by Will Durant
The Jesuits gave generous commendation to Chinese religion and philosophy. Trigault reported that the educated Chinese conceived God as the soul of the world, and the world as his body; Spinoza, who held a similar view, could have read this idea in a book published in Amsterdam in 1649; his Latin teacher Frans van den Enden had this book in his library.26 In 1622 the Jesuits published a Latin translation of Confucius as Sapientia sinica; in a further summary, Confucius Sinarum philosophus (1687), they called the Confucian ethics “the excellentest morality that ever was taught, a morality which might be said to proceed from the school of Jesus Christ.”27 In Mémoires de la Chine (1696) the Jesuit Louis Le Comte wrote that the Chinese people had “for two thousand years preserved the knowledge of the true God” and had “practiced the purest moral code while Europe was yet steeped in error and corruption”;28 this book was condemned by the Sorbonne. In 1697 Leibniz, cautious politically but alert to every breeze in the intellectual atmosphere, published his Novissima Sinaica (“the latest news from China”). He rated Europe as excelling China in science and philosophy, yet
who would formerly have believed that there is a people that surpasses us in its principles of civil life? And this, nevertheless, we now experience in the case of the Chinese … in ethics and politics. For it is impossible to describe how beautifully everything in the laws of the Chinese, more than in those of other peoples, is directed to the achievement of public tranquillity.… The state of our affairs, as corruptions spread among us without measure, seems to me such that it would appear almost necessary that Chinese missionaries should be sent to us to teach us the use and practice of natural religion, just as we send missionaries to them to teach them revealed religion. And so I believe that if a wise man were chosen to pass judgment … upon the excellence of peoples, he would award the golden apple to the Chinese—except that we should have the better of them in one supreme but superhuman thing, namely, the divine gift of the Christian religion.29
Leibniz urged the academies of Europe to gather information about China, and he helped persuade the French government to send accomplished Jesuit scholars to join the mission in China and make factual reports. In 1735 Jean Baptiste du Halde summarized these and other data in his Description … de l’empire de la Chine; a year later this was translated into English; in both France and England it had wide influence. Du Halde was the first to give Mencius a European reputation. By the middle of the eighteenth century Bossuet’s Histoire universelle had been discredited by the revelation of old, extensive, and enlightened cultures which his “universal” history had almost ignored; and the way was open for Voltaire’s larger perspective of the story of civilization.
The results of these enthusiastic exaggerations appeared in European customs, arts, manners, literature, and philosophy. In 1739 the Marquis d’Argens published a series of Lettres chinoises by an imaginary Chinese, criticizing European institutions and ways; in 1757 Horace Walpole amused England with a “Letter from Xo Ho, a Chinese Philosopher”; in 1760 Goldsmith used the same device in his Citizen of the World. When the Emperor Joseph II in person plowed a piece of land, he was imitating a custom of the Chinese emperors.30 When the fine ladies of Paris opened their parasols against the sun, they were displaying a pretty contraption introduced into France from China by the Jesuits;31 toward the end of the eighteenth century the umbrella evolved from the parasol. Chinese porcelain and Japanese lacquer had in the seventeenth century become prized possessions in European homes; Chinese wallpaper, in which the small units, properly placed, made a single large pictorial pattern, captured English fancy toward 1700; Chinese furniture entered English homes about 1750. All through the eighteenth century the taste for chinoiseries—articles of Chinese make or style—characterized English and French decoration, ran through Italy and Germany, entered into rococo ornament, and became so compulsive a fashion that a dozen satirists rose to challenge its tyranny. Chinese silk became a symbol of status; Chinese gardens spread over Western Europe; Chinese firecrackers burned European thumbs.32 Gozzi’s Turandot was a Chinese fantasy. A dozen plays with a Chinese background appeared on the English stage; and Voltaire developed his Orphelin de la Chine from a Chinese drama in the third volume of Du Halde.33
