Imatges de pàgina
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is made, was foreseen and arranged; now, every arrangement has its object, every effect its cause ; therefore every thing is equally the result, or the product, of a final cause; therefore it is equally true to say that noses were made to wear spectacles and fingers to be decorated with diamonds, as it is to say that the ear has been made to hear sound, and the eye to receive light.

This difficulty, I apprehend, may be easily cleared up, when the effects are invariably the same in all times and places; when such uniform effects are independent of the beings they appertain to, there is then evidently a final cause.

All animals have eyes, and they see; all have ears, and they hear; all a mouth, with which they eat; a stomach, or something similar, by which they digest; all an orifice, which voids the excrement; all an instrument of generation, and these natural gifts operate in them without the intervention of Here are clear demonstrations of final causes, and any art. to gainsay so universal a truth, would be to pervert our faculty of thinking.

But it is not in all places, nor at all times, that stones form edifices; all noses do not wear spectacles; all fingers have not rings; nor are all legs covered with silk stockings: therefore a silk-worm is not made to cover my legs, as your mouth is made to eat, and your orifice for evacuation. Thus there are effects produced by final causes, but withal many which cannot come within that appellation.

But both the one and the other are equally agreeable to the plan of general providence; for certainly nothing comes to pass in opposition to it, or so much as without it. Every particular within the compass of nature is uniform, immutable, and the immediate work of their Author. From him are derived the laws by which the moon is three-fourths of the cause of tides, and the sun the other fourth it is he who has given a rotary motion to the sun, by which, in five minutes and a half, it emits rays of light into the eyes of men, crocodiles, and cats.

But, if, after many centuries, we have hit on the invention of shears and spits, with the former shearing the sheep of their wool, and with the latter roasting them for food, what can be inferred from thence, but that God has so made us, that one day we should necessarily grow ingenious and carnivorous?

Sheep, doubtless, were not absolutely made to be dressed and eaten, since several nations abstain from that sanguinary practice. Men were not essentially created to butcher one

another, for the Bramins and Quakers never kill any body; but the composition we are made of is frequently productive of massacres, as it produces calumnies, vanities, persecutions, and impertinencies; not that the formation of man is precisely the final cause of our folly and brutality, a final cause being universal and invariable, in all places and at all times. The crimes and absurdities of the human mind are, nevertheless, in the eternal order of things. In threshing corn the flail is the final cause of the grain's separation; but if the flail, in threshing the corn, destroys a thousand insects, this is not from any determinate will of mine, neither is it mere chance : these insects were at that time under my flail, and it was determined they were to be there.

It is consequential to the nature of things that one man is ambitious; he forms other men into military bodies; that he is beaten, or gains a victory: but never can it be said that man was created by God to be knocked on the head in battle.

The instruments given to us by nature cannot always be final causes, ever in motion, and infallible in their effect. The eyes given us for sight are not always open; every sense has its intervals of rest: there are even some senses we make no use of: for instance, in the case of a poor girl of fourteen, immured in a convent; that door from which was to proceed a new generation, is for ever shut up; still the final cause subsists, and, as soon as it is free, will act.

EQUALITY .

WHAT does one dog owe to another, and one horse to another? nothing. No animal depends on its fellow, but man, partaking of that spark of divinity called reason,—what advantage accrues to him from this? to be a slave almost every where throughout the earth.

Were this earth what it apparently should be; that is, did man every where meet with an easy, certain and safe subsistence, and a climate suitable to his nature, it is manifestly impossible that one man should have enslaved another. When this earth shall every where produce salubrious fruits; when the air, which should contribute to our life, shall not bring us sickness and death; when man shall stand in need of no other lodging and bed than that of the deer and roebuck; then the Gengis Khans and the Tamerlanes will have no other domestics than their children, and these will have as much natural affection, as to assist them in their old age.

In this, so natural a state, which all quadrupeds, birds, and reptiles, enjoy, man would be as happy as they: dominion would then be a chimera, an absurdity, which no one would think of; for who would make a bustle to get servants, without any want of their service?

Should any individual, of a tyrannical disposition and extraordinary strength, take it into his head to make a slave of his weaker neighbour, the thing would be impracticable: the party to be oppressed would be a hundred leagues out of the oppressor's reach, before he had taken his measures.

Thus a freedom from wants would necessarily make all men equal. It is the distress annexed to our species, which subjects one man to another: not that inequality is a real misfortune; the grievance lies in dependence. What signifies one man being styled his highness; another, his holiness? but to serve either is disagreeable.

A numerous family has successfully cultivated a good soil, whilst two small neighbouring families cannot bring their stubborn ground to produce any thing: the poor families must either become servants to the opulent one, or extirpate it; this is self-evident: one of the indigent families, for a subsistence, goes and offers its labour to the rich; the other goes to dispossess it by force of arms, and is beaten. The former is the origin of domestics and labourers; from the latter, slavery is derived.

