The infinite divisibility of atoms is like some propositions in geometry. You may pass an infinity of curves between a circle and its tangent, supposing the circle and the tangent to be lines without breadth; but there are no such lines in nature.
You likewise establish that asymptotes will approach one another without ever meeting; but it is under the supposition that they are lines having length without breadth—things which have only a speculative existence.
So, also, we represent unity by a line, and divide this line and this unity into as many fractions as you please; but this infinity of fractions will never be any other than our unity and our line.
It is not strictly demonstrated that atoms are indivisible, but it appears to be proved that they are undivided by the laws of nature.
AUTHORITY
Wretched human beings, whether you wear green robes, turbans, black robes or surplices, cloaks and clerical bands, never seek to use authority where it is only a question of reason, unless you wish to be scoffed at throughout the centuries as the most impertinent of men, and to suffer public hatred as the most unjust.
You have been spoken to a hundred times of the insolent absurdity with which you condemned Galileo, and I speak to you for the hundred and first, and I hope you will keep the anniversary of that event for ever. Would that there might be graved on the door of your Holy Office: “Here seven cardinals, assisted by minor brethren, had the finest thinker of Italy thrown into prison at the age of seventy; made him fast on bread and water because he instructed the human race, and because they were ignorant.”
In the same place there was pronounced a sentence in favor of Aristotle’s categories, and the penalty of the galleys was learnedly and equitably decreed for anyone who should be sufficiently daring as to hold an opinion different from those of the Stagyrite, whose books were formerly burned by two councils.
Still later a faculty—which was possessed of no great faculties—issued a decree condemning innate ideas, and later a decree in favor of innate ideas, without the said faculty being informed by its beadles what an idea is.
In the neighboring schools judicial proceedings were instituted against the circulation of the blood.
An action has been started against inoculation, and parties have been subpoenaed.
At the Customs of Thought twenty-one folio volumes were seized, in which it was treacherously and wickedly stated that triangles always have three angles; that a father is older than his son; that Rhea Silvia lost her virginity before giving birth to her child, and that flour is not an oak leaf.
On another occasion the action: Utrum chimera bombinans in vacuo possit comedere secundas intentiones, came up for judgment; and it was decided in the affirmative.
The result was that everyone thought himself far superior to Archimedes, Euclid, Cicero, and Pliny, and strutted proudly about the University quarter.
AUTHORS
Do you wish to be an author? Do you wish to make a book? Remember that it must be new and useful, or at least have great charm. Why from your provincial retreat should you slay me with another quarto, to teach me that a king ought to be just, and that Trajan was more virtuous than Caligula? You insist upon printing the sermons which have lulled your little obscure town to sleep, and you put all our histories under contributions to extract from them the life of a prince of whom you can say nothing new.
If you have written a history of your own time, doubt not but you will find some learned chronologist, or newspaper commentator, who will catch you up on a date, a Christian name, or a squadron which you have wrongly placed at the distance of three hundred paces from the place where it was really posted. Be grateful, and correct these important errors forthwith.
If an ignoramus, or an empty fool, pretend to criticize this thing or the other, you may properly confute him; but name him rarely, for fear of soiling your writings. If you are attacked on your style, never answer; your work alone should reply.
If you are said to be sick, content yourself that you are well, without wishing to prove to the people that you are in perfect health; and, above all, remember that the world cares very little whether you are well or ill.
A hundred authors compile to get their bread, and twenty fools extract, criticize, apologize, and satirize these compilations to get bread also, because they have no profession. All these people repair on Fridays to the lieutenant of the police at Paris to demand permission to sell their drugs. They have their audience immediately after the prostitutes, who pay no attention to them, because they know that they are poor customers.
They return with a tacit permission to sell and distribute throughout the kingdom their stories; their collection of bon-mots; the life of the blessed Regis; the translation of a German poem; new discoveries on eels; a new copy of verses; a treatise on the origin of bells, or on the loves of the toads. A bookseller buys their productions for ten crowns; they give five of them to a comer pamphleteer, on condition that he will speak well of them in his sheet. The scribbler takes their money, and says all the ill he can of their books. The aggrieved parties go to complain to the Jew, who is keeping the wife of the journalist, and the scene closes by the critic being carried to Fort-Evêque; and these are they who call themselves authors!
These poor people are divided into two or three bands, and go begging like mendicant friars; but not having taken vows, their society lasts only for a few days, for they betray one another like priests who run after the same benefice, though they have no benefice to hope for. But they still call themselves authors!
The misfortune of these men is that their fathers did not make them learn a trade, which is a great fault of our modem system. Every man of the people who can bring up his son in a useful art, and does not do so, merits punishment. The son of a mason becomes a Jesuit at seventeen; he is chased from society at four-and-twenty, because the looseness of his habits has become too notorious. Behold him without bread! He turns journalist, he cultivates the lowest kind of literature, and is scorned even by the mob. And such as these, again, call themselves authors!
