The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  He was very much in love with life, which, in his own case, he managed to prolong to an advanced old age; the trying experiences of his earlier days were things of the past and life was propitious and kindly to him. That was all he asked for and, among the various epitaphs composed in his honour, this one would assuredly have pleased him:

  Aimé de plus d’un roi, cher à plus d’une dame,

  II connut peu l’orgueil, peu l’amoureuse flamme:

  Écrire, et bien manger, fut son double talent.

  II nourrit pour la vie un amour violent,

  Connut à peine Dieu, mais point du tout son âme.[4]

  A passionate love of life he certainly had, and of that which makes life worth living, namely, freedom, and of all freedoms more especially that of a mind which is a law unto itself.

  But ought we to see in him a spirit of greater complexity than the foregoing implies? Are we to take it that he deliberately invented and propagated his own legend? Are we to believe that, while he wanted to appear in the eyes of the world as the typical sceptic, the real Saint-Évremond, his heart filled with longing, was far less of a doubter than he would have us believe, and that he never ceased to hope. We cannot say for certain, though that view of him has been stoutly maintained. For when deploring the miseries of this our mortal state, he asks either that we should be raised as high as the angels, or depressed as low as the beasts, it is not the God who died for him upon the Cross that he implores, and whom such an appeal would have offended, it is Nature:

  Un mélange incertain d’esprit et de matière

  Nous fait vivre avec trop ou trop peu de lumière,

  Pour savoir justement et nos biens et nos maux.

  Change l’état douteux dans lequel tu nous ranges,

  Nature, élève nous à la clarté des anges,

  Ou nous abaisse au sens des simples animaux . . . [5]

  In any case, even if the portrait elaborately counterfeited differs from the real man, a man with far more doubts and contradictions in his nature, then the real man was careful to keep in the background. It was the sceptic who did the acting, who figured on the stage. If you start on the study of his life and work expecting to acquaint yourself with a man of grave and sober disposition living the life of a sage, you will not get very far before you realize that you have made a vast mistake; you will perceive, in fact, that if you were to model your life on his, no one would ever take you for a serious-minded philosopher indifferent to the gratification of the senses. As touching his writings, if you expect to meet with any profound knowledge of philosophy, or antiquity; if you expect to find yourself in the austere company of a stoic or an anchorite, it will soon dawn on you that you have come to the wrong address. It may perhaps annoy you to realize that you might read him from beginning to end without coming across a trace of the sort of thing you expected to meet with. “A shallow Epicurean”; such is the judgment passed on him by Jean Le Clerc in his Bibliothèque choisie, when reviewing a collected edition of his works published in Amsterdam.[6]

  What, then, is to be learnt from this equivocal freethinker and from others of his school? What has this forerunner of the New Age got to tell us? What is there new about him? To begin with there is some sort of suggestion of a cosmopolitan outlook on things, and that, not merely because he took an interest in the literature of his adopted country, not merely because he translated Volpone, and wrote a comedy of his own in the English manner which he entitled Sir Politick Would-be, but also because he conceived some sort of inkling of relativity, just as he conceived the idea of evolution in history. He recognized the fact that any nation which has a way of life, a number of customs, a spirit, a genius peculiarly its own represents a set of values which no other nation can possibly judge by its own yardstick. He declined to regard every foreigner as a barbarian; and the same tolerant spirit which he displayed in the sphere of ideas he extended to international relationships. Just as there is some truth in every philosophy, so also there are some valuable qualities in every nation: “To tell the truth, I have never come across people better calculated to get on together than the French, who give careful attention to the theory of what they are considering, and the English who avoid getting lost in the abstract by giving concrete expression to their ideas with an independence of mind that we should do well to imitate. The salt of the earth are the French, who do the thinking, and the English, who put the thoughts into words.”

