religion and reflection  reflection on cristianity judaism , the truth and lies, deism of humanists

 complete work (book) text on ligne of Voltaire

  PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY BY VOLTAIRE

                         PART 2

 

 

 

_JOAN OF ARC_


It is meet that the reader should be acquainted with the true history of
Joan of Arc surnamed "the Maid." The details of her adventure are very
little known and may give readers pleasure; here they are.

Paul Jove says that the courage of the French was stimulated by this
girl, and takes good care not to believe her inspired. Neither Robert,
Gaguin, Paul Emile, Polydore Vergile, Genebrard, Philip of Bergamo,
Papyre Masson, nor even Mariana, say that she was sent by God; and even
though Mariana the Jesuit had said it, that would not deceive me.

Mézerai relates "that the prince of the celestial militia appeared to
her." I am sorry for Mézerai, and I ask pardon of the prince of the
celestial militia.

Most of our historians, who copy each other, suppose that the Maid
uttered prophecies, and that her prophecies were accomplished. She is
made to say that "she will drive the English out of the kingdom," and
they were still there five years after her death. She is said to have
written a long letter to the King of England, and assuredly she could
neither read nor write; such an education was not given to an inn
servant in the Barois; and the information laid against her states that
she could not sign her name.

But, it is said, she found a rusted sword, the blade of which was
engraved with five golden _fleurs-de-lis_; and this sword was hidden in
the church of Sainte Catherine de Fierbois at Tours. There, certainly is
a great miracle!

Poor Joan of Arc having been captured by the English, despite her
prophecies and her miracles, maintained first of all in her
cross-examination that St. Catherine and St. Marguerite had honoured her
with many revelations. I am astonished that she never said anything of
her talks with the prince of the celestial militia. These two saints
apparently liked talking better than St. Michael. Her judges thought her
a sorceress, she thought herself inspired.

One great proof that Charles VII.'s captains made use of the marvellous
in order to encourage the soldiers, in the deplorable state to which
France was reduced, is that Saintrailles had his shepherd, as the Comte
de Dunois had his shepherdess. The shepherd made prophecies on one side,
while the shepherdess made them on the other.

But unfortunately the Comte de Dunois' prophetess was captured at the
siege of Compiègne by a bastard of Vendôme, and Saintrailles' prophet
was captured by Talbot. The gallant Talbot was far from having the
shepherd burned. This Talbot was one of those true Englishmen who scorn
superstition, and who have not the fanaticism for punishing fanatics.

This, it seems to me, is what the historians should have observed, and
what they have neglected.

The Maid was taken to Jean de Luxembourg, Comte de Ligny. She was shut
up in the fortress of Beaulieu, then in that of Beaurevoir, and from
there in that of Crotoy in Picardy.

First of all Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, who was of the King of
England's party against his own legitimate king, claims the Maid as a
sorceress arrested on the limits of his diocese. He wishes to judge her
as a sorceress. He supported the right he claimed by a downright lie.
Joan had been captured on the territory of the bishopric of Noyon: and
neither the Bishop of Beauvais, nor the Bishop of Noyon assuredly had
the right of condemning anybody, and still less of committing to death a
subject of the Duke of Lorraine, and a warrior in the pay of the King of
France.

There was at that time (who would believe it?) a vicar-general of the
Inquisition in France, by name Brother Martin.[8] It was one of the most
horrible effects of the total subversion of that unfortunate country.
Brother Martin claimed the prisoner as smelling of heresy (_odorantem
hæresim_). He called upon the Duke of Burgundy and the Comte de Ligny,
"by the right of his office, and of the authority given to him by the
Holy See, to deliver Joan to the Holy Inquisition."

The Sorbonne hastened to support Brother Martin, and wrote to the Duke
of Burgundy and to Jean de Luxembourg--"You have used your noble power
to apprehend this woman who calls herself the Maid, by means of whom the
honour of God has been immeasurably offended, the faith exceedingly
hurt, and the Church too greatly dishonoured; for by reason of her,
idolatry, errors, bad doctrine, and other inestimable evils have ensued
in this kingdom ... but what this woman has done would be of small
account, if did not ensue what is meet for satisfying the offence
perpetrated by her against our gentle Creator and His faith, and the
Holy Church with her other innumerable misdeeds ... and it would be
intolerable offence against the divine majesty if it happened that this
woman were freed."[9]

Finally, the Maid was awarded to Jean Cauchon whom people called the
unworthy bishop, the unworthy Frenchman, and the unworthy man. Jean de
Luxembourg sold the Maid to Cauchon and the English for ten thousand
livres, and the Duke of Bedford paid them. The Sorbonne, the bishop and
Brother Martin, then presented a new petition to this Duke of Bedford,
regent of France, "in honour of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, for
that the said Joan may be briefly put into the hands of the Church."
Joan was led to Rouen. The archbishopric was vacant at that time, and
the chapter permitted the Bishop of Beauvais to _work_ in the town.
(_Besogner_ is the term which was used.) He chose as assessors nine
doctors of the Sorbonne with thirty-five other assistants, abbots or
monks. The vicar of the Inquisition, Martin, presided with Cauchon; and
as he was only a vicar, he had but second place.

Joan underwent fourteen examinations; they are singular. She said that
she saw St. Catherine and St. Marguerite at Poitiers. Doctor Beaupère
asks her how she recognized the saints. She answers that it was by their
way of bowing. Beaupère asks her if they are great chatterboxes. "Go
look on the register," she says. Beaupère asks her if, when she saw St.
Michael, he was naked. She answers: "Do you think our Lord had nothing
to clothe him with?"

The curious will carefully observe here that Joan had long been directed
with other religious women of the populace by a rogue named Richard,[10]
who performed miracles, and who taught these girls to perform them. One
day he gave communion three times in succession to Joan, in honour of
the Trinity. It was then the custom in matters of importance and in
times of great peril. The knights had three masses said, and
communicated three times when they went to seek fortune or to fight in a
duel. It is what has been observed on the part of the Chevalier Bayard.

The workers of miracles, Joan's companions, who were submissive to
Richard, were named Pierrone and Catherine. Pierrone affirmed that she
had seen that God appeared to her in human form as a friend to a friend.
God was "clad in a long white robe, etc."

Up to the present the ridiculous; here now is the horrible.

One of Joan's judges, doctor of theology and priest, by name Nicholas
_the Bird-Catcher_, comes to confess her in prison. He abuses the
sacrament to the point of hiding behind a piece of serge two priests who
transcribed Joan of Arc's confession. Thus did the judges use sacrilege
in order to be murderers. And an unfortunate idiot, who had had enough
courage to render very great services to the king and the country, was
condemned to be burned by forty-four French priests who immolated her
for the English faction.

It is sufficiently well-known how someone had the cunning and meanness
to put a man's suit beside her to tempt her to wear this suit again, and
with what absurd barbarism this transgression was claimed as a pretext
for condemning her to the flames, as if in a warrior girl it was a crime
worthy of the fire, to put on breeches instead of a skirt. All this
wrings the heart, and makes common sense shudder. One cannot conceive
how we dare, after the countless horrors of which we have been guilty,
call any nation by the name of barbarian.

Most of our historians, lovers of the so-called embellishments of
history rather than of truth, say that Joan went fearlessly to the
torture; but as the chronicles of the times bear witness, and as the
historian Villaret admits, she received her sentence with cries and
tears; a weakness pardonable in her sex, and perhaps in ours, and very
compatible with the courage which this girl had displayed amid the
dangers of war; for one can be fearless in battle, and sensitive on the
scaffold.

I must add that many persons have believed without any examination that
the Maid of Orleans was not burned at Rouen at all, although we have the
official report of her execution. They have been deceived by the account
we still have of an adventuress who took the name of the "Maid,"
deceived Joan of Arc's brothers, and under cover of this imposture,
married in Lorraine a nobleman of the house of Armoise. There were two
other rogues who also passed themselves off as the "Maid of Orleans."
All three claimed that Joan was not burned at all, and that another
woman had been substituted for her. Such stories can be admitted only by
those who want to be deceived.


FOOTNOTES:

[8] Beuchot says: There was at that time in France an
Inquisitor-General, named Brother Jean or Jacques le Graverend. His
vice-inquisitor or vicar, who took part in Joan's trial, was not called
Brother Martin, but Brother Jean Magistri or the Master.

[9] This is a translation of the Latin of the Sorbonne, made long after.

[10] Beuchot says that Berriat Saint-Prix, in his "Jeanne d'Arc,"
proves, page 341 _et seq._, that the imputations against Brother Richard
are groundless, and that he could exercise no influence at the trial.




_KISSING_


I ask pardon of the boys and the girls; but maybe they will not find
here what they will seek. This article is only for scholars and serious
persons for whom it is barely suitable.

There is but too much question of kissing in the comedies of Molière's
time. Champagne, in the comedy of "La Mère Coquette" by Quinault, asks
kisses of Laurette; she says to him--"You are not content, then; really
it is shameful; I have kissed you twice." Champagne answers her--"What!
you keep account of your kisses?" (Act I. Sc. 1.).

The valets always used to ask kisses of the soubrettes; people kissed
each other on the stage. Usually it was very dull and very intolerable,
particularly in the case of ugly actors, who were nauseating.

If the reader wants kisses, let him look for them in the "Pastor Fido";
there is one entire chorus where nothing but kisses is mentioned; and
the piece is founded solely on a kiss that Mirtillo gave one day to
Amarilli, in a game of blind man's buff, _un bacio molto saporito_.

Everyone knows the chapter on kisses, in which Jean de la Casa,
Archbishop of Benevento, says that people can kiss each other from head
to foot. He pities the people with big noses who can only approach each
other with difficulty; and he counsels ladies with long noses to have
flat-nosed lovers.

The kiss was a very ordinary form of salutation throughout ancient
times. Plutarch recalls that the conspirators, before killing Cæsar,
kissed his face, hand and breast. Tacitus says that when Agricola, his
father-in-law, returned from Rome, Domitian received him with a cold
kiss, said nothing to him, and left him confounded in the crowd. The
inferior who could not succeed in greeting his superior by kissing him,
put his mouth to his own hand, and sent him a kiss that the other
returned in the same way if he so wished.

This sign was used even for worshipping the gods. Job, in his parable
(Chap. xxxi.), which is perhaps the oldest of known books, says that he
has not worshipped the sun and the moon like the other Arabs, that he
has not carried his hand to his mouth as he looked at the stars.

In our Occident nothing remains of this ancient custom but the puerile
and genteel civility that is still taught to children in some small
towns, of kissing their right hands when someone has given them some
sweets.

It was a horrible thing to betray with a kiss; it was that that made
Cæsar's assassination still more hateful. We know all about Judas'
kisses; they have become proverbial.

Joab, one of David's captains, being very jealous of Amasa, another
captain, says to him (2 Sam. xx. 9): "Art thou in health, my brother?
And he took Amasa by the beard with the right hand to kiss him," and
with his other hand drew his sword and "smote him therewith in the fifth
rib, and shed out his bowels on the ground."

No other kiss is to be found in the other fairly frequent assassinations
which were committed among the Jews, unless it be perhaps the kisses
which Judith gave to the captain Holophernes, before cutting off his
head while he was in bed asleep; but no mention is made of them, and the
thing is merely probable.

In one of Shakespeare's tragedies called "Othello," this Othello, who is
a black, gives two kisses to his wife before strangling her. That seems
abominable to honourable people; but Shakespeare's partisans say it is
beautifully natural, particularly in a black.

When Giovanni Galeas Sforza was assassinated in Milan Cathedral, on St.
Stephen's day, the two Medici in the Reparata church; Admiral Coligny,
the Prince of Orange, the Maréchal d'Ancre, the brothers Witt, and so
many others; at least they were not kissed.

There was among the ancients I know not what of symbolic and sacred
attached to the kiss, since one kissed the statues of the gods and their
beards, when the sculptors had shown them with a beard. Initiates kissed
each other at the mysteries of Ceres, as a sign of concord.

The early Christians, men and women, kissed each other on the mouth at
their _agapæ_. This word signified "love-feast." They gave each other
the holy kiss, the kiss of peace, the kiss of brother and sister, +agion
philêma+. This custom lasted for more than four centuries, and was
abolished at last on account of its consequences. It was these kisses of
peace, these agapæ of love, these names of "brother" and "sister," that
long drew to the little-known Christians, those imputations of
debauchery with which the priests of Jupiter and the priestesses of
Vesta charged them. You see in Petronius, and in other profane authors,
that the libertines called themselves "brother" and "sister." It was
thought that among the Christians the same names signified the same
infamies. They were innocent accomplices in spreading these accusations
over the Roman empire.

There were in the beginning seventeen different Christian societies,
just as there were nine among the Jews, including the two kinds of
Samaritans. The societies which flattered themselves at being the most
orthodox accused the others of the most inconceivable obscenities. The
term of "gnostic," which was at first so honourable, signifying
"learned," "enlightened," "pure," became a term of horror and scorn, a
reproach of heresy. Saint Epiphanius, in the third century, claimed that
they used first to tickle each other, the men and the women; that then
they gave each other very immodest kisses, and that they judged the
degree of their faith by the voluptuousness of these kisses; that the
husband said to his wife, in presenting a young initiate to her: "Have
an agape with my brother," and that they had an agape.

We do not dare repeat here, in the chaste French tongue,[11] what Saint
Epiphanius adds in Greek (Epiphanius, _contra hæres_, lib. I., vol. ii).
We will say merely that perhaps this saint was somewhat imposed upon;
that he allowed himself to be too carried away by zeal, and that all
heretics are not hideous debauchees.

The sect of Pietists, wishing to imitate the early Christians, to-day
give each other kisses of peace on leaving the assembly, calling each
other "my brother, my sister"; it is what, twenty years ago, a very
pretty and very human Pietist lady avowed to me. The ancient custom was
to kiss on the mouth; the Pietists have carefully preserved it.

There was no other manner of greeting dames in France, Germany, Italy,
England; it was the right of cardinals to kiss queens on the mouth, and
in Spain even. What is singular is that they had not the same
prerogative in France, where ladies always had more liberty than
anywhere else, but "every country has its ceremonies," and there is no
usage so general that chance and custom have not provided exceptions. It
would have been an incivility, an affront, for an honourable woman, when
she received a lord's first visit, not to have kissed him, despite his
moustaches. "It is a displeasing custom," says Montaigne (Book III.,
chap. v.), "and offensive to ladies, to have to lend their lips to
whoever has three serving-men in his suite, disagreeable though he be."
This custom was, nevertheless, the oldest in the world.

If it is disagreeable for a young and pretty mouth to stick itself out
of courtesy to an old and ugly mouth, there was a great danger between
fresh, red mouths of twenty to twenty-five years old; and that is what
finally brought about the abolition of the ceremony of kissing in the
mysteries and the agapæ. It is what caused women to be confined among
the Orientals, so that they might kiss only their fathers and their
brothers; custom long since introduced into Spain by the Arabs.

Behold the danger: there is one nerve of the fifth pair which goes from
the mouth to the heart, and thence lower down, with such delicate
industry has nature prepared everything! The little glands of the lips,
their spongy tissue, their velvety paps, the fine skin, ticklish, gives
them an exquisite and voluptuous sensation, which is not without analogy
with a still more hidden and still more sensitive part. Modesty may
suffer from a lengthily savoured kiss between two Pietists of eighteen.

It is to be remarked that the human species, the turtledoves and the
pigeons alone are acquainted with kisses; thence came among the Latins
the word _columbatìm_, which our language has not been able to render.
There is nothing of which abuse has not been made. The kiss, designed by
nature for the mouth, has often been prostituted to membranes which do
not seem made for this usage. One knows of what the templars were
accused.

We cannot honestly treat this interesting subject at greater length,
although Montaigne says: "One should speak thereof shamelessly: brazenly
do we utter 'killing,' 'wounding,' 'betraying,' but of that we dare not
speak but with bated breath."


FOOTNOTES:

[11] Or the English--_Translator._




_LANGUAGES_


There is no complete language, no language which can express all our
ideas and all our sensations; their shades are too numerous, too
imperceptible. Nobody can make known the precise degree of sensation he
experiences. One is obliged, for example, to designate by the general
names of "love" and "hate" a thousand loves and a thousand hates all
different from each other; it is the same with our pleasures and our
pains. Thus all languages are, like us, imperfect.

They have all been made successively and by degrees according to our
needs. It is the instinct common to all men which made the first
grammars without perceiving it. The Lapps, the Negroes, as well as the
Greeks, needed to express the past, the present and the future; and they
did it: but as there has never been an assembly of logicians who formed
a language, no language has been able to attain a perfectly regular
plan.

All words, in all possible languages, are necessarily the images of
sensations. Men have never been able to express anything but what they
felt. Thus everything has become metaphor; everywhere the soul is
enlightened, the heart burns, the mind wanders. Among all peoples the
infinite has been the negation of the finite; immensity the negation of
measure. It is evident that our five senses have produced all languages,
as well as all our ideas. The least imperfect are like the laws: those
in which there is the least that is arbitrary are the best. The most
complete are necessarily those of the peoples who have cultivated the
arts and society. Thus the Hebraic language should be one of the
poorest languages, like the people who used to speak it. How should the
Hebrews have had maritime terms, they who before Solomon had not a boat?
how the terms of philosophy, they who were plunged in such profound
ignorance up to the time when they started to learn something in their
migration to Babylon? The language of the Phoenicians, from which the
Hebrews drew their jargon, should be very superior, because it was the
idiom of an industrious, commercial, rich people, distributed all over
the earth.

The most ancient known language should be that of the nation most
anciently gathered together as a body of people. It should be, further,
that of the people which has been least subjugated, or which, having
been subjugated, has civilized its conquerors. And in this respect, it
is constant that Chinese and Arabic are the most ancient of all those
that are spoken to-day.

There is no mother-tongue. All neighbouring nations have borrowed from
each other: but one has given the name of "mother-tongue" to those from
which some known idioms are derived. For example, Latin is the
mother-tongue in respect of Italian, Spanish and French: but it was
itself derived from Tuscan; and Tuscan was derived from Celtic and
Greek.

The most beautiful of all languages must be that which is at once, the
most complete, the most sonorous, the most varied in its twists and the
most regular in its progress, that which has most compound words, that
which by its prosody best expresses the soul's slow or impetuous
movements, that which most resembles music.

Greek has all these advantages: it has not the roughness of Latin, in
which so many words end in _um_, _ur_, _us_. It has all the pomp of
Spanish, and all the sweetness of Italian. It has above all the living
languages of the world the expression of music, by long and short
syllables, and by the number and variety of its accents. Thus all
disfigured as it is to-day in Greece, it can still be regarded as the
most beautiful language in the universe.

The most beautiful language cannot be the most widely distributed, when
the people which speaks it is oppressed, not numerous, without commerce
with other nations, and when these other nations have cultivated their
own languages. Thus Greek should be less diffused than Arabic, and even
Turkish.

Of all European languages French should be the most general, because it
is the most suited to conversation: it has taken its character from that
of the people which speaks it.

The French have been, for nearly a hundred and fifty years, the people
which has best known society, which the first discarded all
embarrassment, and the first among whom women were free and even
sovereign, when elsewhere they were only slaves. The always uniform
syntax of this language, which admits no inversions, is a further
facility barely possessed by other tongues; it is more current coin than
others, even though it lacks weight. The prodigious quantity of
agreeably frivolous books which this nation has produced is a further
reason for the favour which its language has obtained among all nations.

Profound books will not give vogue to a language: they will be
translated; people will learn Newton's philosophy; but they will not
learn English in order to understand it.

What makes French still more common is the perfection to which the drama
has been carried in this tongue. It is to "Cinna," "Phèdre," the
"Misanthrope" that it owes its vogue, and not to the conquests of Louis
XIV.

It is not so copious and so flexible as Italian, or so majestic as
Spanish, or so energetic as English; and yet it has had more success
than these three languages from the sole fact that it is more suited to
intercourse, and that there are more agreeable books in it than
elsewhere. It has succeeded like the cooks of France, because it has
more flattered general taste.

The same spirit which has led the nations to imitate the French in their
furniture, in the arrangement of rooms, in gardens, in dancing, in all
that gives charm, has led them also to speak their language. The great
art of good French writers is precisely that of the women of this
nation, who dress better than the other women of Europe, and who,
without being more beautiful, appear to be so by the art with which they
adorn themselves, by the noble and simple charm they give themselves so
naturally.

It is by dint of good breeding that this language has managed to make
the traces of its former barbarism disappear. Everything would bear
witness to this barbarism to whosoever should look closely. One would
see that the number _vingt_ comes from _viginti_, and that formerly this
_g_ and this _t_ were pronounced with a roughness characteristic of all
the northern nations; of the month of _Augustus_ has been made the month
of _août_. Not so long ago a German prince thinking that in France one
never pronounced the term _Auguste_ otherwise, called King Auguste of
Poland King Août. All the letters which have been suppressed in
pronunciation, but retained in writing, are our former barbarous
clothes.

It was when manners were softened that the language also was softened:
before François Ier summoned women to his court, it was as clownish as
we were. It would have been as good to speak old Celtic as the French of
the time of Charles VIII. and Louis XII.: German was not more harsh.

It has taken centuries to remove this rust. The imperfections which
remain would still be intolerable, were it not for the continual care
one takes to avoid them, as a skilful horseman avoids stones in the
road. Good writers are careful to combat the faulty expressions which
popular ignorance first brings into vogue, and which, adopted by bad
authors, then pass into the gazettes and the pamphlets. _Roastbeef_
signifies in English _roasted ox_, and our waiters talk to us nowadays
of a "roastbeef of mutton." _Riding-coat_ means _a coat for going on
horseback_; of it people have made _redingote_, and the populace thinks
it an ancient word of the language. It has been necessary to adopt this
expression with the people because it signifies an article of common
use.

In matters of arts and crafts and necessary things, the common people
subjugated the court, if one dare say so; just as in matters of religion
those who most despise the common run of people are obliged to speak and
to appear to think like them.

To call things by the names which the common people has imposed on them
is not to speak badly; but one recognizes a people naturally more
ingenious than another by the proper names which it gives to each thing.

It is only through lack of imagination that a people adapts the same
expression to a hundred different ideas. It is a ridiculous sterility
not to have known how to express otherwise _an arm of the sea_, _a scale
arm_, _an arm of a chair_; there is poverty of thought in saying equally
the _head of a nail_, the _head of an army_.

Ignorance has introduced another custom into all modern languages. A
thousand terms no longer signify what they should signify. _Idiot_ meant
_solitary_, to-day it means _foolish_; _epiphany_ signified
_appearance_, to-day it is the festival of three kings; _baptize_ is to
dip in water, we say _baptize with the name_ of John or James.

To these defects in almost all languages are added barbarous
irregularities. Venus is a charming name, _venereal_ is abominable.
Another result of the irregularity of these languages composed at hazard
in uncouth times is the quantity of compound words of which the simple
form does not exist any more. They are children who have lost their
father. We have _architects_ and no _tects_; there are things which are
_ineffable_ and none which are _effable_. One is _intrepid_, one is not
_trepid_. There are _impudent_ fellows, _insolent_ fellows, but neither
_pudent_ fellows nor _solent_ fellows. All languages more or less retain
some of these defects; they are all irregular lands from which the hand
of the adroit artist knows how to derive advantage.

Other defects which make a nation's character evident always slip into
languages. In France there are fashions in expressions as in ways of
doing the hair. A fashionable invalid or doctor will take it into his
head to say that he has had a _soupçon_ of fever to signify that he has
had a slight attack; soon the whole nation has _soupçons_ of colics,
_soupçons_ of hatred, love, ridicule. Preachers in the pulpit tell you
that you must have at least a _soupçon_ of God's love. After a few
months this fashion gives place to another.

What does most harm to the nobility of the language is not this passing
fashion with which people are soon disgusted, not the solecisms of
fashionable people into which good authors do not fall, but the
affectation of mediocre authors in speaking of serious things in a
conversational style. Everything conspires to corrupt a language that is
rather widely diffused; authors who spoil the style by affectation;
those who write to foreign countries, and who almost always mingle
foreign expressions with their natural tongue; merchants who introduce
into conversation their business terms.

All languages being imperfect, it does not follow that one should change
them. One must adhere absolutely to the manner in which the good authors
have spoken them; and when one has a sufficient number of approved
authors, a language is fixed. Thus one can no longer change anything in
Italian, Spanish, English, French, without corrupting them; the reason
is clear: it is that one would soon render unintelligible the books
which provide the instruction and the pleasure of the nations.




