Part 15

The worship of Humanity would be the only religion, and women would shine as the high priests. Comte thought it all out in detail, and arranged a complete scheme of life, and actually wished to form a political party and overthrow the government, founding a gynecocracy on the ruins. His ebbing mind could not grasp the thought that tyranny founded on goodness is a tyranny still, and that a despotic altruism is a despotism nevertheless. Slavery blocks evolution.

So thus rounded out the life of Auguste Comte--beginning in childhood, he traversed the circle, and ended where he began.

He died in his sixtieth year. M. Littre, his most famous pupil, touchingly looked after his wants to the last, ministered to his necessities, advancing money on royalties that were never due. M. Littre occasionally apologized for the meagerness of the returns, and was closely questioned and even doubted by Comte, who died unaware of the unflinching loyalty of a friendship that endured distrust and contumely without resentment. Such love and patience and loyalty as were shown by M. Littre redeem the race.

The best certificate to the worth of Auguste Comte lies in the fact that, in spite of marked personal limitations and much petty querulousness, he profoundly influenced such men as Littre, Humboldt, Mill, Lewes, Grote, Spencer and Frederic Harrison.

To have helped such men as these, and cheered them on their way, was no small achievement. Comte's sole claim for immortality lies in the Positive Philosophy. The word "positive," as used by Comte, is similar in intent to pose, poise--fixed, final. So, besides a positive present good, Comte believed he was stating a final truth; to-wit: that which is good here is good everywhere, and if there is a future life, the best preparation for it is to live now and here, up to your highest and best. Comte protested against the idea of "a preparation for a life to come"--now is the time, and the place is here.

The essence of Positive Philosophy is that man passes through three mental periods--the Theological or fictitious; the Metaphysical or abstract; the Positive or scientific.

Hence, there are three general philosophies or systems of conceptions concerning life and destiny.

The Theological, or first system, is the necessary starting-point of the human intellect. The Positive, or third period, is the ultimate goal of every progressive, thinking man; the second period is merely a state of transition that bridges the gulf between the first and the third.

Metaphysics holds the child by the hand until he can trust his feet--it is a passageway between the fictitious and the actual. Once across the chasm, it is no longer needed. Theology represents the child; Metaphysics the youth; Science the man.

The evolution of the race is mirrored in the evolution of the individual. Look back on your own career--your first dawn of thought began in an inquiry, "Who made all this--how did it all happen?"

And Theology comes in with a glib explanation: the fairies, dryads, gnomes and gods made everything, and they can do with it all as they please. Later, we concentrate all of these personalities in one god, with a devil in competition, and this for a time satisfies.

Later, the thought of an arbitrary being dealing out rewards and punishments grows dim, for we see the regular workings of Cause and Effect. We begin to talk of Energy, the Divine Essence, and the Reign of Law. We speak, as Matthew Arnold did, of "a Power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness." But Emerson believed in a power that was in himself that made for righteousness.

Metaphysics reaches its highest stage when it affirms "All is One," or "All is Mind," just as Theology reaches its highest conception when it becomes Monotheistic--having one God and curtailing the personality of the devil to a mere abstraction.

But this does not long satisfy, for we begin to ask, "What is this One?" or "What is Mind?"

Then Positivity comes in and says that the highest wisdom lies in knowing that we do not know anything, and never can, concerning a First Cause. All we find is phenomena and behind phenomena, phenomena. The laws of Nature do not account for the origin of the laws of Nature. Spencer's famous chapter on the Unknowable was derived largely from Comte, who attempted to define the limits of human knowledge. And it is worth noting that the one thing which gave most offense in both Comte's and Spencer's works was their doctrine of the Unknowable. This, indeed, forms but a small part of the work of these men, and if it were all demolished there would still remain their doctrine of the known. The bitterness of Theology toward Science arises from the fact that as we find things out we dispense with the arbitrary god, and his business agent, the priest, who insists that no transaction is legal unless he ratifies it.

Men begin by explaining everything, and the explanations given are always first for other people. Parents answer the child, not telling him the actual truth, but giving him that which will satisfy--that which he can mentally digest. To say, "The fairies brought it," may be all right until the child begins to ask who the fairies are, and wants to be shown one, and then we have to make the somewhat humiliating confession that there are no fairies.

But now we perceive that this mild fabrication in reference to Santa Claus, and the fairies, is right and proper mental food for the child. His mind can not grasp the truth that some things are unknowable; and he is not sufficiently skilled in the things of the world to become interested in them--he must have a resting-place for his thought, so the fairy-tale comes in as an aid to the growing imagination. Only this: we place no penalty on disbelief in fairies, nor do we make special offers of reward to all who believe that fairies actually exist. Neither do we tell the child that people who believe in fairies are good, and that those who do not are wicked and perverse.

