The Age of Voltaire

by Will Durant

  Nature in Diderot is everything; she is his God; but of her essence we know only her confused abundance and restless change. Nature is matter alive. Everything is matter, but matter contains in itself the élan of life and the potentiality of thought. Man is not a machine, but neither is he an immaterial spirit; body and soul are one organism, and die together. “Everything destroys itself and perishes; nothing remains but the world; nothing endures but time.”7 Nature is neutral: she makes no distinction between good and evil, great and small, sinner and saint. She cares for the species rather than for the individual; let the individual mature and reproduce, then let him die; and every species too will die. Nature is wise in a myriad subtle details, which seem to show design; she gives organisms instincts that enable them to live and make live; but also she is blind, destroying philosophers and fools alike with one belch of fire, one heave of her shoulders through the crust of the earth. We shall never be able to understand Nature, or to ferret out her purpose or meaning, if she have any; for we ourselves, in all our bloody and majestic history, are among her transient and infinitesimal sports.

  II. THE DREAM OF D’ALEMBERT

  Diderot continued his speculations on nature in one of the strangest productions in French literature—Le Rêve d’Alembert. It was characteristic of him to present his thoughts in the form of a dream, to foist the dream upon his friend, and to make two famous contemporaries—Julie de Lespinasse and Dr. Théophile de Bordeu—the speakers in the dialogue. “I put my ideas into the mouth of a man who dreams,” Diderot told his mistress; “it is often necessary to give wisdom the air of foolishness in order to procure it entry.”8 Under these disguises he let his philosophical imagination run wild, careless of personal peril and social effects. He was quite pleased with the result; he described it to Sophie Volland as “the maddest and deepest thing ever written; there are five or six pages that will make your sister’s hair stand on end”;9 yet he assured her that it contained “not a single improper word.”10 He wrote it in 1769, read parts of it to friends, and thought of having it printed—presumably abroad and unsigned; but Mlle. de Lespinasse protested, for reasons that will soon be obvious. In a heroic gesture he threw the manuscript into the fire, probably knowing that there was another copy; in any case, the work was printed in 1830.

  It is a tripartite affair. In the preliminary “conversation” (“Entretien entre d’Alembert et Diderot”) the mathematician objects to his friend’s vitalistic materialism as no more acceptable than the Schoolmen’s conception of God. “Between you and the animal,” Diderot tells him, “there is no difference but one of organism” (degree of organic development), and likewise between animal and plant; consequently everything in man must have its seed or its analogy in plants. And in matter too? asks d’Alembert. Yes, Diderot replies; for “how do you know that feeling is essentially incompatible with matter—you who do not know the essence of anything, neither of matter nor of feeling? … There is not more than one substance in the universe, in man, in animals.”11

  The second part of the trilogy shows Dr. Bordeu and Mlle. de Lespinasse at the bedside of d’Alembert, who is asleep after his argumentative evening with Diderot. (Mademoiselle, already famous for her salon, was living with d’Alembert in a kind of Platonic cohabitation.) She reports to the doctor that her friend has had a wild dream, and has talked so strangely in his sleep that she took notes. For example, d’Alembert to Diderot: “Stop a moment, philosopher. I can easily comprehend an aggregate … of little feeling beings, but an animal? A whole … with consciousness of its own unity? I do not see it; no, I do not see it.”12 The dreamer dreams that Diderot, dodging the question, takes his stand on spontaneous generation: “When I have seen passive matter become a state of feeling, nothing can astonish me further.”13 If (Diderot continues) all existing species should pass away, they or other animal forms would in the amplitude of time be produced by the fermentation of the earth and the air. Bordeu and Mademoiselle take up the discussion, but are interrupted by a sudden cry from the dreaming man, who now talks like Diderot:

  Why am I what I am? Because it was inevitable that I should be.… If everything is a general flux, … what will not be produced here or elsewhere by the passing and vicissitudes of some millions of centuries? Who can tell what the thinking and feeling being is on Saturn? … Might the feeling and thinking being on Saturn have more senses than we? Ah, if so, the Saturnian is unfortunate, [for] the more the senses, the more the needs.14

  “He is right,” Bordeu comments Lamarckianly; “organs produce needs, and, reciprocally, needs produce organs.”