_LAWS_


Sheep live very placidly in community, they are considered very
easy-going, because we do not see the prodigious quantity of animals
they devour. It is even to be believed that they eat them innocently and
without knowing it, like us when we eat a Sassenage cheese. The republic
of the sheep is a faithful representation of the golden age.

A chicken-run is visibly the most perfect monarchic state. There is no
king comparable to a cock. If he marches proudly in the midst of his
people, it is not out of vanity. If the enemy approaches, he does not
give orders to his subjects to go to kill themselves for him by virtue
of his certain knowledge and plenary power; he goes to battle himself,
ranges his chickens behind him and fights to the death. If he is the
victor, he himself sings the _Te Deum_. In civil life there is no one so
gallant, so honest, so disinterested. He has all the virtues. Has he in
his royal beak a grain of corn, a grub, he gives it to the first lady
among his subjects who presents herself. Solomon in his harem did not
come near a poultry-yard cock.

If it be true that the bees are governed by a queen to whom all her
subjects make love, that is a still more perfect government.

The ants are considered to be an excellent democracy. Democracy is above
all the other States, because there everyone is equal, and each
individual works for the good of all.

The republic of the beavers is still superior to that of the ants, at
least if we judge by their masonry work.

The monkeys resemble strolling players rather than a civilized people;
and they do not appear to be gathered together under fixed, fundamental
laws, like the preceding species.

We resemble the monkeys more than any other animal by the gift of
imitation, the frivolity of our ideas, and by our inconstancy which has
never allowed us to have uniform and durable laws.

When nature formed our species and gave us instincts, self-esteem for
our preservation, benevolence for the preservation of others, love which
is common to all the species, and the inexplicable gift of combining
more ideas than all the animals together; when she had thus given us our
portion, she said to us: "Do as you can."

There is no good code in any country. The reason for this is evident;
the laws have been made according to the times, the place and the need,
etc.

When the needs have changed, the laws which have remained, have become
ridiculous. Thus the law which forbade the eating of pig and the
drinking of wine was very reasonable in Arabia, where pig and wine are
injurious; it is absurd at Constantinople.

The law which gives the whole fee to the eldest son is very good in
times of anarchy and pillage. Then the eldest son is the captain of the
castle which the brigands will attack sooner or later; the younger sons
will be his chief officers, the husbandmen his soldiers. All that is to
be feared is that the younger son may assassinate or poison the Salian
lord his elder brother, in order to become in his turn the master of the
hovel; but these cases are rare, because nature has so combined our
instincts and our passions that we have more horror of assassinating our
elder brother than we have of being envious of his position. But this
law, suitable for the owners of dungeons in Chilperic's time is
detestable when there is question of sharing stocks in a city.

To the shame of mankind, one knows that the laws of games are the only
ones which everywhere are just, clear, inviolable and executed. Why is
the Indian who gave us the rules of the game of chess willingly obeyed
all over the world, and why are the popes' decretals, for example,
to-day an object of horror and scorn? the reason is that the inventor of
chess combined everything with precision for the satisfaction of the
players, and that the popes, in their decretals, had nothing in view but
their own interest. The Indian wished to exercise men's minds equally,
and give them pleasure; the popes wished to besot men's minds. Also, the
essence of the game of chess has remained the same for five thousand
years, it is common to all the inhabitants of the earth; and the
decretals are known only at Spoletto, Orvieto, Loretto, where the
shallowest lawyer secretly hates and despises them.

But I delight in thinking that there is a natural law independent of all
human conventions: the fruit of my work must belong to me; I must honour
my father and my mother; I have no right over my fellow's life, and my
fellow has none over mine, etc. But when I think that from Chedorlaomer
to Mentzel,[12] colonel of hussars, everyone loyally kills and pillages
his fellow with a licence in his pocket, I am very afflicted.

I am told that there are laws among thieves, and also laws of war. I ask
what are these laws of war. I learn that they mean hanging a brave
officer who has held fast in a bad post without cannon against a royal
army; that they mean having a prisoner hanged, if the enemy has hanged
one of yours; that they mean putting to the fire and the sword villages
which have not brought their sustenance on the appointed day, according
to the orders of the gracious sovereign of the district. "Good," say I,
"that is the 'Spirit of the Laws.'"

It seems to me that most men have received from nature enough common
sense to make laws, but that everyone is not just enough to make good
laws.


FOOTNOTES:

[12] Chedorlaomer was king of the Elamites, and contemporary with
Abraham. See Genesis ch. xiv.

Mentzel was a famous chief of Austrian partisans in the war of 1741. At
the head of five thousand men, he made Munich capitulate on February
13th, 1742.




_LIBERTY_


Either I am very much mistaken, or Locke the definer has very well
defined liberty as "power." I am mistaken again, or Collins, celebrated
London magistrate, is the only philosopher who has really sifted this
idea, and Clark's answer to him was merely that of a theologian. But of
all that has been written in France on liberty, the following little
dialogue seems to me the most clear.

A: There is a battery of guns firing in your ears, have you the liberty
to hear them or not to hear them?

B: Without doubt, I cannot stop myself hearing them.

A: Do you want this gun to carry off your head and the heads of your
wife and daughter, who are walking with you?

B: What are you talking about? as long as I am of sound mind, I cannot
want such a thing; it is impossible.

A: Good; you hear this gun necessarily, and you wish necessarily that
neither you nor your family shall die from a cannon shot while you are
out for a walk; you have not the power either of not hearing or of
wishing to remain here?

B: Clearly.

A: You have consequently taken some thirty steps in order to be
sheltered from the gun, you have had the power to walk these few steps
with me?

B: Again very clearly.

A: And if you had been a paralytic, you could not have avoided being
exposed to this battery, you would necessarily have heard and received a
gun shot; and you would be dead necessarily?

B: Nothing is more true.

A: In what then does your liberty consist, unless it be in the power
that your self has exercised in performing what your will required of
absolute necessity?

B: You embarrass me; liberty then is nothing but the power of doing what
I want to do?

A: Think about it, and see if liberty can be understood otherwise.

B: In that case my hunting dog is as free as I am; he has necessarily
the will to run when he sees a hare, and the power of running if he has
not a pain in his legs. I have then nothing above my dog; you reduce me
to the state of the beasts.

A: What poor sophistry from the poor sophists who have taught you.
Indeed you are in a bad way to be free like your dog! Do you not eat,
sleep, propagate like him, even almost to the attitude? Do you want the
sense of smell other than through your nose? Why do you want to have
liberty otherwise than your dog has?

B: But I have a soul which reasons much, and my dog reasons hardly at
all. He has almost only simple ideas, and I have a thousand metaphysical
ideas.

A: Well, you are a thousand times freer than he is; that is, you have a
thousand times more power of thinking than he has; but you do not think
otherwise than he does.

B: What! I am not free to wish what I wish?

A: What do you mean by that?

B: I mean what everyone means. Doesn't one say every day, wishes are
free?

A: A proverb is not a reason; explain yourself more clearly.

B: I mean that I am free to wish as I please.

A: With your permission, that has no sense; do you not see that it is
ridiculous to say, I wish to wish? You wish necessarily, as a result of
the ideas that have offered themselves to you. Do you wish to be
married; yes or no?

B: But if I tell you that I want neither the one nor the other?

A: You will be answering like someone who says: "Some believe Cardinal
Mazarin to be dead, others believe him to be alive, and as for me I
believe neither the one nor the other."

B: Well, I want to be married.

A: Ah! that is an answer. Why do you want to be married?

B: Because I am in love with a beautiful, sweet, well-bred young girl,
who is fairly rich and sings very well, whose parents are very honest
people, and because I flatter myself I am loved by her, and very welcome
to her family.

A: That is a reason. You see that you cannot wish without reason. I
declare to you that you are free to marry; that is, that you have the
power to sign the contract, have your nuptials, and sleep with your
wife.

B: How now! I cannot wish without reason? And what will become of that
other proverb: _Sit pro ratione voluntas_; my will is my reason, I wish
because I wish?

A: That is absurd, my dear fellow; there would be in you an effect
without a cause.

B: What! When I play at odds and evens, I have a reason for choosing
evens rather than odds?

A: Yes, undoubtedly.

B: And what is that reason, if you please?

A: The reason is that the idea of even rather than the opposite idea
presents itself to your mind. It would be comic that there were cases
where you wished because there was a cause of wishing, and that there
were cases where you wished without any cause. When you wish to be
married, you evidently feel the dominating reason; you do not feel it
when you are playing at odds and evens; and yet there certainly must be
one.

B: But, I repeat, I am not free then?

A: Your will is not free, but your actions are. You are free to act,
when you have the power to act.

B: But all the books I have read on the liberty of indifference....

A: What do you mean by the liberty of indifference?

B: I mean the liberty of spitting on the right or on the left, of
sleeping on my right side or on my left, of taking a walk of four turns
or five.

A: Really the liberty you would have there would be a comic liberty! God
would have given you a fine gift! It would really be something to boast
of! Of what use to you would be a power which was exercised only on such
futile occasions? But the fact is that it is ridiculous to suppose the
will to wish to spit on the right. Not only is this will to wish absurd,
but it is certain that several trifling circumstances determine you in
these acts that you call indifferent. You are no more free in these acts
than in the others. But, I repeat, you are free at all times, in all
places, as soon as you do what you wish to do.

B: I suspect you are right. I will think about it.[13]


FOOTNOTES:

[13] See "Free-Will."




_LIBRARY_


A big library has this in it of good, that it dismays those who look at
it. Two hundred thousand volumes discourage a man tempted to print; but
unfortunately he at once says to himself: "People do not read all those
books, and they may read mine." He compares himself to a drop of water
who complains of being lost in the ocean and ignored: a genius had pity
on it; he caused it to be swallowed by an oyster; it became the most
beautiful pearl in the Orient, and was the chief ornament in the throne
of the Great Mogul. Those who are only compilers, imitators,
commentators, splitters of phrases, usurious critics, in short, those on
whom a genius has no pity, will always remain drops of water.

Our man works in his garret, therefore, in the hope of becoming a pearl.

It is true that in this immense collection of books there are about a
hundred and ninety-nine thousand which will never be read, from cover to
cover at least; but one may need to consult some of them once in a
lifetime. It is a great advantage for whoever wishes to learn to find at
his hand in the king's palace the volume and page he seeks, without
being kept waiting a moment. It is one of the most noble institutions.
No expense is more magnificent and more useful.

The public library of the King of France is the finest in the whole
world, less on account of the number and rarity of the volumes than of
the ease and courtesy with which the librarians lend them to all
scholars. This library is incontestably the most precious monument there
is in France.

This astounding multitude of books should not scare. We have already
remarked that Paris contains about seven hundred thousand men, that one
cannot live with them all, and that one chooses three or four friends.
Thus must one no more complain of the multitude of books than of the
multitude of citizens.

A man who wishes to learn a little about his existence, and who has no
time to waste, is quite embarrassed. He wishes to read simultaneously
Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle who wrote against them, Leibnitz who disputed
with Bayle, Clarke who disputed with Leibnitz, Malebranche who differed
from them all, Locke who passed as having confounded Malebranche,
Stillingfleet who thought he had vanquished Locke, Cudworth who thinks
himself above them because he is understood by no one. One would die of
old age before having thumbed the hundredth part of the metaphysical
romances.

One is very content to have the most ancient books, as one inquires into
the most ancient medals. It is that which makes the honour of a library.
The oldest books in the world are the "Kings" of the Chinese, the
"Shastabad" of the Brahmins, of which Mr. Holwell has brought to our
knowledge admirable passages, what remains of the ancient Zarathustra,
the fragments of Sanchoniathon which Eusebius has preserved for us and
which bears the characteristics of the most remote antiquity. I do not
speak of the "Pentateuch" which is above all one could say of it.

We still have the prayer of the real Orpheus, which the hierophant
recited in the old Greek mysteries. "Walk in the path of justice,
worship the sole master of the universe. He is one; He is sole by
Himself. All beings owe Him their existence; He acts in them and by
them. He sees everything, and never has been seen by mortal eyes."

St. Clement of Alexandria, the most learned of the fathers of the
Church, or rather the only scholar in profane antiquity, gives him
almost always the name of Orpheus of Thrace, of Orpheus the Theologian,
to distinguish him from those who wrote later under his name.

We have no longer anything either of Museus or of Linus. A few passages
from these predecessors of Homer would well be an adornment to a
library.

Augustus had formed the library called the Palatine. The statue of
Apollo presided over it. The emperor embellished it with busts of the
best authors. One saw in Rome twenty-nine great public libraries. There
are now more than four thousand important libraries in Europe. Choose
which suits you, and try not to be bored.




_LIMITS OF THE HUMAN MIND_


Someone asked Newton one day why he walked when he wanted to, and how
his arm and his hand moved at his will. He answered manfully that he had
no idea. "But at least," his interlocutor said to him, "you who
understand so well the gravitation of the planets will tell me why they
turn in one direction rather than in another!" And he again confessed
that he had no idea.

Those who taught that the ocean was salt for fear that it might become
putrid, and that the tides were made to bring our ships into port (The
Abbé Pluche in "The Spectacle of Nature"), were somewhat ashamed when
the reply was made to them that the Mediterranean has ports and no ebb.
Musschenbroeck himself fell into this inadvertence.

Has anyone ever been able to say precisely how a log is changed on the
hearth into burning carbon, and by what mechanism lime is kindled by
fresh water?

Is the first principle of the movement of the heart in animals properly
understood? does one know clearly how generation is accomplished? has
one guessed what gives us sensations, ideas, memory? We do not
understand the essence of matter any more than the children who touch
its surface.

Who will teach us by what mechanism this grain of wheat that we throw
into the ground rises again to produce a pipe laden with an ear of corn,
and how the same soil produces an apple at the top of this tree, and a
chestnut on its neighbour? Many teachers have said--"What do I not
know?" Montaigne used to say--"What do I know?"

Ruthlessly trenchant fellow, wordy pedagogue, meddlesome theorist, you
seek the limits of your mind. They are at the end of your nose.




_LOCAL CRIMES_


Traverse the whole earth, you will find that theft, murder, adultery,
calumny are regarded as crimes which society condemns and curbs; but
should what is approved in England, and condemned in Italy, be punished
in Italy as an outrage against the whole of humanity? That is what I
call a local crime. Does not that which is criminal only in the
enclosure of some mountains, or between two rivers, demand of judges
more indulgence than those outrages which are held in horror in all
countries? Should not the judge say to himself: "I should not dare
punish at Ragusa what I punish at Loretto"? Should not this reflection
soften in his heart the hardness that it is only too easy to contract
during the long exercise of his office?

You know the _kermesses_ in Flanders; in the last century they were
carried to a point of indecency which might revolt eyes unaccustomed to
these spectacles. This is how Christmas was celebrated in some towns.
First there appeared a young man half naked, with wings on his back; he
recited the _Ave Maria_ to a young girl who answered him _fiat_, and the
angel kissed her on the mouth: then a child enclosed in a great
cardboard cock cried, imitating the cock's cry: _Puer natus est nobis._
A big ox bellowed _ubi_, which it pronounced _oubi_; a sheep bleated
_Bethlehem_. An ass cried _hihanus_, to signify _eamus_; a long
procession, preceded by four fools with baubles and rattles, closed the
performance. There remain to-day traces of these popular devotions,
which among more educated peoples would be taken for profanations. A
bad-tempered Swiss, more drunk maybe than those who played the rôles of
ox and ass, came to words with them in Louvain; blows were given; the
people wanted to hang the Swiss, who escaped with difficulty.

The same man had a violent quarrel at the Hague in Holland for having
stoutly taken Barneveldt's part against an extravagant Gomarist. He was
put into prison in Amsterdam for having said that priests are the
scourge of humanity and the source of all our misfortunes. "What!" he
said. "If one believes that good works make for salvation, one finds
oneself in a dungeon; if one laughs at a cock and an ass, one risks
being hanged." This adventure, burlesque though it is, makes it quite
clear that one can be reprehensible on one or two points in our
hemisphere, and be absolutely innocent in the rest of the world.




_LOVE_


There are so many sorts of love that one does not know to whom to
address oneself for a definition of it. The name of "love" is given
boldly to a caprice lasting a few days, a sentiment without esteem,
gallants' affectations, a frigid habit, a romantic fantasy, relish
followed by prompt disrelish: people give this name to a thousand
chimeras.

If philosophers want to probe to the bottom this barely philosophical
matter, let them meditate on the banquet of Plato, in which Socrates,
honourable lover of Alcibiades and Agathon, converses with them on the
metaphysics of love.

Lucretius speaks of it more as a natural philosopher: Virgil follows in
the steps of Lucretius; _amor omnibus idem_.

It is the stuff of nature broidered by nature. Do you want an idea of
love? look at the sparrows in your garden; look at your pigeons; look at
the bull which is brought to the heifer; look at this proud horse which
two of your grooms lead to the quiet mare awaiting him; she draws aside
her tail to welcome him; see how her eyes sparkle; hark to the neighing;
watch the prancing, the curvetting, the ears pricked, the mouth opening
with little convulsions, the swelling nostrils, the flaring breath, the
manes rising and floating, the impetuous movement with which he hurls
himself on the object which nature has destined for him; but be not
jealous of him, and think of the advantages of the human species; in
love they compensate for all those that nature has given to the
animals--strength, beauty, nimbleness, speed.

There are animals, even, who have no enjoyment in possession. Scale
fish are deprived of this delight: the female throws millions of eggs on
the mud; the male coming across them passes over them, and fertilizes
them with his seed, without troubling about the female to whom they
belong.

Most animals that pair, taste pleasure only by a single sense, and as
soon as the appetite is satisfied, everything is extinguished. No
animal, apart from you, knows what kissing is; the whole of your body is
sensitive; your lips especially enjoy a voluptuousness that nothing can
tire; and this pleasure belongs to no species but yours: you can give
yourself up to love at any time, and the animals have but a fixed time.
If you reflect on these superiorities, you will say with the Count of
Rochester--"In a country of atheists love would cause the Deity to be
worshipped."

As men have received the gift of perfecting all that nature accords
them, they have perfected love. Cleanliness, the care of oneself, by
rendering the skin more delicate, increase the pleasure of contact; and
attention to one's health renders the organs of voluptuousness more
sensitive. All the other sentiments that enter into that of love, just
like metals which amalgamate with gold: friendship, regard, come to
help; the faculties of mind and body are still further chains.

Self-love above all tightens all these bonds. One applauds oneself for
one's choice, and a crowd of illusions form the decoration of the
building of which nature has laid the foundations.

That is what you have above the animals. But if you taste so many
pleasures unknown to them, how many sorrows too of which the beasts have
no idea! What is frightful for you is that over three-fourths of the
earth nature has poisoned the pleasures of love and the sources of life
with an appalling disease to which man alone is subject, and which
infects in him the organs of generation alone.

It is in no wise with this plague as with so many other maladies that
are the result of our excesses. It was not debauch that introduced it
into the world. Phryne, Lais, Flora, Messalina and those like them,
were not attacked by it; it was born in some islands where men lived in
innocence, and thence spread itself over the ancient world.

If ever one could accuse nature of despising her work, of contradicting
her plans, of acting against her designs, it is in this detestable
scourge which has soiled the earth with horror and filth. Is that the
best of all possible worlds? What! if Cæsar, Antony, Octavius never had
this disease, was it not possible for it not to cause the death of
François I.? "No," people say, "things were ordered thus for the best."
I want to believe it; but it is sad for those to whom Rabelais dedicated
his book.

Erotic philosophers have often debated the question of whether Heloïse
could still really love Abelard when he was a monk and emasculate? One
of these qualities did very great harm to the other.

But console yourself, Abelard, you were loved; the root of the hewn tree
still retains a remnant of sap; the imagination aids the heart. One can
still be happy at table even though one eats no longer. Is it love? is
it simply a memory? is it friendship? All that is composed of something
indescribable. It is an obscure feeling resembling the fantastic
passions retained by the dead in the Elysian fields. The heroes who,
during their lifetime, shone in the chariot races, drove imaginary
chariots when they were dead. Heloïse lived with you on illusions and
supplements. She kissed you sometimes, and with all the more pleasure
that having taken a vow at the Paraclet monastery to love you no longer,
her kisses thereby became more precious as more guilty. A woman can
barely be seized with a passion for a eunuch: but she can keep her
passion for her lover become eunuch, provided that he remains lovable.

It is not the same, ladies, for a lover who has grown old in service;
the externals subsist no longer; the wrinkles horrify; the white
eyebrows shock; the lost teeth disgust; the infirmities estrange: all
that one can do is to have the virtue of being nurse, and of tolerating
what one has loved. It is burying a dead man.




_LUXURY_


People have declaimed against luxury for two thousand years, in verse
and in prose, and people have always delighted in it.

What has not been said of the early Romans when these brigands ravaged
and pillaged the harvests; when, to enlarge their poor village, they
destroyed the poor villages of the Volscians and the Samnites? They were
disinterested, virtuous men; they had not yet been able to steal either
gold, silver, or precious stones, because there were not any in the
little towns they plundered. Their woods and their marshes produced
neither pheasants nor partridges, and people praise their temperance.

When gradually they had pillaged everything, stolen everything from the
far end of the Adriatic Gulf to the Euphrates, and when they had enough
intelligence to enjoy the fruit of their plundering; when they
cultivated the arts, when they tasted of all pleasures, and when they
even made the vanquished taste of them, they ceased then, people say, to
be wise and honest men.

All these declamations reduce themselves to proving that a robber must
never either eat the dinner he has taken, or wear the coat he has
pilfered, or adorn himself with the ring he has filched. He should throw
all that, people say, in the river, so as to live like an honest man.
Say rather that he should not have stolen. Condemn brigands when they
pillage; but do not treat them as senseless when they enjoy. Honestly,
when a large number of English sailors enriched themselves at the taking
of Pondicherry and Havana, were they wrong to enjoy themselves later in
London, as the price of the trouble they had had in the depths of Asia
and America?

The declaimers want one to bury in the ground the wealth one has amassed
by the fortune of arms, by agriculture, by commerce and by industry.
They cite Lacedæmon; why do they not cite also the republic of San
Marino? What good did Sparto to Greece? Did she ever have Demosthenes,
Sophocles, Apelles, Phidias? The luxury of Athens produced great men in
every sphere; Sparta had a few captains, and in less number even than
other towns. But how fine it is that as small a republic as Lacedæmon
retains its poverty.[14]

One arrives at death as well by lacking everything as by enjoying what
can make life pleasant. The Canadian savage subsists, and comes to old
age like the English citizen who has an income of fifty thousand
guineas. But who will ever compare the land of the Iroquois to England?

Let the republic of Ragusa and the canton of Zug make sumptuary laws,
they are right, the poor man must not spend beyond his powers; but I
have read somewhere:

"Learn that luxury enriches a great state, even if it ruins a
small."[15]

If by luxury you understand excess, everyone knows that excess in any
form is pernicious, in abstinence as in gluttony, in economy as in
generosity. I do not know how it has happened that in my village where
the land is ungrateful, the taxes heavy, the prohibition against
exporting the corn one has sown intolerable, there is nevertheless
barely a cultivator who has not a good cloth coat, and who is not well
shod and well fed. If this cultivator toiled in his fields in his fine
coat, with white linen, his hair curled and powdered, there, certainly,
would be the greatest luxury, and the most impertinent; but that a
bourgeois of Paris or London should appear at the theatre clad like a
peasant, there would be the most vulgar and ridiculous niggardliness.

When scissors, which are certainly not of the remotest antiquity, were
invented, what did people not say against the first men who pared their
nails, and who cut part of the hair which fell on their noses? They were
treated, without a doubt, as fops and prodigals, who bought an
instrument of vanity at a high price, in order to spoil the Creator's
handiwork. What an enormous sin to cut short the horn which God made to
grow at the end of our fingers! It was an outrage against the Deity! It
was much worse when shirts and socks were invented. One knows with what
fury the aged counsellors who had never worn them cried out against the
young magistrates who were addicted to this disastrous luxury.[16]


FOOTNOTES:

[14] Lacedæmon avoided luxury only by preserving the community or
equality of property; but she did not preserve either the one or the
other save by having the land cultivated by an enslaved people. The
existence of the equality or community of property supposes the
existence of an enslaved people. The Spartans had virtue, just like
highwaymen, inquisitors and all classes of men whom habit has
familiarized with a species of crime, to the point of committing them
without remorse.

[15] The sumptuary laws are by their nature a violation of the right of
property. If in a little state there is not a great inequality of
fortune, there will be no luxury; if this inequality exists, luxury is
the remedy for it. It is her sumptuary laws that have lost Geneva her
liberty.

