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THE HEAVENLY
CITY OF THE

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
PHILOSOPHERS

BASED ON THE STORRS LECTURES

DELIVERED AT YALE UNIVERSITY

THE HEAVENLY
CITY OF THE
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
PHILOSOPHERS

BY CARL L. BECKER

NEW HAVEN & LONDON

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright 1932 by Yale University Press.
Copyright renewed 1960 by Carl L. Becker.

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any

form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108
of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the pub-

lic press) without written permission

, from the publishers.

Printed in the United States of America by BookCrafters, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Becker, Carl Lotus, 1873-1945

The heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers/by
Carl L. Becker.
p. cm.
"Based on the Storrs lectures delivered at Yale University"
—Halft.p.
ISBN 0-300-00017-0 (pbk.)
1. Philosophy, Modern 18th — century. 2. Philosophy and
religion—History— 18th century. 3. History—Philosophy-
History— 18th century. I. Title. II. Title: Storrs lectures.

B802.B4 1991
190'.9'033—dc20 91-23968
CIP

58 57 56 55 54
 To
Charles Homer Haskins
and
Frederick Jackson Turner
His Friends and Teachers

The Author Dedicates This Book

In Gratitude and A Section
 Preface

This small volume contains jour lectures deliv-

ered in the School of Law in Yale University, on
the Storrs Foundation, late in the month of
April, 1 931. In preparing the lectures for the
press, I have made a few changes, mainly ver-
bal; but certain passages in the last three lec-
tures as here printed were necessarily, for lack of
time, omitted when the lectures were delivered.
For many courtesies extended to me at the
time the lectures were given, I am indebted to
the members of the faculty and to the students
in the School of Law, and in the Department of
History, Yale University.
C.B.
Ithaca, New York,
May, 1932.
 Contents

Preface vii

I. Climates of Opinion i

II. The Laws of Nature and of Nature's

God 33
III. The New History: Philosophy Teach-
ing by Example 71

IV. The Uses of Posterity 119

 THE HEAVENLY CITY

Climates of Opinion

Superstition, like many other fancies, very easily

loses its power when, instead of flattering our

vanity, it stands in the way of it. Goethe.

Like most men I hold certain cherished beliefs which

I think valid because they follow logically from
known and obvious facts. It often distresses me to
find that an intimate friend of mine rejects one or
other of these beliefs, even after I have laid before
him all the relevant facts and have repeatedly re-
traced for his benefit the logical steps that ought to
convince a reasonable mind. It may happen (is al-

most sure to, in fact) that he cannot refute my argu-

ment. No matter. Convinced against his will, he is of
the same opinion still; and I realize at last that his
mind is, unfortunately, not entirely open. Some per-
verse emotion, some deep-seated prejudice or unex-
amined preconception blinds him to the truth.
The disturbing prejudice which leads my friend to
wrong conclusions I readily forgive because I under-
stand it. It is a minor error into which I myself, but
for the grace of some happy chance, might have
fallen. In major matters we agree well enough, for it
 The Heavenly City

happens that we are both professors. Our experience

and our interests are much the same. The facts that
appear relevant and the deductions that win assent
are, generally speaking, the same for him as for me.
Most of our premises, and the phrases we employ
without analysis, are those familiar in the schools.
Agreeing so well in fundamentals, we may argue
copiously throughout the night, except in opinion, as
Carlyle said, not being divided.
It is less easy for us, two professors, to argue
throughout the night with men of another way of
life—with, let us say, politicians or preachers. The
argument soon falters for want of agreement. Facts
which they accept as relevant we question or regard
as negligible. Processes of reasoning which bring
conviction to us they dismiss with perverse and
casual levity as academic. Before the night is well
begun the discussion peters out. We see that it is use-
less to go on because their thought is vitiated, not
merely on the surface by prejudices peculiar to them
as individuals, but fundamentally by unconscious
preconceptions that are common to all men of their
profession.
Nevertheless, great as our differences are, all of us
—professors, politicians, preachers —would no doubt
find that we had much in common after all if it were
possible to meet in the fleshsome distinguished rep-
resentatives of a former age. Let us for the moment
give way to fantasy and suppose that we could, by
 Climates of Opinion

rubbing a Mazda lamp, bring Dante and Thomas

Aquinas before us. Since it would be a waste of
precious time to discuss the weather, we might ask
St. Thomas to define for us the concept of natural
law, a phrase as much used in his time as it is in ours.
Always apt at definition, St. Thomas would not hesi-
tate. He would say:

Since all things subject to Divine providence are ruled

and measured by the eternal law it is evident that
. . . ;

all things partake somewhat of the eternal law, in so far

as, namely, from its being imprinted on them, they derive

their respective inclinations to their proper acts and ends.

Now among all others, the rational creature is subject to
Divine providence in the most excellent way, in so far as
it partakes of a share of providence, by being provident

both for itself and for others. Wherefore it has a share of

the Eternal Reason, whereby it has a natural inclination
to its proper act and end: and this participation of the
eternal law in the rational creature is called the natural
law. 1

Having listened to this concise definition we might

decide that after academic subject would
all a less
be better, for example, the League of Nations, some-
thing on which Dante had much to say under the
caption of De monarchia. Being in favor of the
League, Dante might support his position by the fol-

lowing argument:

Mankind is a whole with relation to certain parts, and

1 Sumtna theologica, Part II (First Part), Q. XCI, art. il

3
 The Heavenly City

is a part with relation to a certain whole. It is a whole, of

course, with relation to particular kingdoms and nations,
as was shown above, and it is a part with relation to the
whole universe, as is man-
self-evident. Therefore, in the
ner in which the constituent parts of humanity cor- . . .

respond to humanity as a whole, so, we say, human- . . .

ity corresponds as a part to its larger whole. That the

constituent parts of humanity correspond to human-
. . .

ity as a whole through the one only principle of submis-

sion to a single Prince, can be easily gathered from what

has gone before. And therefore humanity corresponds to
the universe itself, or to its Prince, who is God, sim- . . .

ply through one only principle, namely, the submission to

a single Prince. We conclude from this that Monarchy
[League of Nations] is necessary to the world for its

well-being. 2

After this the discussion would no doubt drag

heavily. For what could any of us say in reply to
either Dante or St. Thomas? Whatever we might
say, on one side or the other, it is unlikely that either
of them would find it strictly relevant, or even under-
stand which side of the argument we were espousing.
One thing only would be clear to us, namely, that
the two men employed the same technique for
achieving obscurity. Perhaps our first impulse would
be to concede charitably that the distinguished guests
were not at their best; our second, to mutter that,
with all due respect, they were paying us with non-
sensical rigmaroles. It may be so; to the modern
2
De monorchia (English ed., 1904), Bk. I, chap, vii, pp. 24-25.
 Climates of Opinion

mind, indeed, it is so; and

would clearly be un-
it

wise, for example, to reprint the De monarchia as a

League of Nations propagandist tract. Nevertheless,
what troubles me is that I cannot dismiss Dante or
St. Thomas as unintelligent men. The judgment of

posterity has placed them among the lordly ones of

the earth; and if their arguments are unintelligible
to us the fact cannot be attributed to lack of intelli-
gence in them. They were at least as intelligent and
learned as many who in our time have argued for or
against the League of Nations —
as intelligent per-
haps as Clemenceau, as learned as Wilson.
Professor Whitehead has recently restored to cir-
culation a seventeenth-century phrase
—
"climate of
opinion." The phrase is much needed. Whether argu-
ments command assent or not depends less upon the
logic that conveys them than upon the climate of
opinion in which they are sustained. What renders
Dante's argument or St. Thomas' definition mean-
ingless to us is not bad logic or want of intelligence,
but the medieval climate of opinion—those instinc-
tivelyheld preconceptions the broad
in sense, that
Weltanschauung world pattern—which imposed
or
upon Dante and St. Thomas a peculiar use of the
intelligence and a special type of logic. To under-
stand why we cannot easily follow Dante or St.
Thomas it is necessary to understand (as well as may
be) the nature of this climate of opinion.
It is well known that the medieval world pattern,
 The Heavenly City

deriving from Greek logic and the Christian story,

was fashioned by the church which for centuries im-
posed its authority upon the isolated and anarchic
society of western Europe. The modern mind, which
curiously notes and carefully describes everything,
can indeed describe this climate of opinion although
it cannot live in it. In this climate of opinion it was

an unquestioned fact that the world and man in it

had been created in six days by God the Father, an
omniscient and benevolent intelligence, for an ulti-
mate if inscrutable purpose. Although created per-
fect, man had through disobedience fallen from
grace into sin and error, thereby incurring the pen-
alty of eternal damnation. Yet happily a way of
atonement and salvation had been provided through
the propitiatory sacrifice of God's only begotten son.
Helpless in themselves to avert the just wrath of
God, men were yet to be permitted, through his
mercy, and by humility and obedience to his will, to

obtain pardon for sin and error. Life on earth was

but a means to this desired end, a temporary proba-
tion for the testing of God's children. In God's ap-
pointed time, the Earthly City would come to an end,
the earth itself be swallowed up in flames. On that

last day good and evil men would be finally sepa-

rated. For the recalcitrant there was reserved a place
of everlasting punishment; but the faithful would be
gathered with God in the Heavenly City, there in
perfection and felicity to dwell forever.

6
 Climates of Opinion

Existence was thus regarded by the medieval man

as a cosmic drama, composed by the master drama-
tist according to a central theme and on a rational

plan. Finished in idea before it was enacted in fact,

before the world began written down to the last syl-
lable of recorded time, the drama was unalterable
either for good or evil. There it was, precisely de-
fined, to be understood as far as might be, but at all

events to be remorselessly played out to its appointed

end. The duty of man was to accept the drama as
written, since he could not alter it; his function, to
play the role assigned. That he might play his role
according to the divine text, subordinate authorities
—church and state —deriving their just powers from
the will of God, were instituted among men to dis-
pose them to submission and to instruct them in their
proper lines. Intelligence was essential, since God
had endowed men with it. But the function of intelli-
gence was strictly limited. Useless to inquire curi-
ously into the origin or final state of existence, since
both had been divinely determined and sufficiently
revealed. Useless, even impious, to inquire into its
ultimate meaning, since God alone could fully un-
derstand it. The function of intelligence was there-
fore to demonstrate the truth of revealed knowledge,
to reconcile diverse and pragmatic experience with
the rational pattern of the world as given in faith.
Under the bracing influence of this climate of
opinion the best thought of the time assumed a thor-
 The Heavenly City

oughly rationalistic form. I know it is the custom to

call the thirteenth century an age of faith, and to
contrast it with the eighteenth century, which is

thought to be preeminently the age of reason. In a

sense the distinction is true enough, for the word
"reason," like other words, has many meanings.
Since eighteenth-century writers employed reason to
discredit Christian dogma, a "rationalist" in com-
mon parlance came to mean an "unbeliever," one
who denied the truth of Christianity. In this sense
Voltaire was a rationalist, St. Thomas a man of faith.
But this use of the word is unfortunate, since it

obscures the fact that reason may be employed to

support faith as well as to destroy There were, it.

certainly, many differences between Voltaire and St.

Thomas, but the two men had much in common for
all that. What they had in common was the pro-

found conviction that their beliefs could be reason-

ably demonstrated. In a very real sense it may be
said of the eighteenth century that it was an age of
faith as well as of reason, and of the thirteenth cen-
tury that it was an age of reason as well as of faith.
This is not a paradox. On the contrary, passionate
faith and an expert rationalism are apt to be united.
Most men (of course I need parentheses here to take
care of simple-minded folk and the genuine mys-
—most
tics) men who believe passionately
intelligent
that God's heaven and
in his with the all's right
world— the need
feel good and of reasons sufficient

8
 Climates of Opinion

for their faith, all the more so if a few disturbing

doubts have crept in to make them uneasy. This is

perhaps one of the reasons why the thought of

Dante's time was so remorselessly rationalistic. The
faith was still intact, surely; but it was just ceasing
to be instinctively held — its ablest adherents just be-
coming conscious that it was held as faith. All the
more need, therefore, for proving it up to the hilt.
It was precisely because St. Thomas believed in a
divinely ordered world that he needed, for his own
peace of mind, an impregnable rational proof of a
divinely ordered world. He could never have said,
with Tertullian, "I believe that which is absurd." He
could easily have said, with St. Anselm, "I believe in

order that I may know." He might well have added,

"I should be distressed indeed if I could not find a
rational demonstration of what I know."
To reconcile diverse and pragmatic experience
with a rational pattern of the world is a sufficiently
difficult task, even if experience be limited and
—
knowledge not too great an impossible task unless
logic proves amenable to the reasons of the heart
which reason knows not of. And so the men of
Dante's time found it. To devise a highly intricate
dialectic was, of course, essential, but the least of
their difficulties; for even with the aid of Aristotle's
logic was still not always possible to press what
it

William James called the "irreducible brute facts"

into the neat categories prescribed by the faith. It
 The Heavenly City

was therefore necessary, in emergencies, to seek, be-

neath the literal significance of authoritative texts,
hidden meanings which could be elicited only by the
aid of a symbolical interpretation. Litera gesta do-
cet; quid credas, allegoria; moralis quid agas; quo
tendas, anagogia —so runs the famous formula which
the schoolmen devised for use in the schools, a for-
mula which might be freely rendered:

The what we know,

letter teaches

Anagogia what we hope is so;

Faith's confirmed by allegories,
Conduct's shaped by moral stories.

Thus it was possible for the thirteenth century,

employing a highly intricate dialectic supported on
occasion by a symbolical interpretation, to justify
the ways of God to man. Paradise lost and paradise
regained —such was the theme of the drama of exist-
ence as understood in that age; and all the best
minds of the time were devoted to its explication.
Theology related and expounded the history of the
world. Philosophy was the science that rationalized
and reconciled nature and history. Logic provided
both theology and philosophy with an adequate
methodology. As a result we have, among innumer-
able other works, the Summa theologica, surely one
of the most amazing and stupendous products of the
human mind. It is safe to say that never before or
since has the wide world been so neatly boxed and
10
 Climates of Opinion

compassed, so completely and confidently under-

stood, every known detail of it fitted, with such sub-
tle and loving precision, into a consistent and con-
vincing whole.
We have now remained in the medieval climate of
opinion as long as it is perhaps quite safe to do. Let
us then descend from the peaks of the thirteenth to
the lower levels of the twentieth century — to an at-
mosphere in which, since it is charged with a richer
factual content, we can breathe with greater ease and
comfort.

II

What then can we — scientists, historians, philoso-

phers of the twentieth century —make of the the-
ology-history, the philosophy-science, the dialectic-
methodology of the thirteenth century? We can
—must, indeed, since that is our habit —peruse with
infinite attention and indifference the serried, weighty
folios of the Summa and such works now carefully
preserved in libraries. We can perhaps wonder a lit-

—although,
tle since nothing is alien to us, we are
rarely caught wondering — at the unfailing zest, the
infinite patience, the extraordinary ingenuity and
acumen therein displayed. We can even understand
what is therein recorded well enough to translate it

clumsily into modern terms. The one thing we can-

not do with the Summa of St. Thomas is to meet its
arguments on their own ground. We can neither as-
ii
 The Heavenly City

sent to them nor refute them. It does not even occur

to us to make the effort, since we instinctively feel
that in the climate of opinion which sustains such
arguments we could only gasp for breath. Its conclu-
sions seem to us neither true nor false, but only ir-
relevant; and they seem irrelevant because the world
pattern into which they are so dexterously woven is

no longer capable of eliciting from us either an emo-

tional or an aesthetic response.
With the best will in the world it is quite impos-
a divinely
sible for us to conceive of existence as
ordered drama, the beginning and end of which is
known, the significance of which has once for all
been revealed. For good or ill we must regard the
world as a continuous flux, a ceaseless and infinitely
complicated process of waste and repair, so that "all
things and principles of things" are to be regarded
as no more than "inconstant modes or fashions," as
the "concurrence, renewed from moment to moment,
of forces parting sooner or later on their way." The
beginning of this continuous process of change is
shrouded in impenetrable mist; the end seems more
certain, but even less engaging. According to J. H.
Jeans:

Everything points with overwhelming force to a defi-

nite event, or series of events, of creation at some time or

times, not infinitely remote. The universe cannot have
originated by chance out of its present ingredients, and
neither can it have been always the same as now. For in

12
 :

Climates of Opinion

either of these events no atoms would be left save such

as are incapable of dissolving into radiation; there would
be neither sunlight nor starlight but only a cool glow of
radiation uniformly diffused through space. This is, in-
deed, so far as present-day science can see, the final end
towards which all creation moves, and at which it must at
long last arrive. 8

We need not, of course, make immediate prepara-

tion for that far-off, portentous event; the universe is
still a going concern and will outlast our time. But
we may be reasonably curious about the relation of
man to this inevitable running down of the universe.
How did man enter this galley, and what is he doing
in it? According to Professor Dampier-Whetham,
science offers two possible answers

Life . . . may be regarded either as a negligible acci-

dent in a bye-product of the cosmic process, or as the su-
preme manifestation of the high effort of creative evolu-
tion, for which the Earth alone, in the chances of time and
space, has given a fitting home.*

Between these alternatives there is little enough to

choose, since in either case man must be regarded as
part of the cosmic process, fated to extinction with
it. Let us listen to Bertrand Russell:

That man is the product of causes which had no previ-

sion of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his

* Eos, or the Wider Aspects of Cosmogony, p. 55; quoted in

Dampier-Whetham, A History of Science, p. 483.
4 A History of Science, p. 482.

13
 The Heavenly City

growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are
but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that
no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling
can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all

the labours of all the ages, all the devotion, all the in-
spiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are
destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar sys-
tem, and that the whole temple of man's achievement
must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a uni-
verse in ruins —
all these things, if not quite beyond dis-

pute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which

rejects them can hope to stand. 5

Edit and interpret the conclusions of modern sci-

ence as tenderly as we like, it is still quite impossible

for us to regard man as the child of God for whom
the earth was created as a temporary habitation.
Rather must we regard him as little more than a
chance deposit on the surface of the world, care-
lesslythrown up between two ice ages by the same
forces that rust iron and ripen corn, a sentient or-
ganism endowed by some happy or unhappy acci-
dent with intelligence indeed, but with an intelli-
gence that is conditioned by the very forces that it
seeks to understand and to control. The ultimate
cause of this cosmic process of which man is a part,
whether God or electricity or a "stress in the ether,"
we know not. Whatever it may be, if indeed it be
anything more than a necessary postulate of thought,
8 Mysticism and Logic, p.
47; quoted in Dampier-Whetham,
A History of Science, p. 487.

14
 Climates of Opinion

it appears in its effects as neither benevolent nor

malevolent, as neither kind nor unkind, but merely
as indifferent to us. What is man that the electron
should be mindful of him ! Man is but a foundling in
the cosmos, abandoned by the forces that created
him. Unparented, unassisted and undirected by om-
niscient or benevolent authority, he must fend for
himself, and with the aid of his own limited intelli-
gence find his way about in an indifferent universe.
Such is the world pattern that determines the
character and direction of modern thinking. The
pattern has been a long time in the weaving. It has
taken eight centuries to replace the conception of
existence as divinelycomposed and purposeful drama
by the conception of existence as a blindly running
flux of disintegrating energy. But there are signs
that the substitution is now fully accomplished; and
if we wished to reduce eight centuries of intellectual
history to an epigram, we could not do better than to
borrow the words of Aristophanes, "Whirl is king,
having deposed Zeus."
Perhaps the most important consequence of this
revolution is that we look about in vain for any sem-
blance of the old authority, the old absolute, for any
stable foothold from which to get a running start.
Zeus, having been deposed, can no longer serve as a
first premise of thought. It is true we may still be-
lieve in Zeus; many people do. Even scientists, his-
torians, philosophers still accord him the customary

15
 The Heavenly City

worship. But this is no more than a personal privi-

lege, to be exercised in private, as formerly, in Prot-
estant countries, Papists were sometimes permitted
to celebrate mass in private chapels. No serious
scholar would now postulate the existence and good-
ness of God as a point of departure for explaining
the quantum theory or the French Revolution. If I
should venture, as certain historians once did, to ex-
pound the thought of the eighteenth century as hav-
ing been foreordained by God for the punishment of
a perverse and stiff-necked generation, you would
your chairs, you would "register"
shift uneasily in
embarrassment, and even blush a little to think that
a trusted colleague should exhibit such bad taste.
The fact is that we have no first premise. Since
Whirl is king, we must start with the whirl, the mess
of things as presented in experience. We start with
the irreducible brute fact, and we must take it as we
find it, since it is no longer permitted to coax or ca-
jole it, hoping to fit it into some or other category of
thought on the assumption that the pattern of the
world is a logical one. Accepting the fact as given,
we observe it, experiment with it, verify it, classify
it, measure it if possible, and reason about it as lit-

tleas may be. The questions we ask are "What?"

and "How?" What are the facts and how are they
related? If sometimes, in a moment of absent-mind-
edness or idle diversion, we ask the question "Why?"
the answer escapes us. Our supreme object is to
16
 Climates of Opinion

measure and master the world rather than to under-

stand it.

Since our supreme object is to measure and mas-

ter the world, we can make relatively little use of
theology, philosophy, —
and deductive logic the three
stately entrance ways to knowledge erected in the
Middle Ages. In the course of eight centuries these
disciplines have fallen from their high estate, and in
their place we have enthroned history, science, and
the technique of observation and measurement. The-
ology, or something that goes under that name, is
still kept alive by the faithful, but only by artificial

respiration. Its functions, the services it rendered in

the time of St. Thomas, have been taken over, not as
is often supposed by philosophy, but by history —the
study of man and his world in the time sequence.
Theology in the thirteenth century presented the
story of man and the world according to the divine
plan of salvation. It provided the men of that age
with an authentic philosophy of history, and they
could afford to ignore the factual experience of man-
kind since they were so well assured of its ultimate
cause and significance. But in the succeeding cen-
turies men turned more and more to an investigation
of the recorded story of mankind, bringing to that
enterprise a remarkable attention to detail, an ever
greater preoccupation with the factual event. In the
light of the mass of irreducible brute facts thus ac-
cumulated, the theological vision of man and his

17
 —

The Heavenly City

world faded into a pale replica of the original pic-

ture. In the eighteenth century ihe clear-cut theologi-
cal philosophy of history had degenerated into an
amiable and gentlemanly "philosophy teaching by
example." In the early nineteenth century, history
could still be regarded as the Transcendent Idea
realizing itself in the actual. In our time, history is
nothing but history, the notation of what has oc-
curred, just as it happened. The object of history,
according to Santayana, is quite simply "to fix the
order of events throughout past times in all places."
No respectable historian any longer harbors ulterior
motives; and one who should surreptitiously intro-
duce the gloss of a transcendent interpretation into
the human story would deserve to be called a phi-
losopher and straightway lose his reputation as a
scholar.
I am, of course, using the word "history" in the
broad sense. It is to be understood as a method of
approach rather than as a special field of study. Lit-
erature and language, government and law, eco-
nomics, science and mathematics, love and sport
what is there that has not in our time been studied
historically? Much of what is called science is prop-
erly history, the history of biological or physical
phenomena. The geologist gives us the history of the
earth; the botanist relates the life history of plants.
Professor Whitehead has recently illuminated phys-
ics by tracing the history of physical concepts. To
18
 Climates of Opinion

regard all things in their historical setting appears,

indeed, to be an instructive procedure of the modern
mind. We do it without thinking, because we can
scarcely think at all without doing it. The modern
climate of opinion is such that we cannot seemingly
understand our world unless we regard it as a going
concern. We cannot properly know things as they are
unless we know "how they came to be what they
are." Nor is it merely, or chiefly, the succession of
external events that engages our attention. No doubt
St. Thomas was aware that one thing follows an-
other. What is peculiar to the modern mind is the
disposition and the determination to regard ideas and
concepts, the truth of things as well as the things
themselves, as changing entities, the character and
significance of which at any given time can be fully
grasped only by regarding them as points in an end-
less process of differentiation, of unfolding, of waste
and repair. Let St. Thomas ask us to define any-
thing — for example, the natural law — let him ask us
to tell him what it is. We cannot do it. But, given
time enough, we can relate for him its history. We
can him what varied forms the natural law has
tell

assumed up to now. Historical-mindedness is so

much a preconception of modern thought that we
can identify a particular thing only by pointing to
the various things it successively was before it be-
came that particular thing which it will presently
cease to be.

