by Will Durant
He strikes a passing blow at Britain, which had just taken India and Canada:
There is one people who in the transports of their greed seem to have formed the extravagant project of usurping the commerce of the world and making themselves owners of the seas—an iniquitous and mad project whose execution … would hastily bring to certain ruin the nation that is guided by this frenzy.… The day will come when Indians, having learned the art of war from Europeans, will hurl them from their shores.136
D’Holbach is inclined to the physiocratic gospel of laissez-faire:
The government should do nothing for the merchant except to leave him alone. No regulations can guide him in his enterprises so well as his own interest.… The state owes commerce nothing but protection. Among commercial nations those that allow their subjects the most unlimited liberty may be sure of soon excelling all others.137
But then, too, he advises governments to prevent a dangerous concentration of wealth. He quotes with relish St. Jerome’s swift barb, “Dives aut iniquus est, aut iniqui haeres” (The rich man is either a scoundrel or a scoundrel’s heir).138
In almost all nations three quarters of the subjects possess nothing.… When a small number of men absorb all the property and wealth in a state, they become the masters of that state.… Governments seem to have altogether neglected this important truth.139 … When the public will or law ceases to keep the balance even between the different members of society, the laziness of some, aided by force, fraud, and seduction, succeeds in appropriating the fruit of the labor of others.140
Nearly all kings, in d’Holbach’s opinion, ally themselves with the clever minority in exploiting the majority. He seems to be thinking of Louis XV.
On the face of this globe we see only unjust sovereigns, enervated by luxury, corrupted by flattery, depraved by licentiousness, made wicked by impurity, devoid of talents, without morals, … and incapable of exerting an energy for the benefit of the states they govern. They are consequently but little occupied with the welfare of their people, and indifferent to their duties, of which, indeed, they are often ignorant. Stimulated by the desire … to feed their insatiable ambition, they engage in useless, depopulating wars, and never occupy their minds with those objects which are the most important to the happiness of their nation.141
Obviously thinking of the French government, d’Holbach lashes out at the farming of tax collections to private financiers:
The despot addresses himself to a class of citizens who furnish him with the means for his avidity in exchange for the right to extort with impunity from all others.… In his blindness he does not see that the taxes on his subjects are often doubled; that the sums that go to enrich the extortioners are lost to himself; and that the army of subordinate publicani is subsidized at a pure loss, to make war on the nation.… These brigands, grown rich, arouse the jealousy of the nobility and the envy of their fellow citizens.… Wealth becomes the one and only motive, … the thirst for gold lays hold of every heart.142
At times the comfortable aristocrat talks like the angriest of unplaced youths: “Are nations to work without respite to satisfy the vanity, the luxury, the greed of a pack of useless and corrupt bloodsuckers?”143 In this mood he echoes the Contrat Social of his former friend Rousseau:
Man is wicked not because he is born so but because he is rendered so. The great and powerful crush with impunity the indigent and unhappy. These, at the risk of their lives, seek to retaliate the evil they have received; they attack either openly or secretly a country that to them is a stepmother, who gives all to some of her children, and deprives the others of everything. …
Man is almost everywhere a slave. It follows of necessity that he is base, selfish, dissimulating, without honor; in a word, that he has the vices of the state of which he is a member. Everywhere he is deceived, encouraged in ignorance, and prevented from using his reason; of course he must everywhere be stupid, irrational, and wicked; everywhere he sees vice and crime applauded and honored; he concludes that vice is good, and that virtue is only a useless self-sacrifice.… If governments were enlightened, and seriously occupied themselves with the instruction and welfare of the people, and if laws were equitable, … it would not be necessary to seek in another life for financial chimeras which always prove abortive against the infuriate passions and real wants of man.144
How can this exploitation be stopped? The first step is to abolish absolute monarchy. “Absolute power must necessarily corrupt in heart and mind whoever holds it.145 … The power of the king should always be subordinate to the representatives of the people; and these representatives should depend continuously on the will of their constituents”;146 here is a call for the summoning of the fateful States-General of 1789. Since every government derives its powers from the consent of the governed, “the society may at any time revoke these powers if the government ceases to represent the general will”;147 here is the voice of Rousseau and revolution.