In our calamitous globe it is impossible, that men, living together in society, should not be divided into two classes, the rich, who command, and the poor, who serve or obey: these two are subdivided into thousands, and these thousands have their further subdivisions and gradations.

All the oppressed are not absolutely unhappy. Most of them being born in a servile state, continual labour preserves them from too sensible a feeling of their situation; but, whenever they do feel it, wars are the consequence-as, at Rome, between the plebeian and the patrician parties: likewise those of the peasants in Germany, England, and France. All these wars terminate, soon or late, in the subjection of the people; because the great have money, and money does every thing within a state; I say, within a state; for between nation and nation it is otherwise: a nation which handles iron best, will ever be too strong for that which, with all its abundance of gold, is deficient in skill and courage.

Every man is born with no small propensity to power, riches, and pleasure, and has naturally a delight in indolence: consequently every man is for having the money, wife, or

daughters, of others; would subject them to all his humours, and do no work, or, at least, what only pleased himself. You see that for men, with such fine dispositions, to be equal, is as impossible as that two preachers, or two professors of divinity, should not be jealous of each other.

Mankind, in the present state, cannot subsist, unless an affinity of useful men have the misfortune of being without any possession whatever; for, to be sure, no man in easy circumstances will plough your grounds; and if you are in want of a pair of shoes, you must find some other hand than a serjeant-at-law to make them for you. Thus inequality is, at the same time, both the most natural, and the most chimerical thing in the world.

Men being excessive in every thing where they can be so, this inequality has been carried too far: in several governments it is a standing maxim, that a citizen is not allowed to quit the country where he happened to be born; the import of this law is visibly this: "The country is so bad, and ill governed, that we forbid any person whatever to go out of it, lest every body should leave it." Now, act more wisely; create in your subjects a delight to stay in your country, and in foreigners a desire of coming thither.

Every man has a right to believe himself naturally equal to other men; but it does not from hence follow, that a cardinal's cook may order his eminence to dress his dinner: the cook, indeed, may say, I am as much a man as my master; like him, I cried at my birth, and he will die in the same agonies and amidst the same ceremonies, as I; the animal functions are alike in both; if the Turks should make themselves masters of Rome, and I come to be a cardinal, and my master reduced to turn cook, I will take him into my service. There is nothing in this soliloquy, but what is rational and just; yet, till the grand seignior makes himself master of Rome, the cook is to do his duty, else there is an end of human society.

As to him, who is neither cook to a cardinal, nor holds any state employment, and who has no connexion or dependence, but who is chagrined at being every where received either with an air of protection or contempt; who plainly sees, that many monsigneurs have neither more learning, more genius, nor more virtue, than himself, and to whom it is a torment to be sometimes in their anti-chamber-what would you have him do? take himself away.

EZEKIEL.

OF SOME SINGULAR PASSAGES IN THIS PROPHET, AND OF SOME ANCIENT CUSTOMS.

It is at present very well known, that we are not to judge of ancient customs by modern times. He who would go about to reform the court of Alcinous, in the Odyssey, by that of the grand seignior, or of Louis XIV. would be little applauded by the learned; and, to find fault with Virgil, for having represented king Evander, receiving ambassadors, with a bear-skin for his mantle, and a dog on each side of him, would be very bad criticism.

The manners of the ancient Egyptians and Jews vary from ours, still more than those of king Alcinous, of Nausicæ, his daughter, and the good man, Evander. Ezekiel, when a slave among the Chaldeans, had a vision, near the little river Chebar, which runs into the Euphrates.

It is not to be thought strange, that he should have seen animals with four faces, and four wings, and their feet like those of calves; nor that he saw wheels self-moving, and haying in them the spirit of life. These symbols are pleasing to the very imagination; but several critics cannot be reconciled to the order, given him by the Lord, that, during three hundred and ninety days, he should eat barley, wheat, and millet bread, besmeared with man's dung. Then said the prophet, "Ah, Lord God! behold, my soul hath not hitherto been polluted." And the Lord answered, "Well, instead of man's excrements, I allow thee cow-dung, and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith."

As it is not customary with us, to eat bread with such marmalade, these orders, to the generality of men, appear unworthy of the divine majesty. It must, however, be owned, that cow-dung, and all the diamonds of the Mogul, are entirely alike, not only in the eyes of a divine being, but in those of a genuine philosopher; and, as to the reasons God might have, for ordering such repasts to his prophet, is not for us to examine.

It is sufficient to show, that these orders, however odd and disgusting to us, did not seem so to the Jews. True it is, that in St. Jerome's time, the synagogue did not allow the reading of Ezekiel, under thirty years of age; but this was because, in chap. xviii. it is said, that "the son shall no longer bear the iniquity of the father;" and it shall be no more said, "the

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