§ 79.

François Marie Arouet de Voltaire1 (1694-1778). – Voltaire was educated at a Jesuit college in Paris. He took up the profession of letters, and soon became a popular idol. On account of an "affair of honor" he was obliged to leave France, and he spent three years in England. In England he came under the influence of Newtonian and Deistic doctrines. He returned to France a Newtonian, a Deist, and an admirer of the English constitution. A published work of his, Deistical in sentiment, caused his banishment. He went to Holland. On the removal of the ban in 1735 he returned to France, and took up his abode with a certain Madame du Châtelet in Lorraine as her preceptor. At the invitation of Frederick the Great of Prussia, himself a "freethinker," Voltaire spent three years at the Prussian He quarrelled with Frederick, and went to Switzerland to reside. On a visit to Paris in 1778 he was received with great enthusiasm. His death occurred shortly afterwards. The clergy refused burial to his body in Paris: his life (an industrious one) had been largely spent in antagonizing ecclesiastical bigotry and intolerance.

court.

Works. Voltaire's philosophy (such as it is) is to be found chiefly in the following-named works: "Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais" (1734), "Examen important de my lord Bolingbroke" (1736), "Élémens de la Philosophie de Newton," etc. (1738), "La Métaphysique de Newton, ou Parallel des Sentimens de Newton et de Leibnitz (1740), — ridicules the Leibnitzian optimism," Candide, ou sur l'Optimisme" (1757), "Dictionnaire Philosophique" (1764), "Le Philosophe ignorant" (1767), - probably contains the best exposition of his general world-view, "Réponse au Système de la Nature'" (1772), - an intended refutation of atheism.

Philosophy. The philosophy of Voltaire is that of Locke and of the English Deists. He opposes (with ridicule) the

1 See Franck and Noack; Works of Voltaire.

doctrine of " innate ideas,"

true.

the "mind has to be sent to school to learn what it already knows" if that doctrine be Not ideas, but reason, is innate: "God gave all men the same reason, and by this, when it develops, men perceive the same necessary principles, just as he has given them organs which, when they have the degree of their energy, perpetuate necessarily and in the same manner the race of the Scythian and that of the Egyptian." Voltaire so far dissents from Locke's polemic against the notion of universally prevalent ideas as to maintain that the idea or instinct of justice is universal. Metaphysics (in any real sense) he repudiates as idle curiosity, ruinous to commonsense and morality. Common-sense and the dictates of common morality are a sufficient basis of theoretical belief, which, after all, has its end, not in itself, but in action. Voltaire contends, however, in his fashion, for belief in God, freedom, and immortality. The denier of God is, he says, refuted with the single "Vous existez, donc il y a un Dieu" ("You exist, therefore there is a God"). The supposition of a God is "so convenient, so necessary, indeed (the idea of justice and the manifestation of design in the world require it), that man would have to invent a God if he did not exist." We are necessarily and forever ignorant of God's nature; one must be God to know God. must, as no society can exist without justice, suppose him to be just. It is of course irrational to "believe in a God who promenades in a garden, talks, becomes man, and dies on a cross.' - Liberty is the power to think or not to think of a thing, to move or not to move, at will. Proof of liberty is found in the fact of an irresistible feeling of it, the fact that the opponents of liberty admit the existence of this feeling and give the lie to their professed opinions by their conduct, and that if we are not free, we must conceive God as acting unworthily of the Supreme Being in so creating us as that we should be deceived on this point. Our passions do not disprove liberty any more than (some) disease does (all) health : the will is not necessarily determined

We

by what the understanding thinks, since will and understanding are not two separate entities, acting, as it were, physically on one another, but are activities of one and the same being, who both judges and wills (in other words, moral necessity must not be confounded with physical); the prevision of God does not necessarily conflict with liberty, since the mere knowledge of an action before it is performed does not differ from the knowledge of it after it is performed; God's prevision may be conceived as like that of one who knows beforehand what course of action will in a given instance be pursued by a person whose character he knows; man's freedom does not interfere with God's infinite power, since it is the effect of that; we may be conceived as possessing liberty from God as the general, in an action, does from a king who has given him carte blanche. Liberty is not the liberty of indifference: if it were, we should be inferior to idiots, imbeciles, and brutes.

