216 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



availed themselves of this very receptivity as a medium of attack upon 

 his originality. They are free to pursue him on that score, but it does 

 not appreciably detract from his greatness in the eyes of posterity to 

 recognize that Bayle before him had preached the doctrine of tolera- 

 tion; that Montesquieu had advocated the abolition of torture and of 

 slavery, and the sanctity of social institutions, or that Boileau for- 

 sooth had upheld the dignity of classical formulas in matters literary. 

 It is rather in the mobility of his mind and in the impressionability of 

 his temperament that we should seek for an explanation of a philo- 

 sophical disturbance in his ideas. It is not an actual mental con- 

 fusion that I refer to, for his diction is never more limpid than in 

 the expression of his easy personal beliefs; but a certain intellectual 

 inconsistency in his habits of thought makes it impossible for us to 

 hold him down to any definite set of opinions which we can regard as 

 a genuine confession of faith. And this is a vital characteristic of 

 skeptical minds of his stamp, swiftly receptive, and as open as the 

 day to each new intellectual impulse as it arises. Thus we must 

 attribute to his capacity for mental development, as well as to the nar- 

 rowness of his philosophical range, the many contradictions which 

 his writings exhibit in such matters of intellectual belief as are wont 

 to give a permanent bias of thought to minds less volatile and alert. 

 Are we to regard him as an optimist or a pessimist? a believer in 

 immortality or devotee of annihilation? a fatalist or spiritualist in 

 history? an advocate of free will or determinism? We can not say, 

 and M. Faguet has amused himself with supporting each of these 

 opinions in turn upon its appropriate text, whose clearness is beyond 

 dispute. 



If there was one set of opinions to which Voltaire may be said to 

 have somewhat consistently adhered I may instance his vague and 

 insipid deism, which relegated to God the role of an absentee land- 

 lord in this poor world which he created and governs by absolute 

 law, but in whose affairs he only intervenes when the death rent 

 is to be collected. He infers a creative God from the argument of 

 the clockmaker and the clock, but takes extreme pleasure in show- 

 ing how sadly the poor machine is out of order. His idea of the 

 social utility of an avenging and rewarding God must of course be re- 

 garded as a freak of intellectual caprice, and yet his timid political 

 instincts made him regard the terrorizing influence of the doctrine 

 of hell with some complacency as a restraining force upon the un- 

 thinking masses. The story is well known of the atheistic conversa- 

 tion between D'Alembert and Condorcet at Voltaire's table, who 

 summarily dismissed the servants from the room with the remark: 

 " Maintenant, messieurs, vous pouvez continuer. Je craignais seule- 

 ment d'etre egorge cette nuit." The Dictionnaire philosophique 