[16] If by luxury one understands everything that is beyond the
necessary, luxury is a natural consequence of the progress of the human
species; and to reason consequently every enemy of luxury should believe
with Rousseau that the state of happiness and virtue for man is that,
not of the savage, but of the orang-outang. One feels that it would be
absurd to regard as an evil the comforts which all men would enjoy:
also, does one not generally give the name of luxury to the
superfluities which only a small number of individuals can enjoy. In
this sense, luxury is a necessary consequence of property, without which
no society can subsist, and of a great inequality between fortunes which
is the consequence, not of the right of property, but of bad laws.
Moralists should address their sermons to the legislators, and not to
individuals, because it is in the order of possible things that a
virtuous and enlightened man may have the power to make reasonable laws,
and it is not in human nature for all the rich men of a country to
renounce through virtue procuring for themselves for money the
enjoyments of pleasure or vanity.




_GENERAL REFLECTION ON MAN_


It needs twenty years to lead man from the plant state in which he is
within his mother's womb, and the pure animal state which is the lot of
his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of the reason begins
to appear. It has needed thirty centuries to learn a little about his
structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It
takes an instant to kill him.




_MAN IN THE IRON MASK_


The author of the "Siècle de Louis XIV."[17] is the first to speak of
the man in the iron mask in an authenticated history. The reason is that
he was very well informed about the anecdote which astonishes the
present century, which will astonish posterity, and which is only too
true. He was deceived about the date of the death of this singularly
unfortunate unknown. The date of his burial at St. Paul was March 3rd,
1703, and not 1704. (Note.--According to a certificate reported by
Saint-Foix, the date was November 20th, 1703.)

He was imprisoned first of all at Pignerol before being so on St.
Margaret's Islands, and later in the Bastille; always under the same
man's guard, Saint-Mars, who saw him die. Father Griffet, Jesuit, has
communicated to the public the diary of the Bastille, which testifies to
the dates. He had this diary without difficulty, for he held the
delicate position of confessor of prisoners imprisoned in the Bastille.

The man in the iron mask is a riddle to which everyone wishes to guess
the answer. Some say that he was the Duc de Beaufort: but the Duc de
Beaufort was killed by the Turks at the defence of Candia, in 1669; and
the man in the iron mask was at Pignerol, in 1662. Besides, how would
one have arrested the Duc de Beaufort surrounded by his army? how would
one have transferred him to France without anybody knowing anything
about it? and why should he have been put in prison, and why this mask?

Others have considered the Comte de Vermandois, natural son of Louis
XIV., who died publicly of the small-pox in 1683, with the army, and was
buried in the town of Arras.

Later it was thought that the Duke of Monmouth, whose head King James
II. had cut off publicly in London in 1685, was the man in the iron
mask. It would have been necessary for him to be resuscitated, and then
for him to change the order of the times, for him to put the year 1662
in place of 1685; for King James who never pardoned anyone, and who on
that account deserved all his misfortunes, to have pardoned the Duke of
Monmouth, and to have caused the death, in his place, of a man exactly
like him. It would have been necessary to find this double who would
have been so kind as to have his neck cut off in public in order to save
the Duke of Monmouth. It would have been necessary for the whole of
England to have been under a misapprehension; for James then to have
sent his earnest entreaties to Louis XIV. to be so good as to serve as
his constable and gaoler. Then Louis XIV. having done King James this
little favour, would not have failed to have the same consideration for
King William and for Queen Anne, with whom he was at war; and he would
carefully have preserved in these two monarchs' consideration his
dignity of gaoler, with which King James had honoured him.

All these illusions being dissipated, it remains to be learned who was
this prisoner who was always masked, the age at which he died, and under
what name he was buried. It is clear that if he was not allowed to pass
into the courtyard of the Bastille, if he was not allowed to speak to
his doctor, unless covered by a mask, it was for fear that in his
features might be recognized some too striking resemblance. He might
show his tongue, and never his face. As regards his age, he himself said
to the Bastille apothecary, a few days before his death, that he thought
he was about sixty; and Master Marsolan, surgeon to the Maréchal de
Richelieu, and later to the Duc d'Orléans, regent, son-in-law of this
apothecary, has repeated it to me more than once.

Finally, why give him an Italian name? he was always called Marchiali!
He who writes this article knows more about it, maybe, than Father
Griffet, and will not say more.


PUBLISHERS NOTE[18]

It is surprising to see so many scholars and so many intelligent and
sagacious writers torment themselves with guessing who can have been
the famous man in the iron mask, without the simplest, most natural,
most probable idea ever presenting itself to them. Once the fact as M.
de Voltaire reports it is admitted, with its circumstances; the
existence of a prisoner of so singular a species, put in the rank of the
best authenticated historical truths; it seems that not only is nothing
easier than to imagine who this prisoner was, but that it is even
difficult for there to be two opinions on the subject. The author of
this article would have communicated his opinion earlier, if he had not
believed that this idea must already have come to many others, and if he
were not persuaded that it was not worth while giving as a discovery
what, according to him, jumps to the eyes of all who read this anecdote.

However, as for some time past this event has divided men's minds, and
as quite recently the public has again been given a letter in which it
is claimed as proved that this celebrated prisoner was a secretary of
the Duke of Mantua (which cannot be reconciled with the great marks of
respect shown by M. de Saint-Mars to his prisoner), the author has
thought it his duty to tell at last what has been his opinion for many
years. Maybe this conjecture will put an end to all other researches,
unless the secret be revealed by those who can be its guardians, in such
a way as to remove all doubts.

He will not amuse himself with refuting those who have imagined that
this prisoner could be the Comte de Vermandois, the Duc de Beaufort, or
the Duke of Monmouth. The scholarly and very wise author of this last
opinion has well refuted the others; but he had based his own opinion
essentially merely on the impossibility of finding in Europe some other
prince whose detention it would have been of the very highest importance
should not be known. M. de Saint-Foix is right, if he means to speak
only of princes whose existence was known; but why has nobody yet
thought of supposing that the iron mask might have been an unknown
prince, brought up in secret, and whose existence it was important
should remain unknown?

The Duke of Monmouth was not for France a prince of such great
importance; and one does not see even what could have engaged this
power, at least after the death of this duke and of James II., to make
so great a secret of his detention, if indeed he was the iron mask. It
is hardly probable either that M. de Louvois and M. de Saint-Mars would
have shown the Duke of Monmouth the profound respect which M. de
Voltaire assures they showed the iron mask.

The author conjectures, from the way that M. de Voltaire has told the
facts, that this celebrated historian is as persuaded as he is of the
suspicion which he is going, he says, to bring to light; but that M. de
Voltaire, as a Frenchman, did not wish, he adds, to publish point-blank,
particularly as he had said enough for the answer to the riddle not to
be difficult to guess. Here it is, he continues, as I see it.

"The iron mask was undoubtedly a brother and an elder brother of Louis
XIV., whose mother had that taste for fine linen on which M. de Voltaire
lays stress. It was in reading the Memoirs of that time, which report
this anecdote about the queen, that, recalling this same taste in the
iron mask, I doubted no longer that he was her son: a fact of which all
the other circumstances had persuaded me already.

"It is known that Louis XIII. had not lived with the queen for a long
time; that the birth of Louis XIV. was due only to a happy chance
skilfully induced; a chance which absolutely obliged the king to sleep
in the same bed with the queen. This is how I think the thing came to
pass.

"The queen may have thought that it was her fault that no heir was born
to Louis XIII. The birth of the iron mask will have undeceived her. The
cardinal to whom she will have confided the fact will have known, for
more than one reason, how to turn the secret to account; he will have
thought of making use of this event for his own benefit and for the
benefit of the state. Persuaded by this example that the queen could
give the king children, the plan which produced the chance of one bed
for the king and the queen was arranged in consequence. But the queen
and the cardinal, equally impressed with the necessity of hiding from
Louis XIII. the iron mask's existence, will have had him brought up in
secret. This secret will have been a secret for Louis XIV. until
Cardinal Mazarin's death.

"But this monarch learning then that he had a brother, and an elder
brother whom his mother could not disacknowledge, who further bore maybe
the marked features which betrayed his origin, reflecting that this
child born during marriage could not, without great inconvenience and a
horrible scandal, be declared illegitimate after Louis XIII.'s death,
Louis XIV. will have judged that he could not use a wiser or juster
means than the one he employed in order to assure his own tranquillity
and the peace of the state; means which relieved him of committing a
cruelty which policy would have represented as necessary to a monarch
less conscientious and less magnanimous than Louis XIV.

"It seems to me, our author continues, that the more one knows of the
history of those times, the more one must be struck by these assembled
circumstances which are in favour of such a supposition."


FOOTNOTES:

[17] Voltaire.

[18] This note, given as a publisher's note in the 1771 edition, passes
among many men of letters as being by Voltaire himself. He knew of this
edition, and he never contradicted the opinion there advanced on the
subject of the man in the iron mask.

He was the first to speak of this man. He always combated all the
conjectures made about the mask: he always spoke as though better
informed than others on the subject, and as though unwilling to tell all
he knew.

There is a letter in circulation from Mlle. de Valois, written to the
Duke, afterward Maréchal de Richelieu, where she boasts of having
learned from the Duc d'Orléans, her father, under strange conditions,
who the man in the iron mask was; this man, she says, was a twin brother
of Louis XIV., born a few hours after him.

Either this letter, which it was so useless, so indecent, so dangerous
to read, is a supposititious letter, or the regent, in giving his
daughter the reward she had so nobly acquired, thought to weaken the
danger there was in revealing a state secret, by altering the facts, so
as to make of this prince a younger son without right to the throne,
instead of the heir-apparent to the crown.

But Louis XIV., who had a brother; Louis XIV., whose soul was
magnanimous; Louis XIV., who prided himself even on a scrupulous
probity, whom history has reproached with no crime, who indeed committed
no crime apart from letting himself be too swayed by the counsels of
Louvois and the Jesuits; Louis XIV. would never have detained one of his
brothers in perpetual prison, in order to forestall the evils announced
by an astrologer, in whom he did not believe. He needed more important
motives. Eldest son of Louis XIII., acknowledged by this prince, the
throne belonged to him; but a son born of Anne of Austria, unknown to
her husband, had no rights, and could, nevertheless, try to make himself
acknowledged, rend France with a long civil war, win maybe over Louis
XIII.'s son, by alleging the right of primogeniture, and substitute a
new race for the old race of the Bourbons. These motives, if they did
not entirely justify Louis XIV.'s rigour, serve at least to excuse him;
and the prisoner, too well-informed of his fate, could be grateful to
him for not having listened to more rigorous counsels, counsels which
politics have often employed against those who had pretensions to
thrones occupied by their competitors.

From his youth Voltaire was connected with the Duc de Richelieu, who was
not discreet: if Mlle. de Valois' letter is authentic, he knew of it;
but, possessed of a just mind, he felt the error, and sought other
information. He was in a position to obtain it; he rectified the truth
altered in the letter, as he rectified so many other errors.




_MARRIAGE_


I came across a reasoner who said: "Engage your subjects to marry as
soon as possible; let them be exempt from taxes the first year, and let
their tax be distributed over those who at the same age are celibate.

"The more married men you have, the less crime there will be. Look at
the frightful records of your registers of crime; you will find there a
hundred bachelors hanged or wheeled for one father of a family.

"Marriage makes man wiser and more virtuous. The father of a family,
near to committing a crime, is often stopped by his wife whose blood,
less feverish than his, makes her gentler, more compassionate, more
fearful of theft and murder, more timorous, more religious.

"The father of a family does not want to blush before his children. He
fears to leave them a heritage of shame.

"Marry your soldiers, they will not desert any more. Bound to their
families, they will be bound also to their fatherland. A bachelor
soldier often is nothing but a vagabond, to whom it is indifferent
whether he serves the king of Naples or the king of Morocco."

The Roman warriors were married; they fought for their wives and
children; and they enslaved the wives and children of other nations.

A great Italian politician, who further was very learned in oriental
languages, a very rare thing among our politicians, said to me in my
youth: "_Caro figlio_, remember that the Jews have never had but one
good institution, that of having a horror of virginity." If this little
race of superstitious intermediaries had not considered marriage as the
first law of man, if there had been among them convents of nuns, they
were irreparably lost.




_MASTER_


SECTION I

"Unfortunate that I am to have been born!" said Ardassan Ougli, young
page of the great Sultan of the Turks. "If it were only the great Sultan
on whom I am dependent; but I am subject to the chief of my oda, to the
capigi pasha; and when I receive my pay, I have to bow down to one of
the tefterdar's clerks who deducts half of it. Before I was seven years
old I had cut off, in spite of myself, in ceremony, the end of my
prepuce, and it made me ill for a fortnight. The dervish who prays for
us is my master; an iman is still more my master; the mollah is still
more my master than the iman. The cadi is another master; the
cadi-leskier is master still more; the mufti is much more master than
all these together. The grand vizier's kaia can with a word have me
thrown into the canal; and the grand vizier, finally, can have my neck
wrung at his pleasure, and stuff the skin of my head, without anybody
even taking notice.

"How many masters, great God! even if I had as many bodies and as many
souls as I have duties to accomplish, I could not attend to everything.
Oh, Allah! if only you had made me a screech-owl! I should live free in
my hole, and I should eat mice at my ease without masters or servants.
That assuredly is man's real destiny; only since he was perverted has he
masters. No man was made to serve another man continuously. Each would
have charitably aided his fellow, if things were as they should be. The
man with eyes would have led the blind man, the active man would have
acted as crutch to the cripple. This world would have been the paradise
of Mohammed; and it is the hell which is exactly under the pointed
bridge."

Thus did Ardassan Ougli speak, after receiving the stirrup-leather from
one of his masters.

After a few years Ardassan Ougli became pasha with three tails. He made
a prodigious fortune, and he firmly believed that all men, excepting the
Great Turk and the Grand Vizier, were born to serve him, and all women
to give him pleasure in accordance with his caprice.


SECTION II

How has it been possible for one man to become another man's master, and
by what species of incomprehensible magic has he been able to become the
master of many other men? On this phenomenon a great number of good
volumes have been written; but I give the preference to an Indian fable,
because it is short, and because the fables have said everything.

Adimo, the father of all the Indians, had two sons and two daughters by
his wife Procriti. The elder son was a giant, the younger was a little
hunchback, the two daughters were pretty. As soon as the giant was
conscious of his strength, he lay with his two sisters, and made the
little hunchback serve him. Of his two sisters, one was his cook, the
other his gardener. When the giant wanted to sleep, he started by
chaining his little hunchback brother to a tree; and when the brother
escaped, he caught him in four strides, and gave him twenty strokes with
a length of ox sinew.

The hunchback became submissive and the best subject in the world. The
giant, satisfied to see him fulfilling his duties as subject, permitted
him to lie with one of his sisters for whom he himself had taken a
distaste. The children who came of this marriage were not entirely
hunchbacked; but they had sufficiently misshapen forms. They were
reared in fear of God and the giant. They received an excellent
education; they were taught that their great uncle was giant by divine
right, that he could do with his family as pleased him; that if he had a
pretty niece or great-niece, she was for him alone without a doubt, and
that no one could lie with her until he wanted her no longer.

The giant having died, his son, who was not by a long way as strong and
as big as he, thought nevertheless that he, like his father, was giant
by divine right. He claimed to make all the men work for him, and to lie
with all the women. The family leagued itself against him, he was beaten
to death, and the others turned themselves into a republic.

The Siamese, on the contrary, maintain that the family had started by
being republican, and that the giant did not come until after a great
number of years and dissensions; but all the authors of Benares and Siam
agree that mankind lived an infinity of centuries before having the
intelligence to make laws; and they prove it by an unanswerable reason,
which is that even to-day when everyone plumes himself on his
intelligence, no way has been found of making a score of passably good
laws.

It is indeed still an insoluble question in India whether republics were
established before or after monarchies, whether confusion appeared more
horrible to mankind than despotism. I do not know what happened in order
of time; but in that of nature it must be agreed that all men being born
equal, violence and adroitness made the first masters, the laws made the
last.




_MEN OF LETTERS_


In our barbarous times, when the Franks, the Germans, the Bretons, the
Lombards, the Spanish Muzarabs, knew not how either to read or write,
there were instituted schools, universities, composed almost entirely of
ecclesiastics who, knowing nothing but their own jargon, taught this
jargon to those who wished to learn it; the academies came only a long
time afterwards; they despised the foolishness of the schools, but did
not always dare to rise against them, because there are foolishnesses
that are respected provided that they concern respectable things.

The men of letters who have rendered the greatest services to the small
number of thinking beings spread over the world, are the isolated
writers, the true scholars shut in their studies, who have neither
argued on the benches of the universities, nor told half-truths in the
academies; and almost all of them have been persecuted. Our wretched
species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always
throw stones at those who are showing a new road.

Montesquieu says that the Scythians rent their slaves' eyes, so that
they might be less distracted while they were churning their butter;
that is just how the inquisition functions, and in the land where this
monster reigns almost everybody is blind. In England people have had two
eyes for more than two hundred years; the French are starting to open
one eye; but sometimes there are men in power who do not want the people
to have even this one eye open.

These poor persons in power are like Doctor Balouard of the Italian
Comedy, who does not want to be served by anyone but the dolt
Harlequin, and who is afraid of having too shrewd a valet.

Compose some odes in praise of My Lord Superbus Fadus, some madrigals
for his mistress; dedicate a book on geography to his door-keeper, you
will be well-received; enlighten mankind, you will be exterminated.

Descartes was forced to leave his country, Gassendi was calumniated,
Arnauld dragged out his days in exile; every philosopher is treated as
the prophets were among the Jews.

Who would believe that in the eighteenth century a philosopher was
dragged before the secular tribunals, and treated as impious by the
tribunals of arguments, for having said that men could not practise the
arts if they had no hands? I do not despair that soon the first person
who is so insolent as to say that men could not think if they had no
heads will be immediately condemned to the galleys; "for," some young
graduate will say to him, "the soul is a pure spirit, the head is only
matter; God can put the soul in the heel, as well as in the brain;
therefore I denounce you as impious."

The greatest misfortune of a man of letters is not perhaps being the
object of his confrères' jealousy, the victim of the cabal, the despised
of the men of power; but of being judged by fools. Fools go far
sometimes, particularly when bigotry is added to ineptitude, and to
ineptitude the spirit of vengeance. The further great misfortune of a
man of letters is that ordinarily he is unattached. A bourgeois buys
himself a small position, and there he is backed by his colleagues. If
he suffers an injustice, he finds defenders at once. The man of letters
is unsuccoured; he resembles a flying-fish; if he rises a little, the
birds devour him; if he dives, the fish eat him.

Every public man pays tribute to malignity, but he is paid in honours
and gold.




_METAMORPHOSIS_, _METEMPSYCHOSIS_


Is it not very natural that all the metamorphoses with which the world
is covered should have made people imagine in the Orient, where
everything has been imagined, that our souls passed from one body to
another? An almost imperceptible speck becomes a worm, this worm becomes
a butterfly; an acorn transforms itself into an oak; an egg into a bird;
water becomes cloud and thunder; wood is changed into fire and ash;
everything in nature appears, in fine, metamorphosed. Soon people
attributed to souls, which were regarded as light figures, what they saw
in more gross bodies. The idea of metempsychosis is perhaps the most
ancient dogma of the known universe, and it still reigns in a large part
of India and China.




_MILTON, ON THE REPROACH OF PLAGIARISM AGAINST_


Some people have accused Milton of having taken his poem from the
tragedy of "The Banishment of Adam" by Grotius, and from the "Sarcotis"
of the Jesuit Masenius, printed at Cologne in 1654 and in 1661, long
before Milton gave his "Paradise Lost."

As regards Grotius, it was well enough known in England that Milton had
carried into his epic English poem a few Latin verses from the tragedy
of "Adam." It is in no wise to be a plagiarist to enrich one's language
with the beauties of a foreign language. No one accused Euripides of
plagiarism for having imitated in one of the choruses of "Iphigenia" the
second book of the Iliad; on the contrary, people were very grateful to
him for this imitation, which they regarded as a homage rendered to
Homer on the Athenian stage.

Virgil never suffered a reproach for having happily imitated, in the
Æneid, a hundred verses by the first of Greek poets.

Against Milton the accusation was pushed a little further. A Scot, Will
Lauder by name, very attached to the memory of Charles I., whom Milton
had insulted with the most uncouth animosity, thought himself entitled
to dishonour the memory of this monarch's accuser. It was claimed that
Milton was guilty of an infamous imposture in robbing Charles I. of the
sad glory of being the author of the "Eikon Basilika," a book long dear
to the royalists, and which Charles I., it was said, had composed in his
prison to serve as consolation for his deplorable adversity.

Lauder, therefore, about the year of 1752, wanted to begin by proving
that Milton was only a plagiarist, before proving that he had acted as a
forger against the memory of the most unfortunate of kings; he procured
some editions of the poem of the "Sarcotis." It seemed evident that
Milton had imitated some passages of it, as he had imitated Grotius and
Tasso.

But Lauder did not rest content there; he unearthed a bad translation in
Latin verse of the "Paradise Lost" of the English poet; and joining
several verses of this translation to those by Masenius, he thought
thereby to render the accusation more grave, and Milton's shame more
complete. It was in that, that he was badly deceived; his fraud was
discovered. He wanted to make Milton pass for a forger, and he was
himself convicted of forging. No one examined Masenius' poem of which at
that time there were only a few copies in Europe. All England, convinced
of the Scot's poor trick, asked no more about it. The accuser,
confounded, was obliged to disavow his manoeuvre, and ask pardon for
it.

Since then a new edition of Masenius was printed in 1757. The literary
public was surprised at the large number of very beautiful verses with
which the Sarcotis was sprinkled. It is in truth nothing but a long
declamation of the schools on the fall of man: but the exordium, the
invocation, the description of the garden of Eden, the portrait of Eve,
that of the devil, are precisely the same as in Milton. Further, it is
the same subject, the same plot, the same catastrophe. If the devil
wishes, in Milton, to be revenged on man for the harm which God has done
him, he has precisely the same plan in the work of the Jesuit Masenius;
and he manifests it in verses worthy maybe of the century of Augustus.
("Sarcotis," I., 271 _et seq._)

One finds in both Masenius and Milton little episodes, trifling
digressions which are absolutely alike; both speak of Xerxes who covered
the sea with his ships. Both speak in the same tone of the Tower of
Babel; both give the same description of luxury, of pride, of avarice,
of gluttony.

What most persuaded the generality of readers of Milton's plagiarism was
the perfect resemblance of the beginning of the two poems. Many
foreigners, after reading the exordium, had no doubt but that the rest
of Milton's poem was taken from Masenius. It is a very great error and
easy to recognize.

I do not think that the English poet imitated in all more than two
hundred of the Jesuit of Cologne's verses; and I dare say that he
imitated only what was worthy of being imitated. These two hundred
verses are very beautiful; so are Milton's; and the total of Masenius'
poem, despite these two hundred beautiful verses, is not worth anything
at all.

Molière took two whole scenes from the ridiculous comedy of the "Pédant
Joué" by Cyrano de Bergerac. "These two scenes are good," he said as he
was jesting with his friends. "They belong to me by right: I recover my
property." After that anyone who treated the author of "Tartufe" and "Le
Misanthrope" as a plagiarist would have been very badly received.

It is certain that generally Milton, in his "Paradise", has in imitating
flown on his own wings; and it must be agreed that if he borrowed so
many traits from Grotius and from the Jesuit of Cologne, they are
blended in the crowd of original things which are his; in England he is
always regarded as a very great poet.

It is true that he should have avowed having translated two hundred of a
Jesuit's verses; but in his time, at the court of Charles II., people
did not worry themselves with either the Jesuits, or Milton, or
"Paradise Lost", or "Paradise Regained". All those things were either
scoffed at, or unknown.




_MOHAMMEDANS_


I tell you again, ignorant imbeciles, whom other ignoramuses have made
believe that the Mohammedan religion is voluptuous and sensual, there is
not a word of truth in it; you have been deceived on this point as on so
many others.

Canons, monks, vicars even, if a law were imposed on you not to eat or
drink from four in the morning till ten at night, during the month of
July, when Lent came at this period; if you were forbidden to play at
any game of chance under pain of damnation; if wine were forbidden you
under the same pain; if you had to make a pilgrimage into the burning
desert; if it were enjoined on you to give at least two and a half per
cent. of your income to the poor; if, accustomed to enjoy possession of
eighteen women, the number were cut down suddenly by fourteen; honestly,
would you dare call that religion sensual?

The Latin Christians have so many advantages over the Mussulmans, I do
not say in the matter of war, but in the matter of doctrines; the Greek
Christians have so beaten them latterly from 1769 to 1773, that it is
not worth the trouble to indulge in unjust reproaches against Islam.

