Dangers and difficulties man surround,
Doubts and perplexities his mind confound.
To nature we apply for truth in vain,
God should His will to human kind explain.
He only can illume the human soul,
Instruct the wise man, and the weak console.
Without Him man of error still the sport,
Thinks from each broken reed to find support.
Leibnitz can’t tell me from what secret cause
In a world governed by the wisest laws,
Lasting disorders, woes that never end
With our vain pleasures real sufferings blend;
Why ill the virtuous with the vicious shares?
Why neither good nor bad misfortunes spares?
I can’t conceive that “what is, ought to be,”
In this each doctor knows as much as me.
We’re told by Plato, that man, in times of yore,
Wings gorgeous to his glorious body wore,
That all attacks he could unhurt sustain,
By death ne’er conquered, ne‘er approached by pain.
Alas, how changed from such a brilliant state!
He crawls ’twixt heaven and earth, then yields to fate.
Look round this sublunary world, you’ll find
That nature to destruction is consigned.
Our system weak which nerves and bone compose,
Cannot the shock of elements oppose;
This mass of fluids mixed with tempered clay,
To dissolution quickly must give way.
Their quick sensations can’t unhurt sustain
The attacks of death and of tormenting pain,
This is the nature of the human frame,
Plato and Epicurus I disclaim.
Nature was more to Bayle than either known:
What do I learn from Bayle, to doubt alone?
Bayle, great and wise, all systems overthrows,
Then his own tenets labors to oppose.
Like the blind slave to Delilah’s commands,
Crushed by the pile demolished by his hands.
Mysteries like these can no man penetrate,
Hid from his view remains the book of fate.
Man his own nature never yet could sound,
He knows not whence he is, nor whither bound.47
Atoms tormented on this earthly ball,
The sport of fate, by death soon swallowed all,
But thinking atoms, who with piercing eyes
Have measured the whole circuit of the skies;
We rise in thought up to the heavenly throne,
But our own nature still remains unknown.
This world which error and o’erweening pride,
Rulers accursed between them still divide,
Where wretches overwhelmed with lasting woe,
Talk of a happiness they never know,
Is with complaining filled, all are forlorn
In seeking bliss; none would again be born.
If in a life midst sorrows past and fears,
With pleasure’s hand we wipe away our tears,
Pleasure his light wings spreads, and quickly flies,
Losses on losses, griefs on griefs arise.
The mind from sad remembrance of the past.
Is with black melancholy overcast;
Sad is the present if no future state,
No blissful retribution mortals wait,
If fate’s decrees the thinking being doom
To lose existence in the silent tomb.
All may be well; that hope can man sustain,
All now is well; ’tis an illusion vain.
The sages held me forth delusive light,
Divine instructions only can be right.
Humbly I sigh, submissive suffer pain,
Nor more the ways of Providence arraign.
In youthful prime I sung in strains more gay,
Soft pleasure’s laws which lead mankind astray.
But times change manners; taught by age and care
Whilst I mistaken mortals’ weakness share,
The light of truth I seek in this dark state,
And without murmuring submit to fate.
A caliph once when his last hour drew nigh,
Prayed in such terms as these to the most high:
“Being supreme, whose greatness knows no bound,
I bring thee all that can’t in Thee be found;
Defects and sorrows, ignorance and woe.”
Hope he omitted, man’s sole bliss below.
Translation by Tobias Smollett and others
THE VIKING PORTABLE LIBRARY
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1
L J. Moorman, M.D., “Tuberculosis and Genius: Voltaire,” Annals of Medical History, New Series, VoL III. 1931.
2
Ira Owen Wade, “Voltaire’s Name,” Publication of Modem Language Association, June 1929.
3
Henry E. Haxo, “Pierre Bayle et Voltaire avant les lettres philosophiques,” Publication of Modem Language Association, June 1931.
4
See Ira O. Wade, Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet. An Essay on the Intellectual Activity at Cirey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941).
5
See Louis Nicolardot, Ménage et Finances de Voltaire (Paris: E. Dentu, 1854).
6
Wade, Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet.
7
See Wade, Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet.
