There was a moment in the last century when the Gallican church
hoped for a return of internal union and prosperity. This brief era of
hope coincided almost exactly with the middle of the century. Voltaire
was in exile at Berlin. The author of the Persian Letters and the
Spirit of Laws was old and near his end. Rousseau was copying music in
a garret. The Encyclopædia was looked for, but only as a literary
project of some associated booksellers. The Jansenists, who had been
so many in number and so firm in spirit five-and-twenty years earlier,
had now sunk to a small minority of the French clergy. The great
ecclesiastical body at length offered an unbroken front to its rivals,
the great judicial bodies. A patriotic minister was indeed audacious
enough to propose a tax upon ecclesiastical property, but the Church
fought the battle and won. Troops had just been despatched to hunt and
scatter the Protestants of the desert, and bigots exulted in the
thought of pastors swinging on gibbets, and heretical congregations
fleeing for their lives before the fire of orthodox musketry. The
house of Austria had been forced to suffer spoliation at the hands of
the infidel Frederick, but all the world was well aware that the
haughty and devout Empress-Queen would seize a speedy opportunity of
taking a crushing vengeance; France would this time be on the side of
righteousness and truth. For the moment a churchman might be pardoned
if he thought that superstition, ignorance, abusive privilege, and
cruelty were on the eve of the smoothest and most triumphant days that
they had known since the Reformation.
We now know how illusory this sanguine anticipation was destined to
prove, and how promptly. In little more than forty years after the
triumphant enforcement of the odious system of confessional
certificates, then the crowning event of ecclesiastical supremacy,
Paris saw the Feast of the Supreme Being, and the adoration of the
Goddess of Reason. The Church had scarcely begun to dream before she
was rudely and peremptorily awakened. She found herself confronted by
the most energetic, hardy, and successful assailants whom the spirit
of progress ever inspired. Compared with the new attack, Jansenism was
no more than a trifling episode in a family quarrel. Thomists and
Molinists became as good as confederates, and Quietism barely seemed a
heresy. In every age, even in the very depth of the times of faith,
there had arisen disturbers of the intellectual peace. Almost each
century after the resettlement of Europe by Charlemagne had procured
some individual, or some little group, who had ventured to question
this or that article of the ecclesiastical creed, to whom broken
glimpses of new truth had come, and who had borne witness against the
error or inconsistency or inadequateness of old ways of thinking. The
questions which presented themselves to the acuter minds of a hundred
years ago, were present to the acuter minds who lived hundreds of
years before that. The more deeply we penetrate into the history of
opinion, the more strongly are we tempted to believe that in the great
matters of speculation no question is altogether new, and hardly any
answer is altogether new. But the Church had known how to deal with
intellectual insurgents, from Abelard in the twelfth century down to
Giordano Bruno and Vanini in the seventeenth. They were isolated; they
were for the most part submissive; and if they were not, the arm of
the Church was very long and her grasp mortal. And all these
meritorious precursors were made weak by one cardinal defect, for
which no gifts of intellectual acuteness could compensate. They had
the scientific idea, but they lacked the social idea. They could have
set opinion right about the efficacy of the syllogism, and the virtue
of entities and quiddities. They could have taught Europe earlier than
the Church allowed it to learn that the sun does not go round the
earth, and that it is the earth which goes round the sun. But they
were wholly unfitted to deal with the prodigious difficulties of moral
and social direction. This function, so immeasurably more important
than the mere discovery of any number of physical relations, it was
the glory of the Church to have discharged for some centuries with as
much success as the conditions permitted. We are told indeed by
writers ignorant alike of human history and human nature, that only
physical science can improve the social condition of man. The common
sense of the world always rejects this gross fallacy. The acquiescence
for so many centuries in the power of the great directing organisation
of Western Europe, notwithstanding its intellectual inadequateness,
was the decisive expression of that rejection.
After the middle of the last century the insurrection against the
pretensions of the Church and against the doctrines of Christianity
was marked in one of its most important phases by a new and most
significant feature. In this phase it was animated at once by the
scientific idea and by the social idea. It was an advance both in
knowledge and in moral motive. It rested on a conception which was
crude and imperfect enough, but which was still almost, like the great
ecclesiastical conception itself, a conception of life as a whole.
Morality, positive law, social order, economics, the nature and limits
of human knowledge, the constitution of the physical universe, had one
by one disengaged themselves from theological explanations. The final
philosophical movement of the century in France, which was represented
by Diderot, now tended to a new social synthesis resting on a purely
positive basis. If this movement had only added to its other contents
the historic idea, its destination would have been effectually
reached. As it was, its leaders surveyed the entire field with as much
accuracy and with as wide a range as their instruments allowed, and
they scattered over the world a set of ideas which at once entered
into energetic rivalry with the ancient scheme of authority. The great
symbol of this new comprehensiveness in the insurrection was the
Encyclopædia.
