The anatomy of negation

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THE

PHILOSOPHY OF DISENCHANTMENT.

Crown 8vo, oilt top.

"Mr. Saltus is a scientific pessimist, as witty, as bitter, as
satirical, as interesting, and as insolent to humanity in general
as are his great teachers, Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann."—
Worcester Spy.

"The author has brought to his part, which was to show the
principles of pessimism according to their greatest exponents, a
treatment whose unique quality is an attractiveness of style that
commands attentive reading of what in itself is otherwise a most
difficult, if not a disagreeable study. The style is original and

brilliant, and illustrative of rare art as an essayist It contains

the gentlest satire and humour, but it is deep, searching, critical,
and clearly expoaitive."— Boston Globe.

" ilr. Saltus argues his case well, and casts himself with a fine
literaiTT spirit into the subject. It does not read like a lament
over life so much as an eulogy of death, and we are ready to
ascribe to TiItti the sentiment he quotes from Pascal, that 'he
who writes down glory, still desires the glory of writing it down
well' Mr. Saltus has written as though he expected to live for
ever, at least in literature. He has a graceful style and a keen
analytical mind ; he has studied his theme with great ability, and
presented it with almost startling attractions."— Proe»d«nce Tele-
gram.

"If it is ever heavy, it is only with the weight of ynt."—New
York Evening Telegram,

IN PRBPABATION,

CIMMEEIA.

THE ANATOMY OF
NEGATION.

BY

EDGAR SALTUS.

"Quoy qu'on nous presche, il fauldroit
toujours se souvenir que c'est I'honime
qui donne et rhomme qui reQoit."

Montaigne.

WILLIAMS AND NORGATE,

14, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London ;
AND 20, South Frederick Street, Edinburgh.

1886.

LONDON :

PRINTED BY C. GREEN AND SON,

178, STRAND.

3827
£2>

TO

C. A.

THESE PAGES ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.

iVi652116

^

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I. PAGK

The Revolt of the Orient s '. i

Kapila — The Buddha — Laou-tze.

CHAPTER II.

The Negations of Antiquity 33

Theomachy— Scepticism — Epicurism — Atheism.

CHAPTER III.

The Convulsions of the Church 67

Galilee — Rome.

CHAPTER IV.

The Dissent of the Seers ni

Spinoza — The Seven Sages of Potsdam — Hol-
bach and his Guests.

CHAPTER V.

The Protests of Yesterday 157

Akosmism — Pessimism — Materialism — Positivism.

CHAPTER VI.

A Poet's Verdict 206

Romantics and Parnassians.

Bibliography 227

II est un jour, une heure, ou dans le chemin rude,
Courbe sous le fardeau des ans multiplies,
L' Esprit humain s' arret e, et pris de lassitude,
• Se retourne pensif vers les jours oublies.

La vie a fatigue son attente infeconde ;
Desabuse du Dieu qui ne doit point venir,
II sent renaitre en lui la jeunesse du monde ;
II ecoute ta voix, 6 sacre souvenir !

Mais si rien ne repond dans I'immense etendue
Que le sterile echo de I'eternel desir,
Adieu, deserts, ou I'ame ouvre une aile eperdue !
Adieu, songe sublime, impossible a saisir !

Et toi, divine Mort, oh tout rentre et s'efFace,
Accueille tes enfants dans ton sein etoile ;
Affranchis-nous du temps, du nombre et de I'espace,
Et rends-nous le repos que la vie a trouble !

Leconte de Lisle.

PREFATORY NOTE.

The accompanying pages are intended to convey
a tableau of anti-theism from Kapila to Leconte de
Lisle. The anti-theistic tendencies of England and
America have been treated by other writers ; in the
present volume, therefore, that branch of the subject
is not discussed.

To avoid misconception, it may be added that no
attempt has been made to prove anything.

Biarritz, i^th September^ 1886.

THE

ANATOMY OF NEGATION,

CHAPTER I.

THE REVOLT OF THE ORIENT.

Man, as described by Quatrefages, is a reli-
gious animal. The early naturalists said the
same thing of the elephant ; but while this state-
ment, which contains all the elements of a libel,
has fallen into disrepute, the former, little by
Uttle, has assumed the purple among accepted
facts.

Man's belief in the supernatural antedates
chronology. It was unfathered and without a
mother. It was spontaneous, natural, and un-
assisted by revelation. It sprang into being with
the first flight of fancy.

The characteristic trait of primitive man seems
to have been that of intellectual passivity. He
was never astonished : if he noticed anything, it
was his own weakness ; the power of the elements
he accepted as a matter of course. The pheno-
mena that he witnessed, the sufferings that he
endured, were to him living enemies whose vio-

B

2 The A natomy of Negation,

lence could be conjured by prayers and dona-
tions. Everything had its spectre; phantoms
were as common as leaves. There was not a
corner of the earth unpeopled by vindictive
demons. In sleep he was visited by them all,
and as his dreams were mainly nightmares, his
dominant sensation was that of fright.

As his mind developed, frontiers were outlined
between the imaginary and the real ; the animate
and the inanimate ceased to be identical. In-
stead of attributing a particular spirit to every
object, advancing theology conceived a number
of aggrandised forces. The earth, sea and sky
were laid under contribution, and the phenomena
of nature were timidly adored. In the course of
time these open-air deities were found smitten
by a grave defect — they were visible. The fear
of the unseen demanded something more mys-
terious, a hierarchy of invisible divinities of whom
much might be suspected and but little known.
It was presumably at this point that the high-
road to polytheism was discovered; and when
man grew to believe that the phenomena which
his ancestors had worshipped were but the un-
conscious agents of higher powers, the gods were
born.

Consecutive stages of development such as
these have evidently been far from universal.
There are races whose belief in the supernatural
is so accidental that any classification is impos-
sible. There are others in whose creeds the
transition from animism to broader views is still

The Revolt of the Orient. 3

unmarked. In the equatorial regions of Africa,
in Madagascar, Polynesia, and among certain
Tartar tribes, animism and its attendant fetishism
is reported to be still observable. The distinc-
tion between the palpable and the impalpable,
the separation between what is known to be ma-
terial and that which is conceived to be divine,
"does not necessarily exist even in countries that
have reached a high degree of civilisation. In
India, the dance of the bayaderes before the
gilded statues, and the top -playing that is to
amuse a stone Krishna, are cases in point. But
these instances are exceptions to the general rule.
It seems well established that man, in proportion
to his intelligence, passed out of animism, loitered
in polytheism, and drifted therefrom into mono-
theistic or pantheistic beliefs.

The race whose beliefs have held most stead-
fast from their incipiency to the present day is
the Hindu. In their long journey these beliefs
have encountered many vicissitudes ; they have
been curtailed, elaborated and degraded, but in
the main they are still intact. At the contact
with fresher faiths, the primitive religions of other
lands have either disappeared abruptly or gra-
dually faded away. It is India alone that has
witnessed an autonomous development of first
theories, and it is in India that the first denying
voice was raised. To appreciate the denial it is
necessary to understand what was affirmed. For
this purpose a momentary digression may be
permitted. ^

B 2

4 The Anatomy of Negation.

In the beginning of the Vedic period, Nature
in her entirety was held divine. To the deUcate
imagination of the early Aryan, the gods were in
all things, and all things were gods. In no other
land have myths been more fluid and transparent.
Mountains, rivers and landscapes were regarded
with veneration ; the skies, the stars, the sun, the
dawn and dusk were adored, but particularly Agni,
the personification of creative heat. Through
lapse of time of which there is no chronology,
this charming naturalism drifted down the cur-
rents of thought into the serenest forms of pan-
theistic beliefs.

The restless and undetermined divinities, om-
nipresent and yet impalpable, the wayward and
changing phenomena, contributed one and all to
suggest the idea of a continuous transformation,
and with it, by implication^ something that is
transformed. Gradually the early conception of
Agni expanded into 'a broader thought. From
the spectacle of fire arose the theory of a deva,
one who shines j and to this deva a name was
given which signified both a suppliant and a sup-
plication— Brahma. In this metamorphosis all
vagueness was lost. Brahma became not only a
substantial reality, but the creator of all that is.
Later, the labour of producing and creating was
regarded as an imperfection, a blemish on the
splendour of the Supreme. It was thought a
part of his dignity to be majestically inert, and
above him was conceived the existence of a still
higher being, a being who was also called Brahma;

The Revolt of the Orient. 5

yet this time the name was no longer mas-
culine, but neuter and indeclinable — neuter as
having no part in life, and indeclinable because
unique.*

This conception of a neuter principle, eternal,
inactive, and a trifle pale perhaps, was not reached
during the period assigned to the Vedas. It was
the work of time and of fancy, but it was unas-
sisted. The religion of India is strictly its own ;
its systems were founded and its problems solved
almost before the thinkers of other lands were
old enough to reflect. In Greece, which was
then in swaddling clothes, Anaxagorus was the
first who thought of a pure Intelligence, and this
thought he contented himself with stating; its
development was left to other minds, and even
then it remained unadorned until Athens heard
the exultant words of Paul. Nor could the
Hindus have gathered their ideas from other
countries. Their brothers, the Persians, were
watching the combat between Ahura-Mazda and
Ahriman. With the Hebrews there was no chance
nor rumour of contact : Elohim had not given
way to Jehovah. Chaldea was celebrating with
delirious rites the nuptials of Nature and the
Sun; while far beyond was Egypt, and on her
heart the Sphinx.

It seems, then, not unsafe to say that the
Vedas and the theories that were their after-
growth have no connection with any foreign

* Burnouf: Essai sur le Veda. Taine: Essais.

6 The Anatomy of Negation.

civilisation. Beyond this particular, Brahmanism
enjoys over all other religions the peculiar dis-
tinction of being without a founder. Its germ,
as has been hinted, was in the Vedas ; but it
was a germ merely that the priests planted and
tended, and watched develop into a great tree,
which they then disfigured with unsightly engraft-
ments.

Emerson recommended us to treat people as
though they were real, and added, "Perhaps they
are." But the doubt that lingered in the mind of
the stately pantheist never entered into that of
the Hindu. In its purest manifestation the creed
of the latter was a negation of the actuality of the
visible world. The forms of matter were held to
be illusive, and the semblance of reality possessed
by them was considered due to Maya. Maya
originally signified Brahma's longing for some-
thing other than himself; something that might
contrast with his eternal quietude ; something
that should occupy the voids of space; some-
thing that should lull the languors of his infinite
ennui. From this longing sprang whatever is, and
it was through Maya, which afterwards became
synonymous with illusion, that a phantom uni-
verse surged before the god's delighted eyes, the
mirage of his own desire.

This ghostly world is the semblance of reality
in which man dwells : mountains, rivers, land-
scapes, the earth itself, the universe and all
humanity, are but the infinite evolutions of his
fancy. The ringing lines that occur in Mr.

The Revolt of the Orient. y

Swinburne's "Hertha" may not improperly be
referred to him :

" I am that which began ;
Out of me the years roll ;
Out of me, God and man ;
I am equal and whole.
God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily.
I am the soul. "

Familiarly, Brahma is the spider drawing from
his breast the threads of existence ; emblemati-
cally, a triangle inscribed in a circle ; poetically,
the self-existing supremacy that is enthroned on
a lotus of azure and gold ; and theologically, the
one really existing essence, the eternal germ from
which all things issue and to which all things at
last return.

From man to Brahma, a series of higher forms
of existence are traceable in an ascending scale
till three principal divinities are reached. These,
the highest manifestations of the First Cause,
Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and
Siva the Destroyer, constitute the Tri-murti, the
Trinity, typified in the magically mystic syllable
Om. To these were added a host of inferior
deities and even local gods similar to those which
the Romans recognised in later years. Such was
and still is the celestial hierarchy. In the eyes
of the Hindu, none of these gods are eternal.
At the end of cycles of incommensurable dura-
tion, the universe will cease to be, the heavens
will be rolled up like a garment, the Tri-murti
dissolved ', while in space shall rest but the great

8 The Anatomy of Negation.

First Cause, through whose instrumentality, after
indefinite kalpas, life will be re-beckoned out of
chaos and the leash of miseries unloosed. '

This delicious commingling of the real and the
ideal degenerated with the years. Like Olympus,
it was too fair to last. Brahma, Vishnu and Siva,
once regarded as various manifestations of the
primal essence, became in lapses of time concrete.
Female counterparts were found for them, and
the most poetic of the creeds of man was lowered
into a sensuous idolatry. To-day there is nothing,
however monstrous or grotesque, that is deemed
unfit for worship. In Benares there is a shrine
to small-pox ; in Gaya there is one to the police ;
and it may be that somewhere between Cape
Comorin and the Himalayas an altar has been
raised to those who dull digestion with the after-
dinner speech.

This, however, is the work of the priest. In
earlier days the higher castes of man, the younger
brothers of the gods, were thought capable of
understanding the perfection that resides in
Brahm. It was held that they might ascend to
the rank of their elders, and with them at last be
absorbed in the universal spirit. The one path-
way to this goal was worship, and over it the
priests constituted themselves the lawful guides.

The laws which they codified were numberless,
and an infraction of any one of them was severely
visited on the transgressor. For each fault,
whether of omission or commission, there was
an expiation to be undergone, and it was taught

The Revolt of the Orient. g

that the unatoned violation of a precept precipi-
tated the offender into one of twenty-eight hells
which their inflammable imaginations had created.
In the face of absurdities such as these, it is
permissible to suppose that, like the Roman
augurs, the educated Brahmans could not look
at each other without laughing ; yet, however
this may be, it seems certain that many of the
laity laughed at them. Already in the Rig- Veda
mention was made of those who jeered at Agni.
The question as to whether there is really another
life seems to have been often raised, and that
too in the Brahmanas. Yaska, a venerable sage,
found himself obliged to refute the opinions of
sages far older and more venerable than himself,
who had declared the Vedas to be a tissue of
nonsense. This scepticism had found many
adherents. The name given to these early dis-
believers was Nastikas — They who deny. Like
other sects, they had aphorisms and slokas of
their own, which with quaint derision they attri-
buted to the tutor of the gods. The aphorisms
appear to have been markedly anti-theistic, while
the slokas were captivating invitations to the
pleasures of life.

" Vivons, ouvrons nos coeurs aux ivresses nouvelles :
Dorinir et boire en paix, voila I'unique bien.
Buvons ! Notre sang brule et nos femmes sont belles :
Demain n'est pas encore, et le passe n'est rien 1 "

Among those who laughed the loudest was
Kapila. His life is shrouded in the dim magni-
ficence of legends. There let it rest ; yet if little

lO TJu Anatomy of Negation.

can be said of the man, his work at least is not
unfamiliar to students. The Sankhya Karika,
which bears his name, is one of the most impor-
tant and independent relics of Indian thought.
In its broadest sense, Sankhya means rationalism
or system of rational philosophy. In India it is
known as the philosophy Niriswara, the philoso-
phy without a god.

Kapila was the first serious thinker who looked
up into the archaic skies and declared them to
be void. In this there was none of the modera-
tion of scepticism, and less of the fluctuations of
doubt. Kapila saw that the idea of a Supreme
Being was posterior to man; that Nature, anterior
to her demiurge, had created him ; and he reso-
lutely turned his back on the Tri-murti, and
denied that a deity existed, or that the existence
of one was necessary to the order and manage-
ment of the world. The motor-power he held
to be a blind, unconscious force, and of this
force life was the melancholy development. If
he had disbelieved in transmigration, Schopen-
hauer would not have startled the world with a
new theory.

Kapila's purpose was to relieve man from
pain. There were no rites to be observed.
Knowledge and meditation were alone required.
He recognised but three things — the soul, matter
and pain. Freedom from pain was obtainable,
he taught, by the liberation of the soul from the
bondage of matter. According to his teaching,
the heavens, the earth and all that in them is,

The Revolt of the Orient. 1 1

are made up of twenty-five principles, and of
these principles matter is the first and the soul
the last. Matter is the primordial element of
universal life, the element that animates and
sustains all things. The principles that succeed
it are simply its developments. Of these, the
soul is the chief. It is for matter to act and for
the soul to observe. When its observations are
perfect and complete, when it has obtained a
discriminative knowledge of the forms of matter,
of primeval matter and of itself, then is it pre-
pared to enter into eternal beatitude.

On the subject of eternal beatitude, each one
of the systems of Eastern thought has had its
say. That which Kapila had in view is not
entirely clear. He gave no description of it
otherwise than in hinting that it was a state of
abstract and unconscious impassabiUty, and he
appears to have been much more occupied in
devising means by which man might be delivered
from the evils of life than in mapping charts of
a fantastic paradise.

The sentiment of the immedicable misery of
life is as prominent in the preface of history as
on its latest and uncompleted page. The problem
of pain agitated the minds of the earliest thinkers
as turbulently as it has those of the latest comers.
In attempting to solve it, in endeavouring to
find some rule for a law of error, the Hindu
accepted an unfathered idea that he is expiating
the sins of anterior and unremembered existences,
and that he will continue to expiate them until

12 The Anatomy of Negation.

all past transgressions are absolved and the soul
is released from the chain of its migrations.
According to the popular theory, the chain of
migrations consists in twenty-four lakhs of birth,
a lakh being one hundred thousand.

Apparently such beatitude as lay beyond the
tomb consisted to Kapila in relief from trans-
migration, and this relief was obtainable by the
ransomed soul, only, as has been hinted, through
a knowledge acquired of matter and of itself.
Garmented in the flesh of him that constitutes
its individuality, the soul was to apply itself to an
understanding of Nature, who, with the coquetry
of a bayadere, at first resists and then unveils
her beauties to the eyes of the persistent wooer.
This knowledge once obtained, the soul is free.
It may yet linger awhile on earth, as the wheel
of the spinner turns for a moment after the
impulse which put it in motion has ceased to
act ', but from that time the soul has fulfilled all
the conditions of its deliverance, and is for ever
afiranchised from the successive migrations which
the unransomed soul must still undergo.

In his attack on official theology, Kapila paid
little attention to its rites and observances. He
probably fancied that if the groundwork was un-
dermined, the superstructure would soon totter.
In this he was partially correct, though the result
of his revolt was entirely different from what he
had expected. The climax of his philosophy is
a metaphysical paradox : " Neither I am, nor is
aught mine, nor is there any I" — a climax which

The Revolt of the Orient. 1 3

must have delighted Hegel, but one which it is
difficult to reconcile with the report of the phi-
losophy's present popularity. And that it is popu-
lar there seems to be no doubt. There is even a
common saying in India that no knowledge is
equal to the Sankhya, and no power equal to the
Yoga, which latter, a combination of mnemonics
"and gymnastics, is a contrivance for concentrat-
ing the mind intently on nothing.

But whatever popularity the Sankhya may now
enjoy, it is evident that, like other systems of
Eastern thought, it was understood only by
adepts ; and even had the science which it taught
been offered to the people, it was not of a nature
to appeal to them. The masses to-day are as
ignorant as carps, and at that time they were not
a whit more intelligent. Besides, it was easier to
understand the Tri-murti than twenty-five abstract
principles. Brahma was very neighbourly, and
his attendant gods were known to tread the aisles
of night. The languid noons and sudden dawns
were sacred with their presence. What could be
more reasonable ? If Hfe was an affliction, that
very affliction carried the sufferer into realms of
enchantment, where Brahma was enthroned on
a lotus of azure and gold.

It is small wonder then that Kapila's lessons
left the established religion practically unharmed.
Kant's " Kritik" did not prevent the Konigsber-
gians from listening to the Pfarrer with the same
faith with which their fathers had listened before
them. And Kant, it may be remembered, was not

14 The Anatomy of Negation.

only a popular teacher, he was one that was
revered. But aside from any influence that
Kapila's philosophy may have exerted, it was
evidently smitten by a grave defect. Concern-
ing the soul's ultimate abiding-place it was silent.
This silence enveloped the entire system in an
obscurity which another and a greater thinker
undertook to dissipate.

It has been said before, and with such wisdom
that the saying will bear repetition, that revolu-
tions are created, not by the strength of an idea,
but by the intensity of a sentiment. In great
crises there is a formula that all await ; so soon
as it is pronounced, it is accepted and repeated ;
it is the answer to an universal demand. Toward
the close of the sixth century before the present
era, at Kapilavastu, a city and kingdom situated
at the foot of the mountains of Nepal, a prince
of the blood, after prolonged meditations on the
misfortunes of life, pronounced a watchword of
this description.

The name of this early Muhammad was Sid-
dartha. He was the heir of the royal house of
Sakya, and in later years, in remembrance of his
origin, he was called Sakya-Muni, Sakya the An-
chorite, to which was added the title of Buddha,
the Sage. The accounts of his life are contained
in the Lalita Vistara, a collection of fabulous
episodes in which the supernatural joins hands
with the matter-of-fact. It is said, for instance,
that he was born of an immaculate conception,
and died of an indigestion of pork. Apart from

The Revolt of the Orient. 1 5

the mythical element, his life does not appear to
have been different from that of other religious
reformers, save only that he is supposed to have
been born in a palace instead of a hovel. To
his twenty-ninth year Siddartha is represented as
living at court, surrounded by all the barbaric
ease and gorgeousness of the Ind. Yet even in
his youth his mind appears to have been haunted
by great thoughts. He took no part in the sports
of his companions, and was accustomed, it is
said, to wander away into the solitudes of the
vast forests of bamboo, and there to linger, lost
in meditation.

In the course of time he was married to a
beautiful girl, but even in her fair arms his
thoughts were occupied with the destinies of the
world. During the succeeding festivals and
revels, amid the luxury of the palace and the
enticements of love, he meditated on the miseries
of life. In Brahmanism he found no consolation.
At its grotesqueness he too smiled, but his smile
was nearer to tears than to laughter. The melan-
choly residue of his reflections was with him even
in dream, and one night — so runs the legend —
he was encouraged in a vision to teach man-
kind a law which should save the world and
establish the foundation of an eternal and uni-
versal rest.

A combination of fortuitous circumstances,
the play of the merest hazard, appear to have
strengthened the effect of this vision. On the
high-roads about Kapilavastu he encountered a

1 6 The Anatomy of Negation,

man bent double with age, another stricken by-
fever, and lastly a corpse. "A curse," he cried,
" on youth that age must overcome ; a curse on
health that illness destroys ; a curse on life which
death interrupts ! Age, illness, death, could they
but be for ever enchained ! " Soon after, he dis-
appeared, and seeking the jungles, which at that
time were peopled with thinkers of ken, he devoted
himself to the elaboration of his thoughts. It
was there that he seems to have acquired some
acquaintance with the philosophy of Kapila. He
divined its significance and saw its insufficiency.
Thereafter for six years he gave himself up to
austerities so severe that, in the naive language
of the legend, they startled even the gods. These
six years are said to have been passed at Ouru-
vilva, a place as famous in Buddhist annals as
Kapilavastu. In this retreat he arranged the
principles of his system, and perfected the laws
and ethics which were to be its accompaniment.
Yet still the immutable truth that was to save the
world escaped him. A little longer he waited
and struggled. The Spirit of Sin, with all his
seductive cohorts, appeared before him. The
cohorts were routed and the Spirit overcome;
the struggle was ended ; and under a Bodhi-tree
which is still shown to the pilgrim, Siddartha
caught the immutable truth, and thereupon pre-
sented himself as a saviour to his fellows.

Such is the popular legend. Its main incidents
have been recently and most felicitously conveyed
in The Light of Asia. As a literary contribution,

The Revolt of the Orient. ly

Mr. Arnold's poem is simply charming; as a
page of history, it has the value of a zero from
which the formative circle has been eliminated.
The kingdom of Kapilavastu, or rather Kapila-
vatthu, was an insignificant hamlet. The Buddha's
father was a petty chieftain, the raja of a handful
of ignorant savages. Palaces he had none ; his
wealth was his strength j and could his concubine
be recalled to Hfe, she would, had she any sense
of humour, which is doubtful, be vastly amused
at finding that she had been given a role in the
solar myth.

There can, however, be no doubt that the
Buddha really lived. His existence is as well
established as that of the Christ. To precisely
what an extent he was a visionary is necessarily
difficult of conjecture. Yet unless all beHef in
him be refused, it seems almost obligatory to
assume that after years of reflection he considered
himself in possession of absolute knowledge.
The truth which he then began to preach was
not a doctrine that he held as personal and
peculiar to himself, but rather an eternal and
changeless law which had been proclaimed from
age to age by other Buddhas, of whom he fancied
himself the successor.

To speak comparatively, it is only with recent
years that the attention of Western students has
been attracted to Buddhist literature. To-day,
however, thanks to translations from the Pali and
kindred tongues, it is possible for any one to study
the doctrine from the sacred books themselves.
c

1 8 The Anatomy of Negation.

There are verses in the Yedas which when recited
are said to charm the birds and beasts. Compared
with them, the Buddhist Gospels are often lack-
ing in beauty. To be the better understood, the
priests, who addressed themselves not to initiates
but to the masses, employed a language that was
simple and familiar. There are in consequence
many repetitions and trivial digressions, but there
are also parables of such exquisite colour, that in
them one may feel the influence of a bluer sky
than ours, the odour of groves of sandal, the
green abysses of the Himalayas, and the gem-
like splendour of white Thibetian stars.

The Buddha believed neither in a personal
nor an impersonal God. The world he compared
to a wheel turning ceaselessly on itself. Of
Brahman tenets he preserved but one, that of
the immedicable misery of life. But the doctrine
which he taught may perhaps best be summarised
Bs resting on three 'great principles — Karma,
Arahatship and Nirvana. When these principles
are understood, the mysteries of the creed are
dissolved, and the need of esoteric teaching
diminished.

It may be noted, by way of proem, that the
theory of the transmigration of souls is not ad-
vanced in the Vedas. It is a part of Brahman
teaching, but Brahmanism and Vedaism are not
the same. The Yedas are claimed as the out-
come of direct revelation, while all that part of
post-Vedic literature in which Brahmanism is
enveloped is held to be purely traditional The

The Revolt of the Orient. 19

origin of the theory of the transmigration is in-
discoverable, but it is one which has been shared
by many apparently unrelated races. It was a
part of the creed of the Druids ; the Australian
savage, as well as some of the American abori-
gines, held to the same idea ; thinkers in Egypt
and in Greece advanced identical tenets \ it is
alluded to in the Talmud, and hinted at in the
Gospel which bears the name of St. John. Pos-
sibly it was held by the pre-Aryan inhabitants of
India, and in that case it is equally possible that
it was through them that the doctrine descended
into Brahmanism. But whether or not its en-
graftment came about in this way is relatively a
matter of small moment. The important point
to be observed is that it was not received by the
Buddhists. The popular idea to the contrary is
erroneous.

Spinoza noted that there is in every man a
feeling that he has been what he is from all eter-
nity, and this feeling has not left the Buddhist
unaffected. But between such a sentiment and
a belief in transmigration the margin is wide.
The popular error in which the two are confused
has presumably arisen from a misunderstanding
of the laws of Karma and Vipaka, the laws of
cause and effect. The difference therein dis-
coverable amounts in brief to this : in the theory
of transmigration the soul is held to be eternal ;
in Buddhism the existence of the soul is denied.
In the one, the ego resurrects through cycles of
unremembered lives ; in the other, nothing sur-
c 2

20 The Anatomy of Negation.

vives save the fruit of its actions. In the one,
every man is his own heir and his own ancestor ;
in the other, the deeds of the ancestor are con-
centrated in a new individual. In each there is
a chain of existences, but in the one they are
material, in the other they are moral. One
maintains the migration of an essence, the other
the results of causality ; one has no evidence to
support it, the other accords with the law of the
indestructibihty of force. One is metempsy-
chosis, the other palingenesis ; one is beautiful,
and the other awkward ; but one is merely a
theory, and the other is almost a fact.

From this chain the Hindu knew no mode of
relief Prior to the Buddha's advent, there was
an unquestioned belief that man and all that
encompasses him rolled through an eternal circle
of transformation ; that he passed through all the
forms of Hfe, from the most elementary to the
most perfect ; that the place which he occupied
depended on his merits or demerits ; that the vir-
tuous revived in a divine sphere, while the wicked
descended to a yet darker purgatory; that the
recompense of the blessed and the punishment
of the damned were of a duration which was
limited ; that time effaced the merit of virtue as
well as the demerit of sin ; and that the law of
transmigration brought back again to earth both
the just and the unjust, and threw them anew
into a fresh cycle of terrestrial existences, from
which they could fight free as best they might.

When the Buddha began to teach, he endea-

The Revolt of the Orient. 2 1

voured to bring his new theories into harmony
with old doctrines. Throughout life, man, he
taught, is enmeshed in a web whose woof was
woven in preceding ages. The misfortunes that
he endures are not the consequences of his imme-
diate actions; they are drafts which have been
drawn upon him in earlier days — drafts which he
-still must honour, and against which he can plead
no statute of limitations. Karma pursues him in
this life, and unless he learns its relentless code
by heart, the fruit of his years is caught up by
revolving chains, and tossed back into the hfe of
another. How this occurred, or why it occurred,
is explainable only by a cumbersome process
from which the reader may well be spared j and
it may for the moment suffice to note that while
the Buddha agreed with the Brahmans that life
formed a chain of existences, it was the former
who brought the hope that the chain might be
severed.

The means to the accomplishment of this end
consist in a victory over the lusts of the flesh,
the desire for life and the veils of illusion. When
these have been vanquished, the Arahat, the
victor, attains Nirvana.

Nirvana, or Nibbana as it stands in the Pali,
is not a paradise, nor yet a state of post-mortem
trance. It is the extinction of all desire, the
triple victory of the Arahat, which precedes the
great goal, eternal death. The fruit of earlier
sins remain, but they are impermanent and soon
pass away. Nothing is left from which another

22 The Anatomy of Negation.

sentient being can be called into existence. The
Arahat no longer lives; he has reached Para
Nirvana, the complete absence of anything, that
can be likened only to the flame of a lamp which
a gust of wind has extinguished.

The Buddha wrote nothing. It was his dis-
ciples who, in councils that occurred after his
death, collected and arranged the lessons of their
master. In these synods the canon of sacred
scripture was determined. It consisted of three
divisions, called the Tri-pitaka, or Three Baskets,
and contained the Suttas, the discourses of the
Buddha — the Dharmas, the duties enjoined on
the masses — and lastly the Vinayas, the rules of
discipline.

The Dharmas contain the four truths whose
discovery is credited to the Buddha. The first
is that suffering is the concomitant of life. The
second, that suffering is the resultant of desire.
The third, that Telief from suffering is obtained
in the suppression of desire. And fourth, that
Nirvana, which succeeds the suppression of de-
sire, is attainable only through certain paths.
These paths are eight in number; four of which —
correctness in deed, word, thought and sight —
were recommended to all men ; the remainder —
the paths of application, memory, meditation and
proper life — are reserved for the eremites.

For the use of the faithful, the four truths have
been condensed in a phrase : "Abstain from sin,
practise virtue, dominate the flesh — such is the
law of the Buddha." The recognition of the four

The Revolt of the Orient. 23

truths and the observance of the eight virtues are
obligatory to all who wish to reach Nirvana. The
neophyte renounces the world and lives a men-
dicant. Yet inasmuch as a society of saints is
difficult to perpetuate, members are admitted
from whom the usual vows of continence and
poverty are not exacted.

The charm of primitive Buddhism was in its
simplicity. The faithful assembled for meditation
and not for parade. The practice of morality
needed no forms and fewer ceremonies. But
with time it was thought well to make some con-
cession to popular superstitions; and although
the Buddha had no idea of representing himself
as a divinity, every moral and physical perfection
was attributed to him. The rest was easy. Ido-
latry had begun. To the right and left of a saint
elevated to the rank of God Supreme, a glowing
Pantheon was formed of the Buddhas that had
preceded him. A meaningless worship was esta-
blished; virtues were subordinated to ceremonies;
and to-day before a gilded statue a wheel of
prayers is turned, while through the dim temples,
domed like a vase, the initiates murmur, " Life is
evil."

In attempting to convert the multitude, the
Buddha made no use of vulgar seductions. From
him came no flattery to the passions. The re-
compense that he promised was not of the earth
nor material in its nature. To his believers he
offered neither wealth nor power. The psychic
force, the seemingly supernatural faculties, that

24 The Anatomy of Negation.

knowledge and virtue brought to those who had
reached superior degrees of sanctity, were shared
by the Brahmans as well ; they were an appanage,
not a bait. The one reward of untiring efforts
was an eternal ransom from the successive horrors
of Karma. The paradise which he disclosed was
the death of Death. In it all things ceased to be.
It was the ultimate annihilation from which life
was never to be re-beckoned.

It is not surprising that the captivating quiet
of a goal such as this should forcibly appeal to
the inclinations of the ascetic ; the wonder of it
is that it could be regarded for a moment as
attractive to the coarse appetites of the crowd.
Nor does it seem that the Christ of Chaos made
this mistake. It was the after-comers who under-
took to lift the commonplace out of the humdrum.
The Buddha's hope of the salvation of all man-
kind was a dream extending into the indefinite
future; the theory of immediate emancipation
was never shared by him. For the plain man,
he laid down a law which was a law of grace for
all, that of universal brotherhood. If its practice
was insufficient to lead him to Nirvana, it was
still a preparation thereto, a paving of the way
for the travellers that were yet to come.

The method which he employed to convert his
hearers seems to have been a tender persuasion,
in which there was no trace of the dogmatic. He
did not contend against strength, he appealed to
weakness, varying the insinuations of his para-
bles according to the nature of the listener, and

The Revolt of the Orient. 25

charming even the recalcitrant by the simplicity
and flavour of his words. In these lessons there
were no warnings, no detached maledictions ; but
there were exhortations to virtue, and pictures of
the sweet and sudden silence of eternal rest. His
struggle was never with creeds, but with man,
with the flesh and its appetites; and from the
memory of his victorious combat with himself
there came to him precepts and maxims of in-
comparable delicacy and beauty. These were
his weapons. His teaching was a lesson of infi-
nite tenderness and compassion ; it was a lesson
of patience and resignation and abnegation of
self, and especially of humility, which in its re-
nouncement of temporal splendours opens the
path to the magnificence of death.

In the ears of not a few modern thinkers,
this promise of annihilation has sounded Hke a
gigantic paradox. It has seemed inconceivable
that men could be found who would strive unre-
mittingly their whole lives through to reach a
goal where nothing was. And yet there were
many such, and, what is more to the point, their
number is constantly increasing. On the other
hand, it has been argued that to those who knew
no prospect of supernal happiness and who had
never heard of an eternity of bliss, the horror of
life might be of such intensity that they would
be glad of any release whatever. But the value
of this argument is slight. The spectacle of a
Buddhist converted to Christianity is the most
infrequent that has ever gladdened the heart of

26 The Anatomy of Negation,

a missionary. Per contra, the number of those
who turn from other creeds to that of Buddhism
is notoriously large. The number of its converts,
however, is not a proof of its perfection. And
Buddhism is far from perfect : its fantastic shackles
may be alluring to the mystic, but they are mean-
ingless to the mathematician. It may be charm-
ing to hold a faith which has put pessimism into
verse, and raised that verse into something more
than literature ; but it is useless. The pleasure
of utter extinction is one which we will probably
all enjoy, and that too without first becoming
Arahats ; and yet, again, we may not. The veil
of Maya is still unraised. The most we can do
to lift it is to finger feebly at the edges. Sakya-
Muni taught many an admirable lesson, but in
his flights of fancy, like many another since, he
transcended the limits of experience. Let those
who love him follow.

Charity is the New Testament told in a word.
When it was preached on the Mount of Olives
it must have brought with it the freshness and
aroma of a first conception. Before that time,
the Galileans had heard but of Justice and Jeho-
vah ; then at once they knew of Christ and Com-
passion ; and ever since the name and the virtue
have gone hand-in-hand. And yet five hundred
years before, a sermon on charity was preached
in Nepal.

