More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Will Durant
Read between
September 26 - October 11, 2019
Nature in Diderot is everything; she is his God; but of her essence we know only her confused abundance and restless change.
“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.”
“Nature tolerates nothing useless. And then can I be blameworthy in helping her when she calls for my aid by the least equivocal of symptoms? Let us never provoke her, but occasionally lend her a hand.”
Dream of d’Alembert
bowdlerized
in the Café de la Régence and other outposts of advanced and penniless ideas.
living on merciful dinners and forgotten loans, seeing nothing in life but struggle and defeat, rejecting all religion as a beautiful and terrible lie, viewing all morality as timidity and sham, and yet keeping enough of his past to clothe his disillusionment in educated eloquence and rational dress.
“in nature all species devour one another,” and the sublime end of every organism is to be eaten.
All morality, he thinks, is a hoax that the clever play upon the simple, or that the simple play upon themselves.
“Hurrah for wisdom and philosophy!—the wisdom of Solomon: to drink good wines, gorge on choice foods, tumble pretty women, sleep on downy beds; outside of that, all is vanity.”
There were in Diderot at least two characters, as in us all: a private self, preserving secretly all the impulses of human nature as found in primitive, savage, even animal, life; and a public self reluctantly accepting education, discipline, and morality as the price to be paid for protection by social order.
He was one more example of the individual intellect imagining itself wiser than the customs of the race.
In this mood he described coitus as “the sovereign happiness”;52 he defined love as “the voluptuous rubbing of two membranes,” and “the voluptuous loss of a few drops of liquid”;53 and he assured his mistress that adultery “is a fault less reprehensible than the slightest lie.”54 He was a philosopher longing to live like a rooster.
men would be happier if they turned their backs upon priests and kings, and followed scientists and philosophers.
the Catholics profess that they eat God and not bread, the Lutherans eat both God and bread, the Calvinists eat bread but not God; “if anyone told us of a like extravagance or madness among Hottentots and Kaffirs, we should think we were being imposed upon.”
“Laws watch over known crimes, religion over secret crimes.”
We conclude that the Devil can quote Voltaire to his purpose.
“Miserable mortal! If I cannot understand my own intelligence, if I cannot know by what I am animated, how can I have any acquaintance with that ineffable intelligence which visibly presides over the universe?
“I have said to myself a thousand times that I should be happy if I were as ignorant as my old neighbors, and yet it is a happiness I do not desire.”
I concluded that although we may set a great value upon happiness, we set a still greater value upon reason. But after mature reflection … I still thought there was great madness in preferring reason to happiness.
The Abbé de La Bletterie approved of Voltaire’s taking the Sacrament, but remarked, on seeing the communicant’s emaciation, that Voltaire had forgotten to have himself buried; to which Voltaire, bowing courteously, replied, “After you, monsieur.”
“This man is never more than the second in all genres.”
“No philosopher has influenced the manners of even the street he lived in.”
He turned away from systems as the impudent sallies of the minuscle into the infinite.
He was not considered profound, but perhaps that was because he was uncertain and clear.
Voltaire is without question the most brilliant writer that ever lived.
We have learned to sympathize with that which we once loved and had to leave, as we retain a tender memory for the loves of our youth. And to whom, more than to any other one man, do we owe this precious and epochal liberation? To Voltaire.
for when a religion consents to reason it begins to die.
We have seen how Voltaire in 1725 went to some trouble to save Pierre Desfontaines from the statutory punishment for homosexual acts, which was death. Desfontaines never forgave him.
Is not the fanaticism of your irreligion more absurd and more dangerous than the fanaticism of superstition? Begin by tolerating the faith of your fathers. You talk of nothing but tolerance, and never was a sect more intolerant.… As for me, I hold to no cabal of bel esprit, and to no party except that of religion, morality, and honor.
His widow asked Voltaire to adopt his daughter, but Voltaire thought that this would be carrying gallantry to extremes.
Voltaire struggled to reply, but who can refute a smell?
It was crude but legitimate satire, and everyone but the victims enjoyed it.
Agnosticism is a reasoned despair [un désespoir raisonné].
“le ver sorti du cul de Desfontaines” (the worm that came out of Desfontaines’ behind).
“Apply to that villain Fréron; … he is the only man who has taste. I am obliged to confess it, though I love him not.”
Their power almost ruined them.
the unbelievers respected the learning and character of the Jesuits, and these, by patient handling, hoped to bring the errant skeptics back into the orthodox fold.
You need not be alarmed for my safety; I have nothing to fear from the Jesuits. They can teach the youth of the country, and they are better able to do that than anyone else. It is true that they were on the other side during the war, but as a philosopher you ought not to reproach one for being kind and humane to everyone of the human species, no matter what religion or society he belongs to. Try to be more of a philosopher and less of a metaphysician.
The belief in the indefinite possibilities of progress through the improvement and extension of education became a sustaining dogma of the new religion.
Heaven and utopia are the rival buckets that hover over the well of fate: when one goes down the other goes up; hope draws up one or the other in turn. Perhaps when both buckets come up empty a civilization loses heart and begins to die.
And what is our faith in government but that hope revived?
The Devil survived as an expletive, hell as a jest;
When we cease to honor Voltaire we shall be unworthy of freedom.
But it was your brilliance that led you astray. It is difficult to be brilliant and conservative; there is little charm, for active minds, in standing for tradition and authority; it is tempting to be critical, for then you can feel the pleasure of individuality and novelty. But in philosophy it is almost impossible to be original without being wrong.
Tradition is to the group what memory is to the individual; and just as the snapping of memory may bring insanity, so a sudden break with tradition may plunge a whole nation into madness, like France in the Revolution.
I believe that we should be allowed to question traditions and institutions, but with care that we do not destroy more than we can build, and with caution that the stone that we dislodge shall not prove to be a necessary support to what we wish to preserve, and always with a modest consciousness that the experience of generations may be wiser than the reason of a transitory individual.
The true skeptic will doubt reason too.
tough little lens-grinder Spinoza.
If you take from the people the beliefs we allow them to hold, they will adopt legends and superstitions beyond control. Organized religion does not invent superstition, it checks it.