Chinese influence on Western thought was keenest in France, where the esprits forts seized upon it as another weapon against Christianity. They rejoiced to find that Confucius was a freethinker rather than a displaced Jesuit. They proclaimed that the Confucian ethic proved the practicability of a moral code independent of supernatural religion.34 Bayle pointed out (1685) that a Chinese emperor was giving free scope to Catholic missionaries while Louis XIV, revoking Henry IV’s tolerant Edict of Nantes, was enforcing religious conformity through the barbarous violence of dragonnades. Misinterpreting the Confucians as atheists, Bayle cited them as disproving the argument from universal consent for the existence of God.35 Montesquieu stood his ground against the Oriental tide, called the Chinese emperors despots, denounced dishonest Chinese merchants, exposed the poverty of the Chinese masses, and predicted tragic results from overpopulation in China.36 Quesnay tried to answer Montesquieu in Le Despotisme de la Chine (1767), praised it as “enlightened despotism,” and cited Chinese models for needed reforms in French economy and government. Turgot, skeptical of the Chinese utopia, commissioned two Chinese Catholic priests in France to go to China and seek factual answers to fifty-two questions; their report encouraged a more realistic appraisal of good and bad in Chinese life.37
Voltaire read extensively and eagerly on China. He gave Chinese civilization the first three chapters in his Essai sur les moeurs; and in his Dictionnaire philosophique he called China “the finest, the most ancient, the most extensive, the most populous and well-regulated kingdom on earth.”38 His admiration for Chinese government shared in inclining him to the belief that the best hope for social reform lay in despotisme éclairé, by which he meant enlightened monarchy. Like several other Frenchmen, and like the German philosopher Wolff, he was ready to canonize Confucius, who “had taught the Chinese people the principles of virtue five hundred years before the founding of Christianity.”39 Voltaire, famous for his good manners, thought the decorum, self-restraint, and quiet peaceableness of the Chinese a model for his excitable countrymen,40 and perhaps for himself. When two poems by the current Chinese Emperor, Ch’ien Lung (r. 1736–96), were translated into French, Voltaire responded in verse. The Emperor sent him a porcelain vase.
European acquaintance with alien faiths and institutions was a powerful factor in weakening Christian theology. The news from Persia, India, Egypt, China, and America led to an endless series of embarrassing questions. How, asked Montesquieu, could one choose the true religion out of two thousand different faiths?41 How, asked a hundred others, could the world have been created in 4004 B.C when in 4000 B.C China already had a developed civilization? Why had China no record or tradition of Noah’s Flood, which, according to the Bible, had covered the whole earth? Why had God confined his Scriptural revelation to a small nation in western Asia if he had intended it for mankind? How could anyone believe that outside the Church there would be no salvation?—were all those billions who had lived in India, China, and Japan now roasting in hell? The theologians struggled to answer these and similar questions with a mountain of distinctions and explanations, but the structure of dogma nevertheless showed new cracks day by day, often as the result of missionary reports; sometimes it seemed that the Jesuits in China had been converted to Confucius instead of converting the Chinese to Christ.
And was it not by the science they brought, rather than by the theology they taught, that those cultured Jesuits had won so many friends among the Chinese?
* * *
I. Una est fidelium universalis Ecclesia, extra quam nullus omnino salvatur. Pope Pius IX reaffirmed the doctrine in his encyclical of August 10, 1863: “The Catholic dogma is well known, namely, that no one can be saved outside the Catholic Church [Notissimum est catholicum dogma neminem scilicet e
xtra catholicam ecclesiam posse salvari].” (Catholic Encyclopedia, III, 753b.) It is fair to add that recent Catholic theology softens the dogma. “The doctrine … summed up in the phrase Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus … does not mean that none can be saved except those who are in visible communion with the Church. The Catholic Church has ever taught that nothing else is needed to obtain justification than an act of perfect charity and of contrition. Whoever, under the impulse of actual grace, elicits these acts receives immediately the gift of sanctifying grace, and is numbered among the children of God. Should he die in these dispositions he will assuredly attain heaven.” (Ibid., 752b.)
