Imatges de pàgina
PDF
EPUB

NATURE.

You are perfectly right; I am water, earth, fire, air, metal, mineral, stone, vegetable, and animal. I clearly perceive that there is an intelligence in me: you possess an intelligence, although you see it not. Neither do I see mine; I feel this invisible power; I am unable to know it why should you, who are only a very minute portion of myself, be anxious to know what I myself am ignorant of?

PHILOSOPHER.

We are curious. I should be pleased to learn how it is, that while so rough and coarse in your mountains, and deserts, and seas, you are at the same time so ingenious and finished in your animals and vegetables?

NATURE.

My poor child, shall I tell you the real truth? I have had bestowed upon me a name that does not at all suit me: I am called nature, while I am all art.

PHILOSOPHER.

That word deranges all my ideas. What is it possible that nature should be nothing but art.

NATURE.

It is undoubtedly the case. Do you not know that there is infinite art in those seas and mountains which you represent as so rough and so coarse? Do you not know that all those waters gravitate towards the centre of the earth, and are raised only by immutable laws; and that those mountains which crown the earth are immense reservoirs of eternal snows, incessantly producing the fountains, lakes, and rivers, without which my animal and vegetable offspring would inevitably perish? And, with respect to what are denominated my animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, constituting thus only three kingdoms, be assured that I have in fact millions of them. But if you consider the formation of an insect, of an ear of corn, of gold or of copper, all will exhibit to you prodigies of art.

PHILOSOPHER.

[blocks in formation]

I will answer you in the language in which I always have answered, for so long a series of ages, those who have interrogated me on the subject of first principles,"I know nothing at all about

the matter."

[blocks in formation]

It is undoubtedly true. The more I made me.

[blocks in formation]

Yes; I have travelled with Paul Lucas, and wherever I went I saw, that man respected his father and mother; that he thought himself bound to keep his promise; that he pitied oppressed iunocence; that he detested persecution; that he regarded freedom of thinking as a right of nature, and the enemies of that freedom as the enemies of the human race. They who think differently appear to me to be badly organised, and mon

It is however necessary for me to talk sters, like those who are born without to you upon it.

[blocks in formation]

eyes or heads.

OSMIN.

These necessary things-are they necessary in all times, and in all places?

SELIM.

Yes otherwise they would not be necessary to human kind.

OSMIN.

Therefore a new creed is not necessary to mankind. Men could live in society, and perform all their duties towards God, before they believed that Mahomet had frequent conversations with the angel Gabriel.

SELIM.

Nothing is more evident: it would be ridiculous to think, that man could not perform his duties until Mahomet came into the world. It was no way necessary for men to believe the Koran. The world went on before the appearance of Mahomet, precisely as at present. If Mahometanism was necessary to the world, it would exist everywhere. God, who has given us two eyes to see the sun, would have bestowed upon us some means of discovering the truths of the Mahometan religion. That sect therefore resembles the arbitrary laws which change according to times and places, like fashions or the theories of physicians, which displace and succeed one another.

The Mahometan religion cannot therefore be essentially necessary to man.

OSMIN.

But since it exists, God has permitted it.

SELIM.

Yes, as he permits all the world to abound in absurdities, errors, and calamities. This is not saying that men were absolutely created in order to be foolish and unhappy. God permits some men to be eaten by serpents, but we ought not to say, God made man to be eaten by serpents.

OSMIN.

What do you mean by saying God permits? Can anything happen but by his orders? To permit and to will-are they not with him the same thing?

SELIM

He permits crime, but does not commit it.

OSMIN.

To commit a crime is to act against divine justice to disobey God. Therefore, as God cannot disobey himself, he cannot commit crime; but he has so made man, that man commits it frequently. How does that arise?

SELIM.

Some men can tell, but I am not one of them. All that I know is, that the Koran is ridiculous, although possessing here and there things which are passable. } The Koran however is certainly not necessary to man-that I maintain. I perceive clearly that which is false, but know very little of that which is true.

OSMIN.

I thought that you would instruct me, but you teach me nothing.

SELIM.

Is it not something to know the men who deceive you, and the gross and dangerous errors they promulgate?

OSMIN.

I should have cause to complain of a physician who made me acquainted with poisonous plants, without instructing me in regard to such as are salutary.

SELIM.

I am no physician, nor are you a sick

{ man; and it appears to me that I give you a very usefui prescription, when I say to you,-Distrust the inventions of charlatans; worship God; be an honest man; and believe that two and two make four.

[ocr errors]

NEW-NOVELTIES.

It seems as if the first words of Ovid's Metamorphoses-In nova fert animus' were the emblem of mankind. No ong is touched with the admirable spectacle of the sun which rises, or seems to rise every day; but every body runs at the smallest meteor which appears for a moment in the map of vapours which surround the earth, and which we call heaven. We despise whatever is common, or which has been long known :

Vilia sunt nobis quæcumque prioribus annis
Vidimus, et sordet quidquid spectavimus olim.

A hawker will not burthen himself with a Virgil or a Horace, but with a new book, were it ever so detestable. He draws you aside and says to you, Sir, will you have some books from Holland?

From the commencement of the world, women have complained of the infidelities done to them in favour of the first new object which presents itself, and which has often this novelty for its only merit. Several ladies (we must confess it, notwithstanding the infinite respect which we have for them) have treated men as they complain that the men have treated them; and the story of Jocondo is much more ancient than Ariosto.

Perhaps this universal taste for novelty is a benefit of nature. We are told-Content yourselves with what you have-desire nothing beyond your situation-subdue the restlessness of your mind. These are very good maxims; but if we had followed them, we should still live upon acorns and sleep under the stars, and we should have had neither Corneille, Racine, Molière, Poussin, Le Brun, Le Moine, nor Pigal.

NEWTON AND DESCARTES.

SECTION I.

Ir must be acknowledged that these two great men were exceedingly different { from each other in their conduct, their fortune, and their philosophy. Descartes was born with a brilliant and powerful imagination, which made him a singular man in his private life as well as in his manner of reasoning. This imagination { was apparent even in his philosophical productions, which in every page abound in striking comparisons and illustrations. Nature had nearly made him a poet; and he actually composed for the Queen of Sweden a dramatic entertainment, which, to the advantage of his fame, was never printed. He engaged for a time in the profession of arms; and, even after he had devoted himself to philosophy, he did not think it unworthy of him to make love. The mistress of his affections was called Francine, who died young; and her loss he sincerely and tenderly regretted. He thus experienced all that appertains to humanity.

He had for a long time deemed it expedient to seclude himself from mankind, and especially from his own country, in order to philosophise at perfect liberty. In this he acted wisely. The men of his own times were too ignorant to be able to communicate to him any knowledge, and were capable only of doing him injury. He quitted France, because he sought for truth, which was at that time persecuted by the wretched philosophy of the schools; but he did not find reason more prevalent in the universities of Holland, which he chose for his retreat; for at the very time when the only propositions of his philosophy that were true were condemned in France, he was also persecuted by the pretended philosophers of Holland, who understood him no better than those in his own country, and who, as they saw his glory more nearly, hated his person more bitterly. He was obliged to leave Utrecht; he even experienced

the accusation of atheism, that last resource of calumniators; and the man who had devoted all the acuteness of his extraordinary intellect to the discovery of new proofs of the existence of a God, was most absurdly charged with denying him altogether. The various persecutions he sustained implied extraordinary merit and distinguished reputation, both of which he actually possessed. Athwart the profound darkness of the schools, and the prejudices of popular superstition, a ray of reason pervaded the world. His name at length obtained such celebrity, that rewards were held out to him with a view to his residence in France. He was offered a pension of a thousand crowns. He returned in the expectation of this allowance; but after being at the expence of paying for the patent (for patents were at that time not given, but purchased) he never received his pension, and returned to philosophise in his solitude of North Holland, at the time when the great Galileo, at the age of eighty years, was languishing out his life in the prisons of the Inquisition, for having demonstrated the motion of the earth. He at length died prematurely at Stockholm, in consequence of an improper regimen, amidst a number of learned men who were hostile to his opinions or envious of his celebrity, and under the superintendence of a physician who hated him.

The career of Sir Isaac Newton was widely different. He lived to the great age of eighty-four years, always peaceful, happy, and honoured by his country. It I was his great good fortune, not merely to be born in a free country, but at a period when the absurdities of the schools were banished, and reason alone was cultivated; the world could become only his scholar and not his enemy.

One point in which he may be strikingly contrasted with Descartes is, that in the course of so prolonged a life he felt neither passion nor weakness. He never once associated as man with wo'men, which was expressly stated to me

art; and if, notwithstanding this, he was

by the physician and surgeon in whose presence, if not in whose arms, he ex-in some respects entirely mistaken, it is pired. Newton may for this excite our admiration, yet Descartes ought not to incur our censure.

to be remembered that the discoverer of new lands cannot instantly become acquainted with all their various produc

after him owe him some obligation at least, simply for the discovery. I will not deny that all the other works of Descartes abound in errors.

The prevailing public opinion in Eng-tions and qualities. Those who came land respecting these two philosophers is that Descartes, was a visionary and Newton a sage. Very few persons in London read Descartes, whose works have in fact become totally useless. Newton Geometry was a guide which he had also has very few readers, because it in some degree discovered himself, and requires great knowledge and sense to which would have conducted him safely understand him. Every body however through his physical researches; he howtalks about him. No merit is allowed ever at last abandoned this guide, and to the Frenchman, and every merit is gave himself up to the spirit of system. ascribed to the Englishman. There are From that time his philosophy became some who think that the destruction of nothing more than an ingenious romance, the old and once universally received and at most only probable even to the doctrine of nature's abhorring a vacuum;' ignorant philosophers of the day. He that our knowledge of the gravity of was mistaken on the nature of the soul, the atmosphere; that the discovery of on the laws of motion, on the nature of telescopes; are all to be attributed light. He admitted the doctrine of into Newton; he resembles in this re- nate ideas; he invented new elements; spect Hercules in the fable, to whom he created a world; he made man on his the ignorant gave the glory of achiev-own peculiar system; and it was truly ments actually performed by other heroes.

{

said, that Descartes' man was a very different being from the real man. He In a critical examination written at carried his metaphysical errors so far as London, of the discourse of M. de Fon- to maintain that two and two make four, tenelle, the author ventures to assert, that because it is the will of God they should Descartes was not a great geometrican.do so; but notwithstanding all this, it Those who use this language may well is not going beyond the bounds of truth to be reproached with ingratitude to their say, that he was estimable and respecbenefactor. Descartes constructed as table even in his very errors. He was noble a road of science, from the point mistaken, but he was at least methodıat which he found geometry to that tocally, consistently, and we may almost which he carried it, as Newton himself say, rationally mistaken. If he invented did after him. He is the first who taught new chimeras in physics, he at least had the way to find the algebraical equations the merit of destroying old ones. He of curves. His geometry, thanks to his taught his contemporaries the way to powerful and inventive mind, although reason, and how to turn his own weapons now become common and familiar, was against himself. If he did not pay in in his own time so profound, that no pro- good sterling money, he at least cried fessor ventured to undertake the task of down what was false. explaining it, and that there was not a Descartes gave an eye to the blind; man besides Schultens in Holland, and they saw both the faults of antiquity and Fermat in France, who really compre-of himself; the road opened by him has hended it. He carried this spirit of geo-since become immense. The little work metry and invention into optics, which of Rohault constituted at one period, under him became a completely new what was deemed a complete system of

« AnteriorContinua »