The charity which Sakya-Muni taught was not
the ordinary liberality which varies from a furtive
coin to a public bequest. It was a boundless

The. Revolt of the Orient, 27

sympathy, a prodigality of abandonment in which
each creature, however humble, could find a
share, and which, once entered in the heart of
man, extinguished every spark of egotism. This
sentiment of universal compassion was one which
the two greatest of the world's reformers sought
alike to instil. Between the Prince of Kapila-
vastu and Jesus of Nazareth there are many
resemblances, but none, it may be taken, more
striking than this. Beyond the common legend
of their birth, both were supposed to have been
tempted by the devil; and by the Buddha, as the
Christ, the devil was vanquished. Their lessons
in ethics were nearly the same ; both were nihil-
ists ; both held that the highest duty is to be at
variance with self; both struck a blow at the
virility of man, and neither of them wrote. About
the lives of each the myth-makers have been at
work ; both were deified ; and if to-day the be-
lievers in the Buddha largely outnumber those
of the Christ, it is only fair to note that the former
have enjoyed advantages which the latter have
never possessed. Through none of their wide
leisures have they ever held it a blasphemy to
think.

Another religion without a God, and one which
is a twin-sister to Buddhism, is that of the Gainas.
Explanatory documents concerning it are infre-
quent, and in search of information the student
is usually obliged to turn to Brahman sources.
The Gainas are the believers in Gina, the Vic-
torious, as the Buddhists are believers in Buddha,

28 The Anatomy of Negation.

the Sage. A Gina — in Buddhism this term is
one of the many synonyms of Sakya-Muni — is a
prophet who, having attained omniscience, comes
to re-establish the law of salvation when it has
become corrupted through the march of time.
There are said to have been twenty-four Ginas,
including the most recent; and as the Gainas
maintain that the Buddha was a disciple of the
founder of their creed, the number corresponds
to that of Siddartha and his twenty-three prede-
cessors. The Gainas, like the Buddhists, deny
the authority of the Vedas j they consider them
apocryphal, and oppose in their stead a collection
of Angas of their own. No sect has been more
rigorous than they in the respect of everything
that lives. They eat no flesh ; and it is reported
that the stricter devotees filter their water, breathe
through a veil, and as they walk sweep the
ground before them, that no insect, however
insignificant, may be. destroyed. Among the
customs in which they differ from Buddhism,
suicide is the one worth noting. For a long
period this rite seems to have been decorously
observed. On most other points the two beliefs
are in apparent agreement. The Gainas, too, are
atheists. They admit of no Creator, and deny
the existence of a perfect and eternal Being. The
Gina, like the Buddha, has become perfect, but
it is not thought that he has always been so.
This negation has not prevented a particular
division of the faith from affecting a kind of here-
tical and schismatic deism. Like the Nepalese,

The Revolt of the Orient 29

who have imagined an Adibuddha, a supreme
Buddha, they also have invented a Ginapati, a
perfect Gina, whom, in opposition to their canoni-
cal Angas, they regard as primordial creator. The
Angas teach that man possesses a soul, and that
this soul, although a pure and an immortal intel-
ligence, is yet the prey of illusion, and for that
"reason condemned to bear the yoke of matter
through an indefinite series of existences. In
Gainism it is not existence that is an affliction,
it is life ; and the Nirvana is less an annihilation
than an entrance into eternal beatitude. To
distinguish between the two faiths, the Brahmans
called the Buddhists, " They who affirm," and the
Gainas, "They who say. Perhaps."*

The Chinese, who are our elders in little else
than corruption, feel as much need for a religion
as a civilian does for a military uniform. From
the threshold of history to the present day, the
inhabitants of the Celestial Empire have had no
term wherewith to designate a deity. The name
of God has not entered into their philosophy.
As a rule, then, when an educated Chinese is
asked what his creed is, he answers, that not being
a priest, he has none at all. The clergy have
three : the official religion — originated by Con-
fucius— Buddhism and Tauism. The latter faith
was founded by Laou-tze.

The life of this early thinker has been as libe-
rally interwoven with legends as that of the

* Dictionnaire des sciences religieuses, art. Jainisme.

30 TJu A natomy of Negation.

Buddha. The Orient seems to have had a mania
for attributing the birth of reformers to immacu-
late conceptions ; and one learns with the weari-
ness that comes of a thrice-told tale, that the
mother of Laou-tze, finding herself one day alone,
conceived suddenly through the vivifying influ-
ence of Nature. But though the conception was
abrupt, the gestation was prolonged, lasting, it is
said, eighty-four years ; and when at last the
miraculous child was born, his hair was white —
whence his name, Laou-tze, the Aged Baby. This
occurred six hundred years before the present
era.

The philosophy of this prodigy, contained in
the Taou-teh-king, the Book of Supreme Know-
ledge and Virtue, is regarded by OrientaHsts as
the most profound and authentic relic of early
Chinese literature. The most profound, as rival-
ling the works of Confucius and Mencius ; and
the most authentic, in that it was the only one
said to have been exempt from the different
edicts commanding the destruction of manu-
scripts.

Laou-tze was probably the first thinker who
established the fact that it is not in the power
of man to conceive an adequate idea of a First
Cause, and the first to show that any efforts in
that direction result merely in demonstrating
human incompetence and the utter vainness of
the endeavour. When, therefore, he was obliged
to mention the primordial essence in such a
manner as to be understood by his hearers, the

The Revolt of the Orient. 3 1

figurative term which he employed was Tau.
*' Tau," he said, " is empty, in operation exhaust-
less. It is the formless mother of all things."
And to this description Spinoza found little to
add.

Laou-tze appears to have dipped into all the
philosophies then in vogue, and after taking a
little eclectic sip from each, elaborated a system
so cleverly that he may safely be regarded as the
earliest moralist. His doctrine was thoroughly
pantheistic. Man, he taught, is a passing and
inferior phase of the Great Unity which is the
beginning and end of all things, and into which
the soul is absorbed. Happiness, he added, is
like paradise, an imaginary Utopia, a fiction of
the non-existent extending beyond the border-
lands of the known. And on the chart which he
drew of life, he set up a monitory finger-post,
warning men that the only real delights were
those that consist in the absence of pain. Enter-
prise, effort and ambition, were so many good,
old-fashioned words which to this early pessimist
represented merely a forethought for a future
generation. And of a future generation he saw
little need. The one laudable aim was in the
avoidance of suffering. After all, what was there
in life ? Nothing save a past as painful as the
present, with hope to breed chimeras and the
future for a dream.

Like Buddhism, the doctrine of Laou-tze de-
generated with the years. Their common sim-
plicity was too subtle for the canaille, and to

32 The Anatomy of Negation.

each gaudy superstitions have been added. Yet
in their primal significance they are as ushers of
negation, the initial revolt at the supernatural,
the first reasoned attempts to rout the spectres
from the mind of man.

In earlier Hinduism, life was a nightmare, and
the universe a phantasm that vaunted itself real.
In an effort to escape, Kapila lost himself in
abstractions, the Buddha ordered Death to stand
a lackey at the door of Peace, while Laou-tze
turned his almond eyes within and descended
the stair of Thought. To the first, salvation lay
in metaphysics ; to the second, in virtue ; to the
third, in indifference. Had their theories been
fused, the revolt might not have been so vain.

CHAPTER II.

THE NEGATIONS OF ANTIQUITY.

The clamour of life and thought entered
Greece through Asia Minor, Quinet has called
the itinerary of the tribes that took possession of
her hills and vales, an itinerary of the gods. That
somnambulist of history has seen, as in a vision,
their passage marked, here by a temple, there
by a shrine. While the tribes dispersed, the gods
advanced. Orpheus has told the story of their
youth ; but now Orpheus is indiscoverable, and
the days of which he sang are as vague as the
future. When the gods entered folk-lore, they
had already ascended Olympus, and the divinity
of Jupiter was attested in traditions out of which
Homer formed another Pentateuch. The name
of the Ionian Moses is as unsubstantial as that
of Orpheus ; but if his personality is uncertain,
it is yet a matter of common knowledge that his
epics formed the articles of an indulgent creed,
and that from them the infant Greece first learned
the pleasures that belong to dream. At this time
the mysteries of the archaic skies were dissolved.
Dread had vanished ; in its place was the Ideal.

D

34 The Anatomy of Negation.

Throughout the mellow morns and languid dusks
there was an unbroken procession of the gayest,
the -most alluring divinities ; their fare was am-
brosia, their laughter was inextinguishable. Virtue
was rewarded on earth, and Nemesis pursued the
wrong-doer. The dower of men and maidens was
beauty ; love was too near to nature to know of
shame; religion was more aesthetic than moral,
more gracious than austere. The theologians
were poets : first Orpheus, Musaeus and Linus,
then Homer and Hesiod; mirth, magnificence
and melancholy they gave in fee.

Homer was not only a poet, he was an historian
as well ; and it is a fact amply demonstrated that
he believed as little in the sacerdotal legends as
Tennyson in the phantom idyls of Arthur. At
that time no semblance of revealed religion was
affected : the people, however, like all others
before and since, would have gods, and gods
they got; yet in displaying them to the infant
race. Homer laughed at the divinities, and pre-
dicted that their reign would some day cease.

This prescience of the incredulity that was to
come is significant. The history of Greece is
one of freedom in art, in action, but particularly
in thought. The death of Socrates, the flight of
Aristotle, are among the exceptions that make
the rule. In its broad outlines, the attitude of
Hellenic thought was one of aggressive scepti-
cism. This attitude may have been due to the
fact that there was nothing which in any way
resembled a national faith; each town, each

The Negations of Antiquity. 35

hamlet, each upland and valley, possessed myths
of its own, and such uniformity as existed appears
to have been ritualistic rather than doctrinal.
But perhaps the primal cause is best attributable
to that nimble spirit of investigation which was
at once a characteristic of the Greek intellect and
a contrast to the cataleptic reveries of the Hindu.

It goes without the need of telling that the
philosophers put Jupiter aside much as one does
an illusion of childhood, and possibly with some-
thing of the same regret. But this leniency on
their part was not universally imitated. The story
of Prometheus, the most ancient of fables, traces
of which have been discovered in the Vedas,
became in the hands of ^schylus a semi- histo-
rical, semi-cosmological legend, in which the
Titan, as representative of humanity, mouths
from the escarpolated summits of Caucasus his
hatred and defiance of Jove. Euripides, too, was
well in the movement. There was not an article
of Hellenic faith that he did not scoff at. Then
came the farce. Aristophanes found nothing too
sacred for his wit ; with the impartiality of genius
he joked at gods and men alike.

While the poets and dramatists were pulling
down, the philosophers were building up. If the
belief in an eternal fancy ball on Olympus was
untenable, something, they felt, should be sug-
gested in its place. In lieu, therefore, of the
theory that Jupiter was the first link in the chain
of the universe, Thales announced that the be-
ginning of things was watery Anaximenes said
D 2

36 The Anatomy of Negation.

air ; Heraclitus preferred fire. Anaximinder held
to an abstraction, the Infinite. Pythagoras, who,
like all his countrymen, dearly loved a quibble,
declared that the First Cause was One. This One,
Xenophanes asserted, was a self-existent Mind.
Empedocles gave as definition a sphere whose
centre was everywhere and circumference no-
where, a definition which Pascal revived as an
attribute of the Deity. Anaxagoras, who was
banished for his pains, believed in a pure Intel-
ligence. This pure Intelligence was not a deity,
except perhaps in the sense of a deus ex machina;
it was an explanation, not a god. But even so,
it looked like one ; there were already too many
unknown gods, and the idea was not received
with enthusiasm. Among those who opposed it
with particular vehemence was Diagoras, he who
first among the Greeks received the name of
atheist. This reasoner chanced one day to be
at sea during a heavy storm. The sailors attri-
buted the storm to him. All that they were
enduring was a punishment for conveying such
an impious wretch as he. ** Look at those other
ships over there," said Diagoras. " They are in
the same storm, aren't they? Do you suppose
that I am in each of them ?"

Diagoras had learned his lessons from Demo-
critus, a thinker who in certain schools of thought
holds to-day a position which, if not superior, is
at least equal to that of Plato. The reason of
this admiration is not far to seek. Democritus
is the grandsire of materialism. Materialism is

The Negations of Antiquity. 37

out of fashion to-day, but to-morrow it may come
in again. During a long and continually reju-
venated career, it has been a veritable hydra.
Every time its head seemed severed for all eter-
nity, there has sprouted a new one, and one
more sagacious than the last.

The theory of atoms announced in the remote
past and repeated in recent years underwent a
baptism of fire at the beginning of the present
century. Dalton applied it to the interpretation
of chemical laws, and a little later a band of
German erudites embellished it with the garlands
of new discoveries. Contemporary science treats
it with scant respect ; but all who are of a liberal
mind admit that its conclusions have been useful
implements of progress. Its originator, Demo-
critus, was a contemporary of Sakya-Muni. It
is even possible that he sat at the Buddha's feet ;
he is said to have wandered far into the East ;
and it is also recorded that he visited Egypt,
whither he had been preceded by Pythagoras,
and where his questioning eyes must have met
the returning stare of the Sphinx.

At that time travelling was not necessarily
expensive, yet in his journeys Democritus squan-
dered his substance with great correctness ; and
when after years of absence he returned to his
home, he found himself amenable to a law of the
land which deprived of the honours of burial
those who had dissipated their patrimony. A
statute of this description was not of a nature to
alarm such a man as Democritus. He invited

38 The Anatomy of Negation.

all who cared to do so, to meet him in the public
square, and there, through the wide leisures of
Thracian days, he recited passages from Diakos-
mos, his principal work. This procedure, toge-
ther with the novelty of the ideas which he
announced, so impressed his hearers, that they
made for him a purse of five hundred talents,
and after his death erected statues in his honour.
Those indeed were the good old days.

In the system which Democritus suggested to
his countrymen, matter was pictured as the union
of an infinite number of indivisible elements,
which in the diversity of their forms represent
the phenomena of nature. Beyond these indi-
visible elements, space held but voids. Atoms
and emptiness is the theory in a phrase. The
voids are the absence of obstacles, and the atoms
continually passing through them are the consti-
tuents of all that is. In their eternal voyage
through space, "these atoms meet, unite and sepa-
rate, unruled save by the laws of unconscious
and mechanical necessity. To their chance clash
is due the world ; the universe is one of their
fortuitous combinations, and the hazard which
presided at its formation will some day see it
again dissolved. The word hazard, it may be
noted, is used from lack of a better term. In
exact speech there seems to be nothing which at
all resembles it. The accident that occurs in the
street, the rambles of the ball on the roulette-
table, may seem the play of chance; but were
the predisposing causes understood, the accident

The Negations of Antiquity. 39

would be recognised as the result of a cause in
which chance had no part, and in the rambles of
the ball the operations of consistent laws would
be discerned. Dubois Reymond has noted that
if, during a short though determined space of
time, an intelligent man were able to mark the
exact position and movement of every molecule,
he could, in accordance with the laws of mecha-
nics, foresee the whole future of the world. In
the same manner that an astronomer can foretel
the date on which a comet, after years of remote
wanderings, will re-visit our heavens, so in his
equations could this imaginary individual read
the precise day when England shall burn her
last bit of coal, and Germany brew her last keg
of beer.

Beyond this theory, which as a matter of course
includes the denial that man is a free agent,
Democritus was accustomed to assert that out of
nothing, nothing comes — an axiom which one
does not need to be a mathematician to agree
with, though it is one that somewhat impairs the
scientific value of the first chapter of Genesis.
And were it otherwise, if things sprang from
nothing, the producing cause would be limitless ;
men might issue from the sea, and fish from the
earth. In the fecundity of chaos, everything,
even to the impossible, would be possible. But
in a system such as this, in which the operations
of nature are represented as effected by invisible
corpuscles which possess in themselves the laws
of all their possible combinations, there is room

40 The Anatomy of Negation.

only for the actual ; the universe explains itself
more or less clearly, and that too without recourse
to a First Cause or an over- watching Providence.*

Democritus was one of the first quietists, but
he was quietist without leanings to mysticism.
He was among the earliest to note that it is the
unexpected that occurs ; and he barricaded him-
self as best he might against avoidable misfor-
tune by shunning everything that was apt to be
a source of suffering or annoyance. Beyond
mental tranquillity, he appears to have praised
nothing except knowledge ; and it is stated that
he hunted truth not so much for the pleasure of
the chase as for the delight which the quarry
afforded.

The negations of Democritus had been well
ventilated when the stage of history was abruptly
occupied by a band of charlatan nihilists, who
personified the spirit of doubt with ingenious
effrontery. These were the sophists. To be
called a sophist was originally a compliment. It
meant one who was a master in wisdom and
eloquence. But when Greece found herself im-
posed upon by a company of mental gymnasts,
who in any argument maintained the pros and
cons with equal ease, who made the worst appear
the best, who denied all things even to evidence,
and affirmed everything even to the absurd, and
who took sides with the just and the unjust with

* Nolen : La philosophic de Lange. Wurtz : La theorie
atomique.

The Negations of Antiquity. 41

equal indifference — then the title lost its lustre
and degenerated into a slur. This possibly was
a mistake. A disapproval of the paradoxes of
these dialecticians is almost a praise of the com-
monplace. Yet the sophists deserve small appro-
bation. Their efforts to show that all is true and
all is false, and, above all, the brilliancy of their
depravity, undermined thought and morals to
such an extent that philosophy, which had taken
wings, might have flown for ever away, had it not
been re-beckoned to earth by the familiar reform
instituted by Socrates.

Socrates was as ungainly as a satyr, but the
suppleness of his tongue was that of a witch. At
the hands of this insidious Attic, the sophists
fared badly. He brought their versatilities into
discredit ; and in reviewing and enlarging a for-
gotten theory of Anaxagoras, purified thought
with new lessons in virtue. This reaction seems
to have been of advantage to moral philosophy,
but detrimental to metaphysics ; so much so, in
fact, that his hearers turned their backs on theory,
and devoted themselves to ethics. " Give me
wisdom or a rope," cried Antisthenes, presumably
to appreciative ears ; and when Diogenes lit his
dark lantern in broad daylight, he found every
one eager to aid him in the ostentatious bizarrerie
of that immortal farce.

In the midst of these pre-occupations there
appeared a thinker named Pyrrho, to whom
every sceptic is more or less indebted. Pyrrho
was born at Elis. His people were poor, and

42 The Anatomy of Negation.

doubtless worthy; but their poverty compelled
him to seek a livelihood, which for a time he
seems to have found, with the brush. By nature
he was sensitive, nervous, as are all artists, and
passionately in love with solitude. From some
reason or another, but most probably from lack
of success, he gave up painting, and wandered
from one school to another, until at last a sudden
introduction to Democritus turned the whole
current of his restless thought. For this intro-
duction he was indebted to Anaxarchus, a phi-
losopher who went about asserting that all is
relative, and confessing that he did not even
know that he knew nothing. But in this there
was possibly some little professional exaggeration.
He was a thorough atomist, and very dogmatic
on the subject of happiness, which, with broad
good sense, he insisted was found only in the
peace and tranquillity of the mind.

In Alexander's triumphant suite, Pyrrho went
with this scholar to Asia, and together they
visited the magi and the reflective gymnosophists.
The abstracted impassability of these visionaries
caused him, it is said, an admiration so intense
that he made from it a rule of daily conduct ;
and one day when his master, with whom he was
walking, fell into a treacherous bog, Pyrrho con-
tinued calmly on his way, leaving Anaxarchus to
the mud and his own devices. It may be that
in this there was some prescience of the modern
aphorism that any one is strong enough to bear
the misfortunes of another ; but even so, Pyrrho,

The Negations of Antiqtiity. 43

when it was necessary, could be brave in his
own behalf, and one of the few anecdotes that
are current represent his unmurmuring endurance
of an agonising operation. This occurred before
any one was aware of the imperceptibility of pain :
the stoics were yet unborn.

During his long journey, Pyrrho acquired all,
or nearly all, that the East had to teach. He
listened to Brahman and Buddhist, and took
from each what best they had to give. The im- '
passability of the one appealed to him forcibly,
the ethics of the other seemed to him most admi-
rable ; and with these for luggage, packed toge-
ther with an original idea of his own, he returned
to his early home, where his fellow-citizens, as a
mark of their appreciation, elevated him to the
rank of high-priest, a dignity which may have
caused him some slight, if silent, amusement.

At that time Greece was rent by wars and
revolutions. In the uncertainty of the morrow
and the instability of all things, there was a
general effort to enjoy life while enjoyment was
yet to be had, and to make that enjoyment as
thorough as possible. When, therefore, Pyrrho
announced his intention to teach the science of
happiness, he found his audience ready-made.

The doctrine which he then unfolded was
received at first with surprise, but afterwards
with sympathetic attention ; it gained for him
wide praise, and also fervent followers. These
followers, to whom the thanks of posterity are
due, took to themselves the duty of preserving

44 The Anatomy of Negation.

his teaching; for, like Socrates, Pyrrho wrote
nothing.

It has been hinted that Pyrrho accepted the
materialism of Democritus, admired the hedonism
of Anaxarchus, and practised the impassability
of the Hindus. These elements, which formed
what may be termed the angles of his system,
were rounded and completed by an original doc-
trine, which represented doubt as an instrument
of wisdom, moderation and personal welfare.
Before this time there had been much scepticism,
but it had been of a vacillating and unordered
kind, the indecision of the uncertain, and no
one had thought of making it a stepping-stone
to happiness. This Pyrrho did, and in it lies
his chief originality.

The scepticism which Pyrrho instituted was an
unyielding doubt, and one, paradox as it may
seem, which was highly logical. In it Kant
found the outlines of his Criticism traced in ad-
vance, and that too by a master-hand. Pyrrho
admitted no difference between health and ill-
ness, life and death. He expected nothing, asked
for nothing, believed in nothing. If he ever
struggled with himself, the struggle was a silent
combat, of which his heart was the one dumb
witness. He was not simply a sceptic, nor yet
merely a cynic ; he was a stoic, with a leaven of
both. To the eternal question, " What am I ?"
he answered, " It matters not." He had but one
true successor — Montaigne. The everlasting
refrain, Que s^ay ie ? is an echo, faint it may be,

The Negations of Antiquity. 45

but still an echo, of his own unperturbed indif-
ference. The only refuge in the midst of the
uncertainties to which man is ever a prey, lay,
Pyrrho held, in an entire suspension of judgment.
Between assertion and denial he did not so much
as waver \ he balanced his opinion in a perfect
equipoise. As there is no criterion of truth, his
position was impregnable.

" There is," he taught, '* nothing that is inhe-
rently beautiful or ugly, right or wrong, and hence
nothing that can be defined as an absolute truth.
Things in themselves," he added, "are diverse,
uncertain and undiscernible. Neither sensation
nor thought is capable of teaching the difference
between what is true and what is false. As a
consequence, the verdict of mind and of senses
should be equally distrusted ; an opinionless im-
passability should be observed j nothing should
be denied, nothing should be affirmed ; or if one
of the two seems necessary, let the affirmation
and the denial be concurrent."

And happiness ? some one may ask. But that
is happiness. Where there is indifference and
apathy, there too is ataraxia, the perfect and
unruffled serenity of the mind. If in act, word
and thought, an entire suspension of judgment
be maintained, — if men, and women too, and
events and results and causes, concerning all of
which we may have our fancies and our theories,
but whose reality escapes us, are treated with
complete indifference, — then do we possess an
independent freedom, an unroutable calm. Once

46 The Anatomy of Negation.

freed from beliefs and prejudices, an exterior
influence is without effect ; perfect impassability
is obtained; and with it comes the passionless
serenity, the ataraxia, which is the goal of the
sage.

Such in its broad outlines was Pyrrho's doc-
trine. Confute it who may. For the details the
reader must turn to back book-shelves where
speculative spiders are the only hosts, and there
thumb the mildewed pages of Sextus Empiricus,
Aristocles and Diogenes Laertius. It should be
noted that Pyrrho's scepticism did not extend to
virtue, which he was fond of saying is the one
thing whose possession is worth the gift. At an
advanced age he died, greatly esteemed by his
townsmen, who to do him honour exempted all
philosophers from taxation. But elsewhere he
was forgotten, and at the time of his death his
brilliancy was eclipsed by the rising glories of
Epicurus.

When Epicurus addressed the public, he was
no longer a young man. His early life had been
an unbroken journey. No sooner was he settled
in one place, than circumstances compelled him
to seek another. These inconveniences did not
prevent him from cultivating philosophy, for
which from boyhood he evidenced a marked
predilection. " In the beginning was chaos," his
first tutor announced. '' And where did chaos
come from?" asked Epicurus. But to this, the
tutor had no answer, and the boy turned to
Democritus.

The Negations of Antiquity. 47

To this master much of his subsequent philo-
sophy is attributable, but his personal success
was due to the charm of his manner and the
seduction of his words. Syrians and Egyptians
flocked to Athens to hear him speak, and few
among them went away dissatisfied.

At that time the riot of war had demoralised
society. The echoes from a thousand battle-
fields had banished all sense of security. Greece,
moreover, was as tired of speculations as of con-
flicts ; the subtleties of the Lyceum had out-
wearied the most intrepid. In the midst of the
general enervation, Epicurus came, like another
Pyrrho, to tell the secret of Polichinelle, to paint
pleasure and describe happiness. In the telling
he made no mysteries ; his hearers approached
him without eflbrt. Pleasure, he held, was too
simple and unaffected to need logical demonstra-
tions ; and to make her acquaintance, common-
sense was a better letter than mathematics. But
pleasure should not be sought merely for plea-
sure's sake. It should be regarded as a means
to an end. Between pleasure and pleasure there
is always a choice. There are pleasures that
should be shunned, and there are trials that should
be endured. There is the pleasure that is found
in the satisfaction of the flesh, and there is the
pleasure which is found in the tranquillity of the
mind. The one lasts but a moment, and wanes
in repetition ; the other endures through life,
and increases with the years. All this Epicurus
thoroughly understood. He had a maxim to the

48 The Anatomy of Negation.

effect that wealth does not consist in the vastness
of possessions, but in the limitation of desires.
He did not restrict his hearers to scanty enjoy-
ments ; on the contrary, he preached their mul-
tiplication, but it was a multiplication which was
both a lure and a prohibition. He wished men
to live so simply that pleasure, when it came,
might seem even more exquisite than it is. Of
all the high-roads to happiness, he pointed to
prudence as the surest and most expeditious.
The prudent are temperate in all things, unam-
bitious and of modest requirements, and through
this very prudence maintain the health of mind
and body which in itself is the true felicity of the
wise.

The Epicurean doctrine was one long lesson
in mental tranquillity. Anything that ministered
to contentment was welcomed, and all things that
disturbed it were condemned. Among the latter
were the gods/

"Ces dieux que I'liomme a fait, et qui n'ont pas fait
rhomme."

The proper way to treat them was a difficult
question. Epicurus had no taste for hemlock,
and he found his garden very pleasant. He had
no wish to flee, like Aristotle, in the night, nor
mope, like Anaxagoras, in a dungeon. He was
a teacher, not a martyr. His position, therefore,
was one of extreme delicacy. On the one hand,
he was obliged to consider his personal incon-
venience j on the other, the superstitions of the
masses. To respect the former and banish the

The Negations of Antiqtiity. 49

latter, Epicurus took the gods and juggled with
them, and in the legerdemain they mounted to
such altitudes that from them the vulgar had
nothing left to hope or to fear. Their existence
was openly admitted, and their intervention as
openly denied. In words of devout piety he
took from them the reins of government, and
pictured their idleness as an ideal impassability.
After that, Olympus was to let.

The early legends say that the first created
thing was fear. After routing the gods, Epicurus
undertook to banish dread ; // tiinor della paura^
as the Italians have it in their insidious tongue—
the fear of fright, or at least that particular form
with which hallucinated antiquity was accus-
tomed to terrify itself into repentant spasms.
Aided by the materialism of his master, Epicurus
looked across the tomb, and announced that
there no tormenting phantoms lurked in ambush.
The dissolution of the atoms composing the body
was also a dissolution of the atoms composing
the soul. This affirmation of nothing divested
life of a constant anxiety. It took from it one
more care. It made the tranquillity of the mind
easier, and assured it against an idle pre-occu-
pation.

This doctrine, far from giving free play to the
passions, held them well in check. Epicurus
could see two sides to a question as well as ano-
ther. Morality and temperance even to absti-
nence were praised. His hearers were enjoined

£

50 The Anatomy of Negation.

to limit their desires, and at all times to be
just and to be charitable. The virtues, too, were
praised ; and this not so much perhaps on ac-
count of their inherent beauty, as because they
were safeguards against mental disturbance.

In disclosing his ideas, Epicurus necessarily
refuted other theories ; but his candour, his un-
alterable placidity and his luminous good faith,
disconcerted his adversaries, whose infrequent
reprisals he answered, if at all, with an epigram.

In disinteresting his adherents from all things
and even from themselves, it was the wish of
Epicurus to create, not a school of thought, but a
something whose status should approach that of
a general disbelief. It was to be a religion whose
one dogma was repose. In this purpose he very
nearly succeeded. By the terms of his will, his
garden, his writings and authority descended from
one disciple to another in perpetuity. There was
then no statute of mortmain, and the terms of the
testament remained in force for seven hundred
years — in fact, down to the last gasp of classic
antiquity.

The continuity which it enjoyed is perhaps less
attributable to its dogmas than to a sentiment of
great delicacy which pervaded it. Christianity
teaches that all men are brothers, but Epicurism
practised the lesson before it was taught. Its
bonds were those of friendship. Cicero has
given it to history that the Epicureans had one
to another the most unselfish sentiments. There

The Negations of A fitiquity. 5 1

was no community of goods. Friendship gave
its own from a sense of pleasure and not from
constraint.

During its long reign, Epicurism attracted
many converts from other sects, but lost none
of its own adherents. This singularity was
explained by a wit of the baths, who, adjusting
his toga, noted with the light banter of the day
that it was easy enough to make a eunuch of a
man, but another matter to make a man of a
eunuch. It is possible that this bel esprit had
grasped the doctrine better than his hearers.
Certainly it has not always been thoroughly
understood. Montesquieu accused it of cor-
rupting Rome ; but the accusation is groundless,
for at its advent the Eternal City was one vast
lupanar.

Seneca said of Epicurus that he was a hero
disguised as a woman, and it is in this disguise
that he is usually represented. The doctrine
which he gave to the world seemed to praise
sensuality where in reality it preached repose.
Idlers in all times have halted at the appearance
and omitted to go further. For this reason, if
for none that is better, there has always been a
false and a true Epicurism. Unhappily, the
bastard has been best received, and in its recep-
tion it has managed to discredit both the philo-
sopher and the philosophy.

Over the gateway to his olive-gardens Epicurus
had written : " Enter, stranger ; here all is fair ;
Pleasure lords the day." The sign was a bait,
E 2

52 The Anatomy of Negation.

and of a flavour far different from the repellent
severity of the notice which swung from the
Academe. There admittance was refused to
those who did not know geometry. But when the
stranger, attracted by the proffered allurement,
entered the gardens, he found that the lording of
pleasure meant health of body and of mind.

There were some who entered, and who,
delighted at the teaching, remained. There
were others who entered at one gate and passed
out discomfited at another ; and there was also
a third class, who, noting the tenor of the invi-
tation, and knowing that the host was a philo-
sopher, passed on charmed with the idea that
the gratification of the senses possessed the sanc-
tion of metaphysics. These latter necessarily
compromised Epicurus ; and when his doctrine
passed from Athens to Rome, it had been pre-
ceded by a bad reputation. For this the excuse
is, seemingly, small. - Epicurus was as volumi-
nous a writer as Voltaire; and if the Romans
misunderstood him, it is either because their
knowledge of Greek was slight, or else because
they were content to accept his teaching on
hearsay. Toward the close of the republic, the
system — such little at least as was generally
known — became largely the fashion; and the
elegance of Rome, like the indolence of Athens,
cloaked its corruption with a mind-woven mantle
of imaginary philosophy.

In descending the centuries, its reputation has
not improved. Epicurism is not now synony-

The Negations of Antiquity. 53

mous, as it once was, with refined debauchery ;
yet at the dinner-tables of contemporary club-
land there are many still unaware that he who is
claimed as patron-saint had tastes so simple that
his expense for food was less than an obolus a
day, while Metrodorus, his nearest friend, ex-
pended barely a lepton more. Now and then,
on high-days and festivals, a bit of cheese was
eaten with sensual reUsh ; but it is a matter of
history that the ordinary fare of these voluptuaries
was bread dipped in water.

The national divinity of the Romans is un-
known. To all but the hierophants his name
was a secret. Cicero has admitted that to him
it was undisclosed. A tribune was even put to
death for having pronounced it. If, in such a
matter, conjectures were worth anything, it would
not be irrational to fancy that the deity who
ranked as Jupiter's superior was Pavor, Fright.

The hardiest and foremost conquerors in the
world, the descendants of a she-wolf's nursling,
were timid as children before the unintelligibility
of the universe. Their earliest gods were revealed
in the thunder ; their belief was a panic ; and
when the panic subsided, it was succeeded by a
dull, unreasoning dread.

No other land has seen a vaster Pantheon.
There were so many divinities that Petronius
said it was easier for the traveller to meet a god
than a man. The more there were, the less in-
secure they felt. When they conquered a country,
they took the gods as part of the spoils, but they

54 The Anatomy of Negation,

treated them with great reverence \ the temples
were left standing and the altars unharmed. This
moderation was probably due less to a sense of
duty than to fear. They were afraid of their own
gods ; they were afraid of those of other nations ;
and those of whom they knew the least seem to
have frightened them most.

In those days there was no iconoclasm, nor
was there any attempt to make proselytes. The
whole sentiment of Roman antiquity was opposed
to the suppression of a creed, and such an idea
as supplanting one religion by another was un-
known. This liberality was particularly manifest
during the latter part of the republic. At that
time a statue to Isis was erected vis-k-vis to
Jupiter. Sylla escorted a Syrian goddess to
Rome, and Mithra, who had been lured from
the East, became very popular among the lower
classes. But all this occurred after triumphant
campaigns. When Rome was young, her gods,
if equally numerous, were less concrete.

The religion of the Sabines and the Latins was
the naturalism of their Aryan ancestors. In it
the gods, if emblematic, were unimaged; they
were manifestations of the divine, but not actual
divinities. Each new manifestation was a fresh
revelation, to which the early Italiot was quick
to give a name and found a worship ; but in the
worship there was more of dread than of hope,
the dread of the unknown and the invisible.

Gradually the gods became less abstract, but,
as M. Boissier has hinted, they were probably

The Negations of A ntiquity. 5 5

as lack-lustre as the imagination of the labourers
that conceived them, and so remained dully
and dimly perceived until peddlers from Cumae
and Rhegium came over with wares and legends.
To their tales the Romans listened with marvel-
ing surprise. Their gods, like themselves, were
poor and prosaic j they had no history, no myths ;
and with a pleasant and liberal sense of duty,
they robed them with the shreds and tatters of
Ionian verse.

At precisely what epoch this occurred is un-
certain ; but as the art of writing was familiar to
the Romans in very ancient times, and as it has
been shown that the Roman alphabet was drawn
from Eolo-Dorian characters, it is not unreason-
able to infer that relations between the two races
were established at a comparatively early date.

The gods to whom the freedom of the city
was thus unwarily granted, grew and expanded
with it, but their native charm had been lost
in crossing the sea. The serene mythology
in which they were nursed was supplanted by
gloomy superstitions ; the gay and gracious fic-
tions were dulled with grave chronicles ; and
the gods, who at home were cordial and indul-
gent, developed under the heavy hand of their
adopters into an inquisitive and irritable police.