  It is this comprehensive attitude that linked him up with the coming age; so, also, and still more, did the atmosphere of peace and easy tranquillity which pervaded his non-religious mind. He has not the slightest consciousness of being a rebel. With a few concessions to custom, to appearances, he settles down in his scepticism with as much peace of mind as other men find in their religion. If there were freethinkers who suffered persecution for their ideas, he was not one of them. Honour, renown were his reward. Saint-Évremond is not the freethinker militant; he is the freethinker triumphant. Do not his bones lie honourably entombed in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey? Above all, he personifies the trend towards a more forward, a more aggressive school of thought, a school better fitted to produce a pabulum suitable to minds athirst for novelty. During his stay in Holland, which lasted from 1666 to 1672, he became acquainted with a certain Jew whose name was Spinoza. It gave him pleasure, des Maizeaux tells us, to see “some of the famous philosophers and men of learning who were then at The Hague, particularly, Heinsius, Vossius and Spinoza”. We do not know precisely what passed between them; what we do know is that, long after the interview took place, Saint-Évremond was still haunted by the memory of Spinoza. “In the humble and pensive solitary of Ryneburg and Stilla Veerkade, French libertinism, which, till now has been no more than a vague desire to be free, an impatience of rule, and a revolt against dogma, a spiritual Fronde in other words, is on the look-out for, and now thinks it has found, the required apologist for its unbelief, the right man to give a logical basis and formal expression to the aims it has most at heart.”[7]

  First and foremost, then, the freethinkers want to be quoted, in spite of their lack of any definite philosophical basis. They had refused point-blank to have anything to do with the concordat proposed by the French classical school. They flatly declined to regard any doctrine whatever as finally established. All along, their stock-in-trade had consisted of doubts and denials. Their intransigence paved the way for rebellions to come. It is an undoubted characteristic of the controversies of the period, when people were in too much of a hurry to draw any fine distinctions between the various shades of opinion, that whenever they wanted to give an idea of the sort of people who were dangerous to religion, such as those who were given to criticizing the Gospel texts too closely, people who rejected Revelation and miracles, the deists, the atheists or those who were merely indifferent, they lumped them all together under a single label and called them “libertins”.

  But it is also no less true that the “libertins” could not stand on their own feet, and that they were obliged to seek the support of a philosophical system more coherent and more stable than their own. If one of the meanings of the word “libertin” signified a person who had no religious belief, another denoted one who was living a life of gross self-indulgence; if the word connoted two such different sorts of freedom, freedom of thought and freedom to wallow in the sensual sty, the time was coming when these two types of freedom would be put in their respective places. The sceptics were on the look-out for a new philosophy to replace their pinchbeck and threadbare Gassendiism. In Voltaire they were to discover something at once different from, and more than, a “libertin”. The hedonists clamoured for grosser, more unbridled sensuality; they wallowed more openly in debauchery, grew more blatantly cynical. Under the Regency there was no attempt to strike a balance between the mind and the senses, but much rather a deliberate determination to flaunt every kind of excess. The roués were more conspicuous for the indecency of their behaviour than for the independence of their min
ds. La Fare and Chaulieu mark the transition, especially Chaulieu, who held that wine and women were the principal boons which we owe to a wise and beneficent Nature, and who, in reply to some verses of his friend Malézieux, delivered himself of the following profession of faith:

  Pour répondre à tes chansons,

  Il faudrait de la Nature

  De Lucrèce ou d’Épicure

  Emprunter quelques raisons;

  Mais sur l’essence divine

  Je haïs leur témérité,

  Et je n’aime leur doctrine

  Que touchant la Volupté.

  Je suis cet attrait vainqueur,

  Ce doux penchant de mon âme

  Que grava d’un trait de flamme

  Nature au fond de mon cœur;

  Dans une sainte mollesse

  J’écoute tous mes désirs;

  Et je crois que la sagesse

  Est le chemin des plaisirs . . .[8]

  The word itself was in process of changing its connotation and we must now draw a distinction. We must talk of “libertins d’esprit,”[9] if we are to avoid confounding the free-thinkers with the free-livers; while those who declare for Deism and other similar brands of unbelief refer to themselves as “esprits forts”, or intellectuals par excellence.[10]

