Part 3 (1/2)

”All bodies, the firmament, the stars, the earth and its kingdoms, are not worth the smallest mind, for a mind knows them, and itself, and bodies know nothing.”

Here lies the true greatness of man. In respect of material bulk he is nothing, but his thought cannot be measured. ”Man is only a reed, the feeblest reed in nature, _but he is a thinking reed_.” The saying has become famous, and the words that follow are hardly less so; they remove the overpowering and crus.h.i.+ng incubus of man's illimitable material environment, which, since Copernicus, had weighed upon thinkers like a nightmare:

”Were the universe to crush him, man would still be more n.o.ble than that which slays him, because he knows that he dies, and the advantage that the universe has over him: of this the universe knows nothing. Thus all man's dignity lies in his thought.”[13]

PASCAL'S PESSIMISM.--It has been said that an unbridgeable gulf lies between those who believe and those who disbelieve in mankind. It is to the latter category that Pascal belongs. His faith in the dignity of man is paradoxically a.s.sociated with a realisation of his weakness and imbecility:

”What a chimera, then, is man! What an oddity, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, senseless earth-worm; depository of truth, cloaca of uncertainty and error; the glory and the refuse of the universe.”

”We desire truth, and find in ourselves only uncertainty; we seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We are unable not to wish for truth and happiness, and incapable either of certainty or felicity.”

In fact, we may say that Pascal was the first, in an age of exaggerated reverence for logic (the _d.a.m.nosa hereditas_ of the Scholastic theologians) to understand that the best arguments for religion are the facts of human experience, and the conditions of human life.

”In vain, O men, do ye seek within yourselves the cure for your troubles! All your knowledge can only teach you that it is not within yourselves that ye find the true or good!” Here we have the language of religious experience. The result of Augustine's meditation upon life was the same: _Inquietum cor nostrum dum requiescat in te._ It is a tongue that the ”psychic man” can never understand; it seems to him affectation; such language is foreign to the easy optimism of an age of confidence. Indeed Pascal, though so intensely modern, is a stranger, and his words often enigmas to our time.

_Vanitas vanitatum_ is thus the verdict that he pa.s.ses upon human experience. ”The last act is tragic, however fine the comedy of all the rest.”

SIGNIFICANCE OF PASCAL.--It is not as a systematic thinker that Pascal is of importance to the historian of thought. He typifies that more or less inarticulate and unreasoned revolt which the arrogance and optimism of a new science or a new philosophy arouse against themselves. He voices the eternal protest that it is not by bread alone that men live.

As is generally the case with such protests, the pessimism of Pascal was no doubt exaggerated; but exaggeration is necessary if minds are to be impressed; and those who feel strongly see only one side of a question.

RESULTS.--Thus in the three figures that have pa.s.sed before us, we see a threefold protest against that exclusion of the spiritual from the human view of life. Spinoza, the pantheist, sees G.o.d everywhere;[14] Leibniz finds in every recess of nature the principle of personality; Pascal finds the only cure for human frailty and misery in religion.

CHAPTER V

RISE OF AN ANTI-RELIGIOUS SCIENCE

ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS.--As we have seen, a mechanical view of the universe was not felt by thinkers like Descartes or Newton, or even Hobbes, to involve any consequences that were necessarily hostile to religion. The new science sometimes might be anti-theological, because the current theology still seemed too much infected with Scholasticism, but it was not, in the hands of its most notable exponents, anti-religious. Science had no quarrel with religion as such, nor even with a rational type of theology.

Of course the new views aroused many suspicions, and did not escape criticism at the hands of Church authorities, both Protestant and Catholic. And (as we have seen) some early scientists paid very dearly for their allegiance to the spirit of scientific enquiry; but as time went on, actual persecution became impossible, morally and practically.

But theologians were never, during the seventeenth century at least, quite reconciled to a science and a philosophy which seemed to them to be leading men towards areas quite uninhabitable for religion. But in spite of suspicions on either side, and the prevalence of some measure of intolerance, it cannot be said that relations between the scientists or philosophers and the theologians were very seriously strained until well on in the eighteenth century.

