms that threw everything into confusion. The publication of A Word to the Refugees, which, rightly or wrongly, was ascribed to Bayle, and which asserted that the Protestants were quite as intolerant as the Catholics, provoked an outburst of furious antagonism. However, once the storm had subsided, toleration, with its olive branch, was seen in clearer outline.

  Locke was the one that had the most humanity about him. Among all that mountainous heap of writings, no appeal was more eloquent, more generous, than that of his Epistola de Tolerantia, which he brought out in 1689 and defended till his dying day. Do not forget, cried Locke, that tolerance is the very stuff of Christianity. For if a man have not charity, gentleness, kindliness, how dare he call himself a Christian? The instrument of Faith is charity, not fire and sword. For a few differences of opinion, the rights of which will never be known till the Day of Judgment, shall a man burn his brother? Let those furious zealots, if do something they must, fight against the crimes and vices of which their co-religionists are daily guilty. Such things are far worse than haggling with their conscience as to whether they should obey some ecclesiastical ordinance or not. The spiritual is one thing, the temporal another; a religious society is one thing; a secular society, another. A magistrate has no jurisdiction over the spirit; as a magistrate, he has no business in a place of worship. Toleration is so consonant with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and with the common feelings of all mankind, that all who refuse to recognize its necessity and its benefits we may look upon as moral monstrosities. What matters it whether or not Latin is spoken in churches, whether you kneel down or stand up, whether a robe is longer or shorter? You who practise the Catholic ritual, and you, too, men of Geneva, and you Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants, Anabaptists, Arminians, Socinians, know that you will never take a soul by force: you have neither the power nor the right to do so. Bear ye one with another, and, united in the will to do good, love ye one another.

  [1] Fontenelle, Du bonheur.

  [2] Deslandes, Réflexions sur les grands bommes qui sont morts en plaisantant, 1712.

  [3] A Letter concerning Enthusiasm, 1708.

  [4] Bossuet, Oraison funèbre de Marie Thérèse d’Autriche: “A Christian is never alive on earth because he is ever mortified there, and mortification is a trial and an apprenticeship, a rehearsal for Death.”

  [5] David Durand in his continuation of the Histoire d’ Angleterre depuis l’établissement des Romains, by Rapin Thoyras, 1724-1736. Vol. XI, p. 48: Ses sentiments sur la tolérance.

  VI

  SCIENCE AND PROGRESS

  IN the solitudes of a great park, two figures are to be seen: a dainty marquise and a gentleman of fashion, her friend, or, perchance, her lover, who, amid the shades of night, is holding long and earnest converse with her. What, you ask, is the subject of his discourse? Astronomy! “Tell me,” she says, “about these stars of yours.” Gallant, sophisticated, exquisite, thus does Fontenelle portray them, not only because his own nature is like that, but because it is part of his plan to present them in an attractive light. He is particularly anxious that his boo
k should repel no one, that it should appeal to all, especially to the unlearned, whom it was to fascinate at the very outset by its charm and its lightness of touch. He came very near robbing his theme of its grandeur; it came out, however, despite all these airs and graces, in all its sovereign splendour. The man-about-town and his marquise, enveloped in the shades of night, play over again the part enacted by those ancient shepherds of Chaldea, trying to read the secret of the heavens. Like the earliest inhabitants of the earth, they marvelled at the stars even as they had marvelled at the sun; a pair of mortals pathetically trying to read the secret of the skies.

  The marquise knows nothing; but Fontenelle, he knows, and in the space of an evening or two, he will explain to her the courses of the stars, at first sight so mysterious. There had been errors enough in the past; long enough, indeed, had men misread the motions of the heavenly bodies! Long enough had they supposed it was the sun that hurtled round the earth; the prime mistake from which innumerable others did proceed. However, at last, that error had been dispelled. “There came on the scene a certain German, one, Copernicus, who made short work of all those various circles, all those solid skies, which the ancients had pictured to themselves. The former he abolished; the latter, he broke in pieces. Fired with the noble zeal of a true astronomer, he took the earth and spun it very far away from the centre of the universe, where it had been installed, and in that centre he put the sun, which had a far better title to the honour.” So once again the Ancients were at fault, and mankind had gone astray by following them. But now a new era was dawning. Reason and observation had given short shrift to those hoary old errors. Science speaks, and we must give heed to what she says. The heavens and the earth are changed.