Instead of being loved, they were feared, and
the fear they inspired was the heartrending fright
of a child pursued.

To the untrained minds of their supplicants
they lurked everywhere, even in silence. They

56 The Anatomy of Negation.

were cruel and vindictive ; they tormented the
Roman out of sheer wantonness, and for the
mere pleasure of seeing him writhe. Plutarch
has confided to posterity that in those days a
man could not so much as sneeze without
exposing himself to their anger. Under such
circumstances, worship was not merely a moral
obligation, it was a matter of business, a form of
insurance against divine risks, in which the wor-
shipper with naive effrontery tried to bargain
with the gods that they should hold him harm-
less. This effort was solemnised by a religious
ceremony whose meaning had been forgotten,
and during which the priests mumbled prayers
in a jargon which they did not understand.

With a retrospect even of two thousand years,
it is a little difficult to fancy that the Romans
pinned their faith to these mummeries, yet such
seems to have been the case. In Greece there
was much incredulity,' but it was the laughing
incredulity of a boy who has disentangled him-
self from the illusions of the nursery. That of
the Romans took a different form; it was an
irritated scepticism which vacillated between
defiant negation and fervent beHef. Doubtless
there were enlightened men who took it all easily
and with several grains of Attic salt ; but they
were infrequent ; incredulity seems to have been
the exception and in no wise the rule.

When the Roman, angered to exasperation,
braved the gods with a sacrilege, at the first sign
of impending danger he was quick to implore

The Negations of Antiquity. 57

their protection. Sylla, feeling in the humour,
sacked Delphos and insulted Apollo; all of
which, Plutarch says, did not prevent him, the
first time he was frightened, from praying to the
very god whose temple he had pillaged. And
Sylla, it may be remembered, was the last one to
harbour any unnecessary superstitions. If re-
morse was felt by such an accomplished ruffian
as he, what could be expected of the mass of his
compatriots, who, if equally ruffian, were far less
accomplished ?

In reading back through history, it seems as
though the Romans hated their divinities and
yet were afraid to show their hatred; and it
seems too that had one of them met a god alone,
that god would have fared badly. Indeed, it is
probable that the majority were animated with a
feeling of displeasure like to that of the Norse
warrior who ardently wished to meet Odin that
he might attack and slay him. Nevertheless, they
attended to their religious ceremonies; though
they did so, perhaps, very much as most people
pay their taxes. Of two evils, they chose the
least. But when it was found that Evemerus had
announced that the gods were ordinary bullies,
who had been deified because every one was
afraid of them, it was very generally thought that
the right nail had been struck full on the head.
In any event the idea was highly relished ; and
when in a certain play an individual was intro-
duced who denied that there was such a thing as
a Providence, the applause of the audience was

58 The Anatomy of Negation.

appreciatively eruptive. It was like the sight of
a sail to shipwrecked sailors.

This, however, was all very well in comedy,
where any little blasphemy brought with it the
thrill and flavour of forbidden fruit ; but tragedy
was a different matter. There, it is said, when
the hero announced his escape from the infernal
regions, children screamed and women shuddered.
And indeed the contemporary pictures of the
land of shades seem well calculated to terrify
even the valiant. In the imagination of the
people, any life beyond the tomb was nearly
synonymous with an eternal nightmare. Of
actual and physical torture there was none, or
at least none, they believed, for them. The ven-
geance of Jupiter descended only on Titans and
insurgent kings j it disdained the insignificance
of the vulgar.

Nor was there any hope of happiness. The
beatitude of the Elysian Fields was only for the
anointed. The common mortal received neither
reward nor punishment. The just and the unjust
were plunged into the grotesque horrors of a
fantastic night, from which, save on the stage,
there was no escape.

The poets, admittedly, gave pictures of after-
life that were other and more alluring than this,
but their pictures were discredited j and besides,
between the conceptions of the dreamer and the
opinions of the masses there is a chasm that is
never bridged. To the general public the idea
of immortality does not seem to have been a

The Negations of Antiqtdty. 59

consolation. Probably it partook something of
the character of an embarrassing dilemma. On
the one hand was the liberty to accept it for
what it was worth ; on the other was the privilege
to disbelieve in it entirely. There were doubtless
not a few who took the latter course, and whose
consequent freedom of thought must have been
a cause of shuddering envy to the orthodox ; but
so inextinguishable is the love of life, that the
majority seem to have preferred to believe that
existence, however miserable, was continued be-
yond the tomb, to adopting any theory which
savoured of extinction. They were afraid, Seneca
said, to go to Hades, and equally afraid not to
go anywhere.

Toward the latter part of the republic, the
credulity of the masses was somewhat impaired.
Echoes of the obita dicta of the enlightened
reached their ears. Besides, there was then little
time for devotional exercises. Rome was in a
ferment ; the tramp of soldiery was continuous ;
cities were up at auction ; nations were outlawed ;
institutions were falling ; laws were laughed at ;
might was right, and magnificent vice triumphant.
The field, then, was prepared for nothing if not
a morahst, and Nature, who is often beneficent,
produced one in the nick of time.

The annals of literature are harmonious with
the name of Rome, yet Rome was the mother of
but two men of letters — Caesar and this moralist
who was called Lucretius. Concerning the latter,
history has been niggardly. It is said that he

6a The Anatomy of Negation.

was born when Caesar was a child, and died when
Vergil was putting on the toga virilis ; but beyond
these dates history is dumb.

Lucretius is known to be the author of a poem,
the most exquisite perhaps in the Latin tongue ;
but after that is recorded there are no anecdotes
to help the sentence out. "Veil thy days,"
Epicurus had said, and the passionate Eoman
took the maxim for a motto. How he lived or
why he lived, has been and now always will be
purely conjectural. Yet if there is no diary to
tell of the poet's incomings and outgoings, it is
not a difficult matter to familiarise oneself with
his train of thought and to picture the circum-
stances that directed it.

During his childhood, Sylla and Marius were
playing fast -and -loose with their armies and
with Rome. As a boy he could have witnessed
a massacre beside which St. Bartholomew's was
a street row — the massacre of fifty thousand
allies at the gates of Rome — and on the morrow
he may have heard the cries of eight thou-
sand prisoners who were being butchered in the
circus j while Sylla, with the air of one accounting
for a trivial incident, explained to the startled
Senate that the uproar came from a handful of
insurgents bellowing at the whip. Later came
the revolt of Spartacus, the conspiracy of Cataline,
the flight of the coward Pompey, and finally the
passing and apotheosis of Caesar. If such things
are not enough to give impressions to a poet,
then one may well wonder what are.

The Negations of Antiquity. 6i

In a monograph on this subject,* to which,
it should be said in passing, the present writer
is much indebted, M. Martha has noted that
Lucretius believed in but one god. That god
was Epicurus. " Deus ille fuit, deus," he ex-
claimed ; and if the words sound exuberant, they
may perhaps find an excuse in the fact that
the Romans were very ignorant and Epicurus
very wise. How he became acquainted with
the works of the grave Athenian is unrecorded.
In Rome, as has been hinted, contemporary
acquaintance with them was scant and consisted
of hearsay. At that time some fragmentary
translations of Greek physics had been made,
and it is possible that through them his atten-
tion was directed to materialism in general and
Epicurism in particular. There is even a legend
which represents him studying in Athens at the
fountain-head. But however this may be, it is
clear that Lucretius gave Rome her first real
lesson in philosophy.

The doctrine which Lucretius preached to
his compatriots was one of renunciation — renun-
ciation of this world and renunciation of any
hope of another. He was fanatical in his dis-
belief, and he expounded it with a vehemence
and with an emphasis which, while convincing
enough in its way, was yet in striking contrast to
the apathy of Epicurus, who, serenely consistent
to his principles, saw, as M. Martha says, no

* Le Poeme de Lucr^ce.

62 The Anatomy of Negation.

need to get excited when admonishing others
to be quiet. But their tasks were dissimilar.
Epicurus addressed himself to those who were
already indifferent, while those who listened to
Lucretius were still among the horrors of their
original faith.

It was these horrors that Lucretius set about
to dissipate. His imagination had caught fire
on the dry materialism of Greece, and it was
with the theory of atoms that he sought to rout
the gods. The undertaking was not a simple
matter. The abolition of the divine was an
abolition of every tenet, political as well as
devotional. The moment the atomistic theory
was accepted, away went the idea that the phe-
nomena of nature were dependent on the will of
the gods ; the whole phantasmagoria of religion
faded, and with it the elaborate creed of centuries
evaporated into still air. There was nothing left ;
even death was robbed of its grotesqueness.

To those who objected that in devastating
the skies a high-road was opened to crime,
Lucretius, pointing to the holocausts, the heca-
tombs and the sacrifices, answered, "It is religion
that is the mother of sin."

"Religio peperit scelerosa atque impia facta."

Other teachers had tried to purify religion, but
Lucretius wished nothing short of its entire sup-
pression ; it had been without pity for Rome, and
he was without pity for it. He hacked and hewed
it with all his strength, and with a strength that

TJie Negations of Antiquity. 63

was heightened by irony and science. The irony
was not new to Rome, but the science was.
Against the panic of superstition he opposed the
tranquillity of common sense; against Pavor, Veri-
tas, or at least that which seemed truth to him.
There is nothing classic about Lucretius except
his materialism. The value of that is slight,
but contemporary readers have found themselves
startled at the modernity of his sentiments. The
cry of disgust which came from him is identical
with that which the latest singers have uttered.
Their common pessimism has been echoed across
the centuries. In many ways Lucretius may be
considered Pyrrho's heir as well as that of Epi-
curus. Between the testators the difference is
not wide. One addressed the mind, the other
the heart ; the ultimate object, the attainment of
happiness, was the same. If their dual influence
has been unimportant, it is perhaps because the
goal is fabulous. In this respect Lucretius may
then be considered their direct successor, and one,
moreover, who had his own views regarding the
possible improvement of the possessions which
descended to him. Lucretius not only denied
the existence of the gods, he denied the existence
of happiness. There was none in this Hfe, and
in his negation of an hereafter there could be
none in another. As for ambition, what is it
but a desire for an existence in the minds of
other people — a desire which when fulfilled is a
mockery, and unfulfilled a tomb ? And besides,
to what does success lead ? To honour, glory and

64 The Anatomy of Negation.

wealth? But these things are simulachres, not
happiness. Any effort, any aspiration, any strug-
gle, is vain.

" Nequidquam, quoniam medio de fonte leporum
Surgit amari aliquid, quod in ipsis floribus angat."

Nequidquam ! In vain, indeed ! How vain,
few knew better than Alfred de Musset, when he
paraphrased that immortal, if hackneyed, distich
in lines like these :

"Au fond des vains plaisirs que j'appelle a mon aide,
Je sens un tel degout que je me sens mourir."

But Lucretius' nequidquam applied not only to
empty pleasures ; it applied to all the illusions
that circle life, and to all that drape the grave.
His disenchantment needed but one thing to be
complete, a visit from that thought which was
afterwards to haunt De Vigny :

" Seul, le silence est grand, tout le reste est faiblesse."

Whether or not the influence of Lucretius was
great enough to effect a revolution, is difficult to
determine. But this at least is certain : he was
a popular poet, and the appearance of his work
coincided with a great decline of superstition.
The dread which had been multiplying temples
subsided. Among the educated classes, atheism
became the fashion. Those who were less indif-
ferent occupied themselves in cooling their in-
dignation, but believers were infrequent. Varro
declared that religion was perishing, not from the
attacks of its enemies, but from the negligence

The Negations of Antiquity, 65

of the faithless. The testimony of Lucilius is to
the effect that no respect was shown to laws,
religion, or to gods. To Cicero the latter were
absurd ; and the immortality of the soul, which
Caesar denied in the open senate, was to him a
chimera. " In happiness," he said, " death should
be despised; in unhappiness it should be desired.
After it there is nothing." Cornelius Nepos
looked back and saw temples in ruins, unvisited
save by archaic bats. Religion was a thing of
the past. Here and there it received that out-
ward semblance of respect which is the due of
all that is venerable, but faith had faded and
fright had ceased to build. The Romans, some
one has suggested, were not unlike those fabled
denizens of the under-earth, who suddenly de-
serted their subterranean palaces, left their toys,
their statues and their gods to the darkness, and,
emerging into the light, saw for the first time the
pervasive blue of the skies and the magnificent
simplicity of nature.

Later, there was a revival. The restoration
of religion was undertaken as a governmental
necessity. The Senate proclaimed the divinity
of Augustus, and thereafter the Caesars usurped
what little worship was left. That there was much
faith in their divinity is doubtful. Valerius Maxi-
mus appears to have had no better argument
than that they could be seen, which was more
than could be said of their predecessors. Ves-
pasian seems to have taken the whole thing as a
joke. " I am becoming a god," he said with a

F

66 The Anatomy of Negation.

smile as he died. Meanwhile, in the general
incredulity, the earlier deities lost even the im-
mortality of mummies. Under Diocletian a pan-
tomime was given with great success. It was
called, The Last Will and Testament of Defunct
fupiter.

CHAPTER III.

THE CONVULSIONS OF THE CHURCH.

The earliest barbarian that invaded Eome was
a Jew. He did not thunder at the gates; he
went unheralded to the Taberna Meritoria — a
squalid inn on the Tiber that reeked with garlic
— broke his fast, and then sauntered forth, as
any modern traveller might do, to view the city.
His first visit was to his compatriots at the foot
of the Janiculum. To them he whispered some-
thing, went away, returned and whispered again.
After a while he spoke out loud. Some of his
hearers contradicted him ; he spoke louder. The
peddlers, the rag-pickers, the valets-de-place and
hook-nosed porters grew tumultuous at his words.
The ghetto was raided, and a complaint for
inciting disorder was lodged against a certain
Christus, of whom nothing was known and who
had managed to elude arrest.

Who was this Christus? Apart from the
Gospels, canonical and apocryphal, history gives
no answer. He is not mentioned by Philo or
Justus. Other makers of contemporary chro-
nicles are equally silent. Josephus makes a

F 2

68 The Anatomy of Negation.

passing allusion to him, but that passing allusion
is very generally regarded as the interpolation
of a later hand. It may be added, that while
Justus and Josephus say nothing of Jesus, they
yet describe Essenism, and in those days many
of the tenets of the early Church were indis-
tinguishable from it. It seems, therefore, not
unfair to suppose that either these historians
knew nothing of the teaching of the Christ, or
else that they considered it too unimportant to
be deserving of record.

An early legend has, however, been handed
down from Celsus, a Jew who lived about the
time of Hadrian. The work containing this
legend has been lost, and is known only through
fragments which Origen has preserved. In sub-
stance it amounts to this. A beautiful young
woman lived with her mother in a neglected
caphar. This young woman, whose name was
Mirjam — Mary — supported herself by needle-
work. She became betrothed to a carpenter,
broke her vows in favour of a soldier named
Panthera, and wandering away gave birth to a
male child called Jeschu, — Jeschu being a con-
traction of the Hebrew Jehoshua, of which Jesus
is the Greek form. When Jeschu grew up, he
went as servant into Egypt, which was then the
head-quarters of the magicians. There he learned
the occult sciences, and these gave him such
confidence that on his return he proclaimed
himself a god.

The story of Mirjam and Panthera is repeated

The Convulsions of the Church. 6g

in the Gemaras — the complements and com-
mentaries of the Talmud — and also in the
Toledoth Jeschu, an independent collection of
traditions relative to the birth of the Christ.
These later accounts differ from that of Celsus
merely in this, that Mirjam is represented as a
hairdresser, while Panthera or Pandira is de-
scribed as a freebooter and a ruffian. It may be
noted that, in a work on this subject, Mr. Baring-
Gould states that St. Epiphanius, when giving
the genealogy of Jesus, brings the name Panthera
into the pedigree.*

The importance of these legends is slight, and
the question of their truth or falsity is of small
moment. That which it is alone important to
consider is the individuality of the Saviour ; and
the point whose conveyance has been sought is
simply this, that beyond a restricted circle nothing
was known of it during the first century of the
present era.

Jesus, the Anointed, the Christ, was the flower
of the Mosaic Law. The date of his birth is
uncertain, and the story of his early years is
vague. The picture of his boyhood, in which
he is represented as questioning the Darschanim,
the learned men, is, however, familiar to us alL
In the schools — the houses of Midrasch, as they
were called — he heard the sacred books of his
race expounded, and learned such lessons in
ethics as were obtainable from the moralists of

* The Lost and Hostile Gospels.

70 The A natomy of Negation,

the day. Meanwhile the dream of Israel, the
forecast of a triumphant future, the advent of
a Messiah, the abrupt upheaval which was to
be both the beginning of the end and the end
of the beginning, the punishment of the wicked,
the sanctification of the faithful, the remission of
sins and the magnificence that was to be, were
constantly discussed before him. As he grew
older, he seems to have placed little credence
on these prophecies ; he waived them aside,
retaining only the lessons in ethics, to which, in
advancing years, as his own ministry began, he
added an idea which he had gathered from one
preaching in the wilderness, an idea which his
own originality heightened with a newer force
and flavour, and which formed the subsequent
corner-stone of the Christian Church.

At that time his belief in himself appears to
have been slight. To the title of Messiah he
made no claim. It was given to him unsought
by his earliest adherents, who later imagined a
genealogy which certain factions of Christianity
declined to accept. Among these, the Ebionites
and Docetae are the more noteworthy. To the
one he was an ordinary individual ; to the other,
a phantasm.

The story of his birth is one which is common
to many religions. In a fragment of Irenaeus it
is stated that the Gospel according to St. Matthew
was written to the Jews, who earnestly desired a
Messiah of the royal line of David. To satisfy
them that their wish was fulfilled was not an easy

The Convulsions of the Church. 7 1

matter. The Aramaic Gospel to the Hebrews,
as well as the Gospel according to St. Mark,
offered no evidence that Jesus was the one they
sought. But the early Church had the bold-
ness of youth. Against the existing Gospels she
opposed a new evangel, one which was more
complete and convincing than its predecessors,
and one, moreover, which bore the revered and
authoritative name of Matthew. St. Matthew,
however, had then long been dead, and his ability
to write in Greek does not appear to have been
suspected.

The Gospel which the Church attributed to
him is to-day very generally regarded as a com-
pilation of its predecessors, with the addition of
a genealogy. The Messiah, it had been pro-
phesied, would be of the house of David, and
accordingly an effort was made to show that
Jesus was of the royal race. The royal race
seems then to have been extinct \ but that is a
side issue. The one point to be noted is that
the descent of Jesus is claimed through Joseph,
who, it is stated, was not his father.

The genealogy completed, the historian turned
his attention to two passages in what is known
to-day as the Old Testament. The first of these
passages occurs in Isaiah (vii. 14 — 16), the second
in Micah (v. 2). The first relates to a child that
the Lord was to give as a sign, and the second
designates Bethlehem as his future birthplace.
It may be noted that the term in Isaiah which
refers to the child's mother, and which was after-

7 2 The A natomy of Negation.

wards rendered into Trapdivog, is o/me, and o/me
means young woman. The pseudo- Matthew,
however, preferred a narrower description, and
represented the mother as a virgin. In regard
to the second passage, there is doubtless some
mistake, as all impartial commentators are agreed
that the nativity of Jesus took place, not at Beth-
lehem, but at Nazareth.

There are, however, few great events which
have been handed down through history un-
swathed in fables and misconceptions. The
Gospel according to St. Matthew — and the re-
mark holds true of the others — was written with-
out any suspicion that it would be subjected to
the scrutiny of later ages ; it was written to pre-
pare man for the immediate termination of the
world. Such misstatements as it contains may
therefore be regarded with a lenient eye.

But to return to the point. However slight
was the belief of Jesus in himself, it is tolerably
clear that the pretensions of his adherents angered
the Nazarenes. They declined to admit the royal
and supernatural claims that were advanced in
favour of one whose kinsmen were of the same
clay as themselves. To them he was merely a
a graceful rabbi. Yet when he addressed the
wondering fishers of Galilee, his success was both
great and immediate. His electric words thrilled
their rude hearts ; they were both charmed and
coerced by the grave music which he evoked
from the Syro-Chaldaic tongue ; their belief in
him was spontaneous ; they regarded him as

The Convulsions of the Church, 73

dwelling in a sphere superior to that of humanity j
gladly would they have proclaimed him king ; and
it was from their unquestioning confidence that
Jesus drew a larger trust in himself. Certainly
his personal magnetism must have been very
great. There is a legend which represents him
as being far from well-favoured, and this legend,
like the others, is doubtless false. It is probable
that he possessed that exquisite, if effeminate,
type of beauty which is not infrequent in the
East. One may fancy that his tiger-tawny hair
glistened like a flight of bees, and that his face
was whiter than the moon. In his words, his
manner and appearance, there must have been
a charm which was both unusual and alluring.
Indeed, there were few who were privileged to
come into direct contact with him that did not
love him at once ; but the multitude stood aloof.
It refused to recognise the son of David in the
mystic anarchist who had not where to lay his
head.

The ministry of Jesus did not extend over
three years. M. Renan thinks it possible that it
did not extend much over one. But the time,
however short, was well filled. On its lessons,
races and nations have subsisted ever since. The
pity of it is that the purport of the instruction
should have been misunderstood.

It has been already hinted that the corner-
stone of the Christian Church was formed of an
idea which Jesus gathered from John the Baptist.
When, therefore, he sent forth his disciples, he

74 The A natomy of Negation.

gave them no other message than that which he
had himself received : " Go, preach, saying, The
kingdom of heaven is at hand." And he added :
" Verily, I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone
over the cities of Israel before the Son of Man
be come." " All these things shall come upon
this generation," were his explicit words to his
hearers and disciples. After the episodes in the
wilderness, Jesus went into Galilee, saying, " The
time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at
hand." And a little later he addressed his audi-
tors in these words : " Verily, I say unto you that
there be some of them that stand by which shall
in nowise taste of death till they see the kingdom
of God come with power."

Citations of this kind might be multiplied
indefinitely. If the testimony of the Gospels is
to be believed, it is evident that the disciples
were convinced that the fulfilment of the pro-
phecy was a matter of months or at most of a
few years. They lived, as M. Eenan has noted,
in a state of constant expectation. Their watch-
word was Maran atha^ The Lord cometh. In
fancy they saw themselves enthroned in immu-
table Edens, dwelling among realised ideals amid
the resplendent visions which the prophets had
evoked.

It was this error that formed the corner-stone
of the Christian Church. When later it was
recognised as such, the Church interpreted the
" kingdom of God" as the establishment of the
Christian religion.

The Convulsions of the Church. 75

But Jesus had no intention of founding a new
religion, and still less of substituting a personal
doctrine for the Mosaic Law. He came to pre-
pare men, not for life, but for death. The virtues
which he praised most highly were those of re-
nunciation and abnegation of self. His one
thought was centred in the approaching end of
the world. It was on this belief that the value
of his teaching rested ; viewed in any other light,
his continual condemnation of labour would be
inexplicable j while his prohibition against wealth,
his adjuration to forsake all things for his sake,
the blow which he struck at the virility of man,
his praise of celibacy, his disregard of family
ties, his abasement of marriage, and his contempt
even of the dead, would be without meaning.

The faith which he inculcated was a necessary
preparation for the event then assumed to be
near at hand. It was exacted as a means of
grace. In it the reason, the understanding, had
no part. It was the complete submission of the
intelligence, a resolution to accept dogmas with-
out question. In the moral certainty which his
believers possessed of the immediate realisation
of their hopes, it is not surprising that this faith
should have been readily accorded. The enigma
lies in the faith of the subsequent centuries. It
may be, however, that the doctrine which has
descended to us was merely the exoteric teaching.
Of at least fifty Gospels that were written, four only
have been recognised by the Church. Of these,
the originals do not exist, and their supposed

^6 The Anatomy of Negation.

texts have been so frequently re-touched, that
more than thirty thousand variations are said to
have been discovered. It may be, then, that
there was another doctrine, an esoteric teaching,
which was never fully disclosed, or else has been
lost in the dust-bins of literature. This pos-
sibility is strengthened by the fact that Valen-
tine is recorded as asserting that he had received
an esoteric doctrine which Jesus imparted only
to the most spiritual among his disciples; and
the possibility is further heightened by the incon-
gruity between the sublimity of the genius which
was the Christ's and the tenancy of a belief in
the realisation of the visions of Daniel.

Jesus was in no sense a scientist, but his in-
sight was piercing and his intuitions clairvoyant.
He was the most transcendent of rebels, but he
was possessed of a comprehension too unerring
to be deluded by the Utopias of dream. It may
be, then, that in the solitudes of the desert he
conceived some such system as that which was
taught by his predecessor in Nepal. To him, as
to the Buddha, life was a tribulation. And what
fairer paradise could there be than the infinite
rest of chaos ? Let the sullen rumble of accursed
life once be quelled, and God's kingdom would
indeed be come with power. What save this
could have been that peace which passeth all
understanding ?

It may be remembered that according to the
Hebrew sages man survived only in his children.
The doctrine of resurrection, and the attendant

The Convulsions of the Church. y/

theory of rewards and punishments, was unknown
to them. But at the time of the advent of the
Christ, these ideas were part of the teaching of
the Pharisaic party. Where they were gathered
is uncertain. They may have been acquired
through acquaintance with the Parsis — and cer-
tainly Satan bears an astonishing resemblance to
Ahriman — or they may have merely represented
the natural development of Messianic hopes. In
any event they seem to have pre-occupied Jesus
greatly; and when questioned about them, he
gave answers which, while delicate in their irony,
are seldom other than vague.

It is probable that at the time when the ques-
tions were addressed to him, his system, which
owing to his sudden death was perhaps never
fully elaborated, was then merely in germ. But
that he reflected deeply over the views of the
patriarchs there can be no doubt, and it is equally
indubitable that he considered the high-road to
salvation to be discoverable, if anywhere, through
them. The logic of it amounted to this : Life
is evil; the evil subsists through procreation;
ergo, abolish procreation and the evil disappears.

Many texts from the canonical Gospels might
be given in support of this statement, but to
cultivated readers they are doubtless too familiar
to need repetition here. For the moment, there-
fore, it will suffice to quote two passages from
the lost Gospel according to the Egyptians, a
chronicle which was known to exist in the second
half of the second century, and was then regarded

78 The Anatomy of Negation,

as authoritative by certain Christian sects. The
passages are to be found in the Stromata of
Clement of Alexandria, iii. 6 — 9. In one, the
Saviour speaks as follows: " I am come to destroy
the work of the woman : of the woman, that is,
of concupiscence, whose works are generation
and death." In the other passage, Salome, hav-
ing asked how long men should live, the Lord
answered, "So long as you women continue to
bear children."

These passages, if authentic, and there is little
reason to think them otherwise, seem tolerably
conclusive. In any event, it was this idea that
peopled with hermits the deserts of Nitria and-
Scete, and it was this same idea which in its
weakened force filled those bastilles of God, the
convents and monasteries of pre-mediaeval days.
Cerdo, Marcion, and others of lesser note, advo-
cated a doctrine of which it was evidently the
starting-point ; in many religious communities its
influence is still distinguishable ; but the question
as to whether or not the idea as here represented
was really the one On which the thoughts of the
Saviour were turned, seems best answerable in the
affirmative, if for no other reason than that it is
less extravagant and more logical to regard the
Christ as a practical philosopher than as an allur-
ing visionary. And if he was not the one, he
must have been the other. Certainly no one
can claim for him any higher originality than
that which was manifested in the form and flavour
of his parables. He was the most entrancing of

The Convulsions of the Church. 79

nihilists, but he was not an innovator. Others
before him had instituted a reaction against the
formalism of the Judaic creed. The austerity of
his ethics, the communism which he preached,
his contempt of wealth, and his superb disdain
of everything which was of this world, were
integral parts of the doctrine of the Essenes.
The conception of a Supreme Being, differing
in benignity from the implacable terrorism which
Jehovah exerted, had been already begun by the
prophets. Jesus unquestionably amplified the
Father of Israel into the God of Humanity, but
he did not invent Him. It may be further noted
that Jesus had no thought of representing him-
self as an incarnation or descendant of the Deity.
To such a title he made no claim, nor, except
in certain passages inserted in the fourth Gospel,
is he ever represented as using it. If Son of God
at all, he was so in the sense that might apply
to all men, and of which the address beginning,
"Our Father who art in heaven," is a fitting
example.

Yet this at least may be said. He created
pure sentiment, the love of the ideal. He gave
the world a fairer theory of aesthetics, a new
conception of beauty, and he brought to man a
dream of consolation which has outlasted cen-
turies and taken the sting from death. So
singular and powerful was the affection which
he inspired, that after the crucifixion, Mary of
Magdala, in the hallucinations of her love,
asserted that he had arisen. He arose, indeed,

8o The Anatomy of Negation.

but, as elsewhere suggested, it was in the ador-
ing hearts of his disciples. And had it been
otherwise, had their natures been less vibrant,
their sympathies less exalted, less susceptible to
psychological influences, the world would have
lost its suavest legend, and the name of the pale
Nazarene would have faded with those of the
Essenes of the day.

]V[. Eenan says that Rome, through relations
with Syria, was probably the first occidental city
that learned of the new belief. There were then,
he has noted, many Jews there. Some were
descendants of former prisoners of war, others
were fugitives ; but all were poor, miserable and
down-trodden. To this abject colony Christianity
brought an unexpected hope. The ideal, it is
true, had fled from earth ; but was it not possible
to find it again above ?

Many there were that accepted the new creed
unquestioningly, but' some of their more con-
servative brethren, disturbed at its dissidence
with their orthodox tenets, denounced their com-
patriots to the government. It is possible that a
certain amount of suppression was then exercised,
but it appears to have been accidental and mo-
mentary. The Romans were familiar with too
many deities to be alarmed at the advent of a
new one. Their polytheistic tendencies made it
quite easy for them to believe in a god, made
man, and the suppressions which ensued were
ordered in the interest of the public peace. The
Christians were evidently regarded as seditious \

The Convulsions of the Church, 8i

in denying the divinity of the Caesars they were
guilty of nothing less than high-treason. They
were punished accordingly, but their punishment
had no religious signification. The Epicureans
might easily have been subjected to analogous
treatment, but the Epicureans were philosophers,
and as such saw no reason for pulling a wry face
at harmless mummeries.

Then, too, the early Christians seem to have
made themselves extremely unpopular. The Pan-
theon was most hospitable; its niches were free to
every comer. But the believers in the Nazarene
would have none of it. They not only refused any
allegiance to Olympian potentates, but they would
not permit their own God to consort with them.
It was tantamount to saying that Jupiter's society
was pernicious. There were few indeed that
pinned much faith to that opulent divinity ; but
the open show of respect which was demanded as
a governmental necessity was generally accorded,
and nothing else was asked. The Christians,
moreover, gave offence by their mode of Hfe.
They appear to have been a quiet, silent and
possibly inoffensive sect, who avoided the forum
and the circus, and passed their hours in sullen
seclusion. Added to this, they predicted the
approaching end of the world, which was obstinate
enough to continue to revolve through spacious
voids of which they were utterly ignorant ; and
this prophecy on their part could not have been
regarded otherwise than as an open slur on the
imperial optimism of the day.

82 The Anatomy of Negation.

It was doubtless about this time that the edict,
Non licet esse Christianos, was passed — an edict
which with curious clairvoyance appears to have
been directed mainly against those Eomans who
were tempted to embrace the new belief. It is
one of the platitudes of history that Kome fell
through her rottenness. Yet, as M. Kenan has
been at no loss to show, Eome fell when her
soldiery became converted. The spirit of peace
which pervaded the early Church enervated a
nation; the virility of the most belligerent of
races was sapped. But this is a digression.
During its infancy, Christianity was smitten by a
disease which has been likened to croup. This
croup was endemic in Alexandria, and from there
floated over to Kome. It was called Gnosticism.
Gnosticism was a compound of corrupt Plato-
nism, Hinduism and charlatanism. To abandon
M. Kenan's simile and take another, it was the
bridge over which the world passed from pagan-
ism. Gnosticism gathered up theosophy, mys-
ticism, rites, ceremonials and art — everything,
in fact, which seemed worth the gathering — and
passed them all to Christianity, which, thus
equipped, set out on its triumphant career. But
not at once. The populace, as has been hinted,
was not favourably disposed. Tertullian says
that a Christian was defined as an enemy of
gods, emperors, laws, customs, and Nature itself.
To the believers in Jesus was ascribed the influ-
ence of that which the modern Koman calls the
jettatura. They were held to be connected with

The Convulsions of the Church. 83

every calamity ; and after each disaster the Eternal
City echoed with shrieks from uncounted throats,
Christianos ad leomm ! To the circus with the
Christians ; let them camp with the beasts ! It
was then that Christianity learned to hate.

Meanwhile, the Ghetto mounted like a flood.
Its ascension was favoured by many things. The
atmosphere of Kome dripped with metaphysics,
and through it had passed a new and pervading
sense of lassitude. Nero was dead ; and Nero, it
may be noted, was paradox incarnate. He was
an imperial nightmare that was far from unpo-
pular ; a drama of the horrible, with a joke for
finale \ a caricature of the impossible in a crim-
son frame ; a Caesar whose follies were laws and
whose laws were follies; a maniac whose cell
was the world and whose delirium was fame ; a
sceptred acrobat, with a throne for spring-board;
an emperor jealous of a tenor ; and a cabotin
jealous of the gods ; in fact, the antithesis of
the humdrum. Under him, Eome saw luxury
and ferocity hand- in-hand ; cruelty married to
pleasure. Christians mantled in flame illuminated
the gardens of a prince. Intoxication had no
frontiers. Life itself was a breathless chase after
impossible delights. But now all was quite dif-
ferent, and it was with something of that lassitude
which succeeds an orgy that the Romans found
themselves tired even of themselves. They could
not all have the moon for mistress. What was there
left for them to do ? Christianity oflered itself,
and as often as not Christianity was accepted.
G 2

84 The Anatomy of Negation.

After Constantine had used the new belief as
a masquerade, its spread was rapid. Julian,
indeed, threatened to prevent such of the Gali-
leans from wearing their heads as refused to aid
him in the reconstruction of polytheism, but the
halt under him was momentary. The impulsion
continued unchecked ; the intermediate persecu-
tions had made it notorious ; the advance con-
tinued, but in the advance the watchword, Maran
atha, had lost its meaning. The end of the
world was no longer expected. Fortune favour-
ing, Christianity turned optimist. Yet paganism
was not dead ; it had merely fallen asleep. Isis
gave way to Mary ; apotheosis was replaced by
canonization ; the divinities were succeeded by
saints; and, Africa aiding, the Church surged
from mythology with the Trinity for tiara.

At the close of the fourth century, the Church
was practically mistress of civilization. Her sway
was immense and uncontested. And what a sway
it was ! Temples, statues and manuscripts were
destroyed. Bands of monks went about pillag-
ing and demolishing whatever they could. The
Bishop Theophilus, after destroying the temple
of Serapis, set fire to the Alexandrian library,
which contained nearly all the literary treasures
of the past. But the power of the Church, though
magnificent, was brief. At the moment when her
glory was most brilliant, when Julian was forgotten
and persecution had ceased, a mixed multitude
of barbarians beat at the gates of Rome, and in
their victorious onslaught swept antiquity away.