Try to retake from the Mohammedans all that they usurped; but it is
easier to calumniate them.

I hate calumny so much that I do not want even to impute foolishness to
the Turks, although I detest them as tyrants over women and enemies of
the arts.

I do not know why the historian of the Lower Empire maintains that
Mohammed speaks in his Koran of his journey into the sky: Mohammed does
not say a word about it; we have proved it.

One must combat ceaselessly. When one has destroyed an error, there is
always someone who resuscitates it.




_MOUNTAIN_


It is a very old, very universal fable that tells of the mountain which,
having frightened all the countryside by its outcry that it was in
labour, was hissed by all present when it brought into the world a mere
mouse. The people in the pit were not philosophers. Those who hissed
should have admired. It was as fine for the mountain to give birth to a
mouse, as for the mouse to give birth to a mountain. A rock which
produces a rat is a very prodigious thing; and never has the world seen
anything approaching this miracle. All the globes of the universe could
not call a fly into existence. Where the vulgar laugh, the philosopher
admires; and he laughs where the vulgar open their big, stupid eyes in
astonishment.




_NAKEDNESS_


Why should one lock up a man or a woman who walked stark naked in the
street? and why is no one shocked by absolutely nude statues, by
pictures of the Madonna and of Jesus that may be seen in some churches?

It is probably that the human species lived long without being clothed.

People unacquainted with clothing have been found in more than one
island and in the American continent.

The most civilized hide the organs of generation with leaves, woven
rushes, feathers.

Whence comes this form of modesty? is it the instinct for lighting
desires by hiding what it gives pleasure to discover?

Is it really true that among slightly more civilized nations, such as
the Jews and half-Jews, there have been entire sects who would not
worship God save by stripping themselves of all their clothes? such
were, it is said, the Adamites and the Abelians. They gathered quite
naked to sing the praises of God: St. Epiphanius and St. Augustine say
so. It is true that they were not contemporary, and that they were very
far from these people's country. But at all events this madness is
possible: it is not even more extraordinary, more mad than a hundred
other madnesses which have been round the world one after the other.

We have said elsewhere that to-day even the Mohammedans still have
saints who are madmen, and who go naked like monkeys. It is very
possible that some fanatics thought it was better to present themselves
to the Deity in the state in which He formed them, than in the disguise
invented by man. It is possible that they showed everything out of
piety. There are so few well-made persons of both sexes, that nakedness
might have inspired chastity, or rather disgust, instead of increasing
desire.

It is said particularly that the Abelians renounced marriage. If there
were any fine lads and pretty lasses among them, they were at least
comparable to St. Adhelme and to blessed Robert d'Arbrisselle, who slept
with the prettiest persons, that their continence might triumph all the
more.

But I avow that it would have been very comic to see a hundred Helens
and Parises singing anthems, giving each other the kiss of peace, and
making agapæ.

All of which shows that there is no singularity, no extravagance, no
superstition which has not passed through the heads of mankind. Happy
the day when these superstitions do not trouble society and make of it a
scene of disorder, hatred and fury! It is better without doubt to pray
God stark naked, than to stain His altars and the public places with
human blood.




_NATURAL LAW_


B: What is natural law?

A: The instinct which makes us feel justice.

B: What do you call just and unjust?

A: What appears such to the entire universe.

B: The universe is composed of many heads. It is said that in Lacedæmon
were applauded thefts for which people in Athens were condemned to the
mines.

A: Abuse of words, logomachy, equivocation; theft could not be committed
at Sparta, when everything was common property. What you call "theft"
was the punishment for avarice.

B: It was forbidden to marry one's sister in Rome. It was allowed among
the Egyptians, the Athenians and even among the Jews, to marry one's
sister on the father's side. It is but with regret that I cite that
wretched little Jewish people, who should assuredly not serve as a rule
for anyone, and who (putting religion aside) was never anything but a
race of ignorant and fanatic brigands. But still, according to their
books, the young Thamar, before being ravished by her brother Amnon,
says to him:--"Nay, my brother, do not thou this folly, but speak unto
the king; for he will not withhold me from thee." (2 Samuel xiii. 12,
13.)

A: Conventional law all that, arbitrary customs, fashions that pass: the
essential remains always. Show me a country where it was honourable to
rob me of the fruit of my toil, to break one's promise, to lie in order
to hurt, to calumniate, to assassinate, to poison, to be ungrateful
towards a benefactor, to beat one's father and one's mother when they
offer you food.

B: Have you forgotten that Jean-Jacques, one of the fathers of the
modern Church, has said that "the first man who dared enclose and
cultivate a piece of land" was the enemy "of the human race," that he
should have been exterminated, and that "the fruits of the earth are for
all, and that the land belongs to none"? Have we not already examined
together this lovely proposition which is so useful to society
(Discourse on Inequality, second part)?

A: Who is this Jean-Jacques? he is certainly not either John the
Baptist, nor John the Evangelist, nor James the Greater, nor James the
Less[19]; it must be some Hunnish wit who wrote that abominable
impertinence or some poor joker _bufo magro_ who wanted to laugh at what
the entire world regards as most serious. For instead of going to spoil
the land of a wise and industrious neighbour, he had only to imitate
him; and every father of a family having followed this example, behold
soon a very pretty village formed. The author of this passage seems to
me a very unsociable animal.

B: You think then that by outraging and robbing the good man who has
surrounded his garden and chicken-run with a live hedge, he has been
wanting in respect towards the duties of natural law?

A: Yes, yes, once again, there is a natural law, and it does not consist
either in doing harm to others, or in rejoicing thereat.

B: I imagine that man likes and does harm only for his own advantage.
But so many people are led to look for their own interest in the
misfortune of others, vengeance is so violent a passion, there are such
disastrous examples of it; ambition, still more fatal, has inundated the
world with so much blood, that when I retrace for myself the horrible
picture, I am tempted to avow that man is a very devil. In vain have I
in my heart the notion of justice and injustice; an Attila courted by
St. Leo, a Phocas flattered by St. Gregory with the most cowardly
baseness, an Alexander VI. sullied with so many incests, so many
murders, so many poisonings, with whom the weak Louis XII., who is
called "the good," makes the most infamous and intimate alliance; a
Cromwell whose protection Cardinal Mazarin seeks, and for whom he drives
out of France the heirs of Charles I., Louis XIV.'s first cousins, etc.,
etc.; a hundred like examples set my ideas in disorder, and I know no
longer where I am.

A: Well, do storms stop our enjoyment of to-day's beautiful sun? Did the
earthquake which destroyed half the city of Lisbon stop your making the
voyage to Madrid very comfortably? If Attila was a brigand and Cardinal
Mazarin a rogue, are there not princes and ministers who are honest
people? Has it not been remarked that in the war of 1701, Louis XIV.'s
council was composed of the most virtuous men? The Duc de Beauvilliers,
the Marquis de Torci, the Maréchal de Villars, Chamillart lastly who
passed for being incapable, but never for dishonest. Does not the idea
of justice subsist always? It is upon that idea that all laws are
founded. The Greeks called them "daughters of heaven," which only means
daughters of nature. Have you no laws in your country?

B: Yes, some good, some bad.

A: Where, if it was not in the notions of natural law, did you get the
idea that every man has within himself when his mind is properly made?
You must have obtained it there, or nowhere.

B: You are right, there is a natural law; but it is still more natural
to many people to forget it.

A: It is natural also to be one-eyed, hump-backed, lame, deformed,
unhealthy; but one prefers people who are well made and healthy.

B: Why are there so many one-eyed and deformed minds?

A: Peace! But go to the article on "Power."


FOOTNOTES:

[19] Jean=John: Jacques=James.




_NATURE_


DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE PHILOSOPHER AND NATURE

THE PHILOSOPHER:

Who are you, Nature? I live in you; for fifty years have I been seeking
you, and I have not found you yet.

NATURE:

The ancient Egyptians, who lived, it is said, some twelve hundred years,
made me the same reproach. They called me Isis; they put a great veil on
my head, and they said that nobody could lift it.

THE PHILOSOPHER:

That is what makes me address myself to you. I have been able to measure
some of your globes, know their paths, assign the laws of motion; but I
have not been able to learn who you are.

Are you always active? are you always passive? did your elements arrange
themselves, as water deposits itself on sand, oil on water, air on oil?
have you a mind which directs all your operations, as councils are
inspired as soon as they are assembled, although their members are
sometimes ignoramuses? I pray you tell me the answer to your riddle.

NATURE:

I am the great everything. I know no more about it. I am not a
mathematician; and everything is arranged in my world according to
mathematical laws. Guess if you can how it is all done.

THE PHILOSOPHER:

Certainly, since your great everything does not know mathematics, and
since all your laws are most profoundly geometrical, there must be an
eternal geometer who directs you, a supreme intelligence who presides
over your operations.

NATURE:

You are right; I am water, earth, fire, atmosphere, metal, mineral,
stone, vegetable, animal. I feel indeed that there is in me an
intelligence; you have an intelligence, you do not see it. I do not see
mine either; I feel this invisible power; I cannot know it: why should
you, who are but a small part of me, want to know what I do not know?

THE PHILOSOPHER:

We are curious. I want to know how being so crude in your mountains, in
your deserts, in your seas, you appear nevertheless so industrious in
your animals, in your vegetables?

NATURE:

My poor child do you want me to tell you the truth? It is that I have
been given a name which does not suit me; my name is "Nature", and I am
all art.

THE PHILOSOPHER:

That word upsets all my ideas. What! nature is only art?

NATURE:

Yes, without any doubt. Do you not know that there is an infinite art in
those seas and those mountains that you find so crude? do you not know
that all those waters gravitate towards the centre of the earth, and
mount only by immutable laws; that those mountains which crown the
earth are the immense reservoirs of the eternal snows which produce
unceasingly those fountains, lakes and rivers without which my animal
species and my vegetable species would perish? And as for what are
called my animal kingdom, my vegetable kingdom and my mineral kingdom,
you see here only three; learn that I have millions of kingdoms. But if
you consider only the formation of an insect, of an ear of corn, of
gold, of copper, everything will appear as marvels of art.

THE PHILOSOPHER:

It is true. The more I think about it, the more I see that you are only
the art of I know not what most potent and industrious great being, who
hides himself and who makes you appear. All reasoners since Thales, and
probably long before him, have played at blind man's buff with you; they
have said: "I have you!" and they had nothing. We all resemble Ixion; he
thought he was kissing Juno, and all that he possessed was a cloud.

NATURE:

Since I am all that is, how can a being such as you, so small a part of
myself, seize me? Be content, atoms my children, with seeing a few atoms
that surround you, with drinking a few drops of my milk, with vegetating
for a few moments on my breast, and with dying without having known your
mother and your nurse.

THE PHILOSOPHER:

My dear mother, tell me something of why you exist, of why there is
anything.

NATURE:

I will answer you as I have answered for so many centuries all those who
have interrogated me about first principles: I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THEM.

THE PHILOSOPHER:

Would not non-existence be better than this multitude of existences made
in order to be continually dissolved, this crowd of animals born and
reproduced in order to devour others and to be devoured, this crowd of
sentient beings formed for so many painful sensations, that other crowd
of intelligences which so rarely hear reason. What is the good of all
that, Nature?

NATURE:

Oh! go and ask Him who made me.




_NECESSARY_


OSMIN:

Do you not say that everything is necessary?

SELIM:

If everything were not necessary, it would follow that God had made
useless things.

OSMIN:

That is to say that it was necessary to the divine nature to make all
that it has made?

SELIM:

I think so, or at least I suspect it; there are people who think
otherwise; I do not understand them; maybe they are right. I am afraid
of disputes on this subject.

OSMIN:

It is also of another necessary that I want to talk to you.

SELIM:

What! of what is necessary to an honest man that he may live? of the
misfortune to which one is reduced when one lacks the necessary?

OSMIN:

No; for what is necessary to one is not always necessary to the other:
it is necessary for an Indian to have rice, for an Englishman to have
meat; a fur is necessary to a Russian, and a gauzy stuff to an African;
this man thinks that twelve coach-horses are necessary to him, that man
limits himself to a pair of shoes, a third walks gaily barefoot: I want
to talk to you of what is necessary to all men.

SELIM:

It seems to me that God has given all that is necessary to this species:
eyes to see with, feet for walking, a mouth for eating, an oesophagus
for swallowing, a stomach for digesting, a brain for reasoning, organs
for producing one's fellow creature.

OSMIN:

How does it happen then that men are born lacking a part of these
necessary things?

SELIM:

It is because the general laws of nature have brought about some
accidents which have made monsters to be born; but generally man is
provided with everything that is necessary to him in order to live in
society.

OSMIN:

Are there notions common to all men which serve to make them live in
society?

SELIM:

Yes. I have travelled with Paul Lucas, and wherever I went, I saw that
people respected their father and their mother, that people believed
themselves to be obliged to keep their promises, that people pitied
oppressed innocents, that they hated persecution, that they regarded
liberty of thought as a rule of nature, and the enemies of this liberty
as enemies of the human race; those who think differently seemed to me
badly organized creatures, monsters like those who are born without eyes
and hands.

OSMIN:

Are these necessary things in all time and in all places?

SELIM:

Yes, if they were not they would not be necessary to the human species.

OSMIN:

So a belief which is new is not necessary to this species. Men could
very well live in society and accomplish their duty to God, before
believing that Mahomet had frequent interviews with the angel Gabriel.

SELIM:

Nothing is clearer; it would be ridiculous to think that man could not
accomplish his duty to God before Mahomet came into the world; it was
not at all necessary for the human species to believe in the Alcoran:
the world went along before Mahomet just as it goes along to-day. If
Mahometanism had been necessary to the world, it would have existed in
all places; God who has given us all two eyes to see the sun, would have
given us all an intelligence to see the truth of the Mussulman religion.
This sect is therefore only like the positive laws that change according
to time and place, like the fashions, like the opinions of the natural
philosophers which follow one after the other.

The Mussulman sect could not be essentially necessary to mankind.

OSMIN:

But since it exists, God has permitted it?

SELIM:

Yes, as he permits the world to be filled with foolishness, error and
calamity; that is not to say that men are all essentially made to be
fools and miscreants. He permits that some men be eaten by snakes; but
one cannot say--"God made man to be eaten by snakes."

OSMIN:

What do you mean when you say "God permits"? can nothing happen without
His order? permit, will and do, are they not the same thing for Him?

SELIM:

He permits crime, but He does not commit it.

OSMIN:

Committing a crime is acting against divine justice, it is disobeying
God. Well, God cannot disobey Himself, He cannot commit crime; but He
has made man in such a way that man may commit many crimes: where does
that come from?

SELIM:

There are people who know, but I do not; all that I know is that the
Alcoran is ridiculous, although from time to time it has some tolerably
good things; certainly the Alcoran was not at all necessary to man; I
stick by that: I see clearly what is false, and I know very little that
is true.

OSMIN:

I thought you would instruct me, and you teach me nothing.

SELIM:

Is it not a great deal to recognize people who deceive you, and the
gross and dangerous errors which they retail to you?

OSMIN:

I should have ground for complaint against a doctor who showed me all
the harmful plants, and who did not show me one salutary plant.

SELIM:

I am not a doctor, and you are not ill; but it seems to me I should be
giving you a very good prescription if I said to you: "Put not your
trust in all the inventions of charlatans, worship God, be an honest
man, and believe that two and two make four."




_NEW NOVELTIES_


It seems that the first words of Ovid's "Metamorphoses," _In nova fert
animus_, are the motto of the human race. Nobody is touched by the
admirable spectacle of the sun which rises, or rather seems to rise,
every day; everybody runs to see the smallest little meteor which
appears for an instant in that accumulation of vapours, called the sky,
that surround the earth.

An itinerant bookseller does not burden himself with a Virgil, with a
Horace, but with a new book, even though it be detestable. He draws you
aside and says to you: "Sir, do you want some books from Holland?"

From the beginning of the world women have complained of the fickleness
that is imputed to them in favour of the first new object which presents
itself, and whose novelty is often its only merit. Many ladies (it must
be confessed, despite the infinite respect we have for them) have
treated men as they complain they have themselves been treated; and the
story of Gioconda is much older than Ariosto.

Perhaps this universal taste for novelty is one of nature's favours.
People cry to us: "Be content with what you have, desire nothing that is
beyond your estate, restrain your curiosity, tame your intellectual
disquiet." These are very good maxims; but if we had always followed
them, we should still be eating acorns, we should be sleeping in the
open air, and we should not have had Corneille, Racine, Molière,
Poussin, Lebrun, Lemoine or Pigalle.




_PHILOSOPHER_


Philosopher, _lover of wisdom_, that is to say, _of truth_. All
philosophers have had this dual character; there is not one in antiquity
who has not given mankind examples of virtue and lessons in moral
truths. They have all contrived to be deceived about natural philosophy;
but natural philosophy is so little necessary for the conduct of life,
that the philosophers had no need of it. It has taken centuries to learn
a part of nature's laws. One day was sufficient for a wise man to learn
the duties of man.

The philosopher is not enthusiastic; he does not set himself up as a
prophet; he does not say that he is inspired by the gods. Thus I shall
not put in the rank of philosophers either the ancient Zarathustra, or
Hermes, or the ancient Orpheus, or any of those legislators of whom the
nations of Chaldea, Persia, Syria, Egypt and Greece boasted. Those who
styled themselves children of the gods were the fathers of imposture;
and if they used lies for the teaching of truths, they were unworthy of
teaching them; they were not philosophers; they were at best very
prudent liars.

By what fatality, shameful maybe for the Western peoples, is it
necessary to go to the far Orient to find a wise man who is simple,
unostentatious, free from imposture, who taught men to live happily six
hundred years before our vulgar era, at a time when the whole of the
North was ignorant of the usage of letters, and when the Greeks were
barely beginning to distinguish themselves by their wisdom?

This wise man is Confucius, who being legislator never wanted to
deceive men. What more beautiful rule of conduct has ever been given
since him in the whole world?

"Rule a state as you rule a family; one can only govern one's family
well by setting the example.

"Virtue should be common to both husbandman and monarch.

"Apply thyself to the trouble of preventing crimes in order to lessen
the trouble of punishing them.

"Under the good kings Yao and Xu the Chinese were good; under the bad
kings Kie and Chu they were wicked.

"Do to others as to thyself.

"Love all men; but cherish honest people. Forget injuries, and never
kindnesses.

"I have seen men incapable of study; I have never seen them incapable of
virtue."

Let us admit that there is no legislator who has proclaimed truths more
useful to the human race.

A host of Greek philosophers have since taught an equally pure moral
philosophy. If they had limited themselves to their empty systems of
natural philosophy, their names would be pronounced to-day in mockery
only. If they are still respected, it is because they were just and that
they taught men to be so.

One cannot read certain passages of Plato, and notably the admirable
exordium of the laws of Zaleucus, without feeling in one's heart the
love of honourable and generous actions. The Romans have their Cicero,
who alone is worth perhaps all the philosophers of Greece. After him
come men still more worthy of respect, but whom one almost despairs of
imitating; Epictetus in bondage, the Antonines and the Julians on the
throne.

Which is the citizen among us who would deprive himself, like Julian,
Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius, of all the delicacies of our flabby and
effeminate lives? who would sleep as they did on the ground? who would
impose on himself their frugality? who, as they did, would march
barefoot and bareheaded at the head of the armies, exposed now to the
heat of the sun, now to the hoar-frost? who would command all their
passions as they did? There are pious men among us; but where are the
wise men? where are the resolute, just and tolerant souls?

There have been philosophers of the study in France; and all, except
Montaigne, have been persecuted. It is, I think, the last degree of the
malignity of our nature, to wish to oppress these very philosophers who
would correct it.

I quite understand that the fanatics of one sect slaughter the
enthusiasts of another sect, that the Franciscans hate the Dominicans,
and that a bad artist intrigues to ruin one who surpasses him; but that
the wise Charron should have been threatened with the loss of his life,
that the learned and generous Ramus should have been assassinated, that
Descartes should have been forced to flee to Holland to escape the fury
of the ignorant, that Gassendi should have been obliged to withdraw
several times to Digne, far from the calumnies of Paris; these things
are a nation's eternal shame.




_POWER_, _OMNIPOTENCE_


I suppose that the man who reads this article is convinced that this
world is formed with intelligence, and that a little astronomy and
anatomy suffices to make this universal and supreme intelligence
admired.

Can he know by himself if this intelligence is omnipotent, that is to
say, infinitely powerful? Has he the least notion of the infinite, to
understand what is an infinite power?

The celebrated historian philosopher, David Hume, says in "Particular
Providence": "A weight of ten ounces is lifted in a balance by another
weight; therefore this other weight is of more than ten ounces; but one
can adduce no reason why it should weigh a hundred ounces."

One can say likewise: You recognize a supreme intelligence strong enough
to form you, to preserve you for a limited time, to reward you, to
punish you. Do you know enough of this power to demonstrate that it can
do still more?

How can you prove by your reason that this being can do more than he has
done?

The life of all animals is short. Could he make it longer?

All animals are the prey of each other: everything is born to be
devoured. Could he form without destroying?

You do not know what nature is. You cannot therefore know if nature has
not forced him to do only the things he has done.

This globe is only a vast field of destruction and carnage. Either the
great Being has been able to make of it an eternal abode of delight for
all sentient beings, or He has not been able. If He has been able and if
He has not done so, fear to regard him as malevolent; but if He has not
been able, fear not to look on Him as a very great power, circumscribed
by nature in His limits.

Whether or no His power is infinite does not regard you. It is a matter
of indifference to a subject whether his master possesses five hundred
leagues of land or five thousand; he is subject neither more nor less.

Which would be the greater insult to this ineffable Being, to say: "He
has made miserable men without being able to dispense with them, or He
has made them for His pleasure?"

Many sects represent Him as cruel; others, for fear of admitting a
wicked God, have the audacity to deny His existence. Is it not better to
say that probably the necessity of His nature and the necessity of
things have determined everything?

The world is the theatre of moral ill and physical ill; one is only too
aware of it: and the "All is good" of Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke and Pope,
is only a witty paradox, a poor joke.

The two principles of Zarathustra and Manes, so carefully scrutinized by
Bayle, are a still poorer joke. They are, as has been observed already,
Molière's two doctors, one of whom says to the other: "Grant me the
emetic, and I will grant you the bleeding." Manichæism is absurd; and
that is why it has had so many supporters.

I admit that I have not been enlightened by all that Bayle says about
the Manichæans and the Paulicians. That is controversy; I would have
preferred pure philosophy. Why discuss our mysteries beside
Zarathustra's? As soon as you dare to treat of our mysteries, which need
only faith and no reasoning, you open precipices for yourself.

The trash in our scholastic theology has nothing to do with the trash in
Zarathustra's reveries.

Why debate original sin with Zarathustra? There was never any question
of it save in St. Augustine's time. Neither Zarathustra nor any
legislator of antiquity had ever heard speak of it.

If you dispute with Zarathustra, put under lock and key the old and the
new Testaments which he did not know, and which one must revere without
desiring to explain them.

What then should I have said to Zarathustra? My reason cannot admit two
gods who fight, that is good only in a poem where Minerva quarrels with
Mars. My feeble reason is much more content with a single great Being,
whose essence was to make, and who has made all that nature has
permitted Him, than it is satisfied with two great Beings, one of whom
spoils the works of the other. Your bad principle Ahriman, has not been
able to upset a single one of the astronomical and physical laws of the
good principle Ormuzd; everything progresses in the heavens with the
greatest regularity. Why should the wicked Ahriman have had power over
this little globe of the world?

If I had been Ahriman, I should have attacked Ormuzd in his fine grand
provinces of so many suns and stars. I should not have limited myself to
making war on him in a little village.

There is much evil in this village: but whence have you the knowledge
that this evil is not inevitable?

You are forced to admit an intelligence diffused over the universe; but
(1) do you know, for instance, if this power reaches right to foreseeing
the future? You have asserted it a thousand times; but you have never
been able either to prove it, or to understand it. You cannot know how
any being whatever sees what is not. Well, the future is not; therefore
no being can see it. You are reduced to saying that He foresees it; but
foreseeing is conjecturing. This is the opinion of the Socinians.

Well, a God who, according to you, conjectures, can be mistaken. In your
system He is really mistaken; for if He had foreseen that His enemy
would poison all His works here below, He would not have produced them;
He would not have prepared for Himself the shame of being continually
vanquished.

(2) Do I not do Him much more honour by saying that He has made
everything by the necessity of His nature, than you do Him by raising an
enemy who disfigures, who soils, who destroys all His works here below?

