The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  He was quite conscious of his literary flair. He delighted to read to his visitors melodious passages from his volumes; and when he was elected to the French Academy he took as his theme, on the day of his reception (August 25, 1753), not some marvel of science, but an analysis of style. That illustrious Discours, as Cuvier said, “gave at once the precept and the example,”108 for it was itself a gem of style. From all but the French it is hidden in the mountain of his works, and little of it has come to us but its famous, pithy, cryptic judgment that “the style is the man.” Therefore let us spread it out here, and look at it leisurely. Its brilliance is dulled in translation, but even so, and though cruelly syncopated for our ignoble haste, it can adorn any page. After some introductory compliments to an audience that included many masters of style, Buffon proceeded:

  It is only in enlightened ages that men have written and spoken well. True eloquence … is quite different from that natural facility of speech which is … given to all whose passions are strong, … and whose imagination is quick.… But in those few men whose head is steady, whose taste is delicate, and whose sense is exquisite—and who, like you, messieurs, count for little the tone, the gestures, and the empty sound of words—there must be substance, thought, and reason; there must be the art of presenting these, of defining and ordering them; it is not enough to strike the ears and catch the eyes; one must act upon the soul and touch the heart while speaking to the mind.… The more substance and force we give to our thought by meditation, the easier it will be to realize them in expression.

  All this is not yet style, but is its base; it sustains style, directs it, regulates its movement, and submits it to laws. Without this the best writer loses himself, his pen wanders without a guide, and throws out at hazard formless sketches and discordant figures. However brilliant the colors that he uses, whatever beauties he scatters in the details, he will be choked by the mass of his ideas; he will not make us feel; his work will have no structure.… It is for this reason that those who write as they speak, however well they speak, write badly; and those who abandon themselves to the first fire of their imagination take a tone which they cannot sustain. …

  Why are the works of Nature so perfect? It is because each work is a whole, because Nature works on an eternal plan which she never forgets. She prepares in silence the germs of her production, she sketches by a single stroke the primitive form of every living thing; she develops it, she perfects it by a continuous movement and in a prescribed time.… The mind of man can create nothing, produce nothing, except after having been enriched by experience and meditation; its experiences are the seeds of its productions. But if he imitates Nature in his procedure and his labor, if he raises himself by contemplation to the most sublime truths, if he reunites them, links them on a chain, forms of them a whole, a thought-out system, then he will establish, upon unshakable foundations, immortal monuments.

  It is for lack of plan, for not having sufficiently reflected on his purpose, that even a man of thought finds himself confused, and knows not where to begin to write; he perceives at the same time a great number of ideas; and since he has neither compared nor arranged them in order, nothing determines him to prefer some to others; he remains perplexed. But when he has made a plan, when once he has assembled and placed in order all the essential thoughts on his subject, he will perceive at once and with ease at what point he should take up his pen; he will feel his ideas ripening in his mind; he will hurry to bring them to light, he will find pleasure in writing, his ideas will follow one another readily, his style will be natural and easy; a certain warmth will arise from this pleasure, will spread over his work, and give life to his expression; animation will mount, the tone will be elevated, objects will take color, and feeling, joined to light, will increase and spread, will pass from that which we say to that which we are about to say; the style will become interesting and luminous. …

  Only those works that are well written will pass down to posterity. The quantity of knowledge, the singularity of the facts, even the novelty of discoveries, will not be sure guarantees of immortality; if the works that contain them are concerned with petty objects, or if they are written without taste or nobility, … they will perish; for the knowledge, the facts, the discoveries are easily removed and carried off, and even gain by being placed in more able hands. Those things are outside the man, but the style is the man himself [le style est l’homme même]; the style cannot be stolen, transported, or altered; if it is elevated, noble, and sublime, the author will be admired equally in all times, for only truth is durable and everlasting.109

