The Portable Voltaire (Portable Library) Read online

  “Eh! how can you believe such nonsense?”

  “I believe it through faith.”

  “But don’t you know that an impotent man cannot have children?”

  “Faith consists,” returned Pic, “in believing things because they are impossible. And, besides, the honor of your house demands that Lucretia’s son shall not be considered the fruit of incest. You make me believe even more incomprehensible mysteries. Do I not have to believe that a serpent spoke—since when all men have been damned—that Balaam’s she-ass also spoke very eloquently, and that the walls of Jericho fell at the sound of trumpets?” Pic then ran through a litany of all the admirable things he believed.

  Alexander collapsed with laughter on his sofa.

  “I believe all that stuff, just as you do,” he said, “for I know that only by faith can I be saved, and that I shall not be saved by my works.”

  “Ah! Holy Father,” said Pic, “you have need of neither works nor faith. They are good for poor profane people like us, but you who are God’s regent on earth can believe and do whatever you choose. You have the keys of heaven, and there is no chance of St. Peter shutting the door in your face. But for myself, who am only a poor prince, I admit that I should need potent protection if I had slept with my daughter, and if I had used the stiletto and the cantarella as often as your Holiness.”

  Alexander could take a joke. “Let us talk seriously,” he said to Prince della Mirandola. “Tell me what merit one can have in telling God that one is persuaded of things of which in fact one cannot be persuaded? What pleasure can that give God? Between ourselves, saying that one believes what is impossible to believe is lying.”

  Pico della Mirandola made a great sign of the cross. “Eh! God the father!” he cried. “May your Holiness pardon me, but you are not a Christian.”

  “No, by my faith,” said the Pope.

  “I thought as much,” said Pico della Mirandola.

  FATHERLAND

  A young journeyman pastrycook who had been to college, and who still knew a few of Cicero’s phrases, boasted one day of loving his fatherland. “What do you mean by your fatherland?” a neighbor asked him. “Is it your oven? Is it the village where you were born and which you have never seen since? Is it the street in which dwelt your father and mother, who have been ruined with the result that you are reduced to baking little pies for a living? Is it the town hall where you will never be the police superintendent’s clerk? Is it the church of Our Lady where you have not been able to become a choirboy, while a stupid man is archbishop and duke with an income of twenty thousand golden louis?”

  The journeyman pastrycook did not know what to answer. A philosopher, who was listening to this conversation, concluded that in a fatherland of any extent there must often he several million men who have no fatherland.

  You, pleasure-loving Parisians, who have never traveled farther than Dieppe to eat fresh fish; who know nothing but your brilliant town house, your pretty country house, and your box at an Opera where the rest of Europe persists in being bored; who speak your own language well enough because you know no other—you love all these things, and you love the girls you keep, the champagne which comes to you from Rheims, the dividends which the Hotel-de-Ville pays you every six months; and you say you love your fatherland!

  Now, in all conscience, does a financier sincerely love his fatherland?

  The officer and the soldier who pillage their winter quarters, if one lets them—have they a very warm love for the peasants they ruin?

  Where was the fatherland of the scarred Due de Guise, was it in Nancy, Paris, Madrid, Rome? What fatherland have you, Cardinals de La Balue, Duprat, Lorraine, Mazarin? Where was the fatherland of Attila, and of a hundred other heroes of his type? I would like someone to tell me which was Abraham’s fatherland.

  The first man to write that one’s fatherland is wherever one feels comfortable was, I believe, Euripides in his Phaeton. But the first man who left his birthplace to seek his comfort elsewhere had said it before him.

  What, then, is a fatherland? Is it not a good field, whose owner, lodged in a well-kept house, can say: “This field that I till, this house that I have built, are mine. I live here protected by laws which no tyrant can infringe. When those who own fields and houses, like myself, meet in their common interest, I have my voice in the assembly; I am a part of everything, a part of the community, a part of the dominion—there is my fatherland” ?

