The consequence of this peculiarity, call it a destructive and blind
narrowness, or call it a wise and justly-measured openness of mind, as
we may choose, has been that Voltaire has been condemned with unsparing
severity by three of the most influential schools of modern opinion.
Every one who has a system to defend is the enemy of the famous man who
destroyed the reigning system of his day, with engines that seem to
point with uncomfortable directness against all other systems. Every one
who thinks that we have turned over the last leaf of the book of
knowledge, whatever the inscription that he may find written upon it,
naturally detests the whole spirit and impulse of one who felt all his
life that he and his generation were the first band of men who had
shaken off their chains, and ascended to the light of the sun and the
contemplation of some portion of an inexhaustible universe of realities.
Hence, the partisans of the Christian religion, in any of its forms,
have dealt unrelenting contempt and hatred to the foe who did more than
any one else to reduce their churches, once so majestically triumphant,
to their present level, where they are forced under various guises and
with much obsolete pretension to plead for the tolerance of rational
men, on the comparatively modest ground of social fitness. Their
hostility, we may agree, is not very astonishing, when we reflect on the
provocation.
Many of those, however, who have least hope of any future revival of the
ancient creed, and who least regret its fall, are even less hostile to
the Jesuits than they are to Voltaire. Comte, for example, who
elaborated a doctrine with a corresponding system of life deduced from
it, and the central principle of whose method of social action and
movement is to destroy by replacing, has adjudged an emphatically
secondary place to Voltaire’s claims on our good-will.[7] Nor ought
this seriously to surprise us, when we consider that Voltaire trusted to
the individual to replace for himself, by the motion of his own
faculties, the old collective tradition of action and belief; and that
he showed himself too keenly alive to the curses of that empire of
prejudice, authority, social fixity, which he devoted his life to
overthrowing, to lend any help to the restoration of a similar reign
with changed watchwords. He is perhaps the one great Frenchman who has
known how to abide in patient contentment with an all but purely
critical reserve, leaving reconstruction, its form, its modes, its
epoch, for the fulness of time and maturity of effort to disclose. It
has been the fatal quality of the genius of his countrymen, from
Descartes down to Comte, to decline to rest on an uncompleted
interpretation of experience, and to insist on a hasty supplement of
unconcluded analysis by what is virtually an à priori synthesis.
Voltaire deserves no special praise for this abstention from a
premature reconstruction; for it probably was not so much the result of