Comte admits that the theological and metaphysical stages are necessary, but the sooner man can be graduated out of them the better. He brought vast research to bear in order to show the growth and death of theological conceptions. Hate, fear, revenge and doubt are all theological attributes, detrimental to man's best efforts. That moral ideas were an afterthought, and really form no part of theology, Comte emphasized at great length, and shows from much data where these ideas were grafted on to the original tree.

And the sum of the argument is, that all progress of mind, body and material things has come to man through the study of Cause and Effect. And just in degree as he has abandoned the study of Theology as futile and absurd, and centered on helping himself here and now, has he prospered.

Positivism is really a religion. The object of its worship is Humanity. It does not believe in a devil or any influence that works for harm, or in opposition to man. Man's only enemy is himself, and this is on account of his ignorance of this world, and his superstitious belief in another. Our troubles, like diseases, all come from ignorance and weakness, and through our ignorance are we weak and unable to adjust ourselves to conditions. The more we know of this world the better we think of it, and the better are we able to use it for our advancement.

So far as we can judge, the Unknown Cause that rules the world by unchanging laws is a movement forward toward happiness, growth, justice, peace and right. Therefore, the Scientist, who perceives that all is good when rightly received and rightly understood, is really the priest or holy man--the mediator and explainer of the mysteries. As fast as we understand things they cease to be supernatural, for the supernatural is the natural not yet understood. The theological priest who believes in a god and a devil is the real modern infidel. Such a belief is fallacious, contrary to reason, and contrary to all the man of courage sees and knows.

The real man of faith is the one who discards all thought of "how it first happened," and fixes his mind on the fact that he is here. The more he studies the conditions that surround him, the greater his faith in the truth that all is well.

If men had turned their attention to Humanity, discarding Theology, using as much talent, time, money and effort to wring from the skies the secrets of the Unknowable, this world would now be a veritable paradise. It is Theology that has barred the entrance to Eden, by diverting the attention of men from this world to another. Heaven is Here.

All religious denominations now dimly perceive the trend of the times, and are gradually omitting theology from their teachings and taking on ethics and sociology instead. A preacher is now simply Society's walking delegate. We are evolving theology out and sociology in. Theology has ever been the foe of progress and the enemy of knowledge. It has professed to know all and has placed a penalty on advancement. The Age of Enlightenment will not be here until every church has evolved into a schoolhouse, and every priest is a pupil as well as a teacher.

VOLTAIRE

We are intelligent beings; and intelligent beings can not have been formed by a blind, brute, insensible being. There is certainly some difference between a clod and the ideas of Newton. Newton's intelligence came from some greater Intelligence.

--_The Philosophical Dictionary_

[Illustration: VOLTAIRE]

The man, Francois Marie Arouet, known to us as Voltaire (which name he adopted in his twenty-first year), was born in Paris in Sixteen Hundred Ninety-four. He was the second son in a family of three children. During his babyhood he was very frail; in childhood sickly and weak; and throughout his whole life he suffered much from indigestion and insomnia.

In all the realm of writers no man ever had a fuller and more active career, touching life at so many points, than Voltaire.

The first requisite in a long and useful career would seem to be, have yourself born weak and cultivate dyspepsia, nervousness and insomnia. Whether or not the good die young is still a mooted question, but certainly the athletic often do. All those good men and true, who at grocery, tavern and railroad-station eat hard-boiled eggs on a wager, and lift barrels of flour with one hand, are carried to early graves, and over the grass-grown mounds that cover their dust, consumptive, dyspeptic and neurotic relatives, for twice or thrice a score of years, strew sweet myrtle, thyme and mignonette.

Voltaire died of an accident--too much Four-o'Clock--cut off in his prime, when life for him was at its brightest and best, aged eighty-three.

The only evidence we have that the mind of Voltaire failed at the last came from the Abbe Gaultier and the Curé of Saint Sulpice. These good men arrived with a written retraction, which they desired Voltaire to sign. Waiting in the anteroom of the sick-chamber they sent in word that they wished to enter. "Assure them of my respect," said the stricken man. But the holy men were not to be thus turned away, so they entered. They approached the bedside, and the Curé of Saint Sulpice said: "M. de Voltaire, your life is about to end. Do you acknowledge the divinity of Jesus Christ?"