ANTI-RELIGIOUS PROPAGANDA.--That this comparatively pacific state of affairs came to an end was the fault, primarily, at least, neither of the theologians nor of the scientists. A different atmosphere gradually began to envelop and to embitter the controversy. Orthodox religion, especially in Catholic countries, came to be a.s.sociated with political reaction, and the most envenomed onslaughts began to be made upon what seemed to be the chief stronghold of a discredited regime. Especially was this the case in France, where corrupt political conditions were aggravated by the intense social misery which they had created.

Thus France became the cradle of the phenomenon known as anti-clericalism, which is the product not so much of disbelief in a creed as of hatred of a system; it was the correlative of a Church in which religion was extinct, for genuine Catholicism had been rooted out of France early in the eighteenth century, just as Protestantism had been drowned in blood a century before.[15]

SCIENCE POPULARISED.--In two respects France, during the second half of the eighteenth century, was far in advance of other countries. No other literature of that age can be compared with the French for the skill and charm with which scientific views were expressed. There was no lack of first-rate propagandists. And not only in the popularisation, but in the systematic teaching of science, France for a long period led the way.[16] Whereas the history of English or German literature of the eighteenth century could be written almost without reference to science, it is with scientific problems that the names of some of the most brilliant French _litterateurs_ are a.s.sociated. And whereas in England, scientific men worked (in spite of the existence of the Royal Society) more or less in isolation, in France the savants have always been a brotherhood.[17]

VOLTAIRE.--One of the most notorious names a.s.sociated with the type of propaganda referred to is that of Voltaire (1694-1778). Voltaire's polemic cannot be described as anti-religious, for he himself was a theist. It was, rather, political in character. The object of his attack was the Catholic Church as existing in France in his day, which he regarded as the chief surviving obstacle to human progress. _ecrasez l'infame_ was his motto; and if this seems a trifle fanatical, let us not forget, as an acute critic has observed, ”that what Catholicism was accomplis.h.i.+ng in France in the first half of the eighteenth century was not anything less momentous than the slow strangling of French civilisation.”[18]

Voltaire was an industrious and prolific writer (his works are numbered by scores), but he was also a master of French prose, and he was universally read. From the point of view of the history of European thought his importance lies in his popularisation in France of the Newtonian physics.[19] _Newtonisme_ was a word coined by him, and became a.s.sociated with a mechanical view of nature. He also conducted a vigorous polemic against certain religious notions, then current, but now out-of-date, and which need not here detain us. Voltaire was an anti-clerical, but he was not hostile to religion; he was chiefly regarded as an exponent of English (i.e. progressive) ideas.

LA METTRIE.--An advance in the materialistic direction was taken, however, by La Mettrie (1709-1751), who approached the problem from the side of physiology (he was a physician by profession). His two important contributions were _Histoire naturelle de l'ame_ (1745), and _L'Homme Machine_ (1748). The t.i.tles are sufficient to indicate the scope of these works. That of the latter points back to Descartes, who had applied the mechanical theory to animals only, and not to man. La Mettrie extended his application to include man. The implications of this theory did not escape La Mettrie's contemporaries.

DIDEROT AND HIS ENCYCLOPaeDIA.--A definite period in the history of thought is certainly marked by the successful attempt on the part of a group of progressive thinkers, to extend the circle open to scientific ideas by the publication of an Encyclopaedia which should contain all the latest knowledge and speculation. The credit for this notable performance was due to Diderot, who in spite of immense difficulties, which were aggravated by the ecclesiastical authorities and the supporters of reaction in general, carried the work through to a triumphant conclusion. The first volume appeared in 1751. The work was composed with an eye to current prejudices; the language was guarded, but the anti-clerical tendency of the whole was by no means obscure.

Diderot, however, did not obtrude in the Encyclopaedia the definitely anti-religious opinions which he had developed and which are revealed in his correspondence.

HOLBACH.--A disciple of the Encyclopaedist--Holbach, a young German settled in Paris--was bolder than his master, and published, under the name of a savant who had recently died, a book which became widely notorious, and has been called the Bible of materialism--the _Systeme de la Nature_ (1770). Like Voltaire's _elemens_, and La Mettrie's _L'Homme Machine_, it was published in Holland. ”The book is materialism reduced to a system. It contains no really new thoughts. Its significance lies in the energy and indignation with which every spiritualistic and dualistic view was run to earth on account of its injuriousness both in practice and in theory,”[20] is the estimate of a distinguished and impartial writer.