The Encyclopædia was virtually a protest against the old
organisation, no less than against the old doctrine. Broadly stated,
the great central moral of it all was this: that human nature is good,
that the world is capable of being made a desirable abiding-place, and
that the evil of the world is the fruit of bad education and bad
institutions. This cheerful doctrine now strikes on the ear as a
commonplace and a truism. A hundred years ago in France it was a
wonderful gospel, and the beginning of a new dispensation. It was the
great counter-principle to asceticism in life and morals, to formalism
in art, to absolutism in the social ordering, to obscurantism in
thought. Every social improvement since has been the outcome of that
doctrine in one form or another. The conviction that the character and
lot of man are indefinitely modifiable for good, was the indispensable
antecedent to any general and energetic endeavour to modify the
conditions that surround him. The omnipotence of early instruction, of
laws, of the method of social order, over the infinitely plastic
impulses of the human creature—this was the maxim which brought men of
such widely different temperament and leanings to the common
enterprise. Everybody can see what wide and deep-reaching bearings
such a doctrine possessed; how it raised all the questions connected
with psychology and the formation of character; how it went down to
the very foundation of morals; into what fresh and unwelcome sunlight
it brought the articles of the old theology; with what new importance
it clothed all the relations of real knowledge and the practical arts;
what intense interest it lent to every detail of economics and
legislation and government.
The deadly chagrin with which churchmen saw the encyclopedic fabric
rising was very natural. The teaching of the Church paints man as
fallen and depraved. The new secular knowledge clashed at a thousand
points, alike in letter and in spirit, with the old sacred lore. Even
where it did not clash, its vitality of interest and attraction drove
the older lore into neglected shade. To stir men's vivid curiosity and
hope about the earth was to make their care much less absorbing about
the kingdom of heaven. To awaken in them the spirit of social
improvement was ruin to the most scandalous and crying social abuse
then existing. The old spiritual power had lost its instinct, once so
keen and effective, of wise direction. Instead of being the guide and
corrector of the organs of the temporal power, it was the worst of
their accomplices. The Encyclopædia was an informal, transitory, and
provisional organisation of the new spiritual power. The school of
which it was the great expounder achieved a supreme control over
opinion by the only title to which control belongs: a more penetrating
eye for social exigencies and for the means of satisfying them.
Our veteran humorist told us long ago in his whimsical way that the
importance of the Acts of the French Philosophes recorded in whole
acres of typography is fast exhausting itself, that the famed
Encyclopædical Tree has borne no fruit, and that Diderot the great has
contracted into Diderot the easily measurable. The humoristic method
is a potent instrument for working such contractions and expansions at
will. The greatest of men are measurable enough, if you choose to set
up a standard that is half transcendental and half cynical. A saner
and more patient criticism measures the conspicuous figures of the
past differently. It seeks their relations to the great forward
movements of the world, and asks to what quarter of the heavens their
faces were set, whether towards the east where the new light dawns, or
towards the west after the old light has sunk irrevocably down. Above
all, a saner criticism bids us remember that pioneers in the
progressive way are rare, their lives rude and sorely tried, and their
services to mankind beyond price. "Diderot is Diderot," wrote one
greater than Carlyle: "a peculiar individuality; whoever holds him or
his doings cheaply is a Philistine, and the name of them is legion.
Men know neither from God, nor from Nature, nor from their fellows,
how to receive with gratitude what is valuable beyond appraisement"
(Goethe). An intense Philistinism underlay the great spiritual
reaction that followed the Revolution, and not even such of its
apostles as Wordsworth and Carlyle wholly escaped the taint.
Forty years ago, when Carlyle wrote, it might really seem to a
prejudiced observer as if the encyclopædic tree had borne no fruit.
Even then, and even when the critic happened to be a devotee of the
sterile transcendentalism then in vogue, one might have expected some
recognition of the fact that the seed of all the great improvements
bestowed on France by the Revolution, in spite of the woful evils
which followed in its train, had been sown by the Encyclopædists. But
now that the last vapours of the transcendental reaction are clearing
away, we see that the movement initiated by the Encyclopædia is again
in full progress. Materialistic solutions in the science of man,
humanitarian ends in legislation, naturalism in art, active faith in
the improvableness of institutions—all these are once more the marks
of speculation and the guiding ideas of practical energy. The
philosophical parenthesis is at an end. The interruption of eighty
years counts for no more than the twinkling of an eye in the history
of the transformation of the basis of thought. And the interruption
has for the present come to a close. Europe again sees the old enemies
face to face; the Church, and a Social Philosophy slowly labouring to
build her foundations in positive science. It cannot be other than
interesting to examine the aims, the instruments, and the degree of
success of those who a century ago saw most comprehensively how
profound and far-reaching a metamorphosis awaited the thought of the
Western world. We shall do this most properly in connection with
Diderot.
Whether we accept or question Comte's strong description of Diderot
as the greatest genius of the eighteenth century, it is at least
undeniable that he was the one member of the great party of
illumination with a real title to the name of thinker. Voltaire and
Rousseau were the heads of two important schools, and each of them set
deep and unmistakable marks both on the opinion and the events of the
century. It would not be difficult to show that their influence was
wider than that of the philosopher who discerned the inadequateness of
both. But Rousseau was moved by passion and sentiment; Voltaire was
only the master of a brilliant and penetrating rationalism. Diderot
alone of this famous trio had in his mind the idea of scientific
method; alone showed any feeling for a doctrine, and for large organic
and constructive conceptions. He had the rare faculty of true
philosophic meditation. Though immeasurably inferior both to Voltaire
and Rousseau in gifts of literary expression, he was as far their
superior in breadth and reality of artistic principle. He was the
originator of a natural, realistic, and sympathetic school of literary
criticism. He aspired to impose new forms upon the drama. Both in
imaginative creation and in criticism, his work was a constant appeal
from the artificial conventions of the classic schools to the
actualities of common life. The same spirit united with the tendency
of his philosophy to place him among the very few men who have been
great and genuine observers of human nature and human existence. So
singular and widely active a genius may well interest us, even apart
from the important place that he holds in the history of literature
and opinion.