Treatise on Metaphysics by Voltaire

In chapter XXV of his Memoirs published in 1826, Longchamp recounts that he was tasked with stoking the fire in which papers recommended by Madame du Châtelet to be burned after her death had been thrown. He managed to save a notebook filled with very small writing, which contained the Treatise on Metaphysics (1734). It was first published in the Kehl editions. “This work is all the more valuable,” said the publishers, “because it was not intended for publication, so the author was able to express his entire thoughts. It contains his true opinions, not just those he believed he could develop without compromising himself. It shows that he was strongly convinced of the existence of a Supreme Being, and even of the immortality of the soul, but without concealing the difficulties that arise against these two opinions, and which no philosopher has yet completely resolved.”

Voltaire offered it to Madame du Châtelet, for whom he had composed it, along with the following quatrain:

The author of the metaphysics
That we bring to your feet
Deserved to be cooked in the public square,
But he only burned for you.

• Introduction. Doubts about man.
• Chapter I. Of the Different Species of Men.
• Chapter II. Whether There is a God.
• Summary of Reasons in Favor of the Existence of God.
• Difficulties Concerning the Existence of God.
• Response to These Objections.
• Necessary Consequences of the Materialists’ Opinion.
• Chapter III. That All Ideas Come Through the Senses.
• Chapter IV. That There Are Indeed External Objects.
• Chapter V. Whether Man Has a Soul, and What It Could Be.
• Chapter VI. Whether the So-called Soul is Immortal.
• Chapter VII. Whether Man is Free.
• Chapter VIII. On Man Considered as a Social Being.
• Chapter IX. On Virtue and Vice.

Introduction. Doubts about man.

Few people have a clear notion of what man is. Peasants in parts of Europe have little idea of our species other than that it is a two-legged animal with brown skin, speaking some words, cultivating the land, paying certain tributes to another animal they call “king,” selling their goods as high as they can, and gathering on certain days of the year to sing prayers in a language they do not understand.

A king regards the entire human species as beings made to obey him and his peers. A young Parisian woman who enters society sees only what can serve her vanity, and the confused idea she has of happiness, and the noise of everything around her, prevent her soul from hearing the voice of the rest of nature. A young Turk, in the silence of the harem, regards men as superior beings, obliged by a certain law to sleep with their slaves every Friday, and his imagination does not go much beyond that. A priest distinguishes the entire universe into ecclesiastics and lay people, and he regards the ecclesiastical portion without difficulty as the noblest and made to lead the other, etc., etc.

If one believed that philosophers had more complete ideas about human nature, one would be greatly mistaken: for if you exclude Hobbes, Locke, Descartes, Bayle, and a very small number of wise minds, all the others have a particular opinion about man as narrow as that of the common people, and only more confused. Ask Father Malebranche what man is: he will tell you that he is a substance made in the image of God, greatly corrupted since the original sin, yet more united to God than to his body, seeing everything in God, thinking, feeling everything in God.

Pascal regards the entire world as a collection of evil and unhappy people created to be damned, among whom God has chosen from all eternity a few souls, that is, one out of five or six million, to be saved.

One says: Man is a soul united to a body; and when the body is dead, the soul lives alone forever; the other asserts that man is a body that necessarily thinks; and neither proves what they assert. In the search for man, I would like to conduct myself as I have done in the study of astronomy: my thoughts sometimes transport me outside the globe of the earth, from which all celestial movements appear irregular and confusing. And after observing the movement of the planets as if I were in the sun, I compare the apparent movements that I see on the earth with the true movements that I would see if I were in the sun. Likewise, in studying man, I will try to first put myself outside his sphere and outside of any personal interest, and rid myself of all prejudices of education, nationality, and especially those of the philosopher.

For example, I suppose that, born with the ability to think and feel as I currently do, and without the human form, I descend from the globe of Mars or Jupiter. I can take a quick view of all centuries, all countries, and therefore all the nonsense of this little globe.

This supposition is as easy to make, at least, as the one I make when I imagine being in the sun to consider from there the sixteen planets that roll regularly in space around that star.

Chapter I. Of the Different Species of Men.

Descended on this small lump of mud, and having no more notion of man than man has of the inhabitants of Mars or Jupiter, I land on the shores of the Cafrerie, on the coast of the Ocean, and at first I set out to search for a “man”. I see monkeys, elephants, and negroes, all of whom seem to have some hint of imperfect reason. They all have a language that I do not understand, and all their actions seem to relate equally to a certain end. If I judged things by the first effect they have on me, I would have a bias to believe that of all these beings, it is the elephant that is the rational animal. But, not wanting to decide too lightly, I take young ones of these different animals; I examine a six-month-old negro child, a young elephant, a young monkey, a young lion, a young dog: I see, beyond a doubt, that these young animals have incomparably more strength and skill; they have more ideas, more passions, more memory than the young negro; they express all their desires much more sensibly, but after a while, the young negro has just as many ideas as all of them. I even perceive that these negro animals have among themselves a language that is much better articulated and much more variable than that of other animals. I have had time to learn this language, and finally, by considering the slight degree of superiority they have in the long run over monkeys and elephants, I have ventured to judge that in fact this is “man”; and I have made this definition for myself:

Man is a black animal with wool on his head, walking on two legs, almost as dexterous as a monkey, weaker than the other animals of his size, having slightly more ideas than them, and more facility for expressing them; subject moreover to all the same necessities; being born, living, and dying just like them.

After spending some time among this species, I pass into the maritime regions of the East Indies. I am surprised by what I see: elephants, lions, monkeys, and parrots are not quite the same as in Cafrerie, but man appears absolutely different there; they are a beautiful yellow, have no wool; their heads are covered with long black hair. They seem to have ideas contrary to those of the negroes about everything. So I am forced to change my definition and classify human nature into two species: the yellow with hair, and the black with wool.

But in Batavia, Goa, and Surate, which are meeting places for all nations, I see a great multitude of Europeans who are white and who have neither hair nor wool, but thin blond hair on their heads and beards on their chins. I am also shown many Americans who have no beard: now my definition and my species of men are greatly increased.

I encounter in Goa a species even more peculiar than all of these: it is a man dressed in a long black cassock who claims to be made to instruct others. “All these different men that you see,” he tells me, “were all born of the same father,” and he goes on to tell me a long story. But what this creature tells me seems very suspect. I inquire whether a black man and a black woman with woolly hair and a flat nose sometimes have white children with blonde hair, aquiline noses, and blue eyes, whether beardless nations have arisen from bearded peoples, and whether white men and women have ever produced yellow people. I am told that no, that transplanted blacks, for example in Germany, only have black offspring, unless the Germans take on the task of changing the species, and so on. I am also told that no educated person has ever claimed that unmixed species degenerate, and that it is only the Abbé Dubos who has said such foolishness in a book entitled "Reflections on Painting and Poetry, etc."¹.

It seems to me then that I am well founded in believing that it is the same with men as it is with trees: that pear trees, firs, oaks, and apricot trees do not come from the same tree, and that bearded whites, woolly-haired blacks, crin-bearing yellows, and beardless men do not come from the same man².

Chapter II. Whether There is a God.

We have to examine what it is to think in these different species of men; how it acquires its ideas, whether it has a soul separate from the body, whether this soul is eternal, free, virtuous and vicious, etc.; but most of these ideas are dependent on the existence or non-existence of a God. We must, I believe, begin by sounding the abyss of this great principle. Let us here strip ourselves more than ever of all passion and prejudice, and see in good faith what our reason can teach us on this question: “Is there a God or not?”

I first observe that there are peoples who have no knowledge of a creating God: these peoples, it is true, are barbarous and very few in number; but they are nevertheless men; and if the knowledge of a God were necessary to human nature, the Hottentot savages would have as sublime an idea of a Supreme Being as we do. Moreover, there is no child among civilized peoples who has in his head the slightest idea of a God. It is impressed upon them with difficulty; they pronounce the word “God” often throughout their lives without attaching any fixed notion to it; you see also that the ideas of God differ as much among men as their religions and laws; on which I cannot help making this reflection: Is it possible that the knowledge of a God, our creator, our preserver, our all, is less necessary to man than a nose and five fingers? All men are born with a nose and five fingers, and none is born with the knowledge of God: whether this is deplorable or not, such is certainly the human condition.

Let us see if we acquire with time the knowledge of a God, just as we attain mathematical notions and some metaphysical ideas. What can we do better, in such an important inquiry, than to weigh what can be said for and against, and to decide for what appears to us most conformable to reason?

Summary of Reasons in Favor of the Existence of God.

