History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion

by Adam Storey Farrar

Such was the character of the man, and of the efforts which he directed to the injury of revelation. It has been said[536] that to obliterate his influence from the history of the eighteenth century would be to produce a greater difference than the absence of any other individual in it would occasion; and would be similar to the omission of Luther from the sixteenth. The analogy, though startling, is true in the particulars which it is intended to illustrate. The influence of each was European in his respective century; and the doctrine acted not only on the world of thought, but of action.

We have described Voltaire alone; not because he was isolated by any interval of time from a general movement, but because his attack is more rudimentary, being directed rather to disintegrate Christianity than dogmatically to affirm unbelief. He was perhaps rather logically prior to the others than chronologically; being really connected with two bodies of men, which formed the centres of two infidel movements, the one in Paris, the other at the court of Frederick at Berlin.

Frederick the Great surrounded himself with [pg 177] French literary men.[537] They were mostly persons who were exiles from France to escape persecution for their opinions, who had first found a refuge in Holland, and thence endeavoured by means of the Dutch booksellers to introduce their writings into France. From about 1740-60 several such teachers of infidelity were invited to the Prussian court, and dispersed their influence in Germany; the effects of which we shall subsequently find. One of them was the physician La Mettrie,[538] who wrote works on physiology marked by a low materialism. Such also was De Prades,[539] and more especially D'Argens.[540] The latter, struck with the force of “the Persian Letters” of Montesquieu, threw his doubts into an epistolary form, “the Jewish Letters;” in which the traditional opinions and ruling systems of the time were attacked with great freedom. He translated also some ancient works to serve his purpose, especially the fragments of the abusive work of the emperor Julian against Christianity, written in favour of the state religion of the Greeks and Romans.

While this was the character of some of the Frenchmen at the court of Frederick, whom Voltaire subsequently joined; men who, imbued with the most extravagant form of the philosophy of sensation, verged upon materialism; there were coteries of literary persons in Paris, which were the rallying point of sceptical minds, and centres of irreligious influence.

The existence of them is due in part to the altered position already named which literature assumed in reference to the court during the regency. Instead of being fostered, it was discouraged; and Fleury manifested an almost puritan spirit, and has left on record the [pg 178] expression of his alarm at the growing sceptical tone of literary works, and the imitation of the English spirit. Owing accordingly to the absence of patronage, and to the lavishment of those favours on extravagance which the elder Louis had bestowed on the fostering of intellect, literature became disjoined from court influences; and hence there grew up small centres of literary influence, analogous to those preceding the times of Louis XIV,[541] and nuclei for intellectual movement, where of old the various bodies had all moved round one central sun.

It would be irrelevant to enter into the details of these coteries. ([23]) Some were simply of fashion and taste; but others were undoubtedly gatherings of powerful thinkers, imbued with infidel principles, whose character belongs to French literature and the mental and moral culture of the time. One of the most remarkable of these coteries included names noted in French literature, such as Voltaire, Diderot, D'Alembert,[542] D'Holbach, Marmontel,[543] Helvetius, Grimm,[544] St. Lambert,[545] and Raynal.[546] We must notice some of them in detail, in order at once to appreciate the character of their works, and to illustrate the relation of their unbelief to the philosophy which they adopted.[547]