The Convulsions of the Church, 85

When the Church found herself surrounded
by unfamiliar kings and chieftains — a set of fair,
proud, honest and brutal ignoramuses, who wan-
dered from place to place, or shut themselves up
and got drunk in their strongholds, and with
whom she had nothing in common— her domi-
nant idea was to govern them. In this she suc-
ceeded ; strength, however great, is defenceless
against cunning, and the Church then was the
depository of all the intelligence of the age. But
her first act was to save herself from the violence
to which society fell a prey. To save herself,
she announced the principle of the separation
of spiritual and temporal power. This accepted,
she announced as corollary the superiority of the
spiritual over the temporal. The rest was easy.
Free inquiry was condemned ; belief was forced ;
heretics were persecuted ; and out of the ashes
of imperial Rome a mitred prelate dragged a
throne. L'Eglise^ c'efait lui. Through his influ-
ence the barbarians were led to baptism like
brutes to the slaughter. Those who objected
were baptised by force. Dagobert had all Gaul
baptised in this way. Thereafter the Church
presided over an eclipse of the intellect that
lasted a thousand years. During that thousand
years it was blasphemy to think ; yet over those
ages that are known as dark there hovered that
prescience of fairer things which is the accom-
paniment of night.

Meanwhile, in a corner of the Orient whither
some of the flotsam and jetsam of civilization

S6 The Anatomy of Negation.

had drifted, a college of charlatans wearied the
centuries with abstractions and discussions on
words. Their earlier disputes are legendary.
One of them concerned the soul. Was the soul
round or oblong ? This question was never satis-
factorily determined. Another proposition which
was much discussed concerned the Saviour. Was
he, or was he not, co-eternal with God ? The
Council at Nicaea, to which appeal was made,
decided that he was both ; and the Church
anathematised all those who disagreed with its
decision. In spite of the anathema, certain
erudites suggested a compromise which involved
the acceptance or rejection of an iota : ofioovaios
signified consubstantial, bfioiovaios signified like
as to the substance. If the one term were re-
placed by the other, the difficulty, it was argued,
would be removed. But this solution was too
easy to be well received, and the absence of
that iota caused the .death of many thousand
dissenters.

Later, Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople,
asserted that Mary, being of the earth earthy,
could not rightly be considered the mother of a
God. This assertion was condemned as heretical
by the General Council of Ephesus, and it was
ordered that those who accepted it should be
exterminated at once. Eutyches the archiman-
drite announced the contrary of that which Nes-
torius had advanced. He was excommunicated ;
the true doctrine being that Jesus was both a
perfect divinity and a perfect man. Then sud-

The Convulsions of the Church. 8y

denly the Orient became peopled with heretics ;
some held to Nestorius, others to Eutyches. In
the second quarter of the sixth century, Justinian,
an emperor who is said to have been so illiterate
that he could not write his own name, and who
in consequence was easily bored by subtleties,
confiscated the property of all who were suspected
either of Nestorian or Eutychian sympathies.
In spite of these efforts, heresy was not sup-
pressed ; or perhaps it would be more exact to
say that when one was suppressed, its place was
immediately filled by another. At last, Heracli-
tus in utter exasperation issued an edict forbid-
ding any one to speak of the single or double
nature of Jesus the Christ. This edict itself was
regarded as heretical, and continued to be so
regarded until Constant published another which
forbade any theological discussion, n-o matter of
what kind, nature or description. To this edict,
which the Pope Theodore qualified as an abomi-
nable subtlety, no one paid any attention. Con-
stant, however, refused to be idle. He tried to
check the spread of monachism, which at that
time was enormous, and failing, went to Kome
and sacked it.

In the eighth century appeared the heresy
known as that of the iconoclasts. The Church,
as has been hinted, adopted much of the pomp
of paganism, and with advancing years made
herself gorgeous with crosses, images and tapers ;
but a particular predilection was manifested in
favour of big dolls, whether of marble, bronze or

8 8 The A natomy of Negation.

precious metals. To this the iconoclasts objected ;
with the Emperor Leo for chief, they destroyed
the statues of Jesus, of Mary, of the saints and
angels, wherever such statues were to be found ;
and for many years persecuted and massacred
the worshippers. Yet when the Empress Irene
assumed the purple, the iconoclasts were at
once pursued with a vigour that was riotous and
avenging. It is just possible that this terrible
lady perceived that the destruction of images
was the destruction of art. But be this as it
may, the Beautiful had been sadly frightened,
and thereafter remained invisible until lured to
view again by the enticements of the Kenaissance.
In P^urope, matters were even worse. There
was a continual panic, a ceaseless fear. There
was no security, either civil or ecclesiastical.
Diseases of the mind and body were omni-
present; famine at times was so ruthless that
anthropophagy was openly practised. The only
theory of right was might, and of this the Church
held the reins. Many of the bishops were little
better than bandits. They passed their days in
wandering from place to place and in pillaging
right and left. In a forgotten tale of Cervantes,
one amiable scoundrel hails another, " Does
your Grace happen to be a highwayman?"
"Yes," the other answers, "in the service of
God and honest people." Eliminate the courtesy
and replace it with a blow from a bludgeon, and
the question and answer may be represented as
repeated indefinitely for five centuries.

The Convulsions of the Church. 89

Those of the clergy whose tastes were less
adventurous devoted themselves to study and
were looked upon as magicians ; others, in the
dim recesses of undrained monasteries, weary of
all things, and most of life, gave themselves up
unresistingly to acedia, the delirious pessimism
of the cloister, and shrieked for death.

It was in those days that a demon of uncommon
ugliness flitted through the gloom of the abbeys,
whispering gaily to the cowering monks, " Thou
art damned, and thou, and thou art damned for
all eternity !" In the cathedrals, maidens had
seen a beckoning fiend, who through shudders
of song had called them down to swell the red
quadrilles of hell. These visitors of course were
legates of Satan. And who was Satan? His
biography, though well filled, need not be long.

Satan was Jew from horn to hoof. The
registry of his birth is contained in the evolution
of Hebraic thought. In early ages, when sabaism,
the primitive polytheism of the Semitic tribes,
narrowed into monotheism, Jehovah was wor-
shipped as the one real divinity. In his hands
were the springs of all that is, of good and evil
as well. But this idea was transient. About the
Eternal were grouped a number of spirits whose
duty it was to supervise the works of man. Among
these celestials was one whose role was limited
to that of accuser. This role appears to have
been gradually expanded into one of general
hostility. Above was Jehovah, below was man ;
while between the two were the inimical eyes of

90 The Anatomy of Negation.

Satan. In the younger books of the Old Testa-
ment, Satan is little more than a detective ; in
the New Testament he is an inciter to evil. But
during the intervening period two things seem to
have happened. The Hebrews had communi-
cated with the Parsis, and Satan, banished from
heaven, had assumed all the powers and attri-
butes of Ahriman. Thereafter he was hatred
incarnate, the spirit that stets vernemt, the fallen
son of a mighty father, a disinherited prince who
had founded another monarchy and called it
Hell.

It is in this guise that he appears in the New
Testament, and the delicate moral of the Synop-
tic Gospels is perhaps little more than the pre-
figurement of the endless conflict between right
and wrong. But be this as it may, it is evident
that after Satan and the Saviour had met, the
apparitions of the former became a matter of
frequent occurrence. 'Did not his minions the
sucubes and incubes haunt with lascivious lips
the sleep of holy men and holier women ? Was
it not through his artifices that St. Victor was
seduced by a beautiful girl ? Did he not person-
ally menace and threaten St. Maur ? The stone
which he flung at the inflexible St. Dominick is
a matter too well attested to be susceptible of
doubt. See how he tempted St. Anthony. In
fact, unvisited by him it was difficult to be con-
sidered a saint at all. In the middle ages he
was everywhere. The atmosphere was so heavy
with his legions, that the Messalians made spit-

The Convulsions of the Church. 91

ting a part of their devotions. From encounter-
ing him at every turn, the world at last became
used to his ways, and thereupon imagined that
pact in which the devil agrees, in exchange for
the soul, to furnish whatever is desired. The
case of Gerbert is one in point. According to
the gossip of the day,* Gerbert, once a Spanish
student, afterwards Archbishop of Kavenna, and
subsequently Pope, entered into an agreement
of this kind, and one night the devil came in
person to claim him. It was the agreement
they had made together long before in Cordova,
where Gerbert, finding his studies too arduous,
had signed the bond in exchange for the royal
road. It was the devil who had taught him all
he knew — algebra, clock-making, and how to
become a Pope. It was clear as day that he
would have known none of these things without
infernal assistance. Gerbert resists, but Mephisto
proves his claim. "You did not think me a
logician, did you?" are said to have been his
historic words, and, presto ! Gerbert disappears
in a fork of lambent flame.

When Christianity first raised its head, it
viewed the pagan gods as part of the cohorts of
Satan. These cohorts Tertullian divided into
two classes — the rebels who had been banished
from heaven in Satan's train, and the angels who
in antediluvian days had fallen in love with the
daughters of men. Their queen was Lili Abi

♦ Michelet : Histoire de France.

92 The A natomy of Negation,

(Lilith), Adam's first wife, from whose name
our lullaby is said to be derived. The Dusii, a
later subdivision who have given us the deuce,
were so well known to St. Augustine that he
declared it an impertinence to deny their exist-
ence. These latter appear to have been a
malignant set of incubi who made a prey of
women. Mr. Lecky says that but little over a
hundred years ago an annual mass was given in
the abbey of Poissey that the nuns might be
preserved from their wiles.

Satan, meanwhile, lost much of his dignity.
Mice, wolves and toads became his symbols, his
auxiliaries, and even his momentary incarnations.
Throughout the middle ages no sorcerer was con-
sidered well equipped without a sleek black cat,
an animal to which, like many a sensible mortal,
the devil appears to have been greatly attached.
It was in the company of the cat that the sabbat
was attended. The sabbat was popularly held
to be a mass offered to Satan, and any one sus-
pected of attending it, or being in any wise
affiliated with Mephisto, was burned. The first
punishment for this offence occurred in Toulouse
in 1275. During the next fifty years over four
hundred people were burned in the neighbour-
hood. In the fifteenth century all Christianity
joined in a hunt for witches ; and the hunt con-
tinued for three hundred years, until every sor-
cerer had disappeared and Salem put out her
bonfires. In each country the warmth of the
chase was in direct proportion to the power of

The Convulsions of the Church. 93

the clergy. To spare a witch was considered an
insult to the Almighty. Luther was particularly
vehement on this point ; so, too, was Calvin ;
and Wesley was as great a fanatic as any. Mon-
taigne was one of the first to laugh at witchcraft ;
but Montaigne, like all advanced thinkers, was
wickedly incredulous. The hunt, as has been
hinted, was continued, and it was kept up not
only until all the witches had disappeared, but
until all belief in the devil had gone with them.
Persecution subsided when scepticism began.
The history of the Inquisition is exactly analo-
gous. When the world began to think, intole-
rance ceased.

During this time Satan was not otherwise idle.
He continued to appear in the most unexpected
and surprising manner, and that, too, up to with-
in comparatively recent dates. His last historical
appearance is in a pleasant anecdote in which
he is represented as visiting Cuvier. He enters
the great man's study with his usual quczre^is quem
devoret air. " What do you wish of me ?" Cuvier
asks curtly, for he is annoyed at the intrusion.
"I've come to eat you." But Cuvier's shrewd
eye had already examined him. "Horns and
hoofs!" he retorts; " granivorous ! You can't
do it." Whereupon, outfaced by science, Satan
vanished through an in-quarto, never to appear
again save when, in the garb and aspect of a
policeman, he visits the conscience of the mis-
demeanant.

But to return to the middle ages. The chroni-

94 I'he Anatomy of Negation.

cles of Cassien, Vincent de Beauvais and Eaoul
Glaber, are filled with lurid pictures of those
dark days. Disasters followed one another with
the regularity of the seasons. The desolation
which the Church had sought to stay had in-
creased to terrific proportions. The empire of
Karl the Great had been swept away as utterly
as that of the Caesars. Throughout Europe there
was a hideous fear, a breathless expectation. The
Antichrist had come. His presence was signalled
from the pulpit. Churches, monasteries, donjons
and burgs, echoed and thrilled with the rumour
of his sacrileges. Now he was the son of the
Popess Johanna, conceived during a pontifical
procession ; now he was a rufiian marauder, burn-
ing basilicas and violating the tombs of the saints.
In the ninth century there was an eclipse of the
sun which frightened a king to death. In 945,
while a cyclone swept over Paris, monsters armed
with battle-axes dropped from the skies, and, rush-
ing into a church, tore down the pulpit, which
they used as a battering-ram to destroy a neigh-
bouring house. In 988, a wolf entered the
cathedral of Orleans, and, seizing the bell-rope
in his mouth, rang out the knell of the world.
It was evident to every one that the trumpets
of the last judgment were soon to be heard. At
once there was a frantic effort to make peace
with God ; there was a rush for the monasteries,
and a general donation of property to the Church.
The dies ircB was at hand. The exact date was
known. It was to come on the 25th of March,

The Convulsions of the Church. 95

A.D. 1000. An hysterical rictus passed over the
face of Christendom; the forgotten hope was to be
realized ! At last the dies ilia arrived. In the
Holy See the Pope sat, enervated and impatient,
counting the minutes and awaiting the climax
through the succeeding fractions of each hour.
In the churches, the crowd, with heads bowed
to the ground, felt time limp by and yet saw no
sign. The expectation lasted four days and
four nights. Then, so runs the chronicle, an
immense dragon rushed through the open skies.
In an abbey the eyes of a Christ were seen to
weep. Yet still the earth remained unsundered
and humanity unclaimed.

When the panic subsided, the Church found
that her wealth had been largely increased. Her
power, too, had developed. The cowl was every-
where, and everywhere it was dreaded. This
dread was not unmingled with disgust ; the fana-
ticism, asceticism and illiteracy of the clergy
resulted as often as not in dehrium and satyrisis.
Indeed, their customs were neither amiable nor
cleanly. The different bulls which the Popes
launched at them make it easy to see of what
they were capable, and difficult to fancy of what
they were not. But their manners and morals
are relatively unimportant; the terrorism that
the Church exerted is more to the point.

The chief instruments of coercion of which
the Church disposed were excommunication and
the confessional. Without confession, no abso-
lution ; and without absolution, eternal torture.

g6 TJie A natomy of Negation.

There is a quaint little anecdote about the
Cure of Mendon, in which that immortal jester is
represented face to face with Clement VII. His
Holiness having graciously permitted him to ask
a favour, Eabelais begged to be excommunicated.
Exclamation-points and question-marks shot from
the Pontiff's eyes. " Holy Father," said the apos-
tate, " I am a Frenchman. I come from a little
town called Chinon, where the stake is often
seen. A good many fine people have been burned
there : some of my relatives, among others. But
if your Holiness would excommunicate me, I
fancy that I would never be burned. And my
reason is this. Journeying lately with the Bishop
from Paris to Eome, we passed through the
Tarantaises, where the cold is bitter. Having
reached a hut where dwelled an old woman, we
besought her to make a fire. She took a faggot
and tried to light it, but did not succeed ; then
she took some straw from her bed, and, being
still unable to make it burn, she began cursing,
and said, * Since the faggot won't burn, it must
have been excommunicated by the Pope's own
jaw.'" This of course occurred after the Eefor-
mation, and relates to a man who was a notorious
sceptic. It is even probable that the story is a
fabrication j but as an anecdote it is serviceable
in pointing the moral of the decadence of great
things. In the primitive days of the Church,
excommunication amounted merely to expulsion.
Those against whom it was addressed were shut
out of a limited circle; but when that circle

The Convulsions of the Church. 97

expanded until it circumscribed all society, the
potency of excommunication was prodigious. If
the anathema was launched at a king, his entire
monarchy fell under the ban. When Philippe
Auguste was excommunicated, neither baptism,
marriage nor burial was permitted in the realm.
Corpses rotted in the highways. The people
became wild with terror. This state of affairs
lasted for eighteen months — in fact, until the
interdict was removed. But with time, as has
been hinted, its potency waned ; like other
good things, it was overdone ; and early in the
fifteenth century all those who had the heart to
laugh must have been hugely amused at the
spectacle of three rival popes excommunicating
each other.

During the dark ages, however, amusement
was rare. The masses were a prey to all the
delusions and depressions that come of poor
nourishment. They were ignorant and credu-
lous j their minds were filled with fables and
legends; they were terrorised by the dead as
well as the living ; agonised in this life, they were
threatened with everlasting torture in another.
It is, therefore, but small wonder that they
shuddered at the viaticum and trembled before
the priest. It was through his ministrations alone
that salvation was obtainable.

At first the priest was merely an intercessor.
In return for his good offices, he asked of the
penitent little else than fasting, prayer and con-
trition; but gradually he discovered that these

98 The Anatomy of Negation.

canonical penances were without advantage to
himself, and he began to exact payment for the
divine forgiveness which it was his privilege to
declare. In the course of time, this custom was
found so profitable that plenary indulgences were
granted. In 1300, pilgrims from far and near
flocked to Eome and covered the altars with
gold. Every sin, every penalty, was remitted.
The claims of purgatory were obliterated. The
joy was so great, that the pilgrimage was called
a jubilee.

The jubilee was instituted by Boniface VIII.,
the author of the bull Ausculata fill, in which
he declared that, as representative of God, he
had the right and the power to uproot, tear
down, destroy, dissipate, rebuild and raise up in
His name. In spite of this fine language, the
Avignon Consistory established that he had
asserted that the Trinity was an absurdity ; that
it was fatuous to believe in it ; that religion was
all a He; that there was no harm in adultery;
and that he, the pope, who could humble kings,
was mightier than Christ.

The success of the first jubilee was so great
that Urban VI. held another; only instead of
summoning the pilgrims to Kome, he allowed
his absolution to be hawked about wherever
sinners most did congregate. It had been said
that the riches of man are his redemption, and
the clergy were very ready to put the saying into
practice. Indulgences were not only sold, they
appear to have been forced on those who refused

The Convulsions of the Church. 99

them. A dominican, Johan Tetzel, took charge
of the sale in Germany of those granted by
Leo X. He announced that he had power to
deliver a full discharge from the penalties of sin,
even si quis Virginem vitiasset ac gravidam fecisset.
His tariff is still exhibited.

Meanwhile, the General Councils had moved
from Constantinople to Rome. The heresies
which they were called upon to consider were
mainly protestations against the despotism of
the Church. First came the heresies of the
Petrobusians and the Arnoldists — unimportant,
but vexatious; so vexatious, in fact, that their
respective founders, Petrus de Brueys and Arnold
de Bresse, were burned at the stake. The Pe-
trobusians were followed by the Vaudois, who,
although pursued, proscribed and anathematised,
maintained a secret continuity until Calvinism
offered them a harbour. Another heresy was
that of the Albigenses. The Albigenses, who
came from a village in Languedoc, at a time
Michelet has noted, when Languedoc was a
Babel, professed a mixture of Gnosticism and
Manicheism. They considered the Saviour to
have been a man, like any other, who had
suffered the just punishment of his sins. But,
what was more serious, they questioned the pre-
rogatives of the Holy See. Innocent III. deter-
mined to exterminate them. At his commands
the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy
set out for Languedoc. The query was, how the
heretics were to be distinguished from the ortho-
H 2

100 The Anatomy of Negation.

dox. " Kill them all," said Armand, the pope's
legate \ " kill them all j God will know His own."
Sixty thousand are reported to have been killed;
and of these, seven thousand were slaughtered in
a cathedral that was ringing with a Te Deum.
The whole of Provence was devastated ; vines
were uprooted, harvests destroyed, and houses
torn down. As this seemed insufficient, the
bishops received orders to visit personally or by
delegate any portion of their diocese in which
they suspected that heretics might lurk. When
this decretal was made, the Inquisition was esta-
bUshed. " Et ardet," said the pseudo St. John ;
and those two words were sufficient to send over
half-a-million of human beings to the stake.* Yet
still heresies continued to appear. There was
the heresy of the Dulcinists, the heresy of John
Wicliffe, of John Huss, of Jerome of Prague.
J'en passe et des plus exquises.

From the Crusades, in which nations wrangled
over a sepulchre, sprang a new heresy, or rather
an apostasy — that of the Templars, whose office
it had been to protect pilgrims on their way to
the East. It was claimed that, instead of attend-
ing to their duties, they had become believers
in Muhammad ; and, moreover, that they held
Salahaddin to be a valiant and courteous knight,
which he probably was. Muhammad, who had
long been turned to dust, was a well-intentioned

* Michelet: Histoire de France. Llorente: Histoire
de rinquisition. . "

The Convulsions of the Church, loi

visionary, afflicted with what is known to patho-
logy as hysteria muscularis — the only disease
that ever founded a religion. Now if the Tem-
plars were apostates, they at least were logical.
The Papacy had pitted Christianity against Mii-
hammadanism, and staked the authenticity of
each on the result. The result was that the
latter proved its claim. This point, however,
does not seem to have been advanced in their
favour. They were tried, convicted, and many
of them were burned.

Meanwhile, the popes and princes of the
Church had lost faith, and decency as well.
Petrarch, in his letters Sine titulo, speaks of the
papal court as follows :

"There is here (in Avignon) everything ima-
ginable in the way of confusion, darkness and
horror. Avignon is the sewer of every vice, the
gully of every wickedness. I know from personal
experience that in this place there is neither piety
nor charity. Faith is absent; there is nothing
holy, nothing just, nothing human. Friendship,
modesty and decency are unknown. Houses,
squares, temples, courts and pontifical palaces
drip with lies. The hope of a future life is con-
sidered an illusion ; Jesus Christ is looked upon
as a useless invention; virtue is regarded as a
proof of stupidity, and prostitution leads to
fame."

Such is Petrarch's account ; but Petrarch was
possibly annoyed because his sister had been
seduced by the pope.

1 02 The A natomy of Negation.

The Abb^ Guyot, author of the " Dictionary of
Heresies," says, though alluding this time to
Kome : " The luxury of the bishops, their scan-
dalous mode of life, their ignorance, which is on
a par with their vices, have furnished heretics
with excellent grounds for violent rhetoric."

Of Sextus IV., Infessura says, in words that
are best left untranslated, "Puerum amator et
sodomita fuit." And it would appear, not only
that he was guilty of these charming practices,
but that he granted indulgences for their general
commission. Innocent VIII., his successor, by
way of setting a good example to future pontiffs,
made public acknowledgment of four sons and
three daughters. He established an agency
where the remission of sins could be bought as
readily as a railway ticket to-day. Of Alexander
VI., the father and lover of Lucretia Borgia,
little that is favourable can be said, except per-
haps that he was the most magnificent ruffian
that Rome had seen since the days when Nero,
with a concave emerald for monocle, watched
the rape of Christian girls.

If the popes were a bad lot, the clergy do not
seem to have been much better. Gerson says
that the cloisters were like markets, the convents
like lupanars, and that the churches and cathe-
drals were lairs of bandits and thieves. But the
mediaeval priest was not only a voluptuary and
a freebooter, he appears to have been a jocular
blasphemer as well. It is a part of history that
when Luther reached Rome he heard more than

The Convulsions of the Church. 103

one of them consecrate the Eucharist with a jeer:
" Panis es et panis manebis, vinum es et vinum
manebis." There cannot have been two hells ;
and, granting that there was one, the Eoman
Catholic and Apostolic Church seems to have
been built on it.

In the year 1500 the world was very old. The
Eenaissance had lied. It had promised and not
fulfilled. A few years before, Savonarola had
sought to reform Christianity, and particularly
the pope. He was burned. In words that rise
and greet and kiss the eye, Dante had rejuve-
nated hell. Petrarch had poured the newest of
wine into a cup that was gothic. Across the
centuries an unterrified spirit of beauty had
called to Boccaccio, and he had repeated the
message to inattentive ears. There seemed to
be no one that cared to blow away the dust of
ages. Every germ that promised fruit was neu-
tralised. Yet Italy was peopled with atheists.
The jurisdiction of the Orient was lost ; England
was no longer a vassal. A tottering pontiff ana-
thematised in vain, and, seeing the uselessness
of his maledictions, filled Europe with the uproar
of his debauches. The world was very old, but
in the printing-press it had found the waters of
youth. The earth was larger, and soon the skies
were to be unveiled.

It was in those days that a German monk
threw an ink-bottle at the devil and defied the
pope. A little later, Bohemia seceded. Germany
followed in the wake, and with her went Switzer-

104 The Anatomy of Negation.

land and the Northern States. Luther's heresy
became orthodoxy. And yet the newest thing
about it was so old that it had been forgotten.
Everywhere it was welcomed. The question of
its youth or age had nothing to do with it. It
was in opposition to the existing order of things,
and as such it was a success. Catholicism was
a twilight, Lutherism a dawn. Christ said. Pre-
pare j the Church said, Sleep ; the Reformation
called upon the world to awake. Luther's aim
was to lead belief back to the starting-point, but
for the time being his aim was overlooked. The
heresy which bore his name was considered
merely a quarrel between monks. " Bravo !"
Hutten said; *'let them eat each other up !"

Luther, who was a courageous blunderer and
sincere in all his endeavours, did something more
than try to change the current of affairs. He
created German .as Dante had created Italian.
It was he who caught and tamed the ringing
tongue of the Niebelungen. From the resisting
heroes of the Rhine he lured a secret, and, first of
his race, gave to a nation a language for birthright.

Barbarism, meanwhile, had not absorbed itself.
Pyrrho still slept. The reform which Luther
instituted aggravated the evils which it proposed
to correct. The Protestantism which followed
was as intolerant as the mother Church ; more
so perhaps, for it had the intolerance of youth,
and as it broke and scattered into countless
creeds, each of the brood, save the Quakers,
arrogated to itself the right to persecute and

The Convulsions of the Church. 105

destroy. To Luther, persecution seemed not
only lawful but necessary. Calvin, who was as
intolerant as the Inquisition and every whit as
fanatical, made it a prop of his church. And
Knox, to whom one mass was more frightful than
ten thousand insurgents, declared that an idolater
merited nothing less than death.

But persecution, however endorsed, was not
of a nature to resist the influence of advancing
thought. As scepticism arose, intolerance de-
clined ; and as beHef in future punishment passed
away, so did the torture of the recalcitrant. It
may be noted that the lamented Ranke estimates
the number of human beings destroyed by Chris-
tianity as surpassing ten million. And yet there
are people who think that Justice merely limps.
During ten centuries it sat motionless in a cul
de-jatte.

Among the first to break a lance in the Lu-
theran tragedy was Erasmus. No one that has
read ''The Cloister and the Hearth" will need
to be reminded that the story of Gerard and
Marguerite is the history of his parentage. As
a knight-errant of free thought he went about
combating intolerance. In the last pages of the
ever-famous " Praise of Folly," he showed, with
exquisite felicity of diction, the folly of creeds
and sects. We are wiser now; but the world
then was learning the alphabet. Erasmus received
his full share of abuse, and, what is more to the
point, saw his enemies exhaust twenty-seven edi-
tions of his work. Unpopularity has its advantages.

1 06 The A natomy of Negation.

In spite of his intrepidity, Erasmus was as a
small boy in comparison to that abstradeur de
quinte essence^ Master Alcofrybas Nasier. Where
Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio had looked into
the past, the author of the exceedingly horrifying
life of the Great Gargantua pointed to unex-
plored horizons. The " Praise of Folly" was cold
as a rapier ; the biography which Eabelais gave
to the public was as exuberant, as prodigal and
as turbulent as the sea. It was a new praise of
Nature. Its appearance marked the beginning
of another Kenaissance ; in all its pantagruelism
there was not a single tear. Its philosophy was
a commingling of science and satire ; it was un-
exampled in boldness, but it was not dogmatic.
Rabelais, who had been educated in a monastery,
where the vows were those of ignorance and not
of religion, was too wise to be an atheist. He
objected mightily to tyranny, but he did not
meddle with the unknowable. If he was any-
thing, he was an agnostic. *' I am going in search
of the great Perhaps," he said on his death-bed.
His obscenity is compromising, but it is not
blasphemous. The nakedness of his thought
extended only to the material.

Another thinker who refused to take a step
beyond the real was Montaigne. Where Eabelais
hesitated, Montaigne doubted. He had caught
the Isostheneia of Pyrrho, and balanced his
thought in a perfect equilibrium. He neither
affirmed nor denied. If he fancied that the
universe was a foundling, his good taste pre-

The Convulsions of the Church. 107

vented him from openly questioning the parent-
age. In this respect his silence is admirable
and well worthy of imitation. Christianity he
looked upon as a decadence. He noted with
mild regret that the high-roads of civilisation were
moss-grown and abandoned, and that the com-
pass which the Greeks had used was buried
under the dust of centuries. But he waived con-
clusions ; his thought was too volatile to convey
a decision. Stella said that had Swift so desired,
he could have written beautifully about a broom-
stick. Montaigne wrote about nothing at all
with a charm that has never been excelled.

When Montaigne put a question-mark, Charron
shrugged his shoulders ; the Que sfay ie ? the
What do I know? became, What does it matter?
And yet, like many another that affected indif-
ference, Charron was ardent and prone to indig-
nation. In his chief work, De la Sagesse, a work
undeservedly forgotten, he said many smart
things to the orthodox, and he said them, too, in
a language which, if antiquated to-day, was then
very virile. He was among the first to note that
ideas of right and wrong vary with the latitude.
" That which is impious, unjust and abominable
in one place, is piety, justice and honour in
another. There is not a law, a custom or a
belief, that is everywhere received or rejected."
Eeligion, too, he held to be a question of lati-
tude. "Our religion is that of the country in
which we are born and educated; we are cir-
cumcised and baptised, we are Jews, Muham-

io8 The Anatomy of Negation.

madans or Christians, before we know that we
are men." To which he added: "A strange
thing it is that the Christian reHgion, which,
being the only beHef true and revealed of God,
ought to be extremely one and united, because
there is but one God and one truth, is, on the
contrary, torn into many parts and divided into
many conflicting sects, to such an extent even,
that there is not an article of faith or point of
doctrine which has not been diversely argued
and agitated, and given rise to heresies and dis-
sensions. But what makes it seem still more
strange is, that in the false and bastard religions,
whether Gentile, Pagan, Jewish or Muhamma-
dan, the like divisions do not appear." And
much more to the same effect ; concluding that
truth is intangible, religions are equally estranges
et horribles au sens commun, and that the sove-
reign remedy for' the ills of life is de se prester h
aultruy et de ne se donner qu'a soy.

While Charron in this manner was foreshort-
ening Pyrrho, Sanchez, a Spaniard, was laying
the foundations of agnosticism in a work enti-
tled, Tr actus de multum nobile et prima universali
Scientia^ quod non scitur — " Treatise on the very
noble and extremely universal Science, to wit,
that we know nothing." This contribution to
literature appears to have created quite a little
commotion; but, strange as it may seem, the
commotion subsided, and to-day, outside the
covers of a dictionary of philosophy, Sanchez,
like Charron, is hard to find.

The Convulsions of the Church. 109

In the course of these international attacks,
Kome had heard Bruno announce that the uni-
verse was a living organism whose soul was God.
He was sent to the stake. Vanini had refused
to discuss the immortality of the soul before he
was old, rich and a German. He was burned
at -Toulouse. Campanella wrote a book against
heresies, and was tortured at Naples seven times
for his pains.

But the fangs of Eomanism were being drawn.
The Pope Urban VIH. had written on his
brother's tomb, Hie jacet pulvis et cinis^ postea
nihil^ and announced that the world governed
itself. Decidedly the influence of the Church
was on the wane, and yet the time was still far
away when thought was to be disenthralled.

Were it not for a handful of thinkers, the
seventeenth century might be catalogued among
the dark ages. The intellectual fecundity which
was the characteristic of the sixteenth gave way
to an era which was largely one of mental stag-
nation. The world seemed tired of disputes,
and inclined, too, to accept old beliefs unques-
tioned. The hand of scholasticism was still upon
it. It viewed speculation with uneasy dread,
and kept its anxious eyes fixed upon the past.

And yet there were a few whose instincts
invited to other vistas. In Holland was Spinoza;
in England, Bacon and Hobbes; in Germany,
Kepler and Leibnitz j while in France was Gas-
sendi, Bayle, but first Descartes. " Give me
force and matter," he cried, "and I will refurbish

no The A natomy of Negation.

the world." Force and matter were not forth-
coming, but in that magnificent boast was the
accouchement of modern thought. One may-
even say that its layette was already prepared.
A few years before, Europe had listened to
Galileo recanting his heresy; but when, before
the assembled prelates, the prisoner muttered,
E pur si miiove^ a page of history was turned
down, and across it was written, Farewell to
Eome.

CHAPTER IV.

THE DISSENT OF THE SEERS.

In one of the forgotten plays of Laberius, a
jester is represented as recommending a smug-
faced companion to get a foretaste of philosophy
in the latrinae. In one sense the jester was wise
in his generation and clairvoyant too. About
philosophy in general, and metaphysics in par-
ticular, the impolite have always discerned a bad
odour. A,nd this not without reason. In lite-
rature there is nothing more unpleasant than an
attempt to prove something; indeed, if ever a
proper penal code is devised, the dietary pro-
ducts of logic will be declared contraband, and
every ergo banished the realm. In the absence
of any criterion of truth, such a word as therefore
has seemingly no raison (Tttre, The sum of all
the angles of a triangle may be equal to two
right-angles, but however amply that fact or any
other be demonstrated, it cannot lift the inquisi-
tive beyond the limits of an experience which in
itself may be erroneous. Who shall say but that
in some other sphere, where perhaps there are
now such commodities as square fluids and

1 1 2 The A natomy of Negation.

moral substances, — who shall say but that there
the sum of all the angles of a triangle may not
be equal to two right-angles ; or, as Mill has
suggested, who shall say but that there is a land
where two and two make five? Yet, waiving
such magnificent hypotheses, and granting that
deductions which follow from experience are
not erroneous, it must be admitted that they
bring us no nearer the truth ; the essence, the
reason of things is as intangible as before.

And metaphysics has yet another defect. The
eternal questions. What am I? What can I know?
— questions which it purports to answer — are left
for all response as vague as the enveloping scholia.
But the good that comes of evil is ever re-nascent,
and out of the questions and answers have sprung
the three foremost systems of modern anti-theistic
thought. Of these. Pantheism takes the pre-
cedence, which is the due of age. Its nominal
founder is Spinoza.

The life of Baruch Spinoza should be taught
to every school-boy. It is not only as uninterest-
ing as the ordinary studies of average youth, but
it holds a lesson of such gentleness, modesty
and abnegation of self, that in a search for a
better one the whole parade of history might be
reviewed in vain.

Like certain other notabilities, Spinoza was a
Jew. His parents were descendants of Portu-
guese Israelites, who had fled from the Inquisi-
tion and unfolded their tents behind the dykes
of the Netherlands. To-day, in Amsterdam, any

The Dissent of the Seers. 1 1 3

valet-de-place will designate the early home of the
philosopher, and every valet-de-place will point to
a different house. But when the sight-seer is
tired into satisfaction, discrepancies are of small
moment. Moreover, after exhausting his ima-
gination on the Burgwal, any valet-de-place is
competent to show the exact spot near the syna-
gogue where a fanatic believer aimed a dagger
at the thinker's heart. The aim was unsuccess-
ful, though it rent the coat; and this coat the
guide, if he is clever, will tell you that Spinoza
kept ever after by way of memorabilium. But,
clever or not, give him a louis and let him go.
Spinoza's life is not such an one as should be
listened to in the streets.

In the library at Wolfenbeiitel there is a por-
trait of a grave, olive-skinned Hebrew, who stands
in the upright idleness which is peculiar to por-
traits in oil. The hair falls back and over the
shoulders in an expanding flood. The face is
nearly oval, and the eyes are large and patient.
This portrait, which is of Spinoza, was probably
painted toward the close of his life. He died,
it may be noted, at the age of forty-four, in the
year 1677. As has been hinted, his life is without
interest. If there was a tragedy in it, it was, as
Mr. Wilde would say, that there was none at all.
There is some mention of a little romance with
the daughter of his teacher. But Spinoza was
poor, and it is said that a wealthier student made
diamonds of indifferent water fall in miniature
cascades before the maiden's unresisting eyes.
I

1 14 The A natomy of Negation.