And the dying man stretched out a bony hand, making a gesture that they should depart, and murmured, "Let me die in peace."

"You see," said the Curé to the Abbe, as they withdrew, "you see that he is out of his head!"

* * * * *

The father of Voltaire, Francois Arouet, was a notary who looked after various family estates and waxed prosperous on the crumbs that fell from the rich man's table.

He was solicitor to the Duc de Richelieu, the Sullys, and also the Duchesse de Saint-Simon, mother of the philosopher, Saint-Simon, who made the mistake of helping Auguste Comte, thus getting himself hotly and positively denounced by the man who formulated the "Positive Philosophy."

Arouet belonged to the middle class and never knew that he sprang from a noble line until his son announced the fact. It was then too late to deny it.

He was a devout Churchman, upright in all his affairs, respectable, took snuff, walked with a waddle and cultivated a double chin. M. Arouet pater did not marry until his mind was mature, so that he might avoid the danger of a mismating. He was forty, past. The second son, Francois fils, was ten years younger than his brother Armand, so the father was over fifty when our hero was born. Francois fils used to speak of himself as an afterthought--a sort of domestic postscript--"but," added he musingly, "our afterthoughts are often best."

One of the most distinguished clients of M. Arouet was Ninon de Lenclos, who had the felicity to be made love to by three generations of Frenchmen. Ninon has been likened for her vivacious ways, her flashing intellect, and her perennial youth, to the divine Sara, who at sixty plays the part of Juliet with a woman of thirty for the old nurse. Ninon had turned her three-score and ten, and swung gracefully into the home-stretch, when the second son was born to M. Arouet. She was of a deeply religious turn of mind, for she had been loved by several priests, and now the Abbe de Chateauneuf was paying his devotions to her.

Ninon was much interested in the new arrival, and going to the house of M. Arouet, took to bed, and sent in haste for the Abbe de Chateauneuf, saying she was in sore trouble. When the good man arrived, he thought it a matter of extreme unction, and was ushered into the room of the alleged invalid. Here he was duly presented with the infant that later was to write the "Philosophical Dictionary." It was as queer a case of kabojolism as history records.

Doubtless the Abbe was a bit agitated at first, but finally getting his breath, he managed to say, "As there is a vicarious atonement, there must also be, on occasion, vicarious births, and this is one--God be praised."

The child was then baptized, the good Abbe standing as godfather.

There must be something, after all, in prenatal influences, for as the little Francois grew up he evolved the traits of Ninon de Lenclos and the Abbe much more than those of his father and mother.

When the boy was a little over six years old the mother died. Of her we know absolutely nothing. In her son's writings he refers to her but once, wherein he has her say that "Boileau was a clever book, but a silly man."

The education of the youngster seemed largely to have been left to the Abbe, his godfather, who very early taught him to recite the "Mosiad," a metrical effusion wherein the mistakes of Moses were related in churchly Latin, done first for the divertisement of sundry pious monks in idle hours.

At ten years of age Francois was sent to the College of Louis-le-Grand, a Jesuit school where the minds of youth were molded in things sacred and secular.

In only one thing did the boy really excel, and that was in the matter of making rhymes. The Abbe Chateauneuf had taught him the trick before he could speak plainly, and Ninon had been so pleased with the wee poet that she left him two thousand francs in her will for the purchase of books. As Ninon insisted on living to be ninety, Voltaire discounted the legacy and got it cashed on dedicating a sonnet to the divine Ninon. In this sonnet Voltaire suggests that a life of virtue conduces largely to longevity, as witness the incomparable Ninon de Lenclos, to which sentiment Ninon filed no exceptions.

In one of the school debates young Francois presented his argument in rhyme, and evidently ran in some choice passages from the "Mosiad," for Father le Jay, according to Condorcet, left his official chair, and rushing down the aisle, grabbed the boy by the collar, and shaking him, said, "Unhappy boy! you will one day be the standard-bearer of deism in France!"--a prophecy, possibly, made after its fulfilment.

Young Francois remained at the college until he was seventeen years old. From letters sent by him while there, it is evident that the chief characteristic of his mind was already a contempt for the clergy. Of two of his colleagues who were preparing for the priesthood, he says, "They had reflected on the dangers of a world of the charms of which they were ignorant; and on the pleasures of a religious life of which they knew not the disagreeableness." Already we see he was getting handy in polishing a sentence with the emery of his wit. Continuing, he says: "In a quarter of an hour they ran over all the Orders, and each seemed so attractive that they could not decide. In which predicament they might have been left like the ass, which died of starvation between two bundles of hay, not knowing which to choose. However, they decided to leave the matter to Providence, and let the dice decide. So one became a Carmelite and the other a Jesuit."

