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A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 09
But we find that this soul of thought has, on a thousand occasions, the ascendency over the animal soul. The thinking soul commands the hands to take, and they obey. It does not tell the heart to beat, the blood to flow, the chyle to form; all this is done without it. Here then are two souls much involved, and neither of them having the mastery.
Now, this first animal soul certainly does not exist; it is nothing more than the movement of our organs. Take heed, O man! lest thou have no more proofs but thy weak reason that the other soul exists. Thou canst not know it but by faith; thou art born, thou eatest, thou thinkest, thou wakest, thou sleepest, without knowing how. God has given thee the faculty of thinking, as He has given thee all the rest; and if He had not come at the time appointed by His providence, to teach thee that thou hast an immaterial and an immortal soul, thou wouldst have no proof whatever of it.
Let us examine the fine systems on the soul, which thy philosophy has fabricated.
One says that the soul of man is part of the substance of God Himself; another that it is part of the great whole; a third that it is created from all eternity; a fourth that it is made, and not created. Others assure us that God makes souls according as they are wanted, and that they arrive at the moment of copulation. They are lodged in the seminal animalcules, cries one. No, says another, they take up their abode in the Fallopian tubes. A third comes and says: You are all wrong; the soul waits for six weeks, until the fœtus is formed, and then it takes possession of the pineal gland; but if it finds a false conception, it returns and waits for a better opportunity. The last opinion is that its dwelling is in the callous body; this is the post assigned to it by La Peyronie. A man should be first surgeon to the king of France to dispose in this way of the lodging of the soul. Yet the callous body was not so successful in the world as the surgeon was.
St. Thomas in his question 75 and following, says that the soul is a form subsisting per se, that it is all in all, that its essence differs from its power; that there are three vegetative souls, viz., the nutritive, the argumentative, and the generative; that the memory of spiritual things is spiritual, and the memory of corporeal things is corporeal; that the rational soul is a form "immaterial as to its operations, and material as to its being." St. Thomas wrote two thousand pages, of like force and clearness; and he is the angel of the schools.
Nor have there been fewer systems contrived on the way in which this soul will feel, when it shall have laid aside the body with which it felt; how it will hear without ears, smell without a nose, and touch without hands; what body it will afterwards resume, whether that which it had at two years old, or at eighty; how the I– the identity of the same person will subsist; how the soul of a man become imbecile at the age of fifteen, and dying imbecile at the age of seventy, will resume the thread of the ideas which he had at the age of puberty; by what contrivance a soul, the leg of whose body shall be cut off in Europe, and one of its arms lost in America, will recover this leg and arm, which, having been transformed into vegetables, will have passed into the blood of some other animal. We should never finish, if we were to seek to give an account of all the extravagances which this poor human soul has imagined about itself.
It is very singular that, in the laws of God's people, not a word is said of the spirituality and immortality of the soul; nothing in the Decalogue, nothing in Leviticus, or in Deuteronomy.
It is quite certain, it is indubitable, that Moses nowhere proposes to the Jews pains and rewards in another life; that he never mentions to them the immortality of their souls; that he never gives them hopes of heaven, nor threatens them with hell; all is temporal.
Many illustrious commentators have thought that Moses was perfectly acquainted with these two great dogmas; and they prove it by the words of Jacob, who, believing that his son had been devoured by wild beasts, said in his grief: "I will go down into the grave —in infernum– unto my son"; that is, I will die, since my son is dead.
They further prove it by the passages in Isaiah and Ezekiel; but the Hebrews, to whom Moses spoke, could not have read either Ezekiel or Isaiah, who did not come until several centuries after.
It is quite useless to dispute about the private opinions of Moses. The fact is that in his public laws he never spoke of a life to come; that he limited all rewards and punishments to the time present. If he knew of a future life, why did he not expressly set forth that dogma? And if he did not know of it, what were the object and extent of his mission? This question is asked by many great persons. The answer is, that the Master of Moses, and of all men, reserved to Himself the right of expounding to the Jews, at His own time, a doctrine which they were not in a condition to understand when they were in the desert.
If Moses had announced the immortality of the soul, a great school among the Jews would not have constantly combated it. This great retreat of the Sadducees would not have been authorized in the State; the Sadducees would not have filled the highest offices, nor would pontiffs have been chosen from their body.
