The French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and especially
of French materialism, was not only a struggle against the existing
political institutions and against the existing religion and theology,
but equally an open and outspoken campaign against all metaphysics,
especially that of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibnitz.
Metaphysics was confronted with philosophy, just as Feuerbach, in his
first decisive stand against Hegel, opposed sober philosophy to drunken
speculation. The metaphysics of the seventeenth century, which was
driven from the field by the French Enlightenment, and especially by
the French materialism, of the eighteenth century, experienced its
victorious and opulent restoration in the German philosophy, and
particularly in the speculative German philosophy, of the nineteenth
century.
After Hegel had combined it in an ingenious manner with all
subsequent metaphysics and with German idealism, and founded a
universal realm of metaphysics, the attack on speculative metaphysics
and on all metaphysics was once again synonymous, as in the eighteenth
century, with an attack on theology. Metaphysics succumbed for good and
all to materialism, which itself was now perfected by the work of
speculation and coincided with humanism.
French and English socialism and communism represented the
materialism which coincided with humanism in the practical sphere, just
as Feuerbach represented it in the theoretical sphere.
There are two tendencies of French materialism, one of which derives
its origin from Descartes and the other from Locke. The latter is
pre-eminently an element in French culture and merges directly into
socialism. The former, viz., the mechanical materialism, is absorbed in
French natural science. The French materialism which derives directly
from Descartes does not concern us particularly, any more than the
French school of Newton and French natural science generally.
Only this much need be said. In his physics Descartes invested
matter with self-creative power, and he conceived mechanical movement
to be its vital act. He separated his physics completely from his
metaphysics. Within his physics matter is the only substance, the only
basis of being and perceiving.
Mechanical French materialism absorbed the physics of Descartes,
while rejecting his metaphysics. His pupils were anti-metaphysicians by
profession, that is to say, they were physicians.
This school commences with the doctor Leroy, and reaches its acme
with the doctor Cabanis, while the doctor Lamettrie is its centre.
Descartes was still living when Leroy transferred to the human soul the
Cartesian construction of animals, and explained the soul as a mode of
the body and ideas as mechanical movements, similarly to Lamettrie in
the eighteenth century. Leroy even believed that Descartes had
dissembled his real opinion. Descartes protested. At the end of the
eighteenth century Cabanis perfected Cartesian materialism in a work
entitled: Rapport du physic et du moral de l'homme.
Cartesian materialism exists in France even to this day. It had its
great success in mechanical natural science, with which Romanticism
will least of all be reproached.
The metaphysics of the seventeenth century, as specially represented
for France by Descartes, had materialism for its antagonist from its
hour of birth. In person this antagonist confronted Descartes in the
shape of Gassendi, the restorer of Epicurean materialism. French and
English materialism always remain in close relationship with Democritus
and Epicurus.
Cartesian metaphysics found another antagonist in the English
materialist Hobbes. Long after their death, Gassendi and Hobbes
triumphed over their opponent at the moment when the former reigned in
all the schools of France as the official power.
Voltaire once remarked that the indifference of Frenchmen in the
eighteenth century towards Jesuitical and Jansenist quarrels was
brought about less by philosophy than by Law's financial speculations.
Thus the overthrow of the metaphysics of the seventeenth century can be
explained from the materialistic theory of the eighteenth century only
in so far as this theoretical movement is itself explicable by the
practical shape of the French life of that time. This life was directed
to the immediate present, to worldly enjoyment and worldly interests,
to the secular world. It was inevitable that anti-theological,
anti-metaphysical, materialistic theories should correspond to its
anti-theological, anti-metaphysical, its materialistic practice. In
practice metaphysics had lost all credit. Here we have only to indicate
briefly the course of the theoretical movement.
In the seventeenth century metaphysics had already been provided
with a positive, a profane content (pace Descartes, Leibnitz
etc.). It made discoveries in mathematics, physics, and other definite
sciences which appeared to belong to it, but by the beginning of the
eighteenth century this semblance had been destroyed. The positive
sciences had broken away from it and mapped out their own territory.
The whole metaphysical realm consisted in nothing more than creatures
of fancy and heavenly things at the precise time when real beings and
earthly things were beginning to concentrate all interest upon
themselves. Metaphysics had become stale. Helvetius and Condillac were
born in the same year that Malebranche and Arnauld, the last great
French metaphysicians of the seventeenth century, died.
The man who theoretically destroyed the credit of the metaphysics of
the seventeenth century and all metaphysics generally was Pierre Bayle.