But revolutions, sometimes at great cost, destroy the past in order to rebuild it under another phrase and form.
Not through dangerous convulsions, not through conflict, regicide, and useless crimes, can the wounds of the nation be healed. These violent remedies are always more cruel than the evils they are intended to cure.… The voice of reason is neither seditious nor bloodthirsty. The reforms which it proposes may be slow, but therefore all the better planned.148
Men are imperfect, and cannot make perfect states; utopias are chimeras “incompatible with the nature of a being whose feeble machine is subject to derangement, and whose ardent imagination will not always submit to the guidance of reason.… The perfecting of politics can only be the slow fruit of the experience of centuries.”149 Progress is not a straight line, and it is a long one; many generations of education and experiment will be needed to clarify the causes and cures of social ills. Democracy is an ideal, possible only in small states and with widespread popular intelligence; it would be unwise in the France of Louis XVI. Perhaps this new king, so good and well-intentioned, will engage great talents to reform the state. So, in the end, d’Holbach contents himself with a constitutional monarchy, and he dedicates his Éthocratie to Louis as “a just, human, beneficent king, … father of his people, protector of the poor.”150 In that desperate hope the aging philosophe hung up his arms.
4. D’Holbach and His Critics
The Système de la nature is the most thorough and forthright exposition of materialism and atheism in all the history of philosophy. The endless hesitations, contradictions, and subtleties of Voltaire, the vague enthusiasms and ambivalent lucubrations of Diderot, the confusing repudiations of Rousseau by Jean Jacques, are here replaced by a careful consistency of ideas, and a forceful expression in a style sometimes heavy, occasionally flowery, often eloquent, always direct and clear. Yet, realizing that seven hundred such pages would be too much for the general digestion, and anxious to reach a wider audience, d’Holbach expounded his views again, in a simpler forum, in Le Bon Sens, ou idées opposées aux idées surnaturelles (1772). Seldom has a writer been so assiduous in spreading such unpopular convictions.
That he was heard far and wide is proved by the reaction of Frederick the Great to the Système de la nature. He who had so courted the philosophes, and had been lauded as their patron and ideal, turned against them when he saw one of their leaders attacking absolute monarchy as well as Christianity. It had been to his advantage to have the Catholic powers weakened in their internal unity by the campaign against the Church; but to find that rebel ecstasy daring now to insult kings as well as God stirred him to resentment, perhaps to fear. The same pen that had once written Anti-Machiavel now composed a Réfutation du Système de la nature. This man d’Holbach was going too far and too fast. “When one speaks in public,” Frederick suggested, “he should consider the delicacy of superstitious ears; he should not shock anybody; he should wait till the time is sufficiently enlightened to let him think out loud.”151
Apparently a
t Frederick’s suggestion, but probably still more through fear that the extreme radicalism of d’Holbach would alienate all but atheists and revolutionaries from the philosophic camp, Voltaire, like a general reproving a presumptuous lieutenant, inserted into the article “Dieu” in his Dictionnaire philosophique several pages criticizing d’Holbach’s chef-d’oeuvre. He began:
The author has had the advantage of being read by both learned and ignorant, and by women. His style, then, has merits which that of Spinoza lacked. He is often luminous, sometimes eloquent, although, like all the rest, he may be charged with repetitions, declamations, and self-contradictions. But as regards profundity he is very often to be distrusted both in physics and in morals. The interest of mankind is here involved; we will therefore examine whether his doctrine is true and useful.
Voltaire would not agree that the order which we ascribe to the universe, and the disorder which we may think to find in it, are subjective concepts and prejudices; he argued that the order is overwhelmingly obvious, and that disorder is sometimes painfully clear.