CHAPTER XVI
The Scientific AdvanceI
1715–89
I. THE EXPANDING QUEST
SCIENCE too was offering a new revelation. The growth of science—of its pursuit, its methods, its findings, its successful predictions and productions, its power, and its prestige—is the positive side of that basic modern development whose negative side is the decline of supernatural belief. Two priesthoods came into conflict: the one devoted to the molding of character through religion, the other to the education of the intellect through science. The first priesthood predominates in ages of poverty or disaster, when men are grateful for spiritual comfort and moral order; the second in ages of progressive wealth, when men incline to limit their hopes to the earth.
It is customary to rank the eighteenth century below the seventeenth in scientific achievements; and certainly there are no figures here that tower like Galileo or Newton, no accomplishments commensurate with the enlargement of the known universe or the cosmic extension of gravitation, or the formulation of calculus, or the discovery of the circulation of the blood. And yet, what a galaxy of stars brightens the scientific scene in the eighteenth century!—Euler and Lagrange in mathematics, Herschel and Laplace in astronomy, d’Alembert, Franklin, Galvani, and Volta in physics, Priestley and Lavoisier in chemistry, Linnaeus in botany, Buffon and Lamarck in biology, Haller in physiology, John Hunter in anatomy, Condillac in psychology, Jenner and Boerhaave in medicine. The multiplying academies gave more and more of their time and funds to scientific research. The universities increasingly admitted science to their curriculums; between 1702 and 1750 Cambridge established chairs in anatomy, astronomy, botany, chemistry, geology, and “experimental philosophy”—i.e., physics. Scientific method became more rigorously experimental. The nationalistic animosity that had tarnished the International of the Mind in the controversy between Newton and Leibniz subsided, and the new priesthood joined hands across frontiers, theologies, and wars to explore the expanding unknown. Recruits came from every class, from the impoverished Priestley and the foundling d’Alembert to the titled Buffon and the millionaire Lavoisier. Kings and princes entered the quest: George III took up botany, John V astronomy, Louis XVI physics. Amateurs like Montesquieu and Voltaire, women like Mme. du Châtelet and the actress Mlle. Clairon labored or played in laboratories, and Jesuit scientists like Boscovich strove to unite the old faith and the new.
Not till our own explosive times did science enjoy such popularity and honor. The éclat of Newton’s discoveries in mathematics, mechanics, and astronomy had raised the heads of scientists everywhere in Europe. They could not rise to be master of the mint, but on the Continent, after 1750, they were welcomed in scented society and rubbed wigs with lords and dukes. In Paris the lecture halls of science were crowded by eager listeners of all sexes and ranks. Goldsmith, visiting Paris in 1755, reported, “I have seen as bright a circle of beauty at the chemical lectures of Rouelle as gracing the court of Versailles.”1 Fashionable women kept books of science on their dressing tables, and, like Mme. de Pompadour, had their portraits painted with squares and telescopes at their feet. People lost interest in theology, they sloughed off the other world while cherishing their superstitions. Science became the mode and mood of an age that moved in a complex stream of hectic change to its catastrophic end.
II. MATHEMATICS
1. Euler
Change was now slow in mathematics because so much had already been done in that field through five millenniums that Newton seemed to have left no other regions to conquer. For a while, after his death (1727), a reaction set in against the assumptions and abstruseness of calculus. Bishop Berkeley, in a vigorous critique (The Analyst, 1734), assailed these as quite equaling the mysteries of metaphysics and theology, and taunted the followers of science with “submitting to authority, taking things on trust, and believing points inconceivable,” precisely as had been charged against the followers of religious faith. Mathematicians have been as hard put to answer him on this head as materialists have been to refute his idealism.