The only authors are they who have succeeded in a genuine art, be it epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, history, or philosophy, and who teach or delight mankind. The others, of whom we have spoken, are, among men of letters, like bats among the birds.
BABEL
We will say nothing here of the confusion of tongues which took place during the construction of the tower of Babel. It is a miracle, related in the Holy Scriptures. We neither explain, nor even examine any miracles, and as the authors of that great work, the Encyclopedia, believed them, we also believe them with a lively and sincere faith.
We will simply affirm that the fall of the Roman Empire has produced more confusion and a greater number of new languages than that of the tower of Babel. From the reign of Augustus till the time of the Attilas, the Clovises, and the Gondiberts, during six ages, terra erat unius labii—the known earth was of one language. They spoke the same Latin on the Euphrates as at Mount Atlas. The laws which governed a hundred nations were written in Latin, while Greek served for amusement; and the barbarous provincial jargons were only for the lower classes. They pleaded in Latin in the tribunals of Africa as at Rome. An inhabitant of Cornwall could depart for Asia Minor sure of being understood everywhere along his route. It was at least one good effected by the rapacity of the Romans that people found themselves as well understood on the Danube as on the Guadalquivir. At the present time a citizen of Bergamo who travels into the small Swiss cantons, from which he is separated only by a mountain, has the same need of an interpreter as if he were in China. This is one of the greatest plagues of modern life.
BANKRUPTCY
Few bankruptcies were known in France before the sixteenth century. The great reason is that there were no bankers. Lombards and Jews lent on security at ten per cent: trade was conducted in cash. Exchange, remittances to foreign countries, was a secret unknown to all judges.
This does not mean that many people were not ru
ined —but it was not called bankruptcy. One said discom fiture; this word is sweeter to the ear. One used the word rupture, as did the Boulonnais, but rupture does not sound so well.
Bankruptcies came to us from Italy: bancorotto, bancarotta, gambarotta e la giustizia non impicar. Every merchant had his bench (banco) in the place of exchange; and when he had conducted his business badly, declared himself fallito, and abandoned his property to his creditors with the proviso that he retain a good part of it for himself, be free, and be reputed a very upright man. There was nothing to be said to him, his bench was broken, banco rotto, banca rotta. He could even, in certain towns, keep all his property and baulk his creditors, provided he seated himself bare-bottomed on a stone in the presence of all the merchants. This was a mild derivation of the old Roman proverb—solvere aut in aere aut in cute—to pay either with one’s money or one’s skin. But this custom no longer exists; creditors have preferred their money to a bankrupt’s backside.
In England and in some other countries, one declares oneself bankrupt in the gazettes. Partners and creditors gather together by virtue of this announcement, which is read in the coffee-houses, and they come to an arrangement as best they can.
As there are many fraudulent cases in bankruptcy, it has been necessary to punish them. If they are taken to court, they are everywhere regarded as theft, and the guilty are condemned to ignominious penalties.
It is not true that in France the death penalty was decreed against bankrupts without distinction. Simple failures involved no penalty; fraudulent brankrupts suffered the penalty of death in the states of Orleans, under Charles IX, and in the states of Blois in 1576; but these edicts, renewed by Henry IV, were merely comminatory.
It is too difficult to prove that a man has dishonored himself deliberately, and has voluntarily ceded all his goods to his creditors in order to cheat them. When there has been a doubt, it has been deemed enough to put the unfortunate man in the pillory, or send him to the galleys, although ordinarily a banker makes a poor convict.
Bankrupts were very favorably treated in the last year of Louis XIV’s reign, and during the Regency. The sad state to which the internal affairs of the kingdom were reduced, the multitude of merchants who could not or would not pay, the quantity of unsold or unsellable goods, the fear of halting all commerce, obliged the government in 1715, 1716, 1718, 1721, 1722, and 1726 to suspend all proceedings against all those who were in a state of insolvency. These actions were referred for decision to the judge-consuls; a jurisdiction of merchants very expert in these cases, and better constituted for going into these commercial details than the parliaments which have always been more occupied with the laws of the kingdom than with finance. As the state itself was at that time going bankrupt, it would have been too cruel to punish the poor middle-class bankrupts.
Since then we have had eminent men who have been fraudulent bankrupts, but they have not been punished.
BEAUTY
Ask a toad what beauty is, the to kalon? He will answer you that it is his toad wife with two great round eyes issuing from her little head, a wide, flat mouth, a yellow belly, a brown back. Interrogate a Guinea Negro. For him beauty is a black oily skin, deep-set eyes, a flat nose. Interrogate the devil. He will tell you that beauty is a pair of horns, four claws and a tail. Finally, if you consult the philosophers, they will answer you with gibberish: they will insist on something conforming to the archtype of essential beauty, to the to kalon.
One day I was witnessing a tragic drama, a philosopher at my side. “How beautiful it isl” he said.
“What do you find beautiful about it?” I asked.
“It is beautiful,” he answered, “because the author has done what he set out to do.”
