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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029018468 
 
THE ANATOMY OF 
 NEGATION 
 
 BY 
 
 EDGAR SALTUS 
 
 REVISED EDITION 
 
 " Quoy qu'on nous presclie, il fauldroit 
 toujours se souvenir que c'est Thomme 
 qui donne et I'homme qui re9oit. 
 
 Montaigne. 
 
 CHICAGO, NEW YORK, & SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 BELFORD, CLARKE & COMPANY 
 1889 
 
 London : J. H. Drane, Paternoster Row 
 
X 
 
 Copyright, 1889, by Edgar Saltus. 
 
THE 
 
 ANATOMY OF NEGATION. 
 
FOUR GREAT BOOKS 
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 THE TRUTH ABOUT TRISTREM VARICK. 
 
 (izmo., cloth, $i.oo; paper, 50 cts.) 
 This work, which is less a romance than a study of real life, col- 
 ored by the well-known pliilosophical views of the author, places 
 Mr. Saltus easily in the front rank of recent American novelists. 
 The book presents a series of sharply cut cameos on a black back- 
 ground of doubt and disbelief in the value of life, and despite the 
 gloom and, perhaps, one may say, repulsivenessof the subject, the in- 
 terest in the cleverly involved mystery and in the gentle, but noble- 
 minded hero never fails, from cover to cover. " Tristrem Vanck is 
 throughly new ; it has no prototype, and has taken its niche among 
 those creations of human genius which are destined to mould the 
 taste and thought of posterity. 
 
 EDEN. 
 (i2mo., cloth, |i.oo ; paper, 50 cts.) 
 In this work Mr. Saltus departs somewhat from his usual vein, 
 and while conducting his personages through a cleverly constructed 
 labyrinth of incident which seems, almost to the end, predestined to 
 plunge the personages into an abyss of mariial misery, turns aside 
 suddenly, and swiftly leads them to the clear daylight of renewed 
 confidence and felicity. In its sharp satire and merciless portrayal 
 of social shallowness ** Eden " has a value which entitles it to more 
 than the ephemeral applause of a successful novel. 
 
 A TRANSACTION IN HEARTS. 
 (i2mo., cloth, $1.00; paper,- 50 cts.) 
 In this (his latest romance) the admirers of Mr. Saltus will find 
 some of his strongest and most characteristic work. '* A Transac- 
 tion in Hearts " will press " Tristrem Varick " very closely in tliR 
 race for enduring popularity. In many ways the former is the 
 greater work. Its merciless moral surgery, its almost savage ex- 
 posure of the beast crouching in the depths of our common nature, 
 and the pitiless finger pointed nt the hypocrisy writhing in the cold 
 light of day send a tremor of consciousness to every heart capable of 
 honest self-analysis. Few readers of this terrible book who have 
 passed the innocence of childhood but will involuntarily draw the 
 cloak still closer about them, and in the trepidation of undiscovered 
 shame mutter, " It is not I." 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF DISENCHANTMENT. 
 (i2mo., cloth, $1.25.) 
 However we may disagree with that view of life which pro- 
 nounces it an affliction, a tragedy in the language of a farccj no one 
 can deny the force of Saltus* writing and the dark certainty of his 
 deductions. From the first man to the present hour life has pre- 
 sented a problem which neither hope, philosophy, nor religion has 
 been able to answer. Sage and poet have pronounced it a vanity 
 and a sham, a dark shifting curtain painted with fantastic shapes, a 
 lane of light with night on either hand. In the " Philosophy of 
 Disenchantment," Saltus has given voice to that dumb cry and ques- 
 tion which has always and must forever rise in every human heart — 
 " I suffer, and is this all ? " 
 
PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 The accompanying pages are intended to convey a 
 tableau of anti-theism from Kapila to Leconte de Lisle. 
 The anti-theistic tendencies of England and America 
 have been treated by other writers; in the present 
 volume, therefore, that branch of the subject is not dis- 
 cussed. 
 
 To avoid misconception, it may be added that no at- 
 tempt has been made to prove anything. 
 
 Biarritz, i^th September,' i8Sb. 
 
II est un jour, une heure, oil dans le chemin rude, 
 Courbe sous le fardeau des ans multiplies, 
 L'Esprit humain s'arrete, et pris de lassitude, 
 Se retourne pensif vers les jours oublies. 
 
 La vie a fatigue son attente infeconde ; 
 Desabuse du Dieu qui ne doit point venir, 
 II sent renaitre en lui la jeunesse du monde; 
 II ecoute ta voix, 6 sa.a€ souvenir ! 
 
 Mais si rien ne repond dans I'immense etendue 
 Que le sterile echo de I'eternel desir. 
 Adieu, deserts, oil Fame ouvre une aile eperdue ! 
 Adieu, songe sublime, impossible k saisir ! 
 
 Et toi, divine Mort, oil tout rentre et s' efface, 
 Accueille tes enfants dans ton sein etoile ; 
 Affranchis-nous du temps, du nombre et de I'espace, 
 Et rends-nous le repos que la vie a trouble ! 
 
 Leconte de Lisle. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. PAGE. 
 
 The Revolt of the Orient i 
 
 Kapila — The Buddha — Laou-tze. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The Negations of Antiquity 32 
 
 Theomachy — Scepticism — Epicurism — Atheism. 
 
 CHAPTER HI. 
 
 The Convulsions of the Church 65 
 
 Galilee — Rome. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The Dissent of the Seers 107 
 
 Spinoza — The Seven Sages of Potsdam — Hol- 
 bach and his Guests. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 The Protests of Yesterday 152 
 
 Akosmism — Pessimism — Materialism — Positivism. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 A Poet's Verdict 199 
 
 Romantics and Parnassians. 
 
 Bibliography 219 
 
NOTE TO THE REVISED EDITION. 
 
 Since the preceding note was printed it has been re- 
 motely alleged that the absence of an attempt to prove 
 anything argues the absence of a purpose. This it may 
 do, yet the preparation of the present work was none 
 the less premeditated. It was the intention of the writer, 
 not indeed to insist on this or on that, but rather, in dis- 
 playing the views of philosopher and of sage, to suggest 
 that if the laws which govern the universe are invariable, 
 it would seem to follow that everything which happens 
 happens because it must, in which case there can be 
 little that is of much consequence and nothing what- 
 ever that is worthy of dislike, of fear even, or of hope. 
 In brief, it was the writer's endeavor to divest his reader 
 of one or two idle preoccupations, and to leave him 
 serener in spirit, and of better cheer than before. 
 
 New Kp>-,^, 25th February, 1889. 
 
THE 
 
 ANATOMY OF NEGATION. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE REVOLT OF THE ORIENT. 
 
 Man, as described by Quatrefages, is a reli- 
 gious animal. The early naturalists said the 
 same thing of the elephant ; but while this state- 
 ment, which contains all the elements of a libel, 
 has fallen into disrepute, the former, little by 
 little, has assumed the purple among accepted 
 facts. 
 
 Man's belief in the supernatural antedates 
 chronology. It was unfathered and without a 
 mother. It was spontaneous, natural, and un- 
 assisted by revelation. It sprang into being 
 with the first flight of fancy. 
 
 The characteristic trait of primitive man seems 
 to have been that of intellectual passivity. He 
 was never astonished : if he noticed anything, it 
 was his own weakness ; the power of the ele- 
 ments he accepted as a, matter of course. The 
 phenomena that he witnessed, the sufferings that 
 he endured, were to him living enemies whose 
 
2 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 violence could be conjured by prayers and dona- 
 tions. Everything had its spectre ; phantoms 
 were as common as leaves. There was not a 
 corner of the earth unpeopled by vindictive 
 demons. In sleep he was visited by them all, 
 and as his dreams were mainly nightmares, his 
 dominant sensation was that of fright. 
 
 As his mind developed, frontiers were outlined 
 between the imaginary and the real ; the ani- 
 mate and the inanimate ceased to be identical. 
 Instead of attributing a particular spirit to every 
 object, advancing theology conceived a number 
 of aggrandized forces. The earth, sea and sky 
 were laid under contribution, and the phenom- 
 ena of nature were timidly adored. In the 
 course of time these open-air deities were found 
 smitten by a grave defect — they were visible. 
 The fear of the unseen demanded something 
 more mysterious, a hierarchy of invisible divin- 
 ities of whom much might be suspected and but 
 little known. It was presumably at this point 
 that the high-road to polytheism was discovered ; 
 and when man grew to believe that the phenom- 
 ena which his ancestors had worshipped were 
 but the unconscious agents of higher powers, the 
 gods were born. 
 
 Consecutive stages of development such as 
 these have evidently been far from' universal. 
 There are races whose belief in the supernat- 
 ural is so accidental that any classification is 
 impossible. There are others in whose creeds 
 the transition from animism to broader views is 
 still unmarked. In the equatorial regions of 
 
The Revolt of the Orient. j 
 
 Africa, in Madagascar, Polynesia, and among 
 certain Tartar tribes, animism and its attendant 
 fetishism is reported to be still observable. The 
 distinction between the palpable and the impal- 
 pable, the separation between what is known to 
 be material and that which is conceived to be 
 divine, does not necessarily exist even in coun- 
 tries that have reached a high degree of civiliza- 
 tion. In India, the dance of the bayaderes be- 
 fore the gilded statues, and the top-playing that 
 is to amuse a stone Krishna, are cases in point. 
 But these instances are exceptions to the gen- 
 eral rule. It seems well established that man, 
 in proportion to his intelligence, passed out of 
 animism, loitered in polytheism, and drifted there- 
 from into monotheistic or pantheistic beliefs. 
 
 The race whose beliefs have held most stead- 
 fast from their incipiency to the present day is 
 the Hindu. In their long journey these beliefs 
 have encountered many vicissitudes ; they have 
 been curtailed, elaborated and degraded, but in 
 the main they are still intact. At the contact 
 with fresher faiths, the primitive religions of other 
 lands have either disappeared abruptly or grad- 
 ually faded away. It is India alone that has 
 witnessed an autonomous development of first 
 theories, and it is in India that the first denying 
 voice was raised. To appreciate the denial it is 
 necessary to understand what was affirmed. For 
 this purpose a momentary digression may be 
 permitted. 
 
 In the beginning of the Vedic period. Nature 
 in her entirety was held divine. To the delicate 
 
4 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 imagination of thie early Aryan, tlie gods were in 
 all things, and all things were gods. In no other 
 land have myths been more fluid and transparent. 
 Mountains, rivers and landscapes were regarded 
 with veneration ; the skies, the stars, the sun, 
 the dawn and dusk were adored, but particu- 
 larly Agni, the personification of creative heat. 
 Through lapses of time of which there is no chron- 
 ology, this charming naturalism drifted down the 
 currents of thought into the serenest forms of 
 pantheistic belief. 
 
 The restless and undetermined divinities, om- 
 nipresent and yet impalpable, the wayward and 
 changing phenomena, contributed one and all to 
 suggest the idea of a continuous transformation, 
 and with it, by implication, something that is 
 transformed. Gradually the early conception of 
 Agni expanded into a broader thought. From the 
 spectacle of fire arose the theory of a deva, one 
 who shines ; and to this deva a name was given 
 which signified both a suppliant and a supplica- 
 tion — Brahma. In this metamorphosis all vague- 
 ness was lost. Brahma became not only a sub- 
 stantial reality, but the creator of all that is. 
 Later, the labor of producing and creating was 
 regarded as an imperfection, a blemish on the 
 splendor of the Supreme. It was thought a part 
 of his dignity to be majestically inert, and above 
 him was conceived the existence of a still higher 
 being, a being who was also called Brahmi ; yet 
 this time the name was no longer masculine, but 
 neuter and indeclinable — neuter as having no 
 part in life, and indeclinable because unique. 
 
The Revolt of the Orient. ^ 
 
 This conception of a neuter principle, eternal, 
 inactive, and a trifle pale perhaps, was not reach- 
 ed during the period assigned to the Vedas. It 
 was the work of time and of fancy, but it was un- 
 assisted. The religion of India is strictly its 
 own ; its systems were founded and its problems 
 solved before the thinkers of other lands were 
 old enough to reflect. In Greece, which was 
 then in swaddling clothes, Anaxagoras was the 
 first who thought of a pure Intelligence, and this 
 thought he contented himself with stating ; its 
 development was left to other minds, and even 
 then it remained unadorned until Athens heard 
 the exultant words of Paul. Nor could the Hin- 
 dus have gathered their ideas from other coun- 
 tries. Their brothers, the Persians, were watching 
 the combat between Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman. 
 With the Hebrews there was no chance nor 
 rumor of contact : Elohim had not given way 
 to Jehovah. Chaldea was celebrating the nup- 
 tials of Nature and the Sun ; while far beyond 
 was Egypt, and on her heart the Sphinx. 
 
 It seems, then, not unsafe to say that the Vedas 
 and the theories that were their after-growth 
 have no connection with any foreign civilization. 
 Beyond this particular, Brahmanism enjoys over 
 all other religions the peculiar distinction of being 
 without a founder. Its germ, as has been hinted, 
 was in the Vedas ; but it was a germ merely that 
 the priests planted and tended, and watched de- 
 velop into a great tree, which they then disfigured 
 with engraftments. 
 
 Emerson recommended us to treat people as 
 
6 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 though they were real, and added, " Perhaps they 
 are." But the doubt thathngered in the mind of 
 the stately pantheist never entered into that of 
 the Hindu. In its purest manifestation the creed 
 of the latter was a negation of the actuality of the 
 visible world. The forms of matter were held to 
 be illusive, and the semblance of reality possess- 
 ed by them was considered due to Maya. Maya 
 originally signified Brahma's longing for some- 
 thing other than himself ; something that might 
 contrast with his eternal quietude ; something 
 that should occupy the voids of space ; something 
 that should lull the languors of his infinite ennui. 
 From this longing sprang whatever is, and it was 
 through Maya, which afterwards became synony- 
 mous with illusion, that a phantom universe 
 surged before the god's delighted eyes, the mirage 
 of his own desire. 
 
 This ghostly world is the semblance of reality 
 in which man dwells : mountains, rivers, land- 
 scapes, the earth itself, the universe and all 
 humanity, are but the infinite evolutions of his 
 fancy. The ringing lines that occur in Mr. 
 Swinburne's " Hertha " may not improperly be 
 referred to him : 
 
 ' ' I am that which began ; 
 
 Out of me the years roll ; 
 Out of me, God and man ; 
 I am equal and whole. 
 God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily. 
 I am the soul." 
 
 Familiarly, Brahma is the spider drawing from 
 
The Revolt of the Orient. 7 
 
 his breast the threads of existence : emblematical- 
 ly, a triangle inscribed in a circle ; poetically, 
 the self-existing supremacy that is enthroned on 
 a lotus of azure and gold ; and theologically, the 
 one really existing essence, the eternal germ from 
 which all things issue and to which all things at 
 last return. 
 
 From man to Brahnia, a series of higher forms 
 of existence are traceable in an ascending scale 
 till three principal divinities are reached. These, 
 the highest manifestations of the First Cause, 
 Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and 
 Siva the Destroyer, constitute the Tri-murti, the 
 Trinity, typified m the magically mystic syllable 
 Om. To these were added a host of inferior 
 deities and even local gods similar to those which 
 the Romans recognized in later years. Such was 
 and still is the celestial hierarchy. In the eyes 
 of the Hindu, none of these gods are eternal. 
 At the end of cycles of incommensurable dura- 
 tion, the universe will cease to be, the heavens 
 will be rolled up like a garment, the Tri-murti 
 dissolved ; while in space shall rest but the great 
 First Cause, through whose instrumentality, after 
 indefinite kalpas, life will be re-beckoned out of 
 chaos and the leash of miseries unloosed. 
 
 This delicious commingling of the real and the 
 ideal degenerated with the years. Like Olympus, 
 it was too fair to last. Brahma, Vishnu and 
 Siva, once regarded as various manifestations of 
 the primal essence, became in lapses of time con- 
 crete. Female counterparts were found for them, 
 and the most poetic of the creeds of man was low- 
 
8 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 ered into a sensuous idolatry. To-day there is 
 nothing, however monstrous or grotesque, that 
 is deemed unfit for worship. In Benares there is 
 a shrine to small-pox ; in Gaya there is one to the 
 police ; and it may be that somewhere between 
 Cape Comorin and the Himalayas an altar has 
 been raised to those who dull digestion with the 
 after-dinner speech. 
 
 This, however, is the work of the priest. In 
 earlier days the higher castes of man, the younger 
 brothers of the gods, were thought capable of 
 understanding the perfection that resides in 
 Brahm. It was held that they might ascend to 
 the rank of their elders, and with them at last be 
 absorbed in the universal spirit. The one path- 
 way to this goal was worship, and over it the 
 priests constituted themselves the lawful guides. 
 
 The laws which they codified were numberless, 
 and an infraction of any one of them was severe- 
 ly visited on the transgressor. For each fault, 
 whether of omission or commission, there was 
 an expiation to be undergone, and it was taught 
 that the unatoned violation of a precept precipi- 
 tated the offender into one of twenty-eight 
 hells which their inflammable imaginations had 
 created. 
 
 In the face of absurdities such as these, it is 
 permissible to suppose that, like the Roman 
 augurs, the educated Brahmans could not look 
 at each other without laughing ; yet, however 
 this may be, it seems certain that many of the 
 laity laughed at them. Already in the Rig- Veda 
 mention was made of those who jeered at Agni. 
 
The Revolt of the Orient. g 
 
 The question as to whether there is really an- 
 other life seems to have been often raised, and 
 that too in the Brahmanas. Yaska, a venerable 
 sage, found himself obliged to refute the opinions 
 of sages older and more venerable than himself, 
 who had declared the Vedas to be a tissue of 
 nonsense. This scepticism had found many ad- 
 herents. The name given to these early disbe- 
 lievers was Nastikas — They who deny. Like 
 other sects, they had aphorisms and slokas of 
 their own, which with quaint derision they at- 
 tributed to the tutor of the gods. The aphorisms 
 appear to have been markedly anti-theistic, while 
 the slokas were captivating invitations to the 
 pleasures of life. 
 
 ' ' Vivons, ouvrons nos coeurs aux ivresses nouvelles : 
 Dormir et boire en paix, voili I'unique bien. 
 Buvons ! Notre sang brflle et nos femmes sont belles : 
 Demain n'est pas encore, et le passS n'est rien ! " 
 
 Among those who laughed the loudest was 
 Kapila. His life is shrouded in the dim magnifi- 
 cence of legends. There let it rest ; yet if little 
 can be said of the man, his work at least is not 
 unfamiliar to students. The Sankhya Karika, 
 which bears his name, is one of the most impor- 
 tant and independent relics of Indian thought. In 
 its broadest sense, Sankhya means rationalism 
 or system of rational philosophy. In India it is 
 known as the philosophy Niriswara, the philoso- 
 phy without a god. 
 
 Kapila was the first serious thinker who looked 
 into the archaic skies and declared them to be 
 
lo The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 void. In this there was none of the moderation 
 of scepticism, and less of the fluctuations of doubt. 
 Kapila saw that the idea of a Supreme Being was 
 posterior to man ; that Nature, anterior to her 
 demiurge, had created him ; and he resolutely 
 turned his back on the Tri-murti, and denied 
 that a deity existed, or that the existence of one 
 was necessary to the order and management of 
 the world. The motor-power he held to be a 
 blind, unconscious force, and of this force, life 
 was the melancholy development. If he had dis- 
 believed in transmigration, Schopenhauer would 
 not have startled the world with a new theory. 
 
 Kapila's purpose was to relieve man from suf- 
 fering. There were no rites to be observed. 
 Knowledge and meditation were alone required. 
 He recognized but three things — the soul, matter 
 and pain. Freedom from pain was obtainable, 
 he taught, by the liberation of the soul, from the 
 bondage of matter. According to his teaching, 
 the heavens, the earth and all that in them is, 
 are made up of twenty-five principles, and of 
 these principles matter is the first and the soul 
 the last. Matter is the primordial element of 
 universal life, the element that animates and sus- 
 tains all things. The principles that succeed it 
 are simply its developments. Of these, the soul 
 is the chief. It is for matter to act and for the 
 soul to observe. When its observations are per- 
 fect and complete, when it has obtained a dis- 
 criminative knowledge of the forms of matter, of 
 primeval matter and of itself, then is it prepared 
 to enter into eternal beatitude. 
 
The Revolt of the Orient. ii 
 
 On the subject of eternal beatitude, each one of 
 the systems of Eastern thought has had its say. 
 That which Kapila had in view is not entirely 
 clear. He gave no description of it otherwise 
 than in hinting that it was a state of abstract and 
 unconscious impassibility, and he appears to have 
 been much more occupied in devising means by 
 which man might be delivered from the evils 
 of life than in mapping charts of a fantastic 
 paradise. 
 
 The sentiment of the immedicable misery of 
 life is as prominent in the preface of history as on 
 its latest and uncompleted page. The problem 
 of pain agitated the minds of the earliest thinkers 
 as turbulently as it has those of the latest comers. 
 In attempting to solve it, in endeavoring to find 
 some rule for a law of error, the Hindu accepted 
 an unfathered idea that he is expiating the sins of 
 anterior and unremembered existences, and that 
 he will continue to expiate them until all past trans- 
 gressions are absolved and the soul is released 
 from the chain of its migrations. According to 
 the popular theory, the chain of migrations con- 
 sists in twenty-four lakhs of birth, a lakh being 
 one hundred thousand. 
 
 Apparently such beatitude as lay beyond the 
 tomb consisted to Kapila in relief from transmi- 
 gration, and this relief was obtainable by the 
 ransomed soul, only, as has been hinted, through 
 a knowledge acquired of matter and of itself. 
 Garmented in the flesh of him that constitutes its 
 individuality, the soul was to apply itself to an 
 understanding of Nature, who, with the coquetry 
 
12 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 of a bayadere, at first resists and then unveils her 
 beauties to the eyes of the persistent wooer. This 
 knowledge once obtained, the soul is free. It 
 may yet linger awhile on earth, as the wheel of 
 the spinner turns for a moment after the impulse 
 which puts it in motion has ceased to act ; but 
 from that time the soul has fulfilled all the condi- 
 tions of its deliverance, and is forever affranchised 
 from the successive migrations which the unran- 
 somed soul must still undergo. 
 
 In his attack on official theology, Kapila paid 
 little attention to its rites and observances. He 
 probably fancied that if the groundwork was un- 
 dermined, the superstructure would soon totter. 
 In this he was partially correct, though the result 
 of his revolt was entirely different from what he 
 had expected. The climax of his philosophy is 
 a metaphysical paradox : " Neither I am, nor is 
 aught mine, nor is there any I " — a climax which 
 must have delighted Hegel, but one which it is 
 difficult to reconcile with the report of the philos- 
 ophy's present popularity. And that it is popular 
 there seems to be no doubt. There is even a 
 common saying in India that no knowledge is 
 equal to the Sankhya, and no power equal to the 
 Yoga, which latter, a combination of mnemonics 
 and gymnastics, is a contrivance for concentrat- 
 ing the mind intently on nothing. 
 
 But whatever popularity the Sankhya may now 
 enjoy, it is evident that, like other systems of 
 Eastern thought, it was understood only by 
 adepts ; and even had the science which it taught 
 been offered to the people, it was not of a nature 
 
The Revolt of the Orient. ij 
 
 to appeal to them. The masses to-day are as 
 ignorant as carps, and at that time they were not 
 a whit more intelligent. Besides, it was easier to 
 understand the Tri-murti than twenty-five abstract 
 principles. Brahma was very neighborly, and his 
 attendant gods were known to tread the aisles of 
 night. The languid noons and sudden dawns 
 were sacred with their presence. What could be 
 more reasonable ? If life was an affliction, that 
 very affliction carried the sufferer into realms of 
 enchantment, where BrahmS was enthroned on a 
 lotus of azure and gold. 
 
 It is small wonder then that Kapila's lessons 
 left the established religion practically unharmed. 
 Kant's " Kritik " did not prevent the Konigsber- 
 gians from listening to the Pfarrer with the same 
 faith with which their fathers had listened before 
 them. And Kant, it may be remembered, was not 
 only a popular teacher, he was one that was 
 revered. But aside from any influence that 
 Kapila's philosophy may have exerted, it was 
 evidently smitten by a grave defect. Concerning 
 the soul's- ultimate abiding-place it was silent. 
 This silence enveloped the entire system in an 
 obscurity which another and a greater thinker 
 undertook to dissipate. 
 
 It has been said before, and with such wisdom 
 that the saying will bear repetition, that revolu- 
 tions are created, not by the strength of an idea, 
 but by the intensity of a sentiment. In great 
 crises there is a formula that all await ; so soon 
 as it is pronounced, it is accepted and repeated ; 
 it is the answer to an universal demand. Toward 
 
14 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 the close of the sixth century before the present 
 era, at Kapilavastu, a city and kingdom situated 
 at the foot of the mountains of Nepal, a prince of 
 the blood, after prolonged meditations on the 
 misfortunes of life, pronounced a watchword of 
 this description. 
 
 The name of this early Muhammad was Sid- 
 dartha. He was the heir of the royal house of 
 Sakya, and in later years, in remembrance of his 
 origin, he was called Sakya-Muni, Sakya the An- 
 chorite, to which was added the title of Buddha, 
 the Sage. The accounts of his life are contained 
 in the Lalita VistSra, a collection of fabulous epi- 
 sodes in which the supernatural joins hands with 
 matter-of-fact. It is said, for instance, that he 
 was born of an immaculate conception, and died 
 of an indigestion of pork. Apart from the myth- 
 ical element, his life does not appear to have been 
 different from that of other religious reformers, 
 save only that he is supposed to have been born 
 in a palace instead of a hovel. To his twenty- 
 ninth year Siddartha is represented as living at 
 court, surrounded by all the barbaric ease and 
 gorgeousness of the Ind. Yet even in his youth 
 his mind appears to have been haunted by great 
 thoughts. He took no part in the sports of his 
 companions, and was accustomed, it is said, to 
 wander away into the solitudes of bamboo, and 
 there to linger, lost in meditation. 
 
 In the course of time he was married to a 
 beautiful girl, but even in her fair arms his 
 thoughts were occupied with the destinies of the 
 world. During the succeeding festivals and rev- 
 
The Revolt of the Orient. ij 
 
 els, amid the luxury of the palace and the en- 
 ticements of love, he meditated on the miseries 
 of life. In Brahmanism he found no consolation. 
 At its grotesqueness he too smiled, but his smile 
 was nearer to tears than to laughter. The melan- 
 choly residue of his reflections was with him even 
 in dream, and one night — so runs the legend — 
 he was encouraged in a vision to teach man- 
 kind a law which should save the world and es- 
 tablish the foundation of an eternal and universal 
 rest. 
 
 A combination of fortuitous circumstances, 
 the play of the merest hazard, appears to have 
 strengthened the effect of this vision. On the 
 high-roads about Kapilavastu he encountered a 
 man bent double with age, another stricken by 
 fever, and lastly a corpse. " A curse," he cried, 
 " on youth that age must overcome ; a curse on 
 health that illness destroys ; a curse on life which 
 death interrupts ! Age, illness, death, could they 
 but be forever enchained ! " Soon after, he dis- 
 appeared, and seeking the jungles, which at that 
 time were peopled with thinkers of ken, he devoted 
 himself to the elaboration of his thoughts. It 
 was there that he seems to have acquired some 
 acquaintance with the philosophy of Kapila. He 
 divined its significance and saw its insufficiency. 
 Thereafter for six years he gave himself up to 
 austerities so severe that, in the naive language 
 of the legend, they startled even the g-ods. These 
 six years are said to have been passed at Ouru- 
 vilva, a place as famous in Buddhist annals as 
 Kapilavastu. In this retreat he arranged the 
 
j6 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 principles of his system, and perfected the laws 
 and ethics which were to be its accompaniment. 
 Yet still the immutable truth that was to save the 
 world escaped him. A little longer he waited 
 and struggled. The Spirit of Sin, with all his 
 seductive cohorts, appeared before him. The 
 cohorts were routed and the Spirit overcome ; 
 the struggle was ended ; and under a Bodhi-tree 
 which is still shown to the pilgrim, Siddartha 
 caught the immutable truth, and thereupon pre- 
 sented himself as a saviour to his fellows. 
 
 Such is the popular legend. Its main incidents 
 have been recently and most felicitously conveyed 
 mThe Light of Asia. As a literary contribution, 
 Mr. Arnold's poem is simply charming ; as a 
 page of history, it has the value of a zero from 
 which the formative circle has been eliminated. 
 The kingdom of Kapilavastu, or rather Kapila- 
 vatthu, was an insignificant hamlet. The Buddah's 
 father was a petty chieftain, the raja of a handful 
 of ignorant savages. Palaces he had none ; his 
 wealth was his strength ; and could his concubine 
 be recalled to life, she would, had she any sense 
 of humor, which is doubtful, be vastly amused 
 at finding that she had been given a role in the 
 solar myth. 
 
 There can, however, be no doubt that the 
 Buddha really lived. His existence is as well 
 established as that of the Christ. To precisely 
 what an extent he was a visionary is necessarily 
 difficult of conjecture. Yet unless all belief in 
 him be refused, it seems almost obligatory to 
 assume that after years of reflection he considered 
 
The Revolt q/ the Orient. ly 
 
 himself in possession of absolute knowledge. 
 The truth which he then began to preach was 
 not a doctrine that he held as personal and 
 peculiar to himself, but rather an eternal and 
 changeless law which had been proclaimed from 
 age to age by other Buddhas, of whom he fancied 
 himself the successor. 
 
 To speak comparatively, it is only with recent 
 years that the attention of Western students has 
 been attracted to Buddhist literature. To-day, 
 however, thanks to translations from the Pali and 
 kindred tongues, it is possible for any one to study 
 the doctrine from the sacred books themselves. 
 There are verses in the Vedas which when recited 
 are said to charm the birds and beasts. Com- 
 pared with them, the Buddhist Gospels are often 
 lacking in beauty. To be the better understood, 
 the priests, who addressed themselves not to in- 
 itiates but to the masses, employed a language 
 that was simple and familiar. There are in con- 
 sequence many repetitions and trivial digressions, 
 but there are also parables of such exquisite 
 color, that in them one may feel the influence of 
 a bluer sky than ours, the odor of groves of san- 
 dal, the green abysses of the Himalayas, and the 
 gem-like splendor of white Thibetian stars. 
 
 The Buddha believed neither in a personal nor 
 an impersonal God. The world he compared 
 to a wheel turning ceaselessly on itself. Of Brah- 
 man tenets he preserved but one, that of the im- 
 medicable misery of life. But the doctrine which 
 he taught may perhaps best be summarized as 
 resting on three great principles — Karma, Arahat- 
 
 2 
 
1 8 The Anatomy 0/ Negation. 
 
 ship and Nirvana. When these principles are 
 understood, the mysteries of the creed are dis- 
 solved, and the need of esoteric teaching dimin- 
 ished. 
 
 It may be noted, by way of proem, that the 
 theory of the transmigration of souls is not ad- 
 vanced in the Vedas. It is a part of Brahman 
 teaching, but Brahmanism and Vedaism are not 
 the same. The Vedas are claimed as the out- 
 come of direct revelation, while all that part of 
 post-Vedic literature in which Brahmanism is 
 enveloped is held to be purely traditional. The ■ 
 origin of the theory of the transmigration is in- 
 discoverable, but it is one which has been shared 
 by many apparently unrelated races. It was a 
 •part of the creed ,of the Druids ; the Australian 
 savage, as well as some of the American abori- 
 gines, held to the same idea ; thinkers in Egypt 
 and in Greece advanced identical tenets ; it is 
 alluded to in the Talmud, and hinted at in the 
 Gospel which bears the name of St. John. Pos- 
 sibly it was held by the pre- Aryan inhabitants of 
 India, and in that case it is equally possible that 
 it was through them that the doctrine descended 
 into Brahmanism. But whether or not its en- 
 graftment came about in this way is relatively a 
 matter of small moment. The important point 
 to be observed is that it was not received by the 
 Buddhists. The popular idea to the contrary is 
 erroneous. 
 
 Spinoza noted that there is in every man a 
 feeling that he has been what he is from all eter- 
 nity, and this feeling has not left the Buddhist un- 
 
the Revolt of the Orient. ig 
 
 affected. But between such a sentiment and a 
 belief in transmigration the margin is wide. 
 The popular error in which the two are confused 
 has presumably risen from a misunderstanding 
 of the laws of Karma and Vipaka, the laws of 
 cause and affect. The difference therein discov- 
 erable amounts in brief to this : in the theory of 
 transmigration the soul is held to be eternal ; 
 in Buddhism the existence of the soul is denied. 
 In the one, the ego resurrects through cycles of 
 unremembered lives : in the other, nothing sur- 
 vives save the fruit of its actions. In the one, 
 every man is his own heir and his own ancestor ; 
 in the other, the deeds of the ancestor are con- 
 centrated in a new individual. In each there is 
 a chain of existences, but in the one they are 
 material, in the other they are moral. One 
 maintains the migration of an essence, the other 
 the results of causality ; one has no evidence to 
 support it, the other accords with the law of the 
 indistructibility of force. One is metempsy- 
 chosis, the other palingenesis ; one is beautiful, 
 and the other awkward ; but one is a theory, and 
 the other a* fact. 
 
 From this chain the Hindu knew no mode of 
 relief. Prior to the Buddha's advent, there was 
 an unquestioned belief that man and all that en- 
 compasses him rolled through an eternal circle 
 of transformation ; that he passed through all the 
 forms of life, from the most elementary to the 
 most perfect ; that the place which he occupied 
 depended on his merits or demerits ; that the vir- 
 tuous revived in a divine sphere, while the wicked 
 
20 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 descended to a yet darker purgatory ; that the 
 recompense of the blessed and the punishment 
 of the damned were of a duration which was 
 limited ; that time effaced the merit of virtue as 
 well as the demerit of sin ; and that the law of 
 transmigration brought back again to earth both 
 the just and the unjust, and threw them anew 
 into a fresh cycle of terrestrial existences, from 
 which they could fight free as best they might. 
 
 When the Buddha began to teach, he endeav- 
 vored to bring his new theories into harmony 
 with old doctrines. Throughout life, man, he 
 taught, is enmeshed in a web whose woof was 
 woven in preceding ages. The misfortunes that 
 he endured are not the consequences of his im- 
 mediate actions ; they are drafts which have been 
 drawn upon him in earlier days — drafts which he 
 still must honor, and against which he can plead 
 no statute of limitations. Karma pursues him in 
 this life, and unless he learns its relentless code 
 by heart, the fruit of his years is caught up by 
 revolving chains, and tossed back into the life of 
 another. How this occurred, or why it occurred, 
 is explainable only by a cumbersome process 
 from which the reader may well be spared ; and 
 it may for the moment suffice to note that while 
 the Buddha agreed with the Brahmans that life 
 formed a chain of existences, it was the former 
 who brought the hope that the chain might be 
 severed. 
 
 The means to the accomplishment of this end 
 consist in a victory over the lusts of the flesh, 
 the desire for life and the veils of illusion. When 
 
The Revolt of the Orient. 21 
 
 these have been vanquished, the Arahat, the 
 victor, attains Nirvana. 
 
 Nirvana, or Nibbana as it stands in the Pali, 
 is not a paradise, nor yet a state of post-mortem 
 trance. It is the extinction of all desire, the 
 triple victory of the Arahat, which precedes the 
 great goal, eternal death. The fruits of earlier 
 sins remain, but they are impermanent and soon 
 pass away. Nothing is left from which another 
 sentient being can be called into existence. The 
 Arahat no longer lives ; he has reached Para 
 Nirvana, the complete absence of anything, that 
 can be likened only to the flame of a lamp which 
 a gust of wind has extinguished. 
 
 The Buddha wrote nothing. It was his dis- 
 ciples who, in councils that occurred after his 
 death, collected and arranged the lessons of their 
 master. In these synods the canon of sacred 
 scripture was determined. It consisted of three 
 divisions, called the Tri-pitaka, or Three Baskets, 
 and. contained the Suttas, the discourses, of the 
 Buddha — the Dharmas, the duties enjoined on 
 the masses — and lastly the Vinayas, the rules of 
 discipline. 
 
 The Dharmas contain the four truths whose 
 discovery is credited to the Buddha. The first 
 is that suffering is the concomitant of life. The 
 second, that suffering is the resultant of desire. 
 The third, that relief from suffering is obtained 
 in the suppression of desire. And fourth, that 
 Nirvana, which succeeds the suppression of de- 
 sire, is attainable only through certain paths. 
 These paths are eight in number ; four of which 
 
22 The Anaiotny of Negation. 
 
 — correctness in deed, word, thought and sight 
 — were recommended to all men ; the remainder 
 — the paths of application, memory, meditation 
 and proper life — being reserved for the eremites. 
 
 For the use of the faithful, the four truths have 
 been condensed in a phrase : " Abstain from sin, 
 practice virtue, dominate the flesh — such is the 
 law of the Buddha." The recognition of the four 
 truths and the observance of the eight virtues are 
 obligatory to all who wish to reach Nirvana. 
 The neophyte renounces the world and lives a 
 mendicant. Yet inasmuch as a society of saints 
 is difficult to perpetuate, members are admitted 
 from whom the usual vows of continence and 
 poverty are not exacted. 
 
 The charm of primitive Buddhism was in its 
 simplicity. The faithful assembled for meditation 
 and not for parade. The practice of morality 
 needed no forms and fewer ceremonies. But 
 with time it was thought well to make some con- 
 cession to popular superstitions ; and although 
 the Buddha had no idea of representing himself 
 as a divinity, every moral and physical perfection 
 was attributed to him. The rest was easy. Idol- 
 atry had begun. To the right and left of a saint 
 elevated to the rank of God Supreme, a glowing 
 Pantheon was formed of the Buddhas that had 
 preceded him. A meaningless worship was estab- 
 lished ; virtues were subordinated to ceremonies ; 
 and to-day before a gilded statue a wheel of 
 prayers is turned, while through the dim temples, 
 domed like a vase, the initiates murmur, " Life is 
 evil." 
 
The Revolt of the Orient. 23 
 
 In attempting to convert the multitude, the 
 Buddha made no useofvulgarseductions. From 
 him came no flattery to the passions. The rec- 
 ompense that he promised was not of the earth 
 nor material in its nature. To his believers he 
 offered neither wealth nor power. The psychic 
 force, the seemingly supernatural faculties, that 
 knowledge and virtue brought to those who had 
 reached superior degrees of sanctity, were shared 
 by the Brahmans as well ; they were an appa- 
 nage, not a bait. The one reward of untiring ef- 
 forts was an eternal ransom from the successive 
 horrors of Karma. The paradise which he dis- 
 closed was the death of Death. In it all things 
 ceased to be. It was the ultimate annihilation 
 from which life was never to be re-beckoned. 
 
 It is not surprising that the captivating quiet 
 of a goal such as this should forcibly appeal to 
 the inclinations of the ascetic ; the wonder of it 
 is that it could be regarded for a moment as at- 
 tractive to the coarse appetites of the crowd. 
 Nor does it seem that the Christ of Chaos made 
 this mistake. It was the after-comers who under- 
 took to lift the commonplace out of the humdrum. 
 The Buddha's hope of the salvation of all man- 
 kind was a dream extending into the indefinite 
 future ; the theory of immediate emancipation 
 was never shared by him. For the plain man, 
 he laid down a law which was a law of grace for 
 all, that of universal brotherhood. If its practice 
 was insufficient to lead him to Nirvana, it was 
 still a preparation thereto, a paving of the way 
 for the travellers that were yet to come. 
 
