SECTION I.
Write filosophy or philosophy as you please, but agree that as soon as it appears it is persecuted. Dogs to whom you present an aliment for which they have no taste, bite you. You will say that I repeat myself; but we must a hundred times remind mankind that the holy conclave condemned Galileo; and that the pedants who declared all the good citizens excommunicated who should submit to the great Henry IV., were the same who condemned the only truths which could be found in the works of Descartes.
All the spaniels of the theological kennel bark at one another, and all together at de Thou, la Mothe, Le Vayer, and Bayle. What nonsense has been written by little Celtic scholars against the wise Locke!
These Celts say that Cæsar, Cicero, Seneca, Pliny, and Marcus Aurelius, might be philosophers, but that philosophy is not permitted among the Celts. We answer that it is permitted and very useful among the French; that nothing has done more good to the English; and that it is time to exterminate barbarity. You reply that that will never come to pass. No; with the uninformed and foolish it will not; but with honest people the affair is soon concluded.
SECTION II.
One of the great misfortunes, as also one of the great follies, of mankind, is that in all countries which we call polished, except, perhaps, China, priests concern themselves with what belongs only to philosophers. These priests interfered with regulating the year; it was, they say, their right; for it was necessary that the people should know their holy days. Thus the Chaldæan, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman priests, believed themselves mathematicians and astronomers; but what mathematics and astronomy! Whoever makes a trade of quackery cannot have a just and enlightened mind. They were astrologers, and never astronomers.
The Greek priests themselves first made the year to consist only of three hundred and sixty days. Their geometricians must have informed them that they were deceived by five days and more. They, therefore, corrected their year. Other geometricians further showed them that they were deceived by six hours. Iphitus obliged them to change their Greek almanac. They added one day in four years to their faulty year; Iphitus celebrated this change by the institution of the Olympiads.
They were finally obliged to have recourse to the philosopher Meton, who, combining the year of the moon with that of the sun, composed his cycle of nineteen years, at the end of which the sun and moon returned to the same point within an hour and a half. This cycle was graven in gold in the public place of Athens; and it is of this famous golden number that we still make use, with the necessary corrections.
We well know what ridiculous confusion the Roman priests introduced in their computation of the year. Their blunders were so great that their summer holidays arrived in winter. Cæsar, the universal Cæsar, was obliged to bring the philosopher Sosigenes from Alexandria to repair the enormous errors of the pontiffs. When it was necessary to correct the calendar of Julius Cæsar, under the pontificate of Gregory XIII., to whom did they address themselves? Was it to some inquisitor? It was to a philosopher and physician named Lilio.
When the almanac was given to Professor Cogé, rector of the university, to compose, he knew not even the subject. They were obliged to apply to M. de Lalande, of the Academy of Sciences, who was burdened with this very painful task, too poorly recompensed. The rhetorician Cogé, therefore, made a great mistake when he proposed for the prize of the university this subject so strangely expressed: