When, in 1729, Montesquieu and Voltaire returned to France from
England, and introduced among their fellow-countrymen the ideas
prevalent among the English deists and empiricists, an impetus was
given to a French empirical movement which, with characteristic
disregard for the restraints of convention and positive religion,
advanced from psychological empiricism to materialism in metaphysics,
hedonism in ethics, and unbelief and revolt in matters of religious
conviction. The social, political, and religious conditions of France
in the eighteenth century contributed to this result. The court of
Versailles had become a synonym for frivolity if not for licentiousness, and even
after due allowance is made for the exaggerations of historians
prejudiced against the old régime, it must be admitted
that the grievances of the subjects of the monarchy were many and
serious. The Church, whose duty it was to inculcate justice and
forbearance, was identified, in the minds of the people, with the
monarchy which they feared and detested. Thus it was that the poets,
philosophers, and essayists of the latter half of the eighteenth
century found in the popular mind a field ready to receive the seeds of
the materialism and naturalism which flourished in the days preceding
the Revolution and bore fruit in the Revolution itself. In England the
old order gradually yielded to the action of the new forces; in France
the old order maintained an attitude of unyielding antagonism. In
England the establishment of new political ideas was in the nature of a
slow assimilation; in France the destruction of the ancient political
system assumed the proportions of a cataclysm.
Speculative Sensism. The first to formulate a thoroughgoing
system of sensism, as a logical development of Locke's empiricism, was
the Abbé Condillac (1715-1780) In his Traité
des sensations he reduces all knowledge to experience and all
experience to sensations. In fact, consciousness with all its contents
is nothing but transformed sensations (sensations
transformées). To illustrate this, Condillac imagines a
statue which is first endowed with the sense of smell, and then with
other senses in succession, the sense of touch being last; for it is by
means of the sense of resistance that we distinguish between
self and not-self. Before being endowed with the sense of
touch the statue refers odor, color, and so forth, to itself; after it
has acquired the sense of touch, it refers its sensations to the
external world. Personality is, therefore, the sum of our
sensations. Condillac teaches that it is by the superiority of the
sense of touch that man differs from brutes: that every sensation is
accompanied by pleasure or pain; that desire springs from the
remembrance of pleasant sensations; that the "good" as well as the
"beautiful" denotes a pleasure-giving quality.
With Condillac is associated Charles Bonnet (1720-1793), who in
his Essai de psychologie advocates a mitigated form of
sensationalism.
Ethical Sensism. The ethical deductions from sensistic
psychology appear in the writings of Helvétius (1715-1771),
author of De l'esprit and De l'homme. Helvétius
teaches that all men are equally endowed by nature, that the
difference between men arises from education, and that susceptibility
to pleasure and pain, which declares itself in self-interest, is the
ultimate element in human character, and the source of all mental and
moral activity. Education, legislation, and positive religion are
doomed to failure as long as they refuse to recognize the truth that
all that is good and noble and virtuous in human conduct is based on
self-interest.
Sceptics and Materialists. Voltaire (1694-1778), although
not a professed philosopher, exercised a widespread influence on the
philosophic thought of his century. His Dictionnaire philosophique
portatif was written for the purpose of ridding philosophy of
cumbersome technical terminology and presenting it in popular form.
This necessitated superficiality of treatment, but, as Erdmann
says, in Voltaire's superficiality lies his strength. Voltaire was not
an atheist: not only did he believe that the existence of God is
proclaimed by all nature, but he was even of opinion that if God did
not exist we should be under the necessity of inventing a God. He
defended immortality on the ground of practical necessity, and openly
declared that materialism is nonsense. It was characteristic of the
superficiality of the man that the earthquake of Lisbon (1775) should
change him from an optimist to a pessimist. He attacked Christianity as
a positive form of religion, waging unwearied war against the
Scriptures, the Church, and the most sacred beliefs of Christians. In
this way, by helping to undermine
belief in the supernatural, he aided the cause of materialism and
atheism.