^4 T'he Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 The method which he employed to convert his 
 hearers seems to have been a tender persuasion, 
 in which there was no trace of the dogmatic. He 
 did not contend against strength, he appealed to 
 weakness, varying the insinuations of his para- 
 bles according to the nature of the listener, and 
 charming even the recalcitrant by the simplicity 
 and flavor of his words. In these lessons there 
 were no warnings, no detached maledictions ; but 
 there were exhortations to virtue, and pictures of 
 the sweet and sudden silence of eternal rest. His 
 struggle was never with creeds, but with man, 
 with the flesh and its appetites ; and from the 
 memory of his victorious combat with himself 
 there came to him precepts and maxims of in- 
 comparable delicacy and beauty. These were 
 his weapons. His teaching was a lesson of infi- 
 nite tenderness and compassion ; it was a lesson 
 of patience and resignation and abnegation of 
 self, and especially of humility, which in its re- 
 nouncement of temporal splendors opens the path 
 to the magnificence of death. 
 
 In the ears of not a few modern thinkers, this 
 promise of annihilation has sounded like a gigan- 
 tic paradox. It has seemed inconceivable that 
 men could be found who would strive unremit- 
 tingly their whole lives through to reach a goal 
 where nothing was. And yet there were many 
 such, and, what is more to the point, their 
 number is constantly increasing. On the other 
 hand, it has been argued that to those who knew 
 no prospect of supernal happiness and who had 
 never heard of an eternity of bliss, the horror of 
 
The Revolt of the Orient. 2^ 
 
 life might be of such intensity that they would be 
 glad of any release whatever. But the value of 
 this argument is slight. The spectacle of a Bud- 
 dhist converted to Christianity is the most infre- 
 quent that has ever gladdened the heart of a 
 missionary. Per contra, the number of those 
 who turn from other creeds to that of Buddhism 
 is notoriously large. The number of its converts, 
 however, is not a proof of its perfections. And 
 Buddhism is far from perfect : its fantastic 
 shackles may be alluring to the mystic, but they 
 are meaningless to the mathematician. It may 
 be charming to hold a faith which has put pes- 
 simism into verse, and raised that verse into some- 
 thing more than literature ; but it is useless. The 
 pleasure of utter extinction is one which we will 
 probably all enjoy, and that too without first be- 
 coming Arahats ; and yet, again, we may not. 
 The veil of Maya is still unraised. The most we 
 can do to lift it is to finger feebly at the edges. 
 Sakya-Muni taught many an admirable lesson, 
 but in his flights of fancy, like many another 
 since, he transcended the limits of experience. Let 
 those who love him follow. 
 
 Charity is the New Testament told in a word. 
 When it was preached on the Mount of Olives it 
 must have brought with it the freshness and 
 aroma of a new conception. Before that time, 
 the Galileans had heard but of Justice and Jeho- 
 vah ; then at once they knew of Christ and Com- 
 passion ; and ever since the name and the virtue 
 have gone hand-in-hand. And yet five hundred 
 
26 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 years before, a sermon on charity was preached 
 in Nepal. 
 
 The charity which Sakya-Muni taught was not 
 the ordinary liberality which varies from a furtive 
 coin to a public bequest. It was a boundless 
 sympathy, a prodigality of abandonment in which 
 each creature, however humble, could find a 
 share, and which, once entered in the heart of 
 man, extinguished every spark of egotism. This 
 sentiment of universal compassion was one which 
 the two greatest of the world's reformers sought 
 alike to instil. Between the Prince of Kapila- 
 vastu and Jesus of Nazareth there are many 
 resemblances, but none, it may be taken, more 
 striking than this. Beyond the common legend 
 of their birth, both were supposed to have been 
 tempted by the devil ; and by the Buddha, as the 
 Christ, the devil was vanquished. Their lessons 
 in ethics were nearly the same ; both were nihil- 
 ists ; both held that the highest duty is to be at 
 variance with self; both struck a blow at the 
 virility of man, and neither of them wrote. About 
 the lives of each the myth-makers have been at 
 work ; both were deified ; and if to-day the be- 
 lievers in the Buddha largely outnumber those 
 of the Christ, it is only fair to note that the former 
 have enjoyed advantages which the latter have 
 never possessed. Through none of their wide 
 leisures have they ever held it a blasphemy to 
 think. 
 
 Another religion without a God, and one which 
 is a twin-sister to Buddhism, is that of the Gainas. 
 Explanatory documents concerning it are infre- 
 
The Revolt of the Orient. 2 7 
 
 quent, and in search of information the student 
 is usually obliged to turn to Brahman sources. 
 The Gainas are the believers in Gina, the Vic- 
 torious, as the Buddhists are believers in Buddha, 
 the Sage. A Gina — in Buddhism this term is 
 one of the many synonyms of Sakya-Muni — is a 
 pfophet virho, having attained omniscience, comes 
 to re-establish the law of salvation when it has 
 become corrupted through the march of time. 
 There are said to have been twenty-four Ginas, 
 including the most recent ; and as the Gainas 
 maintain that the Buddha was a disciple of the 
 founder of their creed, the number corresponds 
 to that of Siddartha and his twenty-three prede- 
 cessors. The Gainas, like the Buddhists, deny 
 the authority of the Vedas ; they consider them 
 apocryphal, and oppose in their stead a collection 
 of Angas of their own. No sect has been more 
 rigorous than they in the respect of everything 
 that lives. They eat no flesh ; and it is reported 
 that the stricter devotees filter their water, breathe 
 through a veil, and as they walk sweep the 
 ground before them, that no insect, however 
 insignificant, may be destroyed. Among the 
 customs in which they differ from Buddhism, 
 suicide is the one worth noting. For a long 
 period this rite seems to have been decorously 
 observed. On most other points the two beliefs 
 are in apparent agreement. The Gainas, too, are 
 atheists. They admit of no Creator, and deny 
 the existence of a perfect and eternal Being. The 
 Gina, like the Buddha, has become perfect, but 
 it is not thought that he has always been so. 
 
28 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 This negation has not prevented a particular 
 division of the faith from affecting a kind of he- 
 retical and schismatic deism, Like the Nepalese, 
 who have imagined an Adibuddha, a supreme 
 Buddha, they also have invented a Ginapati, a 
 perfect Gina, whom, in opposition to their canon- 
 ical Angas, they regard as primordial creator. 
 The Angas teach that man possesses a. soul, and 
 that his soul, although a pure and an immortal 
 intelligence, is yet the prey of illusion, and for 
 that reason condemned to bear the yoke of matter 
 through an indefinite series of existences. In 
 Gainism it is not existence that is an affliction, 
 it is life ; and the Nirvana is less an annihilation 
 than an entrance into eternal beatitude. To 
 distinguish between the two faiths, the Brahmans 
 called the Buddhists, "They who affirm,'' and 
 the Gainas, " They who say. Perhaps." 
 
 The Chinese, who are our elders in little else 
 than corruption, feel as much need for a religion 
 as a civilian does for a military uniform. From 
 the threshold of history to the present day, the 
 inhabitants of the celestial Empire have had no 
 term wherewith to designate a deity. The name 
 of God has not entered into their philosophy. 
 As a rule, then, when an educated Chinese is 
 asked what his creed is, he answers, that not 
 being a priest, he has none at all. The clergy 
 have three : the official religion — originated by 
 Confucius — Buddhism and Tauism. The latter 
 faith was founded by Laou-tze. 
 
 The life of this early thinker has been as lib- 
 erally interwoven with legends as that of the 
 
The Revolt of the Orient. 2^ 
 
 Buddha. The Orient seems to have had a mania 
 for attributing the birth of reformers to immacu- 
 late conceptions ; and one learns with the weari- 
 ness that comes of a thrice-told tale, that the 
 mother of Laou-tze, finding herself one day alone, 
 conceived suddenly through the vivifying influ- 
 ence of Nature. But though the conception was 
 abrupt, the gestation was prolonged, lasting, it is 
 said, eighty-four years ; and when at last the 
 miraculous child was born, his hair was white — 
 whence his name, Laou-tze, the Aged Baby. This 
 occurred six hundred years before the present 
 era. 
 
 The philosophy of this prodigy, contained in 
 the Taou-t6h-king, the Book of Supreme Knowl- 
 edge and Virtue, is regarded by Orientalists as 
 the most profound and authentic relic of early 
 Chinese literature. The most profound, as rival- 
 ling the works of Confucius and Mencius ; and 
 the most authentic, in that it was the only one 
 said to have been exempt from the different 
 edicts commanding the destruction of manu- 
 scripts. 
 
 Laou-tze was probably the first thinker who 
 established the fact that it is not in the power 
 of man to conceive an adequate idea of a First 
 Cause, and the first to show that any efforts in 
 that direction result merely in demonstrating 
 human incompetence and the utter vainness of 
 the endeavor. When, therefore, he was obliged 
 to mention the primordial essence in such a 
 manner as to be understood by his hearers, the 
 figurative term which he employed was Tau. 
 
^o The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 " Tau," he said, " is empty, in operation exliaust- 
 less. It is tlie formless motlier of all things.'' 
 And to this description Spinoza found little to 
 add. 
 
 Laou-tze appears to have dipped into all the 
 philosophies then in vogue, and after taking a 
 little eclectic sip from each, elaborated a system 
 so cleverly that he may safely be regarded as the 
 earliest moralist. His doctrine was thoroughly 
 pantheistic. Man, he taught, is a passing and 
 inferior phase of the Great Unity which is the 
 beginning and end of all things, and into which 
 the soul is absorbed. Happiness, he added, is 
 like paradise, an imaginary Utopia, a fiction of 
 the non-existent extending beyond the border- 
 lands of the known. And on the chart which he 
 drew of life, he set up a monitory finger-post, 
 warning men that the only real delights were 
 those that consist in the absence of pain. Enter- 
 prise, effort and ambition, were so many good, 
 old-fashioned words which to this early pessimist 
 represented merely a forethought for a future 
 generation. And of a future generation he saw 
 little need. The one laudable aim was in the 
 avoidance of suffering. After all, what was there 
 in life ? Nothing save a past as painful as the 
 present, with hope to breed chimeras and the 
 future for a dream. 
 
 Like Buddhism, the doctrine of Laou-tze de- 
 generated with the years. Their common sim- 
 plicity was too subtle for the canaille, and to each 
 gaudy superstitions have been added. Yet in 
 their primal significance they are as ushers of ne- 
 
The Revolt of the Orient. ji 
 
 gation, the initial revolt at the supernatural, the 
 first reasoned attempts to route the spectres from 
 the mind of man. 
 
 In earlier Hinduism, life was a nightmare, and 
 the universe a phantasm that vaunted itself 
 real. In an effort to escape, Kapila lost himself in 
 abstractions, the Buddha ordered Death to stand 
 a lackey at the door of Peace, vfhWe Laou-tze 
 turned his almond eyes within and descended the 
 stair of Thought. To the first, salvation lay in 
 metaphysics ; to the second, in virtue ; to the 
 third, in indifference. Had their theories been 
 fused, the revolt might not have been so vain. 
 
J2 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE NEGATIONS OF ANTIQUITY. 
 
 The clamor of life and thought entered 
 Greece through Asia Minor. Quinet has called 
 the itinerary of the tribes that took possession of 
 her hills and vales, an itinerary of the gods. That 
 somnambulist of history has seen, as in a vision, 
 their passage marked, here by a temple, there by 
 a shrine. While the tribes dispersed, the gods 
 advanced. Orpheus has told the story of their 
 youth ; but now Orpheus is indiscoverable, and 
 the days of which he sang are as vague as the 
 future. When the gods entered folk-lore, they 
 had already ascended Olympus, and the divinity 
 of Jupiter was attested in traditions out of which 
 Homer formed another Pentateuch. The name 
 of the Ionian Moses is as unsubstantial as that of 
 Orpheus ; but if his personality is uncertain, it is 
 yet a matter of common knowledge that his epics 
 formed the articles of an indulgent creed, and 
 that from 'them the infant Greece first learned 
 the pleasures that belong to dream. At this time 
 the mysteries of the archaic skies were dissolved. 
 Dread had vanished ; in its place was the Ideal. 
 Throughout the mellow morns and languid dusks 
 there was an unbroken procession of the gayest, 
 the most alluring divinities ; their fare was am- 
 
The Negations of Antiquity. jy 
 
 brosia, their laughter was inextinguishable. 
 Virtue was rewarded on earth, and Nemesis pur- 
 sued the wrong-doer. The dower of men and 
 maidens was beauty ; love was too near to nature 
 to know of shame ; religion was more aesthetic 
 than moral, more gracious than austere. The 
 theologians were poets : first Orpheus, Mu- 
 saeus and Linus, then Homer and Hesiod ; 
 mirth, magnificence and melancholy they gave 
 in fee. 
 
 Homer was not only a poet, he was an historian 
 as well ; and it is a fact amply demonstrated that 
 he believed as little in the sacerdotal legends as 
 Tennyson in the phantom idyls of Arthur. At 
 that time no semblance of revealed religion was 
 affected : the people, however, like all others be- 
 fore and since, would have gods, and gods they 
 got ; yet in displaying them to the infant race. 
 Homer laughed at the divinities, and predicted 
 that their reign would some day cease. 
 
 This prescience oi the incredulity that was to 
 come is significant. The history of Greece is one 
 of freedom in art, in action, but particularly in 
 thought. The death of Socrates, the flight of 
 Aristotle, are among the exceptions that make 
 the rule. In its broad outlines, the attitude of 
 Hellenic thought was one of aggressive scepti- 
 cism. This attitude may have been due to the 
 fact that there was nothing which in any way 
 resembled a national faith ; each town, each 
 hamlet, each upland and valley, possessed myths 
 of its own, and such uniformity as existed appears 
 to have been ritualistic rather than doctrinal. 
 3 
 
J4- The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 But perhaps the primal cause is best attributable 
 to that nimble spirit of investigation which is 
 at once a characteristic of the Greek intellect 
 and a contrast to the cataleptic reveries of the 
 Hindu. 
 
 It goes virithout the need of telling that the 
 philosophers put Jupiter aside much as one does 
 an illusion of childhood, and possibly .with some- 
 thing of the same regret. But this leniency on 
 their part was not universally imitated. The story 
 of Prometheus, the most ancient of fables, traces 
 of which have been discovered in the Vedas, 
 became in the hands of .^schylus a semi-histor- 
 ical, semi-cosmological legend, in which the 
 Titan, as representative of humanity, mouths 
 from the escarpolated summits of Caucasus his 
 hatred and defiance of Jove. Euripides, too, was 
 well in the movement. There was not an article 
 of Hellenic faith that he did not scoff at. Then 
 came the farce. Aristophanes found nothing too 
 sacred for his wit ; with the impartiality of genius 
 he joked at gods and men alike. 
 
 While the poets and dramatists were pulling 
 down, the philosophers were building up. If the 
 belief in an eternal fancy ball on Olympus was 
 untenable, something, they felt, should be sug- 
 gested in its place. In lieu, therefore, of the 
 theory that Jupiter was the first link in the chain 
 of the universe, Thales announced that the be- 
 ginning of things was water ; Anaximenes said 
 air; Heraclitus preferred fire. Anaximinder held 
 to an abstraction, the Infinite. Pythagoras, who, 
 like all his countrymen, dearly loved a quibble, 
 
The Negations of Antiquity. jj' 
 
 declared that the First Cause was One. This One, 
 Xenophanes asserted, was a self-existent Mind. 
 Empedocles gave as definition a sphere whose 
 centre was everywhere and circumference no- 
 where, a definition which Pascal revived as an 
 attribute of the Deity. Anaxagoras, who was 
 banished for his pains, believed in a pure Intel- 
 ligence. This pure Intelligence was not a deity, 
 except perhaps in the sense oia.deus ex mackin&j 
 it was an explanation, not a god. But even so, 
 it looked like one; there were already too many 
 unknown gods, and the idea was not received 
 with enthusiasm. Among those who opposed it 
 with particular vehemence was Diagoras, he who 
 first among the Greeks received the name of 
 atheist. This logician chanced one day to be 
 at sea during a heavy storm. The sailors attri- 
 buted the storm to him. All that they were en- 
 during was a punishment for conveying such an 
 impious wretch, as he. "Look at those other 
 ships over there," said Diagoras. " They are in 
 the same storm, aren't they ? Do you suppose 
 that I am in each of them ? " 
 
 Diagoras had learned his lessons from Demo- 
 critus, a thinker who in certain schools of thought 
 holds to-day a position which, if not superior, is 
 at least equal to that of Plato. The reason of 
 this admiration is not far to seek. Democritus 
 is the grandsire of materialism. Materialism is 
 out of fashion to-day, but to-morrow it may come 
 in again. During a long and continually reju- 
 venated career, it has been a veritable hydra. 
 Every time its head seemed severed for all eter- 
 
j<5 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 nity, there has sprouted a new one, and one 
 more sagacious than the last. 
 
 The theory of atoms announced in the remote 
 past and repeated in recent years underwent a 
 baptism of fire at the beginning of the present 
 century. Dalton applied it to the interpretation 
 of chemical laws, and a little later a band of 
 German erudites embellished it with the garlands 
 of new discoveries. Contemporary science treats 
 it with scant respect; but all who are of a liberal 
 mind admit that its conclusions have been useful 
 implements of progress. Its originator. Demo 
 critus, was a contemporary of Sakya-Muni. It 
 is even possible that he sat at the Buddha's feet ; 
 he is said to have wandered far into the East ; 
 and it is also recorded that he visited Egypt, 
 whither he had been preceded by Pythagoras, 
 and where his questioning eyes must have met 
 the returning stare of the Sphinx. 
 
 At that time travelling was not necessarily 
 expensive, yet in his journeys Democritus squan- 
 dered his substance with great correctness; and 
 when after years of absence he returned to his 
 home, he found himself amenable to a law of the 
 land which deprived of the honors of burial 
 those who had dissipated their patrimony. A 
 statute of this description was not of a nature to 
 alarm such a man as Democritus. He invited 
 all who cared to do so, to meet him in the public 
 square, and there, through the wide leisures of 
 Thracian days, he recited passages from Diakos- 
 mos, his principal work. This procedure, to- 
 gether with the novelty of the ideas which he an- 
 
The Negations of Antiquity. j/ 
 
 nounced, so impressed his hearers, that they 
 made for him a purse of five hundred talents, and 
 after his death erected statues in his honor. 
 Those indeed were the good old days. 
 
 In the system which Democritus suggested to 
 his countrymen, matter was pictured as the union 
 of an infinite number of indivisible elements, 
 which in the diversity of their forms represent 
 the phenomena of nature. Beyond these indi- 
 visible elements, space held but voids. Atoms 
 and emptiness is the theory in a phrase. The 
 voids are the absence of obstacles, and the atoms 
 continually passing through them are the constit- 
 uents of all that is. In their eternal voyage 
 through space, these atoms meet, unite and sepa- 
 rate, unruled save by the laws of unconscious 
 and mechanical necessity. To their chance clash 
 is due the world ; the universe is one of their 
 fortuitous combinations, and the hazard which 
 presided at its formation will some day see it 
 again dissolved. The word hazard, it may be 
 noted, is used from lack of a better term. In 
 exact speech there seems to be nothing which at 
 all resembles it. The accident that occurs in the 
 street, the rambles of the ball on the roulette- 
 table, may seem the play of chance ; but were 
 the predisposing causes understood, the accident 
 would be recognized as the result of a cause in 
 which chance had no part, and in the rambles of 
 the ball the operations of consistent laws would 
 be discerned. Dubois Reymond has noted that 
 if, during a short though determined space of 
 time, an intelligent man were able to mark the 
 
jcP The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 exact position and movement of every molecule, 
 he could, in accordance with the laws of mechan- 
 ics, foresee the whole future of the world. In 
 the same manner that an astronomer can foretell 
 the date on which a comet, after years of remote 
 wanderings, will re-visit our heavens, so in his 
 equations could this imaginary individual read 
 the precise day when England shall burn her 
 last bit of coal, and Germany brew her last keg 
 of beer. 
 
