camp had its own strifes. Maupertuis, for instance, is remembered
mainly as one of the victims of the mockery of Voltaire (which he
well earned by his own antagonism at the court of Frederick); yet he
was really an energetic man of science, and had preceded Voltaire in
setting up in France the Newtonian against the Cartesian physics. In
his System of Nature [1083] (not to be confused with the later work of
d'Holbach under the same title) he in 1751 propounded a new version of
the hylozoisms of ancient Greece; developed the idea of an underlying
unity in the forms of natural life, already propounded by La Mettrie
in his L'Homme Plante; connected it with Leibnitz's formula of the
economy of nature ("minimum of action"--the germ of the modern "line
of least resistance"), and at the same time anticipated some of the
special philosophic positions of Kant. [1084] Diderot, impressed by
but professedly dissenting from Maupertuis's Système in his Pensées
sur l'interprétation de la nature (1754), promptly pointed out that
the conception of a primordially vitalized atom excluded that of a
Creator, and for his own part thereafter took that standpoint. [1085]
In 1754 came the Traité des Sensations of Condillac, in which is most
systematically developed the physio-psychological conception of man as
an "animated statue," of which the thought is wholly conditioned by the
senses. The mode of approach had been laid down before by La Mettrie,
by Diderot, and by Buffon; and Condillac is rather a developer and
systematizer than an originator; [1086] but in this case the process
of unification was to the full as important as the first steps; [1087]
and Condillac has an importance which is latterly being rediscovered
by the school of Spencer on the one hand and by that of James on
the other. Condillac, commonly termed a materialist, no more held
the legendary materialistic view than any other so named; and the
same may be said of the next figure in the "materialistic" series,
J. B. Robinet, a Frenchman settled at Amsterdam, after having been,
it is said, a Jesuit. His Nature (4 vols. 1761-1768) is a remarkable
attempt to reach a strictly naturalistic conception of things. [1088]
But he is a theorist, not an investigator. Even in his fixed idea
that the universe is an "animal" he had perhaps a premonition of
the modern discovery of the immense diffusion of bacterial life;
but he seems to have had more deriders than disciples. He founds
at once on Descartes and on Leibnitz, but in his Philosophical
Considerations on the natural gradation of living forms (1768)
he definitely sets aside theism as illusory, and puts ethics on a
strictly scientific and human footing, [1089] extending the arguments
of Hume and Hutcheson somewhat on the lines of Mandeville. [1090] On
another line of reasoning a similar application of Mandeville's thesis
had already been made by Helvétius in his Traité de l'Esprit [1091]
(1758), a work which excited a hostility now difficult to understand,
but still reflected in censures no less surprising.
One of the worst misrepresentations in theological literature is
the account of Helvétius by the late Principal Cairns (Unbelief
in the Eighteenth Century, 1881, p. 158) as appealing to
government "to promote luxury, and, through luxury, public good,
by abolishing all those laws that cherish a false modesty and
restrain libertinage." Helvétius simply pressed the consequences
of the existing theory of luxury, which for his own part he
disclaimed. De l'Esprit, Disc. ii, ch. xv. Dr. Pünjer (i, 462)
falls so far below his usual standard as to speak of Helvétius
in a similar fashion. As against such detraction it is fitting to
note that Helvétius, like La Mettrie, was one of the most lovable
and most beloved men of his time, though, like him, sufficiently
licentious in his youth.
It was at once suppressed by royal order as scandalous, licentious,
and dangerous, though Helvétius held a post at court as maître d'hôtel
to the Queen. Ordered to make a public retractation, he did so in a
letter addressed to a Jesuit; and this being deemed insufficient,
he had to sign another, "so humiliating," wrote Grimm, [1092]
"that one would not have been astonished to see a man take refuge
with the Hottentots rather than put his name to such avowals." The
wits explained that the censor who had passed the book, being an
official in the Bureau of Foreign Affairs, had treated De l'Esprit
as belonging to that department. [1093] A swarm of replies appeared,
and the book was formally burnt, with Voltaire's poem Sur la loi
naturelle, and several obscure works of older standing. [1094] The
De l'Esprit, appearing alongside of the ever-advancing Encyclopédie,
[1095] was in short a formidable challenge to the powers of bigotry.
Its real faults are lack of system, undue straining after popularity,
some hasty generalization, and a greater concern for the air of paradox
than for persuasion; but it abounds in acuteness and critical wisdom,
and it definitely and seriously founds public ethics on utility. Its
most serious error, the assumption that all men are born with equal
faculties, and that education is the sole differentiating force, was
repeated in our own age by John Stuart Mill; but in Helvétius the
error is balanced by the thoroughly sound and profoundly important
thesis that the general superiorities of nations are the result of
their culture-conditions and politics. [1096] The over-balance of his
stress on self-interest [1097] is an error easily soluble. On the other
hand, we have the memorable testimony of Beccaria that it was the work
of Helvétius that inspired him to his great effort for the humanizing
of penal laws and policy; [1098] and the only less notable testimony
of Bentham that Helvétius was his teacher and inspirer. [1099] It may
be doubted whether any such fruits can be claimed for the teachings
of the whole of the orthodox moralists of the age. For the rest,
Helvétius is not to be ranked among the great abstract thinkers; but it
is noteworthy that his thinking went on advancing to the end. Always
greatly influenced by Voltaire, he did not philosophically harden as
did his master; and though in his posthumous work, Les Progrès de la
Raison dans la recherche du Vrai (published in 1775), he stands for
deism against atheism, the argument ends in the pantheism to which
Voltaire had once attained, but did not adhere.