The following day he took some medicine which did him good. “The medicine has done what it set out to do,” I said to him. “What a beautiful medicine!” He understood that one cannot call a medicine beautiful, and that to give the name of “beauty” to something, the thing must arouse in you both admiration and pleasure. He agreed that the tragedy had inspired these sentiments in him, and that it was in these that to kalon, beauty, resided.
We journey to England. The same piece, perfectly translated, was played there, but it made everybody in the audience yawn. “Ho, ho!” he said, “the to kalon is not the same for the English and the French.” After much reflection he came to the conclusion that beauty is often very relative, just as what is decent in Japan is indecent in Rome, and what is fashionable in Paris, is not fashionable in Pekin; and he saved himself the trouble of composing a long treatise on beauty.
There are actions which the whole world finds beautiful. Two of Caesar’s officers, who are mortal enemies, send each other a challenge, not as to who shall shed the other’s blood with tierce and quarte behind a thicket as with us, but as to who shall best defend the Roman camp which the barbarians are about to attack. One of them, having repulsed the enemy, is near death, when the other flies to his aid, saves his life, and achieves the victory.
A friend gives his life for his friend, a son for his father.... Algonquin, Frenchman, Chinaman, will all agree that this is very beautiful, that these actions give them pleasure, that they admire them.
They will say as much of the great moral maxims—of Zoroaster’s: “In doubt if an action be just, abstain ...”; of Confucius’s: “Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses.”
The Negro with the round eyes and flat nose, who would never give the name of “beauty” to our court ladies, will unhesitatingly give it to the actions and maxims I have quoted. Even a wicked man will recognize the beauty of virtues which he cannot imitate. Beauty which strikes only the senses, the imagination, and what is called “intelligence,” is therefore often uncertain. But not the beauty which speaks to the heart. You will find a host of people who will tell you that they have found nothing beautiful in three-quarters of the Iliad; but nobody will deny that Codrus’s devotion to his people was very beautiful—supposing it to be true.
BEES
The bees may be regarded as superior to the human race in this, that from their own substance they produce another which is useful; while, of all our secretions, there is not one good for anything; nay, there is not one which does not render mankind disagreeable.
I have been charmed to find that the swarms which turn out of the hive are much milder than our sons when they leave school. The young bees sting no one; or at least but rarely and in extraordinary cases. They suffer themselves to be carried quietly in the bare hand to the hive which is destined for them. But no sooner have they learned in their new habitation to know their interests than they become like us and make war. I have seen bees go perfectly peaceably for six months to labor in a neighboring meadow covered with flowers which pleased them. When the mowers came they rushed furiously from their hive upon those who were about to steal their property and put them to flight.
We find in the Proverbs attributed to Solomon that “there are four things, the least upon earth, but which are wiser than the wise men—the ants, a little people who lay up food during the harvest; the hares, a weak people who lie on stones; the grasshoppers, who have no kings and who journey in flocks; and the lizards, which work with their hands and dwell in the palaces of kings.” I do not know why Solomon forgot the bees, whose instinct seems very superior to that of hares, which do not lie on stone, unless it be the rocky soil of Palestine; or of lizards, with whose genius I am not acquainted. Moreover, I shall always prefer a bee to a grasshopper.
The bees have, in all ages, furnished the poet with descriptions, comparisons, allegories, and fables. Mandeville’s celebrated Fable of the Bees made a great stis in England. Here is a short sketch of it:
Once the bees, in worldly things,
Had a happy government;
And their laborers and their kings
Made them wealthy and content;
But some greedy drones at last
Found their way into their hive;
Those, in
idleness to thrive,
Told the bees they ought to fast.
Sermons were their only labors;
Work they preached unto their neighbors.
In their language they would say,
“You shall surely go to heaven,
When to us you’ve freely given
Wax and honey all away.”
Foolishly the bees believed,
Till by famine undeceived;
When their misery was complete,
All the strange delusion vanished!
Now the drones are killed or banished,
And the bees again may eat.
Mandeville goes much further; he asserts that bees cannot live at their ease in a great and powerful hive without many vices. “No kingdom, no state,” says he, “can flourish without vices. Take away the vanity of ladies of quality, and there will be no more making of fine silk, no more employment for men and women in a thousand different branches; a great part of the nation will be reduced to beggary. Take away the avarice of our merchants, and the fleets of England will be annihilated. Deprive artists of envy, and emulation will cease; we shall sink back into primitive rudeness and ignorance.”
He goes so far as to say that even crime has its uses, in that it helps to establish good laws. The highwayman is worth money to the man who denounces him, to those who arrest him, to the jailer who guards him, to the judge who condemns him, and to the hangman who executes him. In short, if there were no thieves, lock-smiths would die of hunger.
It is quite true that a well-governed society turns every vice to account; but it is not true that these vices are necessary to the well-being of the world. Excellent remedies may be made from poisons, but it is not by poison that we live. By reducing the Fable of the Bees to its just value, it might be made a work of more utility.
The Portable Voltaire (Portable Library) Page 8