 Beyond this theory, which as a matter of course 
 includes the denial that man is a free agent, 
 Democritus was accustomed to assert that out of 
 nothing, nothing comes — an axiom which one 
 does not need to be a mathematician to agree 
 with, though it is one that somewhat impairs the 
 scientific value of the first chapter of Genesis. 
 And were it otherwise, if things sprang from 
 nothing, the producing cause would be limitless ; 
 men might issue from the sea, arid fish from the 
 earth. In the fecundity of chaos, everything, 
 even to the impossible, would be possible. But 
 in a system such as this, in which the operations 
 of nature are represented as effected by invisible 
 corpuscles which possess in themselves the laws 
 of all their possible combinations, there is room 
 only for the actual ; the universe explains itself 
 more or less clearly, and that too without re- 
 course to a First Cause or an over-watching 
 Providence.* 
 
 Democritus was one of the first quietists, but 
 
 * Nolen : La philosophic de Lange. Wurtz ; La thiorie atom- 
 ique. 
 
The Negations of Antiquity. jp 
 
 he was quietist without leanings to mysticism. 
 He was among the earliest to note that it is the 
 unexpected that occurs ; and he barricaded him- 
 self as best he might against avoidable misfor- 
 tune by shunning everything that was apt to be 
 a source of suffering or annoyance. Beyond 
 mental tranquillity, he appears to have praised 
 nothing except knowledge ; and it is stated that 
 he hunted truth not so much for the pleasure of 
 the chase as for the delight which the quarry 
 afforded. 
 
 The negations of Democritus had been well 
 ventilated when the stage of history was abruptly 
 occupied by a band of charlatan nihilists, who 
 personified the spirit of doubt with ingenious 
 effrontery. These were the sophists. To be 
 called a sophist was originally a compliment. It 
 meant one who was a master in wisdom and 
 eloquence. But when Greece found herself im- 
 posed upon by a company of mental gymnasts, 
 who in any argument maintained the pros and 
 cons with equal ease, who made the worst appear 
 the best, who denied all things even to evidence, 
 and affirmed everything even to the absurd, and 
 who took sides with the just and the unjust with 
 equal indifference — then the title lost its lustre 
 and degenerated into a slur. This possibly was 
 a mistake. A disapproval of the paradoxes of 
 these dialecticians is almost a praise of the com- 
 monplace. Yet the sophists deserve small appro- 
 bation. Their efforts to show that all is true and 
 all is false, and, above all, the brilliancy of their 
 depravity, undermined thought ,and morals to 
 
40 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 such an extent that philosophy, which had taken 
 wings, might have flown forever away, had it 
 not been re-beckoned to earth by the familiar 
 reform instituted by Socrates. 
 
 Socrates was as ungainly as a satyr, but the 
 suppleness of his tongue was that of a witch. At 
 the hands of this insidious Attic, the sophists 
 fared badly. He brought their versatilities into 
 discredit ; and in reviewing and enlarging a for- 
 gotten theory of Anaxagoras, purified thought 
 with new lessons in virtue. This reaction seems 
 to have been of advantage to moral philosophy, 
 but detrimental to metaphysics ; so much so, in 
 fact, that his hearers turned their backs on theory, 
 and devoted themselves to ethics. " Give me 
 wisdom or a rope,'' cried Antisthenes, presumably 
 to appreciative ears ; and when Diogenes lit his 
 dark lantern in broad daylight, he found every 
 one eager to aid him in the ostentatious bizarrerie 
 of that immortal farce. 
 
 In the midst of these pre-occupations there 
 appeared a thinker named Pyrrho, to whom every 
 sceptic is more or less indebted. Pyrrho was 
 born at Elis. His people were poor, and doubt- 
 less worthy ; but their poverty compelled him to 
 seek a livelihood, which for a time he seems to 
 have found, with his brush. By nature he was 
 sensitive, nervous, as are all artists, and passion- 
 ately in love with solitude. From some reason 
 or another, but most probably from lack of suc- 
 cess, he gave up painting, and wandered from 
 one school to another, until at last a sudden in- 
 troduction to Democritus turned the whole cur- 
 
The Negations of Antiquity, 4T 
 
 rent of his restless thought. For this introduc- 
 tion he was indebted to Anaxarchus, a philoso- 
 pher who went about asserting that all is relative, 
 and confessing that he did not even know that he 
 knew nothing. But in this there was possibly 
 some little professional exaggeration. He was a 
 thorough atomist, and very dogmatic on the sub- 
 ject of happiness, which, with broad good sense, 
 he insisted was found only in the peace and tran- 
 quillity of the mind. 
 
 In Alexander's triumphal suite, Pyrrho went 
 with this scholar to Asia, and together they 
 visited the magi and the reflective gymnosophists. 
 The abstracted impassibility of these visionaries 
 caused him, it is said, an admiration so intense 
 that he made from it a rule of daily conduct ; 
 and one day .when his master, with whom he was 
 walking, fell into a treacherous bog, Pyrrho con- 
 tinued calmly on his way, leaving Anaxarchus to 
 the mud and his own devices. It may be that 
 in this there was some prescience of the modern 
 aphorism that any one is strong enough to bear 
 the misfortunes of another ; but even so, Pyrrho, 
 when it was necessary, could be brave in his 
 own behalf, and one of the few anecdotes that 
 are current represent his unmurmuring endur- 
 ance of an agonizing operation. This occurred 
 before any one was aware of the imperceptibility 
 of pain ; the stoics were yet unborn. 
 
 During his long journey, Pyrrho acquired all, 
 or nearly all, that the East had to teach. He 
 listened to Brahman and Buddhist, and took 
 from each what best they had to give. The im- 
 
4-2 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 passibility of the one appealed to him forcibly, 
 the ethics of the other seemed to him most admi- 
 rable ; and with these for luggage, packed toge- 
 ther with an original idea of his own, he returned 
 to his early home, where his fellow-citizens, as a 
 mark of their appreciation, elevated him to the 
 rank of high priest, a dignity which may have 
 caused him some slight, if silent, amusement. 
 
 At that time Greece was rent by wars and rev- 
 olutions. In the uncertainty of the morrow and 
 the instability of all things, there was a general 
 effort to enjoy life while enjoyment was yet to be 
 had, and to make that enjoyment as thorough as 
 possible. When, therefore, Pyrrho announced 
 his intention to teach the science of happiness, he 
 found his audience ready-made. 
 
 The doctrine which he then unfolded was 
 received at first with surprise, but afterwards 
 with sympathetic attention ; it gained for him 
 wide praise, and also fervent followers. These 
 followers, to whom the thanks of posterity are 
 due, took to themselves the duty of preserving 
 his teaching ; for, like Socrates, Pyrrho wrote 
 nothing. 
 
 It has been hinted that Pyrrho accepted the 
 materialism of Democritus, admired the hedonism 
 of Anaxarchus, and practised the impassibility of 
 the Hindus. These elements, which formed what 
 may be termed the angles of his system, were 
 rounded and completed by an original doctrine, 
 which represented doubt as an instrument of 
 wisdom, moderation and personal welfare. Before 
 this time there had been much scepticism, but it 
 
The Negations of Antiquity. 4^ 
 
 had been of a vacillating and unordered kind, the 
 indecision of the uncertain, and no one had 
 thought of making it a stepping-stone to happi- 
 ness. This Pyrrho did, and in it lies his chief 
 originality. 
 
 The scepticism which Pyrrho instituted was an 
 unyielding doubt, and one, paradox as it may 
 seem, which was highly logical. In it Kant 
 found the outlines of his Criticism traced in ad- 
 vance, and that too by a master-hand. Pyrrho 
 admitted no difference between health and illness, 
 life and death. He expected nothing, asked for 
 nothing, believed in nothing. If he ever struggled 
 with himself, the struggle was a silent combat, of 
 which his heart was the one dumb witness. He 
 was not simply a sceptic, nor yet merely a cynic ; 
 he was a stoic, with a leaven of both. To the 
 eternal question, " What am I ? " he answered, 
 " It matters not," He had but one true successor 
 — Montaigne. The everlasting refrain. Que s(ay 
 ief is an echo, faint may be, but still an echo, of 
 his own unperturbed indifference. The only 
 refuge in the midst of the uncertainties to 
 which man is ever a prey, lay, Pyrrho held, in 
 an entire suspension of judgment. Between as- 
 sertion and denial he did not so much as waver ; 
 he balanced his opinion in a perfect equipoise. 
 As there is no criterion of truth, his position was 
 impregnable. 
 
 "There is," he taught, "nothing that is inhe- 
 rently beautiful or ugly, right or wrong, and hence 
 nothing that can be defined as an absolute truth. 
 Things in themselves," he added, " are diverse. 
 
44 TTie Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 uncertain and undiscernable. Neither sensation 
 nor thought is capable of teaching the difference 
 between what is true and what is false. As a con- 
 sequence, the verdict of mind and of senses should 
 be equally distrusted ; an opinionless impassi- 
 bility should be observed ; nothing should be 
 denied, nothing should be affirmed ; or if one of 
 the two seems necessary, let the affirmation and 
 the denial be concurrent." 
 
 And happiness ? some one may ask. But that 
 is happiness. Where there is indifference and 
 apathy, there too is ataraxia, the perfect and un- 
 ruffled serenity of the mind. If in act, word and 
 thought, an entire suspension of judgment be 
 maintained — if men, and women too, and events 
 and results and causes, concerning all of which 
 we may have our fancies and our theories, but 
 whose reality escapes us, are treated with com- 
 plete indifference — then do we possess an inde- 
 pendent freedom, an unroutable calm. Once 
 freed from beliefs and prejudices, an exterior 
 influence is without effect ; perfect impassibility 
 is obtained ; and with it comes the passionless 
 serenity, the ataraxia, which is the goal of the 
 sage. 
 
 Such in its broadest outlines was Pyrrho's doc- 
 trine. Confute it who may. For the details the 
 reader must turn to back book-shelves where 
 speculative spiders are the only hosts, and there 
 thumb the mildewed pages of Sextus Empiricus, 
 Aristocles and Diogenes Laertius. It should be 
 noted that Pyrrho's scepticism did not extend to 
 virtue, which he was fond of saying is the one 
 
The Negations of Antiquity. ^5 
 
 thing whose possession is worth the gift. At an 
 advanced age he died, greatly esteemed by his 
 townsmen, who to do him honor exempted all 
 philosophers from taxation. But elsewhere he 
 was forgotten, and at the time of his death his 
 brilliancy was eclipsed by the rising glories of 
 Epicurus. 
 
 When Epicurus addressed the public, he was 
 no longer a young man. His early life had been 
 an unbroken journey. No sooner was he settled 
 in one place, than circumstances compelled him 
 to seek another. These inconveniences did not 
 prevent him from cultivating philosophy, for 
 which from boyhood he evinced a marked 
 predilection. " In the beginning was chaos," his 
 first tutor announced. " And where did chaos 
 come from ? " asked Epicurus. But to this the 
 tutor had no answer, and the boy turned to 
 Democritus. 
 
 To this master much of his subsequent philos- 
 ophy is attributable, but his personal success 
 was due to the charm of his manner and the 
 seduction of his words. Syrians and Egyptians 
 flocked to Athens to hear him speak, and few 
 among them went away dissatisfied. 
 
 At that time the riot of war had demoralized 
 society. The. echoes from a thousand battle- 
 fields had banished all sense of security. Greece, 
 moreover, was as tired of speculations as of con- 
 flicts ; the subtleties of the Lyceum had out- 
 wearied the most intrepid. In the midst of the 
 general enervation, Epicurus came, like another 
 Pyrrho, to tell the secret of Polichinelle, to paint 
 
46 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 pleasure and describe happiness. In the telling 
 he made no mysteries ; his hearers approached 
 him without effort. Pleasure, he held, was too 
 simple and unaffected to need logical demonstra- 
 tions ; and to make her acquaintance, common- 
 sense was a better letter than mathematics. But 
 pleasure should not be sought merely for pleas- 
 ure's sake. It should be regarded as a means 
 to an end. Between pleasure and pleasure there 
 is always a choice. There are pleasures that 
 should be shunned, and there are trials that 
 should be endured. There is the pleasure that is 
 found in the satisfaction of the flesh, and there is 
 the pleasure which is found in the tranquillity of 
 the mind. The one lasts but a moment, and wanes 
 in repetition ; the other endures through life, 
 and increases with the years. All this Epicurus 
 thoroughly understood. He had a maxim to the 
 effect that wealth does not consist in the vastness 
 of possessions, but in the limitation of desires. 
 He did not restrict his hearers to scanty enjoy- 
 ments ; on the contrary, he preached their mul- 
 tiplication, but it was a multiplication which was 
 both a lure and a prohibition. He wished men 
 to live so simply that pleasure, when it came, 
 might seem even more exquisite than it is. Of 
 all the high-roads to happiness, he pointed to 
 prudence as the surest and most expeditious. 
 The prudent are temperate in all things, unam- 
 bitious and of modest requirements, and through 
 this very prudence maintain the health of mind 
 and body which in itself is the true felicity of the 
 wise. 
 
The Negations of Antiquity. ^7 
 
 The Epicurean doctrine was one long lesson 
 in mental tranquillity. Anything that ministered 
 to contentment was welcomed, and all things that 
 disturbed it were condemned. Among the latter 
 were the gods. 
 
 "Ces dieux que I'homme a fait, at qui n'ont pas fait 
 I'homme. " 
 
 The proper way to treat them was a difficult 
 question. Epicurus had no taste for hemlock, 
 and he found his garden very pleasant. He had 
 no wish to flee, like Aristotle, in the night, nor 
 mope, like Anaxagoras, in a dungeon. He was 
 a teacher, not a martyr. His position, therefore, 
 was one of extreme delicacy. On the one hand, 
 he was obliged to consider his personal incon- 
 venience ; on the other, the superstitions of the 
 masses. To respect the former and banish the 
 latter, Epicurus took the gods and juggled with 
 them, and in the legerdemain they mounted to 
 such altitudes that from them the vulgar had 
 nothing left to hope or to fear. Their existence 
 was openly admitted, and their intervention as 
 openly denied. In words of devout piety he 
 took from them the reigns of government, and 
 pictured their idleness as an ideal impassibility. 
 After that, Olympus was to let. 
 
 The early legends say that the first created 
 thing was fear. After routing the gods, Epicurus 
 undertook to banish dread ; it timor della paura, 
 as the Italians have it in their insidious tongue — 
 the fear of fright, or at least that particular form 
 with which hallucinated antiquity was accus- 
 
48 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 tomed to terrify itself into repentant spasms. 
 Aided by the materialism of his master, Epicurus 
 looked across the tomb, and announced that 
 there no tormenting phantoms lurked in ambush. 
 The dissolution of the atoms composing the body 
 was also a dissolution of the atoms composing 
 the soul. This affirmation of nothing divested 
 life of a constant anxiety. It took from it one 
 more care. It made the tranquillity of the mind 
 easier, and assured it against an idle pre-occupa- 
 tion. 
 
 This doctrine, far from giving free play to the 
 passions, held them well in check. Epicurus 
 could see two sides to a question as well as an- 
 other. Morality and temperance even to absti- 
 nence were praised. His hearers were enjoined 
 to limit their desires, and at all times to be 
 just and to be charitabje. The virtues, too, were 
 praised ; and this not so much perhaps on ac- 
 count of their inherent beauty, as because they 
 were safeguards against mental disturbance. 
 
 In disclosing his ideas, Epicurus necessarily 
 refuted other theories ; but his candor, his unal- 
 terable placidity and his luminous good faith, 
 disconcerted his adversaries, whose infrequent 
 reprisals he answered, if at all, with an epigram. 
 
 In disinteresting his adherents from all things 
 and even from themselves, it was the wish of 
 Epicurus to create, not a school of thought, but a 
 something whose status should approach that of 
 a general disbelief. It was to be a religion whose 
 one dogma was repose. In this purpose he very 
 nearly succeeded. By the terms of his will, his 
 
Tlie Negations of Antiquity. ^p 
 
 g-arden, his writings and authority descended from 
 one disciple to another in perpetuity. There was 
 then no statute of mortmain, and the terms of the 
 testament remained in force for seven hundred 
 years — in fact, down to the last gasp of classic 
 antiquity. 
 
 The continuity which it enjoyed is perhaps less 
 attributable to its dogmas than to a sentiment of 
 great delicacy which pervaded it. Christianity 
 teaches that all men are brothers, but Epicurism 
 practised the lesson before it was taught. Its 
 bonds were those of friendship. Cicero has 
 given it to history that the Epicureans had one 
 to another the most unselfish sentiments. There 
 was no community of goods. Friendship gave 
 its own from a sense of pleasure and not from 
 constraint. 
 
 During its long reign, Epicurism attracted 
 many converts from other sects, but lost none 
 ot its own adherents. This singularity was ex- 
 plained by a wit of the baths, who, adjusting his 
 toga, noted with the light banter of the day that 
 it was easy enough to make a eunuch of a man, 
 but another matter to make a man of a eunuch. 
 It is possible that this bet esprit had grasped the 
 doctrine better than his hearers. Certainly it has 
 not always been thoroughly understood. Mon- 
 tesquieu accused it of corrupting Rome ; but the 
 accusation is groundless, for at its advent the 
 Eternal City was one vast lupanar. 
 
 Seneca said of Epicurus that he was a hero 
 disguised as a woman, and it is in this disguise 
 that he is usually represented. The doctrine 
 4 
 
^o The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 which he gave to the world seemed to praise 
 sensuality where in reality it preached repose. 
 Idlers in all times have halted at the appearance 
 and omitted to go further. For this reason, if for 
 none that is better, there has always been a false 
 and a true Epicurism. Unhappily, the bastard 
 has been best received, and in its reception it has 
 managed to discredit both the philosopher and 
 the philosophy. 
 
 Over the gateway to his olive-gardens Epicurus 
 had written : " Enter, stranger ; here all is fair ; 
 Pleasure lords the day." The sign was a bait, 
 and of a flavor far different from the repellent 
 severity of the notice which swung from the 
 Academe. There admittance was refused to 
 those who did not know geometry. But when 
 the stranger, attracted by the proffered allure- 
 ment, entered the gardens, he found that the 
 lording of pleasure meant health of body and of 
 mind. 
 
 There were some who entered, and who, de- 
 lighted at the teaching, remained. There were 
 others who entered at one gate and passed out 
 discomfited at another ; and there was also a 
 third class, who, noting the tenor of the invi- 
 tation, and knowing that the host was a philos- 
 opher, passed on charmed with the idea that the 
 gratification of the senses possessed the sanction 
 of metaphysics. These latter necessarily com- 
 promised Epicurus ; and when his doctrine passed 
 from Athens to Rome, it had been preceded by a 
 bad reputation. For this the excuse is, seem- 
 ingly, small. Epicurus was as voluminous a 
 
The Negations of Antiquity. ^i 
 
 writer as Voltaire ; and if the Romans misunder- 
 stood him, it is either because their knowledge of 
 Greek was slight, or else because they were con- 
 tent to accept his teaching on hearsay. Toward 
 the close of the republic, the system — ^such little 
 at least as was generally known — became largely 
 the fashion ; and the elegance of Rome, like the 
 indolence of Athens, cloaked its corruption with 
 a mind-woven matitle of imaginary philosophy. 
 
