A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

Diderot (1713-1784) stands pre-eminent, on retrospect, for variety of power and depth and subtlety of thought; though for these very reasons, as well as because some of his most masterly works were never printed in his lifetime, he was less of a recognized popular force than some of his friends. In his own mental history he reproduces the course of the French thought of his time. Beginning as a deist, he assailed the contemporary materialists; in the end, with whatever of inconsistency, he was emphatically an atheist and a materialist. One of his most intimate friends was Damilaville, of whom Voltaire speaks as a vehement anti-theist; [1100] and his biographer Naigeon, who at times overstated his positions but always revered him, was the most zealous atheist of his day. [1101] Compare, as to Diderot's position, Soury's contention (p. 577) that we shall never make an atheist and a materialist out of "this enthusiastic artist, this poet-pantheist" (citing Rosenkranz in support), with his own admissions, pp. 589-90, and with Lord Morley's remarks, pp. 33, 401, 418. See also Lange, i, 310 sq.; ii, 63 (Eng. tr. ii, 32, 256). In the affectionate éloge of his friend Meister (1786) there is an express avowal that "it had been much to be desired for the reputation of Diderot, perhaps even for the honour of his age, that he had not been an atheist, or that he had been so with less zeal." The fact is thus put beyond reasonable doubt. In the Correspondance Littéraire of Grimm and Diderot, under date September 15, 1765 (vii, 366), there is a letter in criticism of Descartes, thoroughly atheistic in its reasoning, which is almost certainly by Diderot. And if the criticism of Voltaire's Dieu, above referred to (p. 231), be not by him, he was certainly in entire agreement with it, as with Grimm in general. Rosenkranz finally (ii, 421) sums up that "Diderot war als Atheist Pantheist," which is merely a way of saying that he was scientifically monistic in his atheism. Lange points out in this connection (i, 310) that the Hegelian schema of philosophic evolution, "with its sovereign contempt for chronology," has wrought much confusion as to the real developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is recorded that Diderot's own last words in serious conversation were: "The beginning of philosophy is incredulity"; and it may be inferred from his writings that his first impulses to searching thought came from his study of Montaigne, who must always have been for him one of the most congenial of spirits. [1102] At an early stage of his independent mental life we find him turning to the literature which in that age yielded to such a mind as his the largest measure both of nutriment and stimulus--the English. In 1745 he translated Shaftesbury's Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit; and he must have read with prompt appreciation the other English freethinkers then famous. Ere long, however, he had risen above the deistical plane of thought, and grappled with the fundamental issues which the deists took for granted, partly because of an innate bent to psychological analysis, partly because he was more interested in scientific problems than in scholarly research. The Pensées philosophiques, published in 1746, really deserve their name; and though they exhibit him as still a satisfied deist, and an opponent of the constructive atheism then beginning to suggest itself, they contain abstract reasonings sufficiently disturbing to the deistic position. [1103] The Promenade du Sceptique (written about 1747, published posthumously) goes further, and presents tentatively the reply to the design argument which was adopted by Hume. In its brilliant pages may be found a conspectus of the intellectual life of the day, on the side of the religious problem. Every type of thinker is there tersely characterized--the orthodox, the deist, the atheist, the sheer skeptic, the scoffer, the pantheist, the solipsist, and the freethinking libertine, the last figuring as no small nuisance to the serious unbeliever. So drastic is the criticism of orthodoxy that the book was unprintable in its day; [1104] and it was little known even in manuscript. But ere long there appeared the Letter on the Blind, for the use of those who see (1749), in which a logical rebuttal alike of the ethical and the cosmological assumptions of theism, developed from hints in the Pensées, is put in the mouth of the blind English mathematician, Sanderson. It is not surprising that whereas the Pensées had been, with some other books, ordered by the Paris Parlement to be burnt by the common hangman, the Lettre sur les Aveugles led to his arrest and an imprisonment of six months [1105] in the Château de Vincennes. Both books had of course been published without licence; [1106] but the second book was more than a defiance of the censorship: it was a challenge alike to the philosophy and the faith of Christendom; and as such could not have missed denunciation. [1107] But Diderot was not the kind of man to be silenced by menaces. In the famous Sorbonne thesis of the Abbé de Prades (1751) he probably had, as we have seen, some share; and when De Prades was condemned and deprived of his licence (1752) Diderot wrote the third part of the Apologie (published by De Prades in Holland), which defended his positions; and possibly assisted in the other parts. [1108] The hand of Diderot perhaps may be discovered in the skilful allusions to the skeptical Demonstratio Evangelica of Huet, which De Prades professes to have translated when at his seminary, seeking there the antidote to the poison of the deists. The entire handling of the question of pagan and Christian miracles, too, suggests the skilled dialectician, though it is substantially an adaptation of Leslie's Short and Easy Method with the Deists. The alternate eulogy and criticism of Locke are likely to be his, as is indeed the abundant knowledge of English thought shown alike in the thesis and in the Apologie. Whether he wrote the passage which claims to rebut an argument in his own Pensées philosophiques [1109] is surely doubtful. But his, certainly, is the further reply to the pastoral of the Jansenist Bishop of Auxerre against de Prades's thesis, in which the perpetual disparagement of reason by Catholic theologians is denounced [1110] as the most injurious of all procedures against religion. And his, probably, is the peroration [1111] arraigning the Jansenists and imputing to their fanaticism and superstition, their miracle-mongering and their sectarian bitterness, the discredit which among thinking men had latterly fallen upon Church and creed alike. [1112] De Prades, who in his thesis and Apologie had always professed to be a believing Christian, was not a useful recruit to rationalism. Passing from Holland to Berlin, he was there appointed, through the influence of Voltaire, reader and amanuensis to the King, [1113] who in 1754 arranged for him an official reconciliation with the Church. A formal retractation was sent to the Pope, the Sorbonne, and the Bishop of Montauban; [1114] and Frederick in due course presented him to a Catholic canonry at Glogau. In 1757, however, he was put under arrest on the charge, it is commonly said, of supplying military information to his countrymen; [1115] and thereafter, returning to France in 1759, he obtained a French benefice. Diderot, who was now a recognized champion of freethought, turned away with indignation. [1116] Thenceforward he never faltered on his path. It is his peculiar excellence to be an original and innovating thinker not only in philosophy but in psychology, in æsthetics, in ethics, in dramatic art; and his endless and miscellaneous labours in the Encyclopédie, of which he was the most loyal and devoted producer, represent an extraordinary range of interests. He suffered from his position as a hack writer and as a forced dissembler in his articles on religious matters; and there is probably a very real connection between his compulsory insincerities [1117] in the Encyclopédie--to say nothing of the official prosecution of that and of others of his works--and his misdeeds in the way of indecent fiction. When organized society is made to figure as the heartless enemy of thinking men, it is no great wonder if they are careless at times about the effect of their writings on society. But it stands to his lasting honour that his sufferings at the hands of priests, printers, and parlements never soured his natural goodness of heart. [1118] Having in his youth known a day's unrelieved hunger, he made a vow that he would never refuse help to any human being; and, says his daughter, no vow was ever more faithfully kept. No one in trouble was ever turned away from his door; and even his enemies were helped when they were base enough to beg of him. It seems no exaggeration to say that the bulk of his life was given to helping other people; and the indirect effect of his work, which is rather intellectually disinterested than didactic, is no less liberative and humanitarian. "To do good, and to find truth," were his mottoes for life. His daughter, Madame de Vandeul, who in her old age remained tranquilly divided between the religion instilled into her by her pious mother and the rationalism she had gathered from her father and his friends, testified, then, to his constant goodness in the home; [1119] and his father bore a similar testimony, contrasting him with his pious brother. [1120] He was, in his way, as beneficent as Voltaire, without Voltaire's faults of private malice; and his life's work was a great ministry of light. It was Goethe who said of him in the next generation that "whoever holds him or his doings cheaply is a Philistine." His large humanity reaches from the planes of expert thought to that of popular feeling; and while by his Letter on the Blind he could advance speculative psychology and pure philosophy, he could by his tale The Nun (La Religeuse, [1121] written about 1760, published 1796) enlist the sympathies of the people against the rule of the Church. It belonged to his character to be generously appreciative of all excellence; he delighted in other men's capacity as in pictures and poetry; and he loved to praise. At a time when Bacon and Hobbes were little regarded in England he made them newly famous throughout Europe by his praises. In him was realized Bacon's saying, Admiratio semen scientiae, in every sense, for his curiosity was as keen as his sensibility.