It appears that it was not until after the founding of Alexandria that the Jews were divided into three sects – the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. The historian Josephus, who was a Pharisee, informs us in the thirteenth book of his "Antiquities" that the Pharisees believed in the metempsychosis; the Sadducees believed that the soul perished with the body; the Essenes, says Josephus, held that souls were immortal; according to them souls descended in an aerial form into the body, from the highest region of the air, whither they were carried back again by a violent attraction; and after death, those which had belonged to the good dwelt beyond the ocean in a country where there was neither heat nor cold, nor wind, nor rain. The souls of the wicked went into a climate of an opposite description. Such was the theology of the Jews.
He who alone was to instruct all men came and condemned these three sects; but without Him we could never have known anything of our soul; for the philosophers never had any determinate idea of it; and Moses – the only true lawgiver in the world before our own – Moses, who talked with God face to face, left men in the most profound ignorance on this great point. It is, then, only for seventeen hundred years that there has been any certainty of the soul's existence and its immortality.
Cicero had only doubts; his grandson and granddaughter might learn the truth from the first Galileans who came to Rome.
But before that time, and since then, in all the rest of the earth where the apostles did not penetrate, each one must have said to his soul: What art thou? whence comest thou? what dost thou? whither goest thou? Thou art I know not what, thinking and feeling: and wert thou to feel and think for a hundred thousand millions of years, thou wouldst never know any more by thine own light without the assistance of God.
O man! God has given thee understanding for thy own good conduct, and not to penetrate into the essence of the things which He has created.
So thought Locke; and before Locke, Gassendi; and before Gassendi, a multitude of sages; but we have bachelors who know all of which those great men were ignorant.
Some cruel enemies of reason have dared to rise up against these truths, acknowledged by all the wise. They have carried their dishonesty and impudence so far as to charge the authors of this work with having affirmed that the soul is matter. You well know, persecutors of innocence, that we have said quite the contrary. You must have read these very words against Epicurus, Democritus, and Lucretius: "My friend, how does an atom think? Acknowledge that thou knowest nothing of the matter." It is then evident, ye are calumniators.
No one knows what that material being is, which is called "spirit," to which – be it observed – you give this material name, signifying "wind." All the first fathers of the Church believed the soul to be corporeal. It is impossible for us limited beings to know whether our intelligence is substance or faculty: we cannot thoroughly know either the extended being, or the thinking beings, or the mechanism of thought.
We exclaim to you, with the ever to be revered Gassendi and Locke, that we know nothing by ourselves of the secrets of the Creator. And are you gods, who know everything? We repeat to you, that you cannot know the nature and distinction of the soul but by revelation. And is not this revelation sufficient for you? You must surely be enemies of this revelation which we claim, since you persecute those who expect everything from it, and believe only in it.
Yes, we tell you, we defer wholly to the word of God; and you, enemies of reason and of God, treat the humble doubt and humble submission of the philosopher as the wolf in the fable treated the lamb; you say to him: You said ill of me last year; I must suck your blood. Philosophy takes no revenge; she smiles in peace at your vain endeavors; she mildly enlightens mankind, whom you would brutalize, to make them like yourselves.
SPACE
What is space? "There is no space in void," exclaimed Leibnitz, after having admitted a void; but when he admitted a void, he had not embroiled himself with Newton, nor disputed with him on the calculus of fluxions, of which Newton was the inventor. This dispute breaking out, there was no longer space or a void for Leibnitz.
Fortunately, whatever may be said by philosophers on these insolvable questions, whether it be for Epicurus, for Gassendi, for Newton, for Descartes, or Rohaut, the laws of motion will be always the same.
Que Rohaut vainement sèche pour concevoir
Comment tout étant plein, tout a pu se mouvoir.
– BOILEAU, Ep. v, 31-32.
That Rohaut exhausts himself by vainly endeavoring to understand how motion can exist in a plenum will not prevent our vessels from sailing to the Indies, and all motion proceeding with regularity. Pure space, you say, can neither be matter, nor spirit; and as there is nothing in this world but matter and spirit, there can therefore be no space.
So, gentlemen, you assert that there is only matter and spirit, to us who know so little either of the one or the other – a pleasant decision, truly! "There are only two things in nature, and these we know not." Montezuma reasons more justly in the English tragedy of Dryden: "Why come you here to tell me of the emperor Charles the Fifth? There are but two emperors in the world; he of Peru and myself." Montezuma spoke of two things with which he was acquainted, but we speak of two things of which we have no precise idea.
We are very pleasant atoms. We make God a spirit in a mode of our own; and because we denominate that faculty spirit, which the supreme, universal, eternal, and all-powerful Being has given us, of combining a few ideas in our little brain, of the extent of six inches more or less, we suppose God to be a spirit in the same sense. God always in our image – honest souls!
But how, if there be millions of beings of another nature from our matter, of which we know only a few qualities, and from our spirit, our ideal breath of which we accurately know nothing at all? and who can assert that these millions of beings exist not; or suspects not that God, demonstrated to exist by His works, is eminently different from all these beings, and that space may not be one of them?
We are far from asserting with Lucretius —
Ergo, præter inane et corpora, tertia per se
Nulla potest rerum in numero natura referri.
– LIB., i, v. 446, 447.
That all consists of body and of space. – CREECH.
But may we venture to believe with him, that space is infinite?
Has any one been ever able to answer his question: Speed an arrow from the limits of the world – will it fall into nothing, into nihility?
Clarke, who spoke in the name of Newton, pretends that "space has properties, for since it is extended, it is measurable, and therefore exists." But if we answer, that something may be put where there is nothing, what answer will be made by Newton and Clarke?
Newton regards space as the sensorium of God. I thought that I understood this grand saying formerly, because I was young; at present, I understand it no more than his explanation of the Apocalypse. Space, the sensorium, the internal organ of God! I lose both Newton and myself there.
Newton thought, according to Locke, that the creation might be explained by supposing that God, by an act of His will and His power, had rendered space impenetrable. It is melancholy that a genius so profound as that possessed by Newton should suggest such unintelligible things.
STAGE (POLICE OF THE)
Kings of France were formerly excommunicated; all from Philip I. to Louis VIII. were solemnly so; as also the emperors from Henry IV. to Louis of Bavaria inclusively. The kings of England had likewise a very decent part of these favors from the court of Rome. It was the rage of the times, and this rage cost six or seven hundred thousand men their lives. They actually excommunicated the representatives of monarchs; I do not mean ambassadors, but players, who are kings and emperors three or four times a week, and who govern the universe to procure a livelihood.
I scarcely know of any but this profession, and that of magicians, to which this honor could now be paid; but as sorcerers have ceased for the eighty years that sound philosophy has been known to men, there are no longer any victims but Alexander, Cæsar, Athalie, Polyeucte, Andromache, Brutus, Zaïre, and Harlequin.
The principal reason given is, that these gentlemen and ladies represent the passions; but if depicting the human heart merits so horrible a disgrace, a greater rigor should be used with painters and sculptors. There are many licentious pictures which are publicly sold, while we do not represent a single dramatic poem which maintains not the strictest decorum. The Venus of Titian and that of Correggio are quite naked, and are at all times dangerous for our modest youth; but comedians only recite the admirable lines of "Cinna" for about two hours, and with the approbation of the magistracy under the royal authority. Why, therefore, are these living personages on the stage more condemned than these mute comedians on canvas? "Ut pictura poesis erit." What would Sophocles and Euripides have said, if they could have foreseen that a people, who only ceased to be barbarous by imitating them, would one day inflict this disgrace upon the stage, which in their time received such high glory?
Esopus and Roscius were not Roman senators, it is true; but the Flamen did not declare them infamous; and the art of Terence was not doubted. The great pope and prince, Leo X., to whom we owe the renewal of good tragedy and comedy in Europe, and who caused dramatic pieces to be represented in his palace with so much magnificence, foresaw not that one day, in a part of Gaul, the descendants of the Celts and the Goths would believe they had a right to disgrace that which he honored. If Cardinal Richelieu had lived – he who caused the Palais Royal to be built, and to whom France owes the stage – he would no longer have suffered them to have dared to cover with ignominy those whom he employed to recite his own works.
It must be confessed that they were heretics who began to outrage the finest of all the arts. Leo X., having revived the tragic scene, the pretended reformers required nothing more to convince them that it was the work of Satan. Thus the town of Geneva, and several illustrious places of Switzerland, have been a hundred and fifty years without suffering a violin amongst them. The Jansenists, who now dance on the tomb of St. Paris, to the great edification of the neighborhood, in the last century forbade a princess of Conti, whom they governed, to allow her son to learn dancing, saying that dancing was too profane. However, as it was necessary he should be graceful, he was taught the minuet, but they would not allow a violin, and the director was a long time before he would suffer the prince of Conti to be taught with castanets. A few Catholic Visigoths on this side the Alps, therefore, fearing the reproaches of the reformers, cried as loudly as they did. Thus, by degrees, the fashion of defaming Cæsar and Pompey, and of refusing certain ceremonies to certain persons paid by the king, and laboring under the eyes of the magistracy, was established in France. We do not declaim against this abuse; for who would embroil himself with powerful men of the present time, for hedra and heroes of past ages?