 In descending the centuries, its reputation has 
 not improved. Epicurism is not now synony- 
 mous, as it once was, with refined debauchery ; 
 yet at the dinner-tables of contemporary club- 
 land there are many still unaware that he who is 
 claimed as patron-saint had tastes so simple that 
 his expense for food was less than an obolus a 
 day, while Metrodorus, his nearest friend, ex- 
 pended barely a lepton more. Now and then, 
 on high-days and festivals, a bit of cheese was 
 eaten with sensual relish ; but it is a matter of 
 history that the ordinary fare of these voluptu- 
 aries was bread dipped in water. 
 
 The national divinity of the Romans is un- 
 known. To all but the hierophants his name 
 v^as a secret. Cicero has admitted that to him 
 it was undisclosed. A tribune was even put to 
 death for having pronounced it. If, in such a 
 matter, conjectures were worth anything, it 
 would not be irrational to fancy that the deity 
 who ranked as Jupiter's superior was Pavor, 
 Fright. 
 
 The hardiest and foremost conquerors in the 
 world, the descendants of a she-wolf's nursling. 
 
^2 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 were timid as children before the unintelligibility 
 of the universe. Their earliest gods were revealed 
 in the thunder ; their belief was a panic ; and 
 when the panic subsided, it was succeeded by a 
 dull, unreasoning dread. 
 
 No other land has seen a vaster Pantheon. 
 There were so many divinities that Petronius 
 said it was easier for the traveller to meet a god 
 than a man. The more there- were, the less in- 
 secure they felt. When they conquered a country, 
 they took the gods as part of the spoils, but they 
 treated them with great reverence ; the temples 
 were left standing and the altars unharmed. 
 This moderation was probably due less to a sense 
 of duty than to fear. They were afraid of their 
 own gods ; they were afraid of those of other 
 nations ; and those of whom they knew the least 
 seem to have frightened them most. 
 
 In those days there was no iconoclasm, nor 
 was there any attempt to make proselytes. The 
 whole sentiment of Roman antiquity was opposed 
 to the suppression of a creed, and such an idea 
 as supplanting one religion by another was un- 
 known. This liberality was particularly manifest 
 during the latter part of the republic. At that 
 time a statue to Isis was erected vis-Si-vis to 
 Jupiter. Sylla escorted a Syrian goddess to 
 Rome, and Mithra, who had been lured from 
 the East, became very popular among the lower 
 classes. But all this occurred after triumphant 
 campaigns. When Rome was young, her gods, 
 if equally numerous, were less concrete. 
 
 The religion of the Sabines and the Latins was 
 
The Negations of Antiquity. jj 
 
 the naturalism of their Aryan ancestors. In it 
 the gods, if emblematic, were unimaged ; they 
 were manifestations of the divine, but not actual 
 divinities. Each new manifestation was a fresh 
 revelation, to which the early Italiot was quick 
 to give a name and found a worship ; but in the 
 worship there was more of dread than of hope, 
 the dread of the unknown and the invisible. 
 
 Gradually the gods became less abstract, but 
 as M. Boissier has hinted, they were probably 
 as lack-lustre as the imagination of the laborers 
 that conceived them, and so remained dully and 
 dimly perceived until peddlers from Cumse and 
 Rhegium came over with wares and legends. 
 To their tales the Romans listened with marvel- 
 ling surprise. Their gods, like themselves, were 
 poor and prosaic ; they had no history, no myths ; 
 and with a pleasant and liberal sense of duty, 
 they robed them with the shreds and tatters of 
 Ionian verse. 
 
 At precisely what epoch this occurred is un- 
 certain ; but as the art of writing was familiar to 
 the Romans in very ancient times, and as it has 
 been shown that the Roman alphabet was drawn 
 from Eolo-Dorian characters, it is not unreason- 
 able to infer that relations between the two races 
 were established at a comparatively early date. 
 
 The gods to whom the freedom of the city 
 was thus unwarily granted, grew and expanded 
 with it, but their native charm had been lost in 
 crossing the sea. The serene mythology in 
 which they were nursed was supplanted by gloomy 
 superstitions ; the gay and gracious fictions were 
 
S4 Th^ Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 dulled with grave chronicles ; and the gods, 
 who at home were cordial and indulgent, devel- 
 oped under the heavy hand of their adopters 
 into an inquisitive and irritable police. 
 
 Instead of being loved, they were feared, and 
 the fear they inspired was the heartrending fright 
 of a child pursued. 
 
 To the untrained minds of their supplicants 
 they lurked everywhere, even in silence. They 
 were cruel and vindictive ; they tormented the 
 Roman out of sheer wantonness, for the mere 
 pleasure of seeing him writhe. Plutarch has con- 
 fided to posterity that in those days a man could 
 not so much as sneeze without exposing him- 
 self to their anger. In such circumstances, wor- 
 ship was not merely a moral obligation, it was 
 a matter of business, a form of insurance against 
 divine risks, in which the worshipper with naive 
 effrontery tried to bargain with the gods that they 
 should hold him harmless. This effort was sol- 
 emnized by a religious ceremony whose meaning 
 had been forgotten, and during which the priests 
 mumbled prayers in a jargon which they did not 
 understand. 
 
 With a retrospect even of two thousand years, 
 it is a little difficult to fancy that the Romans 
 pinned their faith to these mummeries, yet such 
 seems to have been the case. In Greece there 
 was much incredulity, but it was the laughing 
 incredulity of a boy who has disentangled him- 
 self from the illusions of the nursery. That of 
 the Romans took a different form ; it was an 
 irritated scepticism which vacillated between 
 
The Negations of Antiquity. ^^ 
 
 defiant negation and fervent belief. Doubtless 
 there were enlightened men who took it all 
 easily and with several grains of Attic salt ; 
 but they were infrequent ; incredulity seems 
 to have been the exception and in no wise the 
 rule. 
 
 When the Roman, angered to exasperation, 
 braved the gods with a sacrilege, at the first sign 
 of impending danger he was quick to implore 
 their protection. Sylla, feeling in the humor, 
 sacked Delphi and insulted Apollo ; all of which, 
 Plutarch says, did not prevent him, the first time 
 he was frightened, from praying to the very god 
 whose temple he had pillaged. And Sylla, it 
 may be remembered, was the last one to harbor 
 any unnecessary superstitions. If remorse was 
 felt by such an accomplished ruffian as he, what 
 could be expected of the mass of his compa- 
 triots, who, if equally ruffian, were far less accom- 
 plished ? 
 
 In reading back through history, it seems as 
 though the Romans hated their divinities and 
 yet were afraid to show their hatred ; and it 
 seems too that had one of them met a god alone, 
 that god would have fared badly. Indeed, it is 
 probable that the majority were animated with a 
 feeling of displeasure like to that of the Norse 
 warrior who ardently wished to meet Odin that 
 he might attack and slay him. Nevertheless, they 
 attended to their religious ceremonies ; though 
 they did so, perhaps, very much as most people 
 pay their taxes. Of two evils, they chose the 
 least. But when it was found that Evemerus had 
 
5(5 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 announced that the gods were ordinary bullies, 
 who had been deified because every one was 
 afraid of them, it was very generally thought that 
 the right nail had been struck full on the head. 
 In any event the idea was highly relished ; and 
 when in a certain play an individual was intro- 
 duced who denied that there was such a thing as 
 a Providence, the applause of the audience was 
 appreciatively eruptive. It was like the sight of 
 a sail to shipwrecked sailors. 
 
 This, however, was all very well in comedy, 
 where any little blasphemy brought with it the 
 thrill and flavor of forbidden fruit ; but tragedy 
 was a different matter. There, it is said, when 
 the hero announced his escape from the infernal 
 regions, children screamed and women shud- 
 dered. And indeed the contemporary pictures 
 of the land of shades seem well calculated to 
 terrify even the valiant. In the imagination of 
 the people, any life beyond the tomb was nearly 
 synonymous with an eternal nightmare. Of 
 actual and physical torture there was none, or 
 at least none, they believed, for them. The ven- 
 geance of Jupiter descended only on Titans and 
 insurgent kings ; it disdained the insignificance 
 of the vulgar. 
 
 Nor was there any hope of happiness. The 
 beatitude of the Elysian Fields was only for the 
 anointed. The common mortal received neither 
 reward nor punishment. The just and the unjust 
 were plunged into the grotesque horrors of a 
 fantastic night, from which, save on the stage, 
 there was no escape. 
 
ITie Negations of Antiquity. 57 
 
 The poets, admittedly, gave pictures of after- 
 life that were other and more alluring than this, 
 but their pictures were discredited ; and besides, 
 between the conceptions of the dreamer and the 
 opinions of the masses there is a chasm that is 
 never bridged. To the general public the idea 
 of immortality does not seem to have been a 
 consolation. Probably it partook something of 
 the character of an embarrassing dilemma. On 
 the one hand was the liberty to accept it for what 
 it was worth ; on the other was the privilege to 
 disbelieve in it entirely. There were doubtless not 
 a few who took the latter course, and whose con- 
 sequent freedom of thought must have been a 
 cause of shuddering envy to the orthodox ; but 
 so inextinguishable is the love of life, that the 
 majority seem to have preferred to believe that 
 existence, however miseralble, was continued be- 
 yond the tomb, to adopting any theory which 
 savored of extinction. They were afraid, Seneca 
 said, to go to Hades, and equally afraid not to 
 go anywhere. 
 
 Toward the latter part of the republic, the 
 credulity of the masses was somewhat impaired. 
 Echoes of the obiter dicta of the enlightened 
 reached their ears. Besides, there was then little 
 time for devotional exercises. Rome was in a 
 ferment ; the tramp of soldiery was continuous ; 
 cities were up at auction; nations were outlawed; 
 institutions were falling ; laws were laughed at ; 
 might was right, and magnificent vice triumphant. 
 The field, then, was prepared for nothing if not 
 
^8 Tlte Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 a moralist, and Nature, who is often beneficent, 
 produced one in the nick of time. 
 
 The annals of literature are harmonious with 
 the name of Rome, yet Rome was the mother of 
 but two men of letters — Caesar and this moralist 
 who was called Lucretius. Concerning the latter, 
 history has been niggardly. It is said that he 
 was born when Cassar was a child, and died when 
 Vergil was putting on the toga virilis ; but be- 
 yond these dates history is dumb. 
 
 Lucretius is known to be the author of a poem, 
 the most exquisite perhaps in the Latin tongue ; 
 but after that is recorded there are no anecdotes 
 to help the sentence out. " Veil thy days," 
 Epicurus had said, and the passionate Roman 
 took the maxim for a motto. How he lived or 
 why he lived, has been and now always will be 
 purely conjectural. Yet if there is no diary to 
 tell of the poet's incomings and outgoings, it is 
 not a difficult matter to familiarize oneself with 
 his train of thought and to picture the circum- 
 stances that directed it. 
 
 During his childhood, Sylla and Marius were 
 playing fast-and-loose with their armies and 
 with Rome. As a boy he could have witnessed 
 a massacre beside which St. Bartholomew's was 
 a street row — the massacre of fifty thousand 
 allies at the gates of Rome — and on the morrow 
 he may have heard the cries of eight thousand 
 prisoners who were being butchered in the cir- 
 cus ; while Sylla, with the air of one accounting 
 for a trivial incident, explained to the startled 
 Senate that the uproar came from a handful of 
 
The Negations of Antiquity. ^g 
 
 insurgents bellowing at the whip. Later came 
 the revolt of Spartacus, the conspiracy of Cata- 
 line, the flight of the coward Pompey, and finally 
 the passing and apotheosis of Csesar. If such 
 things are not enough to give impressions to a 
 poet, then one may well wonder what are. 
 
 In a monograph on this subject,* to which, 
 it should be said in passing, the present writer 
 is much indebted, M. Martha has noted that 
 Lucretius believed in but one god. That god 
 was Epicurus. " Deus ille fuit, deus," he ex- 
 claimed ; and if the words sound exuberant, they 
 may perhaps find an excuse in the fact that 
 the Romans were very ignorant and Epicurus 
 very wise. How he became acquainted with 
 the works of the grave Athenian is unrecorded. 
 In Rome, as has been hinted, contemporary 
 acquaintance with them was scant and consisted 
 of hearsay. At that time some fragmentary 
 translations of Greek physics had been made, 
 and it is possible that through them his atten- 
 tion was directed to materialism in general and 
 Epicurism in particular. There is even a legend 
 which represents him studying in Athens at the 
 fountain-head. But however this may be, it is 
 clear that Lucretius gave Rome her first real 
 lesson in philosophy. 
 
 The doctrine which Lucretius preached to 
 his compatriots was one of renunciation — renun- 
 ciation of this world and renunciation of any 
 hope of another. He was fanatical in his dis- 
 belief, and he expounded it with a vehemence 
 
 ■* Le Po&me de Lucrfece. 
 
6o The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 and with an emphasis which, while convincing 
 enough in its way, was yet in striking contrast to 
 the apathy of Epicurus, who, serenely consistent 
 to his principles, saw, as M. Martha says, no 
 need to get excited when admonishing others 
 to be quiet. But their tasks were dissimilar. 
 Epicurus addressed himself to those who were 
 already indifferent, while those who listened to 
 Lucretius were still among the horrors of their 
 original faith. 
 
 It was these horrors that Lucretius set about 
 to dissipate. His imagination had caught fire 
 on the dry materialism of Greece, and it was 
 with the theory of atoms that he sought to rout 
 the gods. The undertaking was not a simple 
 matter. The abolition of the divine was an 
 abolition of every tenet, political as well as devo- 
 tional. The moment the atomistic theory was 
 accepted, away went the idea that the phenomena 
 of nature were dependent on the will of the gods; 
 the whole phantasmagoria of religion faded, and 
 with it the elaborate creed of centuries evaporated 
 into still air. There was nothing left ; even 
 death was robbed of its grotesqueness. 
 
 To those who objected that in devastating the 
 skies a high-road was opened to crime, Lucretius, 
 pointing to the holocausts, the hecatombs and 
 the sacrifices, answered, " It is religion that is 
 the mother of sin.'' 
 
 " Religio peperit scelerosa atque impia facta." 
 
 Other teachers had tried to purify religion, but 
 Lucretius wished nothing short of its entire sup- 
 pression; it had been without pity for Rome, and 
 
The Negations of Antiquity. 6l 
 
 he was without pity for it. He hacked and hewed 
 it with all his strength, and with a strength that 
 was heightened by irony and science. The irony 
 was not new to Rome, but the science was. 
 Against the panic of superstition he opposed the 
 tranquillity of common sense ; against Pavor, 
 Veritas, or at least that which seemed truth to 
 him. 
 
 There is nothing classic about Lucretius except 
 his materialism. The value of that is slight, but 
 contemporary readers have found themselves 
 startled at the modernity of his sentiments. The 
 cry of disgust which came from him is identical 
 with that which the latest singers have uttered. 
 Their common pessimism has been echoed across 
 the centuries. In many ways Lucretius may be 
 considered Pyrrho's heir as well as that of Epi- 
 curus. Between the testators the difference is 
 not wide. One addressed the mind, the other 
 the heart ; the ultimate object, the attainment of 
 happiness, was the same. If their dual influence 
 has been unimportant, it is perhaps because the 
 goal is fabulous. In this respect Lucretius may 
 then be considered their direct successor, and 
 one, moreover, who had his own views regarding 
 the possible improvement of the possessions which 
 descended to him. Lucretius not only denied 
 the existence of the gods, he denied the existence 
 of happiness. There was none in this life, and 
 in his negation of an hereafter there could be 
 none in another. As for ambition, what is it but 
 a desire for an existence in the minds of other 
 people — a desire which when fulfilled is a mockery. 
 
62 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 and unfulfilled a tomb ? And besides, to what 
 does success lead ? To honor, glory and wealth ? 
 But these things are simulachres, not happiness. 
 Any effort, any aspiration, any struggle, is vain. 
 
 ' ' Nequidquam, quoniam medio de fonte leporum 
 Surgit amari aliquid, quod in ipsis floribus angat. ' ' 
 
 Nequidquam. ! In vain, indeed ! How vain, 
 few knew better than Alfred de Musset, when he 
 paraphrased that immortal, if hackneyed, distich 
 in lines like these : 
 
 " Au fond des vains plaisirs que j'appelle h. mon aide, 
 Je sens un tel degout que je me sens mourir. ' ' 
 
 But Lucretius' nequidquam applied not only to 
 empty pleasures ; it applied to all the illusions 
 that circle life, and to all that drape the grave. 
 His disenchantment needed but one thing to be 
 complete, a visit from that thought which was 
 afterwards to haunt De Vigny : 
 
 ' ' Seul, le silence est grand, tout le reste est faiblesse. ' ' 
 
 Whether or not the influence of Lucretius was 
 great enough to effect a revolution, is difficult to 
 determine. But this at least is certain : he was 
 a popular poet, and the appearance of his work 
 coincided with a great decline of superstition. 
 The dread which had been multiplying temples 
 subsided. Among the educated classes, atheism 
 became the fashion. Those who were less indif- 
 ferent occupied themselves in cooling their in- 
 dignation, but believers were infrequent. Varro 
 declared that religion was perishing, not from the 
 
The Negations of Antiquity. 6j 
 
 attacks of its enemies, but from the negligence 
 of the faithless. The testimony of Lucilius is to 
 the effect that no respect was shown to laws, 
 religion, or to gods. To Cicero the latter were 
 absurd ; and the immortality of the soul, which 
 Caesar denied in the open senate, was to him a 
 chimera. " In happiness," he said, " death should 
 be despised ; in unhappiness it should be desired. 
 After it there is nothing.'' Cornelius Nepos 
 looked back and saw temples in ruins, unvisited 
 save by archaic bats. Religion was a thing of 
 the past. Here and there it received that out- 
 ward semblance of respect which is the due of 
 all that is venerable, but faith had faded and 
 fright had ceased to build. The Romans, some 
 one has suggested, were not unlike those fabled 
 denizens of the under-earth, who suddenly de- 
 serted their subterranean palaces, left their toys, 
 their statues and their gods to the darkness, and, 
 emerging into the light, saw for the first time the 
 pervasive blue of the skies and the magnificent 
 simplicity of nature. 
 
 Later there was a revival. The restoration of 
 religion was undertaken as a governmental ne- 
 cessity. The Senate proclaimed the divinity of 
 Augustus, and thereafter the Caesars usurped 
 what little worship was left. That there was much 
 faith in their divinity is doubtful. Valerius Maxi- 
 mus appears to have had no better argument 
 than that they could be seen, which was more 
 than could be said of their predecessors. Ves- 
 pasian seems to have taken the whole thing as a 
 joke. " I am becoming a god," he said with a 
 
64 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 smile as he died. Meanwhile, in the general 
 incredulity, the earlier deities lost even the im- 
 mortality of mummies. Under Diocletian a pan- 
 tomime was given with great success. It was 
 called, The Last Will and Testament of Defunct 
 Jupiter. 
 
The Convulsions of The Church. 63 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE CONVULSIONS OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 The earliest barbarian that invaded Rome was 
 a Jew. He did not tliunder at the g-ates ; he 
 went unheralded to the Taberna Meritoria — a 
 squalid inn on the Tiber that reeked with garlic 
 — broke his fast, and then sauntered forth, as 
 any modern traveller might do, to view the city. 
 His first visit was to his compatriots at the foot 
 of the Janiculum. To them he whispered some- 
 thing, went away, returned and whispered again. 
 After a while he spoke out loud. Some of his 
 hearers contradicted him ; he spoke louder. The 
 peddlers, the rag-pickers, the valets-de-place and 
 hook-nosed porters grew tumultuous at his words. 
 The ghetto was raided, and a complaint for in- 
 citing disorder was lodged against a certain 
 Christus, of whom nothing was known and who 
 had managed to elude arrest. 
 