His weapon was scepticism, forged out of the magic formulas of
metaphysics itself. He took Cartesian metaphysics as his immediate
starting-point. Just as Feuerbach in combating speculative theology was
driven to combat speculative philosophy, because he perceived in
speculation the last support of theology, because he had to force the
theologians to retreat from fictitious science to crude, repugnant
faith, so religious doubt drove Bayle into doubts of the metaphysics
which supported this faith. Consequently he subjected metaphysics in
its entire historical evolution to criticism. He became its historian
in order to write the history of its death. Above all he refuted
Spinoza and Leibnitz.
Pierre Bayle not only prepared the way for the acceptance in France
of the materialism and philosophy of healthy common science through the
sceptical disintegration of metaphysics. He announced the atheistic
society which was soon to come into existence, inasmuch as a society of
avowed atheists could exist, as an atheist could be an honest man, as
man was not degraded by atheism, but by superstition and idolatry.
In the words of a French writer, Pierre Bayle was “the last
metaphysician in the sense of the seventeenth and the first philosopher
in the sense of the eighteenth century.”
In addition to the negative refutation of the theology and
metaphysics of the seventeenth century, a positive, anti-metaphysical
system was required. A book was wanted which would systematize the
practical activities of that time and provide them with a theoretical
foundation. Locke's essay on the “Origin of the Human Understanding”
came as if summoned from beyond the Channel. It was greeted
enthusiastically as an anxiously awaited guest.
It may be asked: Is Locke perchance a pupil of Spinoza? We would
answer. Materialism is the native son of Great Britain. Already her
schoolman Duns Scotus asked “whether matter could not think?”
In order to work this miracle, he took refuge in God's omnipotence,
that is, he made theology itself preach materialism. Moreover, he was a
nominalist. Nominalism is found to be a chief ingredient among English
materialists, just as it is the first expression of materialism
generally.
The real progenitor of English materialism and of all modern
experimental science is Bacon. Natural science was regarded by him as
the true science, and physics as the principal part of natural science.
Anaxagoras and his homoiomeriæ, Democritus and his atoms, are
frequently quoted as his authorities. According to his doctrine, the
senses are infallible and the source of all knowledge. All science is
based upon experience and consists in subjecting the data furnished by
the senses to a rational method of investigation. Induction, analysis,
comparison, observation, experiment, are the chief instruments of such
a rational method. Among the qualities inherent in matter movement is
the first and foremost, not only in the form of mechanical and
mathematical movement, but even more as an impulse, a vital spirit, a
tension, as a qual (a torture)—to use an expression of Jacob
Bohme's—of matter.
In Bacon, as its first creator, materialism still conceals within
itself in an ingenuous manner the germs of a many-sided development. On
the one hand, the sensuous poetic glamour in which matter is bathed
entices the whole personality of man. On the other, the aphoristically
formulated doctrine swarms with theological inconsistencies.
In its further development, materialism becomes one-sided. Hobbes is
the man who systematizes Baconian materialism. Knowledge based upon the
senses loses its poetic bloom, and Becomes the abstract experience of
the mathematician. The physical movement is sacrificed to the
mechanical or mathematical; geometry is proclaimed as the chief
science. Materialism takes to misanthropy. In order to overcome
misanthropic, fleshless spiritualism on the latter's own ground,
materialism must mortify its own flesh and turn ascetic. It reappears
as an intellectual entity, but it also develops all the ruthless
consistency of the intellect.
Hobbes, as Bacon's continuator, argues that if the senses furnish
men with all knowledge, then concepts and ideas are nothing but
phantoms of the material world more or less divested of their sensual
forms. All philosophy can do is to give these phantoms names. One name
may be applied to several phantoms. There may even be names of names.
It would, however, imply a contradiction if, on the one hand, we
contended that all ideas had their origin in the world of senses, and,
on the other hand, that a word was worth more than a word; that besides
the individual beings known to us by our senses, there existed also
beings of a general nature. An immaterial substance is rather the same
absurdity as an immaterial body. Bodies, being, substance are but
different terms for the same reality. One cannot separate thought from
matter that thinks. It is the substratum of all changes. The word
infinite is meaningless unless it signifies the capacity of our minds
to perform an endless process of addition. As only material things are
perceptible and knowable, nothing can be known about the existence of
God.
My own existence alone is certain. Every human passion is a
mechanical movement which has a beginning or an end. The objects of
impulse are what are called good. Man is subject to the same laws of
Nature. Power and freedom are identical.
Hobbes had systematized Bacon, without, however, providing any
firmer basis for the latter's fundamental principle, the origin of all
knowledge and ideas from the world of the senses.
It was Locke who established the principle of Bacon and Hobbes in
his Essay on the Human Understanding.