19
 The Heavenly City

Besides the historical approach to knowledge we

have another to which we are even more committed
— the scientific. As history has gradually replaced
theology, so science has replaced philosophy. Phi-
losophy, it is true, has managed, much better than
theology, to keep up appearances in the modern
world, and at the present moment signs are not
wanting of refurbishings going on in its ancient and

somewhat dilapidated dwelling. Yet, it is obvious

that the undisputed sway which it formerly exer-
cised has long been usurped by natural science. In
the hands of St. Thomas, philosophy, with "deduc-
tive" logic as its instrument of precision, was a
method of building a rational world, its aim being to
reconcile experience with revealed truth. But the in-
fluences which disposed succeeding generations to
examine the facts of human history, induced them
also to examine the facts of natural phenomena. The
rise of history and of science were but two results of

a single impulse, two aspects of the trend of modern

thought away from an overdone rationalization of
the facts to a more careful and disinterested exami-
nation of the facts themselves.
Galileo, for example (not that he was the first by
any means), did not ask what Aristotle had said
about falling bodies, or whether it was reasonable to
suppose that a ten-pound weight would fall to the
ground more quickly than a one-pound weight. He
applied to this problem the scientific method. He

20
 Climates of Opinion

dropped two weights, differing as ten to one, from

the leaning tower, and noted the fact that both
weights reached the ground at the same time. In
such a world as this, he said in effect, this is the way
falling bodies behave. If that is not possible in a ra-
tional world, then the world we live in is not a ra-
tional one. Facts are primary and what chiefly con-
cern us; they are stubborn and irreducible and we
cannot get around them. They may be in accord with
reason, let us hope that they are; but whether they
are so or not is only a question of fact to be deter-
mined like any other.
This subtle shift in the point of view was perhaps
the most important event in the intellectual history
of modern times, but its implications were not at
once understood. Philosophy continued to reign, and
when in the eighteenth century she added a new
word to her title (calling herself natural philosophy),
no one noted the fact as ominous. Galileo and his
successors were philosophers too, preeminently so,
since their marvelous discoveries, based upon obser-
vation and experiment, uncovered so many secret
places in the world, and by promising to banish mys-
tery from the universe seemed to leave it more obvi-
ously rational than they found it. The laws of nature
and nature's God appeared henceforth to be one and
the same thing, and since every part of God's handi-
work could all in good time be reasonably demon-
strated, the intelligent man could very well do with a

21
 The Heavenly City

minimum of faith — except, of course (the exception

was tremendous but scarcely noticed at the time),
faith in the uniform behavior of nature and in the
capacity of reason to discover its modus operandi.
In the course of the nineteenth century this opti-
mistic outlook became overcast. The marriage of
fact and reason, of science and the universal laws of
nature, proved to be somewhat irksome, and in the
twentieth century it was, not without distress, alto-
gether dissolved. Natural philosophy was trans-
formed into natural science. Natural science became
science, and scientists rejected, as a personal af-
front, the title of philosopher, which formerly they
had been proud to bear. The vision of man and his
world as a neat and efficient machine, designed by
an intelligent Author of the Universe, gradually
faded away. Professors of science ceased to speak
with any assurance of the laws of nature, and were
content to pursue, with unabated ardor, but without
any teleological implications whatever, their proper
business of observing and experimenting with the
something which is the stuff of the universe, of meas-
uring and mastering its stress and movement. "Sci-
ence," said Lloyd Morgan, "deals exclusively with
changes of configuration, and traces the accelerations
which are observed to occur, leaving to metaphysics
6
to deal with the underlying agency, if it exist."

It is well known that the result of pursuing this

8 Interpretation of Nature, p. 58.

22
 Climates of Opinion

restricted aim (the scientific method reduced to its

lowest terms) has been astounding. It is needless to

say that we live in a machine age, that the art of in-

venting is the greatest of our inventions, or that

within a brief space of fifty years the outward condi-
tions of life have been transformed. It is less well

understood that this bewildering experience has given

a new slant to our minds. Fresh discoveries and new
inventions are no longer the result of fortunate acci-
dents which we are expected to note with awe. They
are all a part of the day's work, anticipated, delib-
erately intended,and brought to pass according to
schedule. Novelty has ceased to excite wonder be-
cause it has ceased to be novelty; on the contrary,
the strange, so habituated have we become to it, is of
the very essence of the customary. There is nothing
new in heaven or earth not dreamt of in our labora-
and we should be amazed indeed if tomorrow
tories;
and tomorrow and tomorrow failed to offer us some-
thing new to challenge our capacity for readjust-
ment. Science has taught us the futility of troubling

to understand the "underlying agency" of the things

we use. We have found that we can drive an automo-
bile without knowing how the carburetor works, and
listen to a radio without mastering the secret of
radiation. We really haven't time to stand amazed,
either at the starry firmament above or the Freudian
complexes within us. The multiplicity of things to
manipulate and make use of so fully engages our

23
 The Heavenly City

attention that we have neither the leisure nor the

inclination to seek a rational explanation of the force
that makes them function so efficiently.

In dismissing the underlying agency with a casual

shrug, we are in good company. The high priest of
science, even more than the common man,
is a past

master of this one of the engaging ironies

art. It is

of modern thought that the scientific method, which

itwas once fondly hoped would banish mystery from
the world, leaves it every day more inexplicable.

Physics, which it was thought had dispensed with

the need of metaphysics, has been transformed by its
own proper researches into the most metaphysical of
disciplines. The more attentively the physicist looks
at the material stuff of the world the less there is to
see. Under his expert treatment the substantial world
of Newtonian physics has been dissolved into a com-
plex of radiant energies. No efficient engineer or
Prime Mover could have designed the world, since it

can no longer be fully understood in terms of me-

chanics. "What is the sense of talking about a me-
chanical explanation," asks Professor Whitehead,
"when you do not know what you mean by me-
chanics?" 7 We are told that if we ascribe position to
anything it ceases to have determinable velocity; if

we ascertain its velocity it ceases to have determi-

nable position. The universe is said to be composed of
atoms, an atom is said to be composed of a nucleus
7 Science and the Modern World, p. 24.

24
 Climates of Opinion

around which electrons revolve in determinable or-

bits; but experiments seem to show that an electron
may, for reasons best known to itself, be moving in
two orbits at the same time. To this point Galileo's
common-sense method of noting the behavior of
things, of sticking close to the observable facts, has
brought us: it has at last presented us with a fact
thatcommon sense repudiates.
What can we do? Reason and logic cry out in pain
no doubt; but we have long since learned not to
bother overmuch with reason and logic. Logic was
formerly visualized as something outside us, some-
thing existing independently which, if we were will-

ing, could take us by the hand and lead us into the

paths of truth. We now suspect that it is something
the mind has created to conceal its timidity and keep
up its courage, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal
validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if

everybody else in our set will too. If all men are

mortal (an assumption), and if Socrates was a man
(in the sense assumed), no doubt Socrates must have
been mortal; but we suspect that we somehow knew
all this before it was submitted to the test of a syllo-

gism. Logics have a way of multiplying in response

to the changes in point of view. First there was one
logic, then there were two, then there were several;
so that now, according to one authority (if a con-
tributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica who ven-
tures to employ humor can be an authority), the

25
 —

The Heavenly City

state of logic is "that of Israel under the Judges,

every man doeth that which is right in his own eyes."
With all due allowance made for mathematical logic
(which has to do with concepts, not with facts), and
for the logic of probability (which Mr. Keynes as-
sures us has a probable validity), the secure founda-
tions of deductive and inductive logic have been
battered to pieces by the ascertainable facts, so that
we really have no choice; we must cling to the as-
certainable facts though they slay us.
Physicists, therefore, stick to the ascertainable
facts. If logic presumes to protest in the name of the
law, they know how to square it, so that it com-
plaisantly looks the other way while they go on with
illicit enterprises —with the business, for example (it

is Sir William Bragg who vouches for it), of teaching

Monday, Wednesday,
"the wave theory of light on
and Friday, and the quantum theory on Tuesday,
Thursday, and Saturday." It need not surprise us,
then, to learn that physicists make nothing, when it

suits their convenience, of regarding nucleus and

electron, not as substances, but only as radiations
thus, casually dissolving the substantial world into a
congeries of repellent and attractive velocities which
we are invited to believe in because they can be
mathematically identified and made use of. Perhaps,
as Professor Jeans suggests, the world we live in was
designed by a mathematician. Why not, indeed, if it

can be most easily understood in terms of mathe-

26
 Climates of Opinion

matical formulas? We know that two apples plus two

apples make four apples. We have always taken it
for granted that the apples exist, but we can very
well understand that even no apples are anywhere
if

found it still remains true that two plus two make

four. The mathematician gets on just as well without
the apples, better indeed, since the apples have other
attributes besides number. When sufficiently hard
pressed, therefore, the physicist solves his difficulties
by turning mathematician. As mathematician he can
calculate the velocities that are observed to occur,
meantime assuring us that the velocities could readily
be attributed to substantial electrons, provided sub-
stantial electrons with such velocities should ever
turn up. There is really no occasion for despair : our
world can be computed even if it doesn't exist.
Perhaps I have said enough to suggest that the
essential quality of the modern climate of opinion is

factual rather than rational. The atmosphere which

sustains our thought is so saturated with the actual
that we can easily do with a minimum of the theo-
retical. We necessarily look at our world from the
point of view of history and from the point of view
of science. Viewed historically, it appears to be
something in the making, something which can at
best be only tentatively understood since it is not yet
finished. Viewed scientifically, it appears as some-
thing to be accepted, something to be manipulated
and mastered, something to adjust ourselves to with

27
 The Heavenly City

the least possible stress. So long as we can make effi-

cient use of things, we feel no irresistible need to

understand them. No doubt it is for this reason
chiefly that the modern mind can be so wonderfully
at ease in a mysterious universe.

Ill

All this is by way of introduction. I have chosen

to say something about the political and social
thought of the eighteenth century, something about
the Philosophes. If I could stand on high and pro-
nounce judgment on them, estimate authoritatively
the value of their philosophy, tell wherein it is true,
—
wherein false if I could only do all this it would be
grand. But this, unfortunately, is not possible. Liv-
ing in the twentieth century, I am limited by the
preconceptions of my age. It was therefore inevitable
that I should approach the subject from the histori-
cal point of view; and if I have been at great pains
to contrast the climate of opinion of Dante's time
with that of our own, it is merely in order to pro-
vide the historical setting in which the ideas of the
Philosophesmay be placed. Before the historian can
do anything with Newton and Voltaire, he has to
make it clear that they came, historically speaking,
after Dante and Thomas Aquinas and before Ein-
stein and H. G. Wells. I assume that it will be
worth while to place them in this relation, to look at
them in this pattern, because the modern mind has a
28
 Climates of Opinion

predilection for looking at men and things in this

way; it finds a high degree of mental satisfaction in
doing it; and mental satisfaction is always worth
while, for the simple reason that when the mind is

satisfied with the pattern of the things it sees, it has

what it calls an "explanation" of the things it has —
found the "cause" of them. My object is, therefore,
to furnish an explanation of eighteenth-century
thought, from the historical point of view, by show-
ing that it was related to something that came before
and to something else that came after.

We are accustomed to think of the eighteenth cen-

tury as essentially modern in its temper. Certainly,
the Philosophes themselves made a great point of
having renounced the superstition and hocus-pocus
of medieval Christian thought, and we have usually
been willing to take them at their word. Surely, we
say, the eighteenth century was preeminently the age
of reason, surely the Philosophes were a skeptical
lot, atheists in effect if not by profession, addicted
to science and the scientific method, always out to
crush the infamous, valiant defenders of liberty,
equality, fraternity, freedom of speech, and what
you will. All very true. And yet I think the Philoso-
phes were nearer the Middle Ages, less emancipated
from the preconceptions of medieval Christian
thought, than they quite realized or we have com-
monly supposed. If we have done them more (or is it
less?) than justice in giving them a good modern

29
 The Heavenly City

character, the reason is that they speak a familiar

language. We read Voltaire more readily than Dante,
and follow an argument by Hume more easily than
one by Thomas Aquinas. But I think our apprecia-
tion is of the surface more than of the fundamentals
of their thought. We agree with them more readily
when they are witty and cynical than when they are
wholly serious. Their negations rather than their af-
firmations enable us to treat them as kindred spirits.
But, if we examine the foundations of their faith,
we find that at every turn the Philosophes betray
their debt to medieval thought without being aware
of it. They denounced Christian philosophy, but
rather too much, after the manner of those who are
but half emancipated from the "superstitions" they
scorn. They had put off the fear of God, but main-
tained a respectful attitude toward the Deity. They
ridiculed the idea that the universe had been created
in six days,but still believed it to be a beautifully
articulatedmachine designed by the Supreme Being
according to a rational plan as an abiding place for
mankind. The Garden of Eden was for them a myth,
no doubt, but they looked enviously back to the
golden age of Roman virtue, or across the waters to
the unspoiled innocence of an Arcadian civilization
that flourished in Pennsylvania. They renounced the
authority of church and Bible, but exhibited a naive
and reason. They
faith in the authority of nature
scorned metaphysics, but were proud to be called

30
 Climates of Opinion

philosophers. They dismantled heaven, somewhat

prematurely it seems, since they retained their faith
in the immortality of the soul. They courageously
discussed atheism, but not before the servants. They
defended toleration valiantly, but could with diffi-
culty tolerate priests. They denied that miracles ever
happened, but believed in the perfectibility of the
human race. We feel that these Philosophers were at
once too credulous and too skeptical. They were the
victims ofcommon sense. In spite of their rational-
ism and their humane sympathies, in spite of their
aversion to hocus-pocus and enthusiasm and dim
perspectives, in spite of their eager skepticism, their
engaging cynicism, their brave youthful blasphemies
and talk of hanging the last king in the entrails of
the last priest — in spite of all of it, there is more of
Christian philosophy in the writings of the Philoso-
phes than has yet been dreamt of in our histories.
In the following lectures I shall endeavor to
elaborate this theme. I shall attempt to show that
the underlying preconceptions of eighteenth-century
thought were still, allowance made for certain impor-
tant alterations in the bias, essentially the same as
those of the thirteenth century. I shall attempt to
show that the Philosophes demolished the Heavenly
City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more
up-to-date materials.

3i
 II

The Laws of Nature and of

Nature's God
Qu'est-ce que la loi naturelle? C'est
Tordre regulier et constant des faits, par
lequel Dieu regit l'univers. Volney.

When we think of the Philosophes we think first of

all, and quite rightly, of certain French names so

much written about that they are familiar to all the
world —Montesquieu and Voltaire and Rousseau,
Diderot and Helvetius and Baron d'Holbach, Tur-
got and Quesnay and Condorcet, to mention only
the best known. If we were interested in the En-
lightenment as a prelude to the Revolution we also
might conveniently forget, as most writers do, that
France was not the only country blessed (or cursed,
if you like) with Philosophers; but since we are con-
cerned less with the consequences than with the pre-
conceptions of the Enlightenment we
do well to
will

note that it is not a peculiarly French but an inter-

national climate of opinion that is in question. Leib-
nitzand Lessing and Herder, the young Goethe even
(in some of his varying moods) Locke and Hume ;

and Bolingbroke, Ferguson and Adam Smith, Price

and Priestley; and in the new world Jefferson, whose

33
 The Heavenly City

sensitized mind picked up and transmitted every

novel vibration in the intellectual air, and Franklin
of Philadelphia, printer and friend of the human
race —these also, whatever national or individual
characteristics they may have exhibited, were true
children of the Enlightenment. The philosophical
empire was an international domain of which France
was but the mother country and Paris the capital.
Go where you like —England, Holland, Italy, Spain,
America —everywhere you meet them, Philosophers
speaking the same language, sustained by the same
climate of opinion. They are of all countries and of
none, having openly declared their allegiance to
mankind, desiring nothing so much as to be counted
"among the small number of those who by their in-
telligence and their works have merited well of hu-
manity." 1 They are citizens of the world, the emanci-
pated ones, looking out upon a universe seemingly
brand new because so freshly flooded with light, a
universe in which everything worth attending to is
visible, and everything visible is seen to be unblurred

and wonderfully simple after all, and evidently in-

telligible to the human mind —the mind of Philoso-
phers.
There is one not unimportant point about the Phi-
losophers that ought, in simple fairness to them, to
be noted in passing, especially since few writers take
the trouble to mention it: the Philosophers were not
1 Grimm, Correspondance littiraire, IV, 69.

34
 The Laws of Nature

philosophers. I mean to say they were not professors

of philosophy whose business it was to publish, every
so often, systematic and stillborn treatises on episte-
mology and the like subjects. Exceptions there were
no doubt. Leibnitz and Locke and Hume, Adam
Smith perhaps, and maybe Helvetius will be found
catalogued under philosophy and mentioned in for-
mal histories of that subject. But for the most part
the Philosophers were men of letters, writers of
books intended to be read and designed to spread
abroad new ideas or to shed new light on old ones. I
need only mention that Voltaire wrote plays, his-
tories, tales, and an A BC
Newtonian physics for
of
ladies and gentlemen unblessed with a knowledge of
mathematics; that Franklin was a scientist, inventor,
politician, diplomat, political economist, moralist,
and the first and most -successful of American "col-
umnists"; that Diderot, besides being the literary
editor and promoter of the EncyclopSdie, was a jour-
nalist who wrote on everything that struck his lively
—
fancy on art salons, the social implications of a
mechanistic theory of the universe, the baneful ef-
fect of emotional repression on nuns; that Rousseau,
in defense of the thesis that art is injurious to man-
kind, employed a high degree of art in the writing of
politicalpropaganda and didactic romances; that
Mably wrote a long history to prove that France
once possessed, but had somehow mislaid, a most ad-
mirable political constitution.

35
 The Heavenly City

But if the Philosophers were not philosophers they

had, like their modern counterparts, a philosophical
message to deliver: they were the eager bearers of
good tidings to mankind. Disinterested? Objectively
detached? By no means. Do not look for these high
virtues in the Philosophers, least of all when they
make a point of them. No doubt the objective atti-

tude may sometimes be found — in the scientific ex-

positions of Newton and his confreres, in some of the
writings of Franklin perhaps, or those of Hume. But
to be amused and detached observers of the human
scene was not characteristic of them. It is true you
will find plenty of cynical wit — in Voltaire above all,

as everyone knows. But the wit is too superficially

cynical to be more than a counterirritant. There is
more fundamental pessimism to be found in the
seventeenth than in the eighteenth century, in the
Libertins than in the Philosophes. The disillusion-

ment of Hume and Franklin was deep enough, but it

found easy release in a genial irony that disturbed no
one, least of all themselves. The cynicism of Voltaire
was not bred in the bone as the great Frederick's
was; nor was it, like that of La Rochefoucauld, the
cold-blooded systematization of a grand seignior's in-
difference; still less, like that of Pascal, a fatal spir-

itual malady troubling the heart. It was all on the

surface, signifying nothing but the play of a supple
and irrepressible mind, or the sharp impatience of an
exasperated idealist. In spite of Candide and all the

36
 The Laws of Nature

rest of it, Voltaire was an optimist, although not a

naive one. He was the defender of causes, and not of
lost causes either —a crusader pledged recover the to
holy places of the true the
faith, of human-
religion
ity. Voltaire, skeptic—strange misconception! On
the contrary, a man of faith, an apostle who fought
the good fight, tireless to the end, writing seventy
volumes to convey the truth that was to make us
free.

At this point I ought perhaps to mention the well-

worn word "enthusiasm." Do not the writers of the
eighteenth century, the early eighteenth century,
commonly insist on the just measure, the virtue of
keeping cool and not straying beyond the call of

common sense? Do they not even become a little

heated and scornful when confronted with examples

of "enthusiasm"? They do indeed, and there's the
rub. To be scornful is not to be detached. The aver-
sion of the Philosophers to enthusiasm did not carry
them to the high ground of indifference. Their aver-
sion to enthusiasm was itself an enthusiasm, a mark
of their resolute rejection of all that was not evident
to the senses, of their commendable passion for open-
ing up and disinfecting all the musty, shuttered clos-
ets of the mind. The best case in point, the best and
most ironical, is Hume, no less: Hume, the personifi-
cation of common sense, stiffly priding himself on a
Jove-like avoidance of enthusiasm. Who, indeed, was
so well suited to be an indifferent observer of the

37
 The Heavenly City

human scene? He had it, and

the temperament for
him quite without
his philosophical speculations left
illusion, or should have, since they led him to the

conclusion that the ultimate cause of things "has no

more regard to good above ill than to heat above
2
cold." But a conclusion which left so little scope for
enthusiasm was too much even for Hume. He writes
in 1737:

1 am at present castrating my work . . . ; that is,

endeavouring it shall give as little offence as possible.

. . . This is a piece of cowardice. . . . But I was re-

solved not to be an enthusiast in philosophy, while blam-

ing other enthusiasms. 8

It seems oversubtle —avoiding enthusiasm to the

point of refusing to press a pessimistic argument to
its logical conclusion. I think Hume's real reason for
soft-pedaling skepticism was the feeling that such
negative conclusions were useless. He writes:
A man has but a bad grace who delivers a theory,
however true, which . . . leads to a practice dangerous
and pernicious. Why rake into those corners of nature,
which spread a nuisance all around? Truths which . . .

are pernicious to society, if any such there be, will yield

to errors, which are salutary and advantageous.
4.

At all events, in mid career Hume abandoned philo-

2 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1907), p. 160.

J. H. Burton, Life and Correspondence of David Hume,
8 I, 64.

* Essays (1767), H, 352, 353-

38
 The Laws of Nature

sophical speculations for other subjects, such as

history and ethics, which could be treated honestly
without giving "offense," and from which useful les-

sons might be drawn. By this devious route the

prince of skeptics, who abhorred enthusiasm with a
pure passion, found his way into the company of
those who might be regarded as having "deserved
well of humanity."
In all this Hume is representative of his century.
Its characteristic note is not a disillusioned indiffer-
ence, but the eager didactic impulse to set things
right. Bienfaisance, humaniti —the very words, we
are told, are new, coined by the Philosophers to ex-
press in secular terms the Christian ideal of service.
In this connection one is reminded of that earnest
and amiable and rather futile Abbe de Saint-Pierre,
the man "at whom every one laughs, and who is

alone serious and without laughter."

6
How industri-
ously this priest labored in the secular vineyard of
the Lord! How many "projects" he wrote, helpful
hints for the improvement of mankind "Project —
for Making Roads Passable in Winter," "Project for
the Reform of Begging," "Project for Making Dukes
and Peers Useful." And then one day, quite sud-
denly, so he tells us, "there came into my mind a
project which by its great beauty struck me with as-
tonishment. It has occupied all my attention for fif-

Quoted from La Bruyere by Sainte-Beuve, Lundis, XV, 257.

39
 The Heavenly City
8
teen days." The result we know: A Project for
Making Peace Perpetual in Europe!
Well, let us join the others and laugh at the Abbe,
but does not his penchant for projects remind us of
improvement re-
Jefferson, does not his passion for
callPoor Richard? Let us laugh at him, by all
means, but be well assured that when we do we are
laughing at the eighteenth century, at its preoccupa-
tion with human welfare, at its penchant for proj-
ects. Who, indeed, was not, in this bright springtime
of the modern world, making or dreaming of proj-
ects? What were most of the scientific academies in
France doing but discussing, quarreling about, and
having a jolly time over the framing of projects?
What was Ency elope' die, what was the Revolu-
the
tion Grand projects, surely. What, indeed
itself?

(the question stares us in the face), was this en-

lightened eighteenth century doing, what significance
had it in the world anyway if not just this: that with
earnest purpose, with endless argument and impas-
sioned propaganda and a few not unhappy tears shed
in anticipation of posterity's gratitude, it devoted all

its energies to sketching the most naively simple

project ever seen for making dukes and peers useful,

for opening all roads available to the pursuit of hap-

piness, for securing the blessings of liberty, equality,
and fraternity to all mankind? Maybe this project

• Drouet, Abbi de Saint-Pierre, p. 108.

40
 The Laws of Nature

was less futile than those of the Abbe de Saint-

Pierre, maybe it only seems so; but it was at all
events inspired by the same ideal —the Christian
ideal of service, the humanitarian impulse to set
things right.
I do not forget that during the course of the cen-
tury there is to be noted a change in the outward ex-
pression of this didactic impulse to set things right.
Sometime about 1750, men of sense became men of
sentiment, and presently men of sentiment began to
weep. The tears of the later century have often been
attributed to the influence of Rousseau, wrongly I
think. It is certain that Diderot shed tears before he
knew Rousseau, and continued to do so after he
quarreled with him. As early as 1760, the practice
was so common that the little Abbe Galiani shocked
Diderot one day by confessing that he had never
shed a tear in his life; and some years before the
statement of Fontenelle that he had "relegated senti-
ment to the iglogue" aroused in the cold and upright
Grimm a feeling very near aversion. 7 Too much may
easily be made of this change in manners. The re-
serve of a Fontenelle or the expansiveness of a Dide-
rot were but outward characteristics the outward —
evidence of an inward grace; an inward grace, they
would have you know, far more efficacious than that
of the religious. But the Philosophers were more akin

7 Correspondence UtUraire, III, 345.

41
 The Heavenly City

to the religious than they knew. They were the secu-

lar bearers of the Protestant and the Jansenist tradi-
tion.Their aversion to enthusiasm was in truth but
the measure of their irritation. It irritated them, the
enlightened ones, to think that mankind had been so
long deluded by priests and medicine men who had
played their game, and still played it, by keeping
the minds of the vulgar loosely wrapped in a warm,
emotional fog. "It has taken centuries," exclaimed
Grimm, "to subdue the human race to the tyrannical
yoke of the priests; it will take centuries and a series
of efforts and successes to secure its freedom." We
8

need not be deceived. In spite of their persiflage and

wit, in spite of their correct manner and restrained
prose, we can still hear, in the very accents of the
saints, the despairing cry, "How long, O Lord, how
long!"
Not so long, at that, if the Philosophers could have
their way. And they were bent on having They
it.

were out for the cold facts, out to spoil the game of
the mystery-mongers. That species of enthusiasm
was indeed to be banned; but only to be replaced by
an enthusiasm, however well concealed beneath an
outward calm, for the simple truth of things. Know-
ing beforehand that the truth would make them free,
they were on the lookout for a special brand of
truth, a truth that would be on their side, a truth
they could make use of in their business. Some sure
8 Correspondance littiraire, V, 389.