What, is not a child born blind or without legs, or a monstrous freak, contrary to the nature of the species? Is it not the ordinary regularity of nature that makes order, and the irregularity that constitutes disorder? Is it not a great derangement, a dreadful disorder, when nature gives a child hunger and a closed esophagus? Evacuations of every kind are necessary, yet the excretory channels are frequently without openings, which it is necessary to remedy.… The origin of the disorder remains to be discovered, but the disorder is real.
As to matter having the power to generate life and mind, Voltaire, though he too had once inclined to that view, preferred a modest agnosticism to d’Holbach’s confident assumptions:
“Experience [he quotes from the Système] proves to us that the matter which we regard as inert and dead assumes action, life, and intelligence when it is combined in a certain way.” But this is precisely the difficulty. How does a living germ arise? About this the author and the reader are alike ignorant. Hence, are not the System of Nature, and all the [philosophical] systems in the world, so many dreams? “It would be necessary [says d’Holbach] to define the vital principle, which I deem impossible.” Is not this definition very easy? … Is not life organization with feeling? But that these two properties can arise solely from matter in motion it is impossible to prove; and if it is impossible to prove, why affirm it? … Many readers will feel indignant at the decisive tone assumed when nothing is explained.… When you venture to affirm that there is no God, or that matter acts of itself by an eternal necessity, you must demonstrate this like a proposition in Euclid; otherwise you rest your system on a “perhaps.” What a foundation for a belief that is of the greatest importance to the human race!
D’Holbach had supported abiogenesis by referring to the experiments (1748) of the English Jesuit Needham, who believed that he had produced new organisms out of nonliving matter. Voltaire, alert to the latest developments in science, referred to the experiments (1765) of Spallanzani as having shown the error of Needham’s procedure and conclusions. D’Holbach had seen no design in nature; Voltaire sees much. He argues that the development of intelligence in man indicates an intelligence in or behind the universe. Finally he returns to his famous proposition that “if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him”; that without belief in a Supreme Being, in his intelligence and his justice, life with its mysteries and miseries would be unbearable. He joins d’Holbach in scorning superstition, but he defends religion as the simple adoration of a deity. He concludes amiably:
I am persuaded that you are in a great error, but I am equally convinced that you are honest in your self-delusion. You would have men virtuous even without a God, although you have unfortunately said that “so soon as vice renders man happy he must love vice”—a frightful proposition, which your friends should have prevailed upon you to erase. Everywhere else you inspire probity. This philosophical dispute will only be between you and a few philosophers scattered over Europe, and the rest of the world will not even hear of it. The people do not read us.… You are wrong, but we owe respect to your genius and your virtue.152
We do not know if Voltaire had his heart in this refutation. We note his light remark, when he heard that Frederick also had written against the Système de la nature, “God had on his side the two least superstitious men in all Europe—which ought to have pleased him immensely.”153 He asked the Duc de Richelieu to let Louis XV know that the unwilling exile of Ferney had written an answer to the audacious book that was the talk of Paris.
D’Holbach’s friends published Voltaire’s critique as a means of advertising the Baron’s ideas. Young rebels took up materialism as a badge of bravery in the war against Catholicism. D’Holbach’s philosophy entered into the spirit of the French Revolution before and after Robespierre—who preferred Rousseau; we hear echoes of the Système in Camille Desmoulins, Marat, and Danton.154 “D’Holbach, more than Voltaire, more than Diderot,” said Faguet, “is the father of all the philosophy and all the anti-religious polemics of the end of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century.”155 During the Directory a minister sent copies of a book by d’Holbach to all departmental heads in an attempt to check the Catholic revival.156 In England we feel d’Holbach’s influence in the materialism of Priestley (1777); Godwin’s Enquiry concerning Political Justice stemmed from d’Holbach, Helvétius, and Rousseau in that order of influence;157 and the enthusiastic atheism of Godwin’s son-in-law, Shelley, dated from his reading of the Système de la nature, which he began to translate as a means of enlisting the Oxford dons in the campaign against religion.158 In Germany it was d’Holbach’s materialism, as well as Hume’s skepticism, that aroused Kant from his “dogmatic slumber.” Perhaps Marx, through devious channels, inherited his materialist tradition from d’Holbach.