There are two ways of arriving at the notion of a being who presides over the universe. The most natural and perfect way for common capacities is to consider not only the order that is in the universe, but the end to which each thing appears to relate. Many large books have been composed on this single idea, and all these large books together contain nothing more than this argument: When I see a watch whose hand marks the hours, I conclude that an intelligent being arranged the springs³ of this machine so that the hand would mark the hours. Thus, when I see the springs of the human body, I conclude that an intelligent being arranged these organs to be received and nourished for nine months in the womb; that the eyes are given to see, the hands to take, etc. But from this single argument I can conclude nothing else, except that it is probable that an intelligent and superior being prepared and shaped matter with skill; but I cannot conclude from this alone that this being made matter out of nothing, and that he is infinite in every sense. No matter how much I search in my mind for the connection of these ideas: “It is probable that I am the work of a being more powerful than I am, therefore this being exists for all eternity, therefore he created everything, therefore he is infinite, etc.” I do not see the chain that leads straight to this conclusion; I only see that there is something more powerful than I am, and nothing more.

The second argument is more metaphysical, less intended to be grasped by coarse minds, and leads to much broader knowledge; here is the summary:

I exist, therefore something exists. If something exists, then something has existed for all eternity: because what is, either exists by itself, or has received its being from another. If it exists by itself, it is necessarily so, it has always been necessary, and that is God; if it has received its being from another, and this second from a third, then the one from whom the latter received its being must necessarily be God. For you cannot conceive of one being giving being to another if it does not have the power to create; moreover, if you say that one thing receives, I do not mean the form, but its existence, from another thing, and that one from a third, and so on up to infinity, then you are saying something absurd, because all these beings will have no cause for their existence. Taken all together, they have no external cause for their existence; taken individually, they have no internal cause, that is, taken all together, they owe their existence to nothing; taken individually, none exists by itself, therefore none can exist necessarily.

Therefore, I am forced to confess that there is a being who exists necessarily by itself for all eternity, and who is the origin of all other beings. From this it follows essentially that this being is infinite in duration, in immensity, in power: for who can limit it? But, you will say, the material world is precisely the being we are looking for. Let us examine honestly whether this is probable.

If this material world exists by itself of absolute necessity, it is a contradiction in terms to suppose that the smallest part of this universe could be otherwise than it is: because, if it is at this moment of absolute necessity, that word alone excludes any other way of being; now, certainly this table on which I write, this pen which I use, have not always been what they are; these thoughts that I trace on paper did not even exist a moment ago, therefore they do not exist necessarily. Now, if each part does not exist of absolute necessity, then it is impossible for the whole to exist by itself. I produce movement, therefore movement did not exist before; therefore movement is not essential to matter; therefore matter receives it from elsewhere; therefore there is a God who gives it to it. Similarly, intelligence is not essential to matter, for a rock or wheat does not think. From whom then have the parts of matter that think and feel received sensation and thought? It cannot be from themselves, since they feel in spite of themselves; it cannot be from matter in general, since thought and sensation are not of the essence of matter: they have therefore received these gifts from the hand of a supreme, intelligent, infinite being, and the original cause of all beings.

Here in a few words are the proofs of the existence of a God, and the summary of several volumes: a summary that each reader can extend as they wish.

Here, with the same brevity, are the objections that can be made to this system.

Difficulties Concerning the Existence of God.

1. If God is not this material world, then he created it (or, if you prefer, he gave some other being the power to create it, which amounts to the same thing); but in creating this world, he either brought it out of nothing, or he brought it out of his own divine being. He cannot have brought it out of nothing, which is nothing; he cannot have brought it out of himself, since in that case this world would be essentially part of the divine essence: therefore, I cannot have an idea of creation, therefore I should not admit creation.

2. God would have made this world either necessarily or freely: if he made it out of necessity, he must always have made it, because this necessity is eternal; therefore, in this case, the world would be eternal and created, which implies a contradiction. If God made it freely by pure choice, without any antecedent reason, that too is a contradiction: for it is contradictory to suppose the infinitely wise Being doing everything without any reason to determine him, and the infinitely powerful Being having spent an eternity without making the slightest use of his power.

3. If it appears to most people that an intelligent being has stamped the seal of wisdom on all of nature, and that everything seems to be made for a certain purpose, it is even more true in the eyes of philosophers that everything in nature happens according to eternal, independent, and immutable mathematical laws; the construction and duration of the human body are a result of the balance of fluids and the strength of levers. The more discoveries we make in the structure of the universe, the more we find it arranged, from the stars to the ciron, according to mathematical laws. It is therefore permissible to believe that these laws, having operated according to their nature, produce necessary effects that are taken for the arbitrary determinations of an intelligent power. For example, a field produces grass because that is the nature of its soil watered by the rain, and not because there are horses that need hay and oats; and so on for the rest.

4. If the arrangement of the parts of this world, and everything that happens among beings that have sentient and thinking life, proves a Creator and a master, it would prove even better a barbaric being: for, if we admit final causes, we will be forced to say that God, infinitely wise and infinitely good, gave life to all creatures to be devoured by each other. Indeed, if we consider all animals, we will see that each species has an irresistible instinct that forces it to destroy another species. As for the miseries of man, there is enough to reproach Divinity with throughout our lives. It is all very well for us to be told that the wisdom and goodness of God are not like ours, this argument will carry no weight with the minds of many people, who will respond that they can only judge justice by the very idea that is supposed to have been given to them by God, that we can only measure with the measure we have, and that it is as impossible for us not to believe very barbarous an being who would behave like a barbaric man, as it is impossible for us not to think that any being has six feet when we have measured it with a yardstick, and it appears to us to be that size.

If we are told in response that our measure is faulty, they will say something that seems to imply a contradiction: for it is God himself who will have given us this false idea; therefore God will have made us only to deceive us. Now, this is to say that a being who can only have perfections throws his creatures into error, which is, properly speaking, the only imperfection; it is visibly contradictory. Finally, materialists will end up saying: We have fewer absurdities to swallow in the system of atheism than in that of deism: for, on the one hand, it is true that we must conceive as eternal and infinite this world that we see; but, on the other hand, we must imagine another infinite and eternal being, and add to it the creation, of which we cannot have an idea. It is therefore easier for us, they will conclude, not to believe in a God than to believe in one.

Response to These Objections.

The arguments against creation reduce to showing that it is impossible for us to conceive of it, that is, to conceive of its manner, but not that it is impossible in itself. To prove that creation is impossible, it would first be necessary to prove that it is impossible for there to be a God. But far from proving this impossibility, we are obliged to recognize that it is impossible for there not to be a God. This argument, that there must be an infinite, eternal, immense, all-powerful, free, and intelligent being outside of ourselves, and the darkness that accompanies this light, only serves to show that this light exists: for it is precisely from the fact that an infinite being is demonstrated to us that it is also demonstrated to us that it must be impossible for a finite being to understand it.

It seems to me that one can only make sophisms and say absurdities when one wants to deny the necessity of a being existing by itself, or when one wants to argue that matter is that being. But when it comes to establishing and discussing the attributes of that being, whose existence is demonstrated, it is quite another matter.

The masters of the art of reasoning, such as Locke and Clarke, tell us: “This being is an intelligent being, for the one who has produced everything must have all the perfections that he has put into what he has produced, otherwise the effect would be more perfect than the cause”; or in another way: “There would be a perfection in the effect that would not have been produced by anything, which is obviously absurd. Therefore, since there are intelligent beings, and matter could not have given itself the faculty of thinking, it must be that the being existing by itself, that is God, is an intelligent being.” But couldn’t one retort this argument and say, “God must be matter,” since there are material beings; for otherwise, matter would have been produced by nothing, and a cause would have produced an effect whose principle was not in it? This argument has been believed to be evaded by slipping in the word “perfection”: Mr. Clarke seems to have anticipated it, but he did not dare to put it in all its glory; he only makes this objection: “It will be said that God has indeed communicated divisibility and figure to matter, although he is neither figured nor divisible.” And he gives a very solid and easy answer to this objection, namely that divisibility and figure are negative qualities and limitations, and that although a cause cannot communicate to its effect any perfection that it does not have, the effect can nevertheless have, and must necessarily have, limitations, imperfections that the cause does not have. But what would Mr. Clarke have answered to someone who said to him, “Matter is not a negative being, a limitation, an imperfection; it is a real, positive being, which has its attributes just like the mind; now, how could God have produced a material being if he is not material?” Therefore, either you admit that the cause can communicate something positive that it does not have, or matter has no cause for its existence; or finally, you maintain that matter is a pure negation and a limitation; or if these three parts are absurd, you must admit that the existence of intelligent beings proves no more that the being existing by itself is an intelligent being than the existence of material beings proves that the being existing by itself is matter: for the thing is absolutely similar; the same thing will be said of movement. As for the word “perfection,” it is clearly being abused here: for who would dare to say that matter is an imperfection, and thought a perfection? I do not believe that anyone would dare to decide thus on the essence of things. And then, what does “perfection” mean? Is it perfection in relation to God, or in relation to us?