42
 The Laws of Nature

instinctwarned them that it would be dangerous to

know too much, that "to comprehend all is to pardon
all." They were too recently emancipated from er-

rors to regard error with detachment, too eager to

spread the light to enjoy the indolent luxury of the
suspended judgment. Emancipated themselves, they
were conscious of a mission to perform, a message to
deliver to mankind; and to this messianic enterprise

they brought an extraordinary amount of earnest

conviction, of devotion, of enthusiasm. We can watch
this enthusiasm, this passion for libertyand justice,
for truth and humanity, rise and rise throughout the
century until it becomes a delirium, until it culmi-
nates, in some symbolical sense, in that half admi-
June 8, 1794, when
rable, half pathetic spectacle of
Citizen Robespierre, with a bouquet in one hand and
a torch in the other, inaugurated the new religion of
humanity by lighting the conflagration that was to
purge the world of ignorance, vice, and folly.

Too much has been made of the negations of these

crusaders of the age of reason : too much by the nine-
teenth century because it had no liking for the en-
lightened ones; too much by our own century be-
cause we have no liking for the Victorians. Their
negations more often than not were mere surface
cynicisms, and there is less in these surface cyni-
cisms than we are apt to think. Take one of Vol-
taire's swift shining shafts of wit: "History is after
all only a pack of tricks we play on the dead." Ah,

43
 The Heavenly City

yes, how true it is, we say; and we are astonished

that Voltaire could have been so profound. Then we
realize that he did not really mean it. To him it was

a witticism intended to brand dishonest historians,

whereas we perceive that it formulated, in the neat-
est possible way, a profound truth the truth that —
all historical writing, even the most honest, is uncon-

sciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite

of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it
finds necessary for its own peace of mind. And this
leads us to reconsider another of his sayings: "Noth-
ing is more annoying than to be obscurely hanged."
And we wonder whether he understood all the impli-
cations of this pregnant saying as well as we do;
whether he understood as well as we do, or think we
do, that he and his brother Philosophes must have
fed their enthusiasm for liberty and justice not a lit-
tleon the satisfaction they found in being conspicu-
ously hanged (if only in effigy) for their brave little
blasphemies.
But, if we have understood their negations too
well, we have accepted their affirmations, their pro-
fessions of faith, rather too much as a matter of
course. Let Voltaire define natural religion: "I un-
derstand by natural religion the principles of mo-
rality common to the human race." If it does not
bore us too much we ask a perfunctory question,
What is morality? and pause not for an answer. If
9 Oeuvres (1883-85), XXII, 419.

44
 The Laws of Nature

by chance we really attend to these affirmations they

puzzle us. Over against the Angelic Doctor's defini-
tion of natural law, set that of Volney:

The by which God

regular and constant order of facts
which his wisdom presents
rules the universe; the order
to the sense and reason of men, to serve them as an
equal and common rule of conduct, and to guide them,
without distinction of race or sect, towards perfection and
happiness. 10

The language is familiar, we ex-

but the idea, once
amine it critically, is Thomas
as remote as that of
Aquinas. Important if true, we say; but how comes
it, we ask, that you are so well acquainted with God

and his purposes? Who told you, skeptic as we have

been led to suppose, that there is a regular and con-
stant order of nature? And this animal man (that
"damned race" as the great Frederick defined it),
how can you be so sure that he knows what perfec-
tion is, or would be happy if he had it?
Indeed, it is all too simple, this dogmatic affirma-
tion. It assumes everything that most needs to be
proved, and begs every question we could think of
asking. These skeptics who eagerly assent to so much
strike our sophisticated minds as overcredulous. We
feel that they are too easily persuaded, that they are
naive souls after all, duped by their humane sympa-
thies, on every occasion hastening to the gate to
10 Oeuvres (2d ed.)> I, 249.

45
 The Heavenly City

meet and welcome platitudes and thin panaceas. And

so our jaded and somewhat morbid modern curiosity
is at last aroused. We wish to know the reason for
all this fragile optimism. We wish to know what it is

that sustains this childlike faith, what unexamined

prepossessions enable the Philosophers to see the
tangled wilderness of the world in this symmetrical,
this obvious and uncomplicated pattern. Have they
perhaps had some recent revelation authorizing them
to speak in the very accents of the voice of God?
Across the decades we hear the timid vagabond from
Geneva, in passion-laden tones, thunder his arrogant
challenge in the teeth of an archbishop: "Is it sim-
ple, is it natural that God should go in search of
11
Moses Jean Jacques Rousseau?" Well,
to speak to
frankly, we do not know. But it seems obvious that
Rousseau has up his sleeve some good answer to his
own question, some answer that all the Philosophes
will surely regard as conclusive. There must be, we
begin to be aware, some private passageway to the
heavenly throne, some secret backstairs entry that
all the Philosophes know of, some door, closed to us,
that will open to them when they give it a certain
understood succession of raps. We should like to en-
ter this door. We should really like to discover what
it is that Jean Jacques Rousseau goes in search of
when he wishes to know what God has said to him.

11 Oeuvres (1823), VI, 115.

46
 The Laws of Nature

II

If we would discover the little backstairs door that

for any age serves as the secret entranceway to
knowledge, we will do well to look for certain unob-
trusive words with uncertain meanings that are per-
mitted to slip off the tongue or the pen without fear
and without research; words which, having from
constant repetition lost their metaphorical signifi-

cance, are unconsciously mistaken for objective

realities. In the thirteenth century the key words
would no doubt be God, sin, grace, salvation, heaven,
and the like; in the nineteenth century, matter, fact,
matter-of-fact, evolution, progress; in the twentieth
century, relativity, process, adjustment, function,
complex. In the eighteenth century the words with-
out which no enlightened person could reach a rest-
ful conclusion were nature, natural law, first cause,
reason, sentiment, humanity, perfectibility (these
last three being necessary only for the more tender-
minded, perhaps).
In each age these magic words have their en-
trances and their exits. And how unobtrusively they
come inand go out! We should scarcely be aware
either of their approach or their departure, except
for a slight feeling of discomfort, a shy self-con-
sciousness in the use of them. The word "progress"
has long been in good standing, but just now we are
beginning to feel, in introducing it into the highest

47
 The Heavenly City

circles, the need of easing it in with quotation marks,

that conventional apology that will save all our faces.
Words of more ancient lineage trouble us more. Did
not President Wilson, during the war, embarrass us
not a little by appearing on such familiar
in public
terms with "humanity," by the frank avowal of his
love for "mankind"? As for God, sin, grace, salva-
tion —the introduction of these ghosts from the dead
past we regard as inexcusable, so completely do their
unfamiliar presences put us out of countenance, so
effectively do they, even under the most favorable
circumstances, cramp our style.
In the eighteenth century these grand magisterial
words, although still to be seen, were already going
out of fashion, at least in high intellectual society. It
is true that theologians still made much of them, but
even they felt called upon to
a rational apology
offer
famous Analogy of Re-
for doing so. Bishop Butler's
ligion, Natural and Revealed (1737) was only one,

although one of the most elaborate and painstaking,

of many exercises of this kind. But for the sophisti-
cated, men of letters and men of the world, these
masterful words were regarded with distaste. Unable
to pronounce them without discomfort, enlightened
"men of parts" commonly employed substitutes or
euphemisms with less explicit, less compromising im-
plications. The picture of salvation in the Heavenly
City they toned down to a vague impressionistic im-
age of a "future state," "immortality of the soul," or

48
 —

The Laws of Nature

a more generalized earthly and social filiate or per-

fectibility du genre humain. Grace was translated

into virtue, virtue with a certain classical implication

in the meaning ce fonds de rectitude et de bonti

morale, qui est la base de la vertu, as Marmontel de-
12
fined it. To be esteemed a "man of virtue" was
both sufficient and efficacious, and likely to give one,
without any painful searchings of the heart, the as-
surance of being in a state of social justification, or
even, if the esteem were general enough, of complete
sanctification. I suppose that Hume
and Franklin,
when they were in France, for example, must have
had this assurance as fully as any saint of the church
ever did.
With the Heavenly City thus shifted to earthly
foundations, and the business of justification trans-
ferred from divine to human hands, it was inevitable
that God should be differently conceived and more
indifferently felt. Not that he could be (except by a
few unnaturally hardened souls) dispensed with al-
together. Most eighteenth-century minds were too
accustomed to a stable society with fixed ranks, too
habituated to an orderly code of manners and a
highly conventionalized art, to be at all happy in a
disordered universe. It seemed safer, therefore, even
for the enlightened ones, to retain God, or some
plausible substitute, as a kind of dialectical guaranty
that all was well in the most comfortable of common-
12 M4moires (1818), II, 195.

49
 The Heavenly City

sense worlds. But, obviously, the Creator as a mere

first premise no longer needed those rich and all too
human qualities of God the Father. Having per-
formed his essential function of creation, it was
proper for him to withdraw from the affairs of men
into the shadowy places where absolute being dwells.
Thus withdrawn, he ceased to be personal and incon-
venient. No longer demanding propitiatory sacrifices,
he could be regarded merely as that Omniscience or
Beneficence which men of sense could serenely con-
template with respect untempered with fear or ado-
ration. Yet, even men of sense needed some word for
this necessary thing, some suitable substitute for God
the Father. Supreme Being? Author of the Universe?
Great Contriver? Prime Mover? First Cause? Surely,
any of these would serve. We know at least, to our
great discomfort, that all of them were freely used.
It would have been impossible, would it not, for
the Philosophes to have thus complacently permitted
God the Father to fade away into the thin abstrac-
tion of a First Cause unless they were prepared to
dispense with his revelation to men —the revelation
through Holy Writ and Holy Church. This was, in-

deed, the whole point of their high, offensive ges-

ture. Renunciation of the traditional revelation was
the very condition of being truly enlightened; for to
be truly enlightened was to see the light in all its ful-

ness,and the light in its fulness revealed two very

simple and obvious facts. One of these contained the

50
 The Laws of Nature

sum of those negations which we understand so well

—the fact that the supposed revelation of God's pur-
poses through Holy Writ and Holy Church was a
fraud, or at best an illusion born of ignorance, perpe-
trated, or at least maintained, by the priests in order
to accentuate the fears of mankind, and so hold it in
subjection. The other fact contained the sum of those
affirmations which we understand less easily that —
God had revealed his purpose to men in a far more
simple and natural, a far less mysterious and recon-
dite way, through his works. To be enlightened was
to understand this double truth, that it was not in

Holy Writ, but book of nature, open for

in the great
all mankind to read, that the laws of God had been
recorded. This is the new revelation, and thus at last
we enter the secret door to knowledge. This open
book of nature was what Jean Jacques Rousseau and
went in search of when
his philosophical colleagues
they wished to know what God had said to them.
—
Nature and natural law what magic these words
held for the philosophical century! Enter that coun-
try by any door you like, you are at once aware of its
pervasive power. I have but just quoted, in another
connection, extracts from the writings of Hume, Vol-
taire, Rousseau, Volney: in each of them nature

takes without question the position customarily re-

served for the guest of honor. To find a proper title
for this lecture I had only to think of the Declara-
tion of Independence —"to assume, among the pow-

5i
 The Heavenly City

ers of the earth, the separate and equal station, to

which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle
them." Turn to the French counterpart of the Decla-
ration, and you will find that "the aim of every po-
litical association is the preservation of the natural
and imprescriptible rights of man." Search the writ-
ings of the new economists and you will find them
demanding the abolition of artificial restrictions on
trade and industry in order that men may be free to
follow the natural law of self-interest. Look into the
wilderness of forgotten books and pamphlets dealing
with religion and morality: interminable arguments,
clashing opinions, different and seemingly irreconcil-
able conclusion you will find, and yet strangely
enough controversialists of every party unite in call-
ing upon nature as the sovereign arbiter of all their
quarrels. The Christian Bishop Butler affirms with
confidence that "the whole analogy of nature . . .

most fully shews that there is nothing incredible in

the general [Christian] doctrine of religion, that
God will reward and punish men for their actions
13
hereafter." The deist Voltaire, rejecting the Chris-
tian doctrine of religion, asserts with equal dogma-
tism that "natural law . . . which nature teaches all
men" is that "upon which all religion is founded." 14
The atheist Holbach, rejecting all religion, neverthe-
13 The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Con-
stitution and Course of Nature (1900), p. 39.
" Oeuvres, XXV, 39 J
IX, 443.

52
 The Laws of Nature

less holds that "the morality suitable to man should

16
be founded on the nature of man." Christian, deist,

atheist —
all acknowledge the authority of the book

of nature; if they differ it is only as to the scope of

its authority, as to whether it merely confirms or
entirely supplants the authority of the old revela-
tion.In the eighteenth-century climate of opinion,
whatever question you seek to answer, nature is the
test, the standard: the ideas, the customs, the insti-
tutions of men, if ever they are to attain perfection,
must obviously be in accord with those laws which
16
"nature reveals at all times, to all men."
Not that the concepts of nature and natural law
were new in the world. Aristotle justified slavery on
17
the ground that it was in accord with nature. The
stoic emperor, Marcus Aurelius, understood that
18
"nothing is evil which is according to Nature." Ro-
man jurists endeavored to reconcile positive law with
the law of nature and right reason. Thomas Aquinas
knew that the "participation of the eternal law in the
19
rational creature is called the natural law." Accord-
ing to Calvin, "Natural equity . . . demands that
princes be armed ... to defend the subjects com-
mitted to their care whenever they are hostilely as-
20
sailed." Robert Barclay, the Quaker, tells us that

15 Systeme social, I, 58. 16 Voltaire, Oeuvres, 560. XXV,

17 Politics, chaps, v, vi. 18 Meditations, Bk. II, 17.
19 Summa theologica, Part II (First Part), Q. XCI, art. ii.
20 Institutes, Bk. IV, chap, xx, sec. 11.

53
 The Heavenly City

"this forcing of men's consciences is contrary ... to

21
the very law of nature" Dominican pro-
Vittoria, a
fessor, denned the law of nations as "that which
natural reason establishes between all nations." 22
Suarez, the Jesuit philosopher, thought that the
"natural light of intelligence, spontaneously pro-
nouncing on that which should be done, may be
23
called the natural law." Grotius founded civil and
international society on human nature, which is the
24
"mother of . . . natural law." English Levelers in
the seventeenth century founded their revolt on the
"laws of God and nature." Hobbes defended, and
Locke refuted, the doctrine of despotic power on the
same high ground. Montaigne, who welcomed and
relished every idea that ever was, felt it not reason-
able that "art should gain the pre-eminence of our
great and powerful mother nature." 25 And, finally,
not to try your patience further, Pascal was familiar
enough with nature and all her ways to pronounce a
final judgment. "But what is nature? Why is cus-

tom not natural? I much fear that this nature is it-

26
self only a first custom, as custom is second nature."

Not the exclusive possession of the eighteenth cen-

tury, this "ideal image" of nature; no, but after all a
different, a more substantial image arises to charm
21 Apology, XIV, sec. 4.
22 Quoted in C. L. Lange, Histoire de Vinternationalistne, I, 272.
23 Ibid.,
p. 281.
24 Rights of War and Peace, Prolegomena, p. 16.
26 Essays, Bk. chap. xxx. 26 Pensies 42.
I, (1897), I,

54
 The Laws of Nature

that century. In earlier centuries the ideal image of

nature was, as one may say, too ghostly ever to be
mistaken for nature herself. Nature herself had hith-
erto seemed to common sense intractable, even mys-
terious and dangerous, at best inharmonious to man.
Men some authoritative assurance
therefore desired
that there was no need to be apprehensive; and this
assurance came from theologians and philosophers
who argued that, since God is goodness and reason,
his creation must somehow be, even if not evidently
so to finite minds, good and reasonable. Design in
nature was thus derived a priori from the character
which the Creator was assumed to have; and natural
law, so far from being associated with the observed
behavior of physical phenomena, was no more than a
conceptual universe above and outside the real one, a
logical construction dwelling in the mind of God and
dimly reflected in the minds of philosophers.
Once safely within the eighteenth century we
cease to be haunted by this ghostly ideal image. The
ideal image is still with us, but it has taken on a more
familiar and substantial body. No one ever looked
more attentively at the eighteenth-century image of
nature than Hume, who knew better than anyone
else that it was an illusion and ; for that very reason
there is no better description of it than that which
he put into the mouth of Cleanthes, one of the char-
acters in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Reli-
gion. In defense of natural religion, Cleanthes says:

55
 The Heavenly City

Look around the world: contemplate the whole and

every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one
great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of les-
ser machines, which again admit of subdivisions, to a de-
gree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace
and explain. All these various machines, and even their
most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an
accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men, who
have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of
means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly,
though it much exceeds, the productions of human . . .

intelligence. Since therefore the effects resemble each

other, we are led to infer . . . that the causes also re-
semble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat simi-
lar to the mind of man; though possessed of much larger
faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work, which
he has executed. 27

The passage is significant in two respects. We

note at once that the logical process has been re-
versed. Cleanthes does not conclude that nature
must be rational because God is eternal reason; he
concludes that God must be an engineer because na-
ture is a machine. From this reversal of the logical
process it follows that natural law is identified with
the actual behavior of nature. What ravishes Clean-
thes into admiration is not the exceeding beauty of a
logical concept of the world, but the exceeding in-
tricacyand delicate adjustment of the world itself.
For him nature is not a logical concept, but a sub-
27 Dialogues
(1907), p. 30.

56
 The Laws of Nature

stantial reality; and natural law, instead of being a

construction of deductive logic, is the observed har-
monious behavior of material objects.
This transformation of the ideal image of nature
was the result, as everyone knows, of the scientific

discoveries of the seventeenth century. Galileo ob-

served that the pendulum behaved in a certain man-
ner,and then formulated the law of the pendulum in
terms of mathematics. Newton did not doubt that the
heavens declare the glory of God; but he was con-
cerned to find out, by looking through a telescope
and doing a sum in mathematics, precisely how they
managed it. He discovered that every particle of
matter, whether in the heavens or elsewhere, be-
haved as if it attracted every other particle with a
force proportional to the product of the masses and
inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
This was a new kind of "law of nature." Formerly,
as the editor of the second edition of the Principia
tells us, philosophers were "employed in giving
names to things, and not in searching into things
themselves." Newton himself noted the difference
by saying: "These Principles I consider not as oc-
supposed to result from the specific
cult Qualities,
Forms of Things, but as general Laws of Nature, by
which the Things themselves are form'd." 28 This was
the new way to knowledge opened up by "natural

28 Quoted in Dampier-Whetham, A History of Science, pp. 181,

183.

57
 The Heavenly City

philosophy": to "search into Things themselves,"

and then to formulate the "general Laws of Nature
by which the Things themselves are form'd."
Certainly, this new philosophy ravished the eight-
eenth century into admiration; and not the least
astonishing thing about it was the commonplace

methods employed to discover such marvelous

truths. That Newton discovered the nature of light
seemed even less significant to his contemporaries
than that he did so by playing with a prism. It was
as if nature had for the first time been brought
close to men, close enough to be tangible and clearly
visible in all its wonderful details. Nature, it seemed,
was, after all, just the common things that common
men observed and handled every day, and natural
law only the uniform way these things behaved.
Steam bubbling from the spout of a kettle, smoke
whisking up a chimney, morning mist lifting from
—
meadows here was nature all about, moving in
ways not mysterious her wonders to perform; and
revealing, to the eyes of common men, no less than to
the learned, those laws that imposed on all things
their reasonable and beneficent, even if curious and
intricate, commands.

When philosophy became a matter of handling test

tubes instead of dialectics everyone could be, in the
measure of his intelligence and interest, a philoso-
pher.As Goethe tells us:
Many a one became convinced that nature had en-

58
 The Laws of Nature

dowed him with as great a portion of good and straight-

forward sense as, perchance, he required to form such a
clear notion of objects that he could manage them and
turn them to his own profit, and that of others, without
laboriously troubling himself about the most universal
problems. . . . Men made the trial, opened their eyes,
looked straight before them, observant, industrious, ac-
tive. . . .

. . . every one was now entitled, not only to philoso-

phize, but also by degrees to consider himself a philoso-

pher. Philosophy, therefore, was more or less sound and
practised common sense, which ventured to enter upon
the universal, and to decide upon inner and outer experi-
ences. . . . and thus at last philosophers were found in
29
all the faculties, nay, in all classes and trades.

"Until philosophers become kings, . . . cities will

not cease from ill," said Plato; but philosophy is

perhaps in an even better way to exert influence

(whether for good or ill) when common men become
philosophers. The reason is that common men take
up philosophy, if at all, not as an exercise in dialec-
tic, but as something that holds for them the assur-
ance of a better way of life. They are apt, therefore,
to associate any philosophy that interests them with
the name of some great man, whom they can love or
hate for having given the world a new idea; and they
are sure to invest the new idea with some meaning
29 Autobiography (Bohn Sammtliche
ed.), I, 231; Werke,
XXIII, 71.

59
 The Heavenly City

that it did not originally have. We are familiar with

this procedure, having noted, during the last fifty
years, the association of the "evolutionary philoso-
phy" with the name of Darwin, and the transforma-
tion of "Darwinism" into "monkeyism" or the "white
man's burden" as the case may be into something —
which Darwin, simple man, would be
at all events
astonished to hear of. The same thing happened in
the eighteenth century. Common men associated the
new philosophy with the name of Newton because it

appeared that Newton, more than any other man,

had banished mystery from the world by discovering
a "universal law of nature," thus demonstrating,
what others had only asserted, that the universe was
rational and intelligible through and through, and
capable, therefore, of being subdued to the uses of
men.
The "Newtonian philosophy" was, accordingly, as
common men in the middle eighteenth
familiar to
century as the "Darwinian philosophy" is in our
day. "Very few people read Newton," Voltaire ex-
plained, "because it is necessary to be learned to
understand him. But everybody talks about him." 30
Why, indeed, should ordinary men read Newton?
They were not greatly interested in the proposition
that "reaction is always equal and opposite to ac-
tion." They were interested in the Newtonian phi-
losophy, a very different thing. No need to open the
80 Oeuvres, XXII, 130.

60
 The Laws of Nature

what the Newtonian philosophy

Principia to find out
was —much Leave that to the
better not, in fact.
popularizers, who could find in the Principia more
philosophy than common men could, very often
more, I must say, than Newton himself ever did.
Anyone might open, instead of the Principia, Benja-
min Martin's A Plain and Familiar Introduction to
the Newtonian Philosophy in Six Sections, Illus-
,

trated by Six Copper-Plates (1751), of which there

appeared in due time five editions; or James Fergu-
son's Astronomy Explained upon Sir Isaac Newton's
Principles, and Made Easy to Those who have not
Studied Mathematics (1756), which ran to seven
editions; or Voltaire'sElements de la philosophic de
Newton, which could be read in English (1738) as
well as in the original French; or Count Algorotti's
// N ewtonianismo per le dame, which ran to three

editions in Italian, was translated into French

(1738), and into English under the title Theory of
Light and Colors (1739); or (for those poetically
inclined) J. T. Desaguliers' The Newtonian System
of the World the Best Model of Government, an Alle-
gorical Poem (1728).
In these books, or in others like them, common
men could find the Newtonian philosophy, a philoso-
phy which was of interest to them, not so much for

the scientific discoveries it set forth as for the bear-

ing of those discoveries upon the most fundamental
of human problems —that is to say, the relation of

61
 The Heavenly City

man and of both to God. What those rela-

to nature
tions were, or were taken to be, is admirably stated
by Colin Maclaurin, Professor of Mathematics in
the University of Edinburgh, in his book, An Ac-
count of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discov-
perhaps the ablest of the popular expositions in
eries,

English.

To describe the phenomena of nature, to explain their

causes . . . and to inquire into the whole constitution of
the universe, is the business of natural philosophy. A
strong curiosity has prompted men in all times to study
nature; every useful art has some connexion with this
science; and the inexhausted beauty and variety of things
makes it ever agreeable, new, and surprising.
But natural philosophy is subservient to purposes of a
higher kind, and is chiefly to be valued as it lays a sure
foundation for natural religion and moral philosophy; by
leading us, in a satisfactory manner, to the knowledge of
the Author and Governor of the universe. . . .

We are, from his works, to seek to know God, and not

to pretend to mark out the scheme of his conduct, in na-
ture, from the very deficient ideas we are able to form of
that great mysterious Being. . . .

Our views of Nature, however imperfect, serve to rep-

resent to us, in the most sensible manner, that mighty
power which prevails throughout, acting with a force and
efficacy that appears to suffer no diminution from the
greatest distances of space or intervals of time; and that
wisdom which we see equally displayed in the exquisite
structure and just motions of the greatest and subtilest

62
 The Laws of Nature

parts. These, with perfect goodness, by which they are

evidently directed, constitute the supreme object of the
speculations of a philosopher; who, while he contemplates
and admires so excellent a system, cannot but be himself
excited and animated to correspond with the general har-
mony of nature.*
1

The closing words of this passage may well be

taken as a just expression of the prevailing state of
mind about the middle of the eighteenth century.
Obviously the disciples of the Newtonian philosophy
had not ceased to worship. They had only given an-
other form and a new name to the object of worship:
having denatured God, they deified nature. They
could, therefore, without self-consciousness, and with
only a slight emendation in the sacred text, repeat
the cry of the psalmist: "I will lift up mine eyes to
Nature from whence cometh my help!" With eyes
uplifted, contemplating and admiring so excellent a
system, they were excited and animated to corre-
spond with the general harmony.

