The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

It was by combining Spinoza with Kant’s epistemology that Fichte, Schelling and Hegel reached their varied pantheisms; it was from conatus sese preservandi, the effort to preserve one’s self, that Fichte’s Ich was born, and Schopenhauer’s “will to live,” and Nietzsche’s “will to power,” and Bergson’s élan vital.

Hegel objected that Spinoza’s system was too lifeless and rigid; he was forgetting this dynamic element of it and remembering only that majestic conception of God as law which he appropriated for his “Absolute Reason.” But he was honest enough when he said, “To be a philosopher one must first be a Spinozist.”

In England the influence of Spinoza rose on the tide of the Revolutionary movement; and young rebels like Coleridge and Wordsworth talked about “Spy-nosa” (which the spy set by the government to watch...

Wordsworth caught something of the philosopher’s thought in his famous lines about Something Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;— A motion and a spirit, which impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.

Shelley quoted the Treatise on Religion and the State in the original notes to Queen Mab, and began a translation of it for which Byron promised a preface.

On the second centenary of Spinoza’s death subscriptions were collected for the erection of a statue to him at The Hague. Contributions came from every corner of the educated world; never did a monument rise upon so wide a pedestal of love. At the unveiling in 1882 Ernest Renan concluded his address with words which may fitly conclude also our chapter: “Woe to him who in passing should hurl an insult at this gentle and pensive head. He would be punished, as all vulgar souls are punished, by his very vulgarity, and by his incapacity to conceive what is divine. This man, from his granite pedestal, will point out to all men the way of blessedness which he found; and ages hence, the cultivated traveler, passing by this spot, will say in his heart, ‘The truest vision ever had of God came, perhaps, here.’”

“That is just it,” answered Voltaire; “you must have the devil in you to succeed in any of the arts”134 Even his critics and his enemies admitted that he himself met this requirement perfectly. “Il avait le diable au corps—he had the devil in his body,” said Sainte-Beuve;135 and De Maistre called him the man “into whose hands hell had given all its powers.”

“If we judge of men by what they have done,” said Lamartine, “then Voltaire is incontestably the greatest writer of modern Europe... Destiny gave him eighty-three years of existence, that he might slowly decompose the decayed age; he had the time to combat time; and when he fell he was the conqueror.”

He had for his edification a model elder brother, Armand, a pious lad who fell in love with the Jansenist heresy, and courted martyrdom for his faith. “Well,” said Armand to a friend who advised the better part of valor, “if you do not want to be hanged, at least do not put off other people.”

His later educators, the Jesuits, gave him the very instrument of scepticism by teaching him dialectic—the art of proving anything, and therefore at last the habit of believing nothing.

“Literature,” said M. Arouet, “is the profession of the man who wishes to be useless to society and a burden to his relatives, and to die of hunger”;—one

When the Regent, for economy, sold half the horses that filled the royal stables, François remarked how much more sensible it would have been to dismiss half the asses that filled the royal court. At last all the bright and naughty things whispered about Paris were fathered upon him; and it was his ill luck that these included two poems accusing the Regent of desiring to usurp the throne.

While in the Bastille he adopted, for some unknown reason, the pen-name of Voltaire,143 and became a poet in earnest and at length.

His old father, come to upbraid him, sat in a box, and covered his joy by grumbling, at every hit, “Oh, the rascal! the rascal!”

The Parliament of Paris at once ordered the book to be publicly burned as “scandalous, contrary to religion, to morals, and to respect for authority”; and Voltaire learned that he was again on the way to the Bastille. Like a good philosopher, he took to his heels—merely utilizing the occasion to elope with another man’s wife.

Very soon Cirey became the Paris of the French mind; the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie joined in the pilgrimage to taste Voltaire’s wine and wit, and see him act in his own plays. He was happy to be the centre of this corrupt and brilliant world; he took nothing too seriously, and for a while made “Rire et faire rire” his motto.

