Between these philosophers, in the local and temporary sense of the word, who dealt only with what would now be called the sociological side of philosophy in its bearings on politics, religion, ethics, and economics, and the strictly philosophical school of Condillac and his followers, a small but very influential sect of materialists, who were yet not purely philosophical materialists, has to be considered. Three members of this school have importance in literature—La Mettrie, Helvétius, and Holbach. La Mettrie was a native of Britanny: he entered the medical service of the French army, acquired a speedy reputation for heterodoxy and disorderly living, and fled for shelter to the general patron of heterodox Frenchmen, Frederick of Prussia; at whose court he died, at a comparatively early age, it is said in consequence of a practical joke. La Mettrie's chief work is a paradoxical exercise in materialist physics called L'Homme-Machine, in which he endeavours to prove the purely automatic working of the human frame, and the absence of any mind in the spiritualist sense. This he followed by a similar but less original work, called L'Homme-Plante, and by some other minor publications. La Mettrie was a very unequal thinker and writer, but he has, as Voltaire (who disliked him) expressed it, traits de flamme both in thought and style. Claude Adrian Helvétius was of Swiss descent, and of ample fortune. Born in 1715, he was appointed to the high post of Farmer-General when he was little more than twenty-three; but he did not hold this appointment very long, and became Chamberlain to the Queen. He was very popular in society, and was of a benevolent and philanthropic disposition, though he seems to have got into trouble at his country seat of Voré by excessive game preserving. He married, in 1751, the beautiful Mademoiselle de Ligneville, who was long afterwards one of the chief centres of literary society in Paris. In 1758 his book De l'Esprit appeared, and made a great sensation, being condemned as immoral, and burnt by the hangman. Helvétius subsequently travelled in England and Germany, dying in 1771. A second treatise, De l'Homme, which appeared posthumously, is much inferior to De l'Esprit in literary merit. It was even more fiercely assailed than its predecessor, and Diderot himself, the leader of the more active section of the philosophe party, wrote an elaborate refutation of it, which, however, has only recently been published. The book De l'Esprit is wanting in depth, and too anecdotic in style for a serious work of philosophy, though this very characteristic makes it all the more amusing reading. It endeavours to make out a theory of morals based on what is called the selfish system; and it was the naked manner in which this selfish system of ethics, and the materialist metaphysics which it implies, are manifested in the book which gave occasion to its ill repute. As a mere work of literature, however, it is well, and in parts even brilliantly written, and amid much that is desultory, inconclusive, and even demonstrably unsound, views of extreme shrewdness and originality on social abuses and inconsistencies are to be found.
Système de la Nature.
None of the writers hitherto mentioned made open profession of atheism, and it is doubtful whether even Diderot deserves the appellation of a consistent atheist. There was, however, a large anti-theistic school among the philosophes, which increased in numbers and strength towards the outbreak of the Revolution. The most striking work by far of this school (which included Damilaville, Naigeon, and a few other names of no great distinction in literature) was the Système de la Nature, which appeared in 1770. This remarkable book, which even Voltaire and Frederick II. set themselves seriously to refute, contains a complete materialist system in metaphysics and theology. It represents the existence of God as a mere creation of the superstition of men, unable to assign a cause for the evils under which they suffer, and inventing a supernatural entity to satisfy themselves. The book (to consider its literary style only) is extremely unequal, passages of remarkable vigour alternating with long and dreary tracts of inconclusive and monotonous declamation. It appeared under the name of a dead man, Mirabaud, a person of some slight and chiefly official name in science and letters. It is, however, believed, if not certainly known, to be the work of the Baron d'Holbach (who unquestionably wrote various other books of a similar tendency), with the assistance of divers of his friends, and especially of Diderot. The Système is a very singular production, animated by a kind of fanatical, and in parts almost poetical aspiration after the annihilation of all supernatural belief, which is hardly to be found elsewhere except in Lucretius. It had great influence, though that influence was one of repulsion as well as of conversion, and it may be said to be, up to the present day, the furthest step taken in the direction of philosophical as opposed to political Nihilism. It should, however, be observed that in parts there is a strong political tinge observable in it.
Condillac.