  Nulla nunc celebrior, clamorosiorque secta quam Cartesianorum, loudly asserts a contemporary writer in a work bearing the significant title Historia rationis.[11] And it is a fact that, by the end of the century, Descartes had become King. But his sway was not unlimited, for there is not, and never has been, such a thing as an absolute monarchy in the realms of the intellect. There is a certain national or racial element that persists in clinging to every philosophy no matter how impersonal and abstract, an abiding and inalienable note, or characteristic. Descartes never succeeded in ousting that stubborn residuum which gives to the Englishman or to the Italian his unmistakable national character. It was only when, and in so far as, speculation was raised to the universal plane, that Descartes established his ascendancy. There was not a Frenchman who, if he thought about such things at all, was not to some extent affected by him; and that is true even of his opponents; nor was there a single foreigner of note who was not indebted to him, if only for stimulating him to think, to philosophize on his own account. Locke made no secret of the debt he owed him; Spinoza began his writing career with an account of the Cartesian system, and probably no one had a profounder understanding of the Master’s philosophy than he. When, a little later on, Vico sought to endow his country with a philosophy that should be essentially Italian, the adversary with whom he had to measure swords was not Aristotle, now dethroned, but Descartes, who reigned in his stead. Descartes’ philosophy was officially taught in Dutch schools, and from Holland it was imported into Hungary by students returning thither after finishing their course at the Universities of Leyden, The Hague, Amsterdam, Utrecht and Franeker. It was his teaching which Germany took up, with the idea of freeing herself from the trammels of Scholasticism. Here again, if the intensity of the impact is to be measured by the vehemence of the reaction it provokes, it is significant that no less a person than the great Leibniz himself made it his business to refute the philosophy of Descartes. At first denounced, put on the index, persecuted, condemned, the disciples of Descartes, when fifty years are passed, are appointed to learned professorships, deliver lectures, bring out books. Theirs are the honours now; they wield the sceptre.

  When a system of philosophy has attained such wide currency as to be familiar to people who have never put it into practice, when people who have never read the books in which it is expounded are influenced by it all the same, it may be safely assumed that it has shed a good many of its riches on the way, and that the only operative part remaining is that essential core which has been permanently incorporated into the human heritage. The pineal gland, in which he deemed the soul was lodged; those robots or mechanical animals insensible alike to pain and pleasure, the “plein”; the whirlpools; the physics, and even the metaphysics, of Descartes had fallen by the wayside. What, then, of essential significance survived? His spirit; his method—a lasting acquisition, that—his rules for guiding the operations of the mind, so simple, yet withal so powerful, that even if they did not illuminate the whole domain of truth, they at all events caused some of the shadows to recede.

  Reliance on reason as a sure means of arriving at certitude, “the movement which proceeds from within to without, from subjective to objective, from psychological to ontological, from affirmation of the consciousness to affirmation of the substance”,[12] such were the inalienable values which Descartes bequeathed to his successors of the second and third generation. Hear what Fontenelle has to say on the matter: “He, in my opinion, it is to whom we are indebted for this new method of reasoning, a method far more valuable than his actual philosophy, a good deal of which, judged by his own rules, is either doubtful, or definitely unsound”.

