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French Deism [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
French Deism
With other English influences Deism entered France, where, however,
only its materialistic and revolutionary phases were seized upon,
to the exclusion of that religiosity which had never been lost
in England. French Deism stood outside of theology. The English
writers who came to exercise the greatest influence were Hobbes,
Locke, Shaftesbury, Pope, Bolingbroke, and Hume. Of the true Deists
only Collins, the most critical and the least theological, became
prominent.
Table of Contents (Clicking on the links below will take you to that part of this article)
Voltaire
Encyclopedists
Rousseau
Voltaire
Voltaire (d. 1778) embraced the conception
of natural religion with ardor, and entered into a polemics against
intolerance in Church and State relations as well as against
the philosophy of the Church and the prevailing religious Cartesianism
(Essai sur les mmurs et l'esprit des nations, 1754-58;
Dictionnaire philosophique, 1764). He derived his natural
philosophy from Newton and Clarke, his theory of knowledge and
his ideas on toleration from Locke, the main principles of his
ethics from Shaftesbury, his critical method and the conception
of natural religion from the Deists. All phenomena are explained
historically by the interaction between man and his environment,
and all things are governed by God acting only in accordance with
natural laws. Natural morality and religion are not entirely
innate ideas, but rather simple and universally prevalent conditions
standing in need of development and following a course that leads
through errors arising from ignorance and fear to an ultimate
standard truth which is characterized as the "fruit of the
cultivated reason." Deism is thereby emptied of all religious
content and restricted to the field of morals and rational metaphysics.
All that is essentially characteristic of human nature
is the same everywhere; all that depends on custom varies. The
chief influences for changes in the human mind are climate, government,
religion, and in opposition to these one should seek to arrive
at the underlying, undiversified unity. "Dogma leads to
fanaticism and strife; morality everywhere inspires harmony."
The rise of positive religions may be studied psychologically
in children and savages. Fear and ignorance of the law of nature
are the primary causes; the parallel growth of social groups
and the need of authority cooperate. In China alone natural
religion has escaped this pernicious development. India be came
the home of theological speculation, and influenced the religions
of the West, of which the most important was Judaism as the parent
of Christianity and Islam. Moses was a shrewd politician; the
prophets were enthusiasts like the dervishes, or else epileptics;
Jesus was a visionary like the founder of the Quakers, and his
religion received life only through its union with Platonism.
Voltaire's conception of the evolution of history entered deep
into European thought. By the side of the party of the juste
milieu and of good sense," of which Voltaire is the most
prominent representative, there arose a school which carried
the doctrines of mechanism and sensualism to their furthest consequences.
and evolved a philosophy of materialism.
Back to Table of Contents
Encyclopedists
The Encyclopedists removed from Deism
the great factor of natural religion, retaining only its critical
method as applied to the history of religion. The head of this
school was Denis Diderot (d. 1784), and its great organ of expression
was the Encyclopedie. The state censorship, however,
compelled the projectors to call to their aid a number of contributors
of conservative views and to bring their skeptical method to
the task of defending the compromise between reason and revelation.
In this spirit the main religious topics were treated, but by
a subtle infusion of the spirit of Bayle and the expedient of
cross-references from these articles to topics which might be
handled with greater freedom, Diderot succeeded in supplying
the desired corrective. It was the circle of Holbach (d. 1789)
that dared to apply the most extreme consequences of materialism
to religious questions. Helvetius (d. 1771) prepared the way
with his De l'esprit (17,58), in which he expounded a
materialistic psychology and ethics. Their moral theories, deriving
though they did from Hobbes and Hume, lost all connection with
the position of Deism, which became for them a mere armory of
weapons for the destruction of all religion with its consequences,
intolerance and moral corruption. Holbach is undoubtedly the
author of the Systeme de la nature, which appeared in
1770 as the work of Mirabaud. The Systeme is not original
in ascribing the beginnings of religion to human hope and fear
and to ignorance of the laws of nature. Fraud, ambition, and
unhealthy enthusiasm have made use of it as a means of political
and social influence and have succeeded in crystallizing its
primitive emotions into positive creeds, within which animistic
tendencies have been developed and subtilized into systems of
metaphysics and theology -- the sources of irrational intolerance.
From Holbach and his circle, and from the cognate group of the
Encyclopedists, proceeded the so-called ideological school, who
held the main problem of philosophy to be the analysis of the
mental conceptions aroused by sensations from the material world
(Condorcet, Naigeon, Garat, Volney, Dupuis, Saint-Lambert, Laplace,
Cabinis, De Tracy, J. B. Say, Benjamin Constant, Bichat, Lamarck,
Saint-Simon, Thurot, Stendhal). Out of this school, in turn,
developed the positivism of Comte.
Back to Table of Contents
Rousseau
J. J. Rousseau (d. 1778) gave quite a different
tendency to Deism. Accepting in the main the sensualism of Locke
and the metaphysics of Clarke and Newton, he maintains after the
manner of Shaftesbury and Diderot a belief in inborn moral instincts
which he distinguishes as " sentiments " from mere acquired
ideas; he is true to the position of Deism in connecting this
moral "sentiment " with a belief in God, and he protests
against the separation between the two which the skepticism of
Diderot had brought about. He was influenced by Richardson, as
well as by Locke. "Sentiment " becomes the basis of
a metaphysical system built up out of the data of experience under
the influence of the Deistic philosophy, but redeemed from formalism
by constant reference to sentimentality and emotion as the principal
sources of religion. The nature of religion is not dogmatic but
moralistic, practical, and emotional. Rousseau, therefore, finds
the essence of religion, not (like Voltaire) in the cultivated
intellect, but in the naive and disinterested understanding of
the uncultured. Conscious, rational progress in civilization,
no less than supernaturalism in Church and State, is an outcome
of the fall, when the will chose intellectual progress in preference
to simple felicity. With Rousseau natural religion takes on a
new meaning; "nature" is no longer universality or rationality
in the cosmic order, in contrast to special supernatural and positive
phenomena, but primitive simplicity and sincerity, in contrast
to artificiality and studied reflection. In his scheme of the
rise of religions he gets out from the common standpoint of the
discrepancies and contradictions prevailing among historic creeds.
Yet positive religion to him is not so much the product of ignorance
and fear as the corruption of the original instinct through the
selfishness of man, who has erected rigid creeds that he might
arrogate to himself unwarranted privilege or escape the obligations
of natural morality., Something of the true religion is to be
found in every faith, and of all creeds Christianity has retained
the greatest measure of the original truth, and the purest morality.
So sublime and yet so simple does Rousseau find the Gospel that
he can scarcely believe it the work of men. Its irrational elements
he attributes to misconception on the part of the followers of
Jesus and especially of Paul, who had no personal communication
with him. It was natural that between the advocate of such views
and the party of the materialists strife should rise, and in fact
Rousseau's religious influence in France was slight. On the rising
German idealism, however, he exercised a great influence.
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