8
H. N. Brailsford, Voltaire (New York: Henry Holt. 1935).
9
S. G. Tallentyre, The Life of Voltaire (3rd ed. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1935)·
10
See Mary-Margaret H. Barr, Voltaire in America, 1740-1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1941).
11
See H. Linn Edsall, The Idea of Progress and History in Fontenelle and Voltaire, Studies by
Members of the French Department of Yale. 1941.
12
See Raymond Naves, Voltaire et l’Encyclopédie (Paris, Les Éditions des presses modernes, 1938).
13
Philip George Neserius, “The Political Ideas of Voltaire,” American Political Science Review, February 1926.
14
Jacques Maritain, The Angelic Doctor (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1931).
15
Christopher Dawson, Essays in Order (New York: Macmillan, 1931).
16
Also available in paperback.
17
See “Free Will.”
18
Rousseau had predicted the imminent destruction of the Russian empire; his chief reason being that Peter I had sought to dis seminate the arts and sciences.
19
The Traité de Métaphysique.
20
Voltaire’s widowed niece, who came to Paris to keep house for him after the death of Mme. du Châtelet.
21
Voltaire’s younger niece.
22
Abbé Mignot.
23
Mahomet was dedicated to the Pope.
24
To return from banishment, imposed on him because of his writings.
25
Surgeon-in-Chief to the King of France’s bodyguard.
26
In the Diatribe of Dr. Akakia, the famous pamphlet which ridicules Maupertuis.
27
A spa and summer resort.
28
Dr. Theodore Tronchin.
29
The Abbé Desfontaina.
30
La Baumelle, who pirated Voltaire’s Louis XIV.
31
La Pucelle.
32
The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 inspired Voltaire’s poem The Lisbon Earthquake (page 556) and Candide. Thirty thousand persons perished in six minutes
33
A Councillor of State.
34
Queen Caroline. (Footnotes are by Tobias Smollett)
35
Lord Verulam being committed to the Tower, and conscious of that corruption which was laid to his charge, presented a petition to the house of peers, confessing himself guilty, and requesting that he might not be exposed to the shame of a public trial. He was deprived of his office of chancellor; rendered incapable of sitting in the upper house of parliament; fined forty thousand pounds, and condemned to be imprisoned in the Tower during the king’s pleasure. James, in consideration of his great genius, remitted his fine, re-teased him from prison, and indulged him with a very considerable pension.
36
Hales.
37
Duns Scotus
38
St. Thomas.
39
Bonaventure.
40
This is expressly the doctrine of Aristotle. The soul has no knowledge but that which it acquires through the canal of the senses
41
Richard Smith was a bookbinder, and a prisoner for debt within the liberty of the King’s Bench; and this shocking tragedy was acted in 1732. Smith and his wife had been always industrious and frugal invincibly honest, and remarkable for conjugal affection.
42
Footnotes are by Tobias Smollett.
43
That is to say, he obliged a great prince to do shameful penance, for a murder in which, he had no hand; and by what means did he manifest this power? By employing all the villainous arts of priestcraft to alienate the affections of the people from their natural sovereign; by excommunications, interdictions, and absolving the subjects from their oaths of allegiance. As for Becket, whom Alexander allowed to be canonized, we hope there are not three Britons now living who do not detest his character, as that of a pernicious fire-brand, whose pride, insolence, and fanaticism kept his sovereign and his country in continual disquiet
44
(Note: All footnotes to The Lisbon Earthquake are Tobias Smollett’s.)
The great earthquake occurred on November 1, 1755. The
ruin was instantaneous. Between 30,000 and 40,000 lives were lost
in the shock and in the fire.
45
The universal chain is not, as some have thought, a regular
gradation which connects all beings. There is, in all probability, an
immense distance between man and beast, as well as between man
and substances of a superior nature; there is likewise an infinity between
God and all created beings whatever. There are none of these
insensible gradations in the globes which move round our sun in
their several periods, whether we consider their mass, their distances,
or their satellites.