It is possible that this legend, out of which
Auerbach has weaved one of his charming tales,
is not untrue. There is a quotation to the effect
that Mammon can win his way where angels
might despair j and if an angel, then, a fortiori^ a
philosopher. In any event, Spinoza appears to
have been jilted, which probably was the best
thing that could have happened. A thinker
should have everything, even to sex, in his
brain.

Spinoza was educated to be a rabbi, but with
increasing years he grew too big for Jewish theo-
logy and declined to visit the synagogue. It
was then that" some zealot tried to stab him.
This argument being insufficient, the elders
offered him an annual pension of a thousand
florins, on condition that now and then he would
appear in the synagogue and keep his opinions
to himself Spinoza, was very poor, but his opi-
nions were to him more precious than money.
He refused therefore, and was excommunicated
at once. The great ban, the Schammatha, was
publicly pronounced upon him. For half-an-
hour, to the blare of trumpets, he was cursed
in the name which contains forty-two letters;
in the name of Him who said, / am that I am
and who shall be; in the name of the Lord of
Hosts, the Tetragrammation ; in the name of
the Globes, the Wheels, Mysterious Beasts and
Ministering Angels; in the name of the great
Prince Michael; in the name of Metateron,
whose name is like that of his master ; in the

The Dissent of the Seers. 115

name of Achthariel Jah. The Seraphim and
Ofanim were called upon to give mouth to the
malediction. Jehovah was supplicated never to
forgive his sin, to let all the curses in the Book
of the Law fall upon and blot him from under
the heavens. Then, as the music swooned in a
shudder of brass, the candles were reversed, and
through the darkness the whole congregation
chanted in unison. Amen !

After that, Spinoza, being no longer a Jew,
changed his name from Baruch to Benedictus,
and turned his thoughts from the Kabbala to
Descartes. The life he thereafter led was one
of extreme simplicity. He earned his bread by
poHshing lenses, and expended on it but a trifle
more than the traditional obolus of Epicurus.
When his father died, his sisters, arguing that a
heretic had no right nor title to the property of
the faithful, tried to keep from him his inherit-
ance. Spinoza, however, appealed against them,
won his suit, and then gave back as free gift all .
the contested property except one bed, which his
biographer Colerus says, etait en verite fort bon.
A few other instances of his magnanimity might
be given, and a few anecdotes of his gentleness
related; but when they were told, the reader
would find himself as unacquainted with the man
as before. Properly speaking, he had no bio-
graphy ; his life was one of solitude ; its essence
was meditation; and the Wolfenbeiitel portrait
would have served its purpose better, had it
represented the sombre face of one whose eyes
I 2

1 1 6 The A natomy of Negation.

were lost in thought, and whose patient hand
poUshed a concave lens.

Spinoza's fame rests principally on two works
which shortly after his death were proscribed as
profane, atheistic and blasphemous. These works
are the Tractatus Theologico-politiciis and the
Ethica. The first is the key-note of rationalism,
the second is the basis of modern philosophy.
The rationalism of the first and the philosophy
of the second stand in the closest connection.
In both, Nature is shown to be an omnipotent
ruler, in whose court such a parvenu as the
supernatural is not received.

Spinoza's negations are three-fold. He denied
the existence of an extra-mundane Deity; he
denied that man is a free agent ; and he denied
the doctrine of final causes.

His negation of the existence of an extra-
mundane Deity is not always clearly understood.
The term Deus is strewn through his pages, and
its repetition has often misled the unwary. There
is, he taught, but one substance, and in this sub-
stance all things live, move and have their being.
It is at once cause and effect ; it is God. But
the term thus used has nothing in common with
the theistic idea of a Creator, who, having
fashioned the world, " sits aloft and sees it go."
On the contrary, God and the universe were to
Spinoza one and identical; they were correlatives;
the existence of the one made that of the other
a logical necessity. To him the primordial entity,
the fons et origo rerunty was God ; but God was

The Dissent of the Seers. 117

Nature, and Nature, Substance The three terms
he used interchangeably; the former predominate
in his earlier writings, the third in the Ethics.
His. reason for making use of the first is not
entirely apparent, unless, it be, as Dr. Martineau
has suggested, that even when the sun of Israel
had set, he still loved to linger in the mystical
penumbra of an earlier faith. But be this as
it may, and however his use of the term may
be interpreted, it is tolerably clear that Spinoza,
far from, lowering the Deity to Nature, exalted
Nature to a God. God was everywhere, and
every region was filled with the Divine.

Spinoza has been frequently blamed for reading
the banns over the unknowable and the known,
and perhaps the blame is not altogether unde-
served. But in this connection it may not be
amiss to call Goethe to his rescue. And Goethe,
it may be remembered, is the Spinoza of verse.
"To discuss God apart from Nature," said the
poet, *' is both difficult and dangerous. It is as
though we separated the soul from the body.
We know the soul only through the medium of
the body, and God only through Nature. Hence
the absurdity of accusing of absurdity those who
philosophically unite the world with God." Vol-
taire, however, took a different view, the view
of an inconsequent historian who relies on his wit.
Now wit is little else than the commonplace in
fine clothes ; and Voltaire, who treated the hum-
drum with the skill of a modiste, drew the threads
of fancy, and worked an elaborate hemstitch :

1 1 8 The A natomy of Negation.

" Alors un petit Juif, au long nez, au teint bleme,
Pauvre, mais satisfait, pensif et retire,
Esprit subtil et creux, moins lu que celebre,
Cache sous le manteau de Descartes son maitre,
Marchant k pas comptes, s'approcha du grand Etre :
'Pardonnez moi,' dit-il, 'en lui parlant tout bas,
Mais je crois entre nous, que vous n'existez pas.' "

That which is called Free-will had to Spinoza
a purely verbal existence. To him, the state of
mind at any given moment is the effect of some
definite cause, which itself is the effect of a pre-
ceding cause, and so on without end. His argu-
ment is to the point: "Imagine that a stone
which has been set in motion becomes conscious,
and, so far as it is able, endeavours to persist in
its motion. This stone, since it is conscious of
and interested in its endeavour, will believe that
it is free, and that it continues in motion for no
other reason than that it so wills. Now such is
the freedom of maii, which every one boasts of
possessing, and which consists but in this, that
men are aware of their own desires, and ignorant
of the causes by which those desires are deter-
mined."*

This apt negation of free-will in man, Spinoza
extended to broader spheres ; and in showing
that the force which moves the world acts because
it exists and as it exists — that it has no alterna-
tives, no standards of comparison of better or
worse, and no appreciation of antitheses, of right
or of wrong — in fact, in showing that everything

* Lettre 62. Traduction de Emile Saisset.

The Dissent of the Seers. 1 19

occurs in virtue and in accordance with eternal
laws which could not be otherwise — arrived at
the consoling deduction that he who understands
that everything which happens, happens neces-
sarily, will find nothing worthy of hatred, mockery
or contempt, but rather will endeavour, so far as
human power permits, to do well, and, as the
phrase goes, to be of good cheer.

There is something in the foregoing theory
that seems to savour of Calvinistic predestina^
tion. But it is only a savour. To the Calvinist,
predestination is made endurable by the belief
that everything is ordained by the highest wis-
dom ; while to the Pantheist, man is never the
subject of fate. The laws of necessity are iden-
tical with his own nature, and it is through an
understanding of them that he finds himself at
peace with all the world.

Spinoza held the doctrine of Final Causes to
be untenable, because inconsistent with the per-
fection that resides in God. His argument, which
is advanced in the Ethica^, has the charm which
attaches to brevity : " If God acts for a designed
end, it must be that He desireth something
which He hath not."

Spinoza was neither an optimist nor a pessi-
mist. He neither laughed at life nor grieved
over it. It is possible that he understood it.
Like many another before him, he had looked
about for happiness ; and in the search he saw
that such simulachres as wealth, distinction and
pleasure, even to that grande dame whose name

120 The Anatomy of Negation.

is Glory, were smitten with one and the same
defect. The desire for them sprang from an
archaic source, the love of the transitory. But
happiness to be real, he argued, should be im-
perishable. And where could such happiness
be found ? — where, indeed, save in the love of
the eternal and the unending, in the love of
truth, which in purifying and exalting the heart
shields it from vain desires ? If Spinoza had not
been a geometrician, he would have been a poet.

In the Tractatus Theologico-politicuSy Spinoza
noted, with great good sense, that a plain man
who does not enter upon philosophy may without
harm and even with profit believe whatever he
finds most edifying, provided he believes it sin-
cerely. And it is related that his hostess, a
simple-minded Lutheran, having asked him
whether the religion she professed was capable
of assuring her salvation, he advised her to seek
no other, nor to doubt of its efficiency. *' Do
but good works," he said, " and endeavour so far
as it is possible to lead a peaceful and virtuous
life."

As Heine has well said, wherever a great mind
gives utterance to its thoughts, there too is Gol-
gotha. Spinoza was persecuted during his life-
time, and after death his works were condemned
as profane, blasphemous and atheistic. And yet
it is probable that few men more sincerely reli-
gious than he have ever lived and taught. His
doctrine was one of abnegation of self and patient
devotion to the eternal. He was in love with

The Dissent of the Seers. 121

the Infinite; it was Nature that fluttered his
pulse; it was the Spirit of the universe that
filled his heart with living springs. Nevertheless,
there are to-day many warm-hearted and accom-
plished gentlemen whose views on Spinoza are a
trifle more than two hundred years behind the
age. To them he is still the blasphemer. But
in all sincerity one may ask which is the more
blasphemous, nay, which is the more vulgar, the
mind that pictures the Deity as a jealous tyrant
who keeps the world as a separate establishment,
or the thinker who seeks to banish the dream
that veils the part from the whole, and who
shows the soul of man and of the universe to be
the same ?

In attempting to convey the higher view,
Spinoza admittedly transcended the limits of
experience. Indeed, there are contemporary
free-thinkers who are ready to assert that he was
sunk in the grossest superstitions. Perhaps he
was; yet his superstitions were so refined, that
in them there was room for nothing but the
ideal.

A few years after Spinoza's death, on the 22 nd
day of November, 1694, Frangois Arouet and
Marie-Marguerite Daumart, his wife, caused to
be baptised at the church of St. Andre des Arcs
in Paris, a male child, who, born dying six months
before, lived long enough to christen himself
Voltaire.

The heart of the eighteenth century was like
a veilliebchen. As Michelet, who dissected it,

122 The A natomy of Negation.

announced, it was double. One half was Diderot,
the other Voltaire; but Rousseau was wedged
between. Voltaire wished superstition abolished
and the throne preserved ; Rousseau wanted the
monarchy abolished and the altar upheld. Dide-
rot sought the overthrow of both.

The united works of Diderot and Voltaire form
a library of ninety volumes. But much of their
labour is uncatalogued. Their ninety-first achieve-
ment is the French Revolution, their ninety-second
is Modern Thought. If they are little read to-day,
it is because their ideas have become common
property, their daring seems less bold. Con-
cerning Diderot, a word will be said later on ;
but no cbnj unction of phrases is rich enough to
paint Voltaire. His figure is as familiar as the
moon, yet the currents of his thought are almost
as intangible. Nature, who, as Malebranche
has said, speaks neither Latin nor Greek nor
Hebrew, had taught him the nothingness of
creeds. He had but one dogma, Reason. When
he preached God and liberty, the liberty was
freedom of thought, and God the deification of
common-sense. In his vague deism there was
room for many things. "Believe in Go.d," he
said to a questioning rhymster ; " believe in God;
there is nothing more poetic." But to Madame
du Deffand, in whom he confided, he admitted
his acquaintanceship with a man who thoroughly
believed that when a bee died it ceased to hum.
That man was none other than himself. In those
days there were not a few who beUeved as he

The Dissent of the Seers. 123

did. Among them was that most anti-christian
of monarchs, the fat Frederick, who played badly
on the flute, wrote verses that limp after him
through history, but who possessed an enchanted
sword, a nimble wit, and a great fund of appre-
ciation for those whose views coincided with his
Own.

From this monarch there came to Voltaire an
invitation requesting the pleasures of his society,
and this invitation Voltaire accepted. Voltaire
was never young. When he reached Berlin his
hair was white, and he looked, Madame de Stael
has said, like a wicked old monk come back from
another world to visit this ; but such a fascinating
pagan was he, that in winning him from the fif-
teenth Louis of France, Frederick valued the
gain more highly than a province.

At the historic suppers of the king, Voltaire
likened the symposiasts to the seven sages of
Greece in a lupanar. "In no corner of the
globe," he said, "has liberty of speech been
greater, or have superstitions been treated with
keener contempt." Beside Voltaire and Frede-
rick, the usual guests were the Marquis d'Argens,
Lamettrie, Maupertuis, Algarotti and d'Armand.
The last-named gentlemen are relatively unim-
portant, but the others should not pass unnoticed.

D'Argens was not only the king's guest, he
was his nearest friend, a sort of dignified Tribou-
let. He was a Provengal, an ex-free lance, hand-
some and dissipated, who after a riotous career,
during which he had explored most of the side

124 l^he Anatomy of Negation.

scenes of life, made love in five languages, and
fought over the better part of Europe, retired
suddenly to Holland and burned the midnight
oil. It was the old story of the devil turned
hermit. In Holland in those days, thought was
almost untrammelled. When a foreign author
was afraid of the printers in his own country, he
set those of the Netherlands at work, very much
as the ultra-naturalists of contemporary France
obtain to-day the assistance of Belgian publishers.
D'Argens therefore went to the Hague, hired an
apartment, shut himself up for six months, and
then walked out with the Lettres Juives in his
pockets.

The Lettres Juives, which are nothing if not
liberal, were read and appreciated by the Crown
Prince of Prussia, who at once asked d'Argens
to pay him a visit. But d'Argens sent a regret
The throne was occupied by Frederick Wilhelm,
and that monarch was not an agreeable person.
If he took a walk, everybody took to their heels.
Voltaire has given it to history that whenever he
met a woman in the street, he sent her about
her business : " Get thee hence, thou trull, thou
trollope ; thy place is at home !" — a remonstrance
which was accompanied as often as not by a blow
or a kick; and Voltaire adds that whenever a
minister of the gospel took it into his head to
view a parade, he was, if caught, treated in pre-
cisely the same manner.

D'Argens knew him by reputation, and de-
chned his son's invitation with thanks. "To

The Dissent of the Seers, 125

reach Potsdam," he wrote to the prince, "I
should have to pass three battalions ; and as I
am tall, well-built, and not altogether bad-looking,
I don't dare." But when the prince became
king, there was nothing to fear, and Potsdam
counted another guest.

It was not long before d'Argens became the
chamberlain, and, as has been hinted, the friend
of the king. He was a brilliant conversationalist,
'epigrammatic, paradoxical, and possessed of great
opulence of imagination. And Frederick, who
at that time was possibly the only German in
BerHn who knew how to talk, knew, too, how to
appreciate that ability in another. The intimacy
increased with years. When the king, overcome
by public and private misfortunes, doubtful of
the morrow and uncertain even of the day,
reflected on the advantages which a bare bodkin
can procure, d'Argens hurried to the rescue with
comforting maxims. The King listened, but
would have his say : " Philosophy, my dear
Marquis, is an excellent remedy against the ills
of the past or of the future, but it is powerless
against those of the present." " And what about
the impassability that Zeno taught?" "Zeno,"
answered the king, " was the philosopher of the
gods, and I am a man." Nevertheless, he took
heart again, and all thoughts of the bodkin were
dismissed. But d'Argens was not always so
comforting. On the eve of the battle of Ros-
bach, Frederick happening to remark that if he
lost it he would go and practise medicine in

1 26 The A natomy of Negation.

Venice, Triboulet steadied himself against a table
and hissed, " Toujours assassin."

D'Argens and Frederick grew old together.
They had disputes which made them faster
friends. They played practical jokes on one
another, and quarrelled noisily over trifles. The
king often acted like a school-boy, and d'Argens
not infrequently forgot that he was a philosopher.
He remembered, however, that he was not born
in Berlin. About Sans-Souci there circled at
times an icy wind that made him dream of Pro-
vence. One day he asked for his passport. Fre-
derick was vexed ; he did not like to be deserted ;
it diminished him in his own esteem. " Bah !"
he exclaimed, " what is a prince born for, unless
it be to cause ingratitude?" But he gave the
exeat, and d'Argens returned to his early home.
Soon after he died — a convert, so it was said.
When Frederick heard the rumour, he laughed ;
he knew d'Argens too well to believe any such
gossip as that. " If he received the Last Sacra-
ment," he said, "it is because it was given to
him by main strength."

"D'Argens," said Voltaire, "has the wit of
Bayle and the charm of Montaigne." The doc-
trine which he displayed in the Philosophie du
bon sens is a half-hearted Pyrrhonism. He, too,
saw that there was no criterion of truth, but he
could not always keep his eyes on the fact.
" How," he asked, " can men pretend to know
the essence of things when they are ignorant of
their own ?" That they cannot may be readily

The Dissent of the Seers. 127

admitted, unless it be that they are willing to
supersede judgment with faith, which proceeding
is the one that d'Argens recommended. He
was deeply purposeful, but he was circumspect.
What he shook with one hand, he steadied with
the other. When he showed the advantages of
belief, he was not in a greater hurry to do any-
thing else than to show its disadvantages. First
he honeycombed it with doubt and toppled it
over completely. Then he set to work and built
it up anew. After which he gave it another
shake, and so on indefinitely, until his ink
blushed and his pen refused its office. The
method employed by M. Renan is not dissimilar.
There are few lands in Europe that have been
more fecund in myths than Brittany. The
belief in that lost city of Is, whose spires the
fishers sometimes saw, whose bells, rung by the
waves, clang through the winter nights, and whose
magnificence was such that for the capital of
France no better name could be found than
Par-Is, equal to Is— the belief in that lost city
was the origin of many beautiful legends. In few
other lands has the faith in the weird and the
supernatural been preserved with greater sim-
plicity. Yet through one of those paradoxes of
which Nature alone holds the secret, Brittany has
been as fertile of doubt as of credulity. Many of
the foremost of French anti-theists claim it as
their home. Between Maupertuis and Renan
there is a parade of familiar names, and of these
names few are more significant than that of
Lamettrie.

1 28 The A natonty of Negation,

Lamettrie appears to have been an unprincipled
saint, a rake without vices. He was brilliant and
whimsical, an excellent purveyor of the entremets
of the imagination ; and as it is the individual
and not the topic that makes or unmakes con-
versation, the great Frederick held him in high
favour. Some years before Voltaire appeared in
Berlin, Lamettrie had written a book, VHistoire
naturelle de Pdme, which had created such a
stir that he had been obliged to leave France
and seek refuge in Holland. There he published
another book, V Homme machine^ which created
even a greater stir ; and while he was wondering
where he should hide, Frederick, who had read
his writings, and who never let slip an opportunity
of adding another philosopher to his collection,
invited him to Berlin. " He is a victim of theo-
logians and fools," said the monarch; "let him
come here and write what he pleases. I am
always sorry for a philosopher in difficulties ;
were I not born a prince, I would be one myself."

Lamettrie was quite willing to accord to a
king the pleasures of his company, and took
a seat at the royal supper-table without delay.
Frederick was so charmed with him that he
made him his salaried reader. " I am delighted
with my acquisition," he said ; " Lamettrie is as
light-hearted and clever as any one can be. He
is a sound physician and hates doctors ; he is a
materialist and not material. He says scandalous
things now and then, but we weaken his Epicurean
wine with the water of Pythagoras."

The Dissent of the Seers. 1 29

Like some other gentlemen of a sceptical
turn, Lamettrie announced that vice and virtue
were purely relative — a platitude which has been
running about the book-shelves ever since books
were shelved. But he added something which
is worth larger attention : "Away with remorse !"
he exclaimed ; " it is a weakness, an outcome
of education." And if virtue and vice are merely
questions of surroundings, it is indeed difficult
to view remorse otherwise than as a pre-mediaeval
emotion. But virtue, to say nothing of vice, is
something more. According to the Buddha,
virtue is the agreement of the will and the con-
science, a definition which would be matchless
if the will were free. . Marcus AureUus called it
a living and enthusiastic sympathy with Nature ;
but if the boundless immorality of Nature be
conceded, as it should, the fine words of the
emperor are as empty as the wind. Virtue, said
one who had eyed it narrowly, virtue is a name.
Perhaps. Yet virtue declines to be dismissed
with a phrase ; there is a disturbing magnificence
about it which routs the most skilful. In de-
scribing it, Raphael is a better lexicographer
than Shakespeare, though even Raphael, for all
his cunning, could not paint a temperament.
And virtue is little else than a question of dis-
position. It may be sunned and watered by a
thousand influences, it may be hedged and for-
tified, but in its essence it is temperamental.
However great the outward success may appear,
the lessons and precepts of ages will not suffice

K

130 The Anatomy of Negation.

to keep it unspotted if the inner spirit be adverse.
And as with virtue, so too with vice. Standards
may differ with the dimate, but in each case it
is the conscience that elects itself judge. It is
the heart, memory aiding, that gives us a para-
dise or a hell. If we could hush the conscience
and still the heart, we might afford to listen to
Lamettrie; and perhaps in future ages, when
through the progress of evolution man will lose
the lobes of his ears as he has already lost his
tail, when he will be as completely bald as he
was once entirely hirsute, perhaps then the con-
science will go the way of useless possessions;
but meanwhile to declaim against it is as profit-
able as asking alms of statues. We are perfectly
free to enjoy our remorse undisturbed.

Lamettrie admitted no other life than this, and
not unnaturally- sought to make the most of the
worst. His ideas are contained in a treatise on
Happiness, which he prefixed to a translation of
Seneca's thoughts on the same subject. "Our
organs," he said, **are susceptible of sensations
which render life agreeable. When the impres-
sion which a sensation conveys is brief, it is
pleasure that we experience ; prolonged, it is
bliss ; permanent, it is happiness. But in every
case it is the same sensation, differing merely in
intensity and duration. The absence of fear and
desire is happiness in its privative state; but to
possess all that one wishes — to have beauty, wit,
talent, esteem, wealth, health and glory — that is
a happiness which is real and perfect."

The Dissent of the Seers. 131

The spectacle of a eudsemonist is as charming
as that of a ballerine. Both belong to the cate-
gory of the Delightful. But even though one be
pleasured by a Taglioni, there comes a moment
when the pleasure palls. Lamettrie, who was
fond of adventurous flights and incursions — not
perhaps to the unknowable, but to that which he
might have known and did not — was wont to
please his readers with the ejitrechats of a lawless
imagination. As a consequence, his views, if
entertaining, are valueless. The real and perfect
happiness of which he speaks is a will-o'-the-wisp
of fancy. The possession of all that one wishes,
whether the possession is concomitant, as in fairy
tales, with the wish, or obtained after years of
striving, does not and never will constitute hap-
piness. In its essence, happiness is intangible ;
the desire for it is insatiable ; and consequently,
and despite every possession, it is ever unsatis-
fied. There may be a happiness which is tran-
sitory and fugitive, but there is none that is per-
manent. To say to the contrary is to announce
one of the most insolent absurdities that has
ever been proclaimed in the privileged aisles of
the insane. For the sake of example, let it be
supposed that in some one person are united all
the factors which Lamettrie mentions — beauty,
wit, talent, esteem, wealth, health and glory ; if
these possessions are what may be termed con-
genital, as in the case of a poet-prince, they are
taken by their possessor as a matter of course,
and have never served as preservatives frora

K 2

132 The A natoniy of Negation.

discontent ; on the other hand, if their re-union
is accomplished after more or less prolonged
endeavours, their possessor, in obtaining them,
finds himself as poor as before; he might be
able to call the world his own, and yet not know
what happiness is. The honours, the riches and
glory to which he aspired, are as empty as the
hands of the dead. If they are magnificent, it
is only from afar. The best that can be, the
best that ever has been, is in the discovery and
maintenance of contentment. Its factors are
two-fold — the first is health ; the second, indiffer-
ence.

Lamettrie's chief titles to recognition rest on
the Histoire naturelle de Vdme and the Homme
machine. The first-mentioned work is an argu-
ment against the belief in the immortality of the
soul. With this doctrine ancient philosophy had
little to do. With the exception of Pythagoras
and Plato, the thinkers of classic antiquity agreed
in one particular — the soul was material. Even
to Tertullian its immateriality was unestablished.
" Animam nihil est," he said, " sed corpus non
sit ;" and not a few of the fathers of the Church
held the same opinion. The masses of course
thought differently. The belief in a future life
was by them unquestioned. It probably arose
from the re-appearance of the dead in the dreams
of the living. But in Greece, as in the Roman
Empire, the life prefigured was one in which
there was little charm. The neglect of funeral
rites turned it into a dull and restless torture.

The Dissent of the Seers. 133

In this particular the observances of believers
were little else than precautionary safeguards,
and the Requiescat in pace which is to be seen on
contemporary tomb-stones is but a forlorn sur-
vival of their naive superstitions. Later, when
it was taught that the soul was imperishable, not
through an inherent indestructibility, but through
the influence of grace divine, its materiality was
still undoubted. The soul and the body were
considered inseparable. There were casuists
who thought otherwise, and their disputes are
legendary ; but their disputes occurred in an
era when faith was well-nigh universal. When
the distinction between the soul and the body
was at last satisfactorily established — that is, to
those who were interested in the estabhshment
of a satisfactory distinction— the believer found
himself turning back to Plato. The soul was
represented as a resultant of the forces of the
body, very much as harmony is known to be
won from the strings of the lyre. Yet, as Sim-
mias queried, when the strings are broken and
the wood reduced to dust, from what shall the
harmony be produced ?

In the Histoire naturelle de Pdme, little is said
on this subject. It was not Lamettrie's intention
to narrate what had been thought; what he
wished to do was to paint the soul's development,
and he put forth his best efforts to show that
that which is termed soul is but the outcome of
the perfectionment and education of the senses.

In VHom^ne machine it is again a question of

134 The Anatomy of Negation.

the soul, and the conclusion of course is the
same. In spite of Descartes, who taught of two
substances precisely as though he had seen and
counted them ; in spite of Leibnitz, who spiritual-
ised matter instead of materialising the spirit;
in spite of every one and everything to the
contrary, Lamettrie, in broad paragraphs, proved
to his own satisfaction that to think, to feel, to
distinguish right from wrong as readily as blue
from yellow, and to be but an animal, superior
perhaps, but still a brute, is not a bit more con-
tradictory than it is for a parrot or a monkey to
be able to distinguish pleasure from pain.

"Man is a machine," he said, "wound up
and kept running by digestion. The soul is the
mainspring. Both, of course, are material. As
to thought, it is as much a property of matter
as is electricity, motricity, impenetrability and
breadth. To query with Locke whether matter
can think, is tantamount to wondering whether
it can tell time. In brief, man is a machine,
and throughout the universe there is but one
substance diversely modified. Such," he con-
cluded, *' is my idea, or rather such is the truth.
Dispute qui voudra^

Another Breton who found a seat at the royal
supper-table was Maupertuis. Before he found
it, there had been some discussion among the
erudite concerning the sphericity of the globe,
and two separate expeditions were sent from
France to measure different degrees of longi-
tude. One went to Lapland, the other to Peru.

The Dissent of the Seers. 135

Maupertuis, who was a geometrician, was placed
at the head of the Polar expedition. He set out
at once for Sweden, and after sixteen months of
fatiguing adventures, returned to Paris to find
himself the hero of the day. But in a city like
Paris, a knowledge of the meridian, however
exact, is not an attainment apt to make a man
ceaselessly admired ; and Maupertuis, who had
taken the admiration quite seriously, and had
had himself painted, mantled in fur, in the act of
flattening the globe, soon found that his glory
was so much vapour. Now Maupertuis was not
only a geometrician, he was a philosopher, and
the occupant of the Prussian throne was, as has
been hinted, ever ready to add a new one to his
collection ; consequently, while Maupertuis was
wondering at the inconstancy of his compatriots,
a note was brought to him from Frederick.
" Come to Berlin," it ran. " You have taught
the world the form of the earth ; you shall learn
from a king how much you are appreciated."

The king at that time, however, happened
to be in a battle-field; and to the battle-field
Maupertuis, with the true spirit of a courtier,
directed his steps. Unfortunately for him, Fre-
derick was obliged to retreat, and Maupertuis
was taken prisoner. At first it was thought that
he had been killed ; but when it was learned that
he had been conducted to Vienna and there
feted at court, Voltaire took occasion to say a
few smart things, and the world smiled with
amusement and reHef.

1 36 The A natomy of Negation,

At Vienna, the Queen asked him what his
philosophy taught him to think of two princes
who wrangled over patches of a planet which he
had measured. " I have no right," he answered
sedately, " to be more philosophic than kings."
To change the subject, her Majesty deigned to
inquire whether the Queen of Sweden was not
the most beautiful princess in Europe. To which
Maupertuis, who was nothing if not regence,
answered, with his best bow, "I had always
thought so until now." After that, he was re-
turned unransomed to Frederick.

At Berlin, a young Pomeranian lady fell in
love with him. His conversation, it appears,
was so lively, that women never suspected him
of being a savant. The young Pomeranian be-
came his bride; while he, through the king's
good offices, was made President of the Berlin
Academy, — a sort of Minister of Literature, much
as d'Argens was Minister of the Stage. Voltaire,
meanwhile, was lounging at Sans-Souci. Mau-
pertuis had not forgotten the smart things he
had said, and Voltaire was perhaps a little jealous
of the favour shown to a rival. But, be this as
it may, it is a part of history that no love was
lost between them. When Voltaire had the
king's ear, he poured into it scurrilous anecjdotes
about his compatriot ; and when Maupertuis
enjoyed a similar privilege, the tale of his griev-
ances never tarried. " They take me for a sewer,"
said Frederick, with the indulgent smile of a man
who has said a good thing.

The Dissent of the Seers. 137

Frederick sided with Maupertuis. It is pos-
sible that in some kingly fashion he, too, was
jealous, though in his case the jealousy was of
one whose royalty threatened at times to over-
shadow his own. Voltaire was irascible \ he was
annoyed at the preference \ and after brooding
over his discontent, he composed and published
a pamphlet entitlQd Docteur Akakia.

In this trifle Maupertuis was lampooned as
no one had ever been before ; his pet theories —
to wit, that there is no other proof of God than
an algebraic formula, and that nothing which
we see is as we see it — were held up to the
laughter of the world. Frederick caused the
edition to be seized and burned by the heads-
man. Voltaire, however, was not easily circum-
vented. A few copies escaped the auto-da-f^
and went careering over Europe. Maupertuis
was for ever ridiculous, but Voltaire was still
unsatisfied. He kept pricking him with his pen,
until Maupertuis, outwearied with his struggle
with an ogre, took to his bed and died of morti-
fication— " between two monks," said the relent-
less Arouet. "What do you think of him?" he
asked d'Alembert ; " he has been suffering for a
long time from a repletion of pride, but I did
not take him either for a hypocrite or an imbe-
cile."

Maupertuis was one of the first of the modem
thinkers that have ventured to add up the
balance-sheet of pleasure and pain, and also one
of the first to discover that the latter largely

1 38 The A natomy of Negation.

exceeds the former ; indeed, so large did the
excess seem, that he had no hesitation in an-
nouncing that were all that is painful in life
suppressed and only the pleasurable moments
counted, the duration of the happiest existence
would not exceed a few hours.

He had scanned the paysages de tristesse as
carefully as another, and the fairest vista that he
saw was behind the delinquent hands of death.
*' Post mortem nihil est ; ipsaque mors nihil^" —
After death is nothing j death itself is naught, —
said Seneca; and Maupertuis, who agreed with
him thoroughly, advocated suicide, and praised
the stoics for teaching that it was a permissible
remedy, and one that was most useful, against
the ills of life. " If," he argued, " a man believes
in a religion which offers eternal rewards to those
that suffer, and which threatens with eternal
punishment those that die to avoid suifering, it
is not bravery on his part to commit suicide,
nor is it cowardice, it is idiocy. On the other
hand, a man who has no belief in a future life,
and who is solely occupied in making this one
as little unpleasant as possible, sees neither rhyme
nor reason in submitting to misfortunes from
which he can free himself in a trice." Never-
theless, Maupertuis died a natural death, and,
as Voltaire said, between two monks at that.

Maupertuis, Lamettrie, d'Argens, even to the
philosopher king himself, were dominated and
overshadowed by Voltaire. Though purposeful,
their influence was slight ; it had barely strength

The Dissent of the Seers. 139

enough to cross the Rhine. But on the other
side of that muddy river there was then a group
of thinkers whose influence can be felt in some
of the currents of contemporary thought, and
concerning whom a word or two may now be
said.

When the foremost of England's sceptics,
David Hume, visited Paris, he found a warm
welcome at the house of the Baron d'Holbach.
It was there, Burton says, that professing he had
never met an atheist, Hume was told that he
was in the company of seventeen. Of these,
the more noteworthy were Diderot, d'Alembert,
Naigeon and the host.

The Baron d'Holbach was a German who had
been educated in France. He was a man of
large wealth, wise, liberal and charitable. His
house in the Rue Royale, which was called the
Cafe de TEurope, was a free academy of the
freest thinkers ; and of free-thinkers, domiciled
and transient, d'Holbach was known as the
maitre (T hotel. But d'Holbach was something
more ; he was one of the field-marshals of the
little army of materialists who were the forerun-
ners of the Revolution, and a lord in the literature
of anti-theism. His erudition is said to have
been practically unbounded. There was nothing
of value written or suggested with which he was
unfamiHar. "No matter what system I may-
imagine," said Diderot, " I am always sure that
my friend d'Holbach can find me with facts and
authorities to support it."

140 The Anatomy of Negation.

The doctrine which d'Holbach advocated was
as liberal as the sea. It was a doctrine of free-
dom in all things — in speech, in thought, in poli-
tics and in religion. Its tenets are displayed at
length in the Systeme de la Nature, a work pub-
lished in Holland, and, through a literary trickery
then not infrequent, attributed to a gentleman
who, being dead, could not be prosecuted.

"Lost at nightfall in a forest, I have," said
Diderot, ^'but a feeble light to guide me. A
stranger happens along : ' Blow out your candle,'
he says, ' and you will see your way the better.'
That stranger is a theologian."

This squib might have served as epigraph to
the Systeme de la Nature.

" Man," said d'Holbach, " is miserable, simply
because he is ignorant. His mind is so infected
with prejudices, that, one might think him for
ever condemned to err. ... It is error that has
forged the chains with which tyrants and priests
have manacled nations. ... It is error that has
evoked the religious fears which shrivel up men
with fright, or make them butcher each other for
chimeras. The hatreds, persecutions, massacres
and tragedies of which, under pretext of the
interests of Heaven, the earth has been the
repeated theatre, are one and all the outcome
of error."

These bold words were the prelude to the
frankest exposition of anti-theism that France
had ever read. Its audacity terrified, but its
austerity repelled. Its paragraphs were as Cim-

The Dissent of the Seers. 141

merian to the chamber-maids and hair-dressers
of Paris, as the gaieties of Lamettrie had been
shocking to the pedantry of Berlin. Then, too,
it was rich and elaborate in its materialism.
To-day it seems a trifle antiquated; the world
has thought more deeply since ; but with its
general outlines contemporary thinkers have had
no fault to find. In these outlines Nature is
represented as the one-in-all, beyond which is
nothing. The main propositions tend to show
that throughout the length and breadth of space
there is merely force and matter, the infinite
interconnection of cause and effect \ and that it
is through an ignorance of natural laws that
divinities have been imagined and made the
objects of hope and fear.

