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.
1. 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.
2. 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 theEncyclopedie. 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.
3. 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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