Diderot,[548] next to Voltaire, was the most able of the infidel writers, and greatly superior to the other members of the same class. His history is one of those narratives of struggle and suffering which so often have been the lot of men of letters. Those who have been the teachers of the world have too often been also its martyrs. The great peculiarity of Diderot, as of Johnson, was his encyclopædic knowledge, and his versatility in comprehending a variety of subjects. Less critical than Voltaire, and less philosophical than Rousseau, he exceeded both as the practical teacher. But in unbelief he unhappily advanced farther than either; his temper lacked moral earnestness; and in later life he was an atheist. A growth of unbelief may be traced in him: at first he was a doubter, next he became a deist, lastly an atheist. In the first stage he only translated English works, and even condemned some of the English deists. His views seem gradually to have altered, probably under the influence of Voltaire's writings, and of the infidel books smuggled into France; and he thenceforth assumed a tone bolder and marked by positive disbelief. In 1746 he wrote his Pensées Philosophiques, intended to be placed in opposition to the Pensées of Pascal. Pascal, by a series of sceptical propositions, had hoped to establish the necessity of revelation. Diderot tried by the same method to show that this revelation must be untrue.[549] The first portion of the propositions[550] bore upon philosophy and natural [pg 180] religion, but at length he came to weaken the proofs for the truth of Christianity, and controverted miracles, and the truth of any system which reposes on miracles; yet even in this work he did not evince the atheism which he subsequently avowed. It was soon after the imprisonment in which he was involved by this book, that he projected the plan of the magnificent work, the Encyclopédie, or universal dictionary of human knowledge. Its object however was not only literary, but also theological; for it was designed to circulate among all classes new modes of thinking, which should be opposed to all that was traditionary. Voltaire's unbelief was merely destructive: this was reconstructive and systematic. The religion of this great work was deism: the philosophy of it was sensationalist and almost materialist; seeming hardly to allow the existence of anything but mechanical beings. Soul was absorbed in body; the inner world in the outer;—a tendency fostered by physics. It was the view of things taken by the scientific mind, and lacks the poetical and feeling elements of nature—a true type of the cold and mechanical age which produced it. Diderot's atheism is a still further development of his unbelief. It is expressed in few of his writings, and presents no subject of interest to us; save that it seeks to invalidate the arguments for the being of a God, drawn from final causes. It has been well observed, that the lesson to be derived from him[551] is, that the mechanical view of the world is essentially atheistic; that whosoever will admit no means of discovering God but common logic, cannot find him. Diderot's unbelief may be considered to embody that which resulted from the abuse at once of erudition, physical science, and the sensational theory in metaphysics.

Among the band of friends who from connexion with the Encyclopædia acquired the name of Encyclopædists, was also Helvetius.[552] He was the moralist of [pg 181] the sensational philosophy, one of those who applied the philosophy of Condillac to morals. Each man's tastes are so far affected by circumstances, that it is possible that Helvetius's exclusive association with the selfish circles of the French society, which never lived for the good of others, together with the perception of the hollowness of the respect which persons paid him for his wealth and influence, led him to regard self-love as the sole motive of conduct. His philosophy is expressed in two works;[553] the one on the spirit, the other on man: the former a theoretical view of human nature, the latter a practical view of education and society. His primary position is, that man owes all his superiority over animals to the superior organization of his body. Starting from this point, he argues that all minds are originally equal, and owe their variation to circumstances;[554] that all their faculties and emotions are derivable from sensation; that pleasure is the only good, and self-interest the true ground of morals and the framework of individual and political right.[555]

If in Diderot we have met with atheism, and in Helvetius with the selfish theory of morals; in the author of “the System of Nature” we meet with utter materialism, and the two former evils as corollaries from it. This work, which was published about 1774, though bearing a different author's name on the title, was probably the work of D'Holbach,[556] aided by Diderot and Helvetius, [pg 182] and other members of the society which met at D'Holbach's house. It is a work of unquestionable talent and eloquence, in which materialism, fatalism, and atheism, combine to form a view of human nature which even Voltaire is said to have denounced.

The grand object of this work being to show that there is no God, the first part is occupied by the most rigorous materialism, and is designed to prove that there is no such thing as mind, nothing beyond the material fabric,[557] which is maintained by simple and invariable laws; and that the soul is a mode of organism,[558] the mere action of the body under different functions. The freedom of the will[559] and immortality[560] are accordingly denied. The first part having been directed to disprove the existence of mind, the second part is designed against religion. The author attributes the idea which man has formed of a first Cause to fear,[561] generated through suffering; and attempts to show the insufficiency of the à priori argument in favour of a God,[562] omitting the consideration of the arguments derived from final causes. Nature becomes in his scheme a machine; man an organism; morality self-interest; deity a fiction.