On the subject of hope and fear, d'Holbach
had much to say. The gist of it may be sum-
marised in the fatalist axiom, Whatever will be,
is. Everything that happens, happens neces-
sarily, and in virtue of immutable laws. As to
order. or disorder, they are empty terms; like
time and space, they belong to the categories of
thought; there is nothing outside of us which
corresponds to them. It is all very well for man
to see order in that which is in conformity with
his state of being, and disorder in that which is
contrary to it ; to call one the effect of an Intel-
ligence acting toward a determined end, and the
other the play of hazard. But order and dis-
order are but words used to designate certain
states and conditions of being, which if perma-

142 The Anatomy of Negation,

nent are called after the one, and if transitory
after the other. Beside, Nature can have no
aim, for there is nothing beyond it to which it
can strive. As to hazard, it is meaningless, save
in contradistinction to that Intelligence which
man himself has conceived. Now man, d'Hol-
bach explains, has always fancied himself the
central fact in the universe. He has connected
with himself everything that he has seen, and
modelled everything after his own image. In
this way he grew to believe that the universe is
governed by an intelligence like unto his own ;
yet, being at the same time convinced of his
individual incapacity to cause the multiform
eifects of which he stood a witness, he was forced
to distinguish between himself and the invisible
producer, and he thought to overcome the dif-
ficulty by attributing to that intelligence an
aggrandisement of the prowess which he himself
possessed.

The belief in the supernatural, which in man
is inherent, d'Holbach regarded as a disease to
which humanity's greatest misfortunes are attri-
butable. Truth, he was fond of saying, can
never harm. Nor can it. But that does not
make it a welcome guest. The whole history of
religion goes to prove that man would rather be
wrong in his beliefs than have none at all. Then,
too, the majority have never been provided with
such leisure as would enable them to dispense
with illusions. The thinker may wave them
away, but his gesture leaves the masses unaf-

The Dissent of the Seers. 143

fected. Perhaps if the world were merely learned,
it would be anti-theistic ; but fortunately, or unfor-
tunately, as the actual status of affairs may be
viewed, it is something more or something less ;
there is an unstillable longing, an unconquerable
expectation of better things, which so exalts the
heart, that the serenest of atheists can never
witness its effects without experiencing some
sudden pang of envy.

In the polite society in which d'Holbach
moved, disbelief was so prevalent that it is
possible he had no occasion to experience a
twinge. And if he did, the emotion has been
unrecorded. He was squarely opposed to the
idea of God, and at the same time a living con-
tradiction to the theory that an atheist is neces-
sarily a man of lax principles. Wolmar, in the
Nouvelle Helo'ise, is the portrait which Rousseau
took of him. Yet, as has been alrready inti-
mated, it is the temperament, and not the point
of view, that guides us into paths that are those
of virtue or its opposite. And it was d'Holbach's
temperament that made him shame the Jew devil
as Satan had never been shamed before. On
this point the testimony of his contemporaries is
unanimous. The purity of his life, and that, too,
in a century when immorality was less a vice
than a grace, has never been questioned. He
was a simple -mannered gentleman, warm of
heart, sweet-tempered, endowed with great deli-
cacy of sentiment, and possessed of such tact
that even Rousseau, who would have quarrelled

1 44 The A natomy of Negation.

with an archangel, was unable to find in him any
other cause of grievance than his wealth. " He
is too rich for me," he said ; but he added, " He
is a better man, and one more really charitable,
than many a Christian. He does good without the
hope of rewai'd.^^

The only immortality in which d'Holbach
believed was fame. In life there is certainly
nothing more exquisite. As Schopenhauer said,
it is the Golden Fleece of the elect. But after
death, and true glory comes but then, fame and
ignominy are to the recipient equally unmeaning.
And even were it otherwise, when it is remem-
bered what are the limitations of fame, and
when it is considered how small a value can be
accorded to public opinion, the immortality in
which d'Holbach believed does not seem worth
an effort.

D'Holbach was one of the few writers that
have had the courage to advocate suicide, and
he advocated it as boldly to those who cowered
at death, as he advocated virtue to a century
whose vice is historic. His main argument in
its favour is to the effect that the engagements
between man and Nature are neither voluntary
on the part of the one nor reciprocal on the
part of the other. Man is therefore in nowise
bound ; and should he find himself unsupported,
he can desert a position which has become un-
pleasant and irksome. As to the citizen, he can
hold to his country and associates only by the
mortgage on his well-being. If the lien is paid

The Dissent of the Seers. 145

off, he is free. " Would a man be blamed," he
asks, "a man who, finding himself useless and
without resources in his native place, should
withdraw into solitude ? Well, then, with what
right can a man be blamed who kills himself
from despair ? And what is death but an isola-
tion?"

Maxims such as these are considered dan-
gerous and provocative. But maxims have never
caused a suicide. A man may cut his throat or
hang himself to put an end to the agonies of
grief or boredom, but not because he has hap-
pened on a suggestive quotation. He will look
for the great quietus if he wants to, but not
because it is recommended. In any case the
contempt of death is a useful possession j and it
is well for every one to understand that while
virtue and happiness are supposed to go hand-
in-hand, and that to do good is to receive it, yet
after the loss of any one of us the world will go
on in quite the same manner as before.

In the days when d'Holbach was giving din-
ner-parties in the Rue Royale, the flag of France
was noticeably black. Some said that it was
from the dye of the cassock ; others, that it had
caught the grime of mediaeval institutions. At
d'Holbach's dinner-table, however, in the salons
of Madame Geoffrin — she who was so plain that
Greuze exclaimed, " My God, if she annoys me
I'll paint her ! " — in the salons of Mesdames du
Deffand, de Lespinasse and Necker, there assem-
bled from time to time a handful of thinkers

146 The Anatomy of Negation.

who were determined to give the flag of France
another hue. These gentlemen were resolute
and aggressive. The century, they saw, was
hungry for ideas, and it was in an effort to give
it food of the right quality that the Encyclopaedia
was produced.

The Encyclopaedia — a name coined byEabelais
— displayed the genealogy of thought. It was
at once a storehouse of knowledge, an attack on
ignorance, an appeal to common -sense, and a
plea for liberty. It opposed every abuse, poli-
tical, theological, ecclesiastical, industrial, fiscal,
legal and penal. It sought to establish tolera-
tion, to abolish sacerdotal thaumaturgy, to banish
the supernatural, and thwart the subornation of
the understanding. It was in no sense free from
error, and its erudition presents to-day a most
mildewed appearance \ but it served its purpose,
and from out its wide bindings burst the torrents
of the Revolution.

In its opposition to everything that savoured
of the illiberal, the Encyclopaedia encountered
many an obstacle and not a few embarrassments ;
indeed, the history of the government and litera-
ture of the third quarter of the last century is
interwoven with that of its vicissitudes and final
triumph. Every man of brains wrote for it, and
those who had none and wanted some sub-
scribed. The responsibility of its pubHcation
was assumed by Diderot and d'Alembert.

Diderot was a giant, whose head was in the
clouds and whose feet were in the mud. He

The Dissent of the Seers. 147

wrote obscene stories and anticipated Lamark,
Darwin's precursor. History, art, science and
philosophy he held in fee, and yet he was not
erudite. He had drunk oft, not deep. "I
know a great many things," he said, " but there
is hardly a man that does not know some one
thing better than I." In the activity of his mind
may be found the reason of the admiration of
his contemporaries and that of posterity's neglect.
He has left us twenty volumes of essays and
digressions, but not a single book. Yet no one
was ever so prodigal with his pen as he. He
gave it to any one that asked, to an enemy as
readily as to a friend. Grimm asked his opinion
on an exhibition of paintings ; he gave it in an
in-octavo. " I have written a satire against you,"
said a young man to him one day. " I am poor ;
will you buy it?" "Ah! sir," he exclaimed,
" what a pitiable vocation is yours ! but," he
continued, ** I will tell you what to do. The
Duke of Orleans honours me with his dislike ;
dedicate your book to him; he will pay you well."
" A good dedication is a difficult job," said the
young black-mailer. " Well, sit down," Diderot
answered, "and I will write it for you." And
he did, and the youth received his pay.

Diderot being without ambition was known
as the Philosopher, but he was so poor that he
could hardly buy the cloak. When he wished to
dower his daughter, he found that he had nothing
except his library, and his library to him was
life itself. Nevertheless, he determined to sell

L 2

148 The Anatomy of Negation,

it. Catharine of Eiissia learned of the deter-
mination and bought the library ; but with a true
sense of what is royal, she left him the use of
his books and made him their salaried custodian
beside.

At the beginning of his literary career, Diderot
was a sincere deist, which, as some one has said,
is a proof of what education may do. It was not
long, however, before he saw that scepticism is
the first step to philosophy ; and when the step
was taken, he descended without a compunction
the precipitate stair of negation. The stages of
his thought are well defined. " Aggrandise God,"
he shouted in his first enthusiasm ; " free Him
from the captivity of temples and creeds. See
Him everywhere, or say that He does not exist."
Later — in the "Letter on the Blind for the Use of
those who See " — he manifested a classic indif-
ference on the whole subject. "Ask an Indian
how the world is suspended in the air, and he
will tell you that it rests on the back of an
elephant. * And the elephant?' *0n a turtle.'
You pity the Indian, yet one might say to you
as to him, 'Admit your ignorance, and don't
bother me with a menagerie.'"

But his indifference was transient. "Among
the difficulties (of beheving in God), there is
one," he noted, " which has been agitated since
the world began. It is that men suffer without
having deserved to do so. To this there has
never been an answer. The existence of a
Supreme Being is incompatible with evils, moral

The Dissent of the Seers. 149

and physical. What, then, is the safest course ?
The one which we have taken. Whatever the
optimists may say, we answer that if the world
could not exist without sentient beings, and
sentient beings without pain, the Almighty would
have done better to keep quiet." Thereafter
he became firmly anti-theistic. " It is," he said,
"highly important not to mistake hemlock for
parsley, but it is entirely unnecessary to believe
in God." *' The Christian religion," he added,
" is atrocious in its dogmas. It is unintelligible,
metaphysical, intertwisted and obscure. It is
mischievous to tranquillity, dangerous in its dis-
cipline, puerile and unsociable in its ethics, and
in its ceremonial dreary, flat, Gothic and most
gloomy. ... If my ideas please no one," he
concluded, "it is possible that they are poor;
but if they pleased everybody, I would consider
them detestable." Yet as he preached tolerance,
he practised it, and was never known to refuse a
crutch to those who had no legs.

Among the Encyclopaedists, where Diderot
was king, d'Alembert was prime minister, a
Mazarin, as one may say ; but a Mazarin who
grew faint-hearted, and, fearing the Bastille, left
his monarch in the lurch.

D'Alembert was more a mathematician than
a philosopher. His mistress was Algebra. His-
tory has given the same title to Mile, de I'Espi-
nasse; but if he was unfaithful, the lady in
question appears to have paid him back in a
better coin than his own. He was not a cheerful

1 50 The A natomy of Negation,

person, yet when alone with his books he was
happy as though he were dead. " Qui est-ce qui
estheureux?" some one asked him. "Quelque
miserable," he repHed. He was an invaHd, too ;
but he hated medicine, and held a physician to
be like a blind man who armed with a cudgel
strikes at random, and, according as he strikes,
annihilates the disease or — the patient.

As has been hinted, he was timid, or perhaps
merely cautious, a trait which found little favour
with Voltaire. "Philosophers are too lukewarm,"
he said \ " instead of shrugging their shoulders
at the errors of mankind, they ought to wipe
them out." But apparently d'Alembert did not
agree with him. "Philosophers," he retorted,
" should be like children, who, when they have
done anything wrong, put the blame on the cat."
But if for one reason or another he thought it
best to keep his views from the public, he had
no hesitation in whispering them to the sympa-
thetic ear of Frederick the Great. The latter
had written what he called a refutation of the
naturalism conveyed in d'Holbach's Systlme de la
Nature. The book had annoyed him ; but what
probably annoyed him most was, not its natural-
ism, but its attack on the sacred caste of royalty.
At the same time, as he himself said, if d'Holbach
were condemned to be burned, he would be the
first to play the hose on the stake.

In the eyes of the liberal monarch, d'Alembert,
when answering the refutation, brandished the
historic doubt. " Montaigne's motto, What do

The Dissent of the Seers. 151

I know? seems to me," he wrote, "the answer that
should be made to all questions in metaphysics.
. . . Those who deny the existence of a Supreme
Intelligence advance more than they can prove.
In treating such a subject, scepticism is the only
reasonable standpoint. No one, for instance,
can deny that throughout the universe, and par-
ticularly in the formation of plants and animals,
there are combinations which seem to reveal an
Intelligence. That they prove it, as a watch
proves a watch-maker, is incontestable. But sup-
posing that one wishing to go further asks. What
is this Intelligence? Did it create, or did it
merely arrange matter ? Is creation possible, or,
if it be not, is matter eternal ? And if matter
is eternal and needed an Intelligence simply to
arrange itj is that Intelligence united to matter,
or is it distinct? If it is united, matter, pro-
perly speaking, is God, and God is matter. If
it is distinct, how can that which is material be
fashioned by that which is not ? Besides, if this
Intelligence is infinitely wise and infinitely power-
ful, why is the world, which is its work, so filled
with physical and moral imperfections? Why
are not all men happy ? Why are not all men
just ? Your Majesty assures me that this ques-
tion is answered by the world's eternity. And
so perhaps it is, but seemingly merely in this
sense, that the world being eternal, and in conse-
quence necessary, everything which is, must be
as it is ; and at once we enter into a system of
fatality and necessity which does not in the least

152 The A natomy of Negation.

accord with the idea of a God infinitely wise and
infinitely powerful. Sire, when these questions
arise, we should repeat 'Que sais-je?' an hundred
times. Then, too, there is a consolation for
ignorance in the thought that, as we know nothing,
it is unnecessary for us to know more."

To which Frederick, who gave a nickname as
readily as a pension, answered :

" But, my dear Diagoras, if you fancy that I can
give a detailed explanation of the Intelligence
that I marry to Nature, you over-estimate my
ability. I can say merely that I perceive it as
I would an object of which I might happen to
catch a glimpse through a mist."

D'Alembert, however, was not to be played
with, and he returned to the charge and routed
the fat king with a fresh arsenal of queries.

" With the exception of the animal kingdom^
the realms of matter with which we are acquainted
■ appear deprived of sentiency, volition and thought.
Is it possible that intelligence resides in them
without our knowledge? Of this there is no
evidence, and I am inclined to think that the
block of marble, as well as the plants that are
the most delicately and ingeniously organised,
are without thought and feeling. But, it is
objected, the organisation of these bodies dis-
closes visible traces of an intelligence. This I do
not deny ; but I would be glad to know what has
T)ecome of this intelligence since these bodies
were organised. If it resided within them while
they were being formed and in order to form

^ The Dissent of tJie Seers. 153

them, and if, as it is supposed, this intelligence
is not distinct from them, what has become of it
since its work is done ? Has the very perfection
of the organisation been annihilated ? To me,
such a supposition seems untenable. If, then,
the intelligence whose effects we admire in man
is merely a resultant of organisation, why, in
other realms of matter, may we not admit a
structure and an arrangement as necessary and
as natural as matter itself, and from which, with-
out the intervention of any intelligence, would
result the very effects which surround and sur
prise us ? Lastly, in admitting the doctrine that
an Intelligence presided over the formation of
the world and still watches over its well-being, it
is hard to reconcile the theory of that Intelligence
with the idea of infinite wisdom and power. For,
to the misfortune of humanity, this world of ours
is very far from being the best one possible.
With the best of intentions, we are therefore
unable to recognise any other God than one
who, at most, is material, limited and dependent.
I do not know whether this view is the correct
one, but certainly it is not that of the Deity's
partisans, who would much prefer to have us
atheists than the Spinozists that we are. To
mollify them, let us turn sceptic and repeat with
Montaigne, Que sais-je?"

This amiable agnosticism was shared by few
of the Encyclopaedists. To Naigeon, who would
have nothing to do with half-way measures, it
seemed little less than revolting. Naigeon was

1 54 The A natomy of Negation.

a Puritan without beliefs ; his atheism was as
fervent as his life was austere. When he first
sat, a stripling, at d'Holbach's table, he was
largely ridiculed. He was a pretty boy, with
fair skin and curled blonde hair. Diderot's
monkey. La Harpe called him, for it was through
Diderot that he was brought into notice. But
with age the comely lad developed into a tiger.
To him Diderot left the care of his unpublished
manuscripts, and these Naigeon edited, together
with the memoirs of the author. He, too, was
a voluminous writer, and scattered essays and
treatises with a prodigality which he had caught
from his master. But the work which caused
the greatest number of people to turn about and
look after him in the street was the Theologie
portative. In it the beliefs and tenets of Chris-
tendom were treated, in a manner that reminds
one of Col. IngersoU. In the subsequent En-
cyclopedic methodique he wrote again on these
and adjacent subjects, though this time from a
broader and more serious standpoint.

Politically, socially and morally untrammelled,
he had, meanwhile, been keeping a finger on the
public pulse, and he felt that some great, if un-
determined, change was at hand. So soon, then,
as the National Assembly got to work on its
declaration of the rights of man, Naigeon issued
an address, in which he prayed the Assembly to
banish from the proclamation any suggestion of
reUgion, and in its place to assert man's right to
entire freedom of thought and speech. But the

The Dissent of the Seers. 155

petition was unnoticed. It is possible that he
made a second appeal to Robespierre ; but if he
did, it was as unsuccessful as the first. And
there is an anecdote that one day during the
Terror he looked so much alarmed, that some
asked him if he were on the list of the con-
demned. " Worse than that," he cried. " That
monster Robespierre has decreed the existence
of a Supreme Being !" To Robespierre, an
atheist was an aristocrat.

While Naigeon was addressing the Assembly,
a young man named Sylvain Marechal passed
out of Saint-Lazare. A few months previous, he
had pubhshed a little book entitled, r Almanack
des honnttes gens, in which wise men were given
precedence over saints. This disregard of eti-
quette procured for Marechal an opportunity to
meditate on the proprieties of life. When the
prison-doors were opened, he passed his time
in succouring the indigent and housing the pur-
sued. He fed and sheltered priests and royalists
alike, and even paid masses for the repose of
the soul of an old woman because he knew that
such had been her wish.

Yet Marechal was one of the fanatics of atheism,
and as proud of negation as though he had in-
vented it. The devil, one may see, is rarely as
red as he appears on the stage. The thinkers
with whom this chapter has had to deal were
fervent in their disbelief; but in their disbelief
there was room for such charity, tolerance and
broad good-will, that one looks in vain for a

156 The A natomy of Negation,

stone that shall hit them. Perhaps, as some one
has said, it is only the just that have a right to
be atheists. And yet they were not impeccable ;
with one exception, they were guilty of a grievous
sin against good manners — they were dogmatic.
One may fancy that their voices were seldom
modulated j it is probable that they shouted,
and there are few among us that care to be
shouted at. Then, too, there was a confidence
and an assurance in their atheism which is as
unpleasant as bigotry. They forgot Montaigne,
and they let Pyrrho fall asleep. Marechal was
not better than the others; one may even say
that he was worse, for he was dogmatic in rhyme;
Since Lucretius, atheism had been without a
poet. Leopardi's father was then a bachelor,
and Shelley was in the cradle. It was Marechal
that the irreverent Muse first ordered to. hold
the lute. And Marechal kissed the Muse full
upon the mouth, and sang loudly in a strain of
boyish bravado. Whether or not Marechal's
notes were listened to, is relatively a matter of
small importance. A little later, the Being whose
existence Robespierre had decreed was publicly
deposed. The cathedral of Notre -Dame was
consecrated to the worship of Reason, the crosier
and the ring were trampled under foot, and an
ass, crowned with a mitre, was led through
exulting crowds.

CHAPTER V.

THE PROTESTS OF YESTERDAY.

The lives of philosophers are dull. Descartes
might figure as the hero of a romance, but Des-
cartes is an exception. Fichte belongs to the
rule. The story of his manhood is one of poverty
which is not poignant, and of successes which
were not great.

In a work on this thinker, Professor Adamson
notes one fact which is palpitant in truth and
lucidity ; it is to the effect that Europe to-day
does not hold ten students of that marvellous
sophist. And yet Fichte is one of the most
insolent of dissenters. To the ordinary reader
his negations are inexplicable; they comprise
the denial of the reality of the external world.
This denial, which is known as akosmism, is
pantheism's twin -sister. Pantheism admits no
other reality than Nature ; and akosmism, taking
one step further, declines to admit any reality
at all. Of the two, pantheism has been the more
fruitful. It began with the Vedas ; ran through
Eleatic and Neo-platonic philosophy; was caught
up by Scott Erigena and handed to Bruno, who

158 The A natomy of Negation,

passed it to Spinoza. Another thread or two
runs through the Talmud, the Kabbala, the
theories of Maimonides, Gerson and Chesdai
Creskas \ and there are tangles of it in the beliefs
of mediaeval communities, in the heresies of
the Beghards and Beguines, the Turlupins and
Adamites; but with their unravelment the reader
need not be wearied. Akosmism has found
fewer adherents. Like pantheism, it began with
the Vedas, or, more correctly, with the Vedanta
philosophy; left broad traces in Greece; revived
for a moment during the Renaissance ; and then
sank back into obscurity until Fichte, Kant aid-
ing, brought it to light anew. Between the two
systems there is this cardinal distinction. Pa.n-
theism and science have never been other than
the best of friends. There is nothing in the
one that has ever been seriously opposed by the
other. But akosmism and scignce look at each
other askant. They have as much in common
as have the poet and the mathematician.

The clearest idea of Fichte's akosmism, or
rather the clearest idea of its charm and futility,
is conveyed in a work entitled the Bestimmung
des Menschen^ the Vocation of Man. The work
is divided into three parts : Doubt, Knowledge
and Faith. The first part. Doubt, opens with
an inquiry concerning that mystery within us
that calls itself "I," and an examination of
Nature that vaunts itself real. From this inquiry
and from this examination, Fichte discovers that
man is but a link in a chain of necessity, a part

The Protests of Yesterday. 159

of that force which, amid the everlasting revo-
lution and mutation of things, is the sum and

substance of all that is.

And that chain of necessity ! Was there ever
anything more delicately interconnected ? One
has but to look at it to see that its rivets are so
tight that they make it impossible for anything
to be other than it is. Take, for instance, a
single grain of sand on the sea-shore, and fancy
that it lies a few feet further inland than it
actually does. The mental operation is, admit-
tedly, most easy to perform ; but note the con-
sequences. For that grain of sand to be a few
feet further inland, then must the wind which
bore it have been stronger than it was; then
must the state of the atmosphere which occa-
sioned the wind have been different from what
it was, and the previous changes different; in
fact, it is necessary to presuppose an entirely
different temperature from that which actually
existed. We must also suppose a different con-
stitution of the bodies which influenced the tem-
perature, the barrenness or fertility of countries,
on which depend the health of man and the
duration of life. Interfere, therefore, with that
grain of sand, and it is within the range of pos-
sibilities that in such a state of weather as was
necessary to move it but a few feet further in-
land, some one, long ago, may have died of cold
or hunger — long ago, before the birth of that son
from whom the sophist himself descended ; and
behold, Fichte would have been spared the trials

i6o The Anatomy of Negation.

of life, and prevented, too, from solving every
problem, and leaving the student nothing to do
but to bore himself to death.

From Fichte's logic, therefore, the necessity
which compels everything to be precisely as it
is, is amply demonstrated. Nevertheless, doubt
is not yet banished. It is true he has proved
the existence of man to be but a manifestation
of a force whose operation is determined by the
whole of the universe, but into the nature of
that force he is unable to look. And even could
he, of what use would it be ? It would not help
him to regulate his actions. Nature is the last
one to contradict herself, and she allows no one
to contradict her. The force that acts on us and
in us makes us what we are ; and to attempt to
make ourselves otherwise than it has been ap-
pointed we should be, is a task which may be
pleasant, but which assuredly is useless. In the
chain of necessity we are all interlinked : fight
free who may. Th.ey who have done sa have
reached that bourne from_38dtijch.jaQ.Jxayeller
returns.

We may rejoice and repent, we may form good
resolutions ; but the joy and the repentance and
the good resolutions come to us of themselves,
and not until it is appointed that they shall do
so. When they do come, however sincere the
repentance may be, however magnificent the
resolutions, the course of things moves on un-
changed and changeless as before. We lie in
the lap of necessity. Should Nature destine one

The Protests of Yesterday. i6i

man to be wise and to be brave, wise and brave
he will be. Should she destine another to be
scatterbrained and imbecile, scatterbrained and
imbecile will he become. There is no merit, no
blame, to be ascribed to her or to them. The
wishes that throb in our hearts may rebel, but
the great Mother snuffs them out like a candle.
She is governed herself. Her laws are ours.

It is in musings of this description that Fichte
stretches his hand to Spinoza and denies that
man is a free agent. At best he is a conscious >
automaton. But what if he were not even that ? \|\
Is there any one thing of which he is certain ?

" Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in
dreams?"

Fichte asks himself the same question, and
looking with introspective eye for an answer,
discovers the purely subjective character of all
human knowledge. He sees that he has no con-
sciousness of things in themselves, only a con-
sciousness of a consciousness of them. Were he
blind, what would he know of colour ? Were he
deaf, what would he know of song ? Were he
without imagination, doubt, hope and fear would
have no meaning. Such knowledge as man pos-
sesses is merely a knowledge of himself; beyond
it, consciousness never goes. When it seems to
do otherwise, when man assumes to be conscious
of an object — the sun, for instance — he has
merely the consciousness of a supposition of an
object, which supposition he identifies with sen-
sation and takes for the object itself.

M

1 62 The Anatomy of Negation.

It has been hinted that akosmism and science
are at odds, but on this point they agree. As
a matter of fact, and one admitted by all deco-
rous scholars, we none of us see the sun. What
we do see are certain modifications of light in
immediate relation to our organ of vision. And
in this connection it is not improper to note that
no two persons see the same modifications of
the same light, and that for the reason that each
person sees a different complement of rays acting
on his own individual retina.

But to return to Fichte, and to put his idea
less technically, it is a self-evident proposition
that we neither see our sight, feel our touch, nor
yet have a higher sense by which things affecting
the organs of sense are perceived. It is therefore
not difficult to accept the axiom that our con-
sciousness of external existence is merely the
product of our presentative faculty. The diffi-
culty lies in the application, for with it all reality
vanishes. " In that which we call intuitive know-
ledge, we contemplate only ourselves, and our
consciousness is and can be only a consciousness
of the modifications of our own existence. If,
therefore, the external world arises before us
only through our own consciousness, it follows
that what is particular and multiform in the ex-
ternal world can arise in no other way ; and if
the connection between ourselves and what is
external to us is simply a connection of thought,
then is the connection of the multifarious objects
of the external world simply this and no other."

The Protests of Yesterday. 163

The whole of the material world is, then, but a
cerebral phenomenon. There is no being, no
real existence. The only things that exist are
pictures, and these pictures know themselves
after the fashion of pictures. They are pictures
which float past, without there being anything
past which they float, — pictures which picture
nothing, images without significance and without
an aim. Reality is a dream, without a world of
which the dream might be, or a mind that might
dream it It is a dream which is woven together
in a dream of itself. Intuition is the dream;
thought, the source of fancied reality, is the
dream of that dream.

In this charming manner, Fichte, after divest-
ing himself of doubt and attaining perfect know-
ledge, mounts into a higher sphere which he
terms Faith. Into the austerities of this abstrac-
tion it is unnecessary to follow him \ and it
will perhaps suffice to note that the conclusion
amounts to the assertion that where the canaille
believe that things are as they appear, because
they must, the philosopher believes because he
will. After a deduction such as that, one may
well exclaim against the uselessness of philosophy
in general, and the Fichtean branch in particular.

Fichte's metaphysical hysterics excited the
wildest hilarity. His formula 1 = 1, on which in
an earlier work he had sounded all the changes,
was popularly supposed to mean his own indi-
vidual ego. Fichte, however, meant nothing of
the sort. The "I" he used in the impersonal
M 2

1 64 The A natomy of Negation.

sense which is conveyed in such expressions
as "it rains," "it snows." The "I" represented
the force that pervades all things, and which in
man arrives at a consciousness of self. But
Fichte was not a clear writer — few Germans are ;
and if he was taken au pied de la lettre^ the
fault was his own. In any event, his philosophy
was largely ridiculed. Heine is witness to the
fact that a cartoon was circulated which repre-
sented a goose whose liver had become so big
that the bird was undecided whether she was all
goose or all liver. Across her Fichtean breast
ran the legend 1 = 1. The reality of his idealism,
however, was not taken so easily. The Philis-
tines waxed wroth. Heine represents a burgo-
meister as exclaiming, " That man thinks I don't
exist, does he? Why I'm stouter than he and
his superior too !" The ladies asked, " Doesn't
he at least believe in the existence of his wife ?"
"Of course not." ''And does Madame Fichte
permit that?"

But with whatever facetiousness the matter
may be viewed, the question of an external world
has been, and is still, one of the great battle-fields
of metaphysics. The realists clamour that their
opponents are colossal in their errors ; the ideal-
ists answer, "Tu quoque." Among the latter,
few have been more vehement than Fichte. He
defended his belief with all the heavy artillery
of the German dictionary, and entrenched him-
self with logic. It was, however, merely on
speculative principles that he contended that

The Protests of Yesterday. 165

our knowledge of mind and matter is only a
consciousness of what Sir William Hamilton
has christened " various bundles of baseless ap-
pearances." He did not deny the veracity of
consciousness; he denied the veracity of its
testimony, a distinction as subtle as it is valid.
For all practical purposes the material world —
including Madame Fichte — was to him not only
thoroughly real, but it went spinning through
space at the rate of nineteen miles a second.
And it was merely the certainty of uncertainty,
the haunting conviction of the unreliability of
the perceptions which in earlier days led Socrates
to maintain that the only thing he knew was that
he knew nothing, which caused Fichte to discri-
minate between what he believed and what he
saw.

But however unreal the world might be in
theory, he was quite sure that for every -day
purposes it was the worst one possible. Indeed,
Fichte was not only an akosmist, he was a pessi-
mist too, a combination which seemed so alluring
to Lammenais, that after a debauch in Fichteana
he was pleased to describe the world as a shadow
of that which is not, an echoless sound from
nowhere, the chuckle of Satan in chaos.

Fichte's successor was Schelling. In place of
the abstractions of his precursor, this gentleman
presented an adventurous mysticism. Both were
ideahsts ; but where the one extracted the real
from the ideal, the other reversed the proceeding.
The transcendentahsm which they professed in

1 66 The Anatomy of Negation,

common, is the history of consciousness to the
highest degree of its development. Fichte tiara'd
his system with faith ; Schelling crowned his own
with aesthetics. To the latter, the universe was
a poem whose strophies were writ in metaphysical
formulas, a phrase which may be taken to mean
that he was exquisitely alive to the beauties of
Nature and yet unable to picture them in read- *
able prose. His real master was Spinoza, and
his philosophy in consequence presents some of
the serenest forms of pantheistic belief.

The harmony to which he was alive prefigured
to him the agency of a supreme Principle; of a
Being eternally unconscious; veiled from the
sight of man by the purity of enveloping light,
and apprehensible only through intellectual in-
tuition. On the skirts of this intuition he sus-
pended knowledge. Above it he poised art —
" the revelation of that Absolute in which subject
and object coincide; in which the conscious
and the unconscious unite."

*' That which we call Nature," he said, " is a
poem writ in mysterious hieroglyphics, but in
which, were they decipherable, whoso lists might
read the Odyssey of the Spirit, preyed upon
by illusion, ever seeking, ever fleeing itself. . . .
Nature is to the artist that which it is to the
philosopher ; the ideal world ceaselessly appear-
ing in finite forms ; the wan reflection of a uni-
verse which does not stretch beyond the mind,
but rests within it."

The fundamental idea of the entire system

The Protests of Yesterday, 167

amounts in brief to this : earth, sea and sky, and
all that in them is, are, in their essence, ema-
nations, or, as Leibnitz has it, fulgurations of
an eternal and unconscious activity. Detached
from the primordial matrix, these manifestations,
though interconnected, are without permanent
reality. The finite world is an illusion. The
infinite alone exists.

This idea, while not unalluring, is passably
vague. But vagueness has no terrors for those who
wish to be mystified, and that there were many
such is evident from contemporary accounts of
the enthusiasm with which it was greeted. The
enthusiasm, however, was as impermanent as
Schelling's own reality. His disciples flocked to
a rival teacher, to Hegel, whose name has the
sound of a knell.

The doctrine which this gentleman advanced,
and which to-day is to be sought for in seven-
teen massive in-octavos, may be regarded as the
apotheosis of the arriere-pensee. Hegel was
the chameleon of philosophy. He believed in
nothing ; and not only did he believe in nothing,
but he possessed no fixity of disbelief. When-
ever it is possible to pin him down, it is always
on a contradiction that the pinning is accom-
plished. He was an anatomist of thought, a
midwife of paradox. No phase, no flutter of
consciousness, escaped his diagnostic. He ana-
lysed and dissected, but he did not build, or at
least only on negations. He created doubts,
not convictions. He made disbelievers, not

1 68 The A natomy of Negation,

converts. It was he who should have said,
" Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint."

It may be noted, parenthetically, that the pro-
position of which Plato caught a glimpse, and
which Descartes dimly perceived, the proposi-
tion that man is the one centre of thought,
formed the sum and substance of Kant's teach-
ing. "Look," he admonished the reader, "look
at time and at space. They are but categories
of thought. Time is not, nor yet is space.
They are appearances which the mind creates,
and with which we envelop the universe." This
idealism, which in Kant was partial, in Fichte
subjective, and in Schelling objective, became
absolute with Hegel. To him, illusion was the
one permanency, the one cause, and man but
the shadow of its effects.

In its widest sense, Hegel's philosophy is an
attempt to make the acquaintance of Schelling's
primordial entity — the Absolute. As a necessary
preparation he annihilated the finite, or, to use
his own language, the categories of the finite
which stood in his way \ and when he had done
so, behold, the Absolute had crumbled with
them. The heavens were void. There has been
nothing, there is nothing, there will be nothing,
save a constant evolution, a continuous develop-
ment, with death for a goal. And, after all, what
is the lesson that history conveys? What, indeed,
if it be not this, that whatever is born, is born to
die.

The idolatry, the infatuation of Hegel's dis-

The Protests of Yesterday. i6g

ciples was without precedent or parallel. The
streets and beer-halls echoed with discussions
on the identity of contradictories. The Idea, the
Absolute, the Ich and the non-Ich, were every-
night topics. Metaphysics hung over Berlin
like a London fog. Hegel was not only a popu-
lar teacher, he was a national idol. His dia-
lectic prestidigitations had all the charm which
attaches to the unfathomable. That he was a
charlatan is clear, but that he was revered is
certain. Among the group of mourners that
assembled about his tomb, one, a theologian,
likened him to Jesus. More recently, Scherer
compared him to Napoleon. Yet on his death-
bed Hegel was heard to mutter, " Only one man
understood my philosophy, and he only half-
caught its import."

After such a confession, one might well offer
him the viaticum and hum a requiem over his
seventeen in-octavos. And yet in vain. Hegel's
influence is too substantial to be quieted by any
requiescat, however determined. In spite of
the hilarity of the impolite, his spectre looms
through the most rational forms of contemporary
negation. In the core of his philosophy there
broods a sphinx that still defies.

When the bewilderment which Hegel excited
subsided, the faith which he had inculcated was
questioned] belief soon gave way to heresies, and
the metaphysical assembly divided itself into
dissenting camps. From one of these issued

I/O The Anatomy of Negation.

the philosophy which counted Emerson and
Carlyle among its exponents. In the uproar of
another, Strauss, Feuerbach, Bruno and Stirner
have pointed to an eternal grave and taken the
nimbus from a god. It is owing to the instruc-
tion of a third that Vacherot has occupied his
time in showing that the idea of perfection is
God, but that perfection does not exist ; and it
was something of the original spirit that smoothed
the way for the amiable fumisteries of Ernest
Kenan.