I know that one could say that this opinion would lead to Spinozism; to that, I could only answer that I cannot help it, and that if my reasoning is good, it cannot become bad because of the consequences that can be drawn from it. But, furthermore, nothing would be more false than this consequence: for it would only prove that our intelligence is no more like the intelligence of God than our way of being extended is like the way in which God fills space. God is not in the same situation as the causes that we know: he could create mind and matter, without being either matter or mind; neither one nor the other derives from him, but is created by him. I do not know the “quomodo,” it is true: I prefer to stop than to wander; his existence is demonstrated to me, but for his attributes and essence, it is, I believe, demonstrated to me that I am not made to understand them.

To say that God could not have created this world either necessarily or freely is a fallacy that falls on its own once it has been proven that there is a God, and that the world is not God. This objection boils down to this: I cannot understand why God created the universe at one time rather than another, so he could not have created it. It’s like saying, I can’t understand why such a man or such a horse didn’t exist a thousand years ago, so their existence is impossible. Furthermore, God’s free will is a sufficient reason for the time in which he wanted to create the world. If God exists, he is free; and he would not be if he were always determined by a sufficient reason, and if his will did not serve him. Moreover, is this sufficient reason in or outside of him? If it is outside of him, then he is not determining himself freely; if it is within him, what else is it but his will?

Mathematical laws are immutable, it is true; but it was not necessary for such laws to be preferred over others. It was not necessary for the earth to be placed where it is; no mathematical law can act on its own; none acts without movement, and movement does not exist by itself: therefore, one must resort to a prime mover. I admit that the planets, placed at such a distance from the sun, must travel their orbits according to the laws they observe, that even their distance can be regulated by the amount of matter they contain. But can it be said that it was necessary for there to be such a quantity of matter in each planet, that there be a certain number of stars, that this number cannot be increased or decreased, that on earth it is of absolute and inherent necessity in the nature of things that there be a certain number of beings? No doubt, since this number changes every day: therefore all of nature, from the farthest star to a blade of grass, must be subject to a prime mover.

As for the objection that a meadow is not essentially made for horses, etc., one cannot conclude from this that there is no final cause, but only that we do not know all the final causes. It is especially important to reason honestly here and not seek to deceive oneself; when one sees something that always has the same effect, that only has this effect, that is composed of an infinity of organs, in which there are an infinity of movements that all contribute to the same production, it seems to me that one cannot, without a secret repugnance, deny a final cause. The germ of all plants, of all animals, is in this case: must one not be a little bold to say that all of this does not relate to any end?

I agree that there is no proper demonstration that proves that the stomach is made for digestion, just as there is no demonstration that it is daylight; but materialists are far from being able to demonstrate that the stomach is not made for digestion either. Let us judge with fairness, as we judge things in the ordinary course, which opinion is most probable.

As for the accusations of injustice and cruelty made against God, I first respond that, assuming that there is moral evil (which seems to me a chimera), this moral evil is just as impossible to explain in the system of matter as in that of a God. I then respond that we have no other ideas of justice than those that we have formed of any action useful to society, and in conformity with the laws established by us for the common good: now, since this idea is only an idea of relation of man to man, it can have no analogy with God. It is just as absurd to say of God in this sense that God is just or unjust, as

Regarding the accusations of injustice and cruelty directed towards God, I first respond that even if there were such a thing as moral evil (which I believe to be a fantasy), it would be just as impossible to explain in a system of materialism as it would be in a system with a God. Secondly, I respond that our ideas of justice come solely from actions that we perceive as beneficial to society and conforming to laws established by us for the common good. As this idea of justice is simply a human-to-human relation, it cannot be analogous to God. It is just as absurd to say that God is just or unjust in this sense as it is to say that God is blue or square.

Therefore, it is senseless to blame God for flies being eaten by spiders, or for humans living only 80 years, or for abusing their freedom to harm each other, or for having diseases and cruel passions, etc. For we certainly have no idea that humans and flies should be eternal. To truly establish that something is bad, we must also see that there is a better alternative. We can only judge a machine as imperfect by comparing it to an idea of perfection that it lacks; for example, we can only say that the three sides of a triangle are unequal if we have an idea of an equilateral triangle, or that a watch is faulty if we have a clear idea of a certain number of equal spaces that the watch’s hand should equally traverse. But who has an idea that this world violates divine wisdom?

There are difficulties in the belief that there is a God, but there are absurdities in the opposite belief. This is what we must carefully examine by providing a brief overview of what a materialist is obligated to believe.

Necessary Consequences of the Materialists’ Opinion.

They must say that the world exists necessarily and by itself, so that there would be a contradiction in terms to say that a part of matter could not exist or could exist differently than it is; they must say that the material world essentially has thought and feeling within itself, as it cannot acquire them, since in that case they would come from nothing; it cannot have them from elsewhere since it is assumed to be everything that exists. Therefore, this thought and feeling must be inherent in it, just as extension, divisibility, and the capacity for movement are inherent in matter; and it must be confessed that only a small number of parts have this thought and feeling essential to the total of the world; that these feelings and thoughts, although inherent in matter, nevertheless perish at every moment; or else it must be advanced that there is a soul of the world that spreads throughout organized bodies, and then it must be that this soul is something other than the world. Thus, whichever way we turn, we find only chimeras that destroy themselves.

Materialists must also maintain that movement is essential to matter. They are thereby reduced to saying that movement could never have and will never be able to increase or decrease; they will be forced to advance that a hundred thousand men walking at the same time, and a hundred cannon shots fired, produce no new movement in nature. They must also assert that there is no freedom, and thereby destroy all the bonds of society, and believe in a fate that is just as difficult to understand as freedom, but which they themselves deny in practice. Let a fair reader, having carefully weighed the pros and cons of the existence of a creating God, now see on which side the likelihood lies.

After having thus dragged ourselves from doubt to doubt, and from conclusion to conclusion, until we can regard this proposition “There is a God” as the most plausible thing that men can think, and after having seen that the contrary proposition is one of the most absurd, it seems natural to inquire into what relation there is between God and us; to see if God has established laws for thinking beings, as there are mechanical laws for material beings; to examine if there is a morality, and what it can be; if there is a religion established by God Himself. These questions are undoubtedly of importance to which everything gives way, and the research in which we amuse our lives is very frivolous in comparison; but these questions will be more appropriate when we consider man as a social animal.

Let us first examine how ideas come to him and how he thinks, before seeing what use he makes or should make of his thoughts.

Chapter III. That All Ideas Come Through the Senses.

Anyone who honestly reflects on everything that has passed through their mind will readily admit that their senses have provided all their ideas. However, some philosophers⁴ who have abused their reason have claimed that we have innate ideas, and they have only asserted this on the same basis that they have said that God took cubes of matter and crushed them together to form this visible world. They have forged systems with which they fancied they could hazard some apparent explanation of the phenomena of nature. This way of philosophizing is even more dangerous than the contemptible jargon of the school. For this jargon being absolutely empty of meaning, it only takes a little attention from a straight mind to perceive its ridiculousness all at once, and to seek the truth elsewhere; but an ingenious and bold hypothesis, which at first has some appearance of plausibility, interests human pride in believing it; the mind applauds these subtle principles, and uses all its sagacity to defend them. It is clear that one should never make hypotheses; one should not say: Let us begin by inventing principles with which we will try to explain everything. But one should say: Let us exactly analyze things, and then we will try to see, with much distrust, if they correspond with some principles. Those who have made the romance of innate ideas flattered themselves that they would account for the ideas of the infinite, the immensity of God, and certain metaphysical notions that they supposed to be common to all men. But if, before engaging in this system, they had been willing to reflect that many men have no tint of these notions in their lives, that no child has them unless they are given to him, and that, when finally acquired, one has only very imperfect perceptions, purely negative ideas, they would have been ashamed of their opinion. If there is anything demonstrated outside of mathematics, it is that there are no innate ideas in man; if there were, all men at birth would have the idea of a God, and would all have the same idea; they would all have the same metaphysical notions; add to that the ridiculous absurdity into which one falls when one maintains that God gives us notions in the mother’s womb that we must entirely be taught in our youth.

It is therefore indubitable that our first ideas are our sensations. Little by little, we receive ideas composed of what strikes our organs, our memory retains these perceptions; we then arrange them under general ideas, and from this one faculty that we have of composing and arranging our ideas, all the vast knowledge of man results.

Those who object that the notions of infinity in duration, extension, and number cannot come from our senses, have only to return for a moment to themselves: first, they will see that they have no complete and even positive idea of infinity, but that it is only by adding material things together that they have come to know that they will never see the end of their count; and this impotence they have called infinity, which is much more an admission of human ignorance than an idea above our senses. If it is objected that there is a real infinity in geometry, I reply that there is not: it is only proved that matter will always be divisible; it is proved that all possible circles will pass between two lines; it is proved that an infinity of surfaces has nothing in common with an infinity of cubes; but that does not give any more idea of infinity than this proposition, “There is a God,” gives us an idea of what God is.

But it is not enough to convince ourselves that all our ideas come to us through the senses; our curiosity leads us to want to know how they come to us. This is where all philosophers have made beautiful stories; it was easy to spare them by considering with good faith the limits of human nature. When we cannot use the compass of mathematics, nor the torch of experience and physics, it is certain that we cannot take a single step. Until we have eyes keen enough to distinguish the constituent parts of gold from the constituent parts of a mustard seed, it is certain that we cannot reason about their essences; and until man is of a different nature, and has organs to perceive his own substance and the essence of his ideas, as he has organs to feel, it is indubitable that it will be impossible for him to know them. To ask how we think and how we feel, how our movements obey our will, is to ask for the secret of the Creator; our senses provide us no more ways to arrive at this knowledge than they provide us with wings when we desire the faculty of flying; and this is what proves, in my opinion, that all our ideas come to us through the senses: since when our senses fail us, our ideas fail us; it is also impossible for us to know how we think, for the same reason that it is impossible for us to have the idea of a sixth sense; it is because we lack the organs that teach these ideas. That is why those who have had the audacity to imagine a system about the nature of the soul and our conceptions have been forced to suppose the absurd opinion of innate ideas, flattering themselves that among the so-called metaphysical ideas that descended from heaven into our minds, there would be some that would reveal this impenetrable secret.

Of all the bold reasoners who have lost themselves in the depth of these researches, Father Malebranche is the one who has seemed to stray in the most sublime way.

Here is what his system, which has caused so much noise, boils down to:

Our perceptions, which come to us on the occasion of objects, cannot be caused by these objects themselves, which certainly do not have the power to give a feeling; they do not come from ourselves, for we are, in this regard, as powerless as these objects; therefore, it must be God who gives them to us. “Now God is the place of spirits, and spirits subsist in him;” therefore, it is in him that we have our ideas, and that we see all things.

Now, I ask any man who does not have enthusiasm in his head, what clear notion does this last argument give us?

I ask what does “God is the place of spirits” mean? And even if these words “to feel and to see everything in God” were to form a distinct idea in us, I ask what we would gain from it, and in what way we would be wiser than before.

Certainly, to reduce Father Malebranche’s system to something intelligible, we have to resort to Spinozism, to imagine that the whole of the universe is God, that this God acts in all beings, feels in animals, thinks in humans, vegetates in trees, is thought and rock, has all parts of himself destroyed at every moment, and finally all the absurdities that necessarily flow from this principle.

The errors of all those who have wanted to delve into what is impenetrable to us should teach us not to want to cross the limits of our nature. True philosophy is knowing when to stop, and never walking except with a sure guide.

There is enough ground to cover without traveling in imaginary spaces. Let us content ourselves with knowing, through the experience supported by reasoning, the only source of our knowledge, that our senses are the doors through which all ideas enter our understanding; and let us remember well that it is absolutely impossible for us to know the secret of this mechanism because we do not have instruments proportional to its springs.

Chapter IV. That There Are Indeed External Objects.

We would not have thought to address this question if philosophers had not sought to doubt the most clear things, as they have claimed to know the most doubtful things.

They say that our senses give us ideas, but perhaps our understanding receives these perceptions without any external object being present. We know that during sleep, we see and feel things that do not exist: perhaps our life is a continual dream, and death will be the moment of our awakening or the end of a dream from which there will be no awakening.

Our senses deceive us even in waking life; the slightest alteration in our organs sometimes makes us see objects and hear sounds whose cause is only in the disturbance of our body: it is therefore very possible that what sometimes happens to us always happens to us.

They add that when we see an object, we perceive a color, a shape; we hear sounds, and we have chosen to call all of this “the modes of this object”; but what is the substance of this object? It is indeed there that the object escapes our imagination: what we boldly call “the substance” is in fact only the collection of these modes. Strip this tree of the color and configuration that gave you the idea of a tree, what will be left of it? Now, what I have called modes is nothing but my perceptions. I can certainly say, “I have an idea of the color green and a body so configured”; but I have no proof that this body and this color exist: this is what Sextus Empiricus⁵ says, and to which he cannot find an answer.

Let us grant these gentlemen even more than they ask for a moment: they claim that we cannot prove to them that there are bodies; let us pass to them that they prove themselves that there are no bodies. What will follow from this? Will we behave differently in our lives? Will we have different ideas about anything? We will only have to change a word in our speech. For example, when a battle has been fought, we will have to say that ten thousand men appeared to be killed, that such an officer seems to have a broken leg, and that a surgeon appears to be cutting it off. Similarly, when we are hungry, we will ask for the appearance of a piece of bread to pretend to digest it.

But here is what could be answered to them more seriously:

1. Strictly speaking, you cannot compare life to the state of dreams because when you dream, you only dream of things that you have already experienced while awake; you are certain that your dreams are nothing but a faint reminiscence. On the contrary, during waking life, when we have a sensation, we can never conclude that it is due to reminiscence. For example, if a falling stone breaks our shoulder, it seems quite difficult for that to happen by an effort of memory.

2. It is true that our senses are often deceived, but what does that mean? We only have one sense, properly speaking, which is that of touch; sight, sound, and smell are only the touch of intermediary bodies that emanate from a distant body. I only have the idea of the stars through touch; and since this touch of the light that strikes my eye from millions of miles away is not palpable like the touch of my hands, and it depends on the medium that these bodies have traversed, this touch is improperly called “deceptive”; it does not show me the objects in their true place; it does not give me an idea of their size; none of these touches, which are not palpable, give me a positive idea of bodies. The first time I smell an odor without seeing the object it comes from, my mind finds no relation between a body and that odor; but touch itself, the approach of my body to another, independently of my other senses, gives me the idea of matter: for when I touch a rock, I feel that I cannot take its place, and therefore there is something extended and impenetrable there. Thus, assuming (for what cannot be assumed?) that a person had all the senses except for touch proper, that person could well doubt the existence of external objects, and perhaps even be without an idea of them for a long time; but one who is deaf and blind and has touch could not doubt the existence of things that make him feel hardness, and this is because it is not of the essence of matter that a body be colored or sonorous, but that it be extended and impenetrable.

But what will the extreme skeptics answer to these two questions:

1. If there are no external objects, and if my imagination does everything, why am I burned when I touch fire, and why am I not burned when I touch fire in a dream?

2. When I write my ideas on this paper, and another person comes to read to me what I have written, how can I hear the very words that I have written and thought, if that other person does not actually read them to me? How can I even find them again if they are not there? Finally, no matter how hard I try to doubt, I am more convinced of the existence of bodies than I am of many geometric truths. This may seem surprising, but I cannot help it; I may lack geometric demonstrations to prove that I have a father and a mother, and I may have failed to demonstrate, that is, to answer the argument that proves that an infinity of curved lines can pass between a circle and its tangent, but I am well aware that if an all-powerful being were to tell me these two propositions: “There are bodies,” and “An infinity of curves passes between the circle and its tangent,” there is one proposition that is false, guess which one? I would guess that it is the latter: for knowing full well that I have long been ignorant of this proposition, that I needed sustained attention to understand its demonstration, that I thought I found difficulties in it, that geometric truths have no reality except in my mind, I might suspect that my mind had been deceived.

In any case, since my main goal here is to examine social man, and I cannot be social if there is no society, and therefore no external objects, the Pyrrhonians will allow me to begin by firmly believing that there are bodies, otherwise I would have to deny the existence of these gentlemen.⁶

Chapter V. Whether Man Has a Soul, and What It Could Be.

We are certain that we are made of matter, that we feel and think; we are convinced of the existence of a God who created us, for reasons that our mind cannot rebel against. We have proven to ourselves that this God created what exists. We have convinced ourselves that it is impossible for us to know how He gave us being; but can we know what thinks within us? What is this faculty that God has given us? Is it matter that feels and thinks, or is it an immaterial substance? In short, what is a soul? This is where it is more necessary than ever to put myself back in the state of a thinking being descended from another globe, having none of the prejudices of this one, and possessing the same capacity as myself, not being what is called a human, and judging humans in an impartial manner.

If I were a superior being to whom the Creator had revealed his secrets, I would soon say, upon seeing man, what this animal is; I would define his soul and all his faculties with as much boldness as so many philosophers who knew nothing about it; but, confessing my ignorance and trying my weak reason, I can do nothing else but use the path of analysis, which is the stick that nature has given to the blind: I examine everything part by part, and then I see if I can judge the whole. I therefore suppose myself arrived in Africa, and surrounded by Negroes, Hottentots, and other animals. I first notice that the organs of life are the same in all of them; the operations of their bodies all originate from the same principles of life; they all have, in my eyes, the same desires, the same passions, the same needs; they all express them, each in their own languages. The language I first hear is that of the animals, there can be no other way; the sounds by which they express themselves do not seem arbitrary, they are living characters of their passions; these signs bear the imprint of what they express: the cry of a dog asking for food, combined with all its attitudes, has a sensible relation to its object; I immediately distinguish it from the cries and movements by which it flatters another animal, from those with which it hunts, and from those by which it complains; I also discern whether its complaint expresses the anxiety of loneliness, or the pain of a wound, or the impatience of love. Thus, with a little attention, I hear the language of all animals; they have no feeling that they do not express: perhaps it is not the same with their ideas; but as it appears that nature has given them only a few ideas, it seems natural to me that they would have a limited language, proportionate to their perceptions.

What do I encounter that is different in the Negro animals? What can I see there, except for a few more ideas and combinations in their heads, expressed by a differently articulated language? The more I examine all these beings, the more I must suspect that they are different species of the same kind. This admirable faculty of retaining ideas is common to all of them; they all have dreams and faint images, during sleep, of ideas they received while awake; their sensing and thinking faculty grows with their organs, and weakens with them, perishes with them. If the blood of a monkey and a Negro is spilled, there will soon be a degree of exhaustion in both that will render them unable to recognize me; soon after, their external senses no longer function, and finally, they die.

I then ask what gave them life, sensation, and thought. It was not their own work, it was not that of matter, as I have already proven to myself: therefore it is God who gave all these bodies the power to feel and have ideas in different degrees, proportionate to their organs: this is surely what I would suspect first.

Finally, I see men who seem superior to these Negroes, as these Negroes are to the monkeys, and as the monkeys are to oysters and other animals of that kind.

Philosophers tell me: Do not be mistaken, man is entirely different from other animals; he has a spiritual and immortal soul: for (note this well), if thought is a compound of matter, it must necessarily be the same as what it is composed of; it must be divisible, capable of movement, etc.; but thought cannot be divided, therefore it is not a compound of matter; it has no parts, it is simple, it is immortal, it is the work and image of a God. I listen to these masters, and I reply to them, always with distrust of myself, but not with confidence in them: If man has a soul as you assure me, I must believe that this dog and this mole have one exactly the same. They all swear to me that it is not so. I ask them what the difference is between this dog and them. Some⁷ respond: This dog is a substantial form; others⁸ say: Do not believe it; substantial forms are chimeras; but this dog is a machine like a spit, and nothing more. I ask the inventors of substantial forms what they mean by this word; and as they only answer me with gibberish, I turn to the inventors of spits and say to them: If these animals are pure machines, you are certainly no more than a repeating watch compared to the spit you speak of; or if you have the honor of possessing a spiritual soul, animals have one too, for they are everything that you are, they have the same organs with which you have sensations; and if these organs do not serve them for the same purpose, God, in giving them these organs, will have made a useless work; and God, according to yourselves, does nothing in vain. Therefore, choose either to attribute a spiritual soul to a flea, a worm, or a mite, or to be a machine like them. All these gentlemen can answer me is that they conjecture that the springs of animals, which appear to be the organs of their feelings, are necessary to their life, and are in them only the springs of life; but this answer is an unreasonable supposition.

It is certain that one does not need a nose, ears, or eyes to live. There are animals that do not have these senses and yet live: therefore, these organs of feeling are only given for feeling; therefore, animals feel like us; therefore, it can only be by a ridiculous excess of vanity that men attribute a soul of a different kind from that which animates beasts. So it is clear so far that neither philosophers nor I know what this soul is; it is only proven to me that it is something common to the animal called “man” and the one called “beast.” Let’s see if this faculty common to all these animals is matter or not.

“It is impossible,” they tell me, “for matter to think.” I do not see this impossibility. If thought were a compound of matter, as they tell me, I would admit that thought should be extended and divisible; but if thought is an attribute of God given to matter, I do not see that it is necessary for this attribute to be extended and divisible; for I see that God has communicated other properties to matter, which have neither extension nor divisibility; motion, gravity, for example, which acts without intermediate bodies, and which acts in direct proportion to mass, not surface, and in doubled inverse proportion to distance, is a real quality demonstrated, and whose cause is as hidden as that of thought.

In short, I can only judge based on what I see, and what seems most probable to me; I see that in all of nature the same effects imply the same cause. Thus, I judge that the same cause acts in animals and humans in proportion to their organs; and I believe that this principle common to humans and animals is an attribute given by God to matter. For, if what is called the “soul” were a separate being, of whatever nature that being was, I should believe that thought is its essence, or else I would have no idea of this substance. Also, all those who have admitted an immaterial soul have been obliged to say that this soul always thinks; but I appeal to the conscience of all men: do they always think? Do they think when they sleep deeply? Do animals always have ideas? Does someone who is unconscious have many ideas in that state, which is truly a temporary death? If the soul does not always think, it is therefore absurd to recognize in man a substance whose essence is to think. What could we conclude from this, except that God has organized bodies to think as well as to eat and digest?

As I learn about the history of mankind, I find that men have long held the same opinion as I on this article. I read one of the oldest books in the world, preserved by a people who claim to be the oldest people; this book tells me that God himself seems to think like me; it teaches me that God once gave the Jews the most detailed laws any nation has ever received; He even prescribes to them how they should go to the bathroom,⁹ and He does not say a word about their soul; He speaks only of temporal punishments and rewards: this at least proves that the author of this book did not live in a nation that believed in the spirituality and immortality of the soul.

I am told that two thousand years later, God came to teach men that their soul is immortal; but I, who am from another sphere, cannot help being astonished at this discrepancy that is attributed to God. It seems strange to my reason that God made men believe in both sides of the argument; but if it is a point of revelation where my reason sees nothing, I remain silent and adore in silence. It is not for me to examine what has been revealed; I only notice that these revealed books do not say that the soul is spiritual: they only tell us that it is immortal. I have no difficulty in believing this; for it seems just as possible to God to have formed it (whatever its nature) to preserve it as to destroy it. This God, who can, as he pleases, preserve or annihilate the motion of a body, can surely make the faculty of thinking last forever in a part of that body; if he has indeed told us that this part is immortal, we must be persuaded of it.

But what is this soul made of? This is something the Supreme Being has not seen fit to teach men. Therefore, having only my own lights to guide me in these researches, the desire to know something, and the sincerity of my heart, I sincerely seek what my reason can discover on its own; I test its strength, not to believe it capable of carrying all these immense weights, but to strengthen it through exercise, and to learn how far its power extends. Thus, always ready to yield as soon as revelation presents its barriers, I continue my reflections and conjectures solely as a philosopher, until my reason can no longer advance.

Chapter VI. Whether the So-called Soul is Immortal.

This is not the place to examine whether God has actually revealed the immortality of the soul. I always assume that I am a philosopher from another world, who judges only by reason. Reason has taught me that all human and animal ideas come through the senses. I must admit that I cannot help but laugh when I am told that humans will still have ideas when they no longer have senses. When a man loses his nose, that lost nose is no more a part of him than the North Star. If he loses all his parts and ceases to be a man, is it not a little strange to say that he still has the result of everything that has perished? I would as soon say that he eats and drinks after his death as to say that he has ideas after his death. One is no more inconsistent than the other, and it certainly took many centuries before anyone dared to make such an astonishing supposition. I also know that God, having attached the faculty of having ideas to a part of the brain, can preserve that small part of the brain with its faculty. But to preserve the faculty without the part is as impossible as preserving a man’s laughter or a bird’s song after the death of the bird or the man. God may also have given humans and animals a simple, immaterial soul, and can preserve it independently of their bodies. This is as possible for Him as creating a million more worlds than He has created, and giving humans two noses and four hands, wings, and claws. But to believe that He has actually made all these things possible, it seems to me that we must see them.

Not seeing that human understanding and sensation are immortal, who will prove to me that they are? What! I, who do not know the nature of this thing, will assert that it is eternal? I, who know that man was not yesterday, will affirm that there is an eternal part in this man by nature! And while I deny immortality to what animates this dog, this parrot, this thrush, will I grant it to man because man desires it?

It would be very sweet indeed to survive oneself, to perpetually preserve the most excellent part of one’s being in the destruction of the other, to live forever with one’s friends, etc.! This chimera (if considered in this sense alone) would be consoling in real miseries. Perhaps that is why the system of metempsychosis was invented in the past; but does this system have more likelihood than the Thousand and One Nights? And is it not a fruit of the lively and absurd imagination of most Eastern philosophers? But I suppose, despite all likelihood, that God preserves after the death of man what is called his soul and abandons the soul of the brute to the ordinary course of destruction of all things. I ask what man will gain from this, and what does Jacques' spirit have in common with Jacques when he is dead?

What constitutes the person of Jacques, what makes Jacques himself and the same as he was yesterday in his own eyes, is that he remembers the ideas he had yesterday and in his understanding, he unites his existence yesterday with that of today; for if he had completely lost his memory, his past existence would be as foreign to him as that of another man; he would not be more Jacques of yesterday, the same person, than he would be Socrates or Caesar. Now, I suppose that Jacques, in his final illness, has completely lost his memory and therefore dies not as the same Jacques who lived. Will God restore to his soul this lost memory? Will He create anew these ideas that no longer exist? In that case, will it not be a completely new man, as different from the first as an Indian is from a European?

