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

by Will Durant

God is the cause of all events in the same way that the nature of a triangle is the cause of its properties and behavior. God is “free” only in the sense that He is not subject to any external cause or force, and is determined only by His own essence or nature; but He “does not act from freedom of will”;

Determinism is predestinarianism without theology; it substitutes the primeval vortex or nebula for God. Spinoza followed the logic of mechanism to its bitter end;

The endeavor to preserve oneself is the only basis of virtue.”119 In Spinoza virtue is biological, almost Darwinian; it is any quality that makes for survival. In this sense, at least, virtue is its own reward; “it is to be desired for its own sake; nor is there anything more excellent or more useful to us . . . for the sake of which virtue ought to be desired.”

We judge all things in terms of our desires. “We do not strive for, wish, seek, or desire anything because we think it to be good; we judge a thing to be good because we . . . desire it.”123 “By good (bonum) I understand that which we certainly know to be useful to us.”

to use the imaginary rewards and punishments of a life after death as stimulants to morality is an encouragement to superstition and quite unworthy of a mature society. Virtue should be—and is—its own reward, if we define it, like men, as ability, intelligence, and strength, and not, like cowards, as obedience, humility, and fear.

Spinoza resented the Christian view of life as a vale of tears, and of death as a door to heaven or hell; this, he felt, casts a pall over human affairs, clouding with the notion of sin the legitimate aspirations and enjoyments of men. To be daily thinking of death is an insult to life. “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.”

contemplation of the world as a necessary result of its own nature—of the nature of God—is the ultimate source of content in the mind of the sage; it brings him the peace of understanding, of limitations recognized, of truth accepted and loved.

calculus from Newton’s.9 Newton had apparently made his discovery in 1666, but he did not publish it till 1692; Leibniz published his differential calculus in 1684, his integral calculus in 1686.10 There remains no doubt that Newton was first in the discovery, that Leibniz reached his own discovery independently, that he antedated Newton in publishing the discovery, and that Leibniz’ system of notation proved superior to Newton’s.

We had better, said Bayle, give up the idea of proving religious creeds; it merely brings the difficulties into clearer light.

He was now sixty-four years old, felt the nearness of the “Great Perhaps,” and may have longed to believe in the justice of God to man. How had it come about that a world created by an omnipotent and benevolent deity had been sullied with such martial massacres, political corruption, human cruelty and suffering, earthquakes, famines, poverty, and disease?

Imperfect as it may seem to our selfish sight, this world is the best that God could have created so long as He left men human and free. If a better world had been possible, we may be sure God would have created it.

the Théodicée became the most widely read of Leibniz’ books, and succeeding generations knew him as “the best-of-all-possible-worlds man.” If we must regret the edifying absurdity of that performance, our respect for the author revives when we contemplate the prodigious variety of his intellectual interests.

Anticipating Kant, he interpreted space and time not as objective realities but as perceptual relations: space as perceived coexistence, time as perceived succession—views adopted in relativity theories today.

In biology Leibniz vaguely visioned evolution. Like many thinkers before and after him he saw a “law of continuity” running through the organic world; but he extended the concept to the supposedly inorganic world as well. Everything is a point or stage in an endless series, and is connected with everything else through an infinite number of intermediate forms;79 there is, so to speak, an infinitesimal calculus running through reality.

He corresponded with scholars, scientists, and statesmen in twenty countries and three languages. He wrote some three hundred letters every year; fifteen thousand of them have been preserved;

It is easier to be original and foolish than to be original and wise; there are a thousand possible errors for every truth, and mankind, with all its efforts, has not yet exhausted the possibilities.

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.

The Renaissance was tied to classical antiquity and to Catholic ritual and art; the Reformation was bound to primitive Christianity and a medieval creed. Now this rich and fateful era, from Galileo to Newton, from Descartes to Bayle, from Bacon to Locke, turned its face toward an uncharted future that promised all the dangers of liberty.

In the ecstasy of battle, and forgetting that generals must die in bed, he dashed to the front, and was knocked from his horse. His aide, while helping the Duke to another mount, had his head blown off by a cannon ball. Marlborough recovered, realigned his troops, and led them to another bloody victory;

the treaties of Utrecht and Rastatt achieved little more than what diplomacy might have peacefully achieved in 1701. After thirteen years of slaughter, impoverishment, and devastation, these pacts settled for twenty-six years the map of Europe,

Not till Napoleon would France recover from Louis XIV, only to repeat his tragedy.

A chief product of the war was the intensification of nationalism and international hate. Each nation forgot its gains and remembered its wounds. Germany would never forgive the double devastation of the Palatinate; France would not soon forget the unprecedented slaughter in Marlborough’s victories; Spain suffered every day the indignity of Gibraltar in alien hands. Each nation bided its time for revenge.

Louis had the distinction of living so long that the Furies could revenge upon him in person, rather than upon his children, the sins of his pride and power.

In retrospect it was clear that the invasion of Holland in 1672, the invasion of Germany in 1688, and the hasty seizure of the barrier towns in 1701 had been massive blunders, raising a swarm of foes around France.

What the people felt most keenly and most justly was the immense price they had paid in blood and treasure for the glory that had now collapsed in the death of the King and the desolation of France.

For in modern states the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things; and the men who can manage money manage all.

In judging Louis XIV we must remember Goethe’s humane dictum that a man’s vices are usually the influence of his time, while his virtues are his own; or, as the Romans had put it with characteristic brevity, vitium est temporis potius quam hominis—“vices are of the age rather than of the man.”

“He was,” in Lord Acton’s judgment, “by far the ablest man who was born in modern times on the steps of a throne.”

He became the head and symbol of his country’s supreme epoch; and France, which lives on glory, has learned to forgive him for almost destroying her to make her great.