(3) It is not to have an unworthy idea of God to say that, having formed
thousands of millions of worlds where death and evil do not dwell, it
was necessary that evil and death should dwell in this world.

(4) It is not to disparage God to say that He could not form man without
giving him self-esteem; that this self-esteem could not lead him without
misguiding him almost always; that his passions are necessary, but that
they are disastrous; that propagation cannot be executed without desire;
that desire cannot animate man without quarrels; that these quarrels
necessarily bring wars in their train, etc.

(5) When he sees part of the combinations of the animal, vegetable and
mineral kingdoms, and this globe pierced everywhere like a sieve, from
which escape in crowds so many exhalations, what philosopher will be
bold enough, what scholastic foolish enough to see clearly that nature
could stop the effects of volcanoes, the inclemencies of the atmosphere,
the violence of the winds, the plagues, and all the destructive
scourges?

(6) One must be very powerful, very strong, very industrious, to have
formed lions which devour bulls, and to have produced men who invent
arms to kill at one blow, not only bulls and lions, but even each other.
One must be very powerful to have caused to be born spiders which spin
webs to catch flies; but that is not to be omnipotent, infinitely
powerful.

(7) If the great Being had been infinitely powerful, there is no reason
why He should not have made sentient animals infinitely happy; He has
not done so, therefore He was not able.

(8) All the sects of the philosophers have stranded on the reef of moral
and physical ill. It only remains to avow that God having acted for the
best has not been able to act better.

(9) This necessity settles all the difficulties and finishes all the
disputes. We have not the impudence to say--"All is good." We say--"All
is the least bad that is possible."

(10) Why does a child often die in its mother's womb? Why is another who
has had the misfortune to be born, reserved for torments as long as his
life, terminated by a frightful death?

Why has the source of life been poisoned all over the world since the
discovery of America? why since the seventh century of our era does
smallpox carry off the eighth part of the human race? why since all time
have bladders been subject to being stone quarries? why the plague, war,
famine, the inquisition? Turn in every direction, you will find no other
solution than that everything has been necessary.

I speak here to philosophers only and not to theologians. We know well
that faith is the thread in the labyrinth. We know that the fall of Adam
and Eve, original sin, the immense power given to the devil, the
predilection accorded by the great Being to the Jewish people, and the
baptism substituted for the amputation of the prepuce, are the answers
which explain everything. We have argued only against Zarathustra and
not against the university of Conimbre or Coïmbre, to which we submit in
our articles.




_PRAYERS_


We do not know any religion without prayers, even the Jews had some,
although there was not among them any public form, until the time when
they sang canticles in their synagogues, which happened very late.

All men, in their desires and their fears, invoked the aid of a deity.
Some philosophers, more respectful to the Supreme Being, and less
condescending to human frailty, for all prayer desired only resignation.
It is indeed what seems proper as between creature and creator. But
philosophy is not made to govern the world; she rises above the common
herd; she speaks a language that the crowd cannot understand. It would
be suggesting to fishwives that they should study conic sections.

Even among the philosophers, I do not believe that anyone apart from
Maximus of Tyre has treated of this matter; this is the substance of
Maximus' ideas.

The Eternal has His intentions from all eternity. If prayer accords with
His immutable wishes, it is quite useless to ask of Him what He has
resolved to do. If one prays Him to do the contrary of what He has
resolved, it is praying Him to be weak, frivolous, inconstant; it is
believing that He is thus, it is to mock Him. Either you ask Him a just
thing; in this case He must do it, and the thing will be done without
your praying Him for it; entreating Him is even to distrust Him: or the
thing is unjust, and then you outrage Him. You are worthy or unworthy of
the grace you implore: if worthy, He knows it better than you; if
unworthy, you commit a crime the more in asking for what you do not
deserve.

In a word, we pray to God only because we have made Him in our own
image. We treat Him like a pasha, like a sultan whom one may provoke and
appease.

In short, all nations pray to God: wise men resign themselves and obey
Him.

Let us pray with the people, and resign ourselves with the wise men.




_PRÉCIS OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY_


I have spent nearly forty years of my pilgrimage in two or three corners
of this world seeking the philosopher's stone that is called Truth. I
have consulted all the adepts of antiquity, Epicurus and Augustine,
Plato and Malebranche, and I have remained in my poverty. Maybe in all
these philosophers' crucibles there are one or two ounces of gold; but
all the rest is residue, dull mud, from which nothing can be born.

It seems to me that the Greeks our masters wrote much more to show their
intelligence than that they used their intelligence in order to learn. I
do not see a single author of antiquity who had a coherent system, a
clear, methodical system progressing from consequence to consequence.

When I wanted to compare and combine the systems of Plato, of the
preceptor of Alexander, of Pythagoras and of the Orientals, here, more
or less, is what I was able to gather:

Chance is a word empty of sense; nothing can exist without a cause. The
world is arranged according to mathematical laws; it is therefore
arranged by an intelligence.

It is not an intelligent being such as I am, who directed the formation
of this world, for I cannot form a mite; therefore this world is the
work of a prodigiously superior intelligence.

Does this being, who possesses intelligence and power in so high a
degree, exist necessarily? It must be so, for either the being received
existence from another, or from its own nature. If the being received
existence from another, which is very difficult to imagine, I must have
recourse to this other, and this other will be the prime author. To
whichever side I turn I have to admit a prime author, potent and
intelligent, who is such necessarily by his own nature.

Did this prime author produce things out of nothing? that is not
imaginable; to create out of nothing is to change nothing into
something. I must not admit such a production unless I find invincible
reasons which force me to admit what my intelligence can never
comprehend.

All that exists appears to exist necessarily, since it exists. For if
to-day there is a reason for the existence of things, there was one
yesterday, there was one in all time; and this cause must always have
had its effect, without which it would have been during eternity a
useless cause.

But how shall things have always existed, being visibly under the hand
of the prime author? This power therefore must always have acted; in the
same way, nearly, that there is no sun without light, so there is no
movement without a being that passes from one point of space to another
point.

There is therefore a potent and intelligent being who has always acted;
and if this being had never acted, of what use would his existence have
been to him?

All things are therefore eternal emanations of this prime author.

But how imagine that stone and mud are emanations of the eternal Being,
potent and intelligent?

Of two things one, either the matter of this stone and this mud exist
necessarily by themselves, or they exist necessarily through this prime
author; there is no middle course.

Thus, therefore, there are only two choices to make, admit either matter
eternal by itself, or matter issuing eternally from the potent,
intelligent eternal Being.

But, either subsisting by its own nature, or emanated from the producing
Being, it exists from all eternity, because it exists, and there is no
reason why it should not have existed before.

If matter is eternally necessary, it is therefore impossible, it is
therefore contradictory that it does not exist; but what man can affirm
that it is impossible, that it is contradictory that this pebble and
this fly have not existence? One is, nevertheless, forced to suppress
this difficulty which astonishes the imagination more than it
contradicts the principles of reasoning.

In fact, as soon as you have imagined that everything has emanated from
the supreme and intelligent Being, that nothing has emanated from the
Being without reason, that this Being existing always, must always have
acted, that consequently all things must have eternally issued from the
womb of His existence, you should no more refuse to believe in the
matter of which this pebble and this fly, an eternal production, are
formed, than you refuse to imagine light as an eternal emanation from
the omnipotent Being.

Since I am a being with extension and thought, my extension and my
thought are therefore necessary productions of this Being. It is evident
to me that I cannot give myself either extension or thought. I have
therefore received both from this necessary Being.

Can He give me what He has not? I have intelligence and I am in space;
therefore He is intelligent, and He is in space.

To say that this eternal Being, this omnipotent God, has from all time
necessarily filled the universe with His productions, is not to deprive
Him of His liberty; on the contrary, for liberty is only the power of
acting. God has always acted to the full; therefore God has always made
use of the fullness of His liberty.

The liberty that is called _liberty of indifference_ is a phrase without
idea, an absurdity; for it would be determination without reason; it
would be an effect without a cause. Therefore, God cannot have this
so-called liberty which is a contradiction in terms. He has therefore
always acted through this same necessity which makes His existence.

It is therefore impossible for the world to be without God, it is
impossible for God to be without the world.

This world is filled with beings who succeed each other, therefore God
has always produced beings who succeed each other.

These preliminary assertions are the basis of the ancient Oriental
philosophy and of that of the Greeks. One must except Democritus and
Epicurus, whose corpuscular philosophy combated these dogmas. But let us
remark that the Epicureans relied on an entirely erroneous natural
philosophy, and that the metaphysical system of all the other
philosophers holds good with all the systems of natural philosophy. The
whole of nature, excepting the vacuum, contradicts Epicurus; and no
phenomenon contradicts the philosophy which I have just explained. Well,
is not a philosophy which is in accord with all that passes in nature,
and which contents the most careful minds, superior to all other
non-revealed systems?

After the assertions of the ancient philosophers, which I have
reconciled as far as has been possible for me, what is left to us? a
chaos of doubts and chimeras. I do not think that there has ever been a
philosopher with a system who did not at the end of his life avow that
he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the
mechanical arts have been much more useful to mankind than the inventors
of syllogisms: the man who invented the shuttle surpasses with a
vengeance the man who imagined innate ideas.




_PREJUDICES_


Prejudice is an opinion without judgment. Thus all over the world do
people inspire children with all the opinions they desire, before the
children can judge.

There are some universal, necessary prejudices, which even make virtue.
In all countries children are taught to recognize a rewarding and
revenging God; to respect and love their father and their mother; to
look on theft as a crime, selfish lying as a vice before they can guess
what is a vice and what a virtue.

There are then some very good prejudices; they are those which are
ratified by judgment when one reasons.

Sentiment is not a simple prejudice; it is something much stronger. A
mother does not love her son because she has been told she must love
him; she cherishes him happily in spite of herself. It is not through
prejudice that you run to the help of an unknown child about to fall
into a precipice, or be eaten by a beast.

But it is through prejudice that you will respect a man clad in certain
clothes, walking gravely, speaking likewise. Your parents have told you
that you should bow before this man; you respect him before knowing
whether he merits your respect; you grow in years and in knowledge; you
perceive that this man is a charlatan steeped in arrogance,
self-interest and artifice; you despise what you revered, and the
prejudice cedes to judgment. Through prejudice you have believed the
fables with which your childhood was cradled; you have been told that
the Titans made war on the gods, and Venus was amorous of Adonis; when
you are twelve you accept these fables as truths; when you are twenty
you look on them as ingenious allegories.

Let us examine briefly the different sorts of prejudices, so as to set
our affairs in order. We shall be perhaps like those who, at the time of
Law's system, perceived that they had calculated imaginary riches.


PREJUDICES OF THE SENSES

Is it not strange that our eyes always deceive us, even when we have
very good sight, and that on the contrary our ears do not deceive us?
Let your well-informed ear hear "You are beautiful, I love you"; it is
quite certain that someone has not said "I hate you, you are ugly": but
you see a smooth mirror; it is demonstrated that you are mistaken, it
has a very uneven surface. You see the sun as about two feet in
diameter; it is demonstrated that it is a million times bigger than the
earth.

It seems that God has put truth in your ears, and error in your eyes;
but study optics, and you will see that God has not deceived you, and
that it is impossible for objects to appear to you otherwise than you
see them in the present state of things.


PHYSICAL PREJUDICES

The sun rises, the moon also, the earth is motionless: these are natural
physical prejudices. But that lobsters are good for the blood, because
when cooked they are red; that eels cure paralysis because they wriggle;
that the moon affects our maladies because one day someone observed that
a sick man had an increase of fever during the waning of the moon; these
ideas and a thousand others are the errors of ancient charlatans who
judged without reasoning, and who, being deceived, deceived others.


HISTORICAL PREJUDICES

Most historical stories have been believed without examination, and this
belief is a prejudice. Fabius Pictor relates that many centuries before
him, a vestal of the town of Alba, going to draw water in her pitcher,
was ravished, that she gave birth to Romulus and Remus, that they were
fed by a she-wolf, etc. The Roman people believed this fable; they did
not examine whether at that time there were vestals in Latium, whether
it were probable that a king's daughter would leave her convent with her
pitcher, whether it were likely that a she-wolf would suckle two
children instead of eating them; the prejudice established itself.

A monk writes that Clovis, being in great danger at the battle of
Tolbiac, made a vow to turn Christian if he escaped; but is it natural
to address oneself to a foreign god on such an occasion? is it not then
that the religion in which one was born acts most potently? Which is the
Christian who, in a battle against the Turks, will not address himself
to the Holy Virgin rather than to Mohammed? It is added that a pigeon
brought the holy phial in its beak to anoint Clovis, and that an angel
brought the oriflamme to lead him; prejudice believed all the little
stories of this kind. Those who understand human nature know well that
Clovis the usurper and Rolon (or Rol) the usurper turned Christian in
order to govern the Christians more surely, just as the Turkish usurpers
turned Mussulman in order to govern the Mussulmans more surely.


RELIGIOUS PREJUDICES

If your nurse has told you that Ceres rules over the crops, or that
Vistnou and Xaca made themselves men several times, or that Sammonocodom
came to cut down a forest, or that Odin awaits you in his hall near
Jutland, or that Mohammed or somebody else made a journey into the sky;
if lastly your tutor comes to drive into your brain what your nurse has
imprinted on it you keep it for life. If your judgment wishes to rise
against these prejudices, your neighbours and, above all, your
neighbours' wives cry out "Impious reprobate," and dismay you; your
dervish, fearing to see his income diminish, accuses you to the cadi,
and this cadi has you impaled if he can, because he likes ruling over
fools, and thinks that fools obey better than others: and that will last
until your neighbours and the dervish and the cadi begin to understand
that foolishness is good for nothing, and that persecution is
abominable.




_RARE_


Rare in natural philosophy is the opposite of dense. In moral
philosophy, it is the opposite of common.

This last variety of rare is what excites admiration. One never admires
what is common, one enjoys it.

An eccentric thinks himself above the rest of wretched mortals when he
has in his study a rare medal that is good for nothing, a rare book that
nobody has the courage to read, an old engraving by Albrecht Durer,
badly designed and badly printed: he triumphs if he has in his garden a
stunted tree from America. This eccentric has no taste; he has only
vanity. He has heard say that the beautiful is rare; but he should know
that all that is rare is not beautiful.

Beauty is rare in all nature's works, and in all works of art.

Whatever ill things have been said of women, I maintain that it is rarer
to find women perfectly beautiful than passibly good.

You will meet in the country ten thousand women attached to their homes,
laborious, sober, feeding, rearing, teaching their children; and you
will find barely one whom you could show at the theatres of Paris,
London, Naples, or in the public gardens, and who would be looked on as
a beauty.

Likewise, in works of art, you have ten thousand daubs and scrawls to
one masterpiece.

If everything were beautiful and good, it is clear that one would no
longer admire anything; one would enjoy. But would one have pleasure in
enjoying? that is a big question.

Why have the beautiful passages in "The Cid," "The Horaces," "Cinna,"
had such a prodigious success? Because in the profound night in which
people were plunged, they suddenly saw shine a new light that they did
not expect. It was because this beauty was the rarest thing in the
world.

The groves of Versailles were a beauty unique in the world, as were then
certain passages of Corneille. St. Peter's, Rome, is unique.

But let us suppose that all the churches of Europe were equal to St.
Peter's, Rome, that all statues were Venus dei Medici, that all
tragedies were as beautiful as Racine's "Iphigénie", all works of poetry
as well written as Boileau's "Art Poétique", all comedies as good as
"Tartufe", and thus in every sphere; would you then have as much
pleasure in enjoying masterpieces become common as they made you taste
when they were rare? I say boldly "No!"; and I believe that the ancient
school, which so rarely was right, was right when it said: _Ab assuetis
non fit passio_, habit does not make passion.

But, my dear reader, will it be the same with the works of nature? Will
you be disgusted if all the maids are so beautiful as Helen; and you,
ladies, if all the lads are like Paris? Let us suppose that all wines
are excellent, will you have less desire to drink? if the partridges,
pheasants, pullets are common at all times, will you have less appetite?
I say boldly again "No!", despite the axiom of the schools, "Habit does
not make passion": and the reason, you know it, is that all the
pleasures which nature gives us are always recurring needs, necessary
enjoyments, and that the pleasures of the arts are not necessary. It is
not necessary for a man to have groves where water gushes to a height of
a hundred feet from the mouth of a marble face, and on leaving these
groves to go to see a fine tragedy. But the two sexes are always
necessary to each other. The table and the bed are necessities. The
habit of being alternately on these two thrones will never disgust you.

In Paris a few years ago people admired a rhinoceros. If there were in
one province ten thousand rhinoceroses, men would run after them only to
kill them. But let there be a hundred thousand beautiful women men will
always run after them to ... honour them.




_REASON_


At the time when all France was mad about Law's system, and Law was
controller-general, there came to him in the presence of a great
assembly a man who was always right, who always had reason on his side.
Said he to Law:

"Sir, you are the biggest madman, the biggest fool, or the biggest rogue
who has yet appeared among us; and that is saying a great deal: this is
how I prove it. You have imagined that a state's wealth can be increased
tenfold with paper; but as this paper can represent only the money that
is representative of true wealth, the products of the land and industry,
you should have begun by giving us ten times more corn, wine, cloth,
canvas, etc. That is not enough, you must be sure of your market. But
you make ten times as many notes as we have of silver and commodities,
therefore you are ten times more extravagant, or more inept, or more of
a rogue than all the comptrollers who have preceded you. This is how I
prove my major."

Hardly had he started his major than he was conducted to Saint-Lazare.

When he came out of Saint-Lazare, where he studied much and strengthened
his reason, he went to Rome; he asked for a public audience of the Pope,
on condition that he was not interrupted in his harangue; and he spoke
to the Pope in these terms:

"Holy Father, you are an antichrist and this is how I prove it to Your
Holiness. I call antichrist the man who does the contrary to what Christ
did and commanded. Now Christ was poor, and you are very rich; he paid
tribute, and you exact tribute; he submitted to the powers that were,
and you have become a power; he walked on foot, and you go to
Castel-Gandolfo in a sumptuous equipage; he ate all that one was so good
as to give him, and you want us to eat fish on Friday and Saturday, when
we live far from sea and river; he forbade Simon Barjona to use a sword,
and you have swords in your service, etc., etc., etc. Therefore in this
sense Your Holiness is antichrist. In every other sense I hold you in
great veneration, and I ask you for an indulgence _in articulo mortis_."

My man was put in the Castello St. Angelo.

When he came out of the Castello St. Angelo, he rushed to Venice, and
asked to speak to the doge.

"Your Serenity," he said, "must be a scatter-brain to marry the sea
every year: for firstly, one only marries the same person once;
secondly, your marriage resembles Harlequin's which was half made,
seeing that it lacked but the consent of the bride; thirdly, who has
told you that one day other maritime powers will not declare you
incapable of consummating the marriage?"

He spoke, and was shut up in the Tower of St. Mark's.

When he came out of the Tower of St. Mark's, he went to Constantinople;
he had audience of the mufti; and spoke to him in these terms:

"Your religion, although it has some good points, such as worship of the
great Being, and the necessity of being just and charitable, is
otherwise nothing but a rehash of Judaism and a tedious collection of
fairy tales. If the archangel Gabriel had brought the leaves of the
Koran to Mahomet from some planet, all Arabia would have seen Gabriel
come down: nobody saw him; therefore Mahomet was a brazen impostor who
deceived imbeciles."

Hardly had he pronounced these words than he was impaled. Nevertheless
he had always been right, and had always had reason on his side.




_RELIGION_


I meditated last night; I was absorbed in the contemplation of nature; I
admired the immensity, the course, the harmony of these infinite globes
which the vulgar do not know how to admire.

I admired still more the intelligence which directs these vast forces. I
said to myself: "One must be blind not to be dazzled by this spectacle;
one must be stupid not to recognize the author of it; one must be mad
not to worship Him. What tribute of worship should I render Him? Should
not this tribute be the same in the whole of space, since it is the same
supreme power which reigns equally in all space? Should not a thinking
being who dwells in a star in the Milky Way offer Him the same homage as
the thinking being on this little globe where we are? Light is uniform
for the star Sirius and for us; moral philosophy must be uniform. If a
sentient, thinking animal in Sirius is born of a tender father and
mother who have been occupied with his happiness, he owes them as much
love and care as we owe to our parents. If someone in the Milky Way sees
a needy cripple, if he can relieve him and if he does not do it, he is
guilty toward all globes. Everywhere the heart has the same duties: on
the steps of the throne of God, if He has a throne; and in the depth of
the abyss, if He is an abyss."

I was plunged in these ideas when one of those genii who fill the
intermundane spaces came down to me. I recognized this same aerial
creature who had appeared to me on another occasion to teach me how
different God's judgments were from our own, and how a good action is
preferable to a controversy.

He transported me into a desert all covered with piled up bones; and
between these heaps of dead men there were walks of ever-green trees,
and at the end of each walk a tall man of august mien, who regarded
these sad remains with pity.

"Alas! my archangel," said I, "where have you brought me?"

"To desolation," he answered.

"And who are these fine patriarchs whom I see sad and motionless at the
end of these green walks? they seem to be weeping over this countless
crowd of dead."

"You shall know, poor human creature," answered the genius from the
intermundane spaces; "but first of all you must weep."

He began with the first pile. "These," he said, "are the twenty-three
thousand Jews who danced before a calf, with the twenty-four thousand
who were killed while lying with Midianitish women. The number of those
massacred for such errors and offences amounts to nearly three hundred
thousand.

"In the other walks are the bones of the Christians slaughtered by each
other for metaphysical disputes. They are divided into several heaps of
four centuries each. One heap would have mounted right to the sky; they
had to be divided."

"What!" I cried, "brothers have treated their brothers like this, and I
have the misfortune to be of this brotherhood!"

"Here," said the spirit, "are the twelve million Americans killed in
their fatherland because they had not been baptized."

"My God! why did you not leave these frightful bones to dry in the
hemisphere where their bodies were born, and where they were consigned
to so many different deaths? Why assemble here all these abominable
monuments to barbarism and fanaticism?"

"To instruct you."

"Since you wish to instruct me," I said to the genius, "tell me if there
have been peoples other than the Christians and the Jews in whom zeal
and religion wretchedly transformed into fanaticism, have inspired so
many horrible cruelties."

"Yes," he said. "The Mohammedans were sullied with the same
inhumanities, but rarely; and when one asked _amman_, pity, of them and
offered them tribute, they pardoned. As for the other nations there has
not been one right from the existence of the world which has ever made a
purely religious war. Follow me now." I followed him.

A little beyond these piles of dead men we found other piles; they were
composed of sacks of gold and silver, and each had its label: _Substance
of the heretics massacred in the eighteenth century, the seventeenth and
the sixteenth._ And so on in going back: _Gold and silver of Americans
slaughtered_, etc., etc. And all these piles were surmounted with
crosses, mitres, croziers, triple crowns studded with precious stones.

"What, my genius! it was then to have these riches that these dead were
piled up?"

"Yes, my son."

I wept; and when by my grief I had merited to be led to the end of the
green walks, he led me there.

"Contemplate," he said, "the heroes of humanity who were the world's
benefactors, and who were all united in banishing from the world, as far
as they were able, violence and rapine. Question them."

I ran to the first of the band; he had a crown on his head, and a little
censer in his hand; I humbly asked him his name. "I am Numa Pompilius,"
he said to me. "I succeeded a brigand, and I had brigands to govern: I
taught them virtue and the worship of God; after me they forgot both
more than once; I forbade that in the temples there should be any image,
because the Deity which animates nature cannot be represented. During my
reign the Romans had neither wars nor seditions, and my religion did
nothing but good. All the neighbouring peoples came to honour me at my
funeral: that happened to no one but me."

I kissed his hand, and I went to the second. He was a fine old man about
a hundred years old, clad in a white robe. He put his middle-finger on
his mouth, and with the other hand he cast some beans behind him. I
recognized Pythagoras. He assured me he had never had a golden thigh,
and that he had never been a cock; but that he had governed the
Crotoniates with as much justice as Numa governed the Romans, almost at
the same time; and that this justice was the rarest and most necessary
thing in the world. I learned that the Pythagoreans examined their
consciences twice a day. The honest people! how far we are from them!
But we who have been nothing but assassins for thirteen hundred years,
we say that these wise men were arrogant.

In order to please Pythagoras, I did not say a word to him and I passed
to Zarathustra, who was occupied in concentrating the celestial fire in
the focus of a concave mirror, in the middle of a hall with a hundred
doors which all led to wisdom. (Zarathustra's precepts are called
_doors_, and are a hundred in number.) Over the principal door I read
these words which are the précis of all moral philosophy, and which cut
short all the disputes of the casuists: "When in doubt if an action is
good or bad, refrain."