 Who was this Christus ? Apart from the 
 Gospels, canonical and apocryphal, history gives 
 no answer. He is not mentioned by Philo or 
 Justus. Other makers of contemporary chroni- 
 cles are equally silent. Josephus makes a pass- 
 ing allusion to him, but that passing allusion 
 is very generally regarded as the interpolation 
 of a later hand. It may be added, that while 
 5 
 
66 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 Justus and Josephus say nothing of Jesus, they 
 yet describe Essenism, and in those days many 
 of the tenets of the early Church were indis- 
 tinguishable from it. It seems, therefore, not 
 unfair to suppose that either these historians 
 knew nothing of the teaching of the Christ, or 
 else that they considered it too unimportant to 
 be deserving of record. 
 
 An early legend has, however, been handed 
 down from Celsus, a Jew who lived about the 
 time of Hadrian. The work containing this 
 legend has been lost, and is known only through 
 fragments which Origen has preserved. In sub- 
 stance it amounts to this. A beautiful young 
 woman lived with her mother in a neglected 
 caphar. This young woman, whose name was 
 Mirjam — Mary — supported herself by needle- 
 work. She became betrothed to a carpenter, 
 broke her vows in favor of a soldier named 
 Panthera, and wandering away gave birth to a 
 male child called Jeschu — Jeschu being a con- 
 traction of the Hebrew Jehoshua, of which Jesus 
 is the Greek form. When Jeschu grew up, he 
 went as servant into Egypt, which was then the 
 head-quarters of the magicians. There he learned 
 the occult sciences, and these gave him such 
 confidence that on his return he proclained 
 himself a god. 
 
 The story of Mirjam and Panthera is repeated 
 in the Gemaras — the complements and com- 
 mentaries of the Talmud — and also in the 
 Toledoth Jeschu, an independent collection of 
 traditions relative to the birth of the Christ. 
 
The Convulsions of The Church. 6"^ 
 
 These later accounts differ from that of Celsus 
 merely in this, that Mirjam is represented as a 
 hairdresser, while Panthera or Pandira is de- 
 scribed as a freebooter and a ruffian. It may be 
 noted that, in a work on this subject, Mr. Baring- 
 Gould states that St. Epiphanius, when giving 
 the genealogy of Jesus, brings the name Panthera 
 into the pedigree.* 
 
 The importance of these legends is slight, and 
 the question of their truth or falsity is of small 
 moment. That which it is alone important to 
 consider is the individuality of the Saviour ; and 
 the point whose conveyance has been sought is 
 simply this, that beyond a restricted circle nothing 
 was known of it during the first century of the 
 present era. 
 
 Jesus, the Anointed, the Christ, was the flower 
 of the Mosaic Law. The date of his birth is 
 uncertain, and the story of his early years is 
 vague. The picture of his boyhood, in which 
 he is represented as questioning the Darschanim, 
 the learned men, is, however, familiar to us all. 
 In the schools — the houses of Midrasch, as they 
 were called — he heard the sacred books of his 
 race expounded, and learned such lessons in 
 ethics as were obtainable from the moralists of 
 the day. Meanwhile the dream of Israel, the 
 forecast of a triumphant future, the advent of 
 a Messiah, the abrupt upheaval which was to 
 be both the beginning of the end and the end 
 of the beginning, the punishment of the wicked, 
 the sanctification of the faithful, the remission, Qf 
 * The Lost and Hostile Gospels. 
 
68 The Analomy of Negation. 
 
 sins and the magnificence that was to be, were 
 constantly discussed before him. As he grew 
 older, he seems to have placed little credence 
 on these prophecies ; he waived them aside, 
 retaining only the lessons in ethics, to which, in 
 advancing years, as his own ministry began, he 
 added an idea which he had gathered from one 
 preaching in the wilderness, an idea which his 
 own originality heightened with a newer force 
 and flavor, and which formed the subsequent 
 corner-stone of the Christian Church. 
 
 At that time his belief in himself appears to 
 have been slight. To the title of Messiah he 
 made no claim. It was given to him unsought 
 by his earliest adherents, who later imagined a 
 genealogy which certain fractions of Christianity 
 declined to accept. Among these, the Ebionites 
 and Docets are the most noteworthy. To the 
 one he was an ordinary individual ; to the other, 
 a phantasm. 
 
 The story of his birth is one which is common 
 to many religions. In a fragment of Irenasus it 
 is stated that the Gospel according to St. Matthew 
 was written to the Jews, who earnestly desired a 
 Messiah of the royal line of David. To satisfy 
 them that their wish was fulfilled was not an easy 
 matter. The Aramaic Gospel to the Hebrews, 
 as well as the gospel according to St. Mark, 
 offered no evidence that Jesus was the one they 
 sought. But the early Church had the bold- 
 ness of youth. Against the existing Gospels she 
 opposed a new evangel, one which was more 
 complete and convincing than its predecessors. 
 
The Convulsions of The Church. 6p 
 
 and one, moreover, which bore the revered and 
 authoritative name of Matthew. St. Matthew, 
 however, had then long been dead, and his abil- 
 ity to write in Greek does not appear to have 
 been suspected. 
 
 The Gospel which the Church attributed to 
 him is to-day very generally regarded as a com- 
 pilation of its predecessors, with the addition of 
 a genealogy. The Messiah, it had been prophe- 
 sied, would be of the house of David, and accord- 
 ingly an effort was made to show that Jesus was 
 of the royal race. The royal race seems then to 
 have been extinct ; but that is a side issue. The 
 one point to be noted is that the descent of Jesus 
 is claimed through Joseph, who, it is stated, was 
 not his father. 
 
 The genealogy completed, the historian turned 
 his attention to two passages in what is known 
 to-day as the Old Testament. The first of these 
 passages occurs in Isaiah (vii. 14 — 16), the second 
 in Micah (v. 2). The first relates to a child that 
 the Lord was to give as a sign, and the second 
 designates Bethlehem as his future birthplace. 
 It may be noted that the term in Isaiah which 
 refers to the child's mother, and which was after- 
 wards rendered into wapBivos, is olme, and olme 
 means young woman. The pseudo-Matthew, 
 however, preferred a narrower description, and 
 represented the mother as a virgin. In regard to 
 the second passage, there is doubtless some mis- 
 take, as all impartial commentators are agreed 
 that the nativity of Jesus took place, not at Beth- 
 lehem, but at Nazareth. 
 
70 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 There are, however, few great events which 
 have been handed down through history un- 
 swathed in fables and misconceptions. The 
 Gospel according to St. Matthew — and the re- 
 mark holds true of the others — was written with- 
 out any suspicion that it would be subjected to 
 the scrutiny of later ages ; it was written to pre- 
 pare man for the immediate termination of the 
 world. Such misstatements as it contains may 
 therefore be regarded with a lenient eye. 
 
 But to return to the point. However slight 
 was the belief of Jesus in himself, it is tolerably 
 clear that the pretensions of his adherents angered 
 the Nazarenes. They declined to admit the royal 
 and supernatural claims that were advanced in 
 favor of one whose kinsmen were of the same 
 clay as themselves. To them he was merely a 
 graceful rabbi. Yet when he addressed the won- 
 dering fishers of Galilee, his success was both 
 great and immediate. His electric words thrilled 
 their rude hearts ; they were both charmed and 
 coerced by the grave music which he evoked 
 from the Syro-Chaldaic tongue ; their belief in 
 him was spontaneous ; they regarded him as 
 dwelling in a sphere superior to that of human- 
 ity ; gladly would they have proclaimed him king ; 
 and it was from their unquestioning confidence 
 that Jesus drew a larger trust in himself. Cer- 
 tainly his personal magnetism must have been 
 very great. There is a legend which represents 
 him as being far from well-favored, and this 
 legend, like the others, is doubtless false. It is 
 probable that he possessed that exquisite, if effem- 
 
The Convulsions of The Church, yi 
 
 inate, type of beauty which is not infrequent in 
 the East. One may fancy that his tiger-tawny 
 hair glistened like a flight of bees, and that his 
 face was whiter than the moon. In his words, his 
 manner and appearance, there must have been a 
 charm which was both unusual and alluring. 
 Indeed, there were few who were privileged to 
 come into direct contact with him that did not 
 love him at once ; but the multitude stood aloof. 
 It refused to recognize the son of David in the 
 mystic anarchist who had not where to lay his 
 head. 
 
 The ministry of Jesus did not extend over three 
 years. M. Renan thinks it is possible that it did 
 not extend much over one. But the time, how- 
 ever short, was well filled. On its lessons, races 
 and nations have subsisted ever since. The pity 
 of it is that the purport of the instruction should 
 have been misunderstood. 
 
 It has been already hinted that the cornerstone 
 of the Christian Church was formed of an idea 
 which Jesus gathered from John the Baptist. 
 When, therefore, he sent forth his disciples, he 
 gave them no other message than that which he 
 had himself received : " Go, preach, saying. The 
 kingdom of heaven is at hand." And he added : 
 " Verily, I say unto you. Ye shall not have gone 
 over the cities of Israel before the Son of Man be 
 come." " All these things shall come upon this 
 generation," were his explicit words to his hearers 
 and disciples. After the episodes in the wilder- 
 ness, Jesus went into Galilee, saying, " The time 
 is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand." 
 
J 2 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 And a little later he addressed his auditors in 
 these words : " Verily I say unto you that there 
 be some of them that stand by which shall in no- 
 wise taste of death till they see the Igngdom of 
 God come with power." 
 
 Citations of this kind might be multiplied indef- 
 initely. If the testimony of the Gospels is to be 
 believed, it is evident that the disciples were con- 
 vinced that the fulfilment of the prophecy was 
 a matter of months or at most of a few years. 
 They lived, as M. Renan has noted, in a state of 
 constant expectation. Their watchword was 
 Maran atha. The Lord cometh. In fancy they 
 saw themselves enthroned in immutable Edens, 
 dwelling among realized ideals amid the resplen- 
 dent visions which the prophets had evoked. 
 
 It was this error that formed the corner-stone 
 of the Christian Church. When later it was rec- 
 ognized as such, the Church interpreted the 
 " kingdom of God " as the establishment of the 
 Christian religion. 
 
 But Jesus had no intention of founding a new 
 religion, and still less of substituting a personal 
 doctrine for the Mosaic Law. He came to pre- 
 pare men, not for life, but for death. The virtues 
 which he praised most highly were those of re- 
 nunciation and abnegation of self. His one 
 thought was centred in the approaching end of 
 the world. It was on this belief that the value 
 of his teaching rested ; viewed in any other light, 
 his continual condemnation of labor would be in- 
 explicable; while his prohibition against wealth, 
 his adjuration to forsake all things for his sake, 
 
The Convulsions of The Church. 7^ 
 
 the blow which he struck at the virility of man, 
 his praise of celibacy, his disregard of family 
 ties, his abasement of marriage, and his con- 
 tempt even of the dead, would be without mean- 
 ing. 
 
 The faith which he inculcated was a necessary 
 preparation for the event then assumed to be 
 near at hand. It was exacted as a means of 
 grace. In it the reason, the understanding, had 
 no part. It was the complete submission of the 
 intelligence, a resolution to accept dogmas with- 
 out question. In the moral certainty which his 
 believers possessed of the immediate realization 
 of their hopes, it is not surprising that this faith 
 should have been readily accorded. The enigma 
 lies in the faith of the subsequent centuries. It 
 may be, however, that the doctrine which has 
 descended to us was merely the exoteric teaching. 
 Of at least fifty Gospels that were written, four 
 only have been recognized by the Church. Of 
 these, the originals do not exist, and their sup- 
 posed texts have been so frequently re-touched, 
 that more than thirty thousand variations are said 
 to have been discovered. It may be, then, that 
 there was another doctrine, an esoteric teaching, 
 which was never fully disclosed, or else has been 
 lost in the dust-bins of literature. This pos- 
 sibility is strengthened by the fact that Valen- 
 tine is recorded as asserting that he had received 
 an esoteric doctrine which Jesus imparted only 
 to the most spiritual among his disciples ; and 
 the possibility is further heightened by the incon- 
 gruity between the sublimity of the genius which 
 
'/4 Ths Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 was the Christ's and the tenancy of a belief in the 
 realization of the visions of Daniel. 
 
 Jesus was in no sense a scientist, but his in- 
 sight was piercing and his intuitions clairvoyant. 
 He was the most transcendent of rebels, but he 
 was possessed of a comprehension too unerring 
 to be deluded by the Utopias of dreams. It may 
 be, then, that in the solitudes of the desert he 
 conceived some such system as that which was 
 taught by his predecessor in Nepal. To him, as 
 to the Buddha, life was a tribulation. And what 
 fairer paradise could there be than the infinite 
 rest of chaos ? Let the sullen rumble of accursed 
 life once be quelled, and God's kingdom would 
 indeed be come with power. What save this 
 could have been that peace which passeth all 
 understanding ? 
 
 It may be remembered that according to the 
 Hebrew sages man survived only in his children. 
 The doctrine of resurrection, and the attendant 
 theory of rewards and punishments, was unknown 
 to them. But at the time of the advent of the 
 Christ, these ideas were part of the teaching of 
 the Pharisaic party. Where they were gathered 
 is uncertain. They may have been acquired 
 through acquaintance with the Parsis — and cer- 
 tainly Satan bears an astonishing resemblance to 
 Ahriman — or they may have merely represented 
 the natural development of Messianic hopes. In 
 any event they seem to have pre-occupied Jesus 
 greatly ; and when questioned about them, he 
 gave answers which, while delicate in their irony, 
 are seldom other than vague. 
 
The Convulsions of The Church. 75 
 
 It is probable that at the time when the ques- 
 tions were addressed to him, his system, which 
 owing to his sudden death was perhaps never 
 fully elaborated, was then merely in germ. But 
 that he reflected deeply over the views of the 
 patriarchs there can be no doubt, and it is equally 
 indubitable that he considered the high-road to 
 salvation to be discoverable, if anywhere, through 
 them. The logic of it amounted to this : Life 
 is evil ; the evil subsists through procreation ; 
 ergo, abolish procreation and the evil disap- 
 pears. 
 
 Many texts from the canonical Gospels might 
 be given in support of this statement, but to 
 cultivated readers they are doubtless too familiar 
 to need repetition here. For the moment, there- 
 fore, it will suffice to quote two passages from 
 the lost Gospel according to the Egyptians, a 
 chronicle which was known to exist in the second 
 half of the second century, and was then regarded 
 as authoritative by certain Christian sects. The 
 passages are to be found in the Stromata of 
 Clement of Alexandria, iii. 6 — 9. In one, the 
 Saviour speaks as follows : " I am come to destroy 
 the work of the woman : of the woman, that is 
 of concupiscence, whose works are generation 
 and death." In the other passage, Salome, hav- 
 ing asked how long men should live, the Lord 
 answered, " So long as you women continue to 
 bear children." 
 
 These passages, if authentic, and there is little 
 reason to think them otherwise, seem tolerably 
 conclusive. In any event, it was this idea that 
 
7(5 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 peopled with hermits the deserts of Nitria and 
 Scete, and it was this same idea which in its 
 weakened force filled those bastilles of God, the 
 convents and monasteries of pre-mediseval days. 
 Cerdo, Marcion, and others of lesser note, advo- 
 cated a doctrine of which it was evidently the 
 starting-point; in many religious communities its 
 influence is still distinguishable; but the question 
 as to whether or not the idea as here represented 
 was really the one on which the thoughts of the 
 Saviour were turned, seems best answerable in the 
 affirmative, if for no other reason than that it is 
 less extravagant and more logical to regard the 
 Christ as a practical philosopher than as an allur- 
 ing visionary. And if he was not the one, he 
 must have been the other. Certainly no one 
 can claim for him any higher originality than 
 that which was manifested in the form and flavor 
 of his parables. He was the most entrancing of 
 nihilists, but he was not an innovator. Others 
 before him had instituted a reaction against the 
 formalism of the Judaic creed. The austerity of 
 his ethics, the communism which he preached, 
 his contempt of wealth, and his superb disdain 
 of everything which was of this world, were 
 integral parts of the doctrine of the Essenes. 
 The conception of a Supreme Being, differing in 
 benignity from the implacable terrorism which 
 Jehovah exerted, had been already begun by the 
 prophets. Jesus unquestionably amplified the 
 Father of Israel into the God of Humanity, but 
 he did not invent him. It may be further noted 
 that Jesus had no thought of representing him- 
 
T^ie Convulsions of The Church. 77 
 
 self as an incarnation or descendant of the Deity. 
 To such a title he made no claim, nor except in 
 certain passages inserted in the fourth Gospel, 
 is he ever represented as using it. If Son of God 
 at all, he was so in the sense that might apply- 
 to all men, and of which the address beginning, 
 " Our Father who art in heaven," is a fitting 
 example. 
 
 Yet this at least may be said. He created 
 pure sentiment, the love of the ideal. He gave 
 the world a fairer theory of aesthetics, a new 
 conception of beauty, and he brought to man a 
 dream of consolation which has outlasted cen- 
 turies and taken the sting from death. So 
 singular and powerful was the affection which 
 he inspired, that after the crucifixion, Mary of 
 Magdala, in the hallucinations of her love as- 
 serted that he had arisen. He arose, indeed, 
 but as elsewhere suggested, it was in the ador- 
 ing hearts of his disciples. And had it been 
 otherwise, had their natures been less vibrant, 
 their sympathies less exalted, less susceptible to 
 psychological influences, the world would have 
 lost its suavest legend, and the name of the pale 
 Nazarene would have faded with those of the 
 Essenes of the day. 
 
 M. Renan says that Rome, through relations 
 with Syria, was probably the first occidental city 
 that learned of the new belief. There were then, 
 he has noted, many Jews there. Some were 
 descendants of former prisoners of war, others 
 were fugitives ; but all were poor, miserable and 
 down-trodden. To this abject colony Christianity 
 
7<f The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 brought an unexpected hope. The ideal, it is 
 true, had fled from earth ; but was it not possible 
 to find it again above ? 
 
 Many there were that accepted the new creed 
 unquestioningly, but some of their more con- 
 servative brethren, disturbed at its dissidence 
 with their orthodox tenets, denounced their com- 
 patriots to the government. It is possible that a 
 certain amount of suppression was then exercised, 
 but it appears to have been accidental and mo- 
 mentary. The Romans were familiar with too 
 many deities to be alarmed at the advent of a 
 new one. Their polytheistic tendencies made it 
 quite easy for them to believe in a god, made 
 man, and the suppressions which ensued were 
 ordered in the interest of the public peace. The 
 Christians were evidently regarded as seditious ; 
 in denying the divinity of the Caesars they were 
 guilty of nothing less than high-treason. They 
 were punished accordingly, but their punishment 
 had no religious signification. The Epicureans 
 might easily have been subjected to analogous 
 treatment, but the Epicureans were philosophers, 
 and as such saw no reason for pulling a wry face 
 at harmless mummeries. 
 
 Then, too, the early Christians seem to have 
 made themselves extremely unpopular. The Pan- 
 theon was most hospitable ; its niches were free 
 to every comer. But the believers in the Naza- 
 rene would have none of it. They not only refused 
 any allegiance to Olympian potentates, but they 
 would not permit their own God to consort with 
 them. It was tantamount to saying that Jupiter's 
 
The Convulsions of The Church. yo 
 
 society was pernicious. There were few indeed 
 that pinned much faith to that opulent divinity ; 
 but the open show of respect which was demanded 
 as a governmental necessity was generally ac- 
 corded, and nothing else was asked. The Chris- 
 tians, moreover, gave offence by their mode of 
 life. They appear to have been a quiet, silent and 
 possibly inoffensive sect, who avoided the forum 
 and the circus, and passed their hours in sullen 
 seclusion. Added to this, they predicted the 
 approaching end of the world, which was obsti- 
 nate enough to continue to revolve through spa- 
 cious voids of which they were utterly ignorant ; 
 and this prophecy on their part could not have 
 been regarded otherwise than as an open slur on 
 the imperial optimism of the day. 
 