We are content with finding this rigor absurd, and with always paying our full tribute of admiration to the masterpieces of our stage.
Rome, from whom we have learned our catechism, does not use it as we do; she has always known how to temper her laws according to times and occasions; she has known how to distinguish impudent mountebanks, who were formerly rightly censured, from the dramatic pieces of Trissin, and of several bishops and cardinals who have assisted to revive tragedy. Even at present, comedies are publicly represented at Rome in religious houses. Ladies go to them without scandal; they think not that dialogues, recited on boards, are a diabolical infamy. We have even seen the piece of "George Dandin" executed at Rome by nuns, in the presence of a crowd of ecclesiastics and ladies. The wise Romans are above all careful how they excommunicate the gentlemen who sing the trebles in the Italian operas; for, in truth, it is enough to be castrated in this world, without being damned in the other.
In the good time of Louis XIV., there was always a bench at the spectacles, which was called the bench of bishops. I have been a witness, that in the minority of Louis XV., Cardinal Fleury, then bishop of Fréjus, was very anxious to revive this custom. With other times and other manners, we are apparently much wiser than in the times in which the whole of Europe came to admire our shows, when Richelieu revived the stage in France, when Leo X. renewed the age of Augustus in Italy: but a time will come in which our children, seeing the impertinent work of Father Le Brun against the art of Sophocles, and the works of our great men printed at the same time, will exclaim: Is it possible that the French could thus contradict themselves, and that the most absurd barbarity has so proudly raised its head against some of the finest productions of the human mind?
St. Thomas of Aquinas, whose morals were equal to those of Calvin and Father Quesnel – St. Thomas, who had never seen good comedy, and who knew only miserable players, thinks however that the theatre might be useful. He had sufficient good sense and justice to feel the merit of this art, unfinished as it was, and permitted and approved of it. St. Charles Borromeo personally examined the pieces which were played at Milan, and gave them his approbation and signature. Who after that will be Visigoths enough to treat Roderigo and Chimene as soul-corrupters? Would to God that these barbarians, the enemies of the finest of arts, had the piety of Polyeucte, the clemency of Augustus, the virtue of Burrhus, and would die like the husband of Al-zira!
STATES – GOVERNMENTS
Which is the best? I have not hitherto known any person who has not governed some state. I speak not of messieurs the ministers, who really govern; some two or three years, others six months, and others six weeks; I speak of all other men, who, at supper or in their closet, unfold their systems of government, and reform armies, the Church, the gown, and finances.
The Abbé de Bourzeis began to govern France towards the year 1645, under the name of Cardinal Richelieu, and made the "Political Testament," in which he would enlist the nobility into the cavalry for three years, make chambers of accounts and parliaments pay the poll-tax, and deprive the king of the produce of the excise. He asserts, above all, that to enter a country with fifty thousand men, it is essential to economy that a hundred thousand should be raised. He affirms that "Provence alone has more fine seaports than Spain and Italy together."
The Abbé de Bourzeis had not travelled. As to the rest, his work abounds with anachronisms and errors; and as he makes Cardinal Richelieu sign in a manner in which he never signed, so he makes him speak as he had never spoken. Moreover, he fills a whole chapter with saying that reason should guide a state, and in endeavoring to prove this discovery. This work of obscurities, this bastard of the Abbé de Bourzeis, has long passed for the legitimate offspring of the Cardinal Richelieu; and all academicians, in their speeches of reception, fail not to praise extravagantly this political masterpiece.
The Sieur Gatien de Courtilz, seeing the success of the "Testament Politique" of Richelieu, published at The Hague the "Testament de Colbert" with a fine letter of M. Colbert to the king. It is clear that if this minister made such a testament, it must have been suppressed; yet this book has been quoted by several authors.
Another ignoramus, of whose name we are ignorant, failed not to produce the "Testament de Louis" still worse, if possible, than that of Colbert. An abbé of Chevremont also made Charles, duke of Lorraine, form a testament. We have had the political testaments of Cardinal Alberoni, Marshal Belle-Isle, and finally that of Mandrin.
M. de Boisguillebert, author of the "Détail de la France" published in 1695, produced the impracticable project of the royal tithe, under the name of the marshal de Vauban.