  Very well. But is it better for your fatherland to be a monarchy or a republic? For four thousand years has this question been debated. Ask the rich for an answer, they all prefer aristocracy; question the people, they want democracy: only kings prefer royalty. How then is it that nearly the whole world is governed by monarchs? Ask the rats who proposed to hang a bell round the cat’s neck. But in truth, the real reason is, as has been said, that men are very rarely worthy of governing themselves.

  It is sad that in order to be a good patriot one often has to be the enemy of the rest of mankind. Whenever old Cato, that excellent citizen, spoke before the Roman senate, he always used to say: “Such is my opinion, and Carthage must be destroyed.” To be a good patriot is to wish that one’s city may be enriched by trade, and be powerful by arms. It is clear that one country cannot gain without another’s losing, and that one cannot conquer without bringing misery to another. Such then is the human state, that to wish greatness for one’s country is to wish harm to one’s neighbors. He who wished that his fatherland might never be greater, smaller, richer, or poorer, would be a citizen of the world.

  FREE WILL

  Ever since men have been able to reason, philosophers have obscured the question of free will; but the theologians have rendered it unintelligible by absurd subtleties about grace. Locke was perhaps the first man to find a thread in the labyrinth, for he was the first who, instead of arrogantly setting out from a general principle, examined human nature by analysis. For three thousand years people have disputed whether or not the will is free. In the Essay on the Human Understanding , Locke shows that the question is fundamentally absurd, and that liberty can no more belong to the will than can color and movement.

  What is the meaning of this phrase “to be free”? It means “to be able,” or else it has no meaning. To say that the will “can” is as ridiculous at bottom as to say that the will is yellow or blue, round or square. Will is wish, and liberty is power. Let us examine step by step the chain of our inner processes without befuddling our minds with scholastic terms or antecedent principles.

  It is proposed to you that you mount a horse. You must absolutely make a choice, for it is quite clear that you either will go or that you will not go. There is no middle way. You must wish yes or no. Up to this point it is clear that the will is not free. You wish to mount the horse. Why? An ignoramus will say: “Because I wish it.” This answer is idiotic. Nothing happens or can happen without a reason, a cause; so there must be one for your wish. What is it? It is the agreeable idea of going on horseback, which presents itself in your brain as the dominant idea, the determinant idea. But, you will say, can I not resist an idea which dominates me? No, for what would be the cause of your resistance? None. Your will could “resist” only by obeying a still more despotic idea.

  Now you receive all your ideas; therefore you receive your “wish,” you “wish” by necessity. The word “liberty” does not therefore belong in any way to your will.

  You ask me how thought and wish are formed in us. I answer you that I have not the remotest idea. I do not know how ideas are made any more than how the world was made. All we can do is to grope in darkness for the springs of our incomprehensible machine.

  Will, therefore, is not a faculty that can be called free. A free will is an expression absolutely void of sense, and what the scholastics have called “will of indifference that is to say, willing without cause, is a chimera unworthy of being combated.

  In what, then does liberty consist? In the power to do what one wills. I wish to le
ave my study, the door is open, I am free to leave it.

  But, you say, suppose the door is closed, and I wish to stay where I am. Then I stay there freely. Let us be explicit. In this case you exercise the power that you have of staying; for you have this power, but not that of going out.

  Liberty, then, about which so many volumes have been written is, when accurately defined, only the power of acting.

  In what sense then must one utter the phrase: “Man is free”? In the same sense that one uses the words, “health,” “strength,” and “happiness.” Man is not always strong, always healthy, nor always happy. A great passion, a great obstacle, may deprive him of his liberty, his power of action.

  The words “liberty,” and “free will,” are therefore abstract words, general words, like beauty, goodness, justice. These terms do not signify that all men are always beautiful, good, and just; similarly, they are not always free.