Result. Voltaire is one of the founders of the " Éclaircissement," or (French) "Illumination." He exercised a very wide influence upon popular thinking, and (without being himself really a philosopher in the strict sense of the term) made certain philosophical notions universal commonplaces of thought among men of the eighteenth and even of the nineteenth century. “We are all,” in the words of Professor Du Bois Reymond, Voltairians."

§ 80.

66 more or less

Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu1 (1689-1755). — Montesquieu, born near Bordeaux, received thorough early training, studied law, became a counsellor in and was for twelve years president of the provincial Parliament of Bordeaux. He resigned his position in 1726 to devote himself to philosophical, historical, and political studies. He was elected member of the Bordeaux Academy, and contributed to its Proceedings. In 1728 he

1 See Franck and Noack.

was elected member of the French Academy, and in the same year began a tour through Europe to observe men, things, and constitutions." He spent a year in Italy, and eighteen months in England, becoming possessed with a decided admiration for English character and customs and the English Constitution, an admiration which had its effect in a changed manner of living, as well as in certain doctrines contained in his chief work, written a few years after his return to France.

a sa

Works. The philosophical works by which Montesquieu is known are: "Lettres Persanes" (1720), tirical criticism of certain social, political, ecclesiastical (and literary) conditions in France at the beginning of the eighteenth century; "Considérations sur les Causes de la Grandeur et la Décadence des Romains" (1734), "L'Esprit des Lois ou du Rapport que les Lois doivent avoir avec la Constitution de chaque Gouvernment, les Moeurs, le Climat, la Religion, le Commerce," etc. (1748). These works received a wide reading, and exercised a powerful influence on popular opinion, "L'Esprit des Lois" becoming one of the recognized causes of the French Revolution.

:

Philosophy."All things," says Montesquieu, "have their laws divinity has its laws; the material world its laws; superhuman intelligences their laws; animals their laws, man his laws." Laws are the relations existing between primordial reason and the various sorts of being, and the relations of these beings to one another. With law there naturally co-exists freedom: God does not foreknow all the individual acts of self-determination. But his freedom, though" ruling as a king within its sphere," obeys the larger sphere "like a slave." As the laws of the universe as a whole have their source in the primordial reason, so human laws originate in human reason, are the self-determinations of that reason. They are, ideally, adapted to the particular people for whom they exist: adapted to the general nature of things, on the one hand, and to the diversity of existing conditions, on the other; they are not arbitrary,

artificial, Utopian. There are, in the nature of the case, three most general species of government, the republic, the monarchy, and the despotism. For the security of the State it is requisite that the citizens have a grade of elevation corresponding to the nature of the government; private virtue is the fundamental principle of action in popular States in aristocracies it is less necessary; in a monarchy honor, in a despotism terror, occupies the place of virtue. The principle of the republic becomes corrupt not only when the spirit of equality is lost, but when it becomes extreme; monarchy is destroyed by the enfeeblement of intermediary powers (as the nobility); the despotic government is already corrupt. Political liberty consists, not in power to do what one likes, but only in the power to do what one should like: it is the right to do all that the laws permit. The powers of the government are three, — legislative, judicial, and executive; and security in government requires that these powers be in distinct hands, or, at least, that the judicial be kept entirely independent of both executive and legislative powers. The abuse of power cannot always be prevented, even in the most moderated States: it must set limits to itself. Between laws and the Christian religion there is such connection that "that which seems to have no other object than the felicity of the other life constitutes our happiness also in this."

§ 81.

Jean Jacques Rousseau1 (1712-1778). — Rousseau was early left without parents' care, and received but little primary training from any source. He read Plutarch and romances. After failures to obtain a practical foot-hold in the world, and some wanderings and escapades, he was taken into the house of a Madame de Warens, who felt interest enough in him to have his education looked after and to become mistress to him. He studied Latin, mathematics, music, and the Port Royal logic; and read the works of Locke, 1 Noack; "Encyclopædia Britannica; " Franck.