However, mathematics built bridges, and the pursuit of numbers continued. In England Abraham Demoivre, Nicholas Saunderson, and Brook Taylor, and in Scotland Colin Maclaurin, developed the Newtonian form of calculus. Demoivre advanced the mathematics of chance and of life annuities; being of French birth and English residence, he was chosen by the Royal Society of London (1712) to arbitrate the rival claims of Newton and Leibniz to the invention of infinitesimal calculus. Saunderson became blind at the age of one; he learned to carry on long and complicated mathematical problems mentally; he was appointed professor of mathematics at Cambridge at the age of twenty-nine (1711), and wrote an Algebra that won international acclaim; we shall see how his career fascinated Diderot. Taylor left his name on a basic theorem of calculus, and Maclaurin showed that a liquid mass rotating on its axis would take an ellipsoidal form.
In Basel the Bernoulli family continued through three generations to produce distinguished scientists. Protestant in faith, the family had fled from Antwerp (1583) to avoid the atrocities of Alva. Two of seven Bernoulli mathematicians belong to the age of Louis XIV; a third, Johann I (1667–1748), overspread two reigns. Daniel (1700–82) became professor of mathematics at St. Petersburg at the age of twenty-five, but returned eight years later to teach anatomy, botany, physics, and finally philosophy in the University of Basel; he left works on calculus, acoustics, and astronomy, and almost founded mathematical physics. His brother Johann II (1710–90) taught rhetoric and mathematics, and left his mark on the theory of heat and light. Daniel won prizes of the Académie des Sciences ten times, Johann thrice. Of Johann’s sons, Johann III (1744–1807) became astronomer royal at the Berlin Academy, and Jakob II (1758?—89) taught physics at Basel, mathematics at St. Petersburg. This remarkable family spanned the curriculum, the century, and the Continent.
Leonhard Euler, pupil of Johann Bernoulli I and friendly rival of Daniel, stands out as the most versatile and prolific mathematician of his time. Born at Basel in 1707, dying at St. Petersburg in 1783, eminent in mathematics, mechanics, optics, acoustics, hydrodynamics, astronomy, chemistry, and medicine, and knowing half the Aeneid by heart, he illustrated the uses of diversity and the scope of the human mind. In three major treatises on calculus he freed the new science from the geometric placenta in which it had been born, and established it as algebraic calculus—“analysis.” To these classics he added works on algebra, mechanics, astronomy, and music; however, his Tentamen novae Theoriae Musicae (1729) “contained too much geometry for musicians, and too much music for geometers.”2 With all his science he retained his religious faith to the end.
When Daniel Bernoulli moved to St. Petersburg he promised to get Leonhard a post in the Academy there. The youth went, aged twenty; and when Daniel left Russia (1733) Euler succeeded him as head of the mathematical section. He astonished his fellow Academicians by computing in three days astronomical tables that were expected to require several months. On this and other tasks he worked so intensely, night and day and by poor light, that in 1735 he lost the sight of his right eye. He married, and began at once to add and multiply, while death subtracted; of his thirteen children eight died young. His own life was not safe in a capital racked with political intrigue and assassinations. In 1741 he accepted an invitation from Frederick the Great to join the Berlin Aca
demy; there, in 1759, he succeeded Maupertuis in charge of mathematics. Frederick’s mother liked him, but found him strangely reticent. “Why don’t you speak to me?” she asked. “Madame,” he replied, “I come from a country where if you speak you are hanged.”3 The Russians, however, could be gentlemen. They continued his salary for a long time after his departure; and when a Russian army, invading Brandenburg, pillaged Euler’s farm, the general indemnified him handsomely, and the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna added to the sum.
The history of science honors Euler first for his work in calculus, and especially for his systematic treatment of the calculus of variations. He advanced both geometry and trigonometry as branches of analysis. He was the first to distinctly conceive the notion of a mathematical function, which is now the heart of mathematics. In mechanics he formulated the general equations that still bear his name. In optics he was the first to apply calculus to the vibrations of light, and to formulate the curve of vibration as dependent upon elasticity and density. He deduced the laws of refraction analytically, and made those studies in the dispersion of light that prepared for the construction of achromatic lenses. He shared in the international enterprise of finding longitude at sea by charting the position of the planets and the phases of the moon; his approximate solution helped John Harrison to draw up successful lunar tables for the British Admiralty.