A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 07

It is true, that the magician so pushed might say: My conscience extends not so far as to extinguish a pile without water, and to kill my judges with words. I can only call up spirits, read the future, and change certain substances into others; my power is bounded; but you should not for that reason burn me at a slow fire. It is as if you caused a physician to be hanged who could cure fever, and not a paralysis.

The judges might, however, still reasonably observe: Show us then some secret of your art, or consent to be burned with a good grace.

MALADY – MEDICINE

I will suppose that a fair princess who never heard speak of anatomy is ill either from having eaten or danced too much, or having done too much of what several princesses occasionally do. I suppose the following controversy takes place:

PHYSICIAN

Madam, for your health to be good, it is necessary for your cerebrum and cerebellum to distribute a fine, well-conditioned marrow, in the spine of your back down to your highness's rump; and that this marrow should equally animate fifteen pairs of nerves, each right and left. It is necessary that your heart should contract and dilate itself with a constantly equal force; and that all the blood which it forces into your arteries should circulate in all these arteries and veins about six hundred times a day. This blood, in circulating with a rapidity which surpasses that of the Rhone, ought to dispose on its passage of that which continually forms the lymph, urine, bile, etc., of your highness – of that which furnishes all these secretions, which insensibly render your skin soft, fresh, and fair, that without them would be yellow, gray, dry, and shrivelled, like old parchment.

PRINCESS

Well, sir, the king pays you to attend to all this: fail not to put all things in their place, and to make my liquids circulate so that I may be comfortable. I warn you that I will not suffer with impunity.

PHYSICIAN

Madam, address your orders to the Author of nature. The sole power which made millions of planets and comets to revolve round millions of suns has directed the course of your blood.

PRINCESS

What! are you a physician, and can you prescribe nothing?

PHYSICIAN

No, madam; we can only take away from, we can add nothing to nature. Your servants clean your palace, but the architect built it. If your highness has eaten greedily, I can cleanse your entrails with cassia, manna, and pods of senna; it is a broom which I introduce to cleanse your inside. If you have a cancer, I must cut off your breast, but I cannot give you another. Have you a stone in your bladder? I can deliver you from it. I can cut off a gangrened foot, leaving you to walk on the other.

In a word, we physicians perfectly resemble teethdrawers, who extract a decayed tooth, without the power of substituting a sound one, quacks as they are.

PRINCESS

You make me tremble; I believed that physicians cured all maladies.

PHYSICIAN

We infallibly cure all those which cure themselves. It is generally, and with very few exceptions, with internal maladies as with external wounds. Nature alone cures those which are not mortal. Those which are so will find no resource in it.

PRINCESS

What! all these secrets for purifying the blood, of which my ladies have spoken to me; this Baume de Vie of the Sieur de Lievre; these packets of the Sieur Arnauld; all these pills so much praised by femmes de chambre—

PHYSICIAN

Are so many inventions to get money, and to flatter patients, while nature alone acts.

PRINCESS

But there are specifics?

PHYSICIAN

Yes, madam, like the water of youth in romances.

PRINCESS

In what, then, consists medicine?

PHYSICIAN

I have already told you, in cleaning and keeping in order the house which we cannot rebuild.

PRINCESS

There are, however, salutary things, and others hurtful?

PHYSICIAN

You have guessed all the secret. Eat moderately that which you know by experience will agree with you. Nothing is good for the body but what is easily digested. What medicine will best assist digestion? Exercise. What best recruit your strength? Sleep. What will diminish incurable ills? Patience. What change a bad constitution? Nothing. In all violent maladies, we have only the recipe of Molire, "seipnare, purgare;" and, if we will, "clisterium donare." There is not a fourth. All, I have told you amounts only to keeping a house in order, to which we cannot add a peg. All art consists in adaptation.

PRINCESS

You puff not your merchandise. You are an honest man. When I am queen, I will make you my first physician.

PHYSICIAN

Let nature be your first physician. It is she who made all. Of those who have lived beyond a hundred years, none were of the faculty. The king of France has already buried forty of his physicians, as many chief physicians, besides physicians of the establishment, and others.

PRINCESS

And, truly, I hope to bury you also.

MAN

To know the natural philosophy of the human race, it is necessary to read works of anatomy, or rather to go through a course of anatomy.

To be acquainted with the man we call "moral," it is above all necessary to have lived and reflected. Are not all moral works contained in these words of Job? "Man that is born of a woman hath but a few days to live, and is full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth as a shadow, and continueth not."

We have already seen that the human race has not above two-and-twenty years to live, reckoning those who die at their nurses' breasts, and those who for a hundred years drag on the remains of a miserable and imbecile life.

It is a fine apologue, that ancient fable of the first man who was at first destined to live twenty years at most, and who reduced it to five years by estimating one life with another. The man was in despair, and had near him a caterpillar, a butterfly, a peacock, a horse, a fox, and an ape.

"Prolong my life," said he to Jupiter; "I am more worthy than these animals; it is just that I and my family should live long to command all beasts." "Willingly," said Jupiter; "but I have only a certain number of days to divide among the whole of the beings to whom I have granted life. I can only give to thee by taking away from others; for imagine not, that because I am Jupiter, I am infinite and all-powerful; I have my nature and my limits. Now I will grant thee some years more, by taking them from these six animals, of which thou art jealous, on condition that thou shalt successively assume their manner of living. Man shall first be a caterpillar, dragging himself along in his earliest infancy. Until fifteen, he shall have the lightness of a butterfly; in his youth, the vanity of a peacock. In manhood he must undergo the labors of a horse. Towards fifty, he shall have the tricks of a fox; and in his old age, be ugly and ridiculous like an ape. This, in general, is the destiny of man."

Remark further, that notwithstanding these bounties of Jupiter, the animal man has still but two or three and twenty years to live, at most. Taking mankind in general, of this a third must be taken away for sleep, during which we are in a certain sense dead; thus there remain fifteen, and from these fifteen we must take at least eight for our first infancy, which is, as it has been called, the vestibule of life. The clear product will be seven years, and of these seven years the half at least is consumed in grief of all kinds. Take three years and a half for labor, fatigue, and dissatisfaction, and we shall have none remaining. Well, poor animal, will you still be proud?

Unfortunately, in this fable Jupiter forgot to dress this animal as he clothed the ass, horse, peacock, and even the caterpillar. Man had only his bare skin, which, continually exposed to the sun, rain, and hail, became chapped, tanned, and spotted. The male in our continent was disfigured by spare hairs on his body, which rendered him frightful without covering him. His face was hidden by these hairs. His skin became a rough soil which bore a forest of stalks, the roots of which tended upwards, and the branches of which grew downwards. It was in this state and in this image, that this animal ventured to paint God, when in course of time he learned the art of description.

The female being more weak, became still more disgusting and frightful in her old age; and, in short, without tailors, and mantua-makers, one-half of mankind would never have dared to show itself to the other. Yet, before having clothes, before even knowing how to speak, some ages must have passed away – a truth which has been proved, but which must be often repeated.

It is a little extraordinary that we should have harassed an innocent, estimable man of our time, the good Helvetius, for having said that if men had not hands, they could not build houses and work tapestry. Apparently, those who have condemned this proposition, have discovered a secret for cutting stones and wood, and working at the needle with their feet.

I liked the author of the work "On Mind". This man was worth more than all his enemies together; but I never approved either the errors of his book, or the trivial truths which he so emphatically enforced. I have, however, boldly taken his part when absurd men have condemned him for these same truths.

I have no terms to express the excess of my contempt for those who, for example's sake, would magisterially proscribe this passage: "The Turks can only be considered deists." How then, pedant! would you have them regarded as atheists, because they adore only one God!

You condemn this other proposition: "The man of sense knows that men are what they must be; that all hatred against them is unjust; that a fool commits fooleries as a wild stock bears bitter fruits."

So, crabbed stocks of the schools, you persecute a man because he hates you not! Let us, however, leave the schools, and pursue our subject.

Reason, industrious hands, a head capable of generalizing ideas, a language pliant enough to express them – these are great benefits granted by the Supreme Being to man, to the exclusion of other animals.

The male in general lives rather a shorter time than the female. He is also generally larger in proportion. A man of the loftiest stature is commonly two or three inches higher than the tallest woman.

His strength is almost always superior; he is more active; and having all his organs stronger, he is more capable of a fixed attention. All arts have been invented by him, and not by woman. We should remark, that it is not the fire of imagination, but persevering meditation and combination of ideas which have invented arts, as mechanics, gunpowder, printing, dialling, etc.

Man alone knows that he must die, and knows it only by experience. A child brought up alone, and transported into a desert island, would dream of death no more than a plant or a cat.

A singular man has written that the human body is a fruit, which is green until old age, and that the moment of death is that of maturity. A strange maturity, ashes and putrefaction! The head of this philosopher was not ripe. How many extravagances has the rage for telling novelties produced?

The principal occupations of our race are the provision of food, lodging, and clothing; all the rest are nearly accessory; and it is this poor accessory which has produced so many ravages and murders.

Different Races Of Men.

We have elsewhere seen how many different races of men this globe contains, and to what degrees the first negro and the first white who met were astonished at one another.

It is likely enough that several weakly species of men and animals have perished. It is thus that we no longer discover any of the murex, of which the species has probably been devoured by other animals who several ages after visited the shores inhabited by this little shellfish.

St. Jerome, in his "History of the Father of the Desert", speaks of a centaur who had a conversation with St. Anthony the hermit. He afterwards gives an account of a much longer discourse that the same Anthony had with a satyr.

St. Augustine, in his thirty-third sermon, addressed "To his Brothers in the Desert," tell things as extraordinary as Jerome. "I was already bishop of Hippo, when I went into Ethiopia with some servants of Christ, there to preach the gospel. In this country we saw many men and women without heads, who had two great eyes in their breasts. In countries still more southerly, we saw a people who had but one eye in their foreheads," etc.

Apparently, Augustine and Jerome then spoke "with economy"; they augmented the works of creation to raise greater admiration of the works of God. They sought to astonish men by fables, to render them more submissive to the yoke of faith.

We can be very good Christians without believing in centaurs, men without heads, or with only one eye, one leg, etc. But can we doubt that the interior structure of a negro may be different to that of a white, since the mucous netted membrane beneath the skin is white in the one, and black in the other? I have already told you so, but you are deaf.

The Albinos and the Darians – the first originally of Africa, and the second of the middle of America – are as different from us as from the negroes. There are yellow, red, and gray races. We have already seen that all the Americans are without beards or hair on their bodies, except the head and eyebrows. All are equally men, but only as a fir, an oak, and a pear tree are equally trees; the pear tree comes not from the fir, nor the fir from the oak.

But whence comes it, that in the midst of the Pacific Ocean, in an island named Otaheite, the men are bearded? It is to ask why we are so, while the Peruvians, Mexicans, and Canadians are not. It is to ask, why apes have tails, and why nature has refused us an ornament which, at least among us, is an extreme rarity.

The inclinations and characters of men differ as much as their climates and governments. It has never been possible to compose a regiment of Laplanders and Samoyeds, whilst the Siberians, their neighbors, become intrepid soldiers.

Neither can you make good grenadiers of a poor Darian or an Albino. It is not because they have partridge eyes, or that their hair and eyebrows are like the finest and whitest silk; but it is because their bodies, and consequently their courage, partake of the most extreme weakness. There is none but a blind man, and even an obstinate blind man, who can deny the existence of all these different species. It is as great and remarkable as that of apes.

That All Races Of Men Have Constantly Lived In Society.

All the men whom we have discovered in the most uncultivated and frightful countries herd together like beavers, ants, bees, and several other species of animals.

We have never seen countries in which they lived separate; or in which the male only joined with the female by chance, and abandoned her the moment after in disgust; or in which the mother estranged herself from her children, after having brought them up; or in which human beings lived without family and society. Some poor jesters have abused their understandings so far as to hazard the astonishing paradox, that man is originally created to live alone, and that it is society which has depraved his nature. They might as well say that herrings were created to swim alone in the sea; and that it is by an excess of corruption, that they pass in a troop from the Frozen Ocean to our shores; that formerly cranes flew in the air singly, and that, by a violation of their natural instinct, they have subsequently chosen to travel in company.

Every animal has its instinct, and the instinct of man, fortified by reason, disposes him towards society, as towards eating and drinking. So far from the want of society having degraded man, it is estrangement from society which degrades him. Whoever lived absolutely alone, would soon lose the faculty of thinking and expressing himself; he would be a burden to himself, and it would only remain to metamorphose him into a beast. An excess of powerless pride, which rises up against the pride of others, may induce a melancholy man to fly from his fellows; but it is a species of depravity, and punishes itself. That pride is its own punishment, which frets itself into solitude and secretly resents being despised and forgotten. It is enduring the most horrible slavery, in order to be free.

We have enlarged the bounds of ordinary folly so far as to say that it is not natural for a man to be attached to a woman during the nine months of her pregnancy. The appetite is satisfied, says the author of these paradoxes; the man has no longer any want of woman, nor the woman of man; and the latter need not have the least care, nor perhaps the least idea of the effects of the transient intercourse. They go different ways, and there is no appearance, until the end of nine months, that they have ever been known to one another. Why should he help her after her delivery? Why assist to bring up a child whom he cannot instinctively know belongs to him alone?

All this is execrable; but happily nothing is more false. If this barbarous indifference was the true instinct of nature, mankind would always have acted thus. Instinct is unchangeable, its inconsistencies are very rare; the father would always abandon the mother, and the mother would abandon her child. There would have been much fewer men on earth than voracious animals; for the wild beasts better provided and better armed, have a more prompt instinct, more sure means of living, and a more certain nourishment than mankind.

Our nature is very different from the frightful romance which this man, possessed of the devil, has made of it. Except some barbarous souls entirely brutish, or perhaps a philosopher more brutal still, the roughest man, by a prevailing instinct, loves the child which is not yet born, the womb which bears it; and the mother redoubles her love for him from whom she has received the germ of a being similar to himself.

The instinct of the colliers of the Black Forest speaks to them as loudly, and animates them as strongly in favor of their children as the instinct of pigeons and nightingales induces them to feed their little ones. Time has therefore been sadly lost in writing these abominable absurdities.

The great fault of all these paradoxical books lies in always supposing nature very different from what it is. If the satires on man and woman written by Boileau were not pleasantries, they would sin in the essential point of supposing all men fools and all women coquettes.

The same author, an enemy to society, like the fox without a tail who would have his companions cut off theirs, thus in a magisterial style expresses himself:

"The first who, having enclosed an estate, took upon himself to say: 'This is mine,' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of society. What crimes, wars, murders, miseries, and horrors, might have been spared to mankind if some one, seizing the stakes, or filling up the pit, had cried to his companions: 'Take care how you listen to this impostor; you are lost if you forget that the fruits are common to all, and that the earth belongs to nobody!'"

Thus, according to this fine philosopher, a thief, a destroyer, would have been the benefactor of mankind, and we should punish an honest man who says to his children: "Let us imitate our neighbor; he has enclosed his field, the beasts will no longer ravage it, his land will become more fertile; let us work ours as he has labored his; it will aid us, and we shall improve it. Each family cultivating its own enclosure, we shall be better fed, more healthy, more peaceable, and less unhappy. We will endeavor to establish a distributive justice, which will console our unhappy race; and we shall be raised above the foxes and polecats, to whom this babbler would compare us."

Would not this discourse be more sensible and honest than that of the savage fool who would destroy the good man's orchard? What philosophy therefore is that which says things that common sense disclaims from China to Canada? Is it not that of a beggar, who would have all the rich robbed by the poor, in order that fraternal union might be better established among men?

It is true, that if all the hedges, forests, and plains were covered with wholesome and delicious fruits, it would be impossible, unjust, and ridiculous, to guard them.

If there are any islands in which nature produces food and all necessaries without trouble, let us go and live there, far from the trash of our laws; but as soon as you have peopled them, we must return to meum and tuum, and to laws which are often very bad, but which we cannot rationally abolish.

Is Man Born Wicked?

Is it not demonstrated that man is not born perverse and the child of the devil? If such was his nature, he would commit enormous crimes and barbarities as soon as he could walk; he would use the first knife he could find, to wound whoever displeased him. He would necessarily resemble little wolves and foxes, who bite as soon as they can.

On the contrary, throughout the world, he partakes of the nature of the lamb, while he is an infant. Why, therefore, and how is it, that he so often becomes a wolf and fox? Is it not that, being born neither good nor wicked, education, example, the government into which he is thrown – in short, occasion of every kind – determines him to virtue or vice?

Perhaps human nature could not be otherwise. Man could not always have false thoughts, nor always true affections; be always sweet, or always cruel.

It is demonstrable that woman is elevated beyond men in the scale of goodness. We see a hundred brothers enemies to each other, to one Clytemnestra.

There are professions which necessarily render the soul pitiless – those of the soldier, the butcher, the officer of justice, and the jailer; and all trades which are founded on the annoyance of others.

The officer, the soldier, the jailer, for example, are only happy in making others miserable. It is true, they are necessary against malefactors, and so far useful to society; but of a thousand men of the kind, there is not one who acts from the motive of the public good, or who even reflects that it is a public good.

It is above all a curious thing to hear them speak of their prowess as they count the number of their victims; their snares to entrap them, the ills which they have made them suffer, and the money which they have got by it.

Whoever has been able to descend to the subaltern detail of the bar; whoever has only heard lawyears reason familiarly among themselves, and applaud themselves for the miseries of their clients, must have a very poor opinion of human nature.

There are more frightful possessions still, which are, however, canvassed for like a canonship. There are some which change an honest man into a rogue, and which accustom him to lie in spite of himself, to deceive almost without perceiving it, to put a blind before the eyes of others, to prostrate himself by the interest and vanity of his situation, and without remorse to plunge mankind into stupid blindness.

Women, incessantly occupied with the education of their children, and shut up in their domestic cares, are excluded from all these professions, which pervert human nature and render it atrocious. They are everywhere less barbarous than men.

Physics join with morals to prevent them from great crimes; their blood is milder; they are less addicted to strong liquors, which inspire ferocity. An evident proof is, that of a thousand victims of justice in a thousand executed assassins, we scarcely reckon four women. It is also proved elsewhere, I believe, that in Asia there are not two examples of women condemned to a public punishment. It appears, therefore, that our customs and habits have rendered the male species very wicked.

If this truth was general and without exceptions, the species would be more horrible than spiders, wolves, and polecats are to our eyes. But happily, professions which harden the heart and fill it with odious passions, are very rare. Observe, that in a nation of twenty millions, there are at most two hundred thousand soldiers. This is but one soldier to two hundred individuals. These two hundred thousand soldiers are held in the most severe discipline, and there are among them very honest people, who return to their villages and finish their old age as good fathers and husbands.