  Let us go further. If liberty is only the power of acting, what is this power? It is the effect of the constitution and the actual state of our organs. Leibnitz wishes to solve a geometrical problem, but he has an apoplectic fit, and in this condition he certainly is not free to solve his problem. Is a vigorous young man, madly in love, who holds his willing mistress in his arms, free to tame his passion? Undoubtedly not. He has the power of enjoying, and has not the power of refraining. Locke, then, is quite right when he calls liberty “power.” When can this young man refrain despite the violence of his passion? Only when a stronger, contradictory idea determines the activity of his body and his soul.

  But does this mean that the other animals have the same liberty, the same power? Why not? They have senses, memory, feeling, perceptions, as we have. They act with spontaneity as we act. They must also have, as we have, the power of acting by virtue of their perceptions, by virtue of the play of their organs.

  Someone cries: “If all this is true, all things are only machines, everything in the universe is subjected to eternal laws.” Well, would you have everything subject to a million blind caprices? Either everything is a necessary consequence of the nature of things, or everything is the effect of the eternal order of an absolute master. In either case we are only cogs in the machine of the world.

  It is a foolish commonplace to assert that without the pretended liberty of the will, all pains and rewards are useless. Reason, and you will come to a quite contrary conclusion.

  If, when a brigand is executed, his accomplice who sees him expire has the liberty of not being frightened at the punishment; if his will is determined by itself, he will go from the foot of the scaffold to commit murder on the broad highway. But if his organs, stricken with horror, make him experience an unconquerable terror, he will abandon crime. His companion’s punishment becomes useful to him, and an insurance for society, only so long as his will is not free.

  Liberty, then, is only and can be only the power to do what one wills. This is what philosophy teaches us. But if one considers liberty in the theological sense, it is a matter so sublime that profane eyes dare not look so high.

  FRIENDSHIP

  Friendship is the marriage of souls, and this marriage is subject to divorce. It is a tacit contract between two sensitive and virtuous persons. I say sensitive, because a monk, a recluse, can be innocent of evil and still live without knowing the meaning of friendship. I say virtuous, because the wicked have only accomplices; voluptuaries have companions in debauch, self-seekers have partners, politicians attract partisans; the generality of idle men have attachments; princes have courtiers; while virtuous men alone have friends. Cethegus was the accomplice of Catiline, and Maecenas the courtier of Octavius; but Cicero was the friend of Atticus.

  GLORY

  In 1723, a Chinese visited Holland. This Chinese was a man of letters and a merchant; which two professions ought not to be incompatible, but which have become so among us, thanks to the extreme regard which is paid to money, and the little consideration which mankind has ever shown, and will ever show, for merit.

  This Chinese, who spoke a little Dutch, was once in a bookseller’s shop with some men of learning. He asked for a book, and Bossuet’s Universal History, badly translated, was suggested to him. “Ah!” said he, “how fortunate! I shall now see what is said of our great empire—of our nation, which has existed as one people for more than fifty thousand years—of that succession of emperors who have governed us for so many ages. I shall now see what is thought of the religion of the literate—of that simple worship which we render to the Supreme Being. How pleasing to see what is said in Europe of our arts, many of which are more ancient among us than all the kingdoms of Europe. I suppose the author will have made many mistakes in the history of the war which we had twenty-two thousand five hundred and fifty-two years ago, with the warlike nations of Tonkin and Japan, and of that solemn embassy which the mighty emperor of the Moguls sent to ask laws from us, in the year of the world 500,000,000,000,079,123,450,000.” “Alas!” said one of the learned men to him, “you are not even mentioned in that book; you are not important enough; it is almost all about the first nation in the world—the only nation, the great Jewish people!”

  “The Jewish people!” exclaimed the Chinese. “Are they, then, masters of at least three-quarters of the earth?” “They flatter themselves that they shall one day be so,” was the answer; “until which time they have the honor of being our old-clothesmen, and, now and then, clippers of our coin.”—“You jest,” said the Chinese; “had these people ever a vast empire?” “They had as their own for some years,” said I, “a small country; but it is not by the extent of their states that a people are to be judged; as it is not by his riches that we are to estimate a man.”