In 1745 the poet and his mathematician went to Paris, when Voltaire became a candidate for membership in the French Academy. To achieve this quite superfluous distinction he called himself a good Catholic, complimented some powerful Jesuits, lied inexhaustibly,

Voltaire avoided the state dinners; he could not bear to be surrounded with bristling generals; he reserved himself for the private suppers to which Frederick, later in the evening, would invite a small inner circle of literary friends; for this greatest prince of his age yearned to be a poet and a philosopher.

The conversation at these suppers was always in French; Voltaire tried to learn German, but gave it up after nearly choking; and wished the Germans had more wit and fewer consonants.

“Only philosophers should write history,” he said. “In all nations, history is disfigured by fable, till at last philosophy comes to enlighten man; and when it does finally arrive in the midst of this darkness, it finds the human mind so blinded by centuries of error, that it can hardly undeceive it; it finds ceremonies, facts and monuments, heaped up to prove lies.”152 “History,” he concludes, “is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead”; we transform the past to suit our wishes for the future, and in the upshot “history proves that anything can be proved by history.”

He was not satisfied with Spinoza’s answer that good and evil are human terms, inapplicable to the universe, and that our tragedies are trivial things in the perspective of eternity.

If the soul is pure spirit, how can enthusiasm warm the body, or fever in the body disturb the processes of the mind? All organisms have evolved out of one original germ, through the reciprocal action of organism and environment.

Belief in God, said Diderot, is bound up with submission to autocracy; the two rise and fall together; and “men will never be free till the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

Diderot’s comrades abandoned him; but he worked on angrily, invigorated by his rage. “I know nothing so indecent,” he said, “as these vague declamations of the theologians against reason. To hear them one would suppose that men could not enter into the bosom of Christianity except

as a herd of cattle enters a stable.”

Diderot did not suspect that the erotic and neurotic Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), whom he had just introduced to Paris, was carrying in his head, or in his heart, the seeds of a revolution against this enthronement of reason; a revolution which, armed with the impressive obscurities of Immanuel Kant, would soon capture every citadel of philosophy.

He tells a story of “The Good Brahmin,” who says, “I wish I had never been born!” “Why so?” said I.

“Because,” he replied, “I have been studying these forty years, and I find that it has been so much time lost... I believe that I am composed of matter, but I have never been able to satisfy myself what it is that produces thought. I am even ignorant whether my understanding is a simple faculty like that of walking or digesting, or if I think with my head in the same manner as I take hold of a thing with my hands... I talk a great deal, and when I have done speaking I remain confounded and ashamed of what I have said.” The same day I had a conversation with an old woman, his neighbor. I asked her if she had ever been unhappy for not understanding how her soul was made? She did not even comprehend my question. She had not, for the briefest moment in her life, had a thought about these subjects with which the good Brahmin had so tormented himself. She believed in the bottom of her heart in the metamorphoses of Vishnu, and provided she could get some of the sacred water of the Ganges in which to make her ablutions, she thought herself the happiest of women. Struck with the happiness of this poor creature, I returned to my philosopher, whom I thus addressed: “Are you not ashamed to be thus miserable when, not fifty yards from you, there is an old automaton who thinks of nothing and lives contented?” “You are right,” he replied. “I have said to myself a thousand times that I should be happy if I were but as ignorant as my old neighbor; and yet it is a happiness which I do not d...

The aristocratic circles in which he moved agreed so readily with his point of view that there was no incentive to polemics; even the priests smiled with him over the difficulties of the faith, and cardinals considered whether, after all, they might not yet make him into a good Capuchin. What were the events that turned him from the polite persiflage of agnosticism to a bitter anti-clericalism which admitted no compromise, but waged relentless war to “crush the infamy” of ecclesiasticism?

In 1765 a young man by the name of La Barre, aged sixteen, was arrested on the charge of having mutilated crucifixes. Subjected to torture, he confessed his guilt; his head was cut off, and his body was flung into the flames, while the crowd applauded. A copy of Voltaire’s Philosophic Dictionary, which had been found on the lad, was burned with him.

When d’Alembert, disgusted equally with state, church and people, wrote that hereafter he would merely mock at everything, Voltaire answered, “This is not a time for jesting; wit does not harmonize with massacres... Is this the country of philosophy and pleasure? It is rather the country of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.”

do not let those who have sense be subjected to those who have none; and the generation which is being born will owe to us its reason and its liberty.”

Voltaire refused; and like another Cato, began to end all his letters with “Crush the infamy.”

“The man who says to me, ‘Believe as I do, or God will damn you,’ will presently say, ‘Believe as I do, or I shall assassinate you.’” “By what right could a being created free force another to think like himself?”166

No such perpetual peace as the Abbé de St.-Pierre had pleaded for could ever be realized unless men learned to tolerate one another’s philosophic, political and religious differences. The very first step towards social health was the destruction of the ecclesiastical power in which intolerance had its root.

Voltaire writes so well that one does not realize that he is writing philosophy. He said of himself, overmodestly, “I express myself clearly enough: I am like the little brooks, which are transparent because they are not deep.”

He began with a “higher criticism” of the authenticity and reliability of the Bible; he takes much of his material from Spinoza, more of it from the English Deists, most of it from the Critical Dictionary of Bayle (1647–1706); but how brilliant and fiery their material becomes in his hands!

One pamphlet is called “The Questions of Zapata,” a candidate for the priesthood; Zapata asks, innocently, “How shall we proceed to show that the Jews, whom we burn by the hundred, were for four thousand years the chosen people of God?”

Voltaire likes to trace Christian dogmas and rites to Greece, Egypt and India, and thinks that these adaptations were not the least cause of the success of Christianity in the ancient world.

Under the article on “Religion” he asks, slyly, “After our own holy religion, which doubtless is the only good one, what religion would be the least objectionable?”—and he proceeds to describe a faith and worship directly opposed to the Catholicism of his day.

“Christianity must be divine,” he says, in one of his most unmeasured sallies, “since it has lasted 1,700 years despite the fact that it...

“the first divine was the first rogue who met the first fool.”

Let it not be supposed from all this that Voltaire was quite without religion. He decisively rejects atheism;169 so much so that some of the Encyclopedists turned against him, saying, “Voltaire is a bigot, he believes in God.” In “The Ignorant Philosopher” he reasons towards Spinozist pantheism, but then recoils from it as almost atheism.

He writes to Diderot: I confess that I am not at all of the opinion of Saunderson, who denies a God because he was born sightless. I am, perhaps, mistaken; but in his place I should recognize a great Intelligence who had given me so many substitutes for sight; and perceiving, on reflection, the wonderful relations between all things, I should have suspected a Workman infinitely able. If it is very presumptuous to divine what He is, and why He has made everything that exists, so it seems to me very presumptuous to deny that He exists. I am exceedingly anxious to meet and talk with you, whether you think yourself one of His works, or a particle drawn, of necessity, from eternal and necessary matter. Whatever you are, you are a worthy part of that great whole which I do not understand.

To Holbach he points out that the very title of his book, the System of Nature, indicates a divine organizing intelligence. On the other hand he stoutly denies miracles and the supernatural efficacy of prayer:

I believe not that a particular Providence changes the economy of the world for your sparrow.”

“His Sacred Majesty, Chance, decides everything.”172 True prayer lies not in asking for a violation of natural law but in the acceptance of natural law as the unchangeable will of God.

Similarly, he denies free will.173 As to the soul he is an agnostic: “Four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is.”174 Being an old man, he would like to believe in immortality, but he finds it difficult.

A child dies in its mother’s womb, just at the moment when it has received a soul. Will it rise again foetus, or boy, or man? To rise again—to be the same person that you were—you must have your memory perfectly fresh and present; for it is memory that makes your identity. If your memory be lost, how will you be the same man?175... Why do mankind flatter themselves that they alone are gifted with a spiritual and immortal principle?... Perhaps from their inordinate vanity. I am persuaded that if a peacock could speak he would boast of his soul, and would affirm that it inhabited his magnificent tail.

In later days he changed his mind. He came to feel that belief in God has little moral value unless accompanied by belief in an immortality of punishment and reward.