Ill
The desire to correspond with the general har-
mony springs perennial in the human breast. Saints
of all ages have aspired to become one with what-
ever gods there be. In medieval times the approved
method, in Europe, was thought to be fasting and
prayer, denial of the flesh, the renunciation of the
81 Newton's Philosophical Discoveries (1775), pp. 3, 4, 95.

63
 The Heavenly City

natural man. "Who shall deliver me from the body

of this death!" The physical dwelling place of the
spiritwas thought to be a disharmony, a soiled and
cloying vesture of decay closing in and blinding the
spirit so that, during its earthly pilgrimage, it could
only with harmony
difficulty, if at all, enter into the

that was God. But the enlightened ones knew that

it was not so. From this darkness also they had

emerged into the light which enabled them to see

that the natural and the spiritual man were but dif-

ferent manifestations of one harmonious whole.

The rationalization of this will to believe was pro-
vided by John Locke in his epoch-making book, An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which be-
came the psychological gospel of the eighteenth cen-
tury. Its great service to the men of that time was to
demonstrate that the mind owed nothing to inherit-
ance, to "innate ideas"; everything to environment,
to the sensations that flowed in upon it from the
outer world. A modern critic assures us that the
theory of innate ideas which Locke demolished was
"so crude that it is difficult to suppose that any seri-
82
ous thinker ever held That may well be. Maybe
it."

serious thinkers are few, and maybe the world is

ruled by crude ideas. What Locke aimed at no doubt,
what the eighteenth century acclaimed him for hav-
ing demolished, was the Christian doctrine of total
82 C. C. Webb, Studies in the History of Natural Theology,
J.
p. 354-

64
 The Laws of Nature

depravity, a black, spreading cloud which for cen-

turies had depressed the human spirit. For if, as
Locke maintained, the mind at birth was devoid of
implanted and ineradicable ideas and dispositions,
was in fact no more than a blank white sheet of
paper upon which the outer world of nature and hu-
man association was to write whatever of good or
ill repute might be found recorded there, why, then,

the mind of man was a record made by that outer

world: jazzed and discordant now that the outer
world was so; a satisfying and ordered symphony
when that outer world should become, as it might,
what men had conceived it ought to be. This was
Locked great title to glory, that he made it possible
for the eighteenth century to believe with a clear
conscience what it wanted to believe, namely, that
since man and the mind of man were shaped by
that nature which God had created, it was possible
for men, "barely by the use of their natural facul-
33
ties," to bring their ideas and their conduct, and
hence the institutions by which they lived, into har-
mony with the universal natural order. With what
simple faith the age of enlightenment welcomed this
doctrine! With what sublime courage
embraced it

the offered opportunity to refashion the outward

world of human institutions according to the laws of
nature and of nature's God!
88 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk. I, chap, ii,

sec. i.

65
 The Heavenly City

I need not say that the difficulties were great: end-

less difficulties in the realm of practice; one funda-

mental difficulty in the realm of theory. Hidden away

in the elaborate structure of Locke's Essay was a
most disconcerting corollary. It was this: if nature
be the work of God, and man the product of nature,
then all that man does and thinks, all that he has
ever done or thought, must be natural, too, and in
accord with the laws of nature and of nature's God.
Pascal had long since asked the fundamental ques-
tion: "Why is custom not natural?" Why, indeed!
But if all is natural, then how could man and his cus-
toms ever be out of harmony with nature? No doubt
the difficulty could be avoided by declaring that
there was no disharmony.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,

Whose body nature is, and God the soul;

All discord, harmony not understood;

All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

But this, addressed to the intelligence, was not an

answer; it was merely an avoidance a dishonest beg-
ging of the question. To assert that all that is, is

right, was to beat all meaning out of the word

"right," unless indeed one were willing to hood one's
eyes once more in the cloak of Christian faith. For

66
 The Laws of Nature

Pope was merely repeating St. Thomas, who had

written twenty volumes to reassure a world on the
verge of doubt —twenty volumes to say that it was
really right that things should be wrong, God only
knows why.
A poet in search of peace and epigrams might be
permitted to repeat the ancient theologians, but the
Philosophers could not do so unless they were willing
to renounce their premises or deny the evidence of
common sense. The very foundation of the new phi-
losophy was that the existence of God, if there was
one, and his goodness, if goodness he could claim,
must be inferred from the observable behavior of
the world. Following Newton, the Philosophers had
all insisted on this to the point of pedantry, and so,

even, had the enlightened Christian theologians in

their desperate effort to find arguments to convince
doubting Thomases. How then could Philosophers
say that all was somehow good in God's sight unless
they could also say that there was no evil to be ob-
served in the world of nature and man? Yet to say
—
that there was no evil in the world a world where
Lisbon earthquakes occurred, where Bastilles func-
tioned, where crowds still gathered to gloat over the
lingering agony of men broken on the wheel —
was an
insult to common sense. No, whatever Locke may
have done, he had done nothing to solve, even if for
the unwary he had done much to obscure, the prob-
lem of evil in the world.
67
 The Heavenly City

Before the middle of the century Hume had taken

up this world-old problem, had looked at it straight,
had examined it attentively round and round about;
and then, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Reli-
gion, with all the dialectical resources of the new
philosophy, with a penetrating insight matched only
by the serene urbanity with which he displayed it,
had remorselessly exposed the futility of reason to
establish either the existence or the goodness of God.
"Epicurus's old questions are yet unanswered. Is he
[God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he
is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is
malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence
then is evil?" 8 * In the end Hume manages to chevy
Christian mystics and atheists into the same camp,
since they obviously agree on the main point, that
reason is totally incompetent to answer ultimate
questions; and so he concludes with that masterpiece
of irony: "To be a philosophical Sceptic is, in a man
of letters, the first and most essential step towards
35
being a sound, believing Christian." To read
Hume's Dialogues after having read, with sympa-
thetic understanding, the earnest deists and optimis-
tic philosophers of the early century, is to experi-
ence a slight chill, a feeling of apprehension. It is as
if, at high noon of the Enlightenment, at the hour of
the siesta when everything seems
so quiet and secure
all about, one were suddenly aware of a short, sharp
84 Dialogues, p. 134. 88 Ibid.,
p. 191.

68
 The Laws of Nature

slipping of the foundations, a faint far-off tremor

running underneath the solid ground of common
sense.
—
There it was then the ugly dilemma, emerging
from the beautiful premises of the new philosophy:
if nature is good, then there is no evil in the world;

if there is evil in the world, then nature is so far not

good. How will they meet it, the enlightened ones
who with so much assurance and complacent wit
have set out with the rule of reason to rebuild an
unlovely universe according to nature's design? Will
they, closing their eyes to the brute facts, maintain
that there is no evil in the world? In that case there
is nothing for them to set right. Or will they, keeping
their eyes open, admit that there is evil in the world?
In that case nature fails to provide them with any
standard for setting things right. They have followed
reason faithfully. Will they follow her to the end?
She is pointing in two directions : back toward Chris-
tian faith; forward toward atheism. Which way will

they choose? It does not really matter much, since in

either case she will vanish at last, leaving them to
face existence with no other support than hope, or in-
difference, or despair.
Well, we know what the Philosophers did in this
emergency. They found, as we all find when suffi-

ciently hard pressed, that reason is amenable to

treatment. They therefore tempered reason with sen-
timent, reasons of the heart that reason knows not
69
 The Heavenly City

of; or held it in leash by experience, the universal

judgment of mankind; or induced it to delay its
pronouncements in view of the possibility (which in
a pinch might be taken as a fact) that the world was
after all neither a completed drama nor a perfected
machine, but rather something as yet unfinished,
something still in the making. It will be the purpose
of the following lectures to elaborate these state-
ments, to show how the Philosophers, still following
reason, perhaps wisely, but certainly none too well,
went on to finish and to furnish and to make re-

splendent the Heavenly City of their dreams.

70
 HI
The New History: Philosophy
Teaching by Example

[LTustoire] nous fera voir, pour ainsi

dire, rhomme en detail, apres que la mo-
rale nous fait voir en gros. Fontenelle.

[History's] chief use is only to dis-

cover the constant and universal
principles of human nature. Hume.

Brunetiere somewhere mentions the fact that offi-

cial documents, whatever their nature, are not

drafted in order that history may be written from
them. It does seem, I must say, that people living in
past times often act as if the convenience of the fu-
ture historian were a matter of negligible impor-
tance. If Hume had only published his Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion when it was written, he
might have saved me much trouble. Had he pub-
lished his book I might have shown that it was read
by other Philosophers —Diderot
and Holbach, for
example; I might have found that Jefferson had a
copy in his library, or that Franklin had mentioned,
in a letter perhaps, having been impressed by this
profound work: from all of which (and from much
else of the same sort) I could no doubt have traced
7i
 The Heavenly City

the "influence," as it is called, of Hume's Dialogues,

and happily concluded maybe that as a result of this
influence philosophy, becoming aware of a logical
dilemma in her path, turned away from rationalistic
speculation to the study of history, morality, and
politics. And the beginning of this new venture on

philosophy's part I might conveniently have placed

at the exact date when Hume's Dialogues was pub-
lished. Unfortunately, owing to his indifference to
my problem, all I can say is that Hume discreetly
locked the manuscript away in his desk, so that it

was quite unknown (except to a few intimate

friends) until after his death.
A history lost and all for the want of a petty date!
It is a tragedy not often met with, I admit. There
are, nevertheless, compensations. With Hume's man-
uscript safely locked up in his desk, we shall at
least notbe taken in by the naive notion that certain
philosophers became atheists because they had read
Hume's Dialogues. It has long been a favorite pas-
time of those who interest themselves in the history
if it were
of culture to note the transfer of ideas (as
no more than a matter of borrowed coins) from one
writer to another; to note, for example, that Mr.
Jones must have got a certain idea from Mr. Smith
because it can be shown that he had read, or might
have read, Mr. Smith's book; all the while forgetting
that if Mr. Jones hadn't already had the idea, or

something like it, simmering in his own mind he

72
 The New History

wouldn't have cared to read Mr. Smith's book, or,

having read it, would very likely have thrown it

aside, or written a review to show what a bad and
mistaken book it was. And how often it happens
that books "influence" readers in ways not intended
by the writers! We know that Madame Roland read
the works of Holbach and Helvetius; but these
works, instead of making her an atheist, only forti-
fied her belief in God, so that she turned, more read-
ily than she might otherwise have done, to Rousseau

for consolation.
It is well to know that Hume locked his Dialogues
away in his desk, but it is far more important to
understand why he should have thought it worth
while to write the work in the first place. Refusing
to publish the manuscript made as little difference
then as reprinting the book does now. Today anyone
may read the Dialogues , but few people are suffi-

ciently interested in the issues it do so; in

raises to
Hume's day no one could read the Dialogues, but
the issues it raised were so important and so familiar
that no one needed to. The issues raised were, for
that century, fundamental. It was as if a rumor,
started no one knew when, had at last become too
insistent to be longer disregarded: the rumor that
God, having departed secretly in the night, was
about to cross the frontiers of the known world and
leave mankind in the lurch. What we have to realize
is that in those years God was on trial. The affair

73
 —

The Heavenly City

was nothing less than the intellectual cause cil&bre

and one which stirred the emotions of men
of the age,
in a way we can with difficulty understand. Not
many men, not many Philosophers even, were likely
tobe troubled by the logical dilemma that interested
Hume and Diderot and Berkeley; but everyone, the
readers as well as the writers of books, was con-
cerned to know whether was a God to care for
there
his immortal soul, or no God and no immortal soul to
care for. It was in this guise that the dilemma, which
I pictured at the close of the last lecture as emerg-
ing from the premises of the new philosophy, ap-
peared to the common run of men: Were they living
in a world ruled by a beneficent mind, or in a world
ruled by an indifferent force? That was the question
which, in this cynical age of reason, men could be-
come heated over, a question debated everywhere
in books, in the pulpit, in the salons, at dinners over
the wine, after the servants had retired —and we can
no more think of a Philosopher ignorant of, or indif-
ferent to, this question than we can think of a mod-
ern philosopher ignorant of, or indifferent to, the
quantum theory. What concerns us is to know how
the Philosophers met and disposed of this profound
question.
Well, we know that there was in France, after the

middle of the century, a little huddled company of

rationalistic enragis who became famous, or infa-
mous rather, by openly professing the creed of athe-

74
 The New History

ism —Holbach and Helvetius and La Mettrie and

Meslier, to mention those who most counted. They
did not lack courage, these enragis. They had the
courage of their logic, and made it a point of pride
or of bravado not to desert the Goddess of Reason
after having been so well served by her. The Goddess
had guided them safely out of the long night of su-
perstition into the light of day, and for that they
could not be too grateful. Were they then timorously
to desert her because she showed them a world, filled
with light, indeed, but unsubdued, uncharted, un-
landscaped? No! They would follow Reason still
(even if Reason turned out to be no goddess, but
merely their own reasoning) into the wilderness of a
world which to all appearance was neither good nor
bad in itself, but good or bad only in so far as men
might by their own unaided efforts make it, or fail to
make it, serve their purposes.
Were they not read, these atheists? Did they not
exert an "influence"? Yes, indeed. Everybody read
them, or, better still, heard their doctrines whispered
about. Everybody read them, but "almost everybody
was They were beyond the pale, these
terrified."
atheists. Let us not forget their social isolation: the
shocked feeling, in the outside world, of something
obscene and blasphemous going on under cover of
night at Holbach's house; the furtive sense of daring
adventure into unconventional and abandoned circles
with which many visitors (Philosophers some of

75
 —

The Heavenly City

them) came away from those famed dinners. Let us

try to recover, if it be at all possible, the feeling of
grim desolation with which the young Goethe read,
and discussed with his fellow student, Holbach's
—
Systdme de la nature that daring book, daring to
the point of denying the existence of God and the
immortality of the soul. "We could not conceive,"
Goethe tells us, "how such a book could be danger-
ous. It came to us so gray, so Cimmerian, so corpse-
like, that we could hardly endure its presence; we
1
shuddered before it, as if it had been a spectre."
This was the influence of the "atheist" writings
they made men shudder. Yet the atheists were only
following the Goddess of all the Philosophers (Rous-
seau perhaps excepted). Holbach's book, as Morley
says, pointed to

the finger of their own divinity, Reason, writing on the

wall the appalling judgments that there is no God; that
the universe is only matter in spontaneous motion; and,
most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls

die with the death of the body, as music dies when the
strings are broken. 2

Appalling is perhaps not quite the word. Appalling

to the general run of readers, no doubt; but other
Philosophers had followed Reason as faithfully as
Holbach had, and were as familiar with her judg-
1 Morley, Diderot, II, 175; Sammtliche Werke, XXTV, 52.
2 Diderot, II, 175.

76
 The New History
ments. Nevertheless, when the Goddess pointed to
her judgments the Philosophers, almost without ex-
ception, refused to accept them; instead of looking
at the writing on the wall, they turned their backs
and edged away, giving one excuse or other.
Each Philosopher might, of course, have own
his
special reason for deserting the Goddess. We know
that Franklin, who as a boy stranded in London had
published an atheistical work, later repented of that
act of youthful braggadocio and dismissed the whole
stupendous question by the casual remark that while
a mechanical theory of the universe might be true it

was "not very useful"; certainly not very useful to

him, a respectable printer and politician living in
Philadelphia, or famous as a defender of liberty at
the Court of St. James's. We know that Hume had
exhausted the dialectical approach to knowledge and
that the truths he arrived at were, on his own con-
fession, inadequately founded. Besides, the lonely
man, tucked away a provincial corner of the
in
world, craved the applause of his fellows; and the
disconcerting fact was that his speculative books not
only did not sell, but were not well received by his
friends. They lacked, as Hutchinson told him, "a
certain warmth in the cause of virtue, which . . .

all good men would relish." Hume certainly took no

8

pleasure in being regarded as the cold and finished

8 and Correspondence of David Hume,
J. H. Burton, Life I,
112, 113.

77
 The Heavenly City

skeptic, a destroyer of illusions. He was much more

ambitious "to be esteemed a man of virtue than a
writer of taste"; and the fact that his history won
forhim the popularity he craved naturally confirmed
him in the belief that it was useless to search into
"those corners of nature that spread a nuisance all

around." These are, no doubt, the reasons why

Hume locked his Dialogues away in his desk, the
reason why his contemporaries, could they have
looked into that locked desk, would have found a
most extraordinary, a most perplexing conclusion to
the brilliant argument that demolished the founda-
tions of natural religion; the conclusion, namely,
that any "person seasoned with a just sense of the
imperfections of natural reason, will fly to revealed
truth with the greatest avidity." 4 Hume did not ex-
actly fly to revealed truth; but he refused to publish
his Dialogues, and never, in public at least, failed to
exhibit a punctiliously correct attitude toward the
Author of the Universe.
As for Voltaire — well, Voltaire, who had a horror
of being duped, lets us know in many an aside that
he aware of the judgments on the wall to which
is

the Goddess is pointing. What, no God? It may be.

But if so, then it is necessary to invent one for the —
people more especially, since they will never be suffi-
ciently enlightened to understand that nature, blind
as she may be, is good enough if she is good enough
* Dialogues, p. 191.

78
 The New History

to bring forth a Voltaire now and then. As for the

Philosophers, they will do well to let insoluble ques-
tions ride, and confine themselves to the cultivation
of their gardens, being well assured that it will al-
ways be worth while to uproot the infamous things
found growing therein.
Diderot, a far more interesting case than Voltaire,
is often classed with the atheists. But the significant
point for us is that this atheist, convinced against
his will, is of another opinion still. Like Hume, he
wrote speculative works {La physiologie and Uen-
tretien) in which he reached the conclusion that the
world is mechanically determined, that man is an
accident, the soul is "nothing without the body,"

good will is nothing but "the last impulse of desire

and aversion," and vice and virtue are mere words
signifying nothing. Diderot the rationalist wrote
these works. But there was another Diderot who
refused to publish them; Diderot the man of virtue,
whose warm heart told him with even greater assur-
ance that vice and virtue were the most real of reali-
ties. This conflict between the two Diderots, between

the fertile brain and the tempestuous heart, is re-

vealed in Le neveu de Rameau, his one masterpiece,
a dialogue as brilliant in its way as Hume's Dia-
logues, and concerned with the same dilemma. But
unlike Hume's Dialogues, Le neveu de Rameau ends
without any solution, not even a Pickwickian solu-
tion. Diderot had none of Hume's serenity, and to

79
 The Heavenly City

the end of his days his soul was filled with discord;
his mind unable to find any sufficient reason for vir-
tuous conduct, his heart unable to renounce the con-
viction that nothing is better in this world than to be
a good man. 5
From all of Diderot's writings there emerges an
anxious concern for morality. He tells us that to
have written some great constructive work on that
subject was what he would "recall with the greatest
satisfaction" in his last moments; but, he says,

I have not even dared to write the first line: I say to my-
self, if I do not come out of the attempt victorious, I be-
come the apologist of wickedness; I will have betrayed
the cause of virtue. . . . I do not feel myself equal to
this sublime work; I have uselessly consecrated my whole
6
life to it.

In this concern for "morality," Diderot was typical

of his generation; generally speaking, the Philoso-
phers were all, like Hume and Diderot, ambitious to
be esteemed "men of virtue." The reason is precisely
that they were, from the point of view of their op-
ponents, enemies of morality and virtue; and what,
indeed, could justify all their negations, all their at-
tacks on Christian faith and doctrine, if they were
unable to replace the old morality by a new and

6 For a fuller treatment of the dilemma of Diderot, see the

Philosophical Review, XXIV, 54.
*Oeuvre$ (1875-77), H, 345.

80
 The New History

more solidly based one? That unbelief would unset-

tle the foundations of morality and social order was
the most effective charge which Christian apologists
could possibly make against the Philosophers. "Phi-
losophy" had to meet this charge. "It is not enough,"
said Diderot, referring to the theologians, "to know
more than they do: it is necessary to show them that
we are better, and that philosophy makes more good
7
men than sufficient or efficacious grace."

Well, would be difficult, would it not, for phi-

it

losophy to make more good men than sufficient or

efficacious grace if it could offer nothing more reas-
suring than the doctrine that "the original source of
things has no more regard to good above ill than to
heat above cold." There is a profound significance

in Diderot's feeling that it would be better not to de-

fend virtue at all than to fail in the attempt; a phi-
losopher who, having demolished the foundations of
Christian morality, should fail to provide a natural
foundation for it, would indeed be, in the eyes of
common men, "an apologist for wickedness." Mo-
rality and social order had so long been founded on
faith in God, the good life had so confidently been
associated with an overruling Providence, that the
prospect of a world in which men should be left to
their own devices, unguarded against the evil im-
pulses of the natural man, was not all at once to be
contemplated with equanimity. Apart from all COn-
'/Wd., XIX, 464.

81
 The Heavenly City

scious motives and personal considerations, the Phi-

losophers instinctively felt that to profess atheism
would be no lessa confession of failure than to re-
turn like lost sheep to the Christian fold. Atheist!
The very word, in that climate of opinion, sounded
ominous, ribald, antisocial. Enlightened? Surely the
Philosophers were enlightened. But the essence of
enlightenment was intellectual security, the most
prized possession of the Philosopher was assured
knowledge; and what was atheism if not a confession
of ignorance? Locked away Hume's desk was the
in
proof of it: the Christian mystic, Demea, and the
skeptic, Philo, following Reason to the bitter end,
found themselves in the same camp, agreeing only
in this, that Reason is incompetent to answer any
fundamental question about God, or morality, or the
meaning of life. The Philosophers could not afford to
accept this conclusion. For more than half a century
they had leveled the batteries of Reason and com-
mon sense against the strongholds of ignorance and
superstition had made a great noise in the world in
:

order that men might be more enlightened, society

more solidly based, morality and virtue more secure.
What a fiasco, then, would all this noise of battle
have been for them had they been compelled in the
end to put off their complaisant optimism, to re-
nounce their dogmatism, to cease their clamor to —
announce, in short, to an expectant world, in a small
voice, this: "Reason tells us after all that there is no

82
 The New History
God, that the universe is only matter in spontane-
ous motion, and that, like the priests whom we have
denounced for their ignorance, we also, we Philoso-
phers, know nothing."
I would not leave the impression that the Philoso-
phers began to cold-shoulder abstract reason merely,
or chiefly, because they found a logical dilemma in
the path; still less that they embraced the cause of
virtue with greater emotional warmth because they
could find no ultimate reason for embracing it at all.

—
There may be something in all that I am inclined
to think there is; but I do not wish to make too much
of it. The Philosophers were certainly in need of a
little intellectual collateral to guarantee their bright
promises, to maintain their professional solvency; but
quite apart from that they were, like other men, car-
ried along by the strong social currents of the time.
Hume's turning away from speculation to the study
of history, economics, and politics was symptomatic
of a certain change in the climate of opinion — of an
and social
increasing interest in the concrete political
activities ofmen, and of the disposition to approach
such matters in a more earnest temper, a mood more
highly charged with emotion. Rousseau is the chief
representative of this new mood, but he did not cre-
ate it. To be convinced of this we need only look into
the literary news sheet that was edited, during the
years 1753-68,by Melchior Grimm. Let us look over
the shoulder of the industrious and firm-lipped

83
 The Heavenly City

Grimm as he runs through the new books just after

the middle of the century. Boileau, he reports in
1755, is little no longer popu-
read because satire is

lar. And the fact recorded is not more significant

than Grimm's comment on it; satire, he thinks, calls

for the lowest order of talent, and since it is merely
8
destructive is essentially useless. In the same year
he notes that Condillac's Traiti des sensations was
not well received, which he attributes to the fact that
besides being too diffuse it is too cold, too lacking
in "philosophical imagination."
9
He complains that
politics is the most backward of sciences; 10 but notes
with satisfaction that otherwise the study of useful
subjects (agriculture, commerce, history, morality)
was never so general.11 To study useful things, to ap-
proach them seriously, en philosophe, to impart to
them a certain imaginative warmth how much bet- —
ter this was than to expose the feebleness of reason
and the uncertain foundations of knowledge I

The age of reason had scarcely run half its course

before the Philosophers were admitting the feeble-
ness of reason, putting the ban on flippancy, and
turning to the study of useful, that is to say, factual,
subjects. In the succeeding decades the trend of in-

terest toward the concrete and the practical, the

increasing preoccupation of thinking men with ques-
tions of political and social reform, and the rising

8 Correspondence littiraire, n, 214. 9 Ibid., m, in.

i° Ibid., p. 97. u loid. t H, 170-171, S©6.

84
 The New History
temperature of the climate of opinion are every year
more apparent. The time had gone by when states-
men could afford to "let sleeping dogs lie"; when
kings could say with a straight face "I am the state."
In these years, when a tide in the affairs of men was
carrying them on to disaster, kings were under pres-
sure to declare, with Frederick the Great, "I am the
first servant of the state." It was everywhere the
fashion, therefore, for rulers to turn benevolent in
order to mitigate the despotism that was denied
them, and to talk of reforms even if they made none;
while young princes, their successors to be, were
urged to engage, under the tutorial system estab-
lished by the Philosophers, in the study of history in
order to learn, from the experience of mankind, what
was "requisite in a prince charged with the ameliora-
12
tion of society."
The amelioration of society was the very thing
Philosophers had most at heart, and surely it was
eminently fitting that they should be called in to tu-
tor princes in that benevolent art. It was unfortu-
nate, nevertheless, that their service should be en-
listed in this practical task at the very moment when
they were becoming aware of the incapacity of ab-
stract reason to negotiate that reconciliation between
custom and nature which they had so confidently
preached as the proper goal of human effort. It was
all very well for the philosophical tutor to say to the
12 Condillac, Oeuvres (1798), XXI, 13.