  D’Alembert wakes for a moment, finds Bordeu kissing Lespinasse, protests, is told to go back to sleep, and obeys. Now the doctor and the salonniére forget him, and pursue the train of ideas started by the dream. Bordeu notes the birth of human freaks, and challenges the believers in divine design to explain them. Mademoiselle has a bright aperçu: “Perhaps man is only the freak of a woman, or woman of a man.”15 The doctor enlarges on this Diderotically: “The only difference between them is that one has a bag hanging outside, and the other has it tucked away inside.” D’Alembert wakes and protests, “I think you are talking filth to Mademoiselle de Lespinasse.” Bordeu rises to keep an appointment with another patient; d’Alembert begs him to stay long enough to explain: “How comes it that I have remained myself to myself and to others through all the vicissitudes I have undergone in the course of my life, and when perhaps I possess no longer a single one of the molecules I brought with me at birth?” The doctor replies, “Memory, and … the slowness of the changes”; and Mademoiselle offers a striking analogy: “The spirit of a monastery is conserved because the monastery repeoples itself bit by bit, and when a new monk enters he finds a hundred old ones who lead him on to think and feel like them.”16

  Bordeu thenceforth dominates the discussion. He differentiates “romantic” from “classic” genius as the senses dominating, or being dominated by, conscious mind. He thinks Lespinasse an obvious example of the first, and blandly informs her, “You will divide your time between laughter and tears, and never be more than a child.” He gives a physiological explanation of dreams:

  Sleep is a state in which there is no more ensemble [no more co-ordination of the senses by consciousness or purpose]. All concerted action, all discipline, ceases. The master [the conscious self] is abandoned to the discretion of his vassals [the senses].… Is the optic thread [nerves] agitated? Then the origin of the network [the brain] sees. If the auditory thread demands, it hears. Action and reaction [sensation and response] are the only things which subsist between them. This is consequent on … the law of continuity and habit. If the action begins by the voluptuous end which nature has destined for the pleasure of love and the propagation of the species, the effect … on the origin of the bundle will be to reveal the image of the beloved. If this image, on the other hand, is first of all revealed to the origin of the bundle, the tension of the voluptuous end, the effervescence and effusion of the seminal fluid, will be the effect of the reaction.… In the waking state the network obeys the impressions made by an external object. Asleep, it is from the exercise of its own feeling that everything passing within itself emanates. There is nothing to distract in a dream; hence its vivacity.17

  Perhaps feeling that the patient he had intended to visit would be more readily cured by nature than by medicine, Bordeu forgets him, and proceeds to expound determinism, and to describe “self-respect, shame, and remorse” as “puerilities founded on the ignorance and vanity of a person who imputes to himself the merit and demerit of an inevitable instant.”18

  Diderot became so enamored of Bordeu as his mouthpiece that in Part III, “Suite de l’entretien” (Continuation of the Conversation) he left d’Alembert out altogether. So freed, the doctor denounces chastity as unnatural, and approves of onanism as the necessary relief of congested vesicles. “Nature tolerates nothing useless. And then can I be blameworthy in helping her when she calls for my aid by the least e
quivocal of symptoms? Let us never provoke her, but occasionally lend her a hand.”19 The doctor ends by recommending experiments in the reproductive mingling of different species, possibly producing thereby a type of man-animal that might contentedly act as servant to man. Mademoiselle, anticipating Anatole France and the penguins, wonders, should these half-men be baptized?

  BORDEU (about to leave). Have you seen in the zoological gardens, in a glass cage, an orangutan with the look of St. John preaching in the desert?

  MADEMOISELLE. Yes, I have.

