The Age of Louis XIV: The Story of Civilization, Volume VIII

by Will Durant

So at last, after twenty years of preparation, appeared the most important book of seventeenth-century science, rivaled, in the magnitude of its effects upon the mind of literate Europe, only by the De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) of Copernicus and The Origin of Species (1859) of Darwin. These three books are the basic events in the history of modern Europe.

Newton’s mind was a mixture of Galileo’s mechanics and Kepler’s laws with Böhme’s theology.

Newton, he added, was the most fortunate of men, for there is only one universe, and one ultimate principle in it, and Newton discovered that principle.

Such judgments are precarious, for “truth,” even in science, wilts like a flower.

Philosophers, cured of certainty by history, may still retain a humble skepticism about contemporary ideas, including their own; they will sense a fluent relativity in relativity formulas; and they will remind all delvers in atoms and stars of Newton’s own final estimate of his epochal achievement:

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

“Words,” said Hobbes, “are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas.”

Hobbes is a blunt nominalist: class or abstract nouns like man or virtue are merely names for generalizing ideas; they do not represent objects; all objects are individual entities—individual virtuous actions, individual men . . .

“A democracy is no more than an aristocracy of orators.”37

The absolutist polity is a child of war, and democracy is a luxury of peace.

Let not dreamers despair; time may surprise them with fulfillments, and turn their poetry into prose.

“to believe our modern earth (a blind and sordid particle of the universe, inferior to each of the fixed stars as well in bulk as in dignity) to be the heart, the most noble and vital part, of so vast a body, is irrational and repugnant to the nature of things.”

The terms freethinker and pantheist were apparently coined by Toland.

“To love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues; and, if I mistake not, you have as much of it as ever I met with in anybody.”

“the bulk of mankind is as well qualified for flying as for thinking”92—which is now a more hopeful statement than Swift intended it to be.

The larger souls, that have traveled the divers climates of opinion [here is born a famous phrase] are more cautious in their resolves, and more sparing to determine.

I doubt not but posterity will find many things, that are now but rumors, verified into practical realities.

Satan had to be rescued for God’s sake.

What, then, are these gods? The offspring of our fears; pretty nothings that we adore without knowing why. . .; Gods whom man has made, and who never made man.”

Here, as by all the philosophers of France, the moral obligation to be intelligible was accepted, and philosophy became literature.

He never married, preferring a library to a wife.

Conscience, Bayle thought, should be the only ruler over a man’s beliefs.

“He who would find all the causes of popular errors will never be finished.”

Bayle passed boldly to one of the most difficult problems of history: Is a natural ethic possible—can a moral code be maintained without the aid of supernatural belief? Did atheism lead to corrupt morals? If that were so, said Bayle, one would have to conclude, from the crime, corruption, and immorality prevalent in Europe, that most Christians are secret atheists. Jews, Mohammedans, Christians, and infidels differ in creeds, but not in deeds.

Apparently religious belief—and ideas in general—have little influence upon conduct; this flows from desires and passions usually stronger than beliefs.

dragonnades

which of us can be so sure that he has the truth as to warrant injuring another for differing from him?

The reasons for doubting are doubtful themselves; one must therefore doubt whether he ought to doubt.

With Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle, and Fontenelle the seventeenth century opened, between Christianity and philosophy, the long and bitter war that would culminate in the fall of the Bastille and the feast of the Goddess of Reason.

And yet he “sowed dragon’s teeth.”

“All men are so much alike that there is no race whose follies should not make us tremble.”

“The spirit of man is extremely sympathetic to falsehood. . . . Truth must borrow the figure of the false to be agreeably received by the human mind.”

but we must not let our affections select the evidence; and (to vary a remark of Cicero’s) there is hardly anything so foolish but we can find it in the lives of the philosophers.

for whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

In what sense, then, is the Bible the Word of God? Only in this: that it contains a moral code that can form men to virtue.

For schisms arise not so much from an ardent love of religion as from men’s various dispositions, or the love of contradiction. . .

For justice and charity are the surest sign of the true Catholic faith . . . , and wherever these are found, there Christ really is, and where they are lacking, there Christ also is not. For by the spirit of Christ alone can we be led to the love of justice and charity.

“the more we understand individual objects, the more we understand God.”

“Men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and desires, but are ignorant of the causes by which they are led to wish and desire”;111 it is as if a stone flung through space should think it is moving and falling of its own will.

Determinism is predestinarianism without theology;

No one becomes passionate at what he considers natural and necessary.

“The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue,”

The greatest gift that knowledge can give us is to see ourselves as reason sees us.

This need to put theological clothing upon philosophical nudities led Leibniz to write the book that drew the ire and wit of Voltaire,

We cannot recommend any further reading of Leibniz’ Theodicy today, except to those who would appreciate to the full the bitter laughter of Candide.

Leibniz’ mind seemed to span the whole continuity that he described. He was au courant with every science; he knew the history of nations and of philosophy; he touched the worldly affairs of a dozen states; he was at home with atoms and with God.

It is easier to be original and foolish than to be original and wise;

“I always begin as a philosopher,” he said, “but I always end up as a theologian”

To round out these superlatives we may add that, all in all, the seventeenth century was the most productive in the history of modern thought. Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Bayle, Leibniz: here was a majestic sequence of men warm with the wine of reason, joyfully confident (most of them) that they could understand the universe, even to forming “clear and distinct ideas” about God, and leading—all but the last—to that heady Enlightenment which was to convulse both religion and government in the French Revolution.

So, for good or ill, the seventeenth century laid the foundations of modern thought. The Renaissance was tied to classical antiquity and to Catholic ritual and art; the Reformation was bound to primitive Christianity and a medieval creed.