A madman, named La Jonchere, wanting bread, wrote, in 1720, a "Project of Finance," in four volumes; and some fools have quoted this production as a work of La Jonchere, the treasurer-general, imagining that a treasurer could not write a bad book on finance.
But it must be confessed that very wise men, perhaps very worthy to govern, have written on the administration of states in France, Spain, and England. Their books have done much good; not that they have corrected ministers who were in place when these books appeared, for a minister does not and cannot correct himself. He has attained his growth, and more instruction, more counsel, he has not time to listen to. The current of affairs carries him away; but good books form, young people, destined for their places; and princes and statesmen of a succeeding generation are instructed.
The strength and weakness of all governments has been narrowly examined in latter times. Tell me, then, you who have travelled, who have read and have seen, in what state, under what sort of government, would you be born? I conceive that a great landed lord in France would have no objection to be born in Germany: he would be a sovereign instead of a subject. A peer of France would be very glad to have the privileges of the English peerage: he would be a legislator. The gownsman and financier would find himself better off in France than elsewhere. But what country would a wise freeman choose – a man of small fortune, without prejudices?
A rather learned member of the council of Pondicherry came into Europe, by land, with a brahmin, more learned than the generality of them. "How do you find the government of the Great Mogul?" said the counsellor. "Abominable," answered the brahmin; "how can you expect a state to be happily governed by Tartars? Our rajahs, our omras, and our nabobs are very contented, but the citizens are by no means so; and millions of citizens are something."
The counsellor and the brahmin traversed all Upper Asia, reasoning on their way. "I reflect," said the brahmin, "that there is not a republic in all this vast part of the world." "There was formerly that of Tyre," said the counsellor, "but it lasted not long; there was another towards Arabia Petræa, in a little nook called Palestine – if we can honor with the name of republic a horde of thieves and usurers, sometimes governed by judges, sometimes by a sort of kings, sometimes by high priests; who became slaves seven or eight times, and were finally driven from the country which they had usurped."
"I fancy," said the brahmin, "that we should find very few republics on earth. Men are seldom worthy to govern themselves. This happiness should only belong to little people, who conceal themselves in islands, or between mountains, like rabbits who steal away from carnivorous animals, but at length are discovered and devoured."
When the travellers arrived in Asia Minor, the counsellor said to the brahmin, "Would you believe that there was a republic formed in a corner of Italy, which lasted more than five hundred years, and which possessed this Asia Minor, Asia, Africa, Greece, the Gauls, Spain, and the whole of Italy?" "It was therefore soon turned into a monarchy?" said the brahmin. "You have guessed it," said the other; "but this monarchy has fallen, and every day we make fine dissertations to discover the causes of its decay and fall." "You take much useless pains," said the Indian: "this empire has fallen because it existed. All must fall. I hope that the same will happen to the empire of the Great Mogul." "Apropos," said the European, "do you believe that more honor is required in a despotic state, and more virtue in a republic?" The term "honor" being first explained to the Indian, he replied, that honor was more necessary in a republic, and that there is more need of virtue in a monarchical state. "For," said he, "a man who pretends to be elected by the people, will not be so, if he is dishonored; while at court he can easily obtain a place, according to the maxim of a great prince, that to succeed, a courtier should have neither honor nor a will of his own. With respect to virtue, it is prodigiously required in a court, in order to dare to tell the truth. The virtuous man is much more at his ease in a republic, having nobody to flatter."
"Do you believe," said the European, "that laws and religions can be formed for climates, the same as furs are required at Moscow, and gauze stuffs at Delhi?" "Yes, doubtless," said the brahmin; "all laws which concern physics are calculated for the meridian which we inhabit; a German requires only one wife, and a Persian must have two or three.
"Rites of religion are of the same nature. If I were a Christian, how would you have me say mass in my province, where there is neither bread nor wine? With regard to dogmas, it is another thing; climate has nothing to do with them. Did not your religion commence in Asia, from whence it was driven? does it not exist towards the Baltic Sea, where it was unknown?"
"In what state, under what dominion, would you like to live?" said the counsellor. "Under any but my own," said his companion, "and I have found many Siamese, Tonquinese, Persians, and Turks who have said the same." "But, once more," said the European, "what state would you choose?" The brahmin answered, "That in which the laws alone are obeyed." "That is an odd answer," said the counsellor. "It is not the worse for that," said the brahmin. "Where is this country?" said the counsellor. The brahmin: "We must seek it."