  This discovery might have been expected to fill the hearts of men with dread. After the manner of that demented Athenian, who thought that every ship which came to anchor in the Piraeus belonged to him, the marquise had believed that the universe had been constructed especially for her; and now, what a rude awakening! The earth, a place of toil, of wars, of endless excursions and alarms, was now like a silkworm’s cocoon, so tiny, so fragile, so pitiable it seemed. She might well tremble at the infinite spaces that were now unfolded to her gaze.

  She might have trembled, but she did not. On the contrary, she felt all the joy, all the pride, of the professed and initiated adept; she lent an attentive ear to this newly resurrected science. She became a member of a sort of sodality, breaking forever with the pagans that had never known the truth, and with those heretics that had ever misrepresented it. That was her position, and she was proud of it. Now, by one of those similes of which Fontenelle makes such frequent use, and which transform abstractions into something pleasing to the sight (like a boat gliding on a river, a vessel sailing the sea, or a bowl rolling along the green sward) we will imagine ourselves at the opera. Phaeton quits the earth, he is caught by the wind, and flies up to heaven. Let us suppose that Pythagoras, Aristotle, Plato, and all the sages we hear so much about are witnessing the performance: Phaeton, one of them will say, is composed of certain numbers which cause him to ascend. Another: it is a certain hidden virtue which raises Phaeton aloft. Another: Phaeton has a certain predilection for the upper part of the theatre; he is not happy when he is not there. Imagine all the fairy tales the ancients had in stock to explain things! Pitiable, was it not? Fortunately Descartes and some other modern thinkers arrive. They tell us: Phaeton ascends because he is pulled up by ropes, and because a weight, heavier than he, is let down. No one had thought of peeping behind the scenes. From the day the machines were discovered, men began to use their reason; they knew. How delightful is discovery! What bliss to know the truth!

  Scientific knowledge has a beauty of its own, for the contemplation of a perfect piece of mechanism wherein the most complicated effects are produced by the simplest of devices, is a delight to the mind. Some people may not care over-much for a mechanical universe, but when the marquise learned that it resembled a watch, she liked it more than ever. Such regularity, such economy of means, such simplicity—what could be more admirable! In thus discovering the laws of nature, she was filled with a rapture rare and delicate, a rapture not of the senses, but of the intellect. “It is not the sort of pleasure you get from a comedy of Molière’s, but something that has to do with your reason, and you laugh only with your mind.” Science, as we have seen, is everywhere, and now we are about to make contact with a set regarded as the very last word in learning, with men who cover blackboards with figures that make your head swim, men who peer through telescopes, men who dissect bodies both animal and human; we are about to set foot on their special preserves. Fontenelle invites us to enter. In the matter of philosophy he takes his stand with the “restless”; in science, with the “enquirers”; they both amount to the same thing. Now may the general run of men draw near without apprehension to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Truth will come like a revelation enlightening the minds of all mankind. The Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes, dated 1686, are an introduction, profound but engaging, to a new interpretation of the universe.

