But if it is easy to refute Helvetius, it is impossible to criticise him with more brilliancy and eloquence than Diderot has done. With what perfection of reason he restores to nature, to innate and irresistible inclinations, the influence which Helvetius denies to them in the formation of character!
“The accidents of Helvetius,” he says, “are like the spark which sets on fire a cask of wine, and which is extinguished in a bucket of water.”
“For thousands of centuries the dew of heaven has fallen on the rocks without making them fertile. The sown fields await it in order to become productive, but it is not the dew that scatters the seed. Accidents themselves no more produce anything, than the pick of the laborer who delves in the mines of Golconda produces the diamond that it brings to the surface.”
Doubtless education has a more radical effect than that which is attributed to it by La Bruyère when he said that “it touches only the surface of the soul.” But if it can do much, it cannot do all. It perfects if it is good; it deadens and it perverts if it is bad; but it can never be a substitute for lacking aptitude, and can never replace nature.
362. Secularized Instruction.—In other parts of his system Helvetius is in accord with Diderot. Like him, he believes the necessary condition of progress in education is that it be made secular and entrusted to the civil power. The vices of education come from the opposition of the two powers, spiritual and temporal, that assume to direct it. Between the Church and the State there is an opposition of interests and views. The State would have the nation become brave, industrious, and enlightened. The Church demands a blind submission and unlimited credulity. Hence there is contradiction in pedagogical precepts, diversity in the means that are employed, and, consequently, an education that is hesitating, that is pulled in opposite directions, that does not know definitely where it is going, that misses its way, that gropes and wastes time.
But the conclusion of Helvetius is not as we might expect,—the separation of Church and State in the matter of instruction and education, such as recent laws have established in France. No; Helvetius would have the State absorb the Church, and have religious power and civil power lodged in the same hands and both belong to those who control the government,—a vexatious confusion that would end in the oppression of consciences.
Helvetius, whatever may be thought of him, does not deserve to claim our attention for any length of time, and we cannot seriously consider as an authority in pedagogy a writer who, in intellectual as in moral education, reduces everything to a single principle, the development and the satisfaction of physical sensibility.[189]
363. The Encyclopædists.—The vast collection which, under the name Encyclopédie, sums up the science and the philosophy of the eighteenth century, touches educational questions only in passing. Properly speaking, the Encyclopédie contains no system of pedagogy. The principal fragment is the article Éducation, written by the grammarian and Latinist Dumarsais.