In all this century of so-called philosophy, France possessed hardly more than one really eminent and considerable metaphysician. This was Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, brother of the Abbé de Mably, who was born in 1715, and died in 1780. Condillac himself was an abbé, and possessing a sufficient benefice, he lived for the most part quietly upon it, and took no part in the political, or even the literary life of the times. In 1746 he published his Essai sur l'Origine des Connoissances Humaines; in 1749 his Traité des Systèmes, a work critical rather than constructive; and in 1754 the Traité des Sensations, his principal work, which completes his theory. The influence of Locke was the most powerful single influence in the philosophe movement of France, and Condillac took up Locke's work at exactly the point where his master had faltered. He set to work to show with great plausibility that, according to Lockeian principles, the addition of ideas of reflection to ideas of sensation is unsustainable, and that all ideas without exception are merely transformed sensations. One of the illustrations which he used to support his views, that of a statue supposed to be endowed with a single sense, and successively developing first the others, and then the powers usually classed as reflection, is famous in the history of philosophy. It concerns us only as giving an instance of the method of Condillac, which is remarkable for vividness and adaptation to the ordinary comprehension. Unlike the style of Locke himself, Condillac's style is not in the least slovenly, but polished and lucid, excellently suited to such a public as that of the eighteenth century, which was at once intelligent enough to understand, and educated enough to demand, finish of manner in discussing abstract points.
After Condillac the history of philosophy in France during the rest of the period is of no great interest to literature. He himself was continued and represented chiefly by Destutt de Tracy. The reaction against the extreme idealist and materialist constructions of Locke respectively, which had been brought about in England by Reid and Stewart, acquired in the last years of the eighteenth century, and the beginning of the nineteenth, a considerable following in France. Its chiefs were Maine de Biran, Royer Collard (who also obtained reputation as an orator and parliamentary politician), and Jouffroy. They belong, however, rather to the history of philosophy than to that of literature.
Joseph de Maistre.
After this long list of writers who advocated, more or less openly, revolution in matters political and religious, but especially in the latter, two authors who with Chateaubriand, but in a definitely philosophical manner, set the example of reaction, and who to a great extent indicated the lines which it was to follow, must be mentioned. These are Joseph de Maistre, and Louis de Bonald. Joseph, Count de Maistre, was born at Chambéry, in 1753, of a noble Savoyard family, which is said to have come originally from Languedoc. His father held important employments in the duchy, and Joseph himself entered its civil service. When, after the French Revolution, Savoy was invaded, and in a short time annexed, he returned to Lausanne, and there wrote Considérations sur la France, his first work of importance. For some years he was employed at Turin in the administration of such of his continental dominions as were left to the King of Sardinia; and then, after the practical annexation of Piedmont, he held a similar employ in the island of Sardinia itself. At the beginning of the present century, he was sent to St. Petersburg to plead the cause of his master. Here he remained till after the overthrow of Napoleon, and wrote, though he did not publish, most of his books. In 1816 he returned to Turin, and died a few years afterwards—in 1821. The three chief works of Joseph de Maistre are Du Pape, 1817, De l'Église Gallicane, and the unfinished Soirées de St. Pétersbourg. The two first compose a complete treatise on the power and position of the pope in relation both to the temporal and to the ecclesiastical form of national government. The author is the most uncompromising of ultramontanes. According to him the pope is the source of all authority on earth, and temporal princes are little more than his delegates. Except in relation to religious error, Joseph de Maistre is not hostile to a certain ordered measure of liberty accorded by their rulers to peoples and individuals. But, strongly impressed by the social and moral, as well as the political and religious anarchy brought about first by the philosophe movement, and then by the Revolution, he sees the only chance of rescue in the establishment of a hierarchy of government culminating in that from which there is no appeal, the single authority of the pope. He is thus a legitimist with a difference. The Soirées de St. Pétersbourg, which are unfinished and not entirely uniform in plan, deal nominally with the providential government of the world, but diverge to a large number of subjects. It is in this book that the author develops the kind of modified terrorism which is often, though not altogether justly, considered to be his chief characteristic, eulogising the executioner as the foundation of society.
Joseph de Maistre is unquestionably one of the greatest thinkers and writers of the eighteenth century. Paradoxical and strained as his system frequently appears, it is rigorously logical. An ordered theocracy seems to him the only polity capable of giving peace and true prosperity to the world, and he shapes all his theories so as to fit in with this central conception. On detached subjects his thoughts are always vigorous, and often strikingly original. His reading was great, and his skill in polemics of the very highest. No one possesses in larger measure the art of hostile criticism without descending to actual abuse. These merits of themselves imply purely literary accomplishments, clearness, distinctness, forcible expression, in a rare kind and degree. But Joseph de Maistre is more than this as a writer. He possesses, though he only occasionally exercises it, a brilliant faculty of rhetoric. His phrase is more than merely clear and forcible; it has a peculiar incisiveness and sharpness of outline which impress it on the memory, while, sparing as he is of ornament, his rare passages of description and fancy have great merit. The surest testimony to his value is the fact that, though both in his own day and since by far the larger number of writers and thinkers have held views more or less opposed to his, no one whose opinion is itself of the least importance has ever spoken of him without respect and even admiration. Those who, like Lamartine, qualify their admiration with a certain depreciation, show inability to recognise fully the beauty of strength undisguised by conventional elegance and grace of form.
Bonald.