 It was doubtless about this time that the edict, 
 Non licet esse Christianas, was passed — an edict 
 which with curious clairvoyance appears to have 
 been directed mainly against those Romans who 
 were tempted to embrace the new belief. It is 
 one of the platitudes of history that Rome fell 
 through her rottenness. Yet, as M. Renan has 
 been at no loss to show, Rome fell when her 
 soldiery became converted. The spirit of peace 
 which pervaded the early Church enervated a 
 nation ; the virility of the most belligerent of 
 races was sapped. But this is a digression. 
 During its infancy, Christianity was smitten by 
 a disease which has been likened to croup. 
 This croup was endemic in Alexandria, and 
 from there floated over to Rome. It was called 
 Gnosticism. 
 
8o The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 Gnosticism was a compound of corrupt Plato- 
 nism, Hinduism and charlatanism. To abandon 
 M. Renan's simile and take another, it was the 
 bridge over which the world passed from pagan- 
 ism. Gnosticism gathered up theosophy, mys- 
 ticism, rites, ceremonials and art — everything, 
 in fact, which seemed worth the gathering — and 
 passed them all to Christianity, which, thus 
 equipped, set out on its triumphant career. But 
 not at once. The populace, as has been hinted, 
 was not favorably disposed. Tertullian says 
 that a Christian was defined as an enemy of 
 gods, emperors, laws, customs, and Nature itself. 
 To the believers in Jesus was ascribed the influ- 
 ence of that which the modern Roman calls the 
 jettatura. They were held to be connected with 
 every calamity ; and after each disaster the 
 Eternal City echoed with shrieks from uncounted 
 throats, Christianas ad leonem ! To the circus 
 with the Christians ; let them camp with the 
 beasts ! It was then that Christianity learned 
 to hate. 
 
 Meanwhile, the Ghetto mounted like a flood. 
 Its ascension was favored by many things. The 
 atmosphere of Rome dripped with metaphysics, 
 and through it had passed a new and pervading 
 sense of lassitude. Nero was dead ; and Nero, it 
 may be noted, was paradox incarnate. He was 
 an imperial nightmare that was far from unpop- 
 ular ; a drama of the horrible, with a joke for 
 finale ; a caricature of the impossible in a crimson 
 frame ; a Caesar whose follies were laws and 
 whose laws were follies ; a maniac whose cell was 
 
nie Convulsions of The Church. 8 1 
 
 the world and whose delirium was fame ; a scep- 
 tred acrobat, with a throne for spring-board ; an 
 emperor jealous of a tenor ; and a cabotin jealous 
 of the gods ; in fact, the antithesis of the hum- 
 drum. Under him, Rome saw luxury and feroc- 
 ity hand-in-hand ; cruelty married to pleasure. 
 Christians mantled in flame illuminated the gar- 
 dens of a prince. Intoxication had no frontiers. 
 Life itself was a breathless chase after impossible 
 delights. But now all was quite different, and it 
 •was with something of that lassitude which suc- 
 ceeds an orgy that the Romans found themselves 
 tired even of themselves. They could not all have 
 the moon for mistress. What was there left for 
 them to do ? Christianity offered itself, and as 
 often as not Christianity was accepted. 
 
 After Constantine had used the new belief as 
 a masquerade, its spread was rapid. Julian, in- 
 deed, threatened to prevent such of the Galileans 
 from wearing their heads as refused to aid him 
 in the reconstruction of polytheism, but the halt 
 under him was momentary. The impulsion con- 
 tinued unchecked ; the intermediate persecutions 
 had made it notorious ; the advance continued, 
 but in the advance the watchword, Maran atha, 
 had lost its meaning. The end of the world was 
 no longer expected. Fortune favoring, Christian- 
 ity turned optimist. Yet paganism was not dead ; 
 it had merely fallen asleep. Isis gave way to 
 Mary ; apotheosis was replaced by canonization ; 
 the divinities were succeeded by saints ; and, 
 Africa aiding, the Church surged from mythology 
 with the Trinity for tiara. 
 6 
 
82 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 At the close of the fourth century, the Church 
 was practically mistress of civilization. Her sway 
 was immense and uncontested. And what a sway 
 it was ! Temples, statues and manuscripts were 
 destroyed. Bands of monks went about pillag- 
 ing and demolishing whatever they could. The 
 Bishop Theophilus, after destroying the temple of 
 Serapis, set fire to the Alexandrian library which 
 contained nearly all the literary treasures of the 
 past. But the power of the Church, though mag- 
 nificent, was brief. At the moment when her- 
 glory was most brilliant, when Julian was for- 
 gotten and persecution had ceased, a mixed mul- 
 titude of barbarians beat at the gates of Rome, 
 and in their victorious onslaught swept antiquity 
 away. 
 
 When the Church found herself surrounded by 
 unfamiliar kings and chieftains — a set of fair, 
 proud, honest and brutal ignoramuses, who wan- 
 dered from place to place, or shut themselves up 
 and got drunk in their strongholds, and with 
 whom she had nothing in common — her domi- 
 nant idea was to govern them. In this she suc- 
 ceeded : strength, however great, is defenceless 
 against cunning, and the Church then was the 
 depository of all the intelligence of the age. But 
 her first act was to save herself from the violence 
 to which society fell a prey. To save herself, she 
 announced the principle of a separation of spirit- 
 ual and temporal power. This accepted, she 
 announced as corollary the superiority of the 
 spiritual over the temporal. The rest was easy. 
 Free inquiry was condemned ; belief was forced ; 
 
The Convulsions of The Church. 83 
 
 heretics were persecuted ; and out of the ashes 
 of imperial Rome a mitred prelate dragged a 
 throne. L'Eglise, c'etait lui. Through his influ- 
 ence the barbarians were led tc5 baptism like 
 brutes to the slaughter. Those who objected 
 were baptized by force. Dagobert had all Gaul 
 baptized in this way. Thereafter the Church 
 presided over an eclipseof the intellect that lasted 
 a thousand years. During that thousand years it 
 was blasphemy to think ; yet over those ages that 
 are known as dark there hovered that prescience 
 of fairer things which is the accompaniment of 
 night. 
 
 Meanwhile, in a corner of the Orient whither 
 some of the flotsam and jetsam of civilization had 
 drifted, a college of charlatans wearied the cen- 
 turies with abstractions and discussions on 
 words. Their earlier disputes are legendary. 
 One of them concerned the soul. Was the soul 
 round or oblong ? This question was never satis- 
 factorily determined. Another proposition which 
 was much discussed concerned the Saviour. Was 
 he, or was he not, co-eternal with God ? The 
 Council at Nicsea, to which appeal was made, 
 decided that he was both ; and the Church 
 anathematized all those who disagreed with its 
 decision. In spite of the anathema, certain 
 erudites suggested a compromise which involved 
 the acceptance or rejection of an iota : hiMoimai 
 signified consubstantial, (S/toioi/o-ios signified like 
 as to the substance. If the one term were re- 
 placed by the other, the difficulty, it was argued, 
 would be removed. But this solution was too 
 
84 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 easy to be well received, and the absence of 
 that iota caused the death of several thousand 
 dissenters. 
 
 Later, Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople, 
 asserted that Mary, being of the earth earthy 
 could not rightly be considered the mother of a 
 God. This assertion was condemned as heretical 
 by the General Council of Ephesus, and it was 
 ordered that those who accepted it should be ex- 
 terminated at once. Eutyches the archimandrite 
 announced the contrary of that which Nestorius 
 had advanced. He, too, was excommunicated ; 
 the true doctrine being that Jesus was both a 
 perfect divinity and a perfect man. Then sud- 
 denly the Orient became peopled with heretics ; 
 some held to Nestorius, others to Eutyches. In 
 the second quarter of the sixth century, Justinian, 
 an emperor who is said to have been so illiterate 
 that he could not write his own name, and who 
 in consequence was easily bored by subtleties, 
 confiscated the property of all who were suspected 
 either of Nestorian or Eutychian sympathies. In 
 spite of these efforts, heresy was not suppressed ; 
 or perhaps it would be more exact to say that 
 when one was suppressed, its place was immedi- 
 ately filled by another. At last, Heraclitus in 
 utter exasperation issued an edict forbidding 
 any one to speak of the single or double nature 
 of Jesus the Christ. This edict itself was re- 
 garded as heretical, and continued to be so re- 
 garded until Constant published another which 
 forbade any theological discussion, no matter of 
 what kind, nature or description, To this edict, 
 
Tlie Convulsions of The Church. 8^ 
 
 which the Pope Theodore qualified as an abomi- 
 nable subtlety, no one paid any attention. Con- 
 stant, however, refused to be idle. He tried to 
 check the spread of monachism, which at that 
 time was enormous, and failing, went to Rome 
 and sacked it. 
 
 In the eighth century appeared the heresy 
 known as that of the iconoclasts. The Church, 
 as has been hinted, adopted much of the pomp of 
 paganism, and with advancing years made her- 
 self gorgeous with crosses, images and tapers ; 
 but a particular predilection was manifested in 
 favor of big dolls, whether of marble, bronze or 
 precious metals. To this the iconoclasts objected ; 
 with the Emperor Leo for chief, they destroyed the 
 statues of Jesus, of Mary, of the saints and angels, 
 wherever such statues were to be found ; and 
 for many years persecuted and massacred the 
 worshippers. Yet when the Empress Irene as- 
 sumed the purple, the iconoclasts were at once 
 pursued with a vigor that was riotous and aveng- 
 ing. It is just possible that this terrible lady 
 perceived that the destruction of images was the 
 destruction of art. But be this as it may, the 
 Beautiful had been sadly frightened, and there- 
 after remained invisible until lured to view again 
 by the enticements of the Renaissance. 
 
 In Europe, matters were even worse. There 
 was a continual panic, a ceaseless fear. There 
 was no security, either civil or ecclesiastical. 
 Diseases of the mind and body were omnipres- 
 ent ; famine at times was so ruthless that an- 
 thropophagy was openly practised. The only 
 
86 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 theory of right was might, and of this the Church 
 held the reins. Many of the bishops were little 
 better than bandits. They passed their days in 
 wandering from place to place and in pillaging 
 right and left. In a forgotten tale of Cervantes, 
 one amiable scoundrel hails another, " Does your 
 Grace happen to be a highwayman ? " " Yes," 
 the other answers, " in the service of God and 
 honest people." Eliminate the courtesy and re- 
 place it with a blow from a bludgeon, and the 
 question and answer may be represented as re- 
 peated indefinitely for five centuries. 
 
 Those of the clergy whose tastes were less ad- 
 venturous devoted themselves to study and were 
 looked upon as magicians ; others, in the dim 
 recesses of undrained monasteries, weary of all 
 things, and most of life, gave themselves up un- 
 resistingly to acedia, the delirious pessimism of 
 the cloister, and shrieked for death. 
 
 It was in those days that a demon of uncom- 
 mon ugliness flitted through the gloom of the 
 abbeys, whispering gaily to the cowering monks, 
 "Thou art damned, and thou, and thou art 
 damned for all eternity ! " In the cathedrals, 
 maidens had seen a beckoning fiend, who 
 through shudders of song had called them down 
 to swell the red quadrilles of hell. These visitors 
 of course were legates of Satan. And who was 
 Satan ? His biography, though well filled, need 
 not be long. 
 
 Satan was Jew from horn to hoof The regis- 
 try of his birth is contained in the evolution of 
 Hebraic thought. In early ages, when sabaism. 
 
Jlie Convulsions of The Church. Sy 
 
 the primitive polytheism of the Semitic tribes, 
 narrowed into monotheism, Jehovah was wor- 
 shipped as the one real divinity. In his hands 
 were the springs of all that is, of good and evil as 
 well. But this idea was transient. About the 
 Eternal were grouped a number spirits whose 
 duty it was to supervise the works of man. Among 
 these celestials was one whose role was limited 
 to that of accuser. This role appears to have 
 been gradually expanded into one of general 
 hostility. Above was Jehovah, below was man ; 
 while between the two were the inimical eyes of 
 Satan. In the younger books of the Old Testa- 
 ment, Satan is little more than a detective ; in 
 the New Testament he is an inciter to evil. But 
 during the intervening period two things seem to 
 have happened. The Hebrews had communi- 
 cated with the Parsis, and Satan, banished from 
 heaven, had assumed all the powers and attri- 
 butes of Ahriman. Thereafter he was hatred 
 incarnate, the spirit that stets verneint, the fallen 
 son of a mighty father, a disinherited prince who 
 had founded a rival monarchy and called it 
 Hell. 
 
 It is in this guise that he appears in the New 
 Testament, and the delicate moral of the Synop- 
 tic Gospels is perhaps little more than the pre- 
 figurement of the endless conflict between right 
 and wrong. But be this as it may, it is evident 
 that after Satan and the Saviour had met, the 
 apparitions of the former became a matter of fre- 
 quent occurrence. Did not his minions the 
 sucubes and incubes haunt with lascivious lips 
 
88 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 the sleep of holy men and holier women ? Was 
 it not through his artifices that St. Victor was 
 seduced by a beautiful girl ? Did he not person- 
 ally menace and threaten St. Maur ? The stone 
 which he flung at the inflexible St. Dominick is a 
 matter too well attested to be susceptible of doubt. 
 See how he tempted St. Anthony. In fact, un- 
 visited by him it was difficult to be considered a 
 a saint at all. In the middle ages he was every- 
 where. The atmosphere was so heavy with his 
 legions, that the Messalians made spitting a part 
 of their devotions. From encountering him at 
 every turn, the world at last became used to his 
 ways, and thereupon imagined that pact in which 
 the devil agrees, in exchange for the soul, to fur- 
 nish whatever is desired. The case of Gerbert is 
 one in point. According to the gossip of the day, 
 Gerbert, once a Spanish student, afterwards 
 Archbishop of Ravenna, and subsequently Pope, 
 entered into an agreement of this kind, and one 
 night the devil came in person to claim him. It 
 was the agreement they had made together long 
 before in Cordova, where Gerbert, finding his 
 studies too arduous, had signed the bond in ex- 
 change for the royal road. It was the devil who 
 had taught him all he knew — algebra, clock-mak- 
 ing, and how to become a Pope. It was clear as 
 day that he would have known none of these things 
 without infernal assistance. Gerbert resists, but 
 Mephisto proves his claim. "You did not think 
 me a logician, did you ? " are said to have been 
 his historic words, and, presto 1 Gerbert disap- 
 pears in a fork of lambent flame. 
 
The Convulsions of The Church. 8g 
 
 When Christianity first raised its head, it 
 viewed the pagan gods as part of the cohorts of 
 Satan. These cohorts Tertullian divided into 
 two classes — the rebels who had been banished 
 from heaven in Satan's train, and the angels who 
 in antediluvian days had fallen in love with the 
 daughters of men. Their queen was Lili Abi 
 (Lilith), Adam's first wife, from whose name 
 our lullaby is said to be derived. The Dusii, a 
 later subdivision who have given us the deuce, 
 were so well known to St. Augustine that he 
 declared it an impertinence to deny their exist- 
 ence. These latter appear to have been a 
 malignant set of incubi who made a prey of 
 women. Mr. Lecky says that but little over 
 a hundred years ago an annual mass was given in 
 the abbey of Poissey that the nuns might be pre- 
 served from their wiles. 
 
 Satan, meanwhile, lost much of his dignity. 
 Mice, wolves and toads became his symbols, his 
 auxiliaries, and even his momentary incarnations. 
 Throughout the middle ages no sorcerer was con- 
 sidered well equipped without a sleek black cat, 
 an animal to which, like many a sensible mortal, 
 the devil appears to have been greatly attached. 
 It was in the company of the cat that the sabbat 
 was attended. The sabbat was popularly held 
 to be a mass offered to Satan, and any one sus- 
 pected of attending it, or being in any wise 
 affiliated with Mephisto, was burned. The first 
 punishment for this offence occurred in Toulouse 
 in 1275. During the next fifty years over four 
 hundred people were burned in the neighbor- 
 
po The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 hood. In the fifteenth century all Christianity 
 joined in a hunt for witches ; and the hunt con- 
 tinued for three hundred years, until every sor- 
 cerer had disappeared and Salem put out her 
 bonfires. In each country the warmth of the 
 chase was in direct proportion to the power of 
 the clergy. To spare a witch was considered an 
 insult to the Almighty. Luther was particularly 
 vehement on this point ; so, too, was Calvin ; 
 and Wesley was as great a fanatic as any. Mon- 
 taigne was one of the first to laugh at witchcraft ; 
 but Montaigne, like all advanced thinkers, was 
 wickedly incredulous. The hunt, as has been 
 hinted, was continued, and it was kept up not 
 only until all the witches had disappeared, but 
 until all belief in the devil had gone with them. 
 Persecution subsided when scepticism began. 
 The history of the Inquisition is exactly analo- 
 gous. When the world began to think, intol- 
 erance ceased. 
 
 During this time Satan was not otherwise idle. 
 He continued to appear in the most unexpected 
 and surprising manner, and that, too, up to with- 
 in comparatively recent dates. His last historical 
 appearance is in a pleasant anecdote in which 
 he is represented as visiting Cuvier. He enters 
 the great man's study with his usual qucerens 
 qucni dcvoret air. " What do you wish of me ? " 
 Cuvier asks curtly, for he is annoyed at the in- 
 trusion. " I've come to eat you." But Cuvier's 
 shrewd eye had already examined him. " Horns 
 and hoofs ! " he retorts ; " granivorous ! You 
 can't do it.'' Whereupon, outfaced by science. 
 
The Convulsions of The Church. gi 
 
 Satan vanished through an in-quarto, never to 
 appear again save vi^hen, in the garb and aspect 
 of a policeman, he visits the conscience of the 
 misdemeanant. 
 
 But to return to the middle ages. The chroni- 
 cles of Cassien, Vincent de Beauvais and Raoul 
 Glaber, are filled with lurid pictures of those 
 dark days. Disasters followed one another with 
 the regularity of the seasons. The desolation 
 which the Church had sought to stay had in- 
 creased to terrific proportions. The empire of 
 Karl the Great had been swept away as utterly 
 as that of the Csesars. Throughout Europe there 
 was a hideous fear, a breathless expectation. 
 The Antichrist had come. His presence was 
 signalled from the pulpit. Churches, monas- 
 teries, donjons and burgs, echoed and thrilled 
 with the rumor of his sacrileges. Now he was 
 the son of the Popess Johanna, conceived during 
 a pontifical procession ; now he was a ruffian 
 marauder, burning basilicas and violating the 
 tombs of the saints. In the ninth century there 
 was an eclipse of the sun which frightened a 
 king to death. In 945, while a cyclone swept 
 over Paris, monsters armed with battle-axes 
 dropped from the skies, and, rushing into a 
 church, tore down the pulpit, which they used 
 as a battering-ram to destroy a neighboring 
 house. In 988, a wolf entered the cathedral of 
 Orleans, and, seizing the bell-rope in his mouth, 
 rang out the knell of the world. It was evident to 
 every one that the trumpets of the last judgment 
 were soon to be heard. At once there was a 
 
g2 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 frantic effort to make peace with God ; there was 
 a rush for the monasteries, and a general dona- 
 tion of property to the Church. The dies irce 
 was at hand. The exact date was known. It 
 was to come on the 25th of March, A. D. 1000. 
 An hysterical rictus passed over the face of 
 Christendom ; the forgotten hope was to be 
 realized ! At last the dies ilia arrived. In the 
 Holy See the Pope sat, enervated and impatient, 
 counting the minutes and awaiting the climax 
 through the succeeding fractions of each "hour. 
 In the churches, the crowd, with heads bowed 
 to the ground, felt time limp by and yet saw no 
 sign. The expectation lasted four days and 
 four nights. Then, so runs the chronicle, an 
 immense dragon rushed through the open skies. 
 In an abbey the eyes of a Christ were seen to 
 weep. Yet still the earth remained unsundered 
 and humanity unclaimed. 
 