  It is not only the geometrical way of thinking that caught on, but geometry itself. From the airy heights to which the preceding age had raised it, it now came down to the level of the ordinary educated public. In Paris, a mathematician, one Joseph Sauveur, made himself quite a name by giving a series of lectures to which gentlemen of the fashionable world came in crowds. Ladies stipulated that the solution of the problem of squaring the circle should be the passport, and the only one, to their favours. So, at least, the Journal des Savants gave out, quizzing the popular craze. “Ever since the mathematicians managed to penetrate into the innermost of feminine sanctuaries, and, with the aid of the Mercure Galant, to bring with them the terminology of a science as solid and serious as mathematics, we hear that Cupid’s empire is rapidly crumbling, and that no one talks now of anything but problems, corollaries, theorems, right-angles, obtuse angles, rhomboids, and so on. It reports that quite recently there were two young ladies in Paris whose heads had been so turned by this branch of learning that one of them declined to listen to a proposal of marriage unless the candidate for her hand undertook to learn how to make telescopes, so often talked of in the Mercure Galant; while the other young lady positively refused a perfectly eligible suitor simply because he had been unable, within a given time, to produce any new idea about ‘squaring the circle’ ” (4th March, 1686). Seeing that matter was nothing but extension, then physics was nothing but mathematics. The geometricians were to be thanked for enabling us to get a hold on matter and for substituting for such wordy vacuities as “Opium induces sleep by reason of its sleep-giving properties”, the sure and solid method of mathematical calculation. Thanks to them, we hold the key to all the phenomena of the universe.

  But, in point of fact, mathematics were not the only thing that occupied an important place in men’s minds. There was another matter that clamoured for solution more peremptorily every day. Mathematics represented one form of knowledge, no doubt; but was it the only one? To reduce everything to an abstraction—was that the way to know all that there was to know? Perhaps geometry, in the flush of victory, had gone a little beyond its proper limits. What seems to prove it is that M. Descartes, excellent geometrician though he was, had gone very considerably astray in physics. Observation and experiment, those were the two things to which the new philosophy exhorted us. Was science bound to disdain them? Men heard the voice of Galileo, and, clearer still, the voice of Bacon. Bacon had never been forgotten. Bacon, men call to mind, had said that we must start with observation; that the human mind apprehended things by perceiving them through the senses; that the impressions made upon the senses, being transmitted to the brain, supplied matter for the reason to examine and report upon; that the reason in its turn gave back these impressions purified and sublimated; wherefore true philosophy should begin with the senses if it was to provide the understanding with a direct and certain line of
progress. The geometricians, starting with their definition of matter, had asserted that space did not exist; whereupon other learned men proceeded to show by experiment that space did exist, beyond all question. It was these latter who had discovered the real truth merely by studying the actual facts. The fact: be guided by the fact. That is the thing.

  Here, then, was another task to shoulder, and a heavy one. Yet once again the mind of man must needs start on a new trail, work and toil unceasingly and get some tangible result. Avail yourself, by all means, of such assistance as the mathematicians can offer, for they can give you certitude in their own sphere; but get hold of another way of acquiring knowledge, a way which will not denude the living being of all its flesh, and which, realizing its complexity, will master it. So a new collective effort was begun by a Europe in its formative stage. Here we have the Italians, grouped, to begin with, about the Academy of the Cimento at Florence. In the eyes of its learned members, every natural phenomenon is a thing to be enquired into: how do grubs get into fruit? What are those excrescences which make their appearance on the twigs and leaves of trees? How is it that a fish which is phosphorescent in water ceases to be so in air? The quest begins. They have no laboratories, no apparatus; often enough they don’t trouble to doff their frock coats or their imposing wigs before starting on their labours. Still the quest goes on. They manufacture instruments. They are forever experimenting. No doubt, they say, geometry is the type of ideal knowledge; but, then, geometry goes soaring off into boundless space, and leaves us standing. Then we turn to the experimental method which, by dint of proof and counter-proof, leads us on to the truth. In 1667, the Academy of the Cimento came to an end, but the Italian tradition did not die with it. It lived on, all through the following century, fostered by such men as Marsigli, Vallisnieri, Gualtieri, Clarici, Micheli, Ramazzini, Fortis; we do not profess to name them all. In the Gallery of Minerva, 1704, Giovanni Maria Lancisi printed a speech which he had delivered on the method of applying philosophy to the art of medicine, wherein it is shown that, for a medicine based on reason, it is better to have recourse to experimental philosophy than to any other.