"Certainly," I said to my genius, "the barbarians who immolated all
these victims had never read these beautiful words."

We then saw the Zaleucus, the Thales, the Aniximanders, and all the
sages who had sought truth and practised virtue.

When we came to Socrates, I recognized him very quickly by his flat
nose. "Well," I said to him, "here you are then among the number of the
Almighty's confidants! All the inhabitants of Europe, except the Turks
and the Tartars of the Crimea, who know nothing, pronounce your name
with respect. It is revered, loved, this great name, to the point that
people have wanted to know those of your persecutors. Melitus and
Anitus are known because of you, just as Ravaillac is known because of
Henry IV.; but I know only this name of Anitus. I do not know precisely
who was the scoundrel who calumniated you, and who succeeded in having
you condemned to take hemlock."

"Since my adventure," replied Socrates, "I have never thought about that
man; but seeing that you make me remember it, I have much pity for him.
He was a wicked priest who secretly conducted a business in hides, a
trade reputed shameful among us. He sent his two children to my school.
The other disciples taunted them with having a father who was a currier;
they were obliged to leave. The irritated father had no rest until he
had stirred up all the priests and all the sophists against me. They
persuaded the counsel of the five hundred that I was an impious fellow
who did not believe that the Moon, Mercury and Mars were gods. Indeed, I
used to think, as I think now, that there is only one God, master of all
nature. The judges handed me over to the poisoner of the republic; he
cut short my life by a few days: I died peacefully at the age of
seventy; and since that time I pass a happy life with all these great
men whom you see, and of whom I am the least."

After enjoying some time in conversation with Socrates, I went forward
with my guide into a grove situated above the thickets where all the
sages of antiquity seemed to be tasting sweet repose.

I saw a man of gentle, simple countenance, who seemed to me to be about
thirty-five years old. From afar he cast compassionate glances on these
piles of whitened bones, across which I had had to pass to reach the
sages' abode. I was astonished to find his feet swollen and bleeding,
his hands likewise, his side pierced, and his ribs flayed with whip
cuts. "Good Heavens!" I said to him, "is it possible for a just man, a
sage, to be in this state? I have just seen one who was treated in a
very hateful way, but there is no comparison between his torture and
yours. Wicked priests and wicked judges poisoned him; is it by priests
and judges that you have been so cruelly assassinated?"

He answered with much courtesy--"_Yes._"

"And who were these monsters?"

"_They were hypocrites._"

"Ah! that says everything; I understand by this single word that they
must have condemned you to death. Had you then proved to them, as
Socrates did, that the Moon was not a goddess, and that Mercury was not
a god?"

"_No, these planets were not in question. My compatriots did not know at
all what a planet is; they were all arrant ignoramuses. Their
superstitions were quite different from those of the Greeks._"

"You wanted to teach them a new religion, then?"

"_Not at all; I said to them simply--'Love God with all your heart and
your fellow-creature as yourself, for that is man's whole duty.' Judge
if this precept is not as old as the universe; judge if I brought them a
new religion. I did not stop telling them that I had come not to destroy
the law but to fulfil it; I had observed all their rites; circumcised as
they all were, baptized as were the most zealous among them, like them I
paid the Corban; I observed the Passover as they did, eating standing up
a lamb cooked with lettuces. I and my friends went to pray in the
temple; my friends even frequented this temple after my death; in a
word, I fulfilled all their laws without a single exception._"

"What! these wretches could not even reproach you with swerving from
their laws?"

"_No, without a doubt._"

"Why then did they put you in the condition in which I now see you?"

"_What do you expect me to say! they were very arrogant and selfish.
They saw that I knew them; they knew that I was making the citizens
acquainted with them; they were the stronger; they took away my life:
and people like them will always do as much, if they can, to whoever
does them too much justice._"

"But did you say nothing, do nothing that could serve them as a
pretext?"

"_To the wicked everything serves as pretext._"

"Did you not say once that you were come not to send peace, but a
sword?"

"_It is a copyist's error; I told them that I sent peace and not a
sword. I have never written anything; what I said can have been changed
without evil intention._"

"You therefore contributed in no way by your speeches, badly reported,
badly interpreted, to these frightful piles of bones which I saw on my
road in coming to consult you?"

"_It is with horror only that I have seen those who have made themselves
guilty of these murders._"

"And these monuments of power and wealth, of pride and avarice, these
treasures, these ornaments, these signs of grandeur, which I have seen
piled up on the road while I was seeking wisdom, do they come from you?"

"_That is impossible; I and my people lived in poverty and meanness: my
grandeur was in virtue only._"

I was about to beg him to be so good as to tell me just who he was. My
guide warned me to do nothing of the sort. He told me that I was not
made to understand these sublime mysteries. Only did I conjure him to
tell me in what true religion consisted.

"_Have I not already told you? Love God and your fellow-creature as
yourself._"

"What! if one loves God, one can eat meat on Friday?"

"_I always ate what was given me; for I was too poor to give anyone
food._"

"In loving God, in being just, should one not be rather cautious not to
confide all the adventures of one's life to an unknown man?"

"_That was always my practice._"

"Can I not, by doing good, dispense with making a pilgrimage to St.
James of Compostella?"

"_I have never been in that country._"

"Is it necessary for me to imprison myself in a retreat with fools?"

"_As for me, I always made little journeys from town to town._"

"Is it necessary for me to take sides either for the Greek Church or the
Latin?"

"_When I was in the world I never made any difference between the Jew
and the Samaritan._"

"Well, if that is so, I take you for my only master." Then he made me a
sign with his head which filled me with consolation. The vision
disappeared, and a clear conscience stayed with me.




_SECT_


SECTION I

Every sect, in whatever sphere, is the rallying-point of doubt and
error. Scotist, Thomist, Realist, Nominalist, Papist, Calvinist,
Molinist, Jansenist, are only pseudonyms.

There are no sects in geometry; one does not speak of a Euclidian, an
Archimedean.

When the truth is evident, it is impossible for parties and factions to
arise. Never has there been a dispute as to whether there is daylight at
noon.

The branch of astronomy which determines the course of the stars and the
return of eclipses being once known, there is no more dispute among
astronomers.

In England one does not say--"I am a Newtonian, a Lockian, a Halleyan."
Why? Those who have read cannot refuse their assent to the truths taught
by these three great men. The more Newton is revered, the less do people
style themselves Newtonians; this word supposes that there are
anti-Newtonians in England. Maybe we still have a few Cartesians in
France; that is solely because Descartes' system is a tissue of
erroneous and ridiculous imaginings.

It is likewise with the small number of truths of fact which are well
established. The records of the Tower of London having been
authentically gathered by Rymer, there are no Rymerians, because it
occurs to no one to combat this collection. In it one finds neither
contradictions, absurdities nor prodigies; nothing which revolts the
reason, nothing, consequently, which sectarians strive to maintain or
upset by absurd arguments. Everyone agrees, therefore, that Rymer's
records are worthy of belief.

You are Mohammedan, therefore there are people who are not, therefore
you might well be wrong.

What would be the true religion if Christianity did not exist? the
religion in which there were no sects; the religion in which all minds
were necessarily in agreement.

Well, to what dogma do all minds agree? to the worship of a God and to
integrity. All the philosophers of the world who have had a religion
have said in all time--"There is a God, and one must be just." There,
then, is the universal religion established in all time and throughout
mankind.

The point in which they all agree is therefore true, and the systems
through which they differ are therefore false.

"My sect is the best," says a Brahmin to me. But, my friend, if your
sect is good, it is necessary; for if it were not absolutely necessary
you would admit to me that it was useless: if it is absolutely
necessary, it is for all men; how then can it be that all men have not
what is absolutely necessary to them? How is it possible for the rest of
the world to laugh at you and your Brahma?

When Zarathustra, Hermes, Orpheus, Minos and all the great men say--"Let
us worship God, and let us be just," nobody laughs; but everyone hisses
the man who claims that one cannot please God unless when one dies one
is holding a cow's tail, and the man who wants one to have the end of
one's prepuce cut off, and the man who consecrates crocodiles and
onions, and the man who attaches eternal salvation to the dead men's
bones one carries under one's shirt, or to a plenary indulgence which
one buys at Rome for two and a half sous.

Whence comes this universal competition in hisses and derision from one
end of the world to the other? It is clear that the things at which
everyone sneers are not of a very evident truth. What shall we say of
one of Sejan's secretaries who dedicated to Petronius a bombastic book
entitled--"The Truths of the Sibylline Oracles, Proved by the Facts"?

This secretary proves to you first that it was necessary for God to send
on earth several sibyls one after the other; for He had no other means
of teaching mankind. It is demonstrated that God spoke to these sibyls,
for the word _sibyl_ signifies _God's counsel_. They had to live a long
time, for it is the very least that persons to whom God speaks should
have this privilege. They were twelve in number, for this number is
sacred. They had certainly predicted all the events in the world, for
Tarquinius Superbus bought three of their Books from an old woman for a
hundred crowns. "What incredulous fellow," adds the secretary, "will
dare deny all these evident facts which happened in a corner before the
whole world? Who can deny the fulfilment of their prophecies? Has not
Virgil himself quoted the predictions of the sibyls? If we have not the
first examples of the Sibylline Books, written at a time when people did
not know how to read or write, have we not authentic copies? Impiety
must be silent before such proofs." Thus did Houttevillus speak to
Sejan. He hoped to have a position as augur which would be worth an
income of fifty thousand francs, and he had nothing.[20]

"What my sect teaches is obscure, I admit it," says a fanatic; "and it
is because of this obscurity that it must be believed; for the sect
itself says it is full of obscurities. My sect is extravagant, therefore
it is divine; for how should what appears so mad have been embraced by
so many peoples, if it were not divine?" It is precisely like the
Alcoran which the Sonnites say has an angel's face and an animal's
snout; be not scandalized by the animal's snout, and worship the angel's
face. Thus speaks this insensate fellow. But a fanatic of another sect
answers--"It is you who are the animal, and I who am the angel."

Well, who shall judge the suit? who shall decide between these two
fanatics? The reasonable, impartial man learned in a knowledge that is
not that of words; the man free from prejudice and lover of truth and
justice; in short, the man who is not the foolish animal, and who does
not think he is the angel.


SECTION II

_Sect_ and _error_ are synonymous. You are Peripatetic and I
Platonician; we are therefore both wrong; for you combat Plato only
because his fantasies have revolted you, and I am alienated from
Aristotle only because it seems to me that he does not know what he is
talking about. If one or the other had demonstrated the truth, there
would be a sect no longer. To declare oneself for the opinion of the one
or the other is to take sides in a civil war. There are no sects in
mathematics, in experimental physics. A man who examines the relations
between a cone and a sphere is not of the sect of Archimedes: he who
sees that the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is
equal to the square of the two other sides is not of the sect of
Pythagoras.

When you say that the blood circulates, that the air is heavy, that the
sun's rays are pencils of seven refrangible rays, you are not either of
the sect of Harvey, or the sect of Torricelli, or the sect of Newton;
you agree merely with the truth demonstrated by them, and the entire
universe will ever be of your opinion.

This is the character of truth; it is of all time; it is for all men; it
has only to show itself to be recognized; one cannot argue against it. A
long dispute signifies--"Both parties are wrong."


FOOTNOTES:

[20] Reference to the Abbé Houtteville, author of a book entitled--"The
Truth of the Christian Religion, Proved by the Facts."




_SELF-ESTEEM_


Nicole in his "Essais de Morale," written after two or three thousand
volumes of ethics ("Treatise on Charity," Chap. II), says that "by means
of the wheels and gibbets which people establish in common are repressed
the tyrannous thoughts and designs of each individual's self-esteem."

I shall not examine whether people have gibbets in common, as they have
meadows and woods in common, and a common purse, and if one represses
ideas with wheels; but it seems very strange to me that Nicole should
take highway robbery and assassination for self-esteem. One should
distinguish shades of difference a little better. The man who said that
Nero had his mother assassinated through self-esteem, that Cartouche had
much self-esteem, would not be expressing himself very correctly.
Self-esteem is not wickedness, it is a sentiment that is natural to all
men; it is much nearer vanity than crime.

A beggar in the suburbs of Madrid nobly begged charity; a passer-by says
to him: "Are you not ashamed to practise this infamous calling when you
are able to work?"

"Sir," answered the beggar, "I ask for money, not advice." And he turned
on his heel with full Castillian dignity.

This gentleman was a proud beggar, his vanity was wounded by a trifle.
He asked charity out of love for himself, and could not tolerate the
reprimand out of further love for himself.

A missionary travelling in India met a fakir laden with chains, naked as
a monkey, lying on his stomach, and having himself whipped for the sins
of his compatriots, the Indians, who gave him a few farthings.

"What self-denial!" said one of the lookers-on.

"Self-denial!" answered the fakir. "Learn that I have myself flogged in
this world in order to return it in another, when you will be horses and
I horseman."

Those who have said that love of ourselves is the basis of all our
opinions and all our actions, have therefore been quite right in India,
Spain, and all the habitable world: and as one does not write to prove
to men that they have faces, it is not necessary to prove to them that
they have self-esteem. Self-esteem is the instrument of our
conservation; it resembles the instrument of the perpetuity of the
species: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and it
has to be hidden.




_SOUL_


SECTION I

This is a vague, indeterminate term, which expresses an unknown
principle of known effects that we feel in us. The word _soul_
corresponds to the Latin _anima_, to the Greek +pneuma+, to the term of
which all nations have made use to express what they did not understand
any better than we do.

In the proper and literal sense of the Latin and the languages derived
from Latin, it signifies _that which animates_. Thus people have spoken
of the soul of men, of animals, sometimes of plants, to signify their
principal of vegetation and life. In pronouncing this word, people have
never had other than a confused idea, as when it is said in
Genesis--"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living
soul; and the soul of animals is in the blood; and kill not my soul,
etc."

Thus the soul was generally taken for the origin and the cause of life,
for life itself. That is why all known nations long imagined that
everything died with the body. If one can disentangle anything in the
chaos of ancient histories, it seems that the Egyptians at least were
the first to distinguish between the intelligence and the soul: and the
Greeks learned from them to distinguish their +nous+, their +pneuma+,
their +skia+. The Latins, following their example, distinguish _animus_
and _anima_; and we, finally, have also had our _soul_ and our
_understanding_. But is that which is the principle of our life
different from that which is the principle of our thoughts? is it the
same being? Does that which directs us and gives us sensation and
memory resemble that which is in animals the cause of digestion and the
cause of their sensations and of their memory?

There is the eternal object of the disputes of mankind; I say eternal
object; for not having any first notion from which we can descend in
this examination, we can only rest for ever in a labyrinth of doubt and
feeble conjecture.

We have not the smallest step where we may place a foot in order to
reach the most superficial knowledge of what makes us live and of what
makes us think. How should we have? we should have had to see life and
thought enter a body. Does a father know how he has produced his son?
does a mother how she conceived him? Has anyone ever been able to divine
how he acts, how he wakes, how he sleeps? Does anyone know how his limbs
obey his will? has anyone discovered by what art ideas are marked out in
his brain and issue from it at his command? Frail automatons moved by
the invisible hand which directs us on this stage of the world, which of
us has been able to detect the wire which guides us?

We dare question whether the soul is "spirit" or "matter"; if it is
created before us, if it issues from non-existence at our birth, if
after animating us for one day on earth, it lives after us into
eternity. These questions appear sublime; what are they? questions of
blind men saying to other blind men--"What is light?"

When we want to learn something roughly about a piece of metal, we put
it in a crucible in the fire. But have we a crucible in which to put the
soul? "The soul is _spirit_," says one. But what is spirit? Assuredly no
one has any idea; it is a word that is so void of sense that one is
obliged to say what spirit is not, not being able to say what it is.
"The soul is matter," says another. But what is matter? We know merely
some of its appearances and some of its properties; and not one of these
properties, not one of these appearances, seems to have the slightest
connection with thought.

"Thought is something distinct from matter," say you. But what proof of
it have you? Is it because matter is divisible and figurable, and
thought is not? But who has told you that the first principles of matter
are divisible and figurable? It is very probable that they are not;
entire sects of philosophers maintain that the elements of matter have
neither form nor extension. With a triumphant air you cry--"Thought is
neither wood, nor stone, nor sand, nor metal, therefore thought does not
belong to matter." Weak, reckless reasoners! gravitation is neither
wood, nor sand, nor metal, nor stone; movement, vegetation, life are not
these things either, and yet life, vegetation, movement, gravitation,
are given to matter. To say that God cannot make matter think is to say
the most insolently absurd thing that anyone has ever dared utter in the
privileged schools of lunacy. We are not certain that God has treated
matter like this; we are only certain that He can. But what matters all
that has been said and all that will be said about the soul? what does
it matter that it has been called entelechy, quintessence, flame, ether?
that it has been thought universal, uncreated, transmigrant, etc.?

In these matters that are inaccessible to the reason, what do these
romances of our uncertain imaginations matter? What does it matter that
the Fathers of the first four centuries thought the soul corporeal? What
does it matter that Tertullian, by a contradiction frequent in him, has
decided that it is simultaneously corporeal, formed and simple? We have
a thousand witnesses to ignorance, and not one that gives a glimmer of
probability.

How then are we so bold as to assert what the soul is? We know certainly
that we exist, that we feel, that we think. Do we want to take a step
beyond? we fall into a shadowy abyss; and in this abyss we are still so
madly reckless as to dispute whether this soul, of which we have not the
least idea, was made before us or with us, and whether it perishes or is
immortal.

The article SOUL, and all the articles of the nature of metaphysics,
must start by a sincere submission to the incontrovertible dogmas of
the Church. Revelation is worth more, without doubt, than the whole of
philosophy. Systems exercise the mind, but faith illumines and guides
it.

Do we not often pronounce words of which we have only a very confused
idea, or even of which we have none at all? Is not the word _soul_ an
instance? When the clapper or valve of a bellows is out of order, and
when air which is in the bellows leaves it by some unexpected opening in
this valve, so that it is no longer compressed against the two blades,
and is not thrust violently towards the hearth which it has to light,
French servants say--"The soul of the bellows has burst." They know no
more about it than that; and this question in no wise disturbs their
peace of mind.

The gardener utters the phrase "the soul of the plants," and cultivates
them very well without knowing what he means by this term.

The violin-maker poses, draws forward or back the "soul of a violin"
beneath the bridge in the belly of the instrument; a puny piece of wood
more or less gives the violin or takes away from it a harmonious soul.

We have many industries in which the workmen give the qualification of
"soul" to their machines. Never does one hear them dispute about this
word. Such is not the case with philosophers.

For us the word "soul" signifies generally that which animates. Our
ancestors the Celts gave to their soul the name of _seel_, from which
the English _soul_, and the German _seel_; and probably the ancient
Teutons and the ancient Britons had no quarrels in their universities
over this expression.

The Greeks distinguished three sorts of souls--+psychê+, which signified
the sensitive soul, the soul of the senses; and that is why Love, child
of Aphrodite, had so much passion for Psyche, and why Psyche loved him
so tenderly: +pneuma+, the breath which gives life and movement to the
whole machine, and which we have translated by _spiritus_, spirit;
vague word to which have been given a thousand different meanings: and
finally +nous+, the intelligence.

We possessed therefore three souls, without having the least notion of
any of them. St. Thomas Aquinas (Summation of St. Thomas. Lyons edition,
1738) admits these three souls as a peripatetic, and distinguishes each
of these three souls in three parts. +psychê+ was in the breast,
+pneuma+ was distributed throughout the body, and +nous+ was in the
head. There has been no other philosophy in our schools up to our day,
and woe betide any man who took one of these souls for the other.

In this chaos of ideas there was, nevertheless, a foundation. Men had
noticed that in their passions of love, hate, anger, fear, their
internal organs were stimulated to movement. The liver and the heart
were the seat of the passions. If one thought deeply, one felt a strife
in the organs of the head; therefore the intellectual soul was in the
head. Without respiration no vegetation, no life; therefore the
vegetative soul was in the breast which receives the breath of air.

When men saw in dreams their dead relatives or friends, they had to seek
what had appeared to them. It was not the body which had been consumed
on a funeral pyre, or swallowed up in the sea and eaten by the fishes.
It was, however, something, so they maintained; for they had seen it;
the dead man had spoken; the dreamer had questioned him. Was it
+psychê+, was it +pneuma+, was it +nous+, with whom one had conversed in
the dream? One imagined a phantom, an airy figure: it was +skia+, it was
+daimôn+, a ghost from the shades, a little soul of air and fire, very
unrestricted, which wandered I know not where.

Eventually, when one wanted to sift the matter, it became a constant
that this soul was corporeal; and the whole of antiquity never had any
other idea. At last came Plato who so subtilized this soul that it was
doubtful if he did not separate it entirely from matter; but that was a
problem that was never solved until faith came to enlighten us.

In vain do the materialists quote some of the fathers of the Church who
did not express themselves with precision. St. Irenæus says (liv. v.
chaps. vi and vii) that the soul is only the breath of life, that it is
incorporeal only by comparison with the mortal body, and that it
preserves the form of man so that it may be recognized.

In vain does Tertullian express himself like this--"The corporeality of
the soul shines bright in the Gospel." (_Corporalitas animæ in ipso
Evangelio relucescit_, DE ANIMA, cap. vii.) For if the soul did
not have a body, the image of the soul would not have the image of the
body.

In vain does he record the vision of a holy woman who had seen a very
shining soul, of the colour of air.

In vain does Tatien say expressly (_Oratio ad Græcos_, c. xxiii.)--"The
soul of man is composed of many parts."

In vain is St. Hilarius quoted as saying in later times (St. Hilarius on
St. Matthew)--"There is nothing created which is not corporeal, either
in heaven, or on earth, or among the visible, or among the invisible:
everything is formed of elements; and souls, whether they inhabit a
body, or issue from it, have always a corporeal substance."

In vain does St. Ambrose, in the sixth century, say (On Abraham, liv.
ii., ch. viii.)--"We recognize nothing but the material, except the
venerable Trinity alone."

The body of the entire Church has decided that the soul is immaterial.
These saints fell into an error at that time universal; they were men;
but they were not mistaken over immortality, because that is clearly
announced in the Gospels.

We have so evident a need of the decision of the infallible Church on
these points of philosophy, that we have not indeed by ourselves any
sufficient notion of what is called "pure spirit," and of what is named
"matter." Pure spirit is an expression which gives us no idea; and we
know matter only by a few phenomena. We know it so little that we call
it "substance"; well, the word substance means "that which is under";
but what is under will be eternally hidden from us. What is _under_ is
the Creator's secret; and this secret of the Creator is everywhere. We
do not know either how we receive life, or how we give it, or how we
grow, or how we digest, or how we sleep, or how we think, or how we
feel.

The great difficulty is to understand how a being, whoever he be, has
thoughts.


SECTION II

The author of the article SOUL in the "Encyclopedia" (the Abbé Yvon)
followed Jaquelot scrupulously; but Jaquelot teaches us nothing. He sets
himself also against Locke, because the modest Locke said (liv. iv, ch.
iii, para. vi.)--"We possibly shall never be able to know whether any
mere material being thinks or no; it being impossible for us, by the
contemplation of our own ideas without revelation, to discover whether
Omnipotency has not given to some systems of matter, fitly disposed, a
power to perceive and think, or else joined and fixed to matter, so
disposed, a thinking immaterial substance: it being, in respect of our
notions, not much more remote from our comprehension to conceive that
God can, if he pleases, superadd to matter a faculty of thinking, than
that he should superadd to it another substance with a faculty of
thinking; since we know not wherein thinking consists, nor to what sort
of substances the Almighty has been pleased to give that power which
cannot be in any created being but merely by the good pleasure and
bounty of the Creator, for I see no contradiction in it, that the first
eternal thinking Being should, if he pleased, give to certain systems of
created senseless matter, put together as he thinks fit, some degrees of
sense, perception and thought."

Those are the words of a profound, religious and modest man.

We know what quarrels he had to undergo on account of this opinion which
appeared bold, but which was in fact in him only a consequence of his
conviction of the omnipotence of God and the weakness of man. He did not
say that matter thought; but he said that we have not enough knowledge
to demonstrate that it is impossible for God to add the gift of thought
to the unknown being called "matter", after according it the gift of
gravitation and the gift of movement, both of which are equally
incomprehensible.

Locke was not assuredly the only one who had advanced this opinion; it
was the opinion of all antiquity, who, regarding the soul as very
unrestricted matter, affirmed consequently that matter could feel and
think.