  BORDEU (going). The Cardinal de Polignac said to it one day, “Speak, and I baptize thee.”20

  In Éléments de physiologie (c. 1774) Diderot rounded out his theory of evolution with some musing on the “missing link”:

  It is necessary to begin by classifying beings, from the inert molecule (if there is one) to the active molecule, to the microscopic animal, to the … plant, to the animal, to man.… One mustn’t believe the chain of being to be interrupted by the diversity of forms; the form is only a mask which deceives, and a missing link exists perhaps in an unknown being which the progress of comparative anatomy has not yet been able to assign to its true place.21

  III. DIDEROT ON CHRISTIANITY

  He had promised Sophie Volland that there would be nothing in The Dream of d’Alembert about religion; actually, of course, the trilogy expressed a philosophy that quite dispensed with deity. Publicly he remained a deist, keeping God as Prime Mover only, and denying providence, or divine design. Theoretically he was an agnostic, disclaiming any knowledge of, or interest in, anything beyond the world of the senses and the sciences. Sometimes he spoke vaguely of a cosmic consciousness, which stumbled along through endless time, making experiments, producing now sterile freaks or lucky accidents—hardly a God to receive a prayer. In another mood he could become violently antagonistic. He told of the misanthrope who, in revenge upon life, propagated the idea of God; the idea spread, and soon “men fell to quarreling, hating, and cutting one another’s throats; and they have been doing the same thing ever since that abominable name was pronounced.” And Diderot added, in cautious ecstasy, “I would sacrifice my life, perhaps, if I could annihilate forever the notion of God.”22 Yet the same muddleheaded genius felt the amazing order and grandeur of the cosmos; he wrote to Mlle. Volland: “Atheism is close to being a kind of superstition, as puerile as the other”; and he added: “I am maddened at being entangled in a devilish philosophy that my mind cannot help approving and my heart refuting.”23 In his later years he admitted the difficulty of deriving the organic from the inorganic, or thought from sensation.24

  But he never relented in his war on Christianity. A passionate paragraph in a private letter sums up his case against it:

  The Christian religion is to my mind the most absurd and atrocious in its dogmas: the most unintelligible, the most metaphysical, the most entangled and obscure, and consequently the most subject to divisions, sects, schisms, heresies; the most mischievous for the public tranquillity, the most dangerous to sovereigns by its hierarchic order, its persecutions, its discipline; the most flat, the most dreary, the most Gothic and most gloomy in its ceremonies; the most puerile and unsociable in its morality; … the most intolerant of all.25

  In Promenade du sceptique (1747) he had acknowledged the services of the Church in training character and forming morals; in later years he thought that while discouraging petty crime the Christian religion had fomented greater ones: “Sooner or later a moment comes when the notion which had prevented a man from stealing a shilling will cause 100,000 men to be slaughtered. Fine compensation!”26 However, “our religious opinions have little influence on our morals”;27 men fear present laws more than a distant hell and an invisible God. Even a priest “hardly relies upon praying to the gods except when he is little concerned about the matter.”28 In 1783 Diderot predicted that belief in God, and submission to kings, would be everywhere at an end within a few years;29 the prediction seemed verified in France in 1792; but Diderot also predicted that “the belief in the existence of God will remain forever.”30

  Like most of those who have lost their faith in Catholic doctrine, this same Diderot who thought Christian ceremonies dreary and gloomy remained sensitive to the beauty and solemnity of Catholic ritual, and he defended it against Protestant critics in his Salon of 1765:

  Those absurd rigorists do not know the effect of outward ceremonies upon the people. They have never seen our Adoration of the Cross on Good Friday, the enthusiasm of the multitude at the procession of Corpus Christi, an enthusiasm by which I am sometimes carried away. I have never seen that long file of priests in sacerdotal vestments, those young acolytes in white albs, … strewing flowers before the Holy Sacrament, that crowd preceding and following them in religious silence, so many men prostrate on the ground, I have never heard that grave, pathetic chant sung by the priests and affectionately answered by numberless men, women, girls, and children, without being stirred in my inmost heart, and without tears coming into my eyes.31

  But after wiping his eyes he resumed the attack. In the Entretien d’un philosophe avec la maréchale de—(1776), he imagined a skeptic, whom he named Crudeli (Italian for cruel), talking with a titled lady who “held that the man who denies the Blessed Trinity is a ruffian who will end on the gallows.” She is surprised to find that M. Crudeli, who is an atheist, is not also a sensualist and a thief. “I think that if I had nothing to fear or hope after death I should allow myself a good many little pleasures here below.” Crudeli asks, “What are those things?” “They are only for my confessor’s ears.… But what motive can an unbeliever have for being good, unless he is mad?” She retreats a little before his arguments, then takes a new line of defense: “We must have something with which to frighten off those actions which escape the severity of the laws.” And besides, “if you destroy religion, what will you put in its place?” Crudeli answers, “Suppose I had nothing to put in its place, there would always be one terrible prejudice less.” He pictures Mohammedans on a Christian-killing rampage, and Christians burning Mohammedans and Jews.