  “But is no other people spoken of in this book?” asked the man of letters. “Certainly,” returned a learned man who stood next me, and who took it upon himself to do the talking, “there is a deal said in it of a small country sixty leagues broad, called Egypt, where it is asserted that there was a lake a hundred and fifty leagues round, cut by the hands of men.”—“Zounds!” said the Chinese; “a lake a hundred and fifty leagues round in a country only sixty broad! That is fine, indeed!”—“Everybody was wise in that country,” added the doctor. “Oh! those must have been happy daysl” said the Chinese. “But is that all?”—“No,” replied the European; “there is also mention of that celebrated people, the Greeks.” “Who are these Greeks?” asked the man of letters. “Ah!” continued the other, “they inhabited a province about a two-hundredth part as large as China, but which has been famous throughout the world.” “I have never heard of these people, neither in Mogul nor in Japan, nor in Great Tartary,” said the Chinese, with an ingenuous look.

  “Oh, ignorant, barbarous man!” politely exclaimed our scholar. “Know you not, then, the Theban Epaminondas, nor the harbor of Piraeus, nor the name of the two horses of Achilles, nor that of Silenus’s ass? Have you not heard of Jupiter, nor of Diogenes, nor of Lais, nor of Cybele, nor—”

  “I am much afraid,” replied the Chinese man of letters, “that you know nothing at all of the ever memorable adventure of the celebrated Xixofou Concochigramki, nor of the mysteries of the great Fi Psi Hi Hi. But pray, what are the other unknown things of which this universal history treats?” The scholar then spoke for a quarter of an hour on the Roman commonwealth: but when he came to Julius Caesar, the Chinese interrupted him, saying, “As for him, I think I know him: was he not a Turk?”

  “What!” said the scholar, somewhat warm, “do you not at least know the difference between Pagans, Christians, and Mussulmans ? Do you not know Constantine, and the history of the popes?” “We have vaguely heard,” answered the Asiatic, “of one Mohammed.”

  “It is impossible,” returned the other, “that you should not, at least, be acquainted with Luther, Zuinglius, Bellarmin, Oecolampadius.” “I shall never remember those names,” said the Chinese.

  He then went away to sell a considerable parcel of tea and fine grogram, with which he bought
two fine girls and a cabin-boy, whom he took back to his own country, adoring Tien, and commending himself to Confucius.

  For myself, who was present at this conversation, I clearly saw what glory is. And I said: since Caesar and Jupiter are unknown in the finest, the most ancient, the most extensive, the most populous and well-regulated kingdom upon earth, it beseems you, ye governors of some little country, ye preachers in some little parish, or some little town—ye doctors of Salamanca and of Bourges, ye flimsy authors, and ye ponderous commentators —it beseems you to make pretensions to renown!

  GOVERNMENT

  What, then, is the destiny of mankind? Scarcely any great people is governed by itself. Begin from the east, and take the circuit of the world. Japan closed its ports against foreigners from the well-founded apprehension of a dreadful revolution. China actually experienced such a revolution; she obeys Tartars of a mixed race, half Manchu and half Hun. India obeys Mogul Tartars. The Nile, the Orontes, Greece, and Epirus are still under the yoke of the Turks. It is not an English race that reigns in England; it is a German family which succeeded to a Dutch prince, as the latter succeeded a Scotch family which had succeeded an Angevin family, that had replaced a Norman family, which had expelled a family of usurping Saxons. Spain obeys a French family, which succeeded to an Austrasian race; that Austrasian race had succeeded families that boasted of Visigoth extraction; these Visigoths had long before been driven out by the Arabs, after having succeeded to the Romans, who had expelled the Carthaginians. Gaul obeys Franks, after having obeyed Roman prefects.

  The same banks of the Danube have belonged to Germans, Romans, Arabs, Slavonians, Bulgarians, and Huns, to twenty different families, and almost all of them foreigners.

  And what greater wonder has Rome had to exhibit than so many emperors who were bom in the barbarous provinces, and so many popes born in provinces no less barbarous? Let him govern who can. And when anyone has made himself master, he governs as best he can.