The New Spirit / Third Edition

by Havelock Ellis

Everything that Diderot touched he vitalized. There were few things that he left untouched. There were very few roads of modern life on which he was not an enthusiastic and often audacious pioneer. He seems to have known instinctively the things that we are laboriously learning. So it is with politics, sexual morality, various social and politico-economical questions, education, philosophy. He touched all the social questions which absorb our attention to-day. He approached the problem of the place of the workers in society in the same temper in which we approach it to-day, and the practical knowledge of industries and industrial life which he had obtained in order to write some of his most remarkable articles in the “Encyclopædia” gave him some right to be heard.

His views on education, chiefly expressed in the “Plan d’une Université pour le Gouvernement de Russie,” are on a level with the most advanced views to-day. The education he demands is free and compulsory, and he is in favour of giving children free meals at school. He censures classical teaching, advocates professional education and instruction in the natural sciences, “the study of things rather than the study of words.” “I think,” he says, “that we should give in our schools something of all the knowledge necessary to a citizen, from legislation to the mechanical arts, and in these mechanical arts I include the occupations of the lowest class of citizens. The spectacle of human industry is in itself large and satisfying, and it is good to know the different ways in which each contributes to the advantages of society. This kind of knowledge is attractive to children, who are naturally inquisitive.” Certainly, from more than one point of view, such an element in education would have an important social significance.

Of the functions and position of women—in most countries, he remarks, that of idiot children—he speaks often, shrewdly indeed, yet with peculiar sympathy. The most important expression of his opinions on sexual morality is contained in the “Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville.” Bougainville, the first Frenchman to sail round the world, had visited the lovely island of Tahiti, and brought back a strange and vivid picture of the idyllic innocence and frank license that existed there. Diderot was aroused to set forth his views on sexual questions with that union of fiery enthusiasm, uncompromising thoroughness, and saving grace of humorous good sense which always characterizes him. He imagines a dialogue between the chaplain of Bougainville’s expedition and Orou, a Tahitian, who is anxious to know why the chaplain refuses to conform to the customs of the country. The worthy chaplain represents the morality of civilized Europe, and Orou, with a few questions concerning this morality, easily succeeds in confounding him and in pouring keen ridicule on the inconsistencies of European morals. With reference to rules of conduct which vary with the country and the time, Diderot makes Orou say, “We must have a surer rule, and what shall this rule be? Do you know any other than the good of the community and the advantage of the individual?” “You were unhappy,” he remarks again to the chaplain, “when I presented to you last night my two daughters and my wife; you exclaimed, ‘But my religion! my office!’ Do you wish to know what in every time and place is good and bad? Concern yourself with the nature of things and of actions, and with your relations to your fellows. Consider the influence of your conduct on yourself and on the community. You are mad if you think that there is anything in the universe, above or below, which can add to or take from the laws of nature.” That rule, he explains, is the polar star on the path of life, and the invention of crimes, punishments, and remorse will only obscure it. “In founding morality on the relationships which must always exist between men, the religious law becomes perhaps superfluous; and the civil law should only be the enunciation of the law of nature, which we bear engraved on our hearts, and which must always be the strongest.” At the end Diderot intervenes with a counsel of moderation and practical wisdom: “What shall we do, then? We will protest against foolish laws until they are reformed: meanwhile we will submit. He who by his private authority breaks a bad law, authorizes others to break good laws. There is less inconvenience in being mad with the mad than in being wise by oneself. Let us say to ourselves, let us proclaim incessantly, that shame, punishment, and ignominy have been attached to actions which in themselves are innocent. But do not let us commit them; for shame, punishment, and ignominy are themselves the worst of evils.”

“Every century has its own spirit; that of ours seems to be liberty.” So in 1776, when men were beginning to say that it was time to burn philosophers instead of their books, and a boy of eighteen was actually burned, Diderot wrote to Voltaire, in the famous letter in which he announced that in spite of all he would stay in Paris, among the enemies of liberty, to carry on his own mission. Timidity in political matters was excusable in Diderot’s day, and existed even among the men of his own set. Helvetius, for instance, advocated the advantages of paternal government and benevolent despotism; with his usual keen and vigorous good sense, Diderot shows how unreal these advantages are. When we give a ruler absolute power to do good, we cannot prevent him assuming also an absolute power to do evil. Moreover, as Diderot insisted, it is not possible to make people good against their wills, nor is it desirable to treat men like sheep. “If they say, ‘We are well enough here,’ or if, even, they say, ‘We are not well here, but we will stay,’ let us try to enlighten them, to undeceive them, to bring them to saner views by persuasion, but never by force.” “The arbitrary government of a just and enlightened prince is always bad.” He insists, again and again, that we must never let our pretended masters do good to us against our wills. “Whenever you see the sovereign authority in a country extending beyond the region of police, you may say that that country is badly governed.” Diderot, Goethe, Adam Smith, Beccaria, Mill, to mention but a few typical names, threw all the weight of their influence, sometimes with passionate emphasis, on the side of individuality and freedom, and their teaching reached its final consecration when Darwin accepted as his central theory the fruitful idea of Malthus. They felt, and rightly felt, that they were taking the step that was most needed. Those who advocated solidarity and social co-operation mostly went to the wall. Now it is the turn of the social instincts, and we must expect them to work themselves out to the utmost. We have to see to it that the truth to which Diderot and the rest fought their way is not meanwhile lost. The general will is itself to-day in danger of becoming a benevolent despotism, and perhaps the time will never arrive when such warnings as these will be quite out of date. When it is a question of the oppression of our fellows, we cannot always afford to wait until the offender listens to the voice of persuasion; him, at least, we must bring within “the region of police:” beyond that lies danger.