8S
 The Heavenly City

young prince: "Religion and morality and politics

should be based on natural law, they should be in
harmony with the nature of man." The young prince,
if he knew his philosophy, might very well reply:

"The universe, I am told, is only matter in spon-

taneous motion, and man a mechanically determined
product of nature; so that all things, just as they are
— priests as well as philosophers, superstition as well
as enlightenment, tyranny and the Inquisition as well
as liberty and the Encyclopidie —are already in har-
mony with nature." What then? In that case the
Philosopher would no doubt need to ameliorate ab-
stract reason before he could ameliorate society. A
society so obviously wrong could never be set right
unless some distinction could be drawn between the
custom that was naturally good and the custom that
was naturally bad.
A distinction between good and bad! Not a novel
idea, certainly; on the contrary, a very old, a most
Christian idea. Must the Philosophers then fly, as
Hume put it, to revealed truth? No, itwas scarcely
necessary to go as far as that; but it was necessary
from the advanced posi-
to execute a strategic retreat
tion occupied by abstract reason, from the notion
that nature has "no more regard to good above ill
than to heat above cold." Otherwise, the campaign
for a regenerated society was surely lost, and the
great project for making dukes and peers useful no
more than a dream. Rousseau understood this better

86
 The New History

than anyone else, perhaps because he understood it

intuitively, without rationalistic inhibitions; and it

was Rousseau who pointed out the lines along which
the retreat must be made. Unless Philosophers

prescribe bounds to Nature, monsters, giants, pigmies

and chimeras of all kinds might be specifically admitted
into nature: every object would be disfigured, and we
should have no common model of ourselves. I repeat it,
in a picture of human nature, every figure should resem-
ble man. . . . We should distinguish between the variety
1*
in human nature and that which is essential to it.

Thus, the innate ideas which Locke had so po-

litely dismissed by way of the hall door had to
be surreptitiously brought back again through the
kitchen window: the soul that Cartesian logic had
eliminated from the individual had to be rediscov-
ered in humanity. The soul of the individual might
be might be temporary, it might even be an
evil, it

illusion. But the soul of humanity, this something

"essential to" human nature, this "common model of

ourselves" (and what was this but the old medieval
"realism" come to life again?) was surely immortal
because permanent and universal. What the Philoso-
phers had to do, therefore, was to go up and down
the wide world with the lamp of enlightenment look-
ing, as Montaigne did before them, for "man in gen-
eral." They had to identify and enumerate and de-

^Eloise (1810), 1,4.

87
 The Heavenly City

scribe the qualities that were common to all men in

order to determine what ideas and customs and insti-
tutions in their own time were out of harmony with
the universal natural order. For the successful con-
duct of this enterprise, this eighteenth-century search
for the Holy Grail, the light of abstract reason had to
be supplemented by the light of experience. "With-
out history," said Priestley, "the advantages of our
rational naturemust have been rated very low." 14 It
goes without saying that the history needed by the
Philosophers was a "new history" the history that—
would be philosophy teaching by example.

II

The "new history" is an old story. Since history is

not an objective reality, but only an imaginative re-

construction of vanished events, the pattern that ap-

pears useful and agreeable to one generation is never
entirely so to the next. There is thus a profound
truth in Voltaire's witticism: "History is only a pack
of tricks we play on the dead." It is unlikely that
these tricks do the dead any harm, and it is certain
that they do us much good. At best they help us to
master our own difficulties; at worst they help us to
endure them by nourishing the hope of a more re-
splendent future. The kind of tricks we play is there-
fore likely to depend on our attitude toward the pres-
14 Lectures on History and General Policy (Am. ed., 1803), I,

52-

88
 The New History

ent. If well enough satisfied with the present we are

likely to pay our ancestors the doubtful compliment
of approaching them with a studied and pedantic in-
difference; but when the times are out of joint we
are disposed to blame them for it, or else we dress
them up, as models suitable for us to imitate, in shin-
ing virtues which in fact they never possessed, which
they would perhaps not have recognized as virtues at
all.

We are all familiar with the "new history" of our

own time. Two decades ago James Harvey Robinson
plaintively deplored the time spent by historians in
determining " whether Charles the Fat was at Ingel-
heim or Lustnau on July i, 887"; suggested that
they knew much about the past but little about man;
and invited them, seeing that the times were so out of
joint, to look more attentively at the jaw of the Hei-

delberg man — invited them, that is to say, to ac-

quaint themselves with the "newer sciences of man"
in order that they might "turn on the past and ex-
ploit it in the interests of advance." 18
Perhaps it is
unnecessary to point out that Robinson was not the
first of the newer historians. In the sixth century,
under somewhat different circumstances, St. Augus-
tine saw the advantages of a new history, and in fact
created it by writing the City of God, which was un-
doubtedly one of the most ingenious and successful
tricks ever played on the dead. At least it served its
18 The New History, pp. 24, 70 ff., 81.

89
 The Heavenly City

purpose well enough until the fifteenth and sixteenth

centuries, when a new history was again called for.
We then find humanists "exploiting the past" in the
interest of classical learning, patriots in the interest
of national or royal prestige, Protestants in the in-
terest of the new religion, Catholics in the interest of
the old faith. In the course of time, as religious and
national hatreds subsided somewhat, the desire to ex-
ploit the past abated a and the seventeenth and
little,

early eighteenth centuries were proper times for his-

torians to become erudite and uninspired proper —
times for a Mabillon or a DuCange, for Bollandists
and Benedictines, for many a meticulous researcher
into the dead past, such, for example, as Freret,
whose innumerable memoirs printed in the Academy
of Inscriptions make eighteen volumes of exact infor-
mation which the world has willingly, and it may be
usefully, forgotten.
Having examined some of the "orthodox" histories
of that time, it does not surprise me to learn that the
Philosophers were dissatisfied with them. They must
have looked in vain for the "composition of the hu-
man heart" in the monographs of Freret and the
works of DeThou and Mezeray, while the something
"essential to" human nature discovered by Bossuet
in hisDiscourse on Universal History was certainly,
from their point of view, quite the wrong thing. In
the very accents, and almost in the very words, of
James Harvey Robinson the Philosophers, therefore,
90
 The New History

raised the cry for a new history. Fenelon, although a

Philosopher only by adoption, was no doubt one of
the first. He complained that the "dry and
sad maker
of annals knows no other order than that of chro-
nology," and thought it far more important to "ob-
serve the changes in the nation as a whole than to
relate particular facts."
16
A voice crying in the wil-
derness, Fenelon's was; but toward the middle of the
eighteenth century the cry became more insistent.
Let us a few of the Philosophers. Fonte-
listen to
nelle: "To amass in the head fact upon fact, retain
dates exactly, fill oneself with the spirit of wars,
treaties of peace, marriages, genealogies —that is

what is called knowing history. ... I had as soon a

man acquired exactly the history of all the clocks of
17
Paris." Grimm: "All the weight of our historians
consists in a dull and pedantic discussion of facts
which are commonly as unimportant as they are un-
certain and disputed, and all their talent in refuting
each other with a certain show of success." "History
must be written by philosophers, whatever our ped-
18
ants say." Voltaire: "You prefer that philosophers
should write ancient history because you wish to
read it as a philosopher. You seek only useful truths,
and have found, as you say, scarcely anything but
19
useless errors." Diderot: "Other historians relate
16 Oeuvres (1848-51), VI, 639, 640.
17 Oeuvres (1790), V, 433.
18 Correspondance littiraire, III, 20 ; VI, 46.
19 Essai sur les moeurs (1775), I, i.

91
 The Heavenly City

facts to inform us of facts. You [Voltaire] relate

them to excite in our heartsan intense hatred of ly-
ing, ignorance, hypocrisy, superstition, tyranny; and
this anger remains even after the memory of the
20
facts has disappeared."
All Philosophers make the same complaint, that
the "orthodox" historians accumulate facts for the
sake of facts; all make the same demand, that the

new must be written by Philosophers in order

history
to disengage from the facts those useful truths that
will "lead us to a knowledge of ourselves and
21
others." Certainly, the demand did not go un-
heeded. During the latter half of the century Phi-
losophers turned historians, or historians turned Phi-
losophers, and between them these newer historians
surveyed mankind from China to Peru. It was a
favorite notion of the nineteenth-century historians
that the eighteenth century was "antihistorical," that
it was not interested in history since it desired to
"break with the past" and start afresh. The assertion
must involve a non sequitur in view of the extraor-
dinary number of histories that were written, the
number of editions they ran to, and the great impor-
tance attributed to the subject by all the leading men
of the time. Names of famous and popular historians
come to mind as soon as one stops to think: Gibbon,
Hume, and Robertson; Rollin, Voltaire, Montes-
20 Oeuvres, XIX, 460.
21 Fontenelle, Oeuvres (1790), V, 431.

92
 The New History

quieu, Mably, Raynal, and Herder. These are the

better known names. One has only to run through
Grimm's Correspondance littiraire to realize that in
the later eighteenth century no subject was more
read or written about than history. I say written
about advisedly, because the Philosophers, whether
they wrote history or not, almost all took the trouble
to tell us why and how it ought to be written. And,
without exception, so far as I know, they tell us that
history, in connection with morality, is, of all sub-
jects, one of the most important to be studied.

It may be that the Philosophers wished to "break

with the past and start afresh." In a certain sense
they did; but it does not follow that they were not
interested in it. We may well be interested in the
shackles that bind us, and that was just the sort of
interest the Philosophers had in the past: they
wished to learn why it was that men were still, after
so many centuries of experience, bound by the follies
and errors of their predecessors. Voltaire might say
that "the history of great events in the world is
, 22
scarcely more than a history of crimes' ;
but, for all
that,he gave himself the trouble of writing a history
of the world in six volumes. No one thought less well
of the past than Chastellux, who was convinced that
existing ideas and customs were little more than a
mass of acquired ignorance. In order to be happy, he
said, there is "far greater need of forgetting than of
22 Essai, I, 172.

93
 The Heavenly City

remembering," since the great object of enlightened

men should be to "raise the edifice of Reason on the
ruins of opinion." As a contribution to this great ob-
ject he wrote a two-volume general history entitled
De la felicitS publique. The public happiness was
something to be attained in the future; it could not
be attained without breaking with the past; but in
order to induce men to break with the past it was
first of all necessary to show them how bad it was.
Thus it turned out that in writing a book on la ]£li-

citi publique Chastellux found that he had assumed

the obligation, as he put it, of "retracing the unhap-
28
piness of humanity."
Even Chastellux did not write history merely in
order to show how bad the past was. It would be
useless, he said, to write the history of so many par-
ticular events if from them "we were unable to disen-
gage general facts ... far more certain than those
which have been so carefully transmitted to us." 24
Not all Philosophers thought so badly of the past as
Chastellux, but they all shared his view that history
should be studied in order to disengage those "gen-
eral facts" that might serve as useful lessons. On this
point one might quote from the writings of men as
different as Fontenelle, Priestley, Bolingbroke, Con-
dillac,Gibbon, Rousseau, and Rollin. But it would
be useless; their views are but variations on a single
28De la f&iciM publique (1822), I, 220.
"Ibid., p. SS-

94
 The New History

theme and this theme is nowhere better stated than

in the Preface to Duclos' Histoire de Louis XL
I shall not undertake to prove the utility of history: it

is a truth too generally recognized to need proof. . . . We

see on the theater of the world a certain number of scenes
which succeed each other in endless repetition: where we
see the same faults followed regularly by the same mis-
fortunes, we may reasonably think that if we could have
known the first we might have avoided the others. The
past should enlighten us on the future: knowledge of his-
tory is no more than an anticipated experience.

And, finally, let Hume put the sum and substance of

the matter in two sentences: "Mankind are so much
the same, in all times and places, that history in-
forms us of nothing new or strange in this particular.
Its chief use is only to discover the constant and uni-
25
versal principles of human nature."
Did the Philosophers, then, wish, as the nine-
teenth-century historians liked to think, to "break
with the past"? Obviously, they wished to get rid of
the bad ideas and customs inherited from the past;
quite as obviously they wished to hold fast to the
good ones, if any good ones there were. But the ques-
tion is worth answering only because it is not a
proper question to ask; and it is an improper ques-
tion to ask because it projects into that climate of
opinion a preconception that was in fact not there.

26 Essays, n, 94.

95
 The Heavenly City

The phrase "break with the past" came spontane-

ously to the lips of nineteenth-century historians
because they were so much concerned with the "con-
tinuity of history," the evolution of institutions.
After twenty-five years of revolution and interna-
tional war, most people felt the need of stabilizing
society; and the most satisfactory rationalization of
this need was presented by those historians and ju-
rists who occupied themselves with social origins,

who asked the question, How did society, especially

the particular society of this or that nation, come to
be what it is? The unconscious preconception in-
volved in this question was that if men understood
just how the customs of any nation had come to be
what they were, they would sufficiently realize the
folly of trying to refashion them all at once accord-
ing to some rational plan. Nineteenth-century his-
torians and jurists, therefore, established the con-
tinuity of history: to suppose it possible to break the
continuity of history naturally seemed to them "un-
historical"; and the attempt to do so as disastrous as
it would be for a flourishing tree to break with the
roots that nourished it.

But the conception of continuity was of little use

to the eighteenth-century Philosophers. No doubt,
the idea was there, ready to be picked up and made
use of, if any one had needed it. It was implied in the
notion that the moderns are superior to the ancients
because they profit by ancient experience and knowl-

96
 The New History

edge. It was implied in the shining vision of perfecti-

bility. It is to be found in the writings of Vico,

Grimm, Turgot, Diderot, Herder, Montesquieu, and

Leibnitz. Diderot stumbled over all the elements es-
sential to the Darwinian theory of evolution; but the
point is that he stumbled overthem as if they were
obstacles instead of stepping-stones, as for him, in-
deed, they were. Professor Vaughan points out that
Montesquieu was troubled with difficulties which the
idea of the progressive unfolding of institutions
would easily have disposed of, and is at a loss to un-
derstand why Montesquieu did not make use of the
idea, since all the elements of it were there, in his
own manuscript, staring up at him from the table.
Very true it is that the idea was there in his own
manuscript. But the significant thing is that Montes-
quieu made little use of it, that no one (Leibnitz ex-
cepted) made much use of it. The idea was present
in the eighteenth century, but no one made it wel-
come; it wandered forlornly about in the fringes of
consciousness, it timidly approached the threshold,

but it never really got across.

The reason is that the eighteenth-century Philoso-
phers were not primarily interested in stabilizing so-
ciety, but in changing it. They did not ask how so-
ciety had come to be what it was, but how it could be
made better than it was. There no more apt illus-
is

tration of this slant of mind than the famous opening

sentences of Rousseau's Social Contract, "Man is

97
 The Heavenly City

born free, and is everywhere in chains. How was this

change made? / do not know. What can make it le-
gitimate? I believe I can answer that question." Do
not, therefore, ask the Philosophers that question so
dear to the nineteenth century: "How did society
come to be what Almost without exception
it is?"
they will reply with Rousseau: "We do not know."
And we at once feel that they have it on the tip of
their tongues to dismiss us with an impatient, "and
we do not care." What difference does it make, they
seem to be saying, how society came to be what it is?
There it is for all men to see, obviously irrational,
oppressive, unjust, obviously contrary to the essen-
tial nature of man, obviously needing to be set right,
and that speedily. What we seek to know is how it

may be set right; and we look to the past for light,

not on the origins of society, but on its future state.
We wish neither to break with the past nor to hold
fast to it, but to make use of it: we wish to disen-
gage from it those ideas, customs, and institutions
which are so widely distributed and so persistent in
human experience that they may be regarded as em-
bodying those "constant and universal principles of
human nature" upon which we may rely for estab-
lishing a more equitable regime than that which now
exists.

In the light of this preconception we can read the

philosopher-historians without being bored or an-
noyed. Since they were not primarily concerned with

98
 The New History

continuity, with the evolution, the unfolding, the dif-

ferentiation of institutions, they could afford to be
loftily contemptuous of "mere events," and were un-
der no compulsion of conscience to lavish loving care
upon the determination of the exact date. They were
looking for "man in general," and it is unreasonable
of us to be annoyed because they did not look for
him at Ingelheim or Lustnau on July i, 887. Man in
general, like the economic man, was a being that did
not exist in the world of time and place, but in the
conceptual world, and he could therefore be found
only by abstracting from all men in all times and all
places those qualities which all men shared. No
doubt Charles the Fat, being, like Socrates, a man,
might exhibit at Ingelheim or Lustnau some of the
qualities he shared with Socrates. The important
point was to note those qualities as exhibited : it mat-
tered not whether they were exhibited at Ingelheim
or at Lustnau, whether on July 1 or on some other
day, the exact time and place being no more than
temporal "accidents" useful chiefly for illustrative
purposes.
Obviously, therefore, the chronological order was
not essential to the writing of history thus conceived.
It might, indeed, be adopted as the most convenient
order, and, in fact, we find Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire,
and Mably presenting their material more or less in
this order. But a philosopher-historian might equally
well ignore the chronological order, as Montesquieu

99
 The Heavenly City

and Raynal open to the

did, without laying himself
charge of being no historian. The method adopted by
Montesquieu would seem to be the method for the
philosopher-historian, the ideal method. For the task
of the philosopher-historian, theoretically speaking,
was to note the ideas, customs, and institutions of all
peoples at all times and in all places, to put them side
by side, and to cancel out as it were those that
appeared to be merely local or temporary: what
remained would be those that were common to hu-
manity. From these common aspects of human ex-
perience it would then be possible, if at all, to dis-
cover, as Hume put it, the "constant and universal
principles of human nature" and on these principles
to base a reconstructed society. The
method ideal
for the philosopher-historian would thus be the com-
parative method, the strictly objective, inductive, sci-
entific method.
Nevertheless, this ideal method was not employed
by the Philosophers, not even by Montesquieu, who
made the bravest appearance of doing so. It is, in-

deed, highly illuminating that those parts of the

Esprit des lois in which Montesquieu was most suc-
cessful in applying the comparative and inductive
method, those parts in which he was most objective
and scientific, were precisely the parts that pleased
the Philosophers least. Generally speaking, the Es-
a bad taste in the mouths of the
prit des lois left
Philosophers because Montesquieu insisted that the

ioo
 The New History

"constant and universal principles of human nature"

were after all "relative," so that, for example, what
was suited to the nature of man in certain climates
might very well be unsuited to the nature of man in
other climates. The Philosophers felt that Montes-
quieu was too much enamored of facts as such to
treat certain facts as harshly as they deserved, and it

shocked them to see him dallying lightly with epi-

sodes that were no better than they should be.
Voltaire (Voltaire of all people!) criticized Montes-
quieu for his levity, for being more disposed to aston-
and thought it mon-
ish than to instruct his readers,
strous that feudal kings and barons should be called
"our fathers." According to Condorcet, Montesquieu
would have done better if he had not been "more
occupied with finding the reasons for that which is
26
than with seeking that which ought to be." And
even Rousseau, who admired Montesquieu more
than the others did, finds that he, like Grotius before
him, is too much inclined to establish the right by
27
the fact. It is surely a paradox needing explanation
that the Philosophers, who professed to study history
man's na-
in order to establish the rights suitable to
ture on the facts of human experience, should have
denounced Montesquieu precisely because he was too
much inclined to establish the right by the fact. Is it,

then, possible that the Philosophers were not really

2 *Oeuvres
(1847), VIII, 188.
27 Political Writings Rousseau (Vaughan ed.), II, 147.
of

IOI
 The Heavenly City

interested in establishing the rights suitable to man's

nature on the facts of human experience? Is it pos-
sible that they were engaged in that nefarious me-
dieval enterprise of reconciling the facts of human
experience with truths already, in some fashion, re-
vealed to them?

Ill
Alas yes, that is, indeed, the fact! The eighteenth-
century Philosophers, like the medieval scholastics,
held fast to a revealed body of knowledge, and they
were unwilling or unable to learn anything from his-
tory which could not, by some ingenious trick played
on the dead, be reconciled with their faith. Their
faith, like the faith by which any age lives, was born

of their experience and their needs; and since their

experience and their needs were in deadly conflict
with the traditional and established and still power-
ful philosophy of church and state, the articles of

their faith were at every point opposed to those of

the established philosophy. The essential articles of
the religion of the Enlightenment may be stated
thus: (i) man is not natively depraved; (2) the end
of life is life itself, the good life on earth instead of
the beatific life after death; (3) man is capable,
guided solely by the light of reason and experience,
of perfecting the good on earth; and (4) the first
life

and essential condition of the good life on earth is

the freeing of men's minds from the bonds of igno-
102
 The New History
ranee and superstition, and of their bodies from the
arbitrary oppression of the constituted social au-
thorities. With this creed the "constant and univer-
sal principles of human nature," which Hume tells

us are to be discovered by a study must

of history,
be in accord, and "man in general' ' must be a crea-
ture who would conveniently illustrate these princi-

ples. What these "universal principles" were the

Philosophers, therefore, understood before they went
in search of them, and with "man in general" they
were well acquainted, having created him in their
own image. They knew instinctively that "man in

general" is natively good, easily enlightened, dis-

posed to follow reason and common sense; generous
and humane and tolerant, more easily led by persua-
sion than compelled by force; above all a good citi-
zen and a man of virtue, being well aware that, since
the rights claimed by himself are only the natural
and imprescriptible rights of all men, it is necessary
for him voluntarily to assume the obligations and to
submit to the restraints imposed by a just govern-
ment for the commonweal.
It is apparent that, in professing with so disarming
an air of candor to be studying history in order to dis-

cover the constant and universal principles of human

nature, they are deceiving us, these philosopher-his-
torians. But we can easily forgive them for that, since
they are, even more effectively, deceiving them-
selves. They do not know that the "man in general"

103
 The Heavenly City

they are looking for is just their own image, that the
principles they are bound to find are the very ones
they start out with. That is the trick they play on the
dead. They unconsciously give themselves away by
their insistence on the union of morality and politics.
Those who would separate morality and politics, ac-
cording to Rousseau, know nothing of either. "His-
tory is good for nothing," said Fontenelle, "if it be
not united with morality. . . . It is certain that one
may know all that men ever did and still be ignorant
28
of man himself." In the Preface to his great work
Montesquieu tells us that the "facts" meant nothing
to him until he discovered the principles which they
were to illustrate. "I have many times begun and
many times abandoned this work; I have repeatedly
thrown away the sheets already written; ... I fol-
lowed my object without forming any design: I was
unable to grasp either the rules or the exceptions; I
found the truth only to lose it: but when I discovered
my principles, everything I sought came to me." And
Diderot: "Some may think that a knowledge of his-
tory should precede that of morality: I am not of
that opinion: it seems to me more useful and expedi-
ent to possess the idea of the just and the unjust be-
fore possessing a knowledge of the actions and the
29
men to whom one ought to apply it." It is only too
clear: the philosopher-historians possess the idea of
the just and the unjust, they have their "universal
28 Oeuvres, V, 434» 435- 29 Oeuvres, HI, 493.

104
 The New History

principles" and their "man in general" well in hand

before they start out to explore the field of human
experience.
They start out, under the banner of objectivity
and with a flourish of scholarly trumpets, as if on a
voyage of discovery in unknown lands. They start
out, but in a very real sense they never pass the
frontiers of the eighteenth century, never really en-
ter the country of the past or of distant lands. They
cannot afford to leave the battlefield of the present
where they are so engaged in a life-and-death
fully
struggle with Christian philosophy and the infamous
things that support it —superstition, intolerance, tyr-
anny. Against the enemy they have brought to bear
all the resources of reason and common sense; but
the enemy is still firmly entrenched all about them,
and reason and common sense, redoubtable as they
may be, are in need of assistance. This assistance the
Philosophers profess to be seeking in the facts of hu-
man history; but, in truth, they are only executing a
flank movement in order to enlarge the field of bat-
tle, in order to deliver their attack from a more ele-
vated position. They project the conflict into the cen-
turies so that it may be regarded as something more
than an eighteenth-century squabble between Phi-
losophers and priests, so that it may be regarded as
an aspect of a conflict exemplified in all human ex-
perience, the conflict between the cosmic forces of
good and evil, between the City of Light and the

105
 The Heavenly City

—
City of Darkness the eternal conflict for the soul of
man. Reason and common sense have noted the evil
character of Christian philosophy; it will be his-
tory's function to exhibit it in action, to note the
striking examples of its evil influence.
The philosopher-historians were very sure that all
human experience would justify reason and common
sense; but, in order that it should turn out so, it was
necessary for them to distribute, over the picture of
the past, the appropriate lights and shadows. It was
necessary for them to appeal, as one may say, from
history drunk to history sober, to differentiate be-
tween the good times and the bad times. The bad
times to be condemned as contrary to reason and
common sense were obviously just those Dark Ages
of ignorance and superstition and tyranny when
Christian philosophy exercised undisputed sway;
and no extended research was required to find the
happier eras of mankind which might be set, in shin-
ing, instructive contrast, over against the Dark Ages.
There were, first, the two golden ages of Pericles and
Augustus. The Philosophers had all (or nearly all)
read the classical authors in college (as often as not
under Jesuit or Benedictine instructors!); and they
had learned from classical writers, or from Rollin's
rehash of classical historians, or from Plutarch
(above all from Plutarch), or from the didactic
"asides" of the translators and editors of Plutarch,
what classical heroes to model themselves upon,

1 06
 The New History
80
what Spartan or Roman virtues to emulate. And
there was the "rebirth" after the Dark Ages as well
as the golden ages before them; and it was a matter
of common knowledge that the age of Louis XIV and
of the eighteenth century had added something to the
light and learning, the liberty and virtue, of the an-

cient world and of the Renaissance: so that the phi-

losopher-historians had at their disposal what Vol-
taire called the "quatre ages heureux" to set over
against the Dark Ages when Christian philosophy
had fastened upon the human spirit.
like a blight
Fortunately, there was more than this. Human ex-
perience could no longer be limited to the Mediter-
ranean lands, nor history to the European tradition.
To say nothing of the happier experience of England
and her American colonies, there was the experience
of non-Christian peoples in distant lands — in Asia
and the two Indies; and from the accounts of six-
teenth- and seventeenth-century travelers it was
made clear that far the greater part of mankind,
during far the greater period of recorded history, had
lived (except, indeed, when oppressed and corrupted
by Christian powers) more happily and humanely,
under laws and customs more free and equitable, and
more in accord with natural religion and morality,
than the peoples of Europe had done during the cen-
80 For much of the detailed information on which this state-
ment is based, I am indebted to the researches of Mr. H. T. Parker,

formerly a graduate student in Cornell University.

