FRANÇOIS AROUET VOLTAIRE
Born in Paris in 1694, died in 1778; his original name Arouet; educated at the College of Louis-le-Grand; exiled because of his freedom of speech; twice imprisoned in the Bastille; resided in England in 1726-29; went to Prussia at the invitation of Frederick the Great in 1750, remaining three years, the friendship ending in bitter enmity; wrote in Prussia his "Le Siècle de Louis XIV"; settled at Geneva in 1756, and two years later at Ferney, where he lived until his death in 1778; visited Paris in 1778, being received with great honors; his works very numerous, one edition comprizing seventy-two volumes.
I
OF BACON'S GREATNESS[40]
Not long since the trite and frivolous question following was debated in a very polite and learned company, viz., Who was the greatest man, Cæsar, Alexander, Tamerlane, Cromwell, etc.?
Somebody answered that Sir Isaac Newton excelled them all. The gentleman's assertion was very just; for if true greatness consists in having received from heaven a mighty genius, and in having employed it to enlighten our own mind and that of others, a man like Sir Isaac Newton, whose equal is hardly found in a thousand years, is the truly great man. And those politicians and conquerors (and all ages produce some) were generally so many illustrious wicked men. That man claims our respect who commands over the minds of the rest of the world by the force of truth, not those who enslave their fellow creatures; he who is acquainted with the universe, not they who deface it.
The most singular and the best of all his pieces is that which, at this time, is the most useless and the least read. I mean his "Novum Scientiarum Organum." This is the scaffold with which the new philosophy was raised; and when the edifice was built, part of it, at least the scaffold was no longer of service.
Lord Bacon was not yet acquainted with nature, but then he knew, and pointed out the several paths that lead to it. He had despised in his younger years the thing called philosophy in the universities, and did all that lay in his power to prevent those societies of men instituted to improve human reason from depraving it by their quiddities, their horrors of the vacuum, their substantial forms, and all those impertinent terms which not only ignorance had rendered venerable, but which had been made sacred by their being ridiculously blended with religion.