  “This discourse,” said Villemain, “so admired at the time, seems to surpass all that had yet been thought on the subject; and we cite it even today as a universal rule.”110 Perhaps some deductions must be made. Buffon’s description holds better for prose than for poetry. It does more justice to the “classic” than to the “romantic” style; it is in the tradition of Boileau, and rightly elevates reason; but it leaves too little room for the Rousseaus, the Chateaubriands, and the Hugos of French prose, or for the enticing confusion of Rabelais and Montaigne, or for the moving, artless simplicity of the New Testament. It could with difficulty explain why Rousseau’s Confessions, so poor in reason, so rich in feeling, remains one of the greatest books of the eighteenth century. Truth can be a fact of feeling as well as a structure of reason or a perfection of form.

  Buffon’s style was the man, a robe of dignity for an aristocratic soul. Only in the absorption of his studies did Buffon forget that he was a seigneur as well as a scientist and scribe. He took in his stride the multiplying honors that crowned his old age. Louis XV made him Comte de Buffon in 1771, and invited him to Fontainebleau. The learned academies of Europe and America offered him honorary membership. He contemplated without qualm the statue that his son raised to him in the Jardin du Roi. His tower at Montbard became in his lifetime a goal of pilgrimage rivaling Voltaire’s Ferney; there Rousseau came, knelt at the threshold, and kissed the floor.111 Prince Henry of Prussia called; and though Catherine the Great could not manage this, she sent him word that she counted him second only to Newton.

  Even in old age he was stately and handsome—“the body of an athlete,” said Voltaire, “and the soul of a sage”;112 looking, said Hume, not like a man of letters but like a marshal of France.113 The people of Montbard adored him. Buffon was fully aware of all this, he prided himself on his fitness and appearance, and had his hair dressed and powdered twice a day.114 He enjoyed good health till he was seventy-two. Then he began to suffer from stone, but he continued to work, and refused to permit an operation. He survived nine years more, and died in 1788. Twenty thousand people attended his funeral. Hardly a year after his death his remains were exhumed, and were scattered to the winds, and his monument was razed to the ground, by revolutionists who could not forgive him for having been a nobleman; and his son was guillotined.115

  2. Toward Evolution

  Led by such a master of perspective, patience, and prose, biology began to lure more and more students from the mathematics and physics that in the seventeenth century had held most scientists in thrall. Diderot, moved by all the currents of his time, felt something of this change. “At this moment,” he wrote in 1754, “we touch upon a great revolution in the sciences. From the inclination that the best minds seem now to have for moral philosophy, literature, natural history, and experimental physics, I dare predict that before another hundred years have passed we shall not count three great mathematicians [géomètres] in Europe.”116 (The year 1859 saw the climax of modern biology.)

  The new science was discouraged by its initial problem—the origin of life. Many attempts were made to show that life could be generated spontaneously from nonliving matter. The multitude of micro-organisms found by the microscope in a drop of water gave new vigor to the old theory of abiogenesis despite Redi’s apparent disproof of it in 1668. In 1748 John Needham, an English Catholic priest resident on the Continent, revived the theory by
repeating Redi’s experiments with different results. He boiled some mutton gravy in flasks, which he immediately corked and sealed. On opening the flasks a few days later he found them teeming with organisms. Arguing that any living germs in the broth must have been killed by boiling, and that the flasks had been firmly sealed with mastic, Needham concluded that new organisms had been spontaneously generated in the liquid. Buffon was impressed, but in 1765 Spallanzani, then a professor at Modena, repeated Needham’s experiments to a contrary conclusion. He found that boiling an infusion for two minutes did not destroy all germs, but that boiling it for forty-five minutes did, and that in this case no organisms appeared. The controversy continued until Schwann and Pasteur apparently disposed of it in the nineteenth century.