Materialism and atheism were openly taught and defended in the famous
Encyclopedia (Dictionnaire raisonné des arts des sciences et
des métiers), which was published at Paris between the years
1751 and 1772. The principal encyclopedists were Diderot,
d'Alembert, Voltaire, Holbach, and Rousseau. The work was
sceptical, irreverent, and brilliant with keen wit and caustic satire.
It was by the charms of its style, rather than by the force of its
arguments, that it did so much towards sapping the popular belief in
God, in spirituality, in human liberty, and in the sacredness of the
traditional ideals of morality.
The physician La Mettrie (1709-1751), author of L'histoire
naturelle de l'âme and L'homme machine, was one of the
most outspoken defenders of materialism. He taught that everything
spiritual is a delusion, and that physical enjoyment is the highest aim
of human action. The soul, he maintained, is nothing but a name, unless
by it we mean the brain, which is the organ of thought; thought is the
function of the brain; man excels brutes simply because his brain is
more highly developed; death ends all things, and consequently we
should enjoy this world and hasten the reign of atheism, for men will
never be truly happy until theologians will have ceased to trouble and
Nature will have asserted her claims.
The materialistic monism thus flippantly defended by La Mettrie was
taught with more pretension to scientific seriousness in the work
entitled Système de la nature, which was published
pseudonymously in 1770, and of which Holbach (1723-1789) is now
universally admitted to be the author. The work may be said to be the
bible of the materialists of the end of the eighteenth century.
The last representative of psychological materialism in the eighteenth
century was the physician Cabanis (1757-1808), who taught that body
and mind are identical, that the nerves are the
man, and that thought is a secretion of the brain: "Le cerveau
digère les impressions . . . il fait organiquement la
sécrétion de la pensée." [1]
[1] Rapports du physique et du morale de l'homme (cf.Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques art., "Cabanis").
Political Philosophers. It was Montesquieu (1689-1755),
author of De l'esprit des lois, who first introduced Locke's
empiricism into France. In his Lettres persanes he had shown
himself an ardent admirer of the federal form of government, but in the
work De l'esprit des lois, written after his return from
England, he holds up the English constitutional monarchy as the ideal
of political organization. He contends that right is anterior to
law, advocates the independence of the judicial power with respect
to the executive and legislative powers, and defends the extension of
the legislative authority of representative assemblies. He teaches
that laws should be adapted to the character and spirit of the nation,
and, following the empirical method, he traces the influence of
climate, manners, religion, etc., on national character
Jean Jacques Rousseau [2] (1712-1778) was, in one respect, the
most consistent representative of the movement which we have been
studying, -- a movement to establish the individualistic point of
view in religion, philosophy, and politics, -- yet, in another
respect, he was a most uncompromising antagonist of that movement; for,
instead of insisting on the advantages of enlightenment and
civilization he advocated a return to primitive feeling and to the
state of nature. Émile, a philosophical romance, is
devoted to an account of his ideal of education, and the treatise
entitled Contrat social, to an exposition of his political
philosophy. He draws an ideal picture of man, as he originally existed
in the state of nature, before entering into the social contract
by which society was first formed, and he teaches that all authority
resides in the sovereign will of the people. He maintains the right of
the people to assemble for the purpose of confirming, altering, and
abrogating all authority in the state. Thus he rejects the division of legislative, judicial,
and executive powers, substituting for them the rule of popular
assembly. In his religious doctrines he is a deist rather than an
atheist.
[2] Consult Morley, Rousseau (London, 1873).
Historical Position. The so-called French enlightenment of the
eighteenth century is a one-sided development of the empiricism
inaugurated in England by Locke and introduced into France by
Montesquieu and Voltaire. If we except Rousseau, the representatives of
the age of enlightenment were men of meager or at most of mediocre
intellectual ability, who failed to leave any lasting impression on the
development of speculative thought. Indeed, Voltaire, who certainly
knew the age in which he lived, pronounced it to be "an age of
trivialities." Rousseau alone spoke as one who had seriously studied
the spirit of his time, when he demanded the abandonment of artificial
culture and conventional refinement in favor of what is natural,
simple, and therefore of permanent value in human life. To this cry of
an age of unrest the French Revolution was the answer.
