Voltaire appears to have been satisfied with the design argument as proving a deity, though he considered speculation as to the nature of deity useless. He showed the Positivist spirit in his rejection of metaphysical subtleties. “When,” he writes, “we have well disputed over spirit and matter, we end ever by no advance. No philosopher has been able to raise by his own efforts the veil which nature has spread over the first principles of things.” Again: “I do not know the quo modo, true. I prefer to stop short rather than to lose myself.” Also: “Philosophy consists in stopping where physics fail us. I observe the effects of nature, but I confess I know no more than you do about first principles.” But a deist he ever remained.
Baron de Gleichen, who visited him in 1757, relates that a young author, at his wits’ end for the means of living, knocked one day at the poet’s door, and to recommend himself said: “I am an apprentice atheist at your service.” Voltaire replied: “I have the honor to be a master deist; but though our trades are opposed, I will give you some supper to-night and some work to-morrow. I wish to avail myself of your arms and not of your head.”
He thought both atheism and fanaticism inimical to society; but, said he, “the atheist, in his error, preserves reason, which cuts his claws, while those of the fanatic are sharpened in the incessant madness which afflicts him.”
Voltaire seems to have been at bottom agnostic holding on to the narrow ledge of theism and afraid to drop.
He says: “For myself, I am sure of nothing. I believe that there is an intelligence, a creative power, a God. I express an opinion to-day; I doubt of it to-morrow; the day after I repudiate it. All honest philosophers have confessed to me, when they were warmed with wine, that the great Being has not given to them one particle more evidence than to me.” He believed in the immortality of the soul, yet expresses himself dubiously, saying to Madame du Deffand that he knew a man who believed that when a bee died it ceased to hum. That man was himself.
On the appearance, however, in 1770 of the Baron d’Holbach’s System of Nature—in which he was very considerably helped by Diderot—Voltaire took alarm at its openly pronounced atheism. “The book,” he wrote,
“has made all the philosophers execrable in the eyes of the King and his court. Through this fatal work philosophy is lost for ever in the eyes of all magistrates and fathers of families.” He accordingly took in hand to combat its atheism, which he does in the article Dieu in the Philosophical Dictionary, and in his History of Jenni (Johnny), a lad supposed to be led on a course of vice by atheism and reclaimed to virtue by the design argument. Voltaire’s real attitude seems fairly expressed in his celebrated mot: “S’il n’y avait pas un dieu, il fraudrait l’inventer”—“If there was not a God it would be necessary to invent one,” which, Morin remarks, was exactly what had been done. Morley says: “It was not the truth of the theistic belief in itself that Voltaire prized, but its supposed utility as an assistant to the police.”
[THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA]
Voltaire was a great stimulator of the French Encyclopædia, a work designed to convey to the many the information of the few. Here again the inspiration was English. It was the success of the Cyclopcedia of Arts and Sciences, edited by the Freethinker Ephraim Chambers, in 1728, which suggested the yet more famous work carried out by Diderot and D’Alembert, with the assistance of such men as Helvetius, Buffon, Turgot, and Condorcet. Voltaire took an ardent interest in the work, and contributed many important articles. The leading contributors were all Freethinkers, but they were under the necessity of advancing their ideas in a tentative way on account of the vigilant censorship. Voltaire not only wrote for the Encyclopædia, but gave valuable hints and suggestions to Diderot and D’Alembert, as well as much sound advice. He cautioned them, for instance, against patriotic bias. “Why,” he asks D’Alembert, “do you say that the sciences are more indebted to France than to any other nation? Is it to the French that we are indebted for the quadrant, the fire-engine, the theory of light, inoculation, the seed-sower? Parbleu! you are jesting! We have invented only the wheelbarrow.”
Voltaire wrote the section on History. The first page contained a Voltairean definition of sacred history which even an ignorant censor could hardly be expected to pass. “Sacred History is a series of operations, divine and miraculous, by which it pleased God formerly to conduct the Jewish nation, and to-day to exercise our faith.” The iron hand beneath the velvet glove was too evident for this to pass the censorship. Vexatious delay and the enforced excision of important articles attended the progress of the work.