Penetrating deeper, Voltaire found not only a new idea of truth as a
something rude, robust, and self-sufficient, but also what was to him a
new order of truths, the triumphs of slow-footed induction and the
positive reason. France was the hotbed of systems of the physical
universe. The provisional and suspensive attitude was intolerable to her
impetuous genius, and the gaps which scientific investigation was
unable to fill, were straightway hidden behind an artificial screen of
metaphysical phantasies. The Aristotelian system died harder in France
than anywhere else, for so late as 1693, while Oxford and Cambridge and
London were actually embracing the Newtonian principles, even the
Cartesian system was forbidden to be taught by decrees of the Sorbonne
and of the Council of the King.[30] When the Cartesian physics once got
a foothold, they kept it as firmly as the system which they had found so
much difficulty in displacing. It is easy to believe that Voltaire’s
positive intelligence would hold aloof by a certain instinct from
physical explanations which were unverified and incapable of being
verified, and which were imbrangled with theology and metaphysics.
We can readily conceive, again, the sensation of freshness and delight
with which a mind so essentially real, and so fundamentally serious,
paradoxical as this may sound in connection with the name of the
greatest mocker that has ever lived, would exchange the poetised
astronomy of Fontenelle, excellently constituted as Fontenelle was in a
great many ways, for the sure and scientific discoveries of a Newton.
Voltaire, in whatever subject, never failed to see through rhetoric, and
for rhetoric as the substitute for clear reasoning he always had an
aversion as deep as it was wholesome. Nobody ever loved grace and form
in style more sincerely than Voltaire, but he has shown in a great many
ways that nobody ever valued grace and form more truly at their worth,
compared with correctness of argument and precision and solidity of
conclusion. Descartes, Fontenelle had said, ‘essaying a bold flight,
insisted on placing himself at the source of all, on making himself
master of the first principles of things by a certain number of clear
and fundamental ideas, having thus only to descend to the phenomena of
nature as necessary consequences; Newton, more timid or more modest,
began his advance by resting on phenomena in order to ascend to the
unknown principles, resolved to admit them, however the combination of
the results might present them. The one starts from what he understands
clearly to discover the cause of what he sees: the other starts from
what he sees, to discover its cause, whether clear or obscure.’ Caution
and reserve and sound method had achieved a generalisation more vast and
amazing than the boldest flight, or most resolute reasoning downwards
from a clearly held conception to phenomena, could possibly have
achieved. This splendid and unrivalled discovery was probably expounded