107
 The Heavenly City

tunes of ecclesiastical ascendancy. All these happier

times and peoples the philosopher-historians mobi-
lized in the service of reason and common sense: the
testimony of the quatre ages heureux, of the English,
of "our brave Americans," of the "wise Chinese,"
the "noble Indian," the "good savages" — all this
convincing testimony could now happily be turned
against the Christian centuries to refute and con-
found them.
This was the function of the new history: to make
that distinction, which abstract reason was unable to
make, between the naturally good and the naturally
bad, between the customs that were suited and those
that were unsuited to man's nature. Human experi-
ence would confirm the verdict of reason, that Chris-
tian philosophy and the infamous things that sup-
ported it were inimical to the welfare of mankind. I
wish now, in conclusion, to note very briefly how cer-
tain historians, by different methods, managed to
"turn on the past and exploit it" in the interest of
this fundamental need.
Let us take firsttwo very popular histories, Ma-
bly's history of France and Hume's history of Eng-
land. The first thing to note about Mably's history of
France is that it is not a history of France, but Ob-
servations on the History of France. And, in fact,
what Mably observes is that long ago, in the time of
Charlemagne, the French possessed the elements of a
political constitution suited to the genius of the na-

108
 —

The New History

tion, but that subsequently, in the centuries of feu-

dal anarchy and ecclesiastical and "ministerial des-
potism," this constitution was overlaid by customs
unsuited to the French people; and the purpose of
Mably's volumes is to disengage this proper consti-
tution from the rubbish heap of accumulated custom,
and to show his contemporaries how it might easily
be refurbished and made use of now that the French
were sufficiently enlightened to know what they were
doing. Hume's history is less narrowly and less ex-
plicitly didactic than Mably's. At first reading it

seems no more than a dull and colorless chronicle of

events, and one wonders why it should have been so
eagerly read by a generation that expected its his-
torians to substitute for the narrative of events a de-
scription of les moeurs. On more attentive reading
the reason for its popularity Hume man-
is clear.

aged, with unobtrusive skill,weave into the tex-

to
ture of the narrative a condemnation of the very
things the eighteenth century wanted condemned
tyranny, superstition, intolerance. The story is a nar-
rative of events, but it is after all well told, and
above all told en p kilos op he: that is to say, not in
order to trace the evolution of events or to explain
them in terms of their origins and effects, but in or-
der to apply to events the "idea of the just and the
unjust," in order to apply to them the ready-made
judgments of the age of reason. It would be a dull
reader indeed who could not carry away from such a

109
 —

The Heavenly City

book that most useful of lessons for the eighteenth

century, namely, that, except for the ambition of
princes and politicians, the worldly interests and in-
trigues of priests, the emotional excesses of fanatics,
and the fears of a superstitious and degraded popu-
lace except for these recognized and remediable
evils, the history of England might have been what
the history of any people ought to be.
Let us now look at three works in some sense uni-
versal, or at least international, in their scope —the
works of Raynal, Voltaire, and Montesquieu. Ray-
nal 's book, The Philosophical and Political History

of the Indies , half fiction though it may be, is of in-

terest to us because of its great popularity. Revised
three times, it ran to fifty-four editions before the
end of the century, 81 and Horace Walpole not in-

aptly, allowance being made for the exaggeration of

a phrase maker, called it the "Bible of two worlds."
The work was welcomed because it was a compen-
dium in which the reader could find the gist, appro-
priately elaborated in a philosophical manner, of
what the and explorers had said about the
travelers
"wise Chinese" and the "good savages." Raynal took
his readers (very conveniently for them, since they
could join or leave the expedition at any point) on
the "grand tour" through the non-Christian world;
and like a good Cook's guide he showed them what
81 Journal of Modern History, III, 576.

IIO
 The New History
was admirable in the native customs of these foreign
peoples, and especially what corruptions and mis-
eries, imposed upon them by their Christian conquer-

ors, a Philosopher should note and deplore. Raynal

was less subtle than the author of the Lettres per-

sanes; but of all the books which condemned the
artificial and Christian civilization of Europe by con-
trasting it with the natural virtues of primitive peo-
ples, The Philosophical and Political History of the

Indies was best suited to the needs of the average

reader, and for that reason was undoubtedly the
most influential.

Of Voltaire's great work, the Essai sur les tnoeurs,

little need be said. Like Wells's Outline of History,
it was a general history from the earliest known
times written to point a moral: to show that the his-
tory of great events in the world is scarcely more
than a history of crimes; that the Dark Ages of hu-
man experience were precisely those when men were
most dominated by the Christian church; and that
almost the only times of light and learning, of prog-
ress in the arts and sciences, were the quatre ages
heureux when the evils of priestcraft were somewhat
abated and the minds of men were in consequence
somewhat free to follow reason. No doubt there is
more in the Essai than this; but this is the chief "les-
son" which the eighteenth-century reader was likely
to learn from it. Its primary effect, as Diderot said,

m
 The Heavenly City

was to excite in the hearts of the readers "an intense

hatred of lying, ignorance, hypocrisy, superstition,
and tyranny."
Montesquieu's Esprit des lots calls for a some-
what more extended comment, since it has been de-
faced by the misleading glosses of nineteenth-cen-
tury interpreters. Very much as the Philosophers
"adopted" Fenelon and made use of him to refute
Bossuet, nineteenth-century writers adopted Mon-
tesquieu and made use of him to refute the Philoso-
phers. They created a Montesquieu in their own
image, making him a forerunner of the objective,
scientific historians, primarily interested in the facts,

primarily concerned to establish, by the inductive

and comparative method, the "relativity" of institu-
tions and the hopeless dependence of custom on cli-
mate and geography. The Philosophers themselves,
as we have seen, suspected Montesquieu of being too
much occupied with finding the reasons for that
which is, too much inclined to establish the right by
the fact. There is some truth in all this, and by care-
fully selecting certain passages and certain books in
the Esprit des lots one can prove a great deal. Pro-
fessor Vaughan tells us that in "the last five books"
Montesquieu is the historian whose one care is "to
ascertain the facts and to explain how and why each
82
of them arose." may be so. But after all what are
It
five books in the sight of Montesquieu who can make
82 Studies in the History of Political Philosophy, I, 275.

112
 The New History

a chapter out of one sentence? What are five books

out of thirty-one? And Vaughan really ex-
Professor
cludes one of the five, leaving only four. Very well,
let us except these four books, and any passages like

them elsewhere; and let us admit that in so far Mon-

,,
tesquieu is the "pure historian, whose only care is to
"ascertain the facts."
But then let us read the rest of the work, first

blotting out the innumerable "Books" and "Chap-

ters" and their numbers; and let us remember as we
read that the work was written by Montesquieu, not
by a nineteenth-century historian or professional
student of comparative politics, but by an eight-
eenth-century aristocrat and man of affairs, M. le
President a Mortier, a man of shrewd practical sense
who had read widely, who had long reflected on the
problems of man and his world, and who liked to set
down his reflections and to support and illustrate
them by such pat instances as "came to him" from
his experience or his reading. If we read the Esprit
des lois so, I think we shall understand that what we
are reading is not a systematic treatise on politics
(everyone has noted the fact that it is not system-
atic), but a book of disconnected reflections —a book
of essays really. It may then occur to us that the au-
thor some sense the eighteenth-century Mon-
is in

taigne —
Montaigne with a pinch of Bayle added, and
with something else added, some strain of eighteenth-
century discontent with things as they are, and of

"3
 The Heavenly City

the eighteenth-century impulse to set them right. We

shall at all events be astonished that Condorcet
could think Montesquieu too much occupied with
that which is, too little with that which ought to be.
Information about that which is, Montesquieu took
as it came to him —from classical writers, from re-
ports of travelers, from oral tradition. The informa-
tion is often enough extremely superficial, and so
rarely questioned that for reliable knowledge of the
facts one goes rather to Voltaire, to say nothing of
Gibbon. Montesquieu has little reverence for the
facts as such; for him they are not fundamental but
illustrative, their essential truth is not in themselves
but in their implications; they are (whether noted
with careful accuracy does not greatly matter) the
conveniently possible incidents which make concrete
and vivid the general policies proper to this or that
kind of government, the general maxims which any
ruler ought to follow under such and such circum-
stances. That little word "ought" —what a funda-
mental role it plays in the Esprit des lots! Open the
book anywhere: "Religion and civil law ought to
have a tendency to make men good citizens." 33 The
laws of chastity "arise from those of nature, and
34
ought to be respected in all nations." The political

and civil laws "of each nation ought to be no more

than special applications of the law of human rea-

88 Bk. XXIV, chap. xiv. 8« Bk. XV, chap. xiL

114
 The New History
86
son." Although the principle of a republic is virtue,

"this does not mean that in any particular republic

the people are virtuous, but that they ought to be
86
so." One might go on indefinitely. It is too obvious
to be missed, and over against the judgment of
Condorcet we must set the more just judgment of
D'Alembert: "He occupies himself less with laws
that have been made than with those that ought to be
made." 87
Before estimating a book it is well to read its title
with care. And what is the title of Montesquieu's
book? Not the laws, but the spirit of the laws. Mon-
tesquieu was not primarily concerned with the laws
as they exist, but with some ideal quality of Tight-
ness which, considering all the physical and human
circumstances, they ought to have. For those who
seek, by the inductive method, to establish a science
of politics on the "facts" of human experience, there
is very little in the Esprit des lois. But where could
the eighteenth-century reformer, bent on sapping the
foundations of church and state in the ancien regime,
find an arsenal better equipped with ammunition for
his purpose? Where could he find the cause of con-
stitutional government in France more effectively set
forth, more solidly grounded on "universal princi-
ples"? Where could he find a greater variety of
facts, analogies, contrasts, indirect refutations, sly

8« Bk. I, chap. iii. so Bk. HI, chap, xl

*7 Oeuvres (1821), m, 450.
"5
 The Heavenly City

left-handed compliments and suave, ironical obei-

sances — all subtly designed to make the dogmas and
the practices of the "one true" and "revealed" reli-

gion ridiculous? Nowhere, I venture to say. Montes-

quieu himself has told us what to think of his work,
in telling us what "the wisest and most enlightened"
men of his own time thought of it: "They have re-
garded the Esprit des lois as a useful work; they
have thought its morality sound, its principles just;
that it was well designed to make good citizens; to
88
refute pernicious opinions, to encourage good ones."
And the great Gibbon? Gibbon, so often bracketed
with Thucydides and Tacitus as a model historian, so
impeccable in his scholarship, so objective, so appar-
ently objective, so accurate at all events in his state-
—
ment of facts what of him? Simply this: That it
was Gibbon after all who sought out the enemy in
his stronghold and made the direct frontal attack on
the Christian centuries. Among the "ruins of the
Capitol" he first conceived the project of narrating
the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, "the
greatest, perhaps,and the most awful scene in the
history of mankind." For twenty years he labored at
his self-imposed task. And with what skill, with
what a wealth of precise and accurate detail he tells
the story of the fall of civilization from that high
point in the second century, the "most happy and
prosperous" in the annals of mankind. With what
88 Difense de I 'esprit des lois, Part II.

116
 The New History

tolerant and amused, and yet saddened and resigned,

aloofness he writes of people whom he disliked, of
activities he deplored. With what relief he returns, on
those rare occasions when his subject permits, to
"breathe the pure and vigorous air of the Republic."
With what urbanity, with what grave and lofty irony
and learned misunderstanding this enlightened sa-
vant describes the spread and triumph of Christian-
ity, reargues the subtle dialectical disputes concern-
ing the Trinity and the Incarnation, and relates the
childish activities of Stylites and the "monkish saints"
—innumerable "transactions" which, being alike
"scandalous for the Church and pernicious to the
State," could not fail to excite the "contempt and
pity" of a Philosopher. In the pages of the Decline
and Folly we seem to be taking a long journey, but
all the time we remain in one place we : sit with Gib-
bon from the ruins
in the ruins of the Capitol. It is
of the Capitol that we from a great dis-
perceive, as
tance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men
moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal
shadowy world. We do not enter the Middle Ages, or
relive a span of human experience: still we sit in the
ruins of the Capitol, becoming cramped and half
numb listening, all this long stationary time, to our
unwearied guide as he narrates for us, in a melan-
choly and falling cadence, the disaster that mankind
has suffered, the defeat inflicted by the forces of evil
on the human spirit. The Decline and Fall is a his-

117
 The Heavenly City

tory, yes; but something more than a history, a me-

morial oration: Gibbon is commemorating the death
of ancient civilization; he has described, for the "in-
struction of future ages," the "triumph of barbarism
and religion."
The triumph of barbarism and religion! The
words up the past as imagined by the
fittingly call
was as if mankind, betrayed
philosophical century. It
by barbarism and religion, had been expelled from
nature's Garden of Eden. The Christian Middle Ages
were the unhappy times after the fall and expulsion,
the unfruitful, probationary centuries when man-
kind, corrupted and degraded by error, wandered
blindly under the yoke of oppression. But mankind
has at last emerged, or is emerging, from the dark
wilderness of the past into the bright, ordered world
of the eighteenth century. From this high point of
the eighteenth century the Philosophers survey the
past and anticipate the future. They recall the mis-
eriesand errors of the past as mature men recall the
and follies of youth, with bitter memories
difficulties

it may be, yet with a tolerant smile after all, with a

sigh of satisfaction and a complacent feeling of as-

surance: the present is so much better than the past.
But the future, what of that? Since the present is so
much better than the past, will not the future be
much better than the present? To the future the Phi-
losophers therefore look, as to a promised land, a
new millennium.
118
 IV
The Uses of Posterity

La posted te pour le philosophe, c'est l'au-

tre monde de l'homme religieux. Diderot.

Whatever was the beginning of this world, the end

will be glorious and paradisaical, beyond what
our imagination can now conceive. Priestley.

Past and future are two time regions which we com-

monly separate by a third which we call the present.
But strictly speaking the present does not exist, or is
at best no more than an infinitesimal point in time,
gone before we can note it as present. Nevertheless
we must have a present; and so we get one by rob-
bing the past, by holding on to the most recent events
and pretending that they all belong to our immediate
perceptions. If, for example, I raise my arm, the total
event is a series of occurrences of which the first are
past before the last have taken place; yet I perceive
it as a single movement executed in one instant of
time. This telescoping of successive occurrences into
one present moment, Philosophers call the "specious
present." Just what limits they would assign to the
specious present I do not know; but I will make a
free use of it, and say for convenience that we can
extend the specious present as much as we like. In

119
 The Heavenly City

common speech we do so: we speak of the "present

hour," the "present year," the "present generation."
Perhaps all living creatures have a specious present;
but no doubt what chiefly distinguishes man from
other animals is that his specious present may be de-
liberately and purposefully enlarged and diversified
and enriched. The extent to which it may be thus
enlarged and enriched will obviously depend on
knowledge (the artificial extension of memory) of
the past and of distant places; so that the educated
man may, whenever he wishes, bring into conscious-
ness a general image (sketchy and incorrect in detail
though it may be) of the long past of mankind and
hold it there, making it for the time being a part of
his "present."
The normal and sensible man does not often drag
the whole past of mankind into the present. But at
any moment of deliberate and purposeful activity
each one of us brings into present consciousness a
certain part of the past, such actual or artificial
memories of past events as may be necessary to ori-
ent us in our little world of endeavor. To be oriented
we must be prepared for what is coming to us, and
to be prepared for what is coming to us it is neces-
sary not only to recall certain past events but to
anticipate (note I do not say "predict") the future.
Thus, from the specious present, which always in-

cludes more or less of the past, the future refuses to

be excluded; and the more of the past we drag into
120
 The Uses of Posterity

the specious present, the more a hypothetical, pat-

terned future crowds into it also. If our memories of
past events are short and barren, our anticipations of
future events will be short and barren ; if our memo-
ries are rich and diversified, our anticipations of

what is to come are likely to be more or less so, too.

But the main point is that the character of the pat-
tern of the one, no less than its richness and extent,
will depend on the character of the other. Which

comes first, which is cause and which effect, whether

our memories construct a pattern of past events at
the behest of our desires and hopes, or whether our
desires and hopes spring from a pattern of past
events imposed upon us by experience and knowl-
edge, I shall not attempt to say. What I suspect is
that memory and anticipation of future
of past
events work hand in hand in a friendly
together, go
way, without disputing over priority and leadership.
Be that as it may, they go together, so that in a real
sense the specious present as held in consciousness at
any time is a pattern of thought woven instantane-
ously from the threads of memories, perceptions, and
anticipations.
If this be true of the individual mind in its ordi-
nary functioning, is it not also true of that general-
ized "mind" of an epoch or climate of opinion which
we courageously construct for purposes of scholastic
discussion? Let us, at all events, adopt that hypothe-
sis. We may find it useful to assume that there was
121
 The Heavenly City

an eighteenth-century "mind," and to suppose that it

had, like an individual mind, a specious present com-

posed of its memories of the past, its perceptions of
present occurrences, and its anticipations of future
events. In the last lecture I endeavored to show how
this eighteenth-century mind, as reflected in the writ-
a period
ings of the Philosophers, recalled the past as
of ignorance and unhappiness from which men had
emerged into a present that was clearly better. In
this lecture I shall endeavor to show how these
memories and present perceptions disposed the eight-
eenth-century mind to look forward to the future as
to a promised land, a kind of Utopia.
I have already stated, more than once perhaps,
that the Philosophers were not professional philoso-
phers sitting in cool ivory towers for contemplative
purposes only, but crusaders whose mission it was to

recover the holy places of the religion of humanity

from Christian philosophy and the infamous things
that supported it. The directing impulse of their
thought was that mankind had been corrupted and
betrayed by false doctrines. Their essential task was
to destroy these false doctrines; and in order to do
so they had of course meet the doctrines of Chris-
to
tian philosophy with opposed doctrines, contrary
ideas. But not with radically different ideas, not with
ideas of a different order altogether, since it is true
of ideas, as of men, that they cannot fight unless they
occupy the same ground: ideas that rush toward
122
 The Uses of Posterity

each other on different levels of apprehension will

pass without conflict or mutual injury because they
never establish contact, never collide. In order to
defeat Christian philosophy the Philosophers had
therefore to meet it on the level of certain common
preconceptions. They could never rout the enemy by
denying that human life is a significant drama the —
notion was too widely, too unconsciously held, even
by the Philosophers themselves, for that; but, ad-
mitting that human life is significant drama, the
Philosophers could claim that the Christian version
of the drama was a false and pernicious one; and
their best hope of displacing the Christian version
lay in recasting it, and in bringing it up to date. In
short, the task of the Philosophers was to present
another interpretation of the past, the present, and
the future state of mankind.
In presenting a new version of the drama of hu-
man life, the Philosophers were employing tactics

which Christian theologians had themselves em-

ployed long ago. The early Christian writers had
won their battle, in so far as they did win it, by
adapting to the needs and experience of the ancient
world (which, like the eighteenth century, needed to
be set right) the old Greek theme of cyclical decline
and recovery. The classical idea of a golden age, or
situation created by some happily inspired Lycurgus
or Solon, the Christian theologians reinterpreted in
terms of their own biblical story. They gave an
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 The Heavenly City

added glamor to the golden age by pushing it back to

the beginning of things, to the creation of man and

his world; they made it seem more real, more au-
thentic, —
by placing it historically in the Garden of
Eden; and they endowed it with perfection and au-
thority by transforming the inspired legislator into
the one true and omniscient and benevolent God.
But however right things may have been in the
golden age or the Garden of Eden, there had been a
decline and fall from that happy first state. Classical
writers (with some exceptions) regarded the present
state of man as a natural degeneration, effected by
fate and human frailty, and they could look forward
to nothing better than some fortunate chance, the re-
appearance of the inspired legislator or philosopher-
king, to set things right again, an4 beyond that to
another inevitable falling away: so that, since "time
is the enemy of man," human history appeared to
them to be no more than an endless series of cycles,
an eternal repetition of the familiar phenomena of
recovery and degeneration. According to Marcus
Aurelius, the rational soul

goeth about the whole universe and the void surrounding

it and traces its plan, and stretches forth into the infini-
tude of Time, and comprehends the cyclical Regeneration
of all things, and takes stock of it and discerns that our
children will see nothing fresh, just as our fathers too
never saw anything more than we. So that in a manner the

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The Uses of Posterity

man of forty years, if he have a grain of sense, in view of

1
this sameness has seen all that has been and shall be.

The classical version of human life was dramatic

enough, but its dramatic quality lay in the implica-
tion that human life is ordered by an implacable fate
from which there no escape: it was a drama with-
is

out a happy ending, or any ending at all. This was

no doubt its fatal weakness. The rational soul, at the
age of forty years, might find a pale satisfaction in
traversing infinite time only to learn that there was
nothing new under the sun, and never would be; but
the common run of men, finding the brief span
of life harsh and profitless and precarious, wanted
compensations for unhappiness, the joy, at the very
least, of looking forward with hope: common men
wanted the play have a happy ending. The Chris-
to
tian version, written for common men, provided the
happy ending which they wanted. The Christian ver-
sion did not make the present life of men less un-
happy, or less fatefully determined, but it presented
a more intelligible, a far more agreeable interpreta-
tion of The "fall of man" was more easily under-
it.

stood when it could be attributed to a definite first

act of disobedience to the paternal authority of God
and present miseries and martyrdoms became endur-
able,became high virtues even, when thought to be
1 The Communings with Himself of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus,
trans. C. R. Haines (1916), XI, sec. 1.

125
 The Heavenly City

inflicted as punishments that might prove to be the

price of eternal felicity in heaven. The Christian ver-
sion put an end to the helpless, hopeless world by
substituting for the eternal "nothing new" another
world altogether new, a golden age to come in place
of a golden age past and done with; it called on the
future to redress the balance of the present, and re-
quired of the individual man, as a condition of enter-
ing the promised land, nothing but the exercise of
those negative virtues which common men under-
stood so well —the virtues of resignation and obedi-
ence.
The extraordinary sway which the Christian story
exercised over the minds of men is easily understood.
No interpretation of the life of mankind ever more
exactly reflected the experience, or more effectively
responded to the hopes of average men. To be aware
of present trials and misfortunes, to look back with
fond memories to the happier times (imagined so at
least) of youth, to look forward with hope to a more
serene and secure old age —what could more ade-
quately sum up the experience of the great ma-
jority? And what was the Christian story if not an
application of this familiar individual experience to
the life of mankind? Mankind had its youth, its hap-
pier time in the Garden of Eden, to look back upon,
its present middle period of misfortunes to endure,
its future security to hope for. The average man
needed no theology to understand universal experi-
126
 The Uses of Posterity

ence when presented in terms so familiar; and it con-

soled him —
it no doubt added something to his sense

of personal significance — to realize that his own life,

however barren and limited it might be, was but a

concrete exemplification of the experience which God
had decreed for all the generations of men. But bet-
ter than all that —best of —he could understand
all

that there should sometime be an end made, a judg-

ment pronounced upon the world of men and things,
a day of reckoning in which evil men would be pun-
ished and good men rewarded: he could believe that
with all his heart, with a conviction fortified by the
stored-up memories of the injustices he had wit-
nessed, the unmerited injuries he had suffered. The
average man could believe all that and in the meas- ;

ure that he could believe it he could hope, he could

so easily convince himself, that in that last day he
would be found among those judged good, among
those to be admitted into that other world in which
things would be forever right.