Just as Hobbes shattered the theistic prejudices of Baconian
materialism, so Collins, Dodwall, Coward, Hartley, Priestley, etc.
broke down the last theological bars which still obstructed Locke's
sensationalism. At least for materialists, theism became nothing more
than a convenient and easy-going way of getting rid of religion.
We have already noticed at what an opportune time Locke's work came
to the French. Locke had established the philosophy of bon sens,
of healthy common sense, that is, to express it in a roundabout way,
that there are no philosophers other than those of the understanding
which is based upon the healthy human senses.
Condillac, who was Locke's immediate pupil and French interpreter,
lost no time in turning the Lockeian sensationalism upon the
metaphysics of the seventeenth century. He contended that the French
had rightly spurned the latter as a clumsy product of the imagination
and theological prejudice.
He published a refutation of the systems of Descartes, Spinoza,
Leibnitz, and Malebranche. In his work: L'essai sur l'origine des
connaissances humaines, he developed Locke's ideas and contended
that not only the soul, but also the senses, not only the art of
fashioning ideas, but also the apparatus of sensual receptivity, are
subjects of experience and usage. Consequently, the entire development
of man depends upon education and external circumstances. Condillac was
only supplanted in the French schools by the eclectic philosophy.
The difference between French and English materialism is the
difference between the two nationalities. The French endowed English
materialism with wit, with flesh and blood, with eloquence. They
invested it with grace and gave it the temperament that was still
lacking. They civilized it.
In Helvetius, who likewise took Locke as his starting point,
materialism receives its proper French character. He applied it
immediately to social life. (Helvetius, de l'homme.) Sensual
qualities and egoism, enjoyment and enlightened self-interests are the
foundations of all morality.
The natural equality of human intelligences, the harmony between the
progress of reason and the progress of industry, the natural goodness
of mankind, the omnipotence of education are the principal factors in
this system.
The writings of Lamettrie exhibit the union of Cartesian and English
materialism. Lamettrie utilizes the physics of Descartes down to its
utmost detail. His l'homme machine is a performance executed on
the model of the animal machine of Descartes. In Holbach's Système
de la nature, the section devoted to physics likewise consists of
the synthesis of English and French materialism, just as the section
devoted to morals is based essentially on the morality of Helvetius.
Robinet (de la nature), the French materialist who more than all
the others kept in touch with metaphysics, expressly founds himself on
Leibnitz.
Of Volney, Dupuis, Diderot, etc., we do not need to speak any more
than of the physiocrats, now that we have shown the double derivation
of French materialism from the physics of Descartes, Spinoza,
Malebranche and Leibnitz. This antagonism could only be realized by
Germans after they themselves had come into conflict with speculative
metaphysics.
Just as Cartesian materialism branches into natural science, so the
other tendency of French materialism merges directly into socialism and
communism.
No special acuteness is required to perceive the necessary
connection of the original goodness and equally intelligent endowment
of men, of the omnipotence of experience, custom and education, the
influence of external circumstances on men, the extreme importance of
industry, the justification of enjoyment, etc., with communism and
socialism.
If man receives all his impressions and forms all his conceptions
from the world of sense, and derives his experiences from the world of
sense, it follows that the empirical world ought to be so constructed
as to offer a wealth of truly human experiences. If enlightened
self-interest is the principle of all morality, it follows that the
private interests of men ought to coincide with human interests. If man
is not free in the materialistic sense, that is to say, is free, not by
reason of his negative strength to avoid this and that, but by reason
of his positive strength to assert his true individuality, then man
must not punish the crimes of individuals, but destroy the anti-social
breeding-places of crime, and afford to each person sufficient social
scope for the expression of his or her individuality. If man is formed
by circumstances, then it is only in society that he develops his real
nature, and the strength of his nature must be measured, not with the
strength of the isolated individual, but with the strength of society.
These and similar sentences may be found almost word for word in the
writings even of the oldest French materialists. This is not the place
to criticize them. Significant of the socialist tendency of materialism
is Mandeville's (one of the older English pupils of Locke) apology for
vice. He shows that vice is indispensable and useful in present-day
society. This, however, was no justification for present-day society.
The doctrines of French materialism form the starting-point of
Fourier. The followers of Babeuf were crude, uncivilized materialists,
but even fully-developed communism derived directly from French
materialism.
The latter, in the shape given it by Helvetius, returned to its
motherland, to England. On the morality of Helvetius, Bentham founded
his system of enlightened self-interest, just as Owen, proceeding from
Bentham's system, founded English communism. On being banished to
England, the Frenchman Cabet was stimulated by the communistic ideas he
found there, and returned to France, to become the most popular, albeit
most superficial, representative of communism here.