  Mysteries almost as baffling surrounded the processes of reproduction. James Logan, Charles Bonnet, and Caspar Wolff puzzled over the roles of the male and female elements in reproduction, and asked how the combined elements can—as they seem to—contain in themselves the predetermination of all the parts and structures in the mature form. Bonnet proposed a fantastic theory of emboîtement, or “incapsulation”: the female contains the germs of all her children, these germs contain the germs of the grandchildren, and so on until imagination rebels; science too can run to mythology. Wolff, whose name adorns the Wolffian ducts, defended Harvey’s theory of “epigenesis”: each embryo is created anew by the parental elements. Wolff anticipated von Baer’s germ-layer theory of organ formation in De Formatione Intestinorum (1768), which von Baer described as “the greatest masterpiece of scientific observation that we possess.”117

  Is the regeneration of tissue a form of reproduction? Abraham Trembley, of Geneva, astonished the learned world in 1744 by experiments that revealed the regenerative obstinacy of the fresh-water polyp: he cut one into four longitudinal strips, each of which grew into a complete and normal organism. He hesitated whether to call the polyp a plant or an animal; it seemed rooted like a plant, but it grabbed and digested food like an animal; speculative souls hailed it as bridging the gap between the plant and animal worlds in the “great chain of being.”118 Trembley concluded, as biologists now do, that it is an animal. Its squirming, groping tentacles led Réaumur to call it “polyp,” or many-footed. We know it also as the hydra, from the legendary monster with nine heads; as soon as Heracles cut off one of these, two heads grew in its place. In literature the hydra has served as a simile with a hundred thousand lives.

  René Antoine de Réaumur was second only to Buffon in the biology of this age, and far superior to him in accuracy of observation. Educated as a physician, he abandoned practice as soon as he was financially independent, and gave himself to scientific research. He seemed at home in a dozen fields. In 1710 he was commissioned to survey and describe the industries and industrial arts of France; he did this with characteristic thoroughness, and made recommendations that led to the establishment of new industries and the revival of ailing ones. He devised the method of tinning iron that is still employed, and investigated the chemical differences between iron and steel. These and other contributions to metallurgy won him a pension of twelve thousand livres from the government; he gave the money to the Académie des Sciences. We have seen his work on the thermometer.

  Meanwhile he was enriching biology. In 1712 he showed that the lobster could regenerate an amputated limb. In 1715 he correctly described the electric shock emitted by the torpedo fish. Between 1734 and 1742 he published his masterpiece, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes— six volumes painstakingly illustrated, and written in a style of charm and animation that made insects almost as interesting as the lovers in the romances of Crébillon fils. Like Fabre in our time, he became fascinated by all

  that relates to the character and manners, so to speak, and to the livelihood, of so many little animals. I have observed their different ways of life, how they get their nourishment, the ruses which some of them use to seize their prey, the precautions which others take to keep themselves safe from enemies, … the choice of places where to lay their eggs so that the young, hatching out, will find suitable food from the moment of their birth.119

  Réaumur agreed with Voltaire that the behavior and structure of organisms could not be explained without assuming a power of design in nature; his volumes served as ammunition to those who opposed the atheistic current that soon flowed in France. Diderot ridiculed him for spending so much time on bugs,120 but it was such careful work that laid the factual foundations of modern biology.

  What must Diderot have said when he heard that Réaumur’s friend Charles Bonnet had demonstrated virgin birth—parthenogenesis—in the animal kingdom? By isolating newborn aphids (the tree lice that love our orange trees) he had found that a female of the species can reproduce fertile offspring without having received the male element usually required; apparently the purpose of sex was not merely reproduction, but the enrichment of the offspring through contribution of diverse qualities from two parents differently endowed. These experiments, reported to the Académie des Sciences in 1740, were described in Bonnet’s Traité d’insectologie (1745). In Recherches sur … des plantes (1754) Bonnet suggested that some plants have powers of sensation, even of discrimination and selection, therefore of judgment—the essence of intelligence.