It was Gassendi's opinion, as may be seen in his objections to
Descartes. "It is true," says Gassendi, "that you know what you think;
but you are ignorant of what species of substance you are, you who
think. Thus although the operation of thought is known to you, the
principle of your essence is hidden from you; and you do not know what
is the nature of this substance, one of the operations of which is to
think. You are like a blind man who, feeling the heat of the sun and
being informed that it is caused by the heat of the sun, thinks he has a
clear and distinct idea of this luminary; because if he were asked what
the sun was, he could reply that it is a thing which heats, etc."

The same Gassendi, in his "Epicurean Philosophy," repeats several times
that there is no mathematical evidence of the pure spirituality of the
soul.

Descartes, in one of his letters to the Palatine Princess Elisabeth,
says to her--"I confess that by the natural reason alone we can make
many conjectures on the soul, and have gratifying hopes, but no
certainty." And in that sentence Descartes combats in his letters what
he puts forward in his works; a too ordinary contradiction.

In fine we have seen that all the Fathers of the first centuries of the
Church, while believing the soul immortal, believed it at the same time
material; they thought that it is as easy for God to conserve as to
create. They said--"God made the soul thinking, He will preserve it
thinking."

Malebranche has proved very well that we have no idea by ourselves, and
that objects are incapable of giving us ideas: from that he concludes
that we see everything in God. That is at the bottom the same thing as
making God the author of all our ideas; for with what should we see in
Him, if we had not instruments for seeing? and these instruments, it is
He alone who holds them and guides them. This system is a labyrinth, one
lane of which would lead you to Spinozism, another to Stoicism, another
to chaos.

When one has had a good argument about spirit and matter, one always
finishes by not understanding each other. No philosopher has been able
with his own strength to lift this veil stretched by nature over all the
first principles of things. Men argue, nature acts.


SECTION III

OF THE SOUL OF ANIMALS, AND OF SOME EMPTY IDEAS

Before the strange system which supposes animals to be pure machines
without any sensation, men had never thought that the beasts possessed
an immaterial soul; and nobody had pushed recklessness to the point of
saying that an oyster has a spiritual soul. Everyone concurred peaceably
in agreeing that the beasts had received from God feeling, memory,
ideas, and no pure spirit. Nobody had abused the gift of reason to the
point of saying that nature had given the beasts all the organs of
feeling so that they might not feel anything. Nobody had said that they
cry when they are wounded, and that they fly when pursued, without
experiencing pain or fear.

At that time people did not deny the omnipotence of God; He had been
able to communicate to the organized matter of animals pleasure, pain,
remembrance, the combination of a few ideas; He had been able to give to
several of them, such as the monkey, the elephant, the hunting-dog, the
talent of perfecting themselves in the arts which were taught to them;
not only had He been able to endow nearly all carnivorous animals with
the talent of warring better in their experienced old age than in their
too trustful youth; not only, I say, had He been able to do these
things, but He had done them: the universe bore witness thereto.

Pereira and Descartes maintained that the universe was mistaken, that
God was a juggler, that He had given animals all the instruments of life
and sensation, so that they might have neither life nor sensation,
properly speaking. But I do not know what so-called philosophers, in
order to answer Descartes' chimera, leaped into the opposite chimera;
they gave liberally of pure spirit to the toads and the insects.

Between these two madnesses, the one refusing feeling to the organs of
feeling, the other lodging a pure spirit in a bug, somebody thought of a
middle path. It was instinct. And what is instinct? Oh, oh, it is a
substantial form; it is a plastic form; it is I do not know what! it is
instinct. I shall be of your opinion so long as you will call the
majority of things, "I do not know what"; so long as your philosophy
begins and ends with "I do not know what", I shall quote Prior to you in
his poem on the vanity of the world.

The author of the article SOUL in the "Encyclopedia" explains
himself like this:--"I picture the animals' soul as an immaterial and
intelligent substance, but of what species? It must, it seems to me, be
an active principle which has sensations, and which has only that.... If
we reflect on the nature of the soul of animals, it supplies us with
groundwork which might lead us to think that its spirituality will save
it from annihilation."

I do not know how one pictures an immaterial substance. To picture
something is to make an image of it; and up till now nobody has been
able to paint the spirit. For the word "picture", I want the author to
understand "I conceive"; speaking for myself, I confess I do not
conceive it. I confess still less that a spiritual soul may be
annihilated, because I do not conceive either creation or non-existence;
because I have never been present at God's council; because I know
nothing at all about the principle of things.

If I wish to prove that the soul is a real being, someone stops me by
telling me that it is a faculty. If I assert that it is a faculty, and
that I have the faculty of thinking, I am told that I am mistaken; that
God, the eternal master of all nature, does everything in me, and
directs all my actions and all my thoughts; that if I produced my
thoughts, I should know the thought I will have in a minute; that I
never know it; that I am only an automaton with sensations and ideas,
necessarily dependent, and in the hands of the Supreme Being, infinitely
more compliant to Him than clay is to the potter.

I confess my ignorance, therefore; I avow that four thousand tomes of
metaphysics will not teach us what our soul is.

An orthodox philosopher said to a heterodox philosopher--"How have you
been able to come to the point of imagining that the soul is mortal by
nature, and eternal only by the pure wish of God?"

"By my own experience," said the other.

"How! are you dead?"

"Yes, very often. I suffered from epilepsy in my youth, and I assure you
that I was completely dead for several hours. No sensation, no
remembrance even of the moment that I fell ill. The same thing happens
to me now nearly every night. I never feel the precise moment that I go
to sleep; my sleep is absolutely dreamless. I cannot imagine by
conjecture how long I have slept. I am dead regularly six hours out of
the twenty-four. That is a quarter of my life."

The orthodox then asserted that he always thought during his sleep
without knowing anything about it. The heterodox answered him--"I
believe through revelation that I shall always think in the other life;
but I assure you I think rarely in this one."

The orthodox was not mistaken in asserting the immortality of the soul,
for faith and reason demonstrate this truth; but he might be mistaken in
asserting that a sleeping man always thinks.

Locke admitted frankly that he did not always think while he was asleep:
another philosopher has said--"Thought is characteristic of man; but it
is not his essence."

Let us leave to each man the liberty and consolation of seeking himself,
and of losing himself in his ideas.

It is good, however, to know, that in 1730 a philosopher[21] suffered a
severe enough persecution for having confessed, with Locke, that his
understanding was not exercised at every moment of the day and night,
just as he did not use his arms and his legs at all moments. Not only
did court ignorance persecute him, but the malignant influence of a few
so-called men of letters was let loose against him. What in England had
produced merely a few philosophical disputes, produced in France the
most cowardly atrocities; a Frenchman suffered by Locke.

There have always been in the mud of our literature more than one of
these miscreants who have sold their pens, and intrigued against their
benefactors even. This remark is rather foreign to the article
SOUL; but should one miss an opportunity of dismaying those who
make themselves unworthy of the name of men of letters, who prostitute
the little mind and conscience they have to a vile self-interest, to a
fantastic policy, who betray their friends to flatter fools, who in
secret powder the hemlock which the powerful and malicious ignoramus
wants to make useful citizens drink?

In short, while we worship God with all our soul, let us confess always
our profound ignorance of this soul, of this faculty of feeling and
thinking which we possess from His infinite goodness. Let us avow that
our feeble reasonings can take nothing away from, or add anything to
revelation and faith. Let us conclude in fine that we should use this
intelligence, the nature of which is unknown, for perfecting the
sciences which are the object of the "Encyclopedia"; just as watchmakers
use springs in their watches, without knowing what a spring is.


SECTION IV

ABOUT THE SOUL, AND ABOUT OUR LITTLE KNOWLEDGE

On the testimony of our acquired knowledge, we have dared question
whether the soul is created before us, whether it comes from
non-existence into our body? at what age it came to settle between a
bladder and the intestines _cæcum_ and _rectum_? if it brought ideas
with it or received them there, and what are these ideas? if after
animating us for a few moments, its essence is to live after us into
eternity without the intervention of God Himself? if being spirit, and
God being spirit, they are both of like nature? These questions seem
sublime; what are they? questions about light by men born blind.

What have all the philosophers, ancient and modern, taught us? a child
is wiser than they are; he does not think about things of which he can
form no conception.

You will say that it is sad for our insatiable curiosity, for our
inexhaustible thirst for happiness, to be thus ignorant of ourselves! I
agree, and there are still sadder things; but I shall answer you:

     _Sors tua mortalis, non est mortale quod optas._

                                         --Ovid, Met. II. 56

     "You have a man's fate, and a god's desires."

Once again, it seems that the nature of every principle of things is the
Creator's secret. How does the air carry sound? how are animals formed?
how do some of our limbs constantly obey our wills? what hand puts ideas
in our memory, keeps them there as in a register, and pulls them out
sometimes when we want them and sometimes in spite of ourselves? Our
nature, the nature of the universe, the nature of the least plant,
everything for us is sunk in a shadowy pit.

Man is an acting, feeling, thinking being: that is all we know of him:
it is not given to us to know what makes us feel and think, or what
makes us act, or what makes us exist. The acting faculty is as
incomprehensible for us as the thinking faculty. The difficulty is less
to conceive how a body of mud has feelings and ideas, than to conceive
how a being, whatever it be, has ideas and feelings.

Here on one side the soul of Archimedes, on the other the soul of an
idiot; are they of the same nature? If their essence is to think, they
think always, and independently of the body which cannot act without
them. If they think by their own nature, can the species of a soul which
cannot do a sum in arithmetic be the same as that which measured the
heavens? If it is the organs of the body which made Archimedes think,
why is it that my idiot, who has a stronger constitution than
Archimedes, who is more vigorous, digests better and performs all his
functions better, does not think at all? It is, you say, because his
brain is not so good. But you are making a supposition; you do not know
at all. No difference has ever been found between healthy brains that
have been dissected. It is even very probable that a fool's cerebellum
will be in better condition than Archimedes', which has worked
prodigiously, and which might be worn out and shrivelled.

Let us conclude therefore what we have already concluded, that we are
ignoramuses about all first principles. As regards ignoramuses who pride
themselves on their knowledge, they are far inferior to monkeys.

Now dispute, choleric arguers: present your petitions against each
other; proffer your insults, pronounce your sentences, you who do not
know one word about the matter.


SECTION V

OF WARBURTON'S PARADOX ON THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL

Warburton, editor and commentator of Shakespeare and Bishop of
Gloucester, making use of English freedom, and abuse of the custom of
hurling insults at one's adversaries, has composed four volumes to prove
that the immortality of the soul was never announced in the Pentateuch,
and to conclude from this same proof that Moses' mission is divine. Here
is the précis of his book, which he himself gives, pages 7 and 8 of the
first volume.

"1. The doctrine of a life to come, of rewards and punishments after
death, is necessary to all civil society.

"2. The whole human race (_and this is where he is mistaken_), and
especially the wisest and most learned nations of antiquity, concurred
in believing and teaching this doctrine.

"3. It cannot be found in any passage of the law of Moses; therefore the
law of Moses is of divine origin. Which I am going to prove by the two
following syllogisms:


_First Syllogism_

"Every religion, every society that has not the immortality of the soul
for its basis, can be maintained only by an extraordinary providence;
the Jewish religion had not the immortality of the soul for basis;
therefore the Jewish religion was maintained by an extraordinary
providence.


_Second Syllogism_

"All the ancient legislators have said that a religion which did not
teach the immortality of the soul could not be maintained but by an
extraordinary providence; Moses founded a religion which is not founded
on the immortality of the soul; therefore Moses believed his religion
maintained by an extraordinary providence."

What is much more extraordinary is this assertion of Warburton's, which
he has put in big letters at the beginning of his book. He has often
been reproached with the extreme rashness and bad faith with which he
dares to say that all the ancient legislators believed that a religion
which is not founded on pains and recompenses after death, can be
maintained only by an extraordinary providence; not one of them ever
said it. He does not undertake even to give any example in his huge book
stuffed with a vast number of quotations, all of which are foreign to
his subject. He has buried himself beneath a pile of Greek and Latin
authors, ancient and modern, for fear one might see through him on the
other side of a horrible multitude of envelopes. When criticism finally
probed to the bottom, he was resurrected from among all these dead men
in order to load all his adversaries with insults.

It is true that towards the end of his fourth volume, after having
walked through a hundred labyrinths, and having fought with everybody he
met on the road, he comes at last to his great question which he had
left there. He lays all the blame on the Book of Job which passes among
scholars for an Arab work, and he tries to prove that Job did not
believe in the immortality of the soul. Later he explains in his own way
all the texts of Holy Writ by which people have tried to combat this
opinion.

All one can say about it is that, if he was right, it was not for a
bishop to be right in such a way. He should have felt that one might
draw dangerous inferences; but everything in this world is a mass of
contradiction. This man, who became accuser and persecutor, was not made
bishop by a minister of state's patronage until immediately after he had
written his book.

At Salamanca, Coimbre or Rome, he would have been obliged to recant and
to ask pardon. In England he became a peer of the realm with an income
of a hundred thousand _livres_; it was enough to modify his methods.


SECTION VI

OF THE NEED OF REVELATION

The greatest benefit we owe to the New Testament is that it has revealed
to us the immortality of the soul. It is in vain, therefore, that this
fellow Warburton tried to cloud over this important truth, by
continually representing in his legation of Moses that "the ancient Jews
knew nothing of this necessary dogma, and that the Sadducees did not
admit it in the time of our Lord Jesus."

He interprets in his own way the very words that have been put into
Jesus Christ's mouth: "... have ye not read that which was spoken unto
you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and
the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living"
(St. Matt. xxii. 31, 32). He gives to the parable of the wicked rich man
a sense contrary to that of all the Churches. Sherlock, Bishop of
London, and twenty other scholars refuted him. English philosophers even
reproached him with the scandal of an Anglican bishop manifesting an
opinion so contrary to the Anglican Church; and after that, this man
takes it into his head to treat these persons as impious: like the
character of _Arlequin_ in the comedy of the _Dévaliseur de maisons_,
who, after throwing the furniture out of the window, sees a man carrying
some of it off, and cries with all his might "Stop thief!"

One should bless the revelation of the immortality of the soul, and of
rewards and punishments after death, all the more that mankind's vain
philosophy has always been sceptical of it. The great Cæsar did not
believe in it at all, he made himself quite clear in full senate when,
in order to stop Catalina being put to death, he represented that death
left man without sensation, that everything died with him; and nobody
refuted this view.

The Roman Empire was divided between two principal sects: that of
Epicurus which asserted that deity was useless to the world, and that
the soul perished with the body: and that of the Stoics who regarded the
soul as part of the Deity, which after death was joined again to its
origin, to the great everything from which it emanated. Thus, whether
one believed the soul mortal, or whether one believed it immortal, all
the sects were agreed in laughing at pains and punishments after death.

We still have a hundred monuments of this belief of the Romans. It is by
virtue of this opinion graved profoundly in their hearts, that so many
simple Roman citizens killed themselves without the least scruple; they
did not wait for a tyrant to hand them over to the executioners.

The most virtuous men even, and those most persuaded of the existence of
a God, hoped for no reward, and feared no punishment. Clement, who later
was Pope and saint, began by himself doubting what the early Christians
said of another life, and consulted St. Peter at Cæsarea. We are far
from believing that St. Clement wrote the history that is attributed to
him; but this history makes evident the need the human race had of a
precise revelation. All that can surprise us is that so repressive and
salutary a doctrine has left a prey to so many horrible crimes men who
have so little time to live, and who see themselves squeezed between two
eternities.


SECTION VII

SOULS OF FOOLS AND MONSTERS

A deformed child is born absolutely imbecile, it has no ideas and lives
without ideas; we have seen examples of this. How shall this animal be
defined? doctors have said that it is something between man and beast;
others have said that it had a sensitive soul, but not an intellectual
soul. It eats, drinks, sleeps, wakes, has sensations; but it does not
think.

Is there another life for this creature, or is there none? The question
has been posed, and has not yet been completely answered.

Some say that this creature must have a soul, because its father and
mother had one. But by this reasoning one would prove that if it came
into the world without a nose it would be deemed to have one, because
its father and its mother had noses.

A woman gives birth to child with no chin, its forehead is receding and
rather black, its nose is slim and pointed, its eyes are round, it bears
not a bad resemblance to a swallow; the rest of its body, nevertheless,
is made like ours. The parents have it baptised; by a plurality of votes
it is considered a man and possessor of an immortal soul. But if this
ridiculous little figure has pointed nails and beak-like mouth, it is
declared a monster, it has no soul, and is not baptised.

It is well known that in London in 1726 there was a woman who gave birth
every week to a rabbit. No difficulty was made about refusing baptism to
this child, despite the epidemic mania there was for three weeks in
London for believing that this poor rogue was making wild rabbits. The
surgeon who attended her, St. André by name, swore that nothing was
more true, and people believed him. But what reason did the credulous
have for refusing a soul to this woman's children? she had a soul, her
children should be provided with souls also; whether they had hands,
whether they had paws, whether they were born with a little snout or
with a face; cannot the Supreme Being bestow the gift of thought and
sensation on a little I know not what, born of a woman, shaped like a
rabbit, as well as to a little I know not what, shaped like a man? Shall
the soul that was ready to lodge in this woman's foetus go back again
into space?

Locke makes the sound observation, about monsters, that one must not
attribute immortality to the exterior of a body; that the form has
nothing to do with it. This immortality, he says, is no more attached to
the form of his face or his chest, than to the way his beard is dressed
or his coat cut.

He asks what is the exact measure of deformity by which you can
recognize whether or no a child has a soul? What is the precise degree
at which it must be declared a monster and deprived of a soul?

One asks still further what would be a soul which never has any but
fantastic ideas? there are some which never escape from them. Are they
worthy or unworthy? what is to be done with their pure spirit?

What is one to think of a child with two heads? without deformity apart
from this? Some say that it has two souls because it is provided with
two pineal glands, with two _corpus callosum_, with two _sensorium
commune_. Others reply that one cannot have two souls when one has only
one chest and one navel.[22]

In fine, so many questions have been asked about this poor human soul,
that if it were necessary to answer them all, this examination of its
own person would cause it the most intolerable boredom. There would
happen to it what happened to Cardinal de Polignac at a conclave. His
steward, tired of never being able to make him settle his accounts, made
the journey from Rome, and came to the little window of his cell
burdened with an immense bundle of papers. He read for nearly two hours.
At last, seeing that no reply was forthcoming, he put his head forward.
The cardinal had departed nearly two hours before. Our souls will depart
before their stewards have acquainted them with the facts: but let us be
exact before God, whatever sort of ignoramuses we are, we and our
stewards.


FOOTNOTES:

[21] Voltaire himself.

[22] The Chevalier d'Angos, learned astronomer, has carefully observed a
two-headed lizard for several days; and he has assured himself that the
lizard had two independent wills, each of which had an almost equal
power over the body. When the lizard was given a piece of bread, in such
a way that it could see it with only one head, this head wanted to go
after the bread, and the other wanted the body to remain at rest.




_STATES_, _GOVERNMENTS_


The ins and outs of all governments have been closely examined recently.
Tell me then, you who have travelled, in what state, under what sort of
government you would choose to be born. I imagine that a great
land-owning lord in France would not be vexed to be born in Germany; he
would be sovereign instead of subject. A peer of France would be very
glad to have the privileges of the English peerage; he would be
legislator. The lawyer and the financier would be better off in France
than elsewhere.

But what country would a wise, free man, a man with a moderate fortune,
and without prejudices, choose?

A member of the government of Pondicherry, a learned man enough,
returned to Europe by land with a Brahmin better educated than the
ordinary Brahmin. "What do you think of the government of the Great
Mogul?" asked the councillor.

"I think it abominable," answered the Brahmin. "How can you expect a
state to be happily governed by the Tartars? Our rajahs, our omrahs, our
nabobs, are very content, but the citizens are hardly so; and millions
of citizens are something."

Reasoning, the councillor and the Brahmin traversed the whole of Upper
Asia. "I make the observation," said the Brahmin, "that there is not one
republic in all this vast part of the world."

"Formerly there was the republic of Tyre," said the councillor, "but it
did not last long; there was still another one in the direction of
Arabia Petrea, in a little corner called Palestine, if one can honour
with the name of republic a horde of thieves and usurers sometimes
governed by judges, sometimes by a species of kings, sometimes by
grand-pontiffs, become slave seven or eight times, and finally driven
out of the country which it had usurped."

"I imagine," said the Brahmin, "that one ought to find very few
republics on the earth. Men are rarely worthy of governing themselves.
This happiness should belong only to little peoples who hide themselves
in islands, or among the mountains, like rabbits who shun carnivorous
beasts; but in the long run they are discovered and devoured."

When the two travellers reached Asia Minor, the councillor said to the
Brahmin: "Would you believe that a republic was formed in a corner of
Italy, which lasted more than five hundred years, and which owned Asia
Minor, Asia, Africa, Greece, Gaul, Spain and the whole of Italy?"

"She soon became a monarchy, then," said the Brahmin.

"You have guessed right," said the other. "But this monarchy fell, and
every day we compose beautiful dissertations in order to find the cause
of its decadence and downfall."

"You take a deal of trouble," said the Indian. "This empire fell because
it existed. Everything has to fall. I hope as much will happen to the
Grand Mogul's empire."

"By the way," said the European, "do you consider that there should be
more honour in a despotic state, and more virtue in a republic?"

The Indian, having had explained to him what we mean by honour, answered
that honour was more necessary in a republic, and that one had more need
of virtue in a monarchical state. "For," said he, "a man who claims to
be elected by the people, will not be if he is dishonoured; whereas at
the court he could easily obtain a place, in accordance with a great
prince's maxim, that in order to succeed a courtier should have neither
honour nor character. As regards virtue, one must be prodigiously
virtuous to dare to say the truth. The virtuous man is much more at his
ease in a republic; he has no one to flatter."

"Do you think," said the man from Europe, "that laws and religions are
made for climates, just as one has to have furs in Moscow, and gauzy
stuffs in Delhi?"

"Without a doubt," answered the Brahmin. "All the laws which concern
material things are calculated for the meridian one lives in. A German
needs only one wife, and a Persian three or four.

"The rites of religion are of the same nature. How, if I were Christian,
should I say mass in my province where there is neither bread nor wine?
As regards dogmas, that is another matter; the climate has nothing to do
with them. Did not your religion begin in Asia, whence it was driven
out? does it not exist near the Baltic Sea, where it was unknown?"

"In what state, under what domination, would you like best to live?"
asked the councillor.

"Anywhere but where I do live," answered his companion. "And I have met
many Siamese, Tonkinese, Persians and Turks who said as much."

"But, once again," persisted the European, "what state would you
choose?"

The Brahmin answered: "The state where only the laws are obeyed."

"That is an old answer," said the councillor.

"It is none the worse for that," said the Brahmin.

"Where is that country?" asked the councillor.

"We must look for it," answered the Brahmin.




_SUPERSTITION_


The superstitious man is to the rogue what the slave is to the tyrant.
Further, the superstitious man is governed by the fanatic and becomes
fanatic. Superstition born in Paganism, adopted by Judaism, infested the
Christian Church from the earliest times. All the fathers of the Church,
without exception, believed in the power of magic. The Church always
condemned magic, but she always believed in it: she did not
excommunicate sorcerers as madmen who were mistaken, but as men who were
really in communication with the devil.

To-day one half of Europe thinks that the other half has long been and
still is superstitious. The Protestants regard the relics, the
indulgences, the mortifications, the prayers for the dead, the holy
water, and almost all the rites of the Roman Church, as a superstitious
dementia. Superstition, according to them, consists in taking useless
practices for necessary practices. Among the Roman Catholics there are
some more enlightened than their ancestors, who have renounced many of
these usages formerly considered sacred; and they defend themselves
against the others who have retained them, by saying: "They are
indifferent, and what is merely indifferent cannot be an evil."

It is difficult to mark the limits of superstition. A Frenchman
travelling in Italy finds almost everything superstitious, and is hardly
mistaken. The Archbishop of Canterbury maintains that the Archbishop of
Paris is superstitious; the Presbyterians make the same reproach against
His Grace of Canterbury, and are in their turn treated as superstitious
by the Quakers, who are the most superstitious of all in the eyes of
other Christians.

In Christian societies, therefore, no one agrees as to what superstition
is. The sect which seems to be the least attacked by this malady of the
intelligence is that which has the fewest rites. But if with few
ceremonies it is still strongly attached to an absurd belief, this
absurd belief is equivalent alone to all the superstitious practices
observed from the time of Simon the magician to that of Father
Gauffridi.

It is therefore clear that it is the fundamentals of the religion of one
sect which is considered as superstition by another sect.