But it can also be said that if Jacques has completely lost his memory before dying, his soul may recover it just as it does after fainting or after a cerebral transport: for a man who has completely lost his memory in a serious illness does not cease to be the same man when he has recovered his memory; therefore, Jacques’s soul, if he has one, and if it is immortal by the will of the Creator, as we suppose, can recover his memory after his death, just as it does after fainting during life; therefore, Jacques will be the same man.

These difficulties are worth proposing: and he who finds a sure way to solve the equation of this unknown will, I think, be a clever man.

I do not advance further into these darknesses; I stop where the light of my torch fails me: it is enough for me to see how far I can go. I do not assert that I have demonstrations against the spirituality and immortality of the soul; but all likelihoods are against them, and it is equally unjust and unreasonable to want a demonstration in a search that is only capable of conjectures.

Only it is necessary to warn the minds of those who would believe the mortality of the soul to be contrary to the good of society, and to remind them that the ancient Jews, whose laws they admire, believed the soul to be material and mortal, not to mention great sects of philosophers who were just as good as the Jews, and who were very honest people.

Chapter VII. Whether Man is Free.

Perhaps there is no question simpler than that of freedom, but none that has been more complicated by humans. The difficulties with which philosophers have laden this subject, and the audacity with which they have always tried to extract God’s secret and reconcile his prescience with free will, have caused the idea of freedom to become obscured by trying to clarify it. People have become so accustomed to no longer uttering the word “freedom” without remembering all the difficulties that come with it, that they almost don’t understand anymore when asked if man is free.

This is no longer the place to imagine a being endowed with reason, which is not human and which examines with indifference what man is; on the contrary, it is here that each man must enter into himself and bear witness to his own feelings.

First of all, let us strip the question of all the illusions with which it is customary to complicate it, and define what we mean by the word “freedom”. Freedom is solely the power to act. If a stone moved by choice, it would be free; animals and men have this power: therefore they are free. I may forcefully contest this faculty in animals; I may imagine, if I want to abuse my reason, that the beasts that resemble me in all other respects differ from me only in this one point. I can conceive of them as machines that have neither sensations, nor desires, nor will, although they have all the appearances of them. I will forge systems, that is to say errors, to explain their nature; but in the end, when it comes to questioning myself, I must confess that I have a will, and that I have within me the power to act, to move my body, to apply my thought to this or that consideration, etc.

If someone comes to me and says, "You believe you have this will, but you don’t: you have a feeling that deceives you, just as you believe you see the sun two feet wide, although it is in size, in relation to the earth, almost like a million to one; I will answer that person: "The case is different. God did not deceive me by showing me what is far from me with a size proportional to its distance: such are the mathematical laws of optics that I cannot and should not perceive objects except in direct proportion to their size and distance; and such is the nature of my organs that if my sight could perceive the real size of a star, I could not see any object on the earth. The same is true of the sense of hearing and of smell. I have sensations more or less strong, all things being equal, only according to the degree to which sonorous and odoriferous bodies are more or less distant from me. There is no error in this; but if I did not have a will, believing that I had one, God would have created me on purpose to deceive me, just as if he made me believe that there are bodies outside of me, although there are none; and nothing would result from this deception except an absurdity in the way of acting of an infinitely wise Supreme Being.

And let no one say that it is unworthy of a philosopher to resort to God here. For, first, this God being proven, it is demonstrated that it is he who is the cause of my freedom in case I am free, and that he is the absurd author of my error if, having made me a purely passive being without will, he makes me believe that I am an agent and that I am free.

Secondly, if there were no God, who would have led me into error? Who would have given me this feeling of freedom while putting me in slavery? Would it be matter that cannot have intelligence? I cannot be taught or deceived by matter, nor can I receive from it the faculty of willing; I cannot have received from God the feeling of my will without actually having one: therefore I truly have a will; therefore I am an agent.

To will and to act is precisely the same thing as to be free. Even God himself can only be free in this sense. He willed and acted according to his will. If we were to suppose that his will was necessarily determined, if we were to say: He was necessitated to will what he did, we would fall into as great an absurdity as if we were to say: There is a God, and there is no God; for if God were necessitated, he would no longer be an agent, he would be passive, and he would no longer be God.

One must never lose sight of these fundamental truths that are linked to each other. Something exists, therefore some being is eternal, therefore this being exists by itself with absolute necessity, therefore it is infinite, therefore all other beings come from it without us knowing how, therefore it could have given them freedom as it gave them movement and life, therefore it has given us this freedom that we feel within ourselves, just as it has given us the life that we feel within ourselves.

Freedom in God is the power to always think whatever he wants, and to always do whatever he wants.

The freedom given by God to man is the weak, limited, and temporary power to apply oneself to some thoughts, and to perform certain movements. The freedom of children who do not yet reflect, and of certain species of animals that never reflect, consists only in willing and performing movements. On what basis could one have imagined that there is no freedom? Here are the reasons for this error: first, it has been noticed that we often have violent passions that carry us away despite ourselves. A man would not want to love an unfaithful mistress, and his desires, stronger than his reason, lead him back to her; we are carried away by violent actions in fits of anger that we cannot control; we wish to lead a peaceful life, and ambition throws us back into the tumult of affairs.

So many visible chains, with which we are burdened almost all our lives, have led people to believe that we are also bound in everything else; and it has been said: Man is sometimes carried away with a rapidity and violence that he feels the agitation of; sometimes he is led by a peaceful movement over which he has no control: he is a slave who does not always feel the weight and the brand of his chains, but he is always a slave.

This reasoning, which is only the logic of human weakness, is quite similar to this: Men are sick sometimes, therefore they never have health.

Who doesn’t see the absurdity of this conclusion? Who doesn’t see, on the contrary, that feeling one’s illness is an indubitable proof that one has had health, and that feeling one’s slavery and powerlessness proves invincibly that one has had power and freedom?

When you have a furious passion, your will is no longer obeyed by your sense: then you are no more free than when paralysis prevents you from moving the arm that you want to move. If a man were dominated all his life by violent passions, or by images that constantly occupy his brain, he would lack that part of humanity which consists in being able to think what one wants; and this is the case with several insane people who are confined, and even with many others who are not confined.

It is certain that some men are more free than others, for the same reason that we are not all equally enlightened, equally robust, etc. Freedom is the health of the soul; few people have this health entire and unaltered. Our freedom is weak and limited, like all our other faculties. We strengthen it by getting used to making reflections, and this exercise of the soul makes it a little more vigorous. But no matter how hard we try, we can never make our reason sovereign over all our desires; there will always be involuntary movements in our soul as well as in our body. We are neither free, nor wise, nor strong, nor healthy, nor spiritual, except to a very small degree. If we were always free, we would be what God is. Let us be content with a share suitable to the rank we hold in nature. But let us not imagine that we lack the very things we enjoy, and let us not give up the faculties of a man because we do not have the attributes of a God.

In the midst of a ball or lively conversation, or in the pains of an illness that weighs down my head, I may try to find out how much the thirty-fifth part of ninety-five and a half thirds multiplied by twenty-five nineteenths and three quarters is, but I will not have the freedom to make such a calculation. But a little reflection will give me back this power, which I had lost in the tumult. The most determined enemies of freedom are therefore forced to admit that we have a will that is sometimes obeyed by our senses. “But this will,” they say, “is necessarily determined like a balance always carried by the heavier weight; man only wants what he judges to be the best; his understanding is not master of not judging good what seems good to him. The understanding acts necessarily; the will is determined by an absolute will: therefore man is not free.”

This argument, which is very dazzling, but which is in fact only a sophism, has deceived many people, because men rarely do more than glimpse what they examine.

The flaw in this argument is as follows: a person can only want things that they have an idea of. They could not desire to go to the opera if they did not have the idea of the opera, and they would not wish to go there and be determined to go there if their understanding did not present this spectacle as a pleasant thing. And it is precisely in this that their freedom consists: in the power to determine oneself to do what seems good; wanting what would not bring pleasure is a formal contradiction and an impossibility. A person is determined by what seems best to them, and this is indisputable, but the point in question is whether they have within themselves this moving force, this primitive power to determine themselves or not. Those who say, “The assent of the mind is necessary and necessarily determines the will,” assume that the mind acts physically on the will. They say a visible absurdity, for they assume that a thought is a real little being that acts really on another being called the will, and they do not reflect that these words “the will,” “the understanding,” etc., are only abstract ideas invented to put clarity and order into our discourse and which mean nothing else but the “thinking man” and the “willing man.” Therefore, the “understanding” and the “will” do not really exist as different beings, and it is irrelevant to say that one acts on the other.

If they do not assume that the mind acts physically on the will, they must say either that man is free, or that God acts for man, determines man, and is eternally occupied with deceiving man; in which case they admit at least that God is free. If God is free, then freedom is possible, and man can have it. They have no reason to say that man is not free.

They may say that man is determined by pleasure, but this is to confess, without realizing it, freedom; for doing what brings pleasure is to be free.