“Et si j’ai quelque volonté,

C’est que chacun fasse la sienne.”

So Diderot wrote in some impromptu verses at a convivial gathering over which he once presided; it was a summary of his views on many matters. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that there can be no true happiness for the human race except in a social state in which there is neither king nor magistrate, nor priest nor laws, nor meum nor tuum, nor property in goods or land, nor vices nor virtues.” This is the anarchism that stands at the end of all social progress, but as an attainable social state it is still certainly, as Diderot adds, “diablement idéal.” He had no faith in moralization by Act of Parliament. “There will then be prostitutes?—Assuredly.—Mistresses?—Why not?—Girls seduced?—I expect there will.—Husbands and wives not always faithful?—I fear so. But at least,” he adds, “I shall be spared all those vices which misery, luxury, and poverty produce. The rest may be as it will be.”

Diderot’s robust faith in nature, that finest fruit of the scientific spirit, comes out again and again, here and elsewhere. “The evil-doer is one whom we must destroy, not punish”: that is the great truth, held by a large number of the foremost men to-day, which is not even yet accepted. “Never to repent and never to reproach others: these are the first steps to wisdom.” And, again: “In the best and most happily constituted man there remains always much of the animal; before becoming a misanthrope, consider whether you have the right.” Not many men have had so much reason as Diderot for becoming misanthropic; few men have had in them less of the misanthrope. “My life is not stolen from me,” he writes; “I give it.... A pleasure which is for myself alone touches me slightly. It is for myself and for my friends that I read, that I reflect, that I write, that I meditate, that I hear, that I observe, that I feel.... I have consecrated to them the use of all my senses, and that is perhaps the reason why everything is a little enriched in my imagination and conversation; sometimes they reproach me, ungrateful as they are. Ungrateful! would I could make hundreds ungrateful every day!” He never seems to waver in his faith in men, nor in the determination, with which, indeed, that faith must ever be bound up, to look every fact of nature squarely in the face. The words with which his letters to Sophie Voland close seem to be the constant refrain throughout all his work: “There is nothing good in this world but that which is true.”

It cannot be said that Diderot performed any one great and paramount achievement. The most brilliant of his fragments—the “Rêve de d’Alembert” or “Le Neveu de Rameau”—is but a magnificent improvisation. He made no memorable contribution to our knowledge of the world. Nor was his genius of what may be called the wedge-shaped order—the genius of the man who, with every nerve strained to the solution of one mystery, never rests until the heart of it is cloven. His genius was essentially fermentative. He knew by a native instinct every promising germ of thought, and he knew how to make it fruitful. He was, as Voltaire called him, Pantophile, the man who loved and was interested in everything. His extreme sensitiveness to impressions was the source of his strength and of his weakness. In his sane, massive, and yet so sensitive temperament, aspirations keen and lyrical as Shelley’s seem to blend harmoniously with laughter broad and tolerant as Rabelais’s. The latent elements in him of fantastic extravagance were held in check by a bourgeois good sense in which we seem to recognize the shrewd old cutler of Langres. There is a profound democratic instinct in him; his never-failing faith in nature and man seems to be a part of this; it is a faith that may possibly be foolish, but for all those who are born men it is the most reasonable faith, and it has commended itself most to those who have been oftenest disillusioned.

There can be no doubt that the immediate effect of the Revolution of 1789 was to kill the spirit that Diderot represented—the spirit of scientific advance, active even to audacity, and allied with a firm faith in man and in social development. The party of progress were not able to recognize progress in the form of the Revolution, and the more obviously dominating movement of the century that is now closing has been the Counter-Revolution, corresponding in many respects to that Counter-Reformation which dominated Catholic countries during the seventeenth century. Putting aside a few stray enthusiasts, like Shelley or Owen, attractive personalities with little grasp of practical life, the men who have directed European thought, especially in England, have been men whose imaginations were profoundly impressed, and their mental equilibrium considerably disturbed, by that brief convulsion of France; and they developed a curious timidity and distrust, visible even when they had the courage to adopt a short-sighted optimism. It is very interesting now to turn back to the essay in which Carlyle, perhaps the most brilliant and distinguished representative of the Counter-Revolution, recorded his estimate of Diderot. How curiously old-fashioned seem to us to-day its mitigated admiration, its vague mysticism, its sneers at Diderot’s loquacity, his generosity, his dyspepsia—sneers that, in the light of Carlyle’s own life, have aroused feelings of pain, and even indignation, among some who in their youth looked up to Carlyle as to a sort of venerable prophet—its absolute failure to perceive that here was a man not to be stifled by a handful of transcendental phraseology. Yet this was at the time accepted as an adequate and even generous account of the matter. To-day we are again in the same position as Diderot, and we are able to see in him the significance, hidden from Carlyle, of the light of science fearlessly brought to illuminate the whole of life.