Superficially considered, considered as an account

of events historically verifiable, the story was no
doubt flimsy enough; and the mere increase of
knowledge —knowledge the world,
of classical of the
early history of the church, of remote primitive and
non-Christian peoples —had done much to discredit
it. Since the fifteenth century, or even earlier, the
Humanists, fascinated by the newly discovered past,
had substituted for the Garden of Eden the golden
127
 The Heavenly City

age of classical civilization, just as the Christian

theologians had in their time substituted the Garden
of Eden for the golden age of Greek imagination.
This was all very well as an initial method of attack:
it was a good thing, and even necessary, for the Hu-

manists to go to school to the Greeks and Romans,

to learn all that theyknew, even for a time to imi-
tate them as models as yet unsurpassed: an excellent
device all this was for throwing fresh light on the
origins of the Christian story, and on the drab and
dreary learning which, in the course of centuries,
had overlaid and obscured its essential meaning. But
the tenacious strength of the Christian story was in-

dependent of its historical accidents. The importance

of the Christian story was that it announced with
authority (whether truly or not matters little) that
the life of man has significance, a universal signifi-

cance transcending and including the temporal ex-

perience of the individual. This was the secret of its

enduring strength, that it irradiated pessimism with

hope: it liberated the mind of man from the cycles in
which classical philosophy had inclosedas in ait

prison, and by transferring the golden age from the

past to the future substituted an optimistic for a dis-
illusioned view of human destiny.
The eighteenth-century Philosophers might there-
fore rewrite the story of man's first state, relegating
the Garden of Eden to the limbo of myths; they
might discover a new revelation in the book of na-
128
 —

The Uses of Posterity

ture to displace the revelation in Holy Writ; they

might demonstrate that reason, supported by the uni-
versal assent of mankind as recorded in history, was
a more infallible authority than church and state
they might well do all this and yet find their task but
half finished. No no "rebirth" of classical
"return,"
philosophy, however idealized and humanized, no
worship of ancestors long since dead, or pale imita-
tions of Greek pessimism would suffice for a society
that had been so long and so well taught to look for-
ward to another and better world to come. Without a
new heaven to replace the old, a new way of salva-
tion, of attaining perfection, the religion of humanity
would appeal in vain to the common run of men.
The new heaven had to be located somewhere
within the confines of the earthly life, since it was an
article of philosophical faith that the end of life is
life itself, the perfected temporal life of man; and in

the future, since the temporal life was not yet per-
fected. But if the celestial heaven was to be disman-
tled in order to be rebuilt on earth, it seemed that
the salvation of mankind must be attained, not by
some outside, miraculous, catastrophic agency (God
or the philosopher-king) but by man himself, by the
,

progressive improvement made by the efforts of suc-

cessive generations of men; and in this cooperative
enterprise posterity had its undeniable uses: pos-
terity would complete what the past and the present
had begun. "We have admired our ancestors less,"
129
 The Heavenly City

said Chastellux, "but we have loved our contem-

poraries better, and have expected more of our
descendants." 2 Thus, the Philosophers called in pos-
terity to exorcise the double illusion of the Christian
paradise and the golden age of antiquity. For the
love of God they substituted love of humanity; for
the vicarious atonement the perfectibility of man
through his own and for the hope of immor-
efforts ;

tality in another world the hope of living in the mem-

ory of future generations.

II
Long before the eighteenth century, writers of high
distinction had dimly perceived the services which
posterity might one day be called upon to perform.
Some day, Seneca said, our posterity will wonder at
our ignorance of things which are so clear to them.
And Dante, in the high Middle Ages, opened his De
monarchia with a sentence that implied more per-
haps than he would willingly have conceded, that im-
plied in fact all that the eighteenth century had to
say on the subject.

All men on whom the Higher Nature has stamped the

love of truth should especially concern themselves in la-
boring for posterity, in order that future generations may
be enriched by their efforts, as they themselves were made
rich by the efforts of generations past. 8

2 De la filiate publique, II, 71.

8 The De Monarchia of Dante Alighieri, ed. with translation and
notes by Aurelia Henry (1904), Bk. I, chap, i, p. 3.

130
 The Uses of Posterity

More than four centuries elapsed before this preg-

nant idea could play its part in the world. The expla-
nation for this long delay is perhaps not too difficult

to find. It could hardly strike Dante's contempo-

raries as worth while to labor especially for pos-
terity, since the fate of posterity, as of themselves, as
of all mankind, had once for all been determined and
would presently be pronounced at the judgment day.
To Erasmus and his contemporaries the idea, in it-
self so essentially humane, might have held some

special glamor except that it invited them to contem-

plate the future when they were so fully occupied in
admiring the past. The Humanists were far too
grateful to the Greeks and Romans for having eman-
cipated them from superstitions to be willing to
compare classical civilization unfavorably with their
own, with that of unknown future genera-
still less

tions. They missed the simple fact (and there are

still many who refuse to see it) that the true way to
imitate the Greeks is not to imitate them, since the
Greeks themselves imitated no one. Yet, obviously, a
Philosopher could not grasp the modern idea of
progress, could not become enamored of posterity,
until he was willing to abandon ancestor worship,
until he analyzed away his inferiority complex
toward the past, and realized that his own generation
was superior to any yet known.
Among the pioneers in effecting this reorientation
was Francis Bacon. In the Novum organum is that

131
 The Heavenly City

famous passage, often quoted, in which he protests

against calling the Greeks and Romans ancient: on
the contrary, he maintains, they lived in the youth of
the world, and it is the moderns who are the true an-
cients, and who should, for that reason, know more
than the Greeks and Romans, having profited by all
4
that has been learned since their time. 1 do not know
whether Pascal had read Bacon or not; but it is cer-
tain that he expressed Bacon's idea better than Ba-
con himself did.

The whole succession of human beings throughout the

course of the ages must be regarded as a single man, con-
tinually living and learning; and this shows how unwar-
ranted is the deference we yield to the philosophers of
antiquity; for, as old ageis most distant from infancy, it

must be manifest to all that old age in the universal man

must be sought, not in the times nearest his birth, but in
the times most distant from it. Those whom we call the
ancients are really those who lived in the youth of the
world, and the true infancy of man; and as we have
added the experience of the ages between us and them to
what they knew, it is only in ourselves that is to be found
5
that antiquity which we venerate in others.

When Pascal wrote these words the quarrel of the

ancients and the moderns was well under way. Pro-
fessor Bury, in his invaluable book, The Idea of
Progress, has noted the beginnings of that famous

* Novum organum, Bk. I, sec. 84.

*Pensees (1897), II, 271.

132
 The Uses of Posterity

polemic. As early as 1620 Allessandro Tassoni

speaks of the controversy as already current, and
announces himself as, on die whole, on the side of the
moderns. In 1627 the English divine George Hake-
will published a six-hundred-page book, entitled An
Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Provi-
dence of God in the Government of the World, in
which he denied the "common error touching Na-
ture's perpetual and universal decay." The modern
world, he maintains, is better than the ancient, so
that "the vain shadows of the world's fatal decay"
should not "keep us either from looking backward
to the imitation of our noble predecessors or for-
ward in providing for posterity, but as our predeces-
sors worthily provided for us, so let our posterity
bless us in providing for them." Half a century later
Glanvill, defender at once of the doctrines of witch-
craft and science (a feat not unknown in our day),
maintained that the modern world was far superior
to the ancient in the accumulation of useful knowl-
edge, was the duty of present generations
and that it

and examine, and lay

to "seek to gather, to observe
up in bank for the ages that are to come." 6 About
the same time Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, who dis-
liked the Greeks (according to Professor Bury, both
because he was a fanatical Christian and a bad
poet), maintained that the ancient world was neither
so learned nor so happy nor so rich and magnificent
6 Plus ultra (1688).

133
 The Heavenly City

as the modern world, and that Christianity offered

better subjects than classicalmythology for poets, a
fact which he illustrated, not very happily, by writ-
—
ing Clovis and Mary Magdalene works which, for
some reason, are still less well known than those of
Homer and Sophocles.
Sorlin solemnly bequeathed his defense of the
moderns to a younger man, Charles Perrault; and
the subsequent history of this battle of the books is
too well known to need recapitulation here. It may
be followed in Perrault's Parallele des anciens et des
modernes (1688-96), Fontenelle's Les anciens et les
modernes (1688); and, for the English record of it,
in Sir William Temple's Essay on Ancient and Mod-

ern Learning (1690), William Wotton's Reflections

upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1696), and
Swift's Battle of the Books. It is sufficient to note
that the ablest champion of the moderns, Fonte-
nelle, rested his defense upon the Cartesian doctrine

of the uniformity of nature. Whether the ancients

are superior to the moderns may be settled, Fonte-
nelle says, by asking whether trees were larger in an-
cient than in modern times: if they were, then a
Socrates cannot appear again; if they were not, then
he may. Nature is no respecter of ages, and if great-
ness fails to make its appearance in certain ages — if,

for example, the centuries following the barbarian

invasions represent a degeneration from classical
times —the explanation is not that nature was less

134
 The Uses of Posterity

potent, but that circumstances were adverse. Such

degeneration is not inevitable, but accidental and
temporary, a falling away which time will correct.
Time is an and
essential element in the problem,
time is on the side of the angels, that on the
is to say
side of the moderns, the proof of which may be read
in history; for, after centuries of ignorance and su-
perstition, the modern world has recovered ancient
learning, emerged from barbarism into a civilized
and ordered state, and may very well equal the an-
cients or even surpass them. It is at this point that
Fontenelle advances a step by making a distinction
between science and the arts. In poetry and the arts,
since these depend on feeling and imagination, the
moderns may equal but can scarcely hope to surpass
the ancients. But in science and learning, since these
depend on knowledge and correct reasoning, later
generations must inevitably surpass the ancients for
the simple reason that they build upon all the accu-
mulated knowledge of the past. "We are under obli-
gation to the ancients,' ' he says, "for having ex-
hausted almost all the false theories that could be
formed."
In supposing that the possibilities of false theories
had been exhausted Fontenelle was no doubt over-
sanguine. To be oversanguine was characteristic of
his generation and if Fontenelle's theories were ac-
;

cepted it was less because of correct reasoning than

because the age of Louis XIV was disposed to think

135
 The Heavenly City

well of itself. The Grand Monarch did not readily

tolerate invidious comparisons. If it was criminal in

the Huguenots to profess another religion than that

of the king, it was at least a sign of provincialism in
men of letters to suppose that the civilization of
Athens could have been superior to that of Ver-
sailles. Talleyrand once remarked that those who had

not lived before 1789 did not really know how pleas-
ant life could be. Properly qualified, the statement is

true enough. During the century that elapsed from

Louis XIV to the Revolution, life must have been,
for the high-placed favorites of fortune, very pleas-
ant indeed; and never more so than during those
quiescent years before 1750, when no king had as yet
found it necessary to make witty remarks about the
coming deluge. It was an essential part of the smiling
complaisance of that contented age, essential to its

self-respect, to think of itself as the equal of any yet

known.
But if the doctrines of Fontenelle were welcome
to his generation, they were also sufficient for it.
Fontenelle did, indeed, recognize that future genera-
tions would surpass the moderns, since it was evident
that in the accumulation and practical application of
knowledge "there is no end." Nevertheless, he did
not follow up the suggestion: he paid his respects to
posterity, but he was in no mood to worship it. Gen-
erally speaking, his mood was that of his contempo-
raries. They were quite content to have abandoned

136
 The Uses of Posterity

the notion of inevitable degeneration, to have demon-

With the future
strated that they were not inferior.
they were not too much concerned. It was a time to
let sleeping dogs lie, a time of quiescence following
the religious and political controversies of the seven-
teenth century, when men were disposed to welcome
the theory of Malebranche that God had created as
good a world as he could, considering the fact that
he had limited himself to working with a few general
principles, or even the more thoroughgoing notion of
Leibnitz that the world, taking the universe as a
whole and in the long run, was the best of possible
worlds. The egoism of the age of Walpole and the
Regent and the Well Beloved was, therefore, satis-
fied with the assurance that it need not lament the
glory that was Greece, that it could happily sustain
comparisons without loss of self-respect, having suffi-

ciently solid, even if somewhat prosaic, glories of its

own.
In the later eighteenth century this mood was re-
placed by another; complaisance gave way to dis-
content. Optimism remains, is even intensified; but it
isno longer an optimism resting on satisfaction with
things as they are. It is an optimism projected into
the future, sustained by the conviction that what is

wrong now be set right. The conviction

will shortly
that thingsmight be set right without too much diffi-
culty found support in the advancement of science,
which more than confirmed Fontenelle's prediction

137
 The Heavenly City

that to the accumulation and practical application of

knowledge there was no end; and especially in the
psychology of Locke which, reinforced and simplified
by Condillac, was generally accepted as self-evident:
it was self-evident that man was the product of his

—
environment of nature and the institutions under
—
which he lived and that by reshaping his environ-
ment in accord with the invariable and determinable
laws of nature, his material and spiritual regenera-
tion might be speedily accomplished. The making of
a suitable constitution, as they were apt to say in the
National Assembly, is a simple matter since it is al-

ready engraved on all hearts; is "perhaps . . . but

the work of a day, since it is the result of the en-
7
lightenment of a century." In the seventeenth cen-
tury Hakewill had advanced, as one reason for deny-
ing the "world's universal decay," the pragmatic ar-
gument that such an idea "quails the hopes and
blunts the edge of men's endeavours." It is in the
later eighteenth century that we can verify the re-
verse of this idea, namely, that when men hope much
and greatly endeavor they are eager to believe in the

world's speedy and universal amelioration. The de-

termination to set things right, which culminated in
the great Revolution, generated and sustained and
gave an emotional and even a religious quality to the
conviction that the future —the immediate future it

7 Barere, Archives parlementaires, VIII, 231.

138
 The Uses of Posterity

might very well be—would be infinitely better than

the present or the past.
It was more especially in France, where social dis-
content was most acute, that the doctrine of prog-
ress, of perfectibility, became an essential article of
faith in the new religion of humanity. Fontenelle had
thought of progress in terms of the gradual increase
in knowledge and correct reasoning. It did not occur
to him, or to many of his contemporaries, to look
forward to any radical regeneration of morals or of
social institutions. To play with the idea of Utopia,
as described by Plato or Thomas More or Bacon,
was an engaging pastime no doubt; to project it, as
something to be practically realized, into the future
history of would have seemed to him
France,
scarcely less an illusion than the naive dream of per-
fection in the Garden of Eden. Yet this is just what,
under the pressure of social discontents, came to
pass: the Utopian dream of perfection, that neces-
sary compensation for the limitations and frustra-
tions of the present state, having been long identified
with the golden age or the Garden of Eden or life

eternal in the Heavenly City of God, and then by

the sophisticated transferred to remote or imagined
lands (the moon or Atlantis or Nowhere, Tahiti or
Pennsylvania or Peking), was at last projected into
the life of man on earth and identified with the de-
sired and hoped-for regeneration of society.
This transformation of the old Utopian dream may
139
 The Heavenly City

be followed in the writings of the Philosophers: not

alone in those well-known formal treatises on the
subject of progress —Turgot's discourses, Lessing's
Education of the Human Race, Herder's Ideas on the
Philosophy of the History of Mankind, Condorcet's
Sketch of the Progress of the Human Spirit; but
equally well in the writings of other Philosophers, in
writings not immediately concerned with that sub-
ject. The Philosophers were, almost without excep-
tion, much concerned with progress, perfectibility,
the fate of posterity; and this interest, needless to
say, was intimately associated with their interest in
history. The past, the present, and the future state of
mankind were for them but aspects of the same pre-
occupation. The Philosophers were, after all, pri-
marily concerned with the present state of things,
which they wished to change; and they needed good
reasons for their desire to change it. They wished to
justify their discontents, to validate their aversions;
and they accomplished this object by enlarging the
social specious present, by projecting the present
where it could be seen to be
state into the centuries,
but a passing unhappy phase of the universal ex-
perience of mankind.

Ill

In this enterprise posterity played an important

role: it replaced God as judge and justifier of those
virtuous and enlightened ones who were not of this

140
 The Uses of Posterity

world. Allmen in some degree need outside approval

for —
what they think and do the approval of loved
ones, of kith and kin, of the community of right-
minded men. Most men in all times obtain the re-
quired approval by following the established customs
and professing the common opinions. But there are
always some eccentric individuals, and on occasion
certain groups, who find the present temporal world
of men and things intolerable. So they withdraw
from it, living in spiritual exile, or else they endeavor
to transform it. In either case they are likely to lose
the approval of the community, and losing the ap-
proval of the community they seek the approval of
some power above or beyond it, of some authority
more universally valid than that of the present world
of men and things: they seek the approval of God, or
the law of nature, or the inevitable class conflict, or
the force outside themselves that makes for right-
eousness. The isolated ones, like Archimedes, find
that without a fulcrum upon which to rest their
lever they cannot move the inert and resistant
world of men and things as they are. The eighteenth-
century revolutionists, whether in thought or in deed,
responded to this need. Finding themselves out of
harmony with the temporary world of men and
things, they endeavored to put themselves in tune
with the infinite powers : over against the ephemeral
customs and mores, they set the universal laws of na-
ture and of nature's God; from the immediate judg-
141
 The Heavenly City

ments of men, they appealed to the universal judg-

ment of humanity. Humanity was an abstraction, no
doubt; but through the beneficent law of progress
the wisdom of the ages would be accumulated, trans-
mitted, and placed at the disposal of posterity. Every
age would be the posterity of all preceding ages; and
as the eighteenth century, in the light of two thou-
sand years of human experience, had vindicated
Socrates and Regulus against the erring opinion of
their times, so generations yet to come would vindi-
cate the Voltaires and the Rousseaus, the Robes-
pierres and the Rolands.
I do not know why historians, who are ardently
devoted to noting exactly what happened, should so
generally have failed to note a fact that is writ large
in the most authentic documents: the fact that the
thought of posterity was apt to elicit from eight-
eenth-century Philosophers and revolutionary leaders
a highly emotional, an essentially religious, response.
Posterity, like nature, was often personified, rever-
ently addressed as a divinity, and invoked in the
accents of prayer. This, too, is a fact to be recorded,
as curious and interesting as many another on which
historians have lavished their erudition. I take at
random an example phenomenon. Robespierre
of this
is speaking before the Jacobin Club on the question

of war with Austria, and he ends his speech with the

following invocation:

posterity, sweet and tender hope of humanity, thou

142
 The Uses of Posterity

art not a stranger to us; it is for thee that we brave all

the blows of tyranny; it is thy happiness which is the

price of our painful struggles: often discouraged by the
obstacles that surround us, we feel the need of thy con-
solations; it is to thee that we confide the task of com-
pleting our labors, and the destiny of all the unborn gen-
erations of men! . . . May the martyrs of liberty occupy
in thy memory the place which the heroes of imposture
and aristocracy have usurped in ours; . . . may thy first

impulse be to scorn traitors and hate tyrants; may thy

motto be: protection, love, benevolence to the unhappy,
eternal war to oppressors! Make haste, O posterity, to
bring to pass the hour of equality, of justice, of happi-
ness! 8

This perfervid invocation makes us smile no doubt;

but do the opponents of Robespierre meet it with
derision? No, indeed. They do not blaspheme. Lou-
vet replies:

Robespierre, . your speeches belong to posterity,

. .

and posterity will come to judge between you and me, but
meantime you assume the gravest responsibility. In per-
sisting in your opinion you are under obligation to your
contemporaries, and even to posterity. Yes, posterity will
come to judge between you and me. Unworthy as I may
a man appeared in the National As-
be, she will say that
sembly untouched by all the passions of the time; one of
the most faithful of the tribunes of the people, it is neces-

8 C. Vellay, DLscours et rapports de Robespierre (1908), p. 155.

Cf. Journal des dibais de la sociiti des amis de la constitution

(January, 1792), No. 127, p. 3.

143
 The Heavenly City

sary to esteem and cherish his virtues, admire his cour-

9
age, . . .

Robespierre and Louvet are fully aware that there is

to be a judgment day in which virtue will be vindi-

cated and corruption condemned, but in their the-
ology posterity has elbowed God out of the judg-
ment seat: it is posterity that will judge and justify
and award the immortal crown.
Men rarely love humanity more fervently than
when they are engaged in deadly conflict with each
other, and it is true that the prestige of posterity
was never quite so high as during the crucial months
of the Revolution. Nevertheless, the Philosophers,
and not French Philosophers only, were well aware
of the uses of posterity long before 1789. Priestley,
for example, a quite saneand sound Englishman, in
on government, turns aside from the
his treatise
main theme to tell us what an inspiration it was to
contemplate "the progress of the species towards
perfection." In a state of society,

it requires but a few years to comprehend the whole pre-

ceding progress of any one art or science; and the rest of
a man's life, in which his faculties are the most perfect,
may be given to the extension of it. If, by this means, one
art or science shouldgrow too large for an easy compre-
hension, ... a commodious subdivision will be made.
Thus all knowledge will be subdivided and extended and ;

9
Journal des debats de la societi des amis de la constitution
(January, 1792), No. 134; Debats, No. 130, p. 4.

144
 The Uses of Posterity

knowledge, as Lord Bacon observes, being power, the hu-

man powers will, in fact, be enlarged; nature, including
both its materials, laws, will be more at our com-
and its

mand; men will make their situation in this world abun-

dantly more easy and comfortable: they will probably
prolong their existence in it, and will grow daily more
happy, each in himself, and more able (and, I believe,
more disposed) to communicate happiness to others.
Thus, whatever was the beginning of this world, the end
will be glorious and paradisaical, beyond what our im-

aginations can now conceive. Extravagant as some may

suppose these views to be, I think I could show them to be
fairly suggested by the true theory of human nature, and

to arise from the natural course of human affairs. But, for

the present, I waive this subject, the contemplation of
which always makes me happy. 10

Herder would not have thought Priestley's views

extravagant. His great work on the philosophy of
history, strange compound of learning, insight, and
mystical piety, is scarcely more than an elaboration
of Priestley's thesis, a sustained oratorical exposition
of the text that God realizes himself in humanity,
and that all working for the happiness
good men, in
of posterity, are furthering the divine purpose, and
may here and now anticipate the heavenly reward.
In a passage not infrequently quoted, he says:

It is a beautiful dream of future life to think of oneself

10 An Essay on the First Principles

of Government; and on the
Nature of Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty (1771), pp. 4-5.

145
 The Heavenly City

in friendly converse with all the wise and good who have
ever worked for mankind, and have entered that higher
realm with the sweet reward of labor accomplished; but
in a sense history already opens to us this pleasant bower
of speech and association with the upright and right-
thinking men of many times. Here Plato stands before
me; there I hear Socrates' friendly questions and share
with him his final fate. If Marcus Aurelius speaks in com-
munion with his own heart he speaks also to mine, and
poor Epictetus gives commands more potent than those
of a king. The perplexed Tully, the unfortunate Boethius
speak to me, communicate to me the circumstances of
their lives, the grief and the consolation of their souls.
. . Manifold is the problem of humanity, and every-
.

where the result of human striving this: "Upon reason

and integrity depends the essence of our race, its end and
its fate." No nobler use has history than this: it leads us
as it were into the council of fate and teaches us to con-
form to the eternal laws of nature. While it shows us the
defects and consequences of all unreason, it teaches us our
place in that great organism in which reason and good-
ness struggle with chaotic forces, always however accord-
ing to their nature creating order, and pressing forward on
the path of victory. 11

In Herder we hear the Philosophers* Manifesto, call-

ingupon virtuous men of all countries and all ages to

unite against eviland unreason. They will find their
reward in heaven, no doubt, but also in the favorable
judgment of posterity.
11 Sdmmtliche Werke (1877-1913), XIV, 251-252.

146
 —

The Uses of Posterity

Of all the Philosophers perhaps none ever gave so

much thought to the uses of posterity as Diderot
Diderot, in whose mind all the intellectual currents
of the age crossed and went their separate ways. One
evening in the year 1765, so we are told, Diderot and
Falconet, "in a corner by the fire, in the Rue Ta-
ranne, argued the question whether a regard for pos-
terity inspired men to noble action and the creation
12
of great works." It seems that Falconet had pro-
pounded one of those conundrums, of the prize essay
species, so dear to the curious and argumentative
mind of the century. Assuming it could be proved
that at a certain date, not too far in the future, a
comet would collide with the earth and totally de-
—
stroy it what effect would this knowledge have on
the conduct of men? None at all, Falconet main-
tained. On the contrary, a most disastrous effect,
Diderot replied: such knowledge would destroy all

incentive togood or great action. "No more ambi-

tion,no more monuments, poets, historians, perhaps
no more warriors or wars. Everyone would cultivate
hisgarden and plant his cabbages." 13 So arguing, the
two men separated for the night; but the question
would not down, and presently they were discussing
it in an exchange of letters. The correspondence ran

for some years, and the letters of Diderot alone,

some of which are veritable pamphlets, fill more than
12 Diderot, Oeuvres, XVHI, 79.
"/Wd.,IX,435,436.

147
 ! —

The Heavenly City

two hundred pages of his collected works. 14 More

than two hundred pages of frantic writing chiefly de-
voted to proving that if it were certainly known that
the world would come to an end, if it were known
that there would be no posterity to reward and pun-
ish, men would straightway rush into evil courses
Falconet took the question lightly enough, too
lightly for Diderot's taste; but Diderot himself took
it in deadly earnest. All his life it worried him, and
he worried it, so that again and again we find him

making some new and tempestuous assault upon it

in Le neveu de Rameau in the Physiology, in the
y

Essay on Claudius and Nero. What concerned Dide-

rot was the old insoluble question of the foundations
of morality and the good life. The old foundations of
morality and the good life (faith in God and the life
after death) Diderot's intelligence had analyzed
away. But if there was no heavenly reward after
death, what was left? Why should any man deny
himself? Why suffer persecution for truth and justice
without compensation here or hereafter? Whatever
Diderot's intellect might say, the good heart of the
man assured him that virtue was the most certain of
realities; and since it was a reality there must be

14 For the letters of Diderot to Falconet on this subject, see

Diderot, Oeuvres, XVIII, 79-336. fitienne Maurice Falconet was a

noted sculptor of his time and professor in the Royal Academy of
Painting and Sculpture. His letters to Diderot are known chiefly
through the quotations made by Diderot in his replies. But see
Gazette des beaux arts, Second Period, II, 120-135.