  And now Reason breaks loose and there’s no holding her any longer. Tradition, authority are nothing to her; “What harm,” she says, “in wiping the slate clean and beginning things all over again?” Of the concrete she intends to make a clean sweep. The talisman, the magic word which was to pull up forces when they looked like getting out of hand and running into danger; the word of warning which the wise master had so promptly and so prudently pronounced, his apprentices knew nothing of, and if they had, they would have declined to heed it. Heaven was theirs, and earth was theirs; theirs was the whole domain of the knowable. There was nothing, they thought, nothing in the whole universe which the geometrical mind could not grasp. Theology, too, was their business. A certain professor of mathematics, one Jean Jacob Scheuchzer, belauding the geometrical mind in its dealings with theology,[13] quotes with proud and grateful satisfaction from Fontenelle’s Preface to his Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences depuis le règlement fait en 1699. “The geometrical method is not so rigidly confined to geometry itself that it cannot be applied to other branches of knowledge as well. A work on politics, on morals, a piece of criticism, even a manual on the art of public speaking would, other things being equal, be all the better for having been written by a geometrician. The order, the clarity, the precision and the accuracy which have distinguished the worthier kind of books for some time past now, may well have been due to the geometrical method which has been continuously gaining ground, and which somehow or other has an effect on people who are quite innocent of geometry. It sometimes happens that a great thinker gives the keynote to the whole of his century. He to whom the distinction of endowing us with a new method of reasoning may most justly be awarded was himself an accomplished geometrician.” No more was needed. The wheel had come full circle; Descartes the geometrician had called the tune for the new era. But what if the geometrical mind collides head on with religion? What will happen if it is applied wholesale to matters of faith? It would mean putting the sponge over the religious slate; every religion would be wiped out.[14]

  Was there ever a more singular example of the way in which after a while a doctrine may develop ideas completely at variance with those with which it started? The truth of that has been demonstrated with an insight so unerring that we need do no more here than offer it the tribute of our admiring recognition.[15] To the cause of religion, the Cartesian philosophy came bringing what seemed a most valuable support, to begin with. But that same philosophy bore within it a germ of irreligion which time was to bring to light, and which acts and works and is made deliberate use of to sap and undermine the foundations of belief. One thing the Cartesian philosophy established as a certitude; to the sceptic’s “No” it replied with a resounding “Yes”; it demonstrated the existence of God, the immateriality of the soul; it distinguished thought from extension, the noble idea from mere sensation; it registered the triumph of will over instinct; in short, it was a bulwark against the freethinkers. But now, lo and behold! it is actually comforting and aiding them; for examination, enquiry, criticism are the very
things it insists upon. It must have evidence even in matters which authority had aforetime ruled to be outside the laws of evidence; it laid rude hands on the temporary structure it had erected to give shelter to religion. Whether you would or no, and provided you did not wilfully blink the truth, you could not fail to see what it would ultimately lead to; it would lead to the calling in question not only of dogmas but of the very basis on which the dogmatic principle reposes. Thus Aristotle had been driven from the field: “The poor Peripatetics and the disciples of Aristotle must be feeling themselves in a very disagreeable quandary when they perceive that the Eternal Word has turned Cartesian in its later years . . .”[16] But wait a while and you will see to what a pass the Cartesian line of thought will bring you: “You would be not a little astonished if Descartes were to come back to earth to-day. I fancy you would see in him the most redoubtable enemy of Christianity.”[17]

  Against this antagonism, which became more and more acute as time went on, one man fought with all the strength at his command, and that was Malebranche, who, throughout his life, never wavered in the belief that “religion is the true philosophy.”

  Malebranche bears a striking resemblance to the philosopher of popular imagination: he is never really at home save in the regions of the Infinite; ideas are his staple food; his material needs are almost negligible. If there had been no such thing as metaphysics before his time, he would assuredly have invented them. A queer yet engaging physiognomy was his, simple and ordinary enough at a first glance, but on closer inspection not a little intriguing. His constitution was delicate and his health uncertain. Fontenelle, who looked on him as a quaint and amusing specimen of humanity, pawkily remarked that, with Malebranche, the feelings prompted what the will enjoined, so that, for once in a way, desire and duty, the flesh and the spirit, found themselves pulling in the same direction. Fearful of the world and its ways, bewildered at life, he sought peace and seclusion in the Congregation of the Oratory. There, he shrank from the responsibilities of office and the burden of honours, and it was with genuine humility of spirit that he chose the lowliest of duties. He was rich, but he divested himself of his riches by bestowing them on others. He had at least some of the virtues that go to the making of a saint. Open-hearted and utterly guileless as he was, he was subtle, too, and stubbornly determined. Nothing in the world would have induced him to abandon his ideas; when they provoked difficulties, he had a way, peculiarly his own, of plunging into still more difficulties, till at length the tangle became inextricable; then he was elated.