  MARÉCHALE. Suppose everything that you believe false should be true, and you were damned. It is a terrible thing to be damned—to burn through eternity.

  CRUDELI. La Fontaine thought we should be as comfortable as fishes in water.

  MARÉCHALE. Yes, yes, but your La Fontaine became very serious at the end, and I expect the same of you.

  CRUDELI. I can answer for nothing when my brain has softened.

  The most anticlerical of the philosophes kept a special bitterness for what seemed to him the waste of human seed and energy in monasteries and nunneries. One of his angriest pages excoriated parents who condemned unwilling daughters to convent life; and his technically most finished production is an imaginary re-creation of such a nun’s career. La Religieuse (The Nun) was written in 1760 as the result of a prank by which Grimm and Diderot hoped to bring back to their company the Marquis de Croixmare from Caen to Paris. About this time Diderot was aroused by a nun’s appeal to the Parlement of Paris to release her from the vows that (she claimed) her parents had constrained her to take. The kindly Marquis wrote to the Parlement in her behalf, but in vain. We know nothing more of this nun, but Diderot reconstructed her history with such realistic fancy that she will live for centuries. He supposed that she had escaped from her convent, and he sent to Croixmare, as if from her pen, a series of letters describing her conventual experiences and asking his help in beginning a new life. The Marquis answered; Diderot replied in her name; and this correspondence continued through four months and 150 pages.

  Diderot pictured Suzanne persecuted by a harsh abbess, imprisoned, stripped, tortured, starved. She complains to a priest, who secures her transfer to another convent; there, however, the abbess is a Lesbian who overwhelms her with love and solicits her co-operation. Diderot probably exaggerated the cruelties of abbesses and the griefs of nuns, but he made all the priests in his story amiable and benevolent,
and he treated the Lesbian theme with a delicacy rare in his works. The Marquis was moved, and came to Paris. The hoax was revealed to him; he forgave it. The strange device had produced a remarkable study in psychology, perhaps influenced by Richardson’s Clarissa; never had a skeptic entered so vividly into the feelings of a reluctant saint. A visitor who came upon the author during the composition of these letters found him, says Grimm, “plunged in grief … and tears.”32 Diderot confessed that he was weeping over his own tale, for tears came to him as readily as to Rousseau. He was forgivably proud of his epistolary novel, of its verisimilitude, sentiment, and style; he revised it carefully, and bequeathed it for publication after his death. It saw the light in 1796, under the Revolution. In 1865 La Religieuse was publicly burned by order of the Tribunal of the Seine.33

  Published with it in 1796, burned with it in 1865, was Jacques le fataliste et son maître, which Diderot, with the pathos of nearness, considered his greatest work.34 It may be so, but it is also the most absurd. Infatuated with Tristram Shandy (1760–67), he adopted Sterne’s trick of composing a story largely of interruptions, intruding upon it whimsically now and then to talk to the reader about the characters and the plot. He began and ended the book with passages and incidents copied directly from Sterne,35 and he bettered Sterne’s example of startling the reader with an occasional indecency. The two characters that carry the story reflect Cervantes’ device of contrasting master and man in temperament and philosophy. The master rejects, Jacques professes, fatalism; “Everything … that happens down here,” he says, “is written up yonder.”36 Jacques “believed that a man wended his way just as necessarily to glory or ignominy as a ball … would follow the slope of the mountain” down which it rolled. “His [former] captain had filled Jacques’ head with all these ideas drained out of Spinoza, whom he knew by heart”37—a rare captain.