If we may believe Pope, man is not capable of discovering the
reason why the satellites of Jove are less than Jove himself; he is
herein mistaken; such an error as this may well be overlooked in so
fine a genius. Every smatterer in mathematics could have told Lord
Bolingbroke and Mr. Pope, that if the satellites of Jove had equaled
him in magnitude, they could not have moved round him; but no
mathematician is able to discover the regular gradation in the bodies
of the solar system.
It is not true, that the world could not exist if a single atom was taken from it: This was justly observed by Mr. Crousaz, a learned geometrician, in a tract which he wrote against Pope. He seems to have been right in this point, though he was fully refuted by Mr. Warburton and Mr. Silhouette.
The concatenation of events was admitted and defended with the utmost ingenuity by the celebrated philosopher Leibnitz; it is worth explaining. All bodies and all events depend upon other bodies and other events. That cannot be denied; but all bodies are not essential to the support of the universe, and the preservation of its order; neither are all events necessary in the general series of events. A drop of water, a grain of sand more or less, can cause no revolution in the general system. Nature is not confined to any determinate quantity, or any determinate form. No planet moves in a curve completely regular; there is nothing in Nature of a figure exactly mathematical; no fixed quantity is required for any operation: Nature is never very strict or rigid in her method of proceeding. It is, therefore, absurd to advance, that the removal of an atom from the earth might be the cause of its destruction.
This holds in like manner, with regard to events. The cause of every event is contained in some precedent event; this no philosopher has ever called in question. If Caesar’s mother had never gone through the Caesarian operation, Caesar had never subverted the commonwealth; he could never have adopted Octavius, and Octavius could never have chosen Tiberius for his successor in the empire. The marriage of Maximilian with the heiress of Burgundy and the Low Countries, gave rise to a war which lasted two hundred years. But Caesar’s spitting on the right or left side, or the Duchess of Burgundy’s dressing her head in this manner or in that, could have altered nothing in the general plan of Providence.
It follows, therefore, that there are some events which have consequences and others which have none. Their chain resembles a genealogical tree, some branches of which disappear at the first genertion, whilst the race is continued by others. There are many events which pass away without ever generating others. Thus in every machine there are some effects indispensably necessary toward producing motion, and others which are productive of nothing at all. The wheels of a coach make it go; but whether they raise more or less dust, the journey is finished alike. Such is the general order of the world, that the links of the chain would not be in the least discomposed by a small increase or diminution of the quantity of matter, or by an inconsiderable deviation from regularity.
The chain is not in an absolute plenum; it has been demonstrated that the celestial bodies perform their revolutions in an unresisting medium. Every space is not filled. It follows th
en, that there is not a progression of bodies from an atom to the most remote fixed star. There may of consequence be immense intervals between beings imbued with sensation, as well as between those that are not. We cannot then be certain, that man must be placed in one of these links joined to another by an uninterrupted connection. That all things are linked together means only that all things are regularly disposed of in their proper order. God is the cause and the regulator of that order. Homer’s Jupiter was the slave of destiny; but, aoccording to more rational philosophy, God is the master of destiny. (See Clarke’s Treatise “Upon the Existence of God.”)
46
Sub Deo justo nemo miser nisi mereatur.—St. Augustine. The
meaning of this ipse dixit of the Saint is, no one is miserable under
the government of a just God, without deserving to be so.
47
It is self-evident, that man cannot acquire this knowledge with. out assistance. The human mind derives all its knowledge from ex perience; no experience can give us an insight into what preceded our existence, into what is to follow it, nor into what supports it at present. In what manner have we received life? What is the spring upon which it depends? How is our brain capable of ideas and memory? In what manner do our limbs obey every motion of the will? Of all this we are entirely ignorant. Is our globe the only one that is inhabited? Was it created after other globes, or at the same instant? Does every particular species of plants proceed from a first plant? Is every species of animals produced by two first animals? The most profound philosophers are no more able to solve these questions than the most ignorant of men. All these questions may be reduced to the vulgar proverb: Was the hen before the egg, or the egg before the hen? The proverb is rather low, but it confounds the utmosx penetration of human wisdom, which is utterly at a loss with regard to the first principles of things without supernatural assistance.
The Portable Voltaire (Portable Library) Page 52