* * * * *

Arouet, at first intent on having his son become a priest, now fell back on the law as second choice. The young man was therefore duly articled with a firm of advocates and sent to hear lectures on jurisprudence. But his godfather introduced him into the Society of the Temple, a group of wits, of all ages, who could take snuff and throw off an epigram on any subject. The bright young man, flashing, dashing and daring, made friends at once through his skill in writing scurrilous verse upon any one whose name might be mentioned. This habit had been begun in college, where it was much applauded by the underlings, who delighted to see their unpopular teachers done to a turn. The scribbling habit is a variant of that peculiar propensity which finds form in drawing a portrait on the blackboard before the teacher gets around in the morning. If the teacher does not happen to love art for art's sake, there may be trouble; but verses are safer, for they circulate secretly and are copied and quoted anonymously.

The thing we do best in life is that which we play at most in youth.

Ridicule was this man's weapon. For the benefit of the Society of the Temple he paid his respects to the sham piety and politics of Versailles. He had been educated by priests, and his father was a politician feeding at the public trough. The young man knew the faults and foibles of both priest and politician, and his keen wit told truths about the court that were so well expressed the wastebasket did not capture them. One of these effusions was printed, anonymously, of course, but a copy coming into the hands of M. Arouet, the old gentleman recognized the literary style and became alarmed. He must get the young man out of Paris--the Bastile yawned for poets like this!

A brother of the Abbe de Chateauneuf was Ambassador at The Hague, and the great man, being importuned, consented to take the youth as clerk.

Life at The Hague afforded the embryo poet an opportunity to meet many distinguished people.

In Francois there was none of the bourgeois--he associated only with nobility--and as he had an aristocracy of the intellect, which served him quite as well as a peerage, he was everywhere received. In his manner there was nothing apologetic--he took everything as his divine right.

In this brilliant little coterie at The Hague was one Madame Dunoyer, a writer of court gossip and a social promoter of ability, separated from her husband for her husband's good. Francois crossed swords with her in an encounter of wit, was worsted, but got even by making love to her; and later he made love to her daughter, a beautiful girl of about his own age.

The air became surcharged with gossip. There was danger of an explosion any moment. Madame Dunoyer gave it out that the brilliant subaltern was to marry the girl. The Madame was going to capture the youth, either with her own charms or those of her daughter--or combined. Rumblings were heard on the horizon. The Ambassador, fearing entanglement, bundled young Arouet back to Paris, with a testimonial as to his character, quite unnecessary. A denial without an accusation is equal to a plea of guilty; and that the young man had made the mistake of making violent love to the mother and daughter at the same time there is no doubt. The mother had accused him and he said things back; he even had shown the atrocious bad taste of references in rhyme to the mutual interchange of confidences that the mother and daughter might enjoy. The Ambassador had acted none too soon.

The father was frantic with alarm--the boy had disgraced him, and even his own position seemed to be threatened when some wit adroitly accused the parent of writing the doggerel for his son.

M. Arouet denied it with an oath--while the son refused to explain, or to say anything beyond that he loved his father, thus carrying out the idea that the stupid old notary was really a wit in disguise, masking his intellect by a seeming dulness. No more biting irony was ever put out by Voltaire than this, and the pathos of it lies in the fact that the father was quite unable to appreciate the quip.

It was a sample of filial humor much more subtle than that indulged in by Charles Dickens, who pilloried his parents in print, one as Mr. Micawber and the other as Mrs. Nickleby. Dickens told the truth and painted it large, but Francois Arouet dealt in indiscreet fallacy when he endeavored to give his father a reputation for raillery.

A peculiarly offensive poem, appearing about this time, with the Regent and his daughter, the Duchesse de Berri, for a central theme, a rescript was issued which indirectly testified to the poetic skill of young Arouet. He was exiled to a point three hundred miles from Paris and forbidden to come nearer on penalty, like unto the injunction issued by Prince Henry against the blameless Falstaff. Rumor said that the father had something to do with the matter.

But the exile was not for long. The young poet wrote a most adulatory composition to the Regent, setting forth his innocence. The Regent was a mild and amiable man and much desired peace with all his subjects--especially those who dipped their quills in gall. He was melted by the rhyme that made him out such a paragon of virtue, and made haste to issue a pardon.

The elder Arouet now proved that he was not wholly without humor, for he wrote to a friend, "The exile of my dear son distressed me much less than does this precipitate recall."