In the days when Hegelism was at its apc^ee,
there appeared in Berlin a young man who
declined to take any other part in the general
intoxication than that of spectre at the feast.
His contempt for the sophist, the pachyderm
hydrocephali, and all the pedantic eunuchs who
made up what he was wont to term the apoca-
lyptic retinue of the bestia trionfante, was sump-
tuous in its magnificence. So sumptuous even,
that he took counsel from an attorney as to the
exact limit his contempt might reach without
making him amenable to a suit for defamation.
Then, reassured, he began an attack. " Hegel's
philosophy," he said, " is sufficient to cause an
atrophy of the intellect. It is a crystallised
paralogism, an abracadabra, a puff of bombast,
and a wish wash of phrases which in its monstrous
construction compels the mind to form impos-
sible contradictions." For its preparation he
offered a receipt which is homeopathic in its

The Protests of Yesterday. 171

simplicity. " Dilute a minimum of thought in
five hundred pages of nauseous phraseology, and
for the rest trust to the Teuton patience of the
reader."

A few years before, this violent yet cautious
young man had written a work which he signed
in full letters, Arthur Schopenhauer, and entitled,
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. This work,
which he thought would shake the sophistry of
all civilisation, had been left unnoticed and
neglected on the back book-shelves of its Leipzig
publisher. It is said that he smarted at this
inattention, and that his aggressiveness and con-
tempt of Hegel, and not of Hegel alone, but
of Fichte and Schelling, the three sophists, as
he was pleased to call them, was the outcome
of envy. Whether or not this statement is true,
is a matter of small importance. The point to
be noted is, that thirty years later Hegel was
largely forgotten, and the works of his obscure
opponent were welcomed with an enthusiasm
which has been expanding ever since.

" The World as Will and Idea" is an atheology
compounded of Buddhism, Tauism and Epi-
curism, a mosaic of Oriental and classic nega-
tions worked out by an original and brilliant
thinker. If the seventeen in-octavos already
alluded to may be regarded as the apotheosis
of the arribre-pensee, then, in comparison, this
philosophy, together with its complementary
monographs, represents the renaissance of com-
mon-sense.

1 72 The A natomy of Negation.

Schopenhauer was not a pantheist. Had he
possessed any of the views of ordinary orthodoxy^
the belief, for instance, in

*' L'univers
Ou r^gne un Jehovah dont Satan est Fenvers,"

he might possibly have read the banns over
Nature and Satan, but he never would have
identified the former with God. Nor was Scho-
penhauer a materialist. He was a theorematist
of force, but atoms found no place in his system.
Yet if he must be catalogued, it will perhaps be
safest to say that he was an idealist who saw the
inutility of dream. Kant's Krittk, from which
all German metaphysics proceeds, had shown
him that reason must either be confined within
the limits of experience, or else let loose into an
absolute idealism. The three sophists had dis-
gusted him with the supersensible, and yet he
felt suffocated in the narrow limits of the real.
There was yet a middle course, and that course
he took. It was useless to ask whence the
world comes or whither it tends, but it would
not be impertinent to state what it is; and the
statement which Schopenhauer made to the
public was to the effect that the world is but the
perception of a perceiver, a simple representation,
a mere idea which man carries with him to the
tomb, and which in the absence of a thinker to
think it would not exist at all.

In the Cogita, a note-book of which extracts
have been selected by Schopenhauer's literary

The Protests of Yesterday. 173

executor,* is the following passage: " Two things
were before me, two bodies, regularly formed,
beautiful to see. One was a vase of jaspar, with
a border and handles of gold. The other was an
organism, a man. When I had admired them
sufficiently from without, I begged the genie who
accompanied me to let me visit within. This
permission was accorded. In the vase I found
nothing save the pressure of weight, and between
the parts some obscure reciprocal tendency which
I have heard designated as cohesion and affinity.
But when I entered the other object, my surprise
was so great as to be almost untellable : in legends
and fairy-tales there is nothing more unbelievable
than the spectacle which I beheld. In this object,
or rather in its upper end, called the head, and
which from without looks like anything else, I
saw nothing less than the world itself j I saw the
immensity of space in which all is contained, the
immensity of time in which everything moves,
and therewith the prodigious variety of objects
that fill both space and time ; but, what is most
astounding, I saw myself coming and going !
That is what I discovered in this object that was
barely larger than a large fruit j in this object
which the headsman can dissever with a single
blow, and that, too, in such wise as to plunge into
sudden and eternal night the whole of the world
that it contains. And the amusing part of it all

* Arthur Schopenhauer. Von ihm. Ueber ihn. Frauen-
stadt.

1 74 The A natomy of Negation.

is, that if objects of this sort did not sprout like
mushrooms, continuously prepared to receive a
universe that is ever ready to subside into chaos,
and did not give and take like a ball the great
idea (Vorstellung) which is identical in each, and
of which the identity is expressed with the word
objectivity, the world would no longer exist."

Schopenhauer was not far from agreeing with
Berkeley that the world is a phantasmagoria, a
transformation-scene existing in fancy, or, as the
Brahmans declared, a mirage evoked for the
entertainment of the Supreme. The source and
origin of the exterior world lay in the representa-
tive faculty which creates it and with which it
disappears. Matter, according to him, is a lie
that is truth j it is not an illusion, it is correlative
with the intelligence j the two rise and fall toge-
ther ; separated, they could not exist ; one is a
reflection of the other. Properly speaking, they
are the same thing examined from different points.
But what is this same thing? Schopenhauer
answers with a word. It is Will.

This Will should not be taken to mean the
conscious act of a higher Intelligence. It is a
force, invariable, identical and equal, of which
gravitation, electricity, heat — in fact, every form
of activity from the fall of an apple to the found-
ing of a monarchy, from a cataclysm to a blade of
grass, from the choir of planets to the invisible
molecule — is merely a derivative and nothing
more. In Nature, it is a blind, unconscious
power; in man, it is the foundation of being.

The Protests oj Yesterday, 175

This theory, which Schopenhauer expounded
with a great luxuriance of vivid argument, and in
a style that is crystal in its clarity, coincides in
the aptest manner with the doctrine of evolution.
During the early ages of the world's formation, the
objectivity of this force was, he says, limited to
inferior forms \ but when the conflict of chemical
forces had ended, atnd the granite, like a tomb-
stone, covered the combatants, it irrupted in the
world of plant and forest. The air, decarbonised,
was then prepared for animal life, and the Will's
objectivity realised a new form. Fish and crusta-
ceans filled the sea, gigantic reptiles covered the
earth, and gradually through innumerable forms,
each more perfect than the last, the propulsion
ascended to man.

Schopenhauer decHned to believe that either
here or in another planet a being superior to man
could possibly exist ; and that for the reason that
with enlarged intelligence he would consider life
too deplorable to be supported for a moment.
As a consequence, the Will's objectivity can
ascend no higher. Its latest manifestation is even
the final term of its progress, for with it has come
the possibiUty of its denial, the possibility that
some day it may be throttled into extinction and
choked back into the chaos from which it sprang.

In all the grades of its manifestations. Will, he
taught, dispenses with any end or aim. It simply
and ceaselessly strives, for striving is its sole
nature. But as any hindrance of this striving,
through an obstacle placed between it and its tem-

176 The Anatomy of Negation.

porary aim, is called suffering, and the absence
of any obstacle, satisfaction, — it follows, if the
obstacles it meets outnumber the facilities it
encounters, that, having no final end or aim,
there can be no end and no measure of suffering.

That pain does outbalance pleasure is a fact
too well established to need discussion here.
Pain begins with the lowest types of animal life,
becomes acute with the nervous system of the
vertebrates, increases in proportion to the deve-
lopment of the intelligence ; and as intelligence
attains distinctness, pain advances with it, until
what Mr. Swinburne calls the gift of tears finds
its supreme expression in man. And man is
not a being to be envied. He is the concretion
of a thousand necessities. His life, as Schopen-
hauer has it, is a fight for existence, with the
certainty of defeat in the end ; and even when
his existence is assured, there comes a struggle
with a shadowy burden, an effort to kill time,
and a vain attempt to escape ennui.

Nor is ennui a minor evil. It is not every
one who can get away from himself Schopen-
hauer could, it is true j but in so doing he noted
that its ravages depicted on the human counte-
nance an expression of absolute despair, and
made beings who love each other as little as
men do, seek eagerly the society of each other.
In this way, between effort and attainment, the
life of man rolls on. The wish is in its nature
pain, and satisfaction soon begets satiety. No
matter what fortune may have done, no matter

The Protests of Yesterday. 177

what a man may be or what he may possess,
pain can never be avoided. Efforts to banish it
effect, if successful, only a change of form. It
may appear as want or care for the maintenance
of life. If this preoccupation be removed, back
it comes again in the mask of love, jealousy,
hatred or ambition; ,and if it gain entrance
through none of these avatars, it comes as simple
boredom, against which we strive as best we
may. Even in this latter case, if we get the
upper hand, we shall hardly do so, Schopenhauer
says, without letting pain in again in one of its
earlier forms. And then the dance begins afresh ;
for life, like a pendulum, swings ever backward
and forward between pain and ennui.

The one relief, a relief which at best is
momentary and accidental, is in that impersonal
contemplation in which the individual is effaced,
and only the pure, knowing subject subsists.
This condition Schopenhauer praises as the pain-
less state which Epicurus described as the highest
good, the bliss of the gods. Therein man is
freed from the yoke of Will ; the penal servitude
of daily life ceases as for a sabbath; the wheel
of Ixion stands still. The cause of this he was
at no loss to explain, and he did so, it may be
added, in a manner poetically logical and pecu-
liar to himself.

" Every desire is born of a need, of a privation
or of a suffering. When satisfied, it is lulled; but
for one that is satisfied, how many are unap-
peased ! Desire, moreover, is of long duration ;

N

178 The A natomy of Negation.

its exigencies are infinite ; while pleasure is brief
and narrowly measured. Pleasure, too, is but
an apparition that is destined to be succeeded
by another. The first is a vanished illusion ;
the second an illusion that lingers still. Nothing
is capable of appeasing Will, nor of permanently
arresting it. The best we can do is like the
alms tossed to a beggar, which, in preserving his
life to-day, prolongs his misery to-morrow. While,
then, we are dominated by desires and ruled by
Will, so long as we give ourselves up to hopes
that delude and fears that alarm, we have neither
peace nor happiness. But when an accident, an
interior harmony lifting us for the moment from
out the torrent of desire, delivers the spirit from
the oppression of Will, turns our attention from
everything that solicits it, and all things seem as
freed from the allurements of hope and personal
interest, then repose, vainly pursued, yet ever
intangible, comes to us of itself, bearing with
open hands the plenitude of the gift of peace."

Contemplation is then an affranchisement. It
delivers us for a moment from ourselves ; it sus-
pends the activity of V/ill ; and in raising man
out of misery into the pure world of ideas, brings
him a foretaste of that repose which is the freedom
of the non-existent. But the liberation from the
trammels of Will which is found in art and dis-
interested contemplation, is a solace that is
momentary and accidental. That which is more
desirable is a complete and unfettered freedom.
The cause of evil is known ; it is the affirmation

The Protests of Yesterday. 179

of the Will-to-live. The remedy is its denial.
The Will affirms itself when, after an acquaintance
with life, it persists as much in willing as in the
first moment when it was a mere blind necessity.
The Will denies itself when it renounces life,
when it frees itself through a persistent abdica-
tion, and abolishes itself of its own accord.

In this there is no question of suicide. For
suicide, far from being a denial of the Will-to-
live, is one of its strongest affirmations. The
man who takes his own life really wants to live.

What he does not want are the miseries and
trials attendant on his particular existence. He
abolishes the individual, but not the race. The
species continues, and pain with it. To be scien-
tifically annihilated, life should be aboHshed not
only in its suffering, but in its empty pleasures
as well. Its entire inanity should be recognised,
and the whole root cut once and for all. In
explaining in what manner this is to be accom-
plished, Schopenhauer carried his reader far off
into the shadows of the Orient. On the one
side is the lethargy of the Rishis ; on the other,
the Tauists drugged with opium \ while above all
rises the phantasy of the East, the dogma of
metempsychosis.

As the present writer has elsewhere explained,*
Schopenhauer gives the name of Will to that
force which in Indian philosophy is held to

* The Philosophy of Disenchantment. Houghton,
Mifflin & Co., Boston

N 2

1 80 The A natomy of Negation.

resurrect with man across successive lives, and
with which the horror of ulterior existences re-
appears. It is from this nightmare that we are
summoned to awake, but in the summons we
are told that the awakening can only come with
a recognition of the true nature of the dream.
The work to be accompHshed is therefore less
physical than moral. We are not to strangle
ourselves in sleep; we are to rise out of it in
meditation.

"In man,*' Schopenhauer says, "the Will-ta-
live advances to consciousness, to that point
where it can choose between its continuance or
abolition. Man is the saviour. Nature awaits
her redemption through him. He is at once the
priest and the victim."

If, then, in the succeeding generations the
appetite for liberty has been so highly cultivated
that a widespread and united compassion is felt
for all things, then through continence absolute
and universal, that condition will be produced in
which subject and object disappear, and — the
sigh of the egotist Will once choked thereby
into a death-rattle — the world, delivered from
pain, will pass into that peace which passeth all
understanding, into the Prajna-Paramita, the
" beyond all knowledge," the Buddhist goal
where nothing is.

"It is this," Schopenhauer exclaims in his
concluding paragraph, "it is this that the Hindus
have expressed in the empty terms of Nirvana
and re-absorption in Brahm. I am, of course,

The Protests of Yesterday. 1 8 1

a^vare that what remains after the abolition of
the Will, is without eifect on those in whom it
still works. But to those in whom it has been
crushed, what is this world of ours, with its suns
and stellar systems ? Nothing^

Among thinking people, Schopenhauer's ad-
mirers are to-day sufficiently frequent to defy
enumeration. The theory of force, which was
his chief originality, has found few serious adhe-
rents ; fewer still are they who pin any faith to
his plan for the extinction of humanity ; it is his
classic insistance on the immedicable misery of
life, it is the pessimism which he expounded,
but which was no more his own invention than
is atheism, that has multiplied the translations
and editions of his works. For thirty years these
works were unnoticed. But Schopenhauer, who
was very blithe in his misanthropy, snapped his
fingers at the inattention of the public \ he knew
that Time, who is at least a gentleman, would
bring him his due unasked. "My death," he
said, " will be a canonisation, the extreme unc-
tion, a baptism." Yet before he died, fame and
honours came and found him unsurprised. ''Time
has brought his roses at last," he said. " But see,"
he added, touching his silvered hair, " they are
white."

The most prominent of Schopenhauer's suc-
cessors is Dr. Eduard von Hartmann. On many
points this gentleman separates widely from the
master. In matters ontological and teleological
there is a variance that is noticeably large. But

1 8 2 The A natomy of Negation.

their pessimism is the same ; if any difference is
discernible, it is merely in this, that the tone of
the later comer has gained from recent science the
steadiness and assurance that comes of broader
knowledge.

Dr. von Hartmann, who sits at the head of
contemporary metaphysicians, is a transcendental
realist. His doctrine is a pantheism, or, as he
prefers to call it, a monism, in which nihilism and
idealism are found in equal parts, and one which
has given to Hegelism a new and unexpected
activity. Nature to him is truly divine ; but the
misery of existence is irremediable, or at least
will continue to be so until advancing science
has taught in what way the clamour of life may
be quelled. That which the Hindu termed Atma,
that which Spinoza designated as Substance — in
short, the universal and indetectable force which
has made all things what they are, is called by
him the Unconscious. The Unconscious is sove-
reignly wise, and the world is admirable in every
respect ; it is existence that is irreclaimable in its
misery.

The originality of this philosophy consists in
a theory of optimistic evolution as counterbal-
anced by a pessimistic analysis of life ; but the
originality is not lost in its conclusion, in which
it is argued that, as the world's progressus tends
neither to universal nor individual happiness, the
great aim of science should be to emancipate
man from a love of life, and in this wise lead the
world back to chaos. The interest of the Un-

The Protests of Yesterday. 183

conscious is opposed to our own. It is to our
advantage not to live j it is to the advantage of
the Unconscious that we should do so, and that
others should be brought into existence through
us. The Unconscious, therefore, in the further-
ment of its aims, has surrounded man with such
illusions as are capable of deluding him into a
belief that life is a pleasant thing well worth the
living. The instincts within us are the different
forms beneath which the desire to live is at work,
and with which the Unconscious moulds man to
its profit. Hence the energy witlessly expended
for the protection of an existence which is but
the right to suifer; hence the erroneous idea
which is formed of the happiness derivable from
life; and hence, too, the modification of past
disenchantments through the influence of fresh
and newer hopes. But when in the old age of
the world, when humanity has divested itself of
the belief that happiness is obtainable in this
life, when it has lost all faith in the promise of
another — in fact, when every illusion has been
dissipated, when hope, love, ambition and gold
are recognized as chimeras, or at least as incen-
tives to activity which cause more pain than
pleasure — then, science aiding, humanity will
perform its own execution, and Time at last will
cease to be.

Such is Dr. von Hartmann's conception of
life, and such is the idea he has formed of the
destiny of the world. In regard to the latter,
nothing need now be said ; but it may be noted

184 The Anatomy of Negation,

that to the general public his theory of pleasure
and pain has not seemed wholly satisfactory.
There have been many attempts to confute his
pessimism, and many attempts to show that life,
so far from being immedicable in its misery, is a
well-spring of delight. And to many, doubtless,
it has so seemed. But a point of view is not an
argument. Whether life is held to be valuable,
or whether it is held to be valueless, its nature
in either case remains unchanged. To the
obtuse it is usually the one ; to the sensitive it
is generally the other. But to the impersonal
observer, the disinterested witness, to him who
looks back through the shudders of history, and
who gazes into a future that will be as inexpli-
cable as the past, to him who feels some sympathy
for the suffering, some compassion for the dis-
tressed and some pity for those in pain, life
seldom seems other than an immense, an un-
necessary affliction.

Why, asked Voltaire, with that leer which de
Musset has made immortal. Why is there any-
thing ? An answer often given to this question
is, that the ultimate reason of things is discover-
able only in matter and motion. In theological
circles the advocates of this explanation are not
in good repute. In polite society it is considered
as bad form to hold such theories as it is to
carve salad or guillotine asparagus. In fact,
beyond the jurisdiction of the scientific world

The Protests of Yesterday. 185

the materialist has a bad name. The pantheist,
passe encore. Pantheism is vague and poetic,
and apprehended with difficulty. But the mate-
rialist brings a different guitar. His conception
of the universe demands but little study to seem
tolerably clear. Besides, in his heart he seems
to say, There is no God, and the appearance of
that inward speech is not compatible with good
manners. Society has a stronger leaning to
affirmations than to negations ; in fact, as Rousseau
has pointed out, the average intellect prefers to
be wrong in its belief than to have none at all.
The materialist, standing as he does in opposi-
tion to theological tenets, is therefore eyed askant,
and, what is more, is called an atheist when his
back is turned.

Parenthetically it may be noted that the his-
torical definition of an atheist is a citizen who
refuses to worship the gods which the authorities
of the state have appointed as worthy of worship.
In modern parlance the word has acquired a
sharper tone, and is generally used in reference
to whoso disbelieves in the supernatural. In
the coming centuries it is possible that it will
cease to be a term of reproach. Indeed, its reha-
bilitation has in certain quarters already begun.
But be this as it may, there are still few thinkers
who hear themselves called atheists without ex-
periencing some bewilderment. "Tell a philoso-
pher," Heine said, " that his theories are atheistic,
and he will be as much surprised as would a geo-
metrician on learning that his triangles were red."

1 86 The A natomy of Negation.

The denomination is as impertinent to the views
of the one, as the colour is to the triangles of the
other. Not every one, however, has had the
privilege of sitting at Heine's feet, and the ex-
pression continues to be flung, with more or less
vigour, at all systems of rationalistic thought,
though at none more virulently than at mate-
rialism.

As has been hinted in earlier chapters, mate-
rialism is as old as philosophy itself. In India,
it was a precursor of Buddhism; in China, it
antedates Laou-tze: In classic antiquity, Demo-
critus, Epicurus and Lucretius were among its
advocates. Arrested by Christianity, it was im-
prisoned all through the middle ages ; but when»
over a century ago, it at last escaped, thrones and
altars fell before it. It is, however, only within
recent years that materialism received the en-
dorsements of science. The standard-bearer of
this movement, a movement all the more signi-
ficant in that it was a reaction against Hegelian
abstractions, was Moleschott. His principal work,
the Krieslauf des Lebens, awoke Germany from
her stupor. It was attacked, applauded and
abused. The thinking world, which since Hegel's
death had been twirling its thumbs, turned toward
it expectant eyes. The hypothesis of an indefi-
nite circulation of matter passing ceaselessly from
life to death and from death to life, was old
enough to seem quite new, and the axiom. With-
out force, no matter; without matter, no force, was
listened to with grave attention.

The Protests of Yesterday, 187

The Kreislauf des Lebens inspired any number
of affiliated works. Vogt, Lowenthal, Czolbe
and Eudolphe Wagner made themselves promi-
nent in its defence. Old-fashioned methods
were abandoned. Psychology was put aside.
Since there was no psyche, of what use could it
be? Metaphysics was relegated to the night
from which it had sprung. Modem materialism
determined to support its dogmas with the
sciences which are called exact. And Biichner,
mailed with astronomy, chemistry, geology, phy-
siology and natural history, produced in Kraft
und Stqf the text-book of the new belief. There-
after it only needed a hymnal to be complete.
The deficiency has been supplied by Eichepin's
Blasphlmes.

The first principle of scientific materialism is
the inseparability of matter and force. Matter is
not a vague substance on which force grapples
from without. In the absence of the one, the
the other is inconceivable, save perhaps by way
of hypothesis. Without force, matter would enter
at once into a formless void. Without matter,
force would fade into a region of pure abstrac-
tions. Endeavour, for instance, to represent
matter without force, that is, without the power
of cohesion or affinity, attraction or repulsion,
and, presto ! the very idea of matter disappears.
In like measure, an effort to represent force
without matter results in a similar denouement.

The second principle is that force and matter
are indestructible. There are transformations.

1 88 The A natomy of Negation.

there are varieties in their manifestations, but in
the sum of their effects the intensity is undimi-
nished. Burn a log of wood, and the scales of
a chemist will show that not a particle of matter
has been destroyed. ** Annihilate a particle of
matter," said Spinoza, **^and the world will
crumble." Not an atom can lose itself in im-
mensity, and to immensity not an atom can be
added. The flux and reflux of things show
beneath incessant variations the same persistent
and invariable aggregate. There is a circulation
of materials of which each fortuitous combination
has its beginning and its end, but in some one
form or another the materials meet again and
interconnect anew.

As with matter, so with force. What disap-
pears on one side re-appears on another. Fric-
tion produces fire, motion is obtained by steam.
The amount of movement expended is reco-
vered in the amount of heat; the amount of
heat dissipated is recovered in the amount of
motion. Force, then, like matter, is immortals
It may be transformed, but never destroyed.
From these considerations, materialism concludes,
that, as that which is indestructible can have had
no beginning, matter and force cannot have been
created. Ex nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil posse
reverti. The transformation of something into-
nothing is as inconceivable, says Lebon, as is the
creation of something from nothing. And Taine
adds, " There is nothing but matter and motion.
Space is the infinity of matter, as time is the

The Protests of Yesterday. 189

eternity of motion." Matter and force are, then,
eternal. But eternity is shared alone by them.
Dust we are, to dust we shall return.

Matter and force being eternal, their laws are
immutable. Were it otherwise, the properties of
matter would change, and on the tablets of ex-
perience no change is recorded. Nature has
never varied. Her laws are the mechanical rela-
tion of forces which, in disclosing no trace of a
higher Will, turn superstition into a vagabond that
has not where to lay its head. Time, in which
all things unroll, is the great, the one creator.

The novelty of modern materialism, a novelty
which distinguishes it from other systems, is that
it claims to rest its affirmations on a basis which
is strictly scientific. . Its explanation of the uni-
verse by means of the action of natural forces,
its reduction of natural forces to the variable
modes of the force inherent in nature, are indeed
supported by physics, chemistry and physiology.
But into certain regions that it attempts to pene-
trate, it has not been preceded by any avant-
courier that at all resembles exact knowledge.

The hypothesis that the attraction of all pon-
derable matter which maintains the planets in
their orbits, must at one time have been in a
condition to mould the universe from the cosmic
dust spread through space, is the starting-point
of materialistic cosmogony. This hypothesis,
hazarded by Kant, signed by Laplace and attested
by Herschel, is crowned by another, which is as
opulent in vistas as is the retrospect of the first.

1 90 The A natomy of Negation.

It is to the effect that the earth, like her lost
satellite whose fragments have deluged the globe,
will in turn be disembowelled and tossed through
space. Historically these hypotheses are not new.
Entertaining as the conjunction may appear, they
are part of Buddhist lore. But they are a part of
Buddhism which is as vague as it is poetic. In
materialism, if there is less vagueness, there is
also less poetry. Materialism is nothing if not
matter-of-fact. Starting, then, from the hypothesis
that a mass of cosmic matter originally filled the
space which our planetary system occupies, and
that, in accordance with the laws of gravitation
which draw the parts to the centre, the sun was
formed by the gradual concentration of its ele-
ments, it is not difficult to fancy a fragment of
nebulosity detached from the centre and shot
through space, developing first in a collection
of gases, then . into molecules that the rotatory
movement fused and ignited, and which in cool-
ing formed a crust above an interior furnace.
This flight of fancy accomplished, it is yet easier
to imagine the condensation of vapours into rain,
the growth of plants and the birth of the monera
from which man descends.

And life ? Is it then, as Marcus Aurelius in
his sceptred melancholy suggested, but a halt
between two eternities? Bah! Away with phrases !
A bottle containing carbonate of ammonia, chlo-
ride of potassium, phosphate of soda, chalk,
magnesia, sulphuric acid and silex, is life in its
most ideal, in its completest expression.

The Protests of Yesterday. 191

Some sixty million years ago, when primitive
man blinked at a brighter sky than ours, he thought
of the archeolithic ape, if he thought at all, as an
inferior animal. And, indeed, there could have
been little in common between the shuddering
orang-outang and the speechless yet ferocious
troglodyte who with an uprooted tree crushed
the skull of a lion and then sucked the fuming
brain.

The link between the two was as undiscernible
to him as to the theologian of to-day. And yet,
as Huxley has pointed out, the anatomical differ-
ence between man and a gorilla is less than
between a gorilla and an inferior ape. And, to
pursue the same line of argument, the difference
between a Shakespeare and a savage is infinitely
greater than between a savage and a brute. Why,
a magpie is cleverer than the aboriginal Austra-
lian ; but at the same time the cleverness of a
magpie is not a proof of the evolution of man.

The old coquette, this world of ours, conceals
her age, but her biography is under our feet. As
we read backwards through it, her years mount
up into ten hundred millions. The date of that
initial catastrophe, her birth, is yet unreached ;
but we know enough of her past to be sure that
it has been long enough and sufficiently immoral
for many things to happen of which our philoso-
phy may dream though it cannot prove. Among
these things are spontaneous generation and the
descent of man. When these are substantiated?
materialism will have proved its claim ; its sway

1 92 The A natomy of Negation,

will be undisputed ; but until then, its arguments
have as much evidential value as so many astro
gals.

In attempting to explain the organic by the
inorganic, the main argument was the alleged
birth of insects in putrefied matter. This argu-
ment was routed by Redi, who enveloped some
meat in a light gauze, on which, a little later,
eggs were found to have been deposited by
passing flies, and at once the mystery was
explained. The discovery of the microscope
brought new hopes to the materialists. The
animalculae which were found in certain infusions
appeared to have been produced without the
assistance of antecedent germs. The falsity of
this conclusion was demonstrated by Schwann,
and the hypothesis of abiogenesis was abandoned,
until Pouchet brought it again into fashion. But
experiments recently made by M. Pasteur con-
tradict those made by Pouchet; and so far as
contemporary science is competent to give a
decision, the arguments of the anti-vitalists are
inadequate to support their case.

But though the theory of spontaneous genera-
tion must be abandoned, at least for the moment,
the materialists are by no means at their wits'-
end. Life has arisen in some manner, and why
not from the interaction of molecular forces ?

One of the most charming hypotheses on this
subject was advanced a few years ago by Sir
William Thomson. To this gentleman, life, or
perhaps it would be better to say a germ poten-

The Protests of Yesterday, 193

tially alive, that is, having within itself the ten-
dency to assume a definite living form, first
visited the earth in a meteor. If it is proper to
assume that meteors are fragments of shattered
and once peopled worlds, it may be assumed
with equal propriety that some of these fragments
are partially intact. The moment, then, that it
is admitted that beside our own there are a
number of life-supporting worlds and that other
worlds have existed in anterior epochs, it would
not seem improbable that germ-bearing meteors
have moved and do still move through space.
As a consequence, any germ -bearing meteor
which fell upon the earth during the time when
it was destitute of life may have been the uncon-
scious cause of the failure which we are now
enjoying.

Dr. Zoellner, a German scientist trained in all
the illiberalities of ofiicial optimism, attempted
to refute this hypothesis on the ground that when
a meteor enters our atmosphere, the friction of
the air makes it incandescent and consequently
incapable of preserving and transporting any
germ, however potentially alive. To this refuta-
tion Helmholtz made answer, that only the surface
of meteors become heated, and that germs might
readily remain unharmed in interior crevices, or
if on the surface might on reaching our atmo-
sphere be blown from their conveyance by the
wind, and that, too, before the heat was great
enough to cause their destruction. But if this
solution be accepted, the origin of life on other
o

1 94 The A natomy of Negation.

planets remains still to be explained. It may
be then, as Helmholtz has suggested, that life is
co-eternal with matter, and its germs, transported
from one planet to another, develop wherever
they find a propitious spot. But this, too, is
merely an hypothesis, and one that has not the
slightest evidence in its favour. The enigma of
life is for the present a part of the unknowable.
But whether it will always remain so is another
question. The differences which once were sup-
posed to constitute a barrier between the verte-
brate and the non-vertebrate no longer exist.
The modifications by which the quadrupedal
reptile became a bipedal bird have been clearly
shown. Forty years ago, there was no evidence
that such a demonstration would ever be made.
Forty years hence, who shall say but that the
missing link may be discovered, or the manufac-
ture of the organic from the inorganic begun ?
As Professor Huxley has hinted, no one who has
watched the gradual development of a compli-
cated animal from the protoplasm which con-
stitutes the egg of a frog or a hen, will deny that
a similar evolution of the whole animal world
from a like foundation is at least within the
bounds of possibility.

Of the various creeds which man has been
pleased to invent, the youngest is positivism.
The position which this system of thought has
acquired is due to its own merit. It cannot, like

The Protests of Yesterday. 195

pantheism, look back through the terraces of
time and claim the quaterings of race. Nor can
it, like materialism, bedeck itself with Greek
insignia. Among philosophies, positivism is a
parvenu. As such, it is viewed with scorn, en-
thusiasm and indifference.

Positivism made its debut a little over forty
years ago. Its name was its fortune. There was
in the sound of it an invitation to nearer acquaint-
ance. But when the acquaintance was made,
the name was found to partake of the nature of
a lure. Relativism, if less attractive, would have
been a clearer description. For positivism, if
positive at all, is positive that there is nothing
positive. Its sponsor was Auguste Comte.

If the realisation of the ambitions of youth
may be regarded as the criterion of a successful
career, the life of this thinker cannot be con-
sidered a failure. At a comparatively early age
the outlines of his doctrine appear to have been
clearly defined. The outlines sprang of a sug-
gestion of Saint-Simon, who was wont to declare
that all knowledge should be co-ordinated into
one vast and comprehensive synthesis, but their
development was accomplished without material
indebtedness. In synthetising knowledge into a
single system of thought, Comte proposed nothing
less than the abolishment of theology and meta-
physics, and the re-organisation of the Occident
through a philosophy of his own manufacture.
In 1842, the sixth and last volume of this philo-
sophy was given to the public, and with it the
o 2

196 TJie Anatomy of Negation.

knell of all religions was supposed to have been
rung. Ten years later, to the utter bewilderment
of his disciples, Comte proclaimed the necessity
of founding a new religion, of which the sovereign
pontiff was to be none other than himself.

In an earlier paragraph it has been hinted
that positivism is positive that there is nothing
positive, a phrase which, from a Comtist stand-
point, may be taken to mean that the essence
of things escapes us. We can understand the
interconnection of facts — that is, their direct
antecedents and immediate sequences — but the
initial causes and ultimate results are inaccessible
to the intellect. In a word, there is nothing
except material phenomena and the laws thereof.
As this principle is the pivot on which the entire
philosophy turns, a momentary examination may
not be without benefit.

Many a sceptic Jias filled his hours in showing
that things are not what they seem, but none of
them, however revolutionary, have disputed the
reality of consciousness, or denied the phenomena
that are manifest in thought, feeling and volition.
In affirming, therefore, that the objects appre-
hended by the senses are the only apprehensible
phenomena, positivism apparently displays a
radicalism which is as audacious as it is novel.
It is of course possible and even proper to
regard thought, feeling and volition as products
of the body, but it would be a misuse of language
to assert that they are material phenomena ; and,
as positivism's first tenet is that there is nothing

The Protests of Yesterday. 197

except material phenomena, it would seem that,
like any other screw, the before-mentioned pivot
is loose. On the other hand, it may be objected
that the phenomena called internal are unob-
servable, and that any attempt to distinguish
them from their external elements results merely
in demonstrating the vainness of the endeavour.
If this view be accepted, positivism is found less
rickety than it first appeared, and the introduc-
tory statement may be welcomed at once and
without further hesitation.

If, then, as positivism asserts, the essence of
things escapes us, any speculation on the origin
and purpose of the world is profitless. On such
and kindred subjects the mind should be without
conjecture. It is only natural that man should
have been on the qui vive in his effort to discover
efficient and final causes, but his effort has never
been successful. " If God did not exist," said
Voltaire, " the world would have invented him.'*
" Which," a wit replied, " is precisely what the
world has done."

The mobility of phenomena, the fugitiveness
of sensations, the impermanency of the actual,
the real which each moment ends and begins
anew, have, in all ages, incited to a knowledge
of the unknowable. But the knowledge has not
been obtained, and it was in view of the imprac-
ticability of the attempt that Comte ventured to
suggest what may be termed a middle course.
In the effort to pierce the impenetrable, humanity,
he said, has passed and is still passing through

1 9S The A natomy of Negation.

certain stages of thought which correspond to
those of childhood, adolescence and maturity.
The first is the age of theology ; the second, of
metaphysics ; and the third, of science. This
doctrine, which is known as the law of the three
states, conveys the suggestion alluded to, together
with a theory which is as liberal as the sea. It
runs somewhat as follows :

In the infancy of thought, Nature is dowered
with the same illusions to which man himself is
subjected. Every object is animated, and the
government of the universe is ascribed, not to
invariable laws, but to sentient and intelligent
beings. In everything that occurs is seen the
manifestation of a direct intention, and each
particular event is attributed to forces which are
but the aggrandisements of those of man. In
the advance of thought, these forces, whose
prowess is discernible in effects which man is
impotent to produce, become the gods, invisible
yet multitudinous. Then, gradually, as arises
the capacity of co-ordinating phenomena into
separate groups, the number of divinities dimi-
nishes, until, through processes of generalisation,
they are reduced to one, and behold, man has
passed out of fetishism into polytheism, and
from thence to a belief in a unique Creator.