  It was this same Geneva-born Bonnet who seems to have first applied the term evolution to biology;121 however, he meant by it the chain of beings from atoms to man. The idea of evolution as the natural development of new species from old ones appeared repeatedly in eighteenth-century science and philosophy. So Benoît de Maillet suggested in his posthumous Telliamed (1748) that all land animals evolved from kindred marine organisms through transformation of species by the changed environment; in this way birds had originated from flying fish, lions from sea lions, men from mermen. Three years later Maupertuis’ Système de la nature not only classed apes and men as allied species,122 but anticipated in outline Darwin’s theory of the evolution of new species through the environmental selection of fortuitous variations favorable to survival. Said the unfortunate scientist who was soon to fall on the point of Voltaire’s pen:

  The elementary particles which form the embryo are each drawn from the corresponding structure of the parent, and conserve a sort of recollection of their previous form.… We can thus readily explain how new species are formed, … by supposing that the elementary particles may not always retain the order which they present in the parents, but may fortuitously produce differences which, multiplying and accumulating, have resulted in the infinite variety of species which we see at the present time.123

  In this manner, given sufficient time, a single prototype (Maupertuis thought) could have produced all living forms—a proposition tentatively entertained by Buffon, and warmly applauded by Diderot.

  Jean Baptiste Robinet returned, in De la Nature (1761), to the older idea of evolution as a “ladder of beings” (échelle des êtres): all nature is a series of efforts to produce even more perfect beings; in conformity with Leibniz’ law of continuity (which admitted no break between the lowest and the highest beings), all forms, even stones, are experiments whereby Nature works her way upward through minerals, plants, and beasts to man. Man himself is only a stage in the great enterprise: beings more perfect will someday replace him.124

  James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, a Scottish judge, was a Darwinian nearly a century before Darwin. In The Origin and Progress of Language (1773–92) he pictured prehistoric man as having no language and no social organization, and as in no way distinguished, in mental attainments or way of life, from the apes; man and the orangutan (as Edward Tyson had said in 1699) are of the same genus; the orangutan (by which Monboddo meant the gorilla or the chimpanzee) is a man who failed to develop. Only through language and social organization did prehistoric man become primitive man. Human history is not a decline from primeval perfection, as in Genesis, but a slow and painful ascent.125

  The poet Goethe touched the history of science at seve
ral points. In 1786 he discovered the intermaxillary bone, and in 1790 he suggested that the skull is composed of modified vertebrae. Independently of Caspar Wolff he reached the theory that all parts of a plant are modifications of leaves; and he held that all plants descended by general metamorphosis from one archetype which he called Urpflanze.

  Last in the line of eighteenth-century Darwinians is the great Darwin’s grandfather. Erasmus Darwin was quite as interesting a personality as Charles. Born in 1731, educated at Cambridge and Edinburgh, he settled down to the practice of medicine in Nottingham, then in Lichfield, then in Derby, where he died in 1802. From Lichfield he rode regularly to Birmingham, fifteen miles away, to attend the dinners of the “Lunar Society,” of which he was the moving spirit, and of which Priestley became the most famous member. A bright and amiable personality shines out in the older Darwin’s letter to Matthew Boulton apologizing for having missed a meeting:

  I am sorry the infernal divinities who visit mankind with diseases … should have prevented my seeing all your great men at Soho [Birmingham] today. Lord! what inventions, what wit, what rhetoric—metaphysical, mechanical, and pyrotechnical—will be on the wing, bandied like a shuttlecock from one to another of your troop of philosophers! while poor I, … imprisoned in a post-chaise, am joggled, and jostled, and bumped, and bruised along the King’s highroad to make war upon a stomach-ache or a fever.126

  Amid this busy life he wrote a substantial Zoonomia (1794–96), mingling medicine and philosophy, and several volumes of science poetry: Botanic Garden (1788), Loves of the Plants (1788), and The Temple of Nature (1802). The last book expressed his evolutionary ideas. It began by affirming abiogenesis as the most probable theory of the origin of life: