A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson
24. Over all of these men, and even in some measure over Voltaire,
1752 words | Chapter 229
Diderot (1713-1784) stands pre-eminent, on retrospect, for variety
of power and depth and subtlety of thought; though for these very
reasons, as well as because some of his most masterly works were never
printed in his lifetime, he was less of a recognized popular force
than some of his friends. In his own mental history he reproduces the
course of the French thought of his time. Beginning as a deist, he
assailed the contemporary materialists; in the end, with whatever of
inconsistency, he was emphatically an atheist and a materialist. One
of his most intimate friends was Damilaville, of whom Voltaire speaks
as a vehement anti-theist; [1100] and his biographer Naigeon, who at
times overstated his positions but always revered him, was the most
zealous atheist of his day. [1101]
Compare, as to Diderot's position, Soury's contention (p. 577)
that we shall never make an atheist and a materialist out of
"this enthusiastic artist, this poet-pantheist" (citing Rosenkranz
in support), with his own admissions, pp. 589-90, and with Lord
Morley's remarks, pp. 33, 401, 418. See also Lange, i, 310 sq.;
ii, 63 (Eng. tr. ii, 32, 256). In the affectionate éloge of his
friend Meister (1786) there is an express avowal that "it had been
much to be desired for the reputation of Diderot, perhaps even for
the honour of his age, that he had not been an atheist, or that he
had been so with less zeal." The fact is thus put beyond reasonable
doubt. In the Correspondance Littéraire of Grimm and Diderot, under
date September 15, 1765 (vii, 366), there is a letter in criticism
of Descartes, thoroughly atheistic in its reasoning, which is
almost certainly by Diderot. And if the criticism of Voltaire's
Dieu, above referred to (p. 231), be not by him, he was certainly
in entire agreement with it, as with Grimm in general. Rosenkranz
finally (ii, 421) sums up that "Diderot war als Atheist Pantheist,"
which is merely a way of saying that he was scientifically monistic
in his atheism. Lange points out in this connection (i, 310) that
the Hegelian schema of philosophic evolution, "with its sovereign
contempt for chronology," has wrought much confusion as to the
real developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
It is recorded that Diderot's own last words in serious conversation
were: "The beginning of philosophy is incredulity"; and it may
be inferred from his writings that his first impulses to searching
thought came from his study of Montaigne, who must always have been
for him one of the most congenial of spirits. [1102] At an early stage
of his independent mental life we find him turning to the literature
which in that age yielded to such a mind as his the largest measure
both of nutriment and stimulus--the English. In 1745 he translated
Shaftesbury's Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit; and he must have
read with prompt appreciation the other English freethinkers then
famous. Ere long, however, he had risen above the deistical plane of
thought, and grappled with the fundamental issues which the deists
took for granted, partly because of an innate bent to psychological
analysis, partly because he was more interested in scientific problems
than in scholarly research. The Pensées philosophiques, published
in 1746, really deserve their name; and though they exhibit him as
still a satisfied deist, and an opponent of the constructive atheism
then beginning to suggest itself, they contain abstract reasonings
sufficiently disturbing to the deistic position. [1103] The Promenade
du Sceptique (written about 1747, published posthumously) goes further,
and presents tentatively the reply to the design argument which was
adopted by Hume.
In its brilliant pages may be found a conspectus of the intellectual
life of the day, on the side of the religious problem. Every type
of thinker is there tersely characterized--the orthodox, the deist,
the atheist, the sheer skeptic, the scoffer, the pantheist, the
solipsist, and the freethinking libertine, the last figuring as
no small nuisance to the serious unbeliever. So drastic is the
criticism of orthodoxy that the book was unprintable in its day;
[1104] and it was little known even in manuscript. But ere long there
appeared the Letter on the Blind, for the use of those who see (1749),
in which a logical rebuttal alike of the ethical and the cosmological
assumptions of theism, developed from hints in the Pensées, is put
in the mouth of the blind English mathematician, Sanderson. It is not
surprising that whereas the Pensées had been, with some other books,
ordered by the Paris Parlement to be burnt by the common hangman,
the Lettre sur les Aveugles led to his arrest and an imprisonment
of six months [1105] in the Château de Vincennes. Both books had of
course been published without licence; [1106] but the second book was
more than a defiance of the censorship: it was a challenge alike to
the philosophy and the faith of Christendom; and as such could not
have missed denunciation. [1107]
But Diderot was not the kind of man to be silenced by menaces. In
the famous Sorbonne thesis of the Abbé de Prades (1751) he probably
had, as we have seen, some share; and when De Prades was condemned
and deprived of his licence (1752) Diderot wrote the third part of
the Apologie (published by De Prades in Holland), which defended his
positions; and possibly assisted in the other parts. [1108] The hand
of Diderot perhaps may be discovered in the skilful allusions to the
skeptical Demonstratio Evangelica of Huet, which De Prades professes
to have translated when at his seminary, seeking there the antidote
to the poison of the deists. The entire handling of the question of
pagan and Christian miracles, too, suggests the skilled dialectician,
though it is substantially an adaptation of Leslie's Short and Easy
Method with the Deists. The alternate eulogy and criticism of Locke
are likely to be his, as is indeed the abundant knowledge of English
thought shown alike in the thesis and in the Apologie. Whether he
wrote the passage which claims to rebut an argument in his own Pensées
philosophiques [1109] is surely doubtful. But his, certainly, is the
further reply to the pastoral of the Jansenist Bishop of Auxerre
against de Prades's thesis, in which the perpetual disparagement
of reason by Catholic theologians is denounced [1110] as the most
injurious of all procedures against religion. And his, probably,
is the peroration [1111] arraigning the Jansenists and imputing to
their fanaticism and superstition, their miracle-mongering and their
sectarian bitterness, the discredit which among thinking men had
latterly fallen upon Church and creed alike. [1112]
De Prades, who in his thesis and Apologie had always professed to be a
believing Christian, was not a useful recruit to rationalism. Passing
from Holland to Berlin, he was there appointed, through the influence
of Voltaire, reader and amanuensis to the King, [1113] who in 1754
arranged for him an official reconciliation with the Church. A formal
retractation was sent to the Pope, the Sorbonne, and the Bishop of
Montauban; [1114] and Frederick in due course presented him to a
Catholic canonry at Glogau. In 1757, however, he was put under arrest
on the charge, it is commonly said, of supplying military information
to his countrymen; [1115] and thereafter, returning to France in 1759,
he obtained a French benefice. Diderot, who was now a recognized
champion of freethought, turned away with indignation. [1116]
Thenceforward he never faltered on his path. It is his peculiar
excellence to be an original and innovating thinker not only in
philosophy but in psychology, in æsthetics, in ethics, in dramatic
art; and his endless and miscellaneous labours in the Encyclopédie,
of which he was the most loyal and devoted producer, represent an
extraordinary range of interests. He suffered from his position as a
hack writer and as a forced dissembler in his articles on religious
matters; and there is probably a very real connection between his
compulsory insincerities [1117] in the Encyclopédie--to say nothing
of the official prosecution of that and of others of his works--and
his misdeeds in the way of indecent fiction. When organized society
is made to figure as the heartless enemy of thinking men, it is no
great wonder if they are careless at times about the effect of their
writings on society. But it stands to his lasting honour that his
sufferings at the hands of priests, printers, and parlements never
soured his natural goodness of heart. [1118] Having in his youth known
a day's unrelieved hunger, he made a vow that he would never refuse
help to any human being; and, says his daughter, no vow was ever more
faithfully kept. No one in trouble was ever turned away from his door;
and even his enemies were helped when they were base enough to beg of
him. It seems no exaggeration to say that the bulk of his life was
given to helping other people; and the indirect effect of his work,
which is rather intellectually disinterested than didactic, is no
less liberative and humanitarian. "To do good, and to find truth,"
were his mottoes for life.
His daughter, Madame de Vandeul, who in her old age remained
tranquilly divided between the religion instilled into her by her
pious mother and the rationalism she had gathered from her father and
his friends, testified, then, to his constant goodness in the home;
[1119] and his father bore a similar testimony, contrasting him
with his pious brother. [1120] He was, in his way, as beneficent as
Voltaire, without Voltaire's faults of private malice; and his life's
work was a great ministry of light. It was Goethe who said of him in
the next generation that "whoever holds him or his doings cheaply is
a Philistine." His large humanity reaches from the planes of expert
thought to that of popular feeling; and while by his Letter on the
Blind he could advance speculative psychology and pure philosophy,
he could by his tale The Nun (La Religeuse, [1121] written about
1760, published 1796) enlist the sympathies of the people against
the rule of the Church. It belonged to his character to be generously
appreciative of all excellence; he delighted in other men's capacity as
in pictures and poetry; and he loved to praise. At a time when Bacon
and Hobbes were little regarded in England he made them newly famous
throughout Europe by his praises. In him was realized Bacon's saying,
Admiratio semen scientiae, in every sense, for his curiosity was as
keen as his sensibility.
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