But there is a further advance of thought, and
in its train comes the suggestion that the uni-
formity noticeable in the universe is incompatible
with the theory of an arbitrary Will. The initial
conceptions are dismissed, the celestial and in-

The Protests of Yesterday. 199

accessible reason of things is banished, and
realised abstractions are accepted instead. Nature
is governed, not by an external power, but by
internal and occult qualities. The reign of dryads
and nymphs is passed, and their place is usurped
by entities, by theories which deal with a plastic
force and a vital principle. This is the second,
or metaphysical state, which is of advantage in
being a negation of the first and a preparation
for the third, which latter is reached when
men, weary of explanations that explain nothing,
discover that what is necessary for the mind is
not obligatory for things, and that a cause which
is conceived by the one need not have a place
among the others. Such is the positive, or scien-
tific state of mind, to which, according to Comte,
all humanity tends ; and such, too, is the middle
course which he recommended to thoughtful and
decorous persons.

Stripped of its verbal husks, the law of the
three states may be reduced to a truism. In
seeking the reason of things, men look first above,
then within, and finally confess themselves van-
quished.

The law of the three states which Stuart Mill
called the backbone of the entire philosophy,
but which is not particularly new nor particularly
convincing — not new, because sketched by Kant
in outline, and not convincing, because Comte
himself decHned to be bound by it — is supple-
mented by a classification of sciences from out
of which was drawn a- fresh one, called sociology.

200 The Anatomy of Negation.

In the study of facts, the interpretation of the
experience which is written between the lines of
history, sociology was to be the lever in the
substitution of science for religion. It was to
terminate the conflict between theology, which
demands order without progress, and metaphysics,
which aims at progress and turns its back on
order. It was to arrest the retrogression of the
one, and still the anarchy of the other. In the
government of life it was to replace religion with
science, and give to intelligence the guiding-
strings of the world.

In mapping this programme, Comte fancied
that sociology could be raised to the level of an
exact science, and that through its influence all
enlightened nations would join hands in the pro-
fession of identical doctrines. In the Utopias in
which he then lost himself, he planned a re-
organisation of society on a basis which, if sug-
gestive of Plato's Republic, is otherwise without
value or allurement. There is, he pointed out,
no such thing as liberalism in astronomy, physics
or chemistry j and if it be otherwise in ethics and
politics, it is because neither of them possess
established principles. When they acquire them,
as they will do when positivism begins its sway,
the force of public opinion will disappear. A
corporation of philosophers, salaried by the State
and treated with the greatest respect, will have
the entire charge of education, together with the
right to counsel and direct each citizen in his
private and public life, and enjoy, moreover, such

The Protests of Yesterday. 201

an amount of authority over students and thinkers
as will enable them to prevent the latter from
squandering their time and knowledge in spe-
culations that are valueless to humanity, and
oblige them to apply themselves to such inves-
tigations as may be deemed most important to
general prosperity. The decrees which the cor-
poration may formulate are not to be questioned,
and, as the idea of the sovereignty of the people
is one of the most pernicious that civilisation has
advanced, but slight attention will be paid to the
inclinations of the masses. In each nation there
will be a governing body and a body governed,
in which latter the citizen will occupy the position
for which his abilities have fitted him. There-
after religion and metaphysics will disappear.
Scientific dissidence will be effaced, and an in-
variable and uniform political dogma will at last
be accepted by united and peaceful nations.

To the clear-headed and matter-of-fact audience
which was Comte's, theories such as these were
viewed with suspicion. The idea that there is
no God had in it nothing that was alarming;
the prophecy of the overthrow of superstition
and the general adoption of positivist tenets
seemed not unreasonable; the prohibition against
idle speculations and the complementary recom-
mendation to treat only with the real were re-
ceived with open favour ; but the sturdiest could
not look without terror on a future governed by
philosophers.

When this horizon was disclosed, it is probable

202 The Anatomy of Negation.

that Comte had already entered into what is
known as his pathological period. In earlier
years he suddenly lost his reason, and as sud-
denly recovered it. The border-lands of genius
and insanity are never well defined, and it is
not unlikely that before the Cours de philosophic
positive was completed, something of that of
which he had too much, something of that weight
of thought which obscures the vision and tips
the scales of common-sense, was again at work,
though this time more dumbly and dimly than
before. Thereafter the champion of the actual
who had wished to lead God to the frontiers,
and there thank him kindly for his provisory
services, lapsed into a morbid mysticism. The
sceptre of the world which he had given to intel-
lect was transferred to sentiment. It was for the
heart to rule and for the intellect to obey.

The Philo'sophie politique^ in which his ideas
on this subject are conveyed, shows, even amid
the luxuriance of luminous thought, the same
evidence of mental decadence as is noticeable
in Kant's Kritik der Pradischen Vernunft. Both
belong to the senilia of great minds. During
the year that intervened between its appearance
and the publication of his chief work, Comte
conceived what his biographers term a platonic
affection for a lady whose influence over him
was of such a nature, that, aided by the historical
meditations in which his life had been passed,
he dreamed of a happiness that should be uni-
versal, and of a world that should be ruled, not

The Protests of Yesterday, 203

by a corporation of salaried philosophers, but by
love in its purest and most disinterested form.

The pompous Religion of Humanity which
he then evolved, and which has no more connec-
tion with positivism than an opera -bouffe has
with logarithms, saddened the boldest among
his adherents. It found adepts — what vagary
has not ? The altruism which it inculcated is cer-
tainly not without charm ; but the deification of
humanity past and future, the transformation of
earth into a fetish, space into fate and numbers
into virtues, are among the most deplorable in-
stances of the aberrations of genius. After shutting
out the unknowable, the door was opened to super-
stition; after banishing metaphysics, sentiment
was beckoned in to occupy its place; religion was
superseded by idolatry; and the heavens, that no
longer told of the glory of God, were set ablaze
with the memories of great men.

In its uncorrupted form, positivism is a modi-
fication of materiaUsm. Among theologians there
is a disposition to regard both in the same light.
But no positivist likes to be called a materialist.
He shows as much displeasure at the term as
he would were he called a theist or a pantheist.
And, indeed, the lines of demarcation, if not
always broad, are none the less apparent. At
the origin of things, theism places a personal
and infinite Being ; pantheism sees in all things
the immanency of a Being that is infinite but
impersonal; and materialism asserts that the
cause of all things lies in the arrangement and

204 The Anatomy of Negation.

properties of force and matter. Positivism, on
the other hand, knows nothing of an infinite
Being, whether personal or impersonal; in the
spheres that are inaccessible to it, it recognises
nothing but matter and the properties of matter ;
but, unlike materialism, it draws no conclusions.
According to Littr^, positivism is simply a me-
thodical, hierarchic arrangement of the general
facts of science, excluding every subjective ele-
ment, and accepting nothing that is not drawn
from experience.

A positivist, moreover, shows no evidence of
delight at being called an atheist. As Littre
has described him, an atheist is in a certain
measure a theologian. He is not entirely eman-
cipated. He has his explanations of things;
he knows how they began. He believes in
the chance clash of atoms, or in occult forces,
or in a first" cause. Of all this the positivist
knows nothing. He ignores productive atoms
as well as a creating and ordaining force. But
whoso thinks that history follows a development
that is obedient to a natural law — whoso thinks
that the origin of societies, the establishment or
mutation of religion, the founding of empires,
cities, castes, aristocracies, governments, oracles,
prophecies, revelations, theologies, arts and in-
dustries, are due, one and all, to the faculties of
man — whoso accepts this view has fully accom-
plished the cycle of mental emancipation. The
moment that he leaves no place for the super-
natural either in the organic or the inorganic.

The Protests of Yesterday. 205

either among cosmic phenomena or among those
of history, that moment he passes initiate into
the brotherhood of positivism.

The charm of positivism is the matter-of-fact
position which it assumes before the insolvable.
If it cuts no old knots, it brings no new tangles.
It treats metaphysics with the respect which is
due to all that is venerable ; in the presence of
religion it puts the dialectic broadsword softly
back in its sheath. It leaves the great query
where it found it. And in this is its wisdom ; its
agnosticism is its strength. Clamour as we may,
there is no answer to our whys and wherefores.
There is in us, about and beyond us, an enigma
that will defy the Champollions of the future as
it has routed the seers of the past. The reason
of things lies beyond the sphere of knowledge,
and the nearest approach that can be made is in
a suspicion that all is relative.

CHAPTER VL

A POET S VERDICT.

There have been days in the history of the
world when the poet was regarded with a respect
that approached veneration. He was considered
the oracle of the gods, and his voice was listened
to with reverence. This pleasant custom has
fallen into disuse. The gods have disappeared
and carried the divine afflatus with them. In
an age like the present, the demand for poets is
slight. Their titles have been examined, and it
has been found that to be useless is their one
patent of nobility. As a consequence, the poet's
vocation has seemed to many a synonym of the
ridiculous. And yet, as Gautier with a charming
affectation of naivete remarked, an inability to
write in verse can scarcely be considered as con-
stituting a special talent. But there is another
inconvenience ; a poet is never rightly appre-
ciated save by his peers ; and as his peers are
infrequent, the majesty which resides within him
often lacks the trumpetings of a herald. Then,
too, in an era of remorseless activity, it is only
quiet people who live in the country that find

A Poefs Verdict. 207

leisure to listen to the footfalls of the Muse. For
the benefit of such as they, verse may be divided
into three broad classes : that which pleases the
author's enemies, that which pleases the author's
contemporaries, and that which passes unob-
served to pleasure the idlesse of posterity. Of
these classes, the verse of Leconte de Lisle
belongs to the third.

Any one who has taken an interest in French
literature during the last decade can hardly have
failed to notice the number of new writers that
have come into being, and more particularly the
inferiority of their work. In explanation of this
surge of mediocrity, many theories might be
advanced ; but perhaps the most palpable would
be that the literature of our expiring century,
after having passed from youth to virility, has
begun to experience the maladies and garrulities
of old age. But however the subject may be
viewed, it is at least evident that the paladins of
1830, who were as revolutionary in literature as
their ancestors were in religion, have passed away,
and also that their methods have so far disap-
peared with them that the day before yesterday
Victor Hugo seemed like a living, anachronism.
Readers latterly have refused to be interested in
the phantasies of the romantics, and perhaps their
pages were a trifle over-coloured; but their excuse
lay in the fact that literature had become im-
poverished through conventionalities; there were
synonyms instead of words; and in place of

208 TJie Anatomy of Negation,

ample vocabularies there were small niceties of
expression. All this the romantics did away
with. They breathed health and vigour into an
enervated dictionary, and startled Europe with
the opulence of their adjectives.

It was in those victorious days that Gautier
threw aside his brush and went in a famous red
waistcoat to guy the philistines at the birth-night
of Hernani. In graver years Gautier complained
that in the eyes of the bourgeois he had never
ceased to wear that crimson garment, and some-
how, save among the liberal few, he has always
been looked upon more or less askant. It has
been said that it was his purpose to seek the
hazardous and display it, but it must be admitted
that what he had to say he told with a grace
such as had been seldom heard before. He
chose his words for their colour, for their aroma,
as one may say; and it is related that he objected
now and then to an accent because it took away
something from the charm which the grouping
of certain letters otherwise conveyed.

Through those days, too, Alfred de Musset
passed with the indolence of a dissolute young
god. He joined the ranks of the romantics, as
did all men of talent, but he joined them more
as an amateur than a professional : the familiar
ballad in which the moon is represented as sus-
pended over a steeple like a dot over an /,
opened for him the doors of the cenacle with-
out even giving him the trouble to knock. In

A Poefs Verdict 209

a subsequent poem he asked forgiveness for that
misdeed ; and though he boasted that his Muse
went bare of foot like Truth, she might still have
been pictured as shod with buskins of gold.

Another of the heroes of this epoch was Alfred
de Vigny. Some one has said that the face of a
poet is never known until years and sorrow have
marred its original beauty ; but to this rule de
Vigny was an exception. He was famous when
quite young, and his bust, as it stands to-day in
the lobby of the Theatre Fran9ais, arrests the
attention even of the indifferent. At the time
to which allusion is made, he mingled but little
with his fellows, appearing only when the moral
support of his presence was needed. In later
years, in spite of his talent, his beauty and his
position, de Vigny, devoured by melancholy, turned
his back entirely upon the world, and retired into
what Sainte-Beuve has termed his totcr d'ivoire.

In the wake of these poets came the familiar
figure of Charles Baudelaire. Recently he has
been described as having had the appearance of
a deHcate prelate, a trifle depraved. This de-
scription might be suggested by the mere reading
of his verse. In the work of every poet there is
something of the individual, and it is probable
that few have studied the chiselled lines which
he worked up with even a shrewder eye for the
Satanic than that which was given to Edgar Poe,
without calling up some such picture of their
author. Baudelaire entered the ranks when the
battle was won, but nevertheless he managed to
p

2 1 o The A natomy of Negation.

flaunt a standard that has troubled the vision of

many an after-comer.

So swiftly does time go by, that of these writers
little more than tradition now remains. In the
eyes of contemporary critics, de Musset is a dis-
locator of Alexandrines, de Vigny is a memory,
Baudelaire a curiosity, and Gautier a model.
Yet each of them left a legacy that is still dis-
puted. From de Musset descends the gift of
eloquence ; in Baudelaire's testament is the heir-
loom of lurid effect ; de Vigny has devised his
morbidity ; while Gautier's bequest is perfection
in form. Taken together, they were the poetic
embodiment of the agitation of which Voltaire,
Holbach and Diderot were the heralds. *'Je
ne crois pas, 6 Christ, k ta parole sainte," cried
de Musset, and the cry was echoed by his fellow-
workers.

In a literary sense, these poets were, on their
first appearance, very generally looked upon as
impertinent innovators, and in their assault upon
the classicists they caused much rage and rhetoric.
Viewed at this distance, the disturbance seems
unnecessary ; for, after all, what is romanticism
but the art of pleasing one's contemporaries, and
what is classicism but the art which delighted
earlier generations? Turn about is always fair
play. In a little while Hugo will be a classic,
precisely as Racine is beginning to be considered
a romantic. But be this as it may, the seething
passion which in 1830 seemed more alluring
than the chill restrictions of former years, gra-

A Poefs Verdict 2ii

dually disappeared, and its place was taken by
the serene impassibility of another group of poets
who were called the Parnassians.

The advent of this new school was necessarily
less boisterous than that of their predecessors : for
that matter, they excited more ridicule than anger;
and it is related that a cabman in a street row,
after having called his adversary everything that
was unpleasant, hurled at him with withering
contempt as last and supreme reproach, the un-
avengeable insult, ^^ Farnassien^ val"

Of the poets who made up this group, the
better known are MM. Sully-Prudhomme and
Frangois Coppee. Sully-Prudhomme is an avowed
materialist and frankly pessimistic. His poems
may be summarised as a series of very delicate
impressions intermingled with a fair amount of
philosophic suggestion. His repertory is not
extensive. It consists in three or four themes
and their variations — such, for instance, as the
familiar aspiration toward the infinite, man's
sentiment of nothingness before the immensity
of the universe, the agony of doubt, and the
usual communion with Nature. The limits of
this range do not necessarily imply a lack of
ability. The art in any form of verse consists
merely in the skill with which one or more of
half-a-dozen old-fashioned sentiments is rendered,
and in this respect the work of Sully-Prudhomme
is generally irreproachable. In his treatment of
purely personal dramas, the mental and moral
combats which we all of us wage with ourselves,

P 2

212 The Anatomy of Negation.

he leaves little to be desired, and it would be
difficult to mention a poet who has entered more
deeply than he into the psychological develop-
ments of the century. For all this he has
received much praise, and if his verse is ever
criticised, it is because it is at times a trifle vague.
Sully-Prudhomme has been as honestly puzzled
by the discord between the real and the ideal as
any writer of his class ; but in his perplexity his
thought floats away to uncertain heights, and
there disappears with a flutter of restless in-
quietude. To put the matter briefly, Sully-Prud-
homme very often seems as though he were
about to say something well worth the telling,
but before he has gotten it safely on paper the
force of the idea has vanished.

Frangois Coppee is another of the dispersed
Parnassians. His negations, if more carefully
veiled than those of Sully-Prudhomme, are none
the less discernible. He is at times dramatic,
but his sadness is always insistent. To be sad
is admittedly the poet's privilege ; yet to be sim-
ply sad, and to express such a state of being as
who should say, " I hunger" or " I thirst," is not
necessarily poetic ; rather is it commonplace. To
be worth the telling, grief should express a thought
that is neither humdrum nor familiar ; it should
lay bare fresh possibilities or set new limits to
resignation : if it does not do this, then, however
readily the tears may flow, however gracefully
the grief be told, it is what a boulevardier would
call le vieux jeu — the old story, of which we are

A Poefs Verdict. 213

most of us thoroughly tired. It is this old story
that M. Coppee re-tells; and though the telling is
managed with much refinement, it is impossible
to call it novel. M. Coppee has also much to
say about his boredom. Boredom, however, is
not a flexible topic ; indeed, unless it is handled
with unusual dexterity, there is a danger that the
reader will find it even more irritating than the
writer, and thereupon withdraw his attention and
support. Boredom also is more of a fine art
than is generally supposed, and not to every one
is it given to disentangle original ideas from that
which is flat and unprofitable. Leopardi and
Baudelaire have done so, it is true; but between
them they managed to throttle the subject and
share the booty. For a later comer like M.
Coppee, nothing was left.

MM. Prudhomme and Coppee have both sat
at the feet of Leconte de Lisle. To-day they
are better known than he, but neither of them
have ventured to rate their work above that
of their master. In this modesty much good
taste is shown. He has none of their faults,
and, moreover, he has genius, which both of
them lack. In comparison with him they are as
concettists to Dante.

Leconte de Lisle is perhaps the most perfect
poet of France. It is he who is the rightful
heir to the legacies of the romantics, and these
possessions he has rounded and improved with
an erudition which embraces history, philology,
archaeology, anthropology, and doubtless much

214 The A natomy of Negation.

more beside. In spite of this, or perhaps on that
account, his literary luggage is scant. He has
translated a few ancient authors, written a drama
or two, and pubUshed three compact volumes of
verse. In speaking of the latter, it is difficult to
describe them in a phrase, though this perhaps
may be accomplished in saying that they do not
contain a commonplace line. The three volumes
are respectively entitled, Foemes antiques, Formes
barhares, and Folmes tragiques. The first division,
which is largely made up of Vedic hymns and
Greek idyls, is one in which the characteristics
of the author are best displayed, and in which
his impersonality is most strongly marked. Many
of the poems in this series bring with them a
haunting impression that they are translations
from some unknown Valmiki, while others might
be taken for the work of Max Miiller turned poet.
When these poems were first published, they
created among the lettered an intense admiration.
It was admitted that lines of such splendour and
impersonal serenity had never been hewn before \
and certainly, after the ardour of the romantics,
their impassibility could not have been other
than a refreshing change. It was, however, the
fortune of the book to appeal only to scholars ;
to the newspaper public it was unintelligible j the
author had made no effort to please ; and, more-
over, he had declined to make any concessions
to the ordinary reader. The result might have
been foreseen ; Brahma was declared to lack
actuality ; and it was held to be tiresome to con-

A Poets Verdict. 215

strue a modem poet with a Greek dictionary.
What, it was asked, has Juno done to be called
Here, and why must the sky be ouranos ?

As was the case with the series just mentioned,
the Polmes barbares found favour only with the
few. To the general public they seemed very
subversive. They displayed a pessimism which
was new to France, and which, being new, was
eyed with suspicion. Then, too, Leconte de
Lisle was calmly anti-theistic. The bravado of
Marechal is boyish in comparison to his grave
disdain of things celestial. In the Formes bar-
bares there are Unes that startle and coerce, lines
in which the horrible is expressed with such
colour and yet with such austerity that the reader
shudders as he reads and admires as he shudders.
Beside them, the declamations of that dissolute
Greuze of literature, Alfred de Musset, sound
cracked and thin — like a man's laughter, as
Mr. Swinburne has it, heard in hell.

The Pohnes tragiques are not as satisfactory as
are the others. They are made up of a dozen
or more recitals which have much to do with the
shedding of blood, a few ballads, villanelles, pan-
toums and sestines, together with a bar or two of
pure harmony.

Leconte de Lisle is the Goya of verse, and yet,
through a delicious contradiction, one of the
most noteworthy characteristics of his work is its
constant evocation and suggestion of the beau-
tiful. No other modern poet, except perhaps

2 1 6 The A natomy of Negation.

Mr. Swinburne, has shown a better acquaintance
with the road to Paphus. And it would be a
task full of charm to follow him from the jungles
of the Indian peninsula to the cool lakes of
Norway, to fan Leilah and kiss Glauc^. Unfor-
tunately, the purpose of these pages will not
permit of such pleasant digressions, and the
beautiful must be neglected that the poet's anti-
theism may be the more quickly understood.
By way of introduction, a momentary examina-
tion of the poem Qain will not, it is imagined,
cause any after reproach of time misspent.

The scenario is simple and audacious. The
son of Elam, Thogorma the seer, a captive among
the Assyrians, dreams of a night in the mysterious
ages when the voice of God echoed through the
universe, and in his dream he sees Henokhia,
the city of giants, in whose highest tower is the
tomb of Cain." Cain's descendants are wending
their way homewards from the chase. Thogorma
sees them disappear in the immense orb of the
ramparts, while night, bringing a vague terror
and dumb dread, mantles the great stairways
that turn in red broad spirals to the winds. He
hears the roar of lions, chained on the ascending
steps, and beneath the porticos the clamours
of crocodiles rise from the reservoirs. Then,
abruptly, from the confines of the outlying desert,
a spectre, loosed from Gehenna, surges through
the shadows, and Thogorma hears the spirit
anathematise Cain and all his race.

A Poets Verdict. 217

Cain awakened, stands upright in the granite
sepulchre where for ten centuries he had slept
with his face to the sky. His eyes, haunted by
one supreme remembrance, contemplate through
the preceding epochs the vanished days when
the world was young ; and with his thoughts rich
with the memory of the earth's primal innocence
and beauty, he calls to the phantom to be silent
and narrates his sombre history. Conceived
while his parents were labouring under the divine
malediction, his mother, Eve, swooning in the
brambles, gave birth with a shriek of horror to
Jehovah's victim, to him who was Cain. Nursed
with tears, his boyhood knew no smile. What
had he done, he wondered, to be punished too ?
And so, later, in the knowledge of his exile he
accosts the angel on guard at the gates of Eden,
and learns that on the morrow he is to know
the reason of his birth. On the morrow the
reason is made apparent. Jehovah arms his hand
against Abel, and incites him to kill the brother
whom he tenderly loved.

Here ends Cain's account of his life ; but im-
mediately, in his awakened thirst for vengeance,
he prophesies that when Jehovah is wearied with
the world and shall seek by means of the deluge
to destroy it, he, Cain, will save the ark — which
the poet represents as constructed in spite of
Jehovah — whereupon man, no longer brave, but
cowardly and envious, will rise from the flood
with its mud in his heart. Cain, the avenger,
continues :

2 1 8 The A natomy of Negation.

" Dieu triste, Dieu jaloux qui derobes ta face,
Dieu qui mentais, disant que ton oeuvre etait bon,
Mon souffle, 6 Petrisseur de I'antique limon,
Un jour redressera ta victime vivace.
Tu lui diras : Adore ! EUe repondra : Non !

Afin d'exterminer le monde qui te nie,
Tu feras ruisseler le sang comme une mer,
Tu feras s'acharner les tenailles de fer,
Tu feras flamboyer, dans I'horreur infinie,
Pres des buchers hurlants le gouffre de I'Enfer

Mais

Je ressusciterai les cites submergees,

Et celles dont le sable a convert les monceaux :

Dans leur lit ecumeux j'enfermerai les eaux :

Et les petits enfants des nations vengees,

Ne sachant plus ton nom, riront dans leurs berceaux I

J'effonderai des cieux la voute derisoire.

Par dela I'epaisseur de ce sepulchre bas

Sur qui gronde le bruit sinistre de ton pas,

Je ferai bouillonner les mondes dans leur gloire :

Et qui t'y cherchera ne t'y trouvera pas.

Et ce sera mon jour ! Et d'etoile en etoile,
Le bienheureux Eden longuement regrette
Verra renaitre Abel sur mon coeur abrite;
Et toi, mort et cousu sous la funebre toile.
Tu t'aneantiras dans ta sterilite."

Apart from the wonder and majesty of the
language, and apart, too, from the intuition which
in earlier stanzas enabled the poet to call again
into being the life of the past, Qain, on a first
reading, seems to be merely a work of cultured

A Poets Verdict 219

and harmonious blasphemy, and, indeed, so far
as the blasphemy is concerned, nothing more
vehement has been penned since ^schylus ; but
yet on a re-reading Qain is found to be little else
than an allegory of the protestation of the intel-
lect against the unintelligible, a revolt at the
mystery of pain.

This protestation, which is as old as philo-
sophy, and which in recent years seems to have
increased in volume and significance, has been
conveyed by Leconte de Lisle in other poems with
great originality, and with particular power in the
parable of the Corbeau. Through this poem, as
through Qain^ there is a running accompaniment
of muffled discontent, which in other verses finds
a clear and decided note. Something of this
same dissatisfaction was expressed by de Vigny
and Alfred de Musset, and yet in their case one
is inclined to fancy that the grievance was less
reasoned than instinctive ; they were at odds, so
to speak, with the inevitable ; life failed to hold
what it had seemed to promise, and in conse-
quence their complaints were more or less per-
sonal. But in Leconte de Lisle there is no
evidence of personal disappointment, and nothing
that can be construed as the outcome of an in-
dividual grievance. It is a part of his doctrine
that an expression of pleasure or pain deforms
the human visage, that the poet's correct attitude
is the one which most nearly approaches the
impassibility of the statue, and it is this theory
which he has carried into his work.

2 20 The A natomy of Negation.

It is difficult to say to what category of anti-
theism Leconte de Lisle belongs. His pantheism
is too evident to permit of his being called a
materialist, and yet his materialism is so marked
that it is difficult to suspect him of any other
sympathies with the ideal than those which are
purely poetic. He is too aggressive for an agnos-
tic, and yet there are moments when he might
be taken for a positivist. Perhaps it will be
safest to say that he is a theoretic pessimist, a
denomination which is broad enough to include
any of the others, and at the same time is ser-
viceable in conveying the exact shade of his
thought.

The pessimism which is manifest in the verse
of Leconte de Lisle has nothing of Renan's
serenity, and none of the calculations of Von
Hartmann. In his case it is the formal protest
against the enigma 'of grief which characterises
the philosophy of the earliest thinkers, but one
which is entirely free from the shackles with
which they delayed the hope of ultimate eman-
cipation. It is not that the idea of absorption
in Brahm, or the extinction in Pari-Nirvana, is
disagreeable to him ; on the contrary, they are
dreams through which he lovingly trails his verse,
but they are dreams.

" Pleurez, contemplateurs ! Votre sagesse est veuve
Vi9nou ne siege plus sur le lotus d'azur."

That of which he seems best convinced is the
irremediable existence of what apparently has no

A Poefs Verdict. 221

reason for being. History is little else than the
tale of an uninterrupted shudder ; chronicles of
private life are merely accounts of combats that
individuals have waged with fate ; and Leconte
de Lisle, who is a patient student, has noted
compassionately in both the persistence of the
law of evil. He should not, however, be con-
sidered a follower of Schopenhauer j the majority
of his poems were pubUshed before the Welt ah
Wille und Vorstellung had crossed the Rhine;
moreover, Schopenhauer did not invent pes-
simism \ Kapila was as much occupied with pain
as was that Emerson in black; indeed, it is
curious to note that the first metaphysician as
well as the latest of great poets are agreed that
life is an affliction, and it is also curious to note
that the tendency of modern thought is to an
agreement with their views.

The soul, whose immortality Robespierre de-
creed in the law known as that of the i8th
Floreal, year IT.; the soul, which all antiquity,
Plato included, accorded to beasts, but whose
possession Christianity has limited to man ; the
soul, which is reported to come no one knows
whence, and to depart no one knows whither,
has for Leconte de Lisle a purely verbal existence.
Robespierre, it is true, knew nothing about primi-
tive man; but Leconte de Lisle does, and he
knows, too, that a gorilla to which a soul is
refused to-day is not a whit more elevated than
was man in the sylvan age — in that age, in fact,
when he had no other weapons than the branches

222 The A natomy of Negation .

which he tore from a tree. And if a soul be
refused to primitive man, at what epoch was
the gift bestowed? Is it a result of evolution,
or, as certain theologasters have asserted, is it
naturally one with the body, and only separable
and capable of immortality through the influence
of grace divine? The last century combatted
these theories with logic. Leconte de Lisle has
at his disposal not alone the logic of yesterday,
but the science of to-day, and to him the soul is
a phantom evoked by the conscience.

" If you do not believe in a soul and in a future
life," said some one to Goethe, "what do you
consider to be the object of the present?" To
which Goethe, with Olympian egotism, answered
tersely, " Self- improvement." One may fancy
that to Leconte de Lisle the object of life is none
other. He was born in the Isle de Bourbon
something over sixty years ago, and came to Paris
when quite young. From his early home he
brought little else than memories of the beauty
of Nature and the invincible immensity of her
forces, memories that have since served as frames
and backgrounds to his verse. In Paris he fol-
lowed the developments of science, and studied
history, religions and life. From them he learned
that man has two antagonists, himself and the
exterior world ; he found, too, that man is a prey
to influences which mould him to their profit, and
that humanity had aggravated its misfortunes by
inventing explanations which it termed beliefs.
Since then, in the quietest ways, he has passed

A Poefs Verdict. 223

his hours in satiating that vague curiosity which
besets even the most indifferent, and in con-
vincing himself not only of the nothingness of
creeds, but of the nothingness of life. Life, he
says :

" La vie est comme I'onde ou tombe un corps pesant :
Un cercle etroit s'y forme et va s'elargissant,
Et disparait enfin dans sa grandeur sans terme.
La Maya te seduit, mais, si ton coeur est ferme,
Tu verras s'envoler comme un peu de vapeur
La colere, I'amour, le desir et la peur,
Et le Monde illusoire aux formes innombrables
S'ecroulera sous toi comme un monceau de sables."

Gibbon, who was fond of fine paragraphs,
declared all religions to be equally true to the
vulgar, equally false to the philosopher, and
to the statesman equally useful. But Gibbon
omitted the poet; and to such an one as Leconte
de Lisle no religion can be true, if for no other
reason than that there is no criterion of truth ; no
religion can be wholly false, for every religion has
enjoyed an hour of undeniable actuality; and
no religion can be deemed useful if the need of
it has disappeared. To his thinking, religions
have served their purpose. Compounded of
fables more or less absurd, and of ethics more
or less wholesome, in their obscure origins they
were intended to be explanations of natural
phenomena with which to-day we are better
acquainted. As to Christianity, it is to Leconte
de Lisle an artistic creation, powerfully conceived,

224 1^^^ Anatomy of Negation,

venerable in its antiquity, and one whose place
is now marked in the museum of history.

It has been objected, that should this view be
accepted, no one would turn to the Bible for
instruction, and as a consequence the gateways
to immorality would be opened wide. Now
Plato said that we should esteem it of the greatest
importance that the fictions which children first
hear should be adapted in the most perfect
manner to the promotion of virtue. There are,
however, not a few grave thinkers who have
asserted that the Bible is inapt to serve such an
end. Admittedly the morality which is displayed
in the Synoptic Gospels is admirable, but it is
sometimes forgotten that it is an integral part of
the teaching of Socrates and the Socratics. M.
Havet has shown its sweetest precepts flowing
from their lips. In other portions of the Bible
there are verses that exalt the spirit like wine ;
there are delicacies of thought and felicities of
expression that both soothe and charm ; but one
must needs be a paradoxist to claim either as an
aid to the promotion of virtue. Beside, as has
been hinted in earlier pages, morality is more
a question of temperament than of instruction.
For that matter, we are most of us well aware
that the instruction sometimes defeats its aim.
Mr. Froude relates that when St. Patrick preached
the gospel on Tarah Hill, the Druids shook their
heads. The king, Leoghaire, marked their dis-
approval wonderingly, and asked, "Why is it
that that which the cleric preaches seems so

A Poefs Verdict. 225

dangerous to you ?" " Because," they answered,
" he preaches repentance, and the law of repent-
ance is such that a man shall say, * I may com-
mit a thousand sins, and if I repent it will be not
worse with me; I shall be forgiven; therefore will
I continue to sin.'" Leconte de Lisle has there-
fore put the Bible reverently aside, and in looking
back through the dreams from which it came
and into the visions which it has evoked, he has
murmured with the sadness of the tender-hearted :

" O songe, o desirs vains, inutiles souhaits,
Ceci ne sera point, maintenant ni jamais."

There is no help there, nor is there any else-
where. The Orient is asleep in the ashes of her
gods. The star of Ormuzd has burned out in
the skies. On the banks of her sacred seas,
Greece, hushed for evermore, rests on the divine
limbs of her white immortals. In the sepulchre
of the pale Nazarene, humanity guards its last
divinity. Every promise is unfulfilled. There
is no light save perchance in death. One torture
more, one more throb of the heart, and after it
nothing. The grave opens, a little flesh falls in,
and the weeds of forgetfulness which soon hide
the tomb grow eternally above its vanities. And
still the voice of the living, of the just and of the
unjust, of kings, of felons and of beasts, will be
raised unsilenced, until humanity, unsatisfied as
before and yet impatient for the peace which
life has disturbed, is tossed at last, with its shat-
Q

226 The A natomy of Negation.

tered globe and forgotten gods, to fertilize the
furrows of space where worlds ferment.

On this vista the curtain may be drawn.
Neither poet nor seer can look beyond. Nature,
who is unconscious in her immorality, entrancing
in her beauty, savage in her cruelty, imperial in
her prodigality, and appalling in her convulsions,
is not only deaf, but dumb. There is no answer
to any appeal. The best we can do, the best
that has ever been done, is to recognise the im-
placability of the laws that rule the universe, and
contemplate as calmly as we can the nothingness
from which we are come and into which we shall
all disappear. The one consolation that we hold,
though it is one which may be illusory too, con-
sists in the belief that when death comes, fear
and hope are at an end. Then wonder ceases ;
the insoluble no longer perplexes ; space is lost ;
the infinite is blank; the farce is done.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

In addition to the authorities cited in the text,
the writer desires to express his indebtedness for
facts and suggestions derived from the follow-
ing works : " Hindu Philosophy," Davies ; "Bud-
dhism" (Hibbert Lectures), Rhys-Davids; "Sacred
Books of the East," edited by Max Miiller ; "Hin-
duism," Monier- Williams ; " Buddha, sein Leben,
u. s. w.," Oldenburg ; " Traduction du Tao-te-
King," Stanislas Julien; "Le Genie des Reli-
gions," Quinet; "Geschichte des Materialismus,"
Lange ; " Pyrrhon," Waddington ; " La Religion
Romaine," Boissier ; " Histoire des Origines du
Christianisme," Renan ; " Histoire Naturelle des
Religions," Veron; " Doctrines Sociales," Guyot;
" Histoire du Diable," R^ville ; History of Ra-
tionaUsm," Lecky ; " La Renaissance," Marc-
Monnier ; " L'AUemagne," Heine ; " Le Mate-
rialisme," Janet; "Auguste Comte et la Philo-
sophie Positive," Littre ; " Diderot," Scherer ;
" Memoires pour servir h I'Histoire de la Philoso-
phic," &c., Damiron ; " Le Roi Voltaire," Hous-
saye; "Les Contemporains," Lemaitre; "Histoire
du Christianisme," Leconte de Lisle; "History of
Philosophy," Lewes ; " Dictionnaire des Sciences
Philosophiques."

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