The Moslems accuse all Christian societies of it, and are themselves
accused. Who will judge this great matter? Will it be reason? But each
sect claims to have reason on its side. It will therefore be force which
will judge, while awaiting the time when reason will penetrate a
sufficient number of heads to disarm force.

Up to what point does statecraft permit superstition to be destroyed?
This is a very thorny question; it is like asking up to what point one
should make an incision in a dropsical person, who may die under the
operation. It is a matter for the doctor's discretion.

Can there exist a people free from all superstitious prejudices? That is
to ask--Can there exist a nation of philosophers? It is said that there
is no superstition in the magistrature of China. It is probable that
none will remain in the magistrature of a few towns of Europe.

Then the magistrates will stop the superstition of the people from being
dangerous. These magistrates' example will not enlighten the mob, but
the principal persons of the middle-classes will hold the mob in check.
There is not perhaps a single riot, a single religious outrage in which
the middle-classes were not formerly imbrued, because these middle
classes were then the mob; but reason and time will have changed them.
Their softened manners will soften those of the lowest and most savage
populace; it is a thing of which we have striking examples in more than
one country. In a word, less superstition, less fanaticism; and less
fanaticism, less misery.




_TEARS_


Tears are the mute language of sorrow. But why? What connection is there
between a sad idea and this limpid, salt liquid, filtered through a
little gland at the external corner of the eye, which moistens the
conjunctiva and the small lachrymal points, whence it descends into the
nose and mouth through the reservoir called the lachrymal sack and its
ducts?

Why in women and children, whose organs are part of a frail and delicate
network, are tears more easily excited by sorrow than in grown men,
whose tissue is firmer?

Did nature wish compassion to be born in us at sight of these tears
which soften us, and lead us to help those who shed them? The woman of a
savage race is as firmly determined to help the child that cries as
would be a woman of the court, and maybe more, because she has fewer
distractions and passions.

In the animal body everything has an object without a doubt. The eyes
especially bear such evident, such proven, such admirable relation to
the rays of light; this mechanism is so divine, that I should be tempted
to take for a delirium of burning fever the audacity which denies the
final causes of the structure of our eyes.

The use of tears does not seem to have so well determined and striking
an object; but it would be beautiful that nature made them flow in order
to stir us to pity.

There are women who are accused of weeping when they wish. I am not at
all surprised at their talent. A live, sensitive, tender imagination can
fix itself on some object, on some sorrowful memory, and picture it in
such dominating colours that they wring tears from it. It is what
happens to many actors, and principally to actresses, on the stage.

The women who imitate them in their own homes add to this talent the
petty fraud of appearing to weep for their husbands, whereas in fact
they are weeping for their lovers. Their tears are true, but the object
of them is false.

One asks why the same man who has watched the most atrocious events
dry-eyed, who even has committed cold-blooded crimes, will weep at the
theatre at the representation of these events and crimes? It is that he
does not see them with the same eyes, he sees them with the eyes of the
author and the actor. He is no longer the same man; he was a barbarian,
he was agitated by furious passions when he saw an innocent woman
killed, when he stained himself with his friend's blood. His soul was
filled with stormy tumult; it is tranquil, it is empty; nature returns
to it; he sheds virtuous tears. That is the true merit, the great good
of the theatres; there is achieved what can never be achieved by the
frigid declamations of an orator paid to bore the whole of an audience
for an hour.

David the capitoul, who, without emotion, caused and saw the death of
innocent Calas on the wheel, would have shed tears at the sight of his
own crime in a well-written and well-spoken tragedy.

It is thus that Pope has said in the prologue to Addison's Cato:--

     "Tyrants no more their savage nature kept;
     And foes to virtue wondered how they wept."




_THEIST_


The theist is a man firmly persuaded of the existence of a Supreme Being
as good as He is powerful, who has formed all beings with extension,
vegetating, sentient and reflecting; who perpetuates their species, who
punishes crimes without cruelty, and rewards virtuous actions with
kindness.

The theist does not know how God punishes, how he protects, how he
pardons, for he is not reckless enough to flatter himself that he knows
how God acts, but he knows that God acts and that He is just.
Difficulties against Providence do not shake him in his faith, because
they are merely great difficulties, and not proofs. He submits to this
Providence, although he perceives but a few effects and a few signs of
this Providence: and, judging of the things he does not see by the
things he sees, he considers that this Providence reaches all places and
all centuries.

Reconciled in this principle with the rest of the universe, he does not
embrace any of the sects, all of which contradict each other; his
religion is the most ancient and the most widespread; for the simple
worship of a God has preceded all the systems of the world. He speaks a
language that all peoples understand, while they do not understand one
another. He has brothers from Pekin to Cayenne, and he counts all wise
men as his brethren. He believes that religion does not consist either
in the opinions of an unintelligible metaphysic, or in vain display, but
in worship and justice. The doing of good, there is his service; being
submissive to God, there is his doctrine. The Mahometan cries to
him--"Have a care if you do not make the pilgrimage to Mecca!" "Woe unto
you," says a Recollet, "if you do not make a journey to Notre-Dame de
Lorette!" He laughs at Lorette and at Mecca; but he succours the needy
and defends the oppressed.




_TOLERANCE_


What is tolerance? it is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed
of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's
folly--that is the first law of nature.

It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother,
because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster. That admits of no
difficulty. But the government! but the magistrates! but the princes!
how do they treat those who have another worship than theirs? If they
are powerful strangers, it is certain that a prince will make an
alliance with them. François I., very Christian, will unite with
Mussulmans against Charles V., very Catholic. François I. will give
money to the Lutherans of Germany to support them in their revolt
against the emperor; but, in accordance with custom, he will start by
having Lutherans burned at home. For political reasons he pays them in
Saxony; for political reasons he burns them in Paris. But what will
happen? Persecutions make proselytes? Soon France will be full of new
Protestants. At first they will let themselves be hanged, later they in
their turn will hang. There will be civil wars, then will come the St.
Bartholomew; and this corner of the world will be worse than all that
the ancients and moderns have ever told of hell.

Madmen, who have never been able to give worship to the God who made
you! Miscreants, whom the example of the Noachides, the learned Chinese,
the Parsees and all the sages, has never been able to lead! Monsters,
who need superstitions as crows' gizzards need carrion! you have been
told it already, and there is nothing else to tell you--if you have two
religions in your countries, they will cut each other's throat; if you
have thirty religions, they will dwell in peace. Look at the great Turk,
he governs Guebres, Banians, Greek Christians, Nestorians, Romans. The
first who tried to stir up tumult would be impaled; and everyone is
tranquil.

Of all religions, the Christian is without doubt the one which should
inspire tolerance most, although up to now the Christians have been the
most intolerant of all men. The Christian Church was divided in its
cradle, and was divided even in the persecutions which under the first
emperors it sometimes endured. Often the martyr was regarded as an
apostate by his brethren, and the Carpocratian Christian expired beneath
the sword of the Roman executioners, excommunicated by the Ebionite
Christian, the which Ebionite was anathema to the Sabellian.

This horrible discord, which has lasted for so many centuries, is a very
striking lesson that we should pardon each other's errors; discord is
the great ill of mankind; and tolerance is the only remedy for it.

There is nobody who is not in agreement with this truth, whether he
meditates soberly in his study, or peaceably examines the truth with his
friends. Why then do the same men who admit in private indulgence,
kindness, justice, rise in public with so much fury against these
virtues? Why? it is that their own interest is their god, and that they
sacrifice everything to this monster that they worship.

I possess a dignity and a power founded on ignorance and credulity; I
walk on the heads of the men who lie prostrate at my feet; if they
should rise and look me in the face, I am lost; I must bind them to the
ground, therefore, with iron chains.

Thus have reasoned the men whom centuries of bigotry have made powerful.
They have other powerful men beneath them, and these have still others,
who all enrich themselves with the spoils of the poor, grow fat on their
blood, and laugh at their stupidity. They all detest tolerance, as
partisans grown rich at the public expense fear to render their
accounts, and as tyrants dread the word liberty. And then, to crown
everything, they hire fanatics to cry at the top of their voices:
"Respect my master's absurdities, tremble, pay, and keep your mouths
shut."

It is thus that a great part of the world long was treated; but to-day
when so many sects make a balance of power, what course to take with
them? Every sect, as one knows, is a ground of error; there are no sects
of geometers, algebraists, arithmeticians, because all the propositions
of geometry, algebra and arithmetic are true. In every other science one
may be deceived. What Thomist or Scotist theologian would dare say
seriously that he is sure of his case?

If it were permitted to reason consistently in religious matters, it is
clear that we all ought to become Jews, because Jesus Christ our Saviour
was born a Jew, lived a Jew, died a Jew, and that he said expressly that
he was accomplishing, that he was fulfilling the Jewish religion. But it
is clearer still that we ought to be tolerant of one another, because we
are all weak, inconsistent, liable to fickleness and error. Shall a reed
laid low in the mud by the wind say to a fellow reed fallen in the
opposite direction: "Crawl as I crawl, wretch, or I shall petition that
you be torn up by the roots and burned?"




_TRUTH_


"Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered,
Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause
came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.
Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice.

"Pilate saith unto Him, What is truth? And when he had said this he went
out, etc." (St. John xviii. 37.)

It is a sad thing for the human race that Pilate went out without
waiting for the answer; we should know what truth is. Pilate had very
little curiosity. The accused led before him, says he is king, that he
was to be king; and Pilate does not inquire how that can be. He is
supreme judge in Cæsar's name, he has power of life and death; his duty
was to probe the sense of these words. He ought to say--"Tell me what
you understand by being king. How were you born to be king and to bear
witness to the truth? It is maintained that truth reaches but with
difficulty to the ear of kings. I am judge, I have always had great
trouble in finding it. While your enemies are howling against you
without, give me some information on the point; you will be doing me the
greatest service that has ever been done a judge; and I much prefer to
learn to recognize truth, than to accede to the Jews' clamorous demand
to have you hanged."

We shall not dare, to be sure, seek what the author of all truth would
have been able to reply to Pilate.

Would he have said: "Truth is an abstract word which most men use
indifferently in their books and judgments, for error and falsehood?"
This definition would have been marvellously appropriate to all makers
of systems. Similarly is the word "wisdom" taken often for folly, and
"wit" for nonsense.

Humanly speaking, let us define truth, while waiting for a better
definition, as--"a statement of the facts as they are."

I suppose that if one had given only six months to teaching Pilate the
truths of logic, he would assuredly have made this conclusive syllogism.
One must not take away the life of a man who has only preached good
morality: well, the man who has been impeached has, on the showing of
his enemies even, often preached excellent morality; therefore he should
not be punished with death.

He might have drawn this further argument.

My duty is to disperse the riotous assemblage of a seditious people who
demand a man's death, unreasonably and without legal form; well, that is
the position of the Jews in this instance; therefore I must drive them
away and break up their meeting.

We suppose that Pilate knew arithmetic; hence we will not speak of those
forms of truth.

As regards mathematical truths, I think it would have taken at least
three years before he could have learned higher geometry. The truths of
physics combined with those of geometry would have demanded more than
four years. We spend six, ordinarily, in studying theology; I ask twelve
for Pilate, seeing that he was pagan, and that six years would not have
been too much for eradicating all his old errors, and six years more for
making him fit to receive a doctor's hood.

If Pilate had had a well-balanced mind, I should have asked only two
years to teach him metaphysical truth; and as metaphysical truth is
necessarily allied to moral truth, I flatter myself that in less than
nine years he would have become a real scholar and a perfectly honest
man.

I should then have said to Pilate:--Historical truths are merely
probabilities. If you had fought at the battle of Philippi, that is for
you a truth which you know by intuition, by perception. But for us who
dwell near the Syrian desert, it is merely a very probable thing, which
we know by hearsay. How much hearsay is necessary to form a conviction
equal to that of a man who, having seen the thing, can flatter himself
that he has a sort of certainty?

He who has heard the thing told by twelve thousand eyewitnesses, has
only twelve thousand probabilities, equal to one strong probability,
which is not equal to certainty.

If you have the thing from only one of these witnesses, you know
nothing; you should be sceptical. If the witness is dead, you should be
still more sceptical, for you cannot enlighten yourself. If from several
witnesses who are dead, you are in the same plight. If from those to
whom the witnesses have spoken, your scepticism should increase still
more.

From generation to generation scepticism increases, and probability
diminishes; and soon probability is reduced to zero.




_TYRANNY_


One gives the name of tyrant to the sovereign who knows no laws but
those of his caprice, who takes his subjects' property, and who
afterwards enrols them to go to take the property of his neighbours.
There are none of these tyrants in Europe.

One distinguishes between the tyranny of one man and that of many. The
tyranny of many would be that of a body which invaded the rights of
other bodies, and which exercised despotism in favour of the laws
corrupted by it. Nor are there any tyrants of this sort in Europe.

Under which tyranny would you like to live? Under neither; but if I had
to choose, I should detest the tyranny of one man less than that of
many. A despot always has his good moments; an assembly of despots
never. If a tyrant does me an injustice, I can disarm him through his
mistress, his confessor or his page; but a company of grave tyrants is
inaccessible to all seductions. When it is not unjust, it is at the
least hard, and never does it bestow favours.

If I have only one despot, I am quit of him by drawing myself up against
a wall when I see him pass, or by bowing low, or by striking the ground
with my forehead, according to the custom of the country; but if there
is a company of a hundred despots, I am exposed to repeating this
ceremony a hundred times a day, which in the long run is very annoying
if one's hocks are not supple. If I have a farm in the neighbourhood of
one of our lords, I am crushed; if I plead against a relation of the
relations of one of our lords, I am ruined. What is to be done? I fear
that in this world one is reduced to being either hammer or anvil; lucky
the man who escapes these alternatives!




_VIRTUE_


SECTION I

It is said of Marcus Brutus that, before killing himself, he uttered
these words: "O virtue! I thought you were something; but you are only
an empty phantom!"

You were right, Brutus, if you considered virtue as being head of a
faction, and assassin of your benefactor; but if you had considered
virtue as consisting only of doing good to those dependent on you, you
would not have called it a phantom, and you would not have killed
yourself in despair.

I am very virtuous says this excrement of theology, for I have the four
cardinal virtues, and the three divine. An honest man asks him--"What is
the cardinal virtue?" The other answers--"Strength, prudence, temperance
and justice."


THE HONEST MAN:

If you are just, you have said everything; your strength, your prudence,
your temperance, are useful qualities. If you have them, so much the
better for you; but if you are just, so much the better for the others.
But it is not enough to be just, you must do good; that is what is
really cardinal. And your divine virtues, which are they?

THE EXCREMENT:

Faith, hope, charity.

THE HONEST MAN:

Is it a virtue to believe? either what you believe seems true to you,
and in this case there is no merit in believing; or it seems false to
you, and then it is impossible for you to believe.

Hope cannot be a virtue any more than fear; one fears and one hopes,
according as one receives a promise or a threat. As for charity, is it
not what the Greeks and the Romans understood by humanity, love of one's
neighbour? this love is nothing if it be not active; doing good,
therefore, is the sole true virtue.

THE EXCREMENT:

One would be a fool! Really, I am to give myself a deal of torment in
order to serve mankind, and I shall get no return! all work deserves
payment. I do not mean to do the least honest action, unless I am
certain of paradise.

THE HONEST MAN:

Ah, master! that is to say that, if you did not hope for paradise, and
if you did not fear hell, you would never do any good action. Believe
me, master, there are two things worthy of being loved for themselves,
God and virtue.

THE EXCREMENT:

I see, sir, you are a disciple of Fénélon.

THE HONEST MAN:

Yes, master.

THE EXCREMENT:

I shall denounce you to the judge of the ecclesiastical court at Meaux.

THE HONEST MAN:

Go along, denounce!


SECTION II

What is virtue? Beneficence towards the fellow-creature. Can I call
virtue things other than those which do me good? I am needy, you are
generous. I am in danger, you help me. I am deceived, you tell me the
truth. I am neglected, you console me. I am ignorant, you teach me.
Without difficulty I shall call you virtuous. But what will become of
the cardinal and divine virtues? Some of them will remain in the
schools.

What does it matter to me that you are temperate? you observe a precept
of health; you will have better health, and I am happy to hear it. You
have faith and hope, and I am happy still; they will procure you eternal
life. Your divine virtues are celestial gifts; your cardinal virtues are
excellent qualities which serve to guide you: but they are not virtues
as regards your fellow-creature. The prudent man does good to himself,
the virtuous man does good to mankind. St. Paul was right to tell you
that charity prevails over faith and hope.

But shall only those that are useful to one's fellow-creature be
admitted as virtues? How can I admit any others? We live in society;
really, therefore, the only things that are good for us are those that
are good for society. A recluse will be sober, pious; he will be clad in
hair-cloth; he will be a saint: but I shall not call him virtuous until
he has done some act of virtue by which other men have profited. So long
as he is alone, he is doing neither good nor evil; for us he is nothing.
If St. Bruno brought peace to families, if he succoured want, he was
virtuous; if he fasted, prayed in solitude, he was a saint. Virtue among
men is an interchange of kindness; he who has no part in this
interchange should not be counted. If this saint were in the world, he
would doubtless do good; but so long as he is not in the world, the
world will be right in refusing him the title of virtuous; he will be
good for himself and not for us.

But, you say to me, if a recluse is a glutton, a drunkard, given to
secret debauches with himself, he is vicious; he is virtuous, therefore,
if he has the opposite qualities. That is what I cannot agree: he is a
very disagreeable fellow if he has the faults you mention; but he is not
vicious, wicked, punishable as regards society to whom these infamies do
no harm. It is to be presumed that were he to return to society he would
do harm there, that he would be very vicious; and it is even more
probable that he would be a wicked man, than it is sure that the other
temperate and chaste recluse would be a virtuous man, for in society
faults increase, and good qualities diminish.

A much stronger objection is made; Nero, Pope Alexander VI., and other
monsters of this species, have bestowed kindnesses; I answer hardily
that on that day they were virtuous.

A few theologians say that the divine emperor Antonine was not virtuous;
that he was a stubborn Stoic who, not content with commanding men,
wished further to be esteemed by them; that he attributed to himself the
good he did to the human race; that all his life he was just, laborious,
beneficent through vanity, and that he only deceived men through his
virtues. "My God!" I exclaim. "Give us often rogues like him!"




_WHY?_


Why does one hardly ever do the tenth part of the good one might do?

Why in half Europe do girls pray to God in Latin, which they do not
understand?

Why in antiquity was there never a theological quarrel, and why were no
people ever distinguished by the name of a sect? The Egyptians were not
called Isiacs or Osiriacs; the peoples of Syria did not have the name of
Cybelians. The Cretans had a particular devotion to Jupiter, and were
never entitled Jupiterians. The ancient Latins were very attached to
Saturn; there was not a village in Latium called Saturnian: on the
contrary, the disciples of the God of truth taking their master's title,
and calling themselves "anointed" like Him, declared, as soon as they
could, an eternal war on all the peoples who were not anointed, and made
war among themselves for fourteen hundred years, taking the names of
Arians, Manicheans, Donatists, Hussites, Papists, Lutherans, Calvinists.
And lastly, the Jansenists and the Molinists have had no more poignant
mortification than that of not having been able to slaughter each other
in pitched battle. Whence does this come?

Why is the great number of hard-working, innocent men who till the land
every day of the year that you may eat all its fruits, scorned,
vilified, oppressed, robbed; and why is it that the useless and often
very wicked man who lives only by their work, and who is rich only
through their poverty, is on the contrary respected, courted,
considered?

Why is it that, the fruits of the earth being so necessary for the
conservation of men and animals, one yet sees so many years and so many
countries where there is entire lack of these fruits?

Why is the half of Africa and America covered with poisons?

Why is there no land where insects are not far in excess of men?

Why does a little whitish, evil-smelling secretion form a being which
has hard bones, desires and thoughts? and why do these beings always
persecute each other?

Why does so much evil exist, seeing that everything is formed by a God
whom all theists are agreed in naming "good?"

Why, since we complain ceaselessly of our ills, do we spend all our time
in increasing them?

Why, as we are so miserable, have we imagined that not to be is a great
ill, when it is clear that it was not an ill not to be before we were
born?

Why and how does one have dreams during sleep, if one has no soul; and
how is it that these dreams are always so incoherent, so extravagant, if
one has a soul?

Why do the stars move from west to east rather than from east to west?

Why do we exist? why is there anything?




_DECLARATION OF THE ADMIRERS, QUESTIONERS AND DOUBTERS WHO HAVE AMUSED
THEMSELVES BY PROPOUNDING TO THE SCHOLARS THE ABOVE QUESTIONS IN NINE
VOLUMES._[23]


We declare to the scholars that, being like them prodigiously ignorant
about the first principles of all things, and about the natural,
typical, mystic, allegorical sense of many things, we refer these things
to the infallible judgment of the Holy Inquisition of Rome, Florence,
Madrid, Lisbon, and to the decrees of the Sorbonne of Paris, perpetual
council of the Gauls.

Our errors springing in no wise from malice, but being the natural
consequence of human frailty, we hope that they will be pardoned to us
in this world and the other.

We beseech the small number of heavenly spirits who are still shut up in
France in mortal bodies, and who, from there, enlighten the universe at
_thirty sous_ the sheet, to communicate their luminousness to us for the
tenth volume which we reckon on publishing at the end of Lent 1772, or
in Advent 1773; and for their luminousness we will pay _forty sous_.

This tenth volume will contain some very curious articles, which, if God
favours us, will give new point to the salt which we shall endeavour to
bestow in the thanks we shall give to these gentlemen.

Executed on Mount Krapack, the thirtieth day of the month of Janus, the
year of the world

according to Scaliger                    5722
according to Riccioli                    5956
according to Eusebius                    6972
according to the Alphonsine Tables       8707
according to the Egyptians             370000
according to the Chaldeans             465102
according to the Brahmins              780000
according to the philosophers        infinity


FOOTNOTES:

[23] The Philosophical Dictionary was first published as "Questions on
the Encyclopedia," then reprinted as "Reason by Alphabet," and then
finally, with many additions, became the "Philosophical Dictionary."




TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:

This text had three occurrences of "François I" followed by a
superscripted "er". These have be rendered as François Ier in this text.

The following words used an "oe" ligature in the original:

    foetus
    manoeuvre
    oesophagus
    Phoenicia
    Phoenicians
    subpoenaed

Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been left as in the original.

There is one occurrence of "Vistnou" and one of "Vitsnou". One of these
is clearly an error, but each has been left as in the original.

The symbol representing infinity has been replaced with the word
"infinity" on page 316, the last line of the text.

The following corrections have been made to the original text:

    page 17: Nestor, in the "Iliad," wishing to insinuate himself
    as a wise conciliator into the minds of Achilles and
    Agamemnon{original had "Agamamemnon"},

    page 40: Atheism is the vice of a few intelligent persons, and
    superstition{original had "superstitution"} is the vice of
    fools.

    page 42: if it is a greater crime not to believe in the
    Deity{original had "Diety"} than to have unworthy opinions
    thereof:

    page 54: They will say as much of the great moral maxims, of
    Zarathustra's--"In doubt if an{original had "in"} action be
    just, abstain...";

    page 58: What time and what trouble for copying correctly in
    Greek and Latin the works of Origen{original had "Origin"}, of
    Clement of Alexandria, and of all those other authors called
    "fathers."

    page 101: we shall be convinced that we must not be vain about
    anything, and yet we shall always{original had "aways"} have
    vanity.

    page 128: All that certain tyrants{original had "tryants"} of
    the souls desire is that the men they teach shall have false
    judgment.

    page 166: and to surround him with little chubby, flushed faces
    accompanied{original had "accompained"} by two wings; I laugh
    and I pardon them with all my heart.

    page 171: And an unfortunate{original had "unforunate"} idiot,
    who had had enough courage to render very great services to the
    king

    page 220: Try to retake from the Mohammedans all that they
    usurped; but it is easier to calumniate{original had
    "calcumniate"} them.

    pafe 224: It was allowed among the Egyptians{original had
    "Egyptains"}, the Athenians and even among the Jews, to marry
    one's sister on the father's side.

    page 251: Your parents have told you that you should bow before
    this man; you respect him before knowing whether he merits your
    respect;{original had colon} you grow in years and in
    knowledge;

    page 280: (Corporalitas animæ in ipso Evangelio relucescit, De
    Anima,{original had period} cap. vii.)

    page 295: "She soon became a monarchy, then,{original had
    period}" said the Brahmin.

    page 315: we refer these things to the infallible{original had
    "infallable"} judgment of the Holy Inquisition of Rome,
    Florence, Madrid, Lisbon.