Long before the Baron wrote, Berkeley had made the most damaging point about materialism: mind is the only reality directly known; matter (since d’Holbach defined it as “all that affects our senses”) is known only indirectly, through mind; and it seems unreasonable to reduce the directly to the indirectly known. We are not so clear about matter as we used to be; we are as much mystified by the atom as by mind; both are being resolved into forms of energy that we cannot understand. And it is as difficult now as in the days of Locke and Voltaire to imagine how “matter” can become idea, much less consciousness. The mechanistic interpretation of life proved fruitful in physiology, but the possibility still remains that organs (matter) may be products and instruments of desire (mind), like the muscles of an athlete. Mechanism, determinism, even “natural law,” may be summary simplifications, logically irrefutable because they are tools invented by the mind for the convenient handling of phenomena, events, and things. These tools have become inextricable elements in scientific thought, but they are unsatisfactory when applied to the mind that fashioned them. We do not know that the world is logical.
* * *
I. “It is certainly true as a historical fact,” said John Morley, “that the rational treatment of insane persons, and the rational view of certain kinds of crime, were due to men like Pinel, trained in the materialistic school of the eighteenth century. And it was clearly impossible that the great and humane reforms in this field could have taken place before the decisive decay of theology.” 112
CHAPTER XXII
Voltaire and Christianity
1734–78
I. VOLTAIRE AND GOD
WE may study later the nonreligious activities, opinions, and interests of that consuming fire called Voltaire, burning fitfully at Ferney; here we summarize only his views on religion and his war against Christianity. We shall say nothing about him that has not been said a hundred times before; and he said nothing about Christianity that had not been said before. It is only that when he said it the words passed like a flame through Europe, and became a force molding his time, and ours.
It was natural that he should ques
tion the Christian creed, for a religion is intended to quiet rather than excite the intellect, and Voltaire was intellect incarnate, unquiet and unappeased. We have seen him in his career joining the skeptical wits of the Temple, nourishing his doubts among the deists of England, pursuing science at Cirey, and exchanging infidelities with Frederick in Germany. Yet, until he was fifty-six, he kept his unbelief as an incidental expression or private sport, and made no open war upon the Church. On the contrary, he publicly and repeatedly defended the fundamentals of the Christian faith—a just God, free will, and immortality. Unless we account him a liar (which he often was), he retained till death his belief in God and in the value of religion. We may quote him to almost any purpose, for, like every living thing, he grew and changed and decayed; which of us retained at fifty the views he held at twenty, or, at seventy, the views he held at fifty? Voltaire contradicted himself endlessly because he lived long and wrote much; his opinions were the fluent vision of his mounting years.1
At Cirey, about 1734, he tried to formulate his ideas on first and last things in a Traité de métaphysique. Years before Paley made the comparison familiar to Englishmen, Voltaire submitted that it was as logical to postulate an intelligent mind in the universe as to suppose that a watchmaker had made a watch; in either case he saw evidence of design in the adaptation of specific means to particular ends. But just as the watch, though designed by intelligence, operates according to fixed laws, so does the universe; there are no miracles. Yet somehow he could not throw off the feeling that the human will is in some mysterious way and modest degree free, though he knew well that free volitions acting upon a mechanical world must upset its mechanism. Mind is a form and function of matter; “we ought to judge,” said Voltaire, following Locke, “that it is quite possible for God to add thought to matter”;2 that matter should think is no greater miracle than it would be for an immaterial mind to act upon a material body. The soul is merely the life of the body, and dies with it. There is no other divine revelation than nature itself; this is enough, and inexhaustible. There may be some good in religion, but an intelligent man does not need it as a support to morality; too often, in history, it has been used by priests to bemuse the public mind while kings picked the public pocket. Virtue should be defined in terms of social good rather than obedience to God, and it should not depend upon rewards and punishments after death.