Again, God can only be free in this way. He can only act according to His pleasure. All sophisms against the freedom of man attack the freedom of God equally.

The last refuge of the enemies of freedom is this argument: “God certainly knows that a thing will happen; therefore, it is not in man’s power not to do it.”

Firstly, note that this argument would also attack the freedom that we are obliged to recognize in God. One can say: “God knows what will happen; it is not in His power not to do what will happen.” So what does this much-repeated argument prove? Nothing else but that we do not know and cannot know what the prescience of God is, and that all His attributes are for us unfathomable abysses.

We demonstrably know that if God exists, God is free; we also know that He knows everything. But this prescience and omniscience are as incomprehensible to us as His immensity, His infinite duration already past, His infinite duration to come, the creation, the conservation of the universe, and so many other things that we can neither deny nor know.

This dispute over the prescience of God has caused so much quarreling only because we are ignorant and presumptuous. What would it have cost to say, “I do not know what the attributes of God are, and I am not made to embrace His essence?” But this is what a bachelor’s or master’s degree holder would be careful not to admit: this is what has made them the most absurd of men and turned a sacred science into a miserable charlatanism.¹⁰

Chapter VIII. On Man Considered as a Social Being.¹¹

The grand design of the Author of nature appears to be the preservation of each individual for a certain period and perpetuating its species. Every animal is always driven by an invincible instinct towards whatever may tend to its preservation. There are also moments when it is carried away by an almost equally strong instinct towards mating and propagation, without us ever being able to fully understand how all of this happens.

Even the wildest and most solitary animals come out of their dens when love calls, and feel bound for a few months by invisible chains to females and offspring that are born from this union. Afterward, they forget about this transient family and return to the ferocity of their solitude, until the sting of love once again forces them out. Other species are formed by nature to always live together, some in a truly civilized society like bees, ants, beavers, and some species of birds. Others are only gathered by a more blind instinct that unites them without any clear objective or purpose, like herds on land and herring in the sea.

Man is certainly not driven by instinct to form a civilized society like ants and bees. However, considering his needs, passions, and reason, it is clear that he could not have remained in a completely wild state for long.

It is enough for the universe to be what it is today, that a man has been in love with a woman. The mutual care they will have for each other and their natural love for their children will soon awaken their industry and give birth to the rough beginnings of arts. Two families will need each other as soon as they are formed, and from these needs new conveniences will arise.

Man is not like other animals who only have the instinct of self-love and mating. Not only does he have this necessary self-love for his own preservation, but he also has a natural benevolence for his species that is not found in beasts.

If a female dog passes by a male dog from the same mother torn into a thousand pieces and covered in blood, she will take a piece without any pity and continue on her way. However, this same dog will defend her own puppies and die fighting rather than allowing them to be taken away from her.

On the contrary, if the most savage man sees a cute child about to be devoured by some animal, he will feel an uneasiness, an anxiety that arises from pity, and a desire to go to his aid, despite himself. It is true that this feeling of pity and benevolence is often stifled by the fury of self-love. Therefore, wise nature should not give us more love for others than for ourselves. It is already a lot that we have this benevolence that predisposes us to union with other humans.

But this benevolence would still be a weak aid in making us live in society. It could never have served to found great empires and flourishing cities if we had not had great passions.

These passions, whose abuse does so much harm, are indeed the main cause of the order we see today on earth. Pride is especially the principal instrument with which this beautiful edifice of society was built. As soon as needs brought together a few men, the most skillful among them realized that all of these men were born with an indomitable pride as well as an invincible inclination for well-being.

It was not difficult to persuade them that, if they did something for the common good of society that cost them a little of their own well-being, their pride would be amply compensated.

Therefore, early on, men were distinguished into two classes: the first, divine men who sacrificed their self-love for the public good; the second, miserable men who love only themselves. Everyone wanted and still wants to be in the first class, although everyone is fundamentally in the second in their hearts. The most cowardly and abandoned to their own desires cried out louder than the others that everything had to be sacrificed for the public good. The desire to command, which is one of the branches of pride and is just as clearly seen in a college pedant or a village bailiff as in a pope or an emperor, also strongly drove human industry to bring men to obey other men. It was necessary to make it clear to them that others knew more than they did and would be useful to them.

Above all, it was necessary to use their greed to buy their obedience. One could not give them much without having much oneself, and this frenzy to acquire the goods of the earth added new progress to all arts every day.

This machine would not have gone far without the help of envy, a very natural passion that men always disguise under the name of emulation. This envy awakened the laziness and sharpened the genius of whoever saw their powerful and happy neighbor. Thus, step by step, passions alone brought men together and drew all arts and pleasures from the bosom of the earth. It is with this spring that God, called by Plato the eternal geometer and whom I call here the eternal machinist, animated and beautified nature: passions are the wheels that drive all the machines.

The reasoners of our days¹² who want to establish the chimera that man was born without passions and that he only had them for disobeying God would have done just as well to say that man was originally a beautiful statue that God had formed and that this statue was later animated by the devil.

Self-love and all its branches are as necessary to man as the blood that flows in his veins; and those who want to take away his passions because they are dangerous are like someone who would want to take away all his blood because he can fall into apoplexy.

What would we say about someone who claimed that the winds are an invention of the devil because they sink some ships and who did not consider that it is a benefit from God by which commerce unites all the places of the earth that immense seas divide? It is therefore very clear that it is our passions and needs that we owe this order and these useful inventions with which we have enriched the universe; and it is very likely that God has given us these needs and passions only so that our industry could turn them to our advantage. If many men have abused them, it is not for us to complain about a benefit that has been misused. God has deigned to put a thousand delicious foods on earth for man: the gluttony of those who have turned this food into deadly poison for themselves cannot be used as a reproach against Providence.

Chapter IX. On Virtue and Vice.

In order for a society to exist, laws were necessary, just as rules are necessary for every game. Most of these laws seem arbitrary: they depend on the interests, passions, and opinions of those who invented them, and on the nature of the climate where people have gathered in society. In a hot country where wine would make people go mad, it has been deemed a crime to drink it; in other colder climates, it is honorable to get drunk. Here a man must be content with one wife; there he is allowed to have as many as he can support. In another country, fathers and mothers beg strangers to sleep with their daughters; everywhere else, a girl who has given herself to a man is dishonored. In Sparta, adultery was encouraged; in Athens, it was punishable by death. Among the Romans, fathers had the right of life and death over their children. In Normandy, a father cannot even take away a penny from his most disobedient son. The name of king is sacred among many nations, and abominable in others.

But all these peoples, who behave so differently, unite in this point, that they call virtuous what is in accordance with the laws they have established, and criminal what is contrary to them. Thus, a man who opposes arbitrary power in Holland will be a very virtuous man, and one who wants to establish a republican government in France will be condemned to the ultimate punishment. The same Jew who would be sent to the galleys in Metz¹³ if he had two wives, will have four in Constantinople, and will be more esteemed by the Muslims.

Most laws contradict each other so visibly that it matters little by which laws a state is governed; but what matters a great deal is that once established, the laws are enforced. Thus, it is of no consequence whether there are certain rules for dice and card games; but one cannot play for even a moment if one does not strictly follow these arbitrary rules agreed upon.¹⁴

Virtue and vice, moral good and evil, are therefore in every country what is useful or harmful to society; and in all places and at all times, the one who sacrifices the most for the public is the one who will be called the most virtuous. It appears, therefore, that good actions are nothing more than actions from which we derive benefit, and crimes are actions that are contrary to our interests. Virtue is the habit of doing things that please people, and vice is the habit of doing things that displease them.

Although what is called virtue in one climate is precisely what is called vice in another, and most rules of good and evil differ like languages and clothing, it nevertheless seems certain to me that there are natural laws which men are obliged to agree upon throughout the universe, despite themselves. God did not, it is true, say to men: “Here are the laws that I give you from my mouth, by which I want you to govern yourselves”; but He did in man what He did in many other animals: He gave bees a powerful instinct by which they work and feed together, and He gave man certain feelings that he can never get rid of, and which are the eternal bonds and the first laws of the society in which He foresaw that men would live. Goodwill toward our kind, for example, was born with us and always acts in us, unless it is fought by self-love, which should always prevail over it. Thus a man is always inclined to assist another man when it costs him nothing. The most barbarous savage, returning from the slaughter and dripping with the blood of the enemies he has eaten, will be moved at the sight of his comrade’s suffering and will give him all the help that depends on him.

Adultery and love of boys will be permitted in many nations; but you will not find any in which it is permitted to break one’s word, because society can indeed exist between adulterers and boys who love each other, but not between people who would take pride in deceiving one another.

Theft was honored in Sparta because all property was communal; but as soon as you have established the concept of “mine” and “yours,” it will then be impossible for you not to regard theft as contrary to society and therefore as unjust.

It is so true that the good of society is the only measure of moral good and evil that we are forced to change, as needed, all the ideas we have formed of what is just and unjust.

We have horror of a father who sleeps with his daughter, and we also brand the brother who abuses his sister with the name of incestuous; but in a nascent colony where there will be only a father with a son and two daughters left, we will consider it a very good deed for this family to take care not to let the species perish.

A brother who kills his brother is a monster; but a brother who had no other means of saving his country than to sacrifice his brother would be a divine man.

We all love the truth, and we make it a virtue because it is in our interest not to be deceived. We have attached all the more infamy to lying because, of all bad actions, it is the easiest to hide and the least costly to commit; but in how many occasions does lying not become a heroic virtue! When it comes, for example, to saving a friend, the person who in this case would tell the truth would be covered in shame: and we hardly make any difference between a man who would slander an innocent person and a brother who, able to save his brother’s life through a lie, would rather abandon him by telling the truth. The memory of M. de Thou, who had his head cut off for not revealing the conspiracy of Cinq-Mars, is a blessing among the French; if he had not lied, it would have been a horror.¹⁵

But, someone might ask, will there only be crime and virtue, good and evil, in relation to us? Will there be no inherent good independent of man? I will ask those who ask this question if cold and hot, sweet and bitter, good and bad smell exist apart from us? Isn’t it true that a man who claimed that heat exists on its own would be a very ridiculous reasoner? So why would someone who claims that moral good exists independently of us reason better?

Are not the Creator’s intentions, who wanted man to live in society, sufficiently fulfilled? If there were a law from heaven that had taught humans God’s will very clearly, then moral good would be nothing more than conformity to that law. When God has said to men, “I want there to be so many kingdoms on earth, and no republic. I want the younger sons to have all the wealth of their fathers, and anyone who eats turkeys or pigs will be punished with death,” then these laws will certainly become the immutable rule of good and evil. But since God has not, as far as I know, deigned to interfere in our conduct in this way, we must stick to the gifts He has given us. These gifts are reason, self-love, benevolence for our species, needs, passions, all means by which we have established society.

Many people are ready to tell me here: “If I find my well-being in disturbing your society, in killing, stealing, slandering, then will I be restrained by nothing, and I can abandon myself without scruple to all my passions!” I have nothing else to say to these people except that they will probably be hanged, just as I will kill the wolves that try to steal my sheep; laws are precisely made for them, just as tiles were invented against hail and rain.

As for the princes who have force in their hands and abuse it to desolate the world, who send part of men to their death and reduce the other to misery, it is the fault of men if they suffer these abominable ravages, which often they even honor with the name of virtue: they have only themselves to blame, for the bad laws they have made, or for the lack of courage that prevents them from enforcing good laws.

All these princes who have done so much harm to men are the first to cry out that God has given rules of good and evil. There is not one of these scourges of the earth who does not perform solemn acts of religion, and I do not see that we gain much by having such rules. It is a misfortune attached to humanity that, despite all the desire we have to preserve ourselves, we destroy each other with fury and folly. Almost all animals eat each other, and in the human species, males exterminate each other through war. It also seems that God foresaw this calamity by causing more males than females to be born among us: in fact, the peoples who seem to have thought most closely about the interests of humanity, and who keep accurate records of births and deaths, have found that one-twelfth more males than females are born each year.

It will be easy to see from all this that it is very likely that all these murders and robberies are harmful to society, without involving the Divinity in any way. God put men and animals on the earth: it is up to them to behave as best they can. Woe to the flies that fall into the spider’s web; woe to the bull that is attacked by a lion, and to the sheep that are encountered by wolves! But if a sheep were to say to a wolf, “You are violating the moral good, and God will punish you,” the wolf would answer, “I am doing my physical good, and it seems that God does not care too much whether I eat you or not.” All the sheep had to do was not to stray from the shepherd and the dog that could defend it.

Would that a Supreme Being had indeed given us laws and proposed punishments and rewards to us! Would that He had said, “This is vice in itself, this is virtue in itself.” But we are so far from having rules of good and evil that of all those who have dared to give laws to men on behalf of God, there is not one who has given a ten-thousandth part of the rules we need in the conduct of life.

If anyone infers from all this that there is nothing left but to abandon oneself without reserve to all the fury of one’s unbridled desires, and that since there is no virtue or vice in itself, he can do everything with impunity, he must first see if he has an army of a hundred thousand soldiers well devoted to his service; he will still risk a lot by declaring himself the enemy of mankind. But if this man is only a private individual, for a little reason, he will see that he has chosen a very bad course and will be infallibly punished, either by the punishments so wisely invented by men against enemies of society, or by the fear of punishment alone, which is a cruel enough punishment in itself. He will see that the life of those who defy the laws is usually the most miserable. It is morally impossible for a wicked man not to be recognized; and as soon as he is merely suspected, he must realize that he is the object of contempt and horror. Now, God has wisely endowed us with a pride that can never tolerate other men hating and despising us; to be despised by those with whom we live is something that no one has ever been able to, and never will be able to, endure. It is perhaps the greatest restraint that nature has put on the injustices of men; it is by this mutual fear that God has deemed it appropriate to bind them. Thus, any reasonable man will conclude that it is clearly in his interest to be an honest man. The knowledge he will have of the human heart, and the persuasion he will have that there is no virtue or vice in itself, will never prevent him from being a good citizen and fulfilling all the duties of life. It is also noted that philosophers (who are baptized with the names of unbelievers and libertines) have been the most honest people in the world in all ages. Without making a list of all the great men of antiquity, it is known that La Mothe Le Vayer, tutor to Louis XIII’s brother, Bayle, Locke, Spinosa, Lord Shaftesbury, Collins, etc., were men of rigid virtue; and it was not only the fear of the contempt of men that made their virtues, it was the taste of virtue itself. A sound education perpetuates these feelings in all men, and hence comes this universal sentiment called “honor,” from which even the most corrupt cannot escape, and which is the pivot of society. Those who need the support of religion to be honest people are to be pitied; and they would have to be monsters of society if they could not find in themselves the necessary feelings for this society, and if they were forced to borrow from elsewhere what should be found in our nature.

End of the Treatise on Metaphysics.

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1. The abbot Dubos, born in 1660, died in 1742, published these “Reflections” in 1719.↩

2. All these different races of men produce individuals capable of perpetuating themselves, which cannot be said of trees of different species; but was there ever a time when there were only one or two individuals of each species? We are completely ignorant of this. (K.)↩

3. In “Les Cabales,” satire, 1772 (see Volume X), Voltaire said in verses 111-112: “The universe puzzles me, and I can only think / That this clock exists and has no clockmaker.”↩

4. Descartes.↩

5. In his “Hypolyposes,” which were translated into French by Huart in 1725.↩

6. See the article “Existence” by Chevalier de Jaucourt in the “Encyclopédie”: this is the only work where this question of the existence of bodies has been well treated so far, and it is completely resolved. (K.)↩

7. The scholastic philosophers.↩

8. The Cartesians.↩

9. Deuteronomy 23:13.↩

10. It will be seen in the following works that Voltaire did not always hold the same opinion on the metaphysical freedom of man: his feelings on this matter changed in his later years, and he put into the discussion of these abstract matters a force and clarity that are found very rarely in other writers. (K.) — “The ignorant man who thinks this way has not always thought the same,” Voltaire said in 1766; see, in the “Mélanges,” the end of paragraph XIII of the “Philosophe ignorant.”↩

11. See in the “Dictionnaire philosophique,” the article “Man,” Volume XIX, page 373.↩

12. The Jansenists.↩

13. The only town in the kingdom where Jews had a synagogue and were openly tolerated.↩

14. We believe, on the contrary, that there should be almost nothing arbitrary in laws. 1) Reason is sufficient to make us understand the rights of men, rights that all derive from the simple maxim that between two sentient beings, equal by nature, it is against order for one to make his happiness at the expense of the other. 2) Reason also shows that it is generally useful for the well-being of societies that the rights of each be respected, and that it is by ensuring these rights in an inviolable manner that one can achieve either to provide the human species with all the happiness of which it is capable, or to share it among individuals with the greatest possible equality. If one then examines the different laws, one will see that some tend to maintain these rights, that others infringe them; that some are in conformity with the general interest, that others are contrary to it. They are therefore either just or unjust in themselves. It is not enough that society is regulated by laws, these laws must be just. It is not enough that individuals conform to established laws, these laws themselves must conform to what is necessary for the maintenance of the right of each.

    To say that it is arbitrary to make this law or a contrary law, or to make none at all, is only to admit that one does not know if this law is in conformity or not with justice. A doctor can say, “It is indifferent to give this patient emetic or ipecacuanha,” but this means, “He must be given a vomitive, and I do not know which of the two remedies is best suited to his condition.” In legislation, as in medicine, as in the works of physical arts, there is only arbitrariness because we do not know the consequences of two means that then appear indifferent to us. Arbitrariness arises from our ignorance, not from the nature of things.↩

15. See the Essay on Manners, chapter clxxvi.↩