148
 The Uses of Posterity

compensation for the practice of it. The only com-

pensation Diderot could ever find was the hope of
living forever in the memory of posterity. "Do you
not see," he exclaims, "that the judgment of pos-
terity anticipated is the sole encouragement, the sole
support, the sole consolation ... of men in a thou-
15
sand unhappy circumstances?" "If our predecessors
have done nothing for us, and if we do nothing for
our descendants, it is almost in vain that nature wills
that man should be perfectible." 16 "All these philoso-
phers, these men of integrity who have been the vic-
tims of stupid people, of atrocious priests, of enraged
tyrants, what consolation remains to them in the
hour of death? This: that prejudice passes, and that
posterity will transfer to their enemies the ignominy
which they have suffered." 17 It is significant that
throughout this discussion Diderot employs the
phrases "sentiment of immortality" and "respect for
posterity." The "sentiment of immortality and re-

spect for posterity move the heart and elevate the

soul ; they are two germs of great things, two prom-
ises as substantial as any others." The ideas, the
phrases, are essentially religious, essentially Chris-
tian: for the worship of God, Diderot has substituted
respect for posterity; for the hope of immortality in
heaven, the hope of living in the memory of future
generations. And in the very accents of a Christian
15 Oeuvres, XVIII, 102. 16 Ibid., p. 179.
17 Ibid.,
p. 100.

149
 The Heavenly City

priesthe can invoke his divinity. "O Posterity, holy

and sacred! Support of the oppressed and unhappy,
thou who art just, thou who art uncorruptible, thou
who wilt revenge the good man and unmask the
hypocrite, consoling and certain idea, do not abandon
me!" The essence of the matter Diderot managed to
reduce to an epigram: "Posterity is for the Philoso-
18
pher what the other world is for the religious."
Diderot would have understood Robespierre's in-
vocation to posterity; he would have understood
Louvet's appeal to posterity for judgment. He would
have understood the Girondists and Jacobins, those
representatives of Latium and the Peloponnesus, os-
tentatiously draping themselves in Roman virtues
lest posterity should fail to recognize and reward
them. He would have understood Condor cet. It has
been noted as remarkable that Condorcet, proscribed
and in hiding, with all his high revolutionary hopes
fallen about him, should have persevered in the faith
sufficiently to write his famous sketch of the progress
of the human spirit. But no: never did he so much
need the consolation of believing in the perfectibility
of the human race as when death stared him in the
face. Then it was that the vision of posterity,

freed from its chains, . . . marching with sure steps on

the road to truth, virtue, and happiness, consoles the phi-
losopher for the errors, the crimes, the injustices that still

soil the earth, and of which he himself is often the victim.

ls Oenvres, XVIII, 101.

150
 The Uses of Posterity

It is in the contemplation of this picture . . . that he

finds his true recompense for virtue. The contemplation
of this picture is an asylum in which the memory of his
persecutors does not follow him, an asylum in which, liv-
ing in imagination with mankind re-established in its
rightsand in its true nature, he can forget mankind cor-
rupted and tormented by greed, fear, envy. It is in this
asylum that he truly lives with his fellows, in a heaven
which his reason has created, and which his love of hu-
manity embellishes with the purest joys. 19

And that more famous Girondist, Madame

still

Roland: I suppose no one ever professed the religion

of humanity with more unquestioned faith, practiced
it more assiduously, or in the end found its consola-

tions more genuine and sustaining. The stuffy apart-

ment of an engraver doing a small business on the
Pont Neuf was no adequate theater for displaying
the talents of a young woman who communed fa-
miliarly with the saints and sages of the world, and
who never "read of a single act of courage or of vir-
tue" without feeling herself capable of imitating it

under similar circumstances. She often wept to think

she was not born a Spartan or a Roman, well know-
ing thathad she been Socrates she would have drunk
the hemlock, had she been Regulus she too would
have returned to Carthage. Since neither opportunity
was likely to come to her on the Pont Neuf, she "per-
19 Esquisse (Tun tableau historique des progr&s de Vesprit hu-
main (1797), PP- 293-294.
 The Heavenly City

suaded herself that she ought to be busy in perfecting

her own being." Yet where could this perfected being
move and speak and Where could she
act the part?
converse with those who would understand her,
where do heroic deeds or make sacrifices that would
not go unrewarded or unacclaimed? Not in the real
world of Paris, but in the world of history, in the
world of Plutarch and Jean Jacques, in the world of
the imagination: there was a world in which others
might see her as she saw herself.
In this world of the imagination the real Madame
Roland, that perfected being which Madame Roland
had created, lived until the Revolution quite unex-
pectedly, quite miraculously so it seemed, offered her
an opportunity to play a noble role in the actual
world of affairs. A few brief months as it proved, and
then proscription: the poor lady sits in prison, wait-
ing the end. Then she remembers that martyrdom
has always been the fate of martyrs: recalls the
"death of Socrates, the exile of Aristides, the con-
demnation of Phocion"; is aware all at once that
heaven has destined her "to be a witness to crimes
similar to those of which they were the victims, and
to participate in the glory of a persecution of the
same kind." Sitting in prison she therefore wrote her
memoirs, for "what better can one do in prison than
to transport one's existence elsewhere by a happy
fiction or interesting memories?" What, indeed!
152
 The Uses of Posterity

Seen too closely, her brief adventure in revolution

was a failureand her death meaningless. But trans-
ported elsewhere, projected into history and looked
at from the perspective of the centuries, both her
life and her death could be regarded as in some sense

the work of a higher power — of God, or the asso-

ciated fates, or whatever beneficent forces might be
supposed to concern themselves with human destiny.
So regarded, her whole life unrolled before her, in
recollection, as a miraculous preparation for the
final sacrifice on the altar of human liberty. Where,
then, was the sting of death when it could be re-
garded as predestined, as an event of more than per-
sonal or local significance, an event which coming
generations might be disposed to record in human-
ity's great book of martyrdoms? Posterity, she was
persuaded, would so regard it. "Roland will never die
in posterity, and I also, I shall have some measure of
existence in future generations." Her memoirs she
entitled, An Impartial Appeal to Posterity, and Bosc,
who edited them, tells us that "Citoyenne Roland
endeavored to find in the esteem of posterity the
means of consoling herself for the injustice of con-
temporaries, and in future glory compensation for
her anticipated death." Posterity was for Madame
Roland, as for Diderot, what the other world was
for the religious: sustained, like the Christian mar-
tyrs of an earlier time, by the hope of immortality,

153
 The Heavenly City

she could mount the scaffold with courage and lift

20
unflinching eyes to the poised and relentless knife

IV
Nearly a century ago De Tocqueville noted the
fact that the French Revolution was a "political
revolution which functioned in the manner and
which took on in some sense the aspect of a religious
revolution." Like Islamism or the Protestant revolt,
it overflowed the frontiers of countries and nations
and was extended by "preaching and propaganda."
It functioned,

in relation to this world, in precisely the same manner

that religious revolutions function in respect to the other:
it considered the citizen in an abstract fashion, apart
from particular societies, in the same way that religions
consider man in general, independently of time and place.
It sought not merely the particular rights of French citi-

zens, but the general political rights and duties of all

men. [Accordingly] since it appeared to be more con-
cerned with the regeneration of the human race than
with the reformation of France, it generated a passion
which, until then, the most violent political revolutions
had never exhibited. and gave
It inspired proselytism
birth to propaganda. It could therefore assume that ap-
pearance of a religious revolution which so astonished
contemporaries; or rather it became itself a kind of new

20 For an elaboration of what is here said about Madame Ro-

land, see American Historical Review, XXXIII, 784.

154
 —

The Uses of Posterity

religion, an imperfect religion it is true, a religion with-

out God, without a form of worship, and without a future

life, but one which nevertheless, like Islamism, inundated
the earth with soldiers, apostles, and martyrs. 21

De Tocqueville's contemporaries were too much

preoccupied with political issues and the validity of
traditional religious doctrines to grasp the signifi-
cance of his pregnant observations. Not until our
own time have historians been sufficiently detached
from religions to understand that the Revolution, in
its later stages especially, took on the character of
a religious crusade. But it is now well understood
(thanks to the writings of Mathiez, Aulard, and
many lesser historians), not only that the Revolu-
tion attempted to substitute the eighteenth-century
religion of humanity for the traditional faiths, but
also that, contrary to the belief of De Tocqueville,
the new was not without God, forms of wor-
religion
ship, or a future life. On the contrary, the new reli-
gion had its dogmas, the sacred principles of the
Revolution Liberty et sainte egalite. It had its
form of worship, an adaptation of Catholic cere-
monial, which was elaborated in connection with the
civic fetes. It had its saints, the heroes and martyrs
of liberty. It was sustained by an emotional impulse,
a mystical faith in humanity, in the ultimate regen-
eration of the human race. While Louis was still on
21 L'ancien regime et la Revolution, Bk. I, chap. iii.

155
 The Heavenly City

his throne contemporaries (knowing their Rousseau)

recognized that

a religion which made the fatherland and the laws the ob-
ject of adoration for all citizens would be in the eyes of a
wise man an excellent religion. Its Pontiff would be the
king, the supreme ruler. To die for the fatherland would
be to achieve eternal glory, eternal happiness. The man
who violated the laws of his country would be impious,
and the first magistrate, king and Pontiff, would rightly
give him over to public execration, in the name of the so-
ciety which he had offended, and in the name of the di-
vinity who has placed us all equally under the restraint of
impartial laws. 22

The civic fetes, beginning with the first celebra-

tion (July 14, 1790) of the taking of the Bastille,
the dechristianization movement, and the Festival of
Reason in November, 1793, were tentative, prelimi-
nary stages in the effort to substitute for the Chris-
tian religion a civic and, as one may say, secular
religion of humanity. The Festival of November is

commonly called the Festival of Reason, and it has

been pointed out that it was somewhat unfortunate
to choose an actress to represent that cold abstrac-
tion. In truth it was Liberty, not Reason, that the
festival was intended to honor: the actress repre-
sented Liberty, the torch represented Reason en-
lightening Liberty. The intention was perfectly ex-

22 Nicolas de Bonneville, De I'esprit des religions (i79i)> Part

n,39.

156
 The Uses of Posterity

pressed by the hymn, composed for the occasion by

Marie-Joseph Chenier, which was chanted in the de-
christianized Cathedral of Notre Dame:

Descend, O Liberty, daughter of Nature;

The people, recovering thy immortal power,
Upon the stately ruins of old imposture,
Raise once again thy altar I

Come, conqueror of kings, Europe's example;

Come, over false Gods complete thy success!
Thou, Saint Liberty, inhabit this temple,
28
Be of our nation the Goddess!

The Festival of November was nevertheless thought

to be, for reasons into which we need not stop to in-
and atheism, as Robespierre
quire, too "atheistical,"
explained,was aristocratic. The final form assumed
by the new religion during the Revolution was fixed
by the decree of May, 1794, on the Worship of the
Supreme Being:

The French people recognize the existence of the Su-

preme Being and the immortality of the soul. It recog- —
nizes that the worship worthy of the Supreme Being is the
practice of the duties of man. —
It places in the front rank
of these duties to detest bad faith and tyranny, to punish
tyrants and traitors, to aid the unfortunate, to respect the
weak, to defend the oppressed, to do unto others all pos-
sible good and to be unjust to no one. —
There shall be
23 Aulard, Le culte de la raison, p. 54 ; Oeuvres de M. J. Chinkr
(1824), HI, 357.

157
 The Heavenly City

instituted fetes in order to remind man of the Divinity

—
and of the dignity of his being. These fetes shall take
their names from the glorious events of our Revolution,
the virtues most cherished and most useful to man, and
the great gifts of nature. —
The French Republic shall an-
nually celebrate the fetes of the 14th July, 1789, the 10th
August, 1792, the 21st January, 1793, and the 31st May,
1793. —
It shall celebrate every tenth day the fetes which

are hereby enumerated. 24

Among the thirty-six fetes of the decadi it was in-

evitable that there should be included fetes in honor

of liberty and equality, love of the fatherland, hatred
of tyrants, frugality, stoicism, agriculture, and pos-
terity.

After the great Revolution had spent its fury, faith

in the new religion of humanity lost much of its mys-

tic and perfervid quality. Still it lived on, inspiring,
in the new world and in the old, many lesser revolu-

tions; and it had even one great revival before and

during the splendid debacle of 1848. Some there were
for whom, even in defeat, it never quite lost its

glamor and high promise. Mazzini was their prophet.

Of the persistence of the faith unimpaired among ob-
scure men, Gabriel Monod has preserved for us a
striking example.

About forty years ago a good woman, who kept the

boarding house where I took my meals, related to me an

2 *Aulard, Le culte de la raison, p. 273.

158
 The Uses of Posterity

anecdote about her father, a simple workingman of

Nantes, which greatly impressed me. This man was very
young when the Revolution broke out. He accepted it
with enthusiasm; took part in the struggle of the Jaco-
bins against the Vendeeans; witnessed with regret the
imperial rigime destroy the democratic liberties so dearly
bought; and at each revolution, in 1814, in 1830, in
1848, believed that the ideal republic, dreamed of in
1793, was about to be reborn. He died during the second
Empire, more than ninety years old, and at the moment
of death, raising to heaven a look of ecstasy, was heard to
murmur: "O sun of '93, 1 shall die at last without having
seen thy rays again." This man, like the first Christians,
lived in the hope of the millennium. 28

The anecdote doubtless lost nothing in the telling.

Yet it serves well enough to symbolize the fact that
the eighteenth-century religion of humanity accom-
panied and sustained the political and social revo-
lution which was gradually accomplished, with
whatever concessions in theory, with whatever com-
promises in practice, during the hundred years that
followed the taking of the Bastille. The concessions
and the compromises were indeed many and flagrant.
Madame Roland would have mounted the scaffold
with less assurance could she have foreseen the third
French Republic, that shabby substitute for the
by monarchists, a re-
ideal, established in default

public without a constitution properly speaking,

26 Mathiez, Contributions a Vhistoire religieuse de la Rivolution
francaise, preface by Monod, p. i.

159
 The Heavenly City

without a declaration of the imprescriptible rights of

man. Mazzini, as we know, could never quite be-
lieve in the validity of that Italian freedom which
Cavour achieved by diplomatic intrigue and war, and
with the aid of Napoleon III, the man who had set
his heel on liberty in France. As for Germany, the
right to make speeches and resolutions in the Reichs-
tag was won, not by the speeches and resolutions of
the Frankfurt Assembly of '48, but by "blood and
iron," by Bismarck, the man who, having no faith in
democracy, conceded universal suffrage as a "species
of political blackmail," a necessary move in the
game. The German Empire, the third French Repub-
lic, the Kingdom of Italy, the Austro-Hungarian

"Compromise," a "household suffrage" thrown as a

—
sop to tenants on entailed estates these, and similar
tarnished imitations, were the "rewards" which pos-
terity, after a century of enlightenment, grudgingly

bestowed upon the impassioned propagandists and

martyrs of the democratic faith. The great Revolu-

tion, as an accomplished fact, betrayed the hopes of

its prophets, the Rousseaus and the Condorcets, the

Robespierres and the Rolands, the Mazzinis and the

Kossuths. No doubt the illusion of its prophets was
to suppose that the evil propensities of men would
disappear with the traditional forms through which
they functioned. Before the end of the nineteenth
century, at all events, was obvious that the aboli-
it

tion of old oppressions and inequities had done little

160
 The Uses of Posterity

more than make room new ones; and when men

for
realized that democratic government as a reality, as
it actually functioned in that besmirched age of iron,
was, after all, only another way of being indifferently
governed, those once glamorous words, libertd, 6ga-
liti, fraternity, lost their prophetic power for the
contented, and the eighteenth-century religion of hu-
manity, suffering the fate of all successful religions,
fell to the level of a conventional and perfunctory
creed for the many.
Meantime, the discontented were renouncing the
democratic faith to follow the prophets of a new re-
ligion. "Working men of all countries, unite!" In the
Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friederich
Engels sounded the battle cry of a new social reli-
gion. Like the eighteenth-century religion of human-
ity, the communist faith was founded on the laws of

nature as revealed by science. But science had made

advances since the eighteenth century. In the eight-
eenth century, nature was regarded as a delicately
adjusted machine, a stationary engine whose mecha-
nism implied the existence of a purposeful engineer,
a beneficent first cause or Author of the Universe.
With Hegel the beneficent Author of the Universe
faded away into a diaphanous Transcendent Idea,
and with Darwin the Transcendent Idea disappeared
altogether. Henceforth, God, and all the substitutes
for that conception, could be ignored since nature
was conceived not as a finished machine but as an
161
 The Heavenly City

unfinished process, a mechanistic process, indeed,

but one generating its own power. Supplied with the
dialectic of Hegel and the evolutionary theories of
Darwin, Marx formulated, in Das Kapital, the creed
of thecommunist faith which was to replace, for the
discontented, the democratic faith of the eighteenth
century. The new faith, like the old, looks to the
past and to the future ; like the old, it sees in the past
a persistent conflict, and in the future a millennial
state. But the new faith is less anthropomorphic, less
personal than the old. It does not look back to a
golden age or a Garden of Eden. It does not see in
the history of mankind the deliberate and sinister
betrayal of good men by the evil-minded. It does not
look forward to the regeneration of humanity by the
pleasant specific of enlightenment and good will. It
sees in the past a ruthless and impersonal conflict of
material forces; a conflict functioning through the
economic class interests of men, which, as it created
the landowning aristocratic regime of the Middle
Ages and then destroyed it in the interest of the
bourgeois -capitalist regime of the nineteenth cen-
tury, will in turn destroy the bourgeois-capitalist re-
gime in the interest of the proletariat. The social
revolution, conceived as the collapse of the capitalist
regime, is coming, not through enlightenment and the
preaching of good will, but through the indefeasible
operation of economic forces. The function of intelli-

gence is to understand these forces; the duty of com-

162
 The Uses of Posterity

mon men is to adjust themselves, in the light of intel-

ligence, to the inevitable process. The stars in their
courses, rather than the puny will of man, will bring
about the social revolution, a kind of promised land
to which the masses may look forward with faith and
hope.
And now, in our day, the first act in the social
revolution, accompanied and sustained by the com-
munist faith, has just been staged in Russia. Between
the Russian and the French revolutions, as between
the democratic and the communist faiths, there are
no doubt many points of difference; but what con-
cerns us is that the differences, in the long view, are
probably superficial, while the similarities are funda-
mental. If we, the beneficiaries of the French Revo-
lution, fail to note the similarities, it is because we
are easily deceived by a slight difference in nomen-
clature (for "people" read "proletariat/' for "aristo-
crats" read "bourgeoisie," for "kings" read "capital-
ist government") ; and we are more than willing to
be deceived because we, the beneficiaries of the
French Revolution, would be the dispossessed of the
Russian Revolution should it be successful through-
out the western world. Like Diderot's Rameau, we
are disposed, naturally enough, to think, "The devil
take the best of possible worlds if I am not a part
of it." But whatever we think, the plain fact is that
the Russian Revolution which menaces us, like the
French Revolution which destroyed the possessing

163
 The Heavenly City

classes of the Old Rigime that we might succeed

them, is being carried through in behalf of the dis-
possessed classes. It aims at nothing less than the
establishment of liberty and equality ("true liberty
and equality" this time, of course) in place of tyr-
anny and exploitation. For the accomplishment of
this object it employs, deliberately, as a temporary
but necessary measure, a dictatorship of the faithful
similar to that which functioned in '93. And the Bol-
sheviks who control the Council of Commissars, like
the Jacobins who controlled the Committee of
Safety, regard themselves as the fated instruments of
a process which will inevitably, in the long run, break
down the factitious division between nations by unit-
ing all the oppressed against all oppressors. "If cabi-
nets unite kings against the people," exclaimed Is-
nard in 1792, "we will unite peoples against kings."
Similarly, the Bolshevik leaders, following Karl
Marx, call upon the "proletarians of all countries" to
unite against all bourgeois-capitalist governments.
The Russian is most of all like the French Revolu-
tion in this, that its leaders, having received the
tablets of eternal law, regard the "revolution" not
merely as an instrument of political and social re-
form but much more as the realization of a philoso-
phy of life which being universally valid because it is
in harmony with science and history must prevail.
For this reason the Russian Revolution like the
French Revolution has its dogmas, its ceremonial, its
164
 The Uses of Posterity

saints. Its dogmas are the theories of Marx inter-

preted by Lenin. The days which it celebrates are the
great days of the Revolution. Its saints are the he-
roes and martyrs of the communist faith. In the
homes of the faithful the portrait of Lenin replaces
the sacred icons of the old religion, and every day the
humble builders of a new order make pilgrimages to
his tomb as formerly they made pilgrimages to holy
places.
Another resemblance there is: In the minds, or
rather in the breasts of its enemies, the Russian
Revolution arouses the same unreasoning, emotional
revulsion which formerly the French Revolution
aroused in the breasts of the counter-revolutionists.
This emotional revulsion, compounded of fear and
anger, was then, as it is now, automatically stimu-
lated by the sound of certain words. To the Castle-
reaghs and Metternichs of 1815 the words "revolu-
tion," "Jacobinism," "republicanism," were suffused
with a sense of universal and unconditioned evil real-
izing itself in certain concrete events. The "revolu-
tion" meant the French Revolution of 1789, but it
was also, for that very reason, a symbol of universal
revolution, of universal denial, der Geist der stets
Verneint: "the revolution" meant quite simply an-
archy in government and atheism in "The
religion.
revolution" was "Jacobinism," and Jacobinism was
"republicanism"; and it was not to be doubted that
the visionary ideas which these words expressed,

165
 5

The Heavenly City

ideas which for twenty-five years had proved their

futility by turning Europe upside down, were a men-
ace to established order, to peace and prosperity, to
the welfare of mankind. To the Castlereaghs and
Metternichs of our day the word "Bolshevism" is the
symbol of all that is horrendously antisocial, just as
the word "Jacobinism" was to the Castlereaghs and
Metternichs of 1815; and the words "soviet" and
"communism" have for the beneficiaries of modern
democracy the same ominous import that the word
"republicanism" formerly had for the beneficiaries of
the age of kings and nobles.
The Castlereaghs and the Metternichs of 181
would have been dismayed indeed to know that be-
fore the end of the century the anarchic and atheisti-
cal doctrines of the Jacobin faith would undermine
the established order throughout the western world.
The Castlereaghs and the Metternichs of our time,
and even lesser people like ourselves, are permitted
to wonder what the next hundred years will bring
forth. Will the new religion (call it a religion of hu-
manity or of inhumanity as you like) make its way,
however gradually, against whatever opposition, by
whatever concessions and compromises, with what-
ever abatement of fanaticism and ruthlessness, and
become in its turn the accepted and the conventional
faith? It is possible. A hundred years is a long time,
and even now, in the very stronghold of "capital-
ism," we hear much talk of the "breakdown '
of the

166
 The Uses of Posterity

competitive system,many suggestions, timid and ten-

tative though they may be, that imply the necessity
of regulation. A new word has recently made its
entrance, very unobtrusively
— "planning." Nothing
very radical has as yet been suggested, nor has
much been done, in that way. It has been suggested
by a high official that every third row of cotton be
plowed under, and in certain states governors have
called out the military in order to regulate the pro-
duction of oil. In the way of constructive planning
this is not much. But so much talk, and even any
slight action by those in high places, indicates at

least a certain awareness that what is needed in our

high-powered technological society is less liberty and
more control, a less freely competitive and a more
consciously regulated economy.
A hundred years is a long time, and it is possible
that within a hundred years a regulated economy
(call it communism or collective planning as you
like) may be recognized throughout the western
world as the indispensable foundation of social or-
der, peace and prosperity, the welfare of mankind.
If that should by any chance be what fortune has in
store for us, it is not too fanciful to suppose that
"posterity/' in the year 2032, will be celebrating the
events of November, 191 7, as a happy turning point
in the history of human freedom, much as we cele-
brate the events of July, 1789. What, then, are we to
think of all these "great days," these intimations of

167
 The Heavenly City

Utopia? Are we to suppose that the Russian Revolu-

tion of the twentieth century, like the French Revo-
lution of the eighteenth, is but another stage in the
progress of mankind toward perfection? Or should
we think, with Marcus Aurelius, that "the man of
forty years, if he have a grain of sense, in view of
this sameness has seen all that has been and shall
be"?

1 68
448
 Library of

New College of California

 HISTORY/PHILOSOPHY

These graceful and witty essays by a distinguished American

historian disclose the fallacy of believing that the eighteenth
century was essentially modern in its temper. Carl Becker
brilliantly demonstrates that the period commonly described
as The Age of Reason was, in fact, very far from that; that
Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, and Locke were living in a medieval
world, and that the philosophers "demolished the Heavenly
City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date
materials."

"There is not a dull page in the book. Professor Becker is as

sound as he is brilliant." — London Times
"It is cast unmistakably in an enduring mold. Into it a lavish
scholarship has been poured, but with a hand so deft as to
conceal everything except the significant."
— Max Lerner, Yale Law Journal

" Professor Becker's statement will remain a classic — a beau-

tifully finished literary product."
— Charles A. Beard, American Historical Review

And now, fifty years after its publication, Frank M. Turner,

professor of history at Yale University, says of this book:

"Becker's Heavenly City is an enduring landmark in the histo-

riography of the Enlightenment. For three generations its

eloquence of style and elegance of concept have provoked

learning and creative criticism. Perhaps the chief indication
of its merit is the high quality and intellectual significance of

the replies and counterarguments it has called forth."

ISBN 0-300-00017-0

Yale University Press

New Haven and London 780300