 When the panic subsided, the Church found 
 that her wealth had been largely increased. Her 
 power, too, had developed. The cowl was every- 
 where, and everywhere it was dreaded. This 
 dread was not unmingled with disgust ; the fana- 
 ticism, asceticism and illiteracy of the clergy 
 resulted as often as not in delirium and satyrisis. 
 Indeed, their customs were neither amiable nor 
 cleanly. The different bulls which the Popes 
 launched at them make it easy to see of what 
 they were capable, and difficult to fancy of what 
 they were not. But their manners and morals 
 are relatively unimportant; the terrorism that 
 the Church exerted is more to the point. 
 
Tlie Convulsions of The Church. gj 
 
 The chief instruments of coercion of which 
 the Church disposed were excommunication and 
 the confessional. Without confession, no abso- 
 lution ; and without absolution, eternal torture. 
 
 There is a quaint little anecdote about the 
 Cur^ of Mendon, in which that immortal jester is 
 represented face to face with Clement VII. His 
 Holiness having graciously permitted him to ask 
 a favor, Rabelais begged to be excommunicated. 
 Exclamation-points and question-marks shot from 
 the Pontiff's eyes. " Holy Father,'' said the apos- 
 tate, "I am a Frenchman. I come from a little 
 town called Chinon, where the stake is often 
 seen. A good many fine people have been burned 
 there : some of my relatives, among others. But 
 if your Holiness would excommunicate me, I 
 fancy that I would never be burned. And my 
 reason is this. Journeying lately with the Bishop 
 from Paris to Rome, we passed through the 
 Tarantaises, where the cold is bitter. Having 
 reached a hut where dwelled an old woman, we 
 besought her to make a fire. She took a faggot 
 and tried to light it, but did not succeed ; then 
 she took some straw from her bed, and, being 
 still unable to make it burn, she began cursing, 
 and said, ' Since the faggot won't burn, it must 
 have been excommunicated by the Pope's own 
 jaw.'" This of course occurred after the Refor- 
 mation, and relates to a man who was a notorious 
 sceptic. It is even probable that the story is a 
 fabrication ; but as an anecdote it is serviceable 
 in pointing the moral of the decadence of great 
 things. In the primitive days of the Church, ex- 
 
^4 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 communication amounted merely to expulsion. 
 Those against wliom it was addressed were shut 
 out of a limited circle ; but when that circle 
 expanded until it circumscribed all society, the 
 potency of excommunication was prodigious. If 
 the anathema was launched at a king, his entire 
 monarchy fell under the ban. When Philippe 
 Auguste was excommunicated, neither baptism, 
 marriage nor burial was permitted in the realm. 
 Corpses rotted in the highways. The people 
 became wild with terror. This state of affairs 
 lasted for eighteen months — in fact, until the 
 interdict was removed. But with time, as has 
 been hinted, its potency waned ; like other 
 good things, it was overdone ; and early in the 
 fifteenth century all those who had the heart to 
 laugh must have been hugely amused at the 
 spectacle of three rival popes excommunicating 
 each other. 
 
 During the dark ages, however, amusement 
 was rare. The masses were a prey to all the 
 delusions and depressions that come of poor 
 nourishment. They were ignorant and credu- 
 lous ; their minds were filled with fables and 
 legends ; they were terrorized by the dead as 
 well as the living; agonized in this life, they were 
 threatened with everlasting torture in another. 
 It is, therefore, but small wonder that they 
 shuddered at the viaticum and trembled before 
 the priest. It was through his ministrations 
 alone that salvation vvas obtainable. 
 
 At first the priest was merely an intercessor. 
 In return for his good offices, he asked of the 
 
The Convulsions of The Church. p5 
 
 penitent little else than fasting, prayer and con- 
 trition; but gradually he discovered that these 
 canonical penances were without advantage to 
 himself, and he began to exact payment for the 
 divine forgiveness which it was his privilege to 
 declare. In the course of time, this custom was 
 found so profitable that plenary indulgences were 
 granted. In 1300, pilgrims from far and near 
 flocked to Rome and covered the altars with 
 gold. Every sin, every penalty, was remitted. 
 The claims of purgatory were obliterated. The 
 joy was so great, that the pilgrimage was called 
 a jubilee. 
 
 The jubilee was instituted by Boniface VIII., 
 the author of the bull Ausculta fili, in which 
 he declared that, as representative of God, he 
 had the right and the power to uproot, tear 
 down, destroy, dissipate, rebuild and raise up in 
 His name. In spite of this fine language, the 
 Avignon Consistory established that he had 
 asserted that the Trinity was an absurdity; that 
 it was fatuous to believe in it; that religion was 
 a lie ; that there was no harm in adultery ; and 
 that he, the pope, who could humble kings, was 
 mightier than Christ. 
 
 The success of the first jubilee was so great 
 that Urban VI. held another ; only instead of 
 summoning the pilgrims to Rome, he allowed 
 his absolution to be hawked about wherever 
 sinners most did congregate. It had been said 
 that the riches of man are his redemption, and 
 the clergy were very ready to put the saying into 
 practice. Indulgences were not only sold, they 
 
p6 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 appear to have been forced on those who refused 
 them. A dominican, Johan Tetzel, took charge 
 of the sale in Germany of those granted by 
 Leo X. He announced that he had power to 
 deliver a full discharge from the penalties of sin, 
 even si quis Virginem vitiasset ac gravidam 
 fecisset. His tariff is still exhibited. 
 
 Meanwhile, the General Councils had moved 
 from Constantinople to Rome. The heresies 
 which they were called upon to consider were 
 mainly protestations against the despotism of the 
 Church. First came the heresies of the Petro- 
 busians and the Arnoldists — unimportant, but 
 vexatious ; so vexatious, in fact, that their re- 
 spective founders, Petrus de Brueys and Arnold 
 de Bresse, were burned at the stake. The Petro- 
 busians were followed by the Vaudois, who, al- 
 though pursued, proscribed and anathematized, 
 maintained a secret continuity until Calvinism 
 offered them a harbor. Another heresy was that 
 of the Albigenses. The Albigenses, who came 
 from a village in Languedoc, at a time Michelet 
 has noted, when Languedoc was a Babel, pro- 
 fessed a mixture of Gnosticism and Manicheism. 
 They considered the Saviour to have been a man, 
 like any other, who had suffered the just punish- 
 ment of his sins. But, what was more serious, 
 they questioned the prerogatives of the Holy See. 
 Innocent III. determined to exterminate them. 
 At his commands the King of France and the 
 Duke of Burgundy set out for Languedoc. The 
 query was, how the heretics were to be distin- 
 quished from the orthodox. "Kill them all, " said 
 
Tlie Convulsions of Hie Church. p/ 
 
 Armand, the pope's legate ; " kill them all ; God 
 will know his own." Sixty thousand are reported 
 to have been killed ; and of these, seven thousand 
 were slaughtered in a cathedral that was ringing 
 with a Te Deum. The whole of Provence was 
 devastated ; vines were uprooted, harvests de- 
 stroyed, and houses torn down. As this seemed 
 insufficient, the bishops received orders to visit 
 personally or by delegate any portion of their 
 diocese in which they suspected that heretics 
 might lurk. When this decretal was made, the 
 Inquisition was established. " Et ardet," said 
 the pseudo St. John ; and those two words were 
 sufficient to send over half-a-million of human 
 beings to the stake.* Yet still heresies continued 
 to appear. There was the heresy of the Dulcin- 
 ists, the heresy of John Wicliffe, of John Huss, of 
 Jerome of Prague. J'en passe et des plus ex- 
 quises. 
 
 From the Crusades, in which nations wrangled 
 over a sepulchre, sprang a new heresy, or rather 
 an apostasy — that of the Templars, whose office 
 it had been to protect pilgrims on their way to 
 the East. It was claimed that, instead of attend- 
 ing to their duties, they had become believers 
 in Muhammad ; and, moreover, that they held 
 Salahaddin to be a valiant and courteous knight, 
 which he probably was. Muhammad, who had 
 long been turned to dust, was a well-intentioned 
 visionary, afflicted with what is known to patho- 
 logy as hysteria muscularis — the only disease 
 
 * Michelet: Histoire de France. Lloreiite; Histoire de I'lnqui- 
 sitlon. 
 
 7 
 
g8 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 that ever founded a religion. Now if the Tem- 
 plars were apostates, they at least were logical. 
 The Papacy had pitted Christianity against Mu- 
 hammadanism, and staked the authenticity of 
 each on the result. The result was that the 
 latter proved its claim. This point, however, 
 does not seem to have been advanced in their 
 favor. They were tried, convicted, and many 
 of them were burned. 
 
 Meanwhile, the popes and princes of the 
 Church had lost faith, and decency as well. 
 Petrarch, in his letters Sine titulo, speaks of the , 
 papal court as follows : 
 
 " There is here (in Avignon) everything ima- 
 ginable in the way of confusion, darkness and 
 horror. Avignon is the sewer of every vice, the 
 gully of every wickedness. I know from personal 
 experience that in this place there is neither piety 
 nor charity. Faith is absent ; there is nothing 
 holy, nothing just, nothing human. Friendship, 
 modesty and decency are unknown. Houses, 
 squares, temples, courts and pontifical palaces 
 drip with lies. The hope of a future life is con- 
 sidered an illusion ; Jesus Christ is looked upon 
 as a useless invention ; virtue is regarded as a 
 proof of stupidity, and prostitution leads to 
 fame." 
 
 Such is Petrarch's account ; but Petrarch was 
 possibly annoyed because his sister had been 
 seduced by the pope. 
 
 The Abbg Guyot, author of the "Dictionary of 
 Heresies," says, though alluding this time to 
 Rome; "The luxury of the bishops, their scan- 
 
The Convulsions of The Church. gg 
 
 dalous mode of life, their ignorance, which is on 
 a par with their vices, have furnished heretics 
 with excellent grounds for violent rhetoric." " 
 
 Of Sixtus IV., Infessura says, in words that 
 are best left untranslated, " puerorum amator et 
 sodomita fuit." And it would appear, not only 
 that he was guilty of these charming practices, 
 but that he granted indulgences for their general 
 commission. Innocent VIII., his successor, by 
 way of setting a good example to future pontiffs, 
 made public acknowledgment of four sons and 
 three daughters. He established an agency 
 where the remission of sins could be bought as 
 readily as a railway ticket to-day. Of Alexander. 
 VI.. the father and lover of Lucretia Borgia, 
 little that is favorable can be said, except per- 
 haps that he was the most magnificent ruffian 
 that Rome had seen since the days when Nero, 
 with a concave emerald for monocle, watched the 
 rape of Christian girls. 
 
 If the popes were a bad lot, the clergy do not 
 seem to have been much better. Gerson says 
 that the cloisters were markets, the convents 
 lupanars, and that the churches and cathedrals 
 were lairs of bandits and thieves. But the 
 mediasval priest was not only a voluptuary and 
 a freebooter, he appears to have been a jocular 
 blasphemer as well. It is a part of history that 
 when Luther reached Rome he heard more than 
 one of them consecrate the Eucharist with a jeer: 
 "Panis es et panis manebis, vinum es et vinum 
 manebis." There cannot have been two hells ; 
 and, granting that there was one, the Roman 
 
loo The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 Catholic and Apostolic Church seems to have 
 been built on it. 
 
 In'the year 1500 the world was very old. The 
 Renaissance had lied. It had promised and not 
 fulfilled. A few years before, Savonarola had 
 sought to reform Christianity, and particularly 
 the pope. He was burned. In words that rise 
 and greet and kiss the eye, Dante had rejuve- 
 ftated hell. Petrarch had poured the newest of 
 wine into a cup that was gothic. Across the 
 centuries an unterrified spirit of beauty had 
 called to Boccaccio, and he had repeated the 
 message to inattentive ears. There seemed to 
 be no one that cared to blow away the dust of 
 ages. Every germ that promised fruit was neu- 
 tralized. Yet Italy was peopled with atheists. 
 The jurisdiction of the Orient was lost; England 
 was no longer a vassal. A tottering pontiff ana- 
 thematized in vain, and, seeing the uselessness 
 of his maledictions, filled Europe with the uproar 
 of his debauches. The world was very old, but 
 in the printing-press it had found the waters of 
 youth. The earth was larger, and soon the skies 
 were to be unveiled. 
 
 It was in those days that a German monk 
 threw an ink-bottle at the devil and defied the 
 pope. A little later, Bohemia seceded. Germany 
 followed in the wake, and with her went Switzer- 
 land and the Northern States. Luther's heresy 
 became orthodoxy. And yet the newest thing 
 about it was so old that it had been forgotten. 
 Everywhere it was welcomed. The question of 
 its youth or age had nothing to do with it. It 
 
The Convulsions of TJie Church. loi 
 
 was in opposition to the existing order of things, 
 and as such it was a success. Catholicism was 
 a twilight, Lutherism a dawn. Christ said, Pre- 
 pare ; the Church said. Sleep ; the Reformation 
 called upon the world to awake. Luther's aim 
 was to lead belief back to the starting-point, but 
 for the time being his aim was overlooked. The 
 heresy which bore his name was considered 
 merely a quarrel between monks. " Bravo ! " 
 Hutton said ; " let them eat each other up ! " 
 
 Luther, who was a courageous blunderer and 
 sincere in all his endeavors, did something more 
 than try to change the current of affairs. He 
 created German as Dante had created Italian. 
 It was he who caught and tamed the ringing 
 tongue of the Niebelungen. From the resisting 
 heroes of the Rhine he lured a secret, and first of 
 his race, gave to a nation a language for birth- 
 right. 
 
 Barbarism, meanwhile, had not absorbed itself 
 Pyrrho still slept. The reform which Luther 
 instituted aggravated the evils which it proposed 
 to correct. The Protestantism which followed 
 was as intolerant as the mother Church ; more 
 so perhaps, for it had the intolerance of youth, 
 and as it broke and scattered into countless 
 creeds, each of the brood, save the Quakers, 
 arrogated to itself .the right to persecute and 
 destroy. To Luther, persecution seemed not 
 only lawful but necessary. Calvin, who was as 
 intolerant as the Inquisition and every whit as 
 fanatical, made it a prop of his church. And 
 Knox, to whom one mass was more frightful thai? 
 
102 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 ten thousands insurgents, declared that an idola- 
 ter merited nothing less than death. 
 
 But persecution, however endorsed, was not of 
 a nature to resist the influence of advancing 
 thought. As scepticism arose, intolerance de- 
 clined ; and as belief in future punishment passed 
 away, so did the torture of the recalcitrant. It 
 may be noted that the lamented Ranke estimates 
 the number of human beings destroyed by Chris- 
 tianity as surpassing ten million. And yet there 
 are people who think that Justice merely limps. 
 During ten centuries it sat motionless in a cul 
 de-jatte. 
 
 Among the first to break a lance in the Lu- 
 theran tragedy was Erasmus. No one that has 
 read " The Cloister and the Hearth " will need 
 to be reminded that the story of Gerard and 
 Marguerite is the history of his parentage. As 
 a knight-errant of free thought he went about 
 combating intolerance. In the last pages of the 
 ever-famous " Praise of Folly," he showed, with 
 exquisite felicity of diction, the folly of creeds 
 and sects. We are wiser now ; but the world 
 then was learning the alphabet. Erasmus received 
 his full share of abuse, and, what is more to the 
 point, saw his enemies exhaust twenty-seven edi- 
 tions of his work. Unpopularity has its advant- 
 ages. 
 
 In spite of his intrepidity, Erasmus was as a 
 small boy in comparison to that abstracteur de 
 quinte essence. Master Alcofrybas Nasier. Where 
 Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio had loolced into 
 the past, the author of the exceedingly horrifying 
 
Tlie Convulsions of The Church. 103 
 
 life of the Great Gargantua pointed to unex- 
 plored horizons. The " Praise of Folly "was cold 
 as a rapier ; the biography which Rabelais gave 
 to the public was as exuberant, as prodigal and 
 as turbulent as the sea. It was a new praise of 
 Nature. Its appearance marked the beginning 
 of another Renaissance ; in all its pantagruelism 
 there was not a single tear. Its philosophy was 
 a commingling of science and satire ; it was un- 
 exampled in boldness, but it was not dogmatic. 
 Rabelais, who had been educated in a monastery, 
 where the vows were those of ignorance and not 
 of religion, was too wise to be an atheist. He 
 objected mightily to tyranny, but he did not 
 meddle with the unknowable. If he was any- 
 thing, he was an agnostic. " I am going in search 
 of the great Perhaps," he said on his death-bed. 
 His obscenity is compromising, but it is not 
 blasphemous. The nakedness of his thought ex- 
 tended only to the real. 
 
 Another thinker who refused to take a step be- 
 yond the actual was Montaigne. Where Rabelais 
 hesitated, Montaigne doubted. He had caught 
 the Isostheneia of Pyrrho, and balanced his 
 thought in a perfect equilibrium. He neither 
 affirmed nor denied. If he fancied that the 
 universe was a foundling, his good taste pre- 
 vented him from openly questioning the parent- 
 age. In this respect his silence is admirable 
 and well worthy of imitation. Christianity he 
 looked upon as a decadence. He noted with 
 mild regret that the high-roads of civilization were 
 moss-grown and abandoned, and that the com- 
 
104- The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 pass which the Greeks had used was buried 
 under the dust of centuries. But he waived con- 
 clusions ; his thought was too volatile to convey 
 a decision. Stella said that had Swift so desired, 
 he could have written beautifully about a broom- 
 stick. Montaigne wrote about nothing at all 
 with a charm that has never been excelled. 
 
 When Montaigne put a question-mark, Charron 
 shrugged his shoulders ; the Que sgay ie ? the 
 What do I know ? became. What does it matter ? 
 And yet, like many another that affected indiffer- 
 ence, Charron was ardent and prone to indig- 
 nation. In his chief work, De la Sagesse, a work 
 undeservedly forgotten, he said many smart 
 things to the orthodox, and he said them, too, in 
 a language which, if antiquated to-day, was then 
 very virile. He was among the first to note that 
 ideas of right and wrong vary with the latitude. 
 " That which is impious, unjust and abominable 
 in one place, is piety, justice and honor in 
 another. There is not a law, a custom or a be- 
 lief, that is everywhere received or rejected." 
 Religion, too, he held to be a question of lati- 
 tude. " Our religion is that of the country in 
 which we are born and educated ; we are cir- 
 cumcised and baptized, we are Jews, Muham- 
 madans or Christians, before we know that we 
 are men." To which he added : " A strange 
 thing it is that the Christian religion, which, 
 being the only belief true and revealed of God, 
 ought to be extremely one and united, because 
 there is but one God and one truth, is, on the 
 contrary, torn into many parts and divided into 
 
The Convulsions of The Church. loj 
 
 many conflicting sects, to such an extent even, 
 that there is not an article of faith or point of 
 doctrine which has not been diversely argued 
 and agitated, and given rise to heresies and dis- 
 sensions. But what makes it seem still more 
 strange is, that in the false and bastard religions, 
 whether Gentile, Pagan, Jewish or Muhamma- 
 dan, the like divisions do not appear." And 
 much more to the same effect ; concluding that 
 truth is intangible, religions are equally estranges 
 et horribles au sens commun, and that the sov- 
 ereign remedy for the ills of life is de se prester & 
 aultruy et denese donner qu'a soy. 
 
 While Charron in this manner was foreshort- 
 ening Pyrrho, Sanchez, a Spaniard, was laying 
 the foundations of agnosticism in a work enti- 
 tled, Tr actus de niultum nobile et prima univer- 
 sali Scientia, quod non scitur — " Treatise on the 
 very noble and extremely universal Science, to- 
 wit, that we know nothing.'' This contribution 
 to literature appears to have created quite a little 
 commotion ; but, strange as it may seem, the 
 commotion subsided, and to-day, outside the 
 covers of a dictionary of philosophy, Sanchez, 
 like Charron, is hard to find. 
 
 In the course of these international attacks, 
 Rome had heard Bruno announce that the uni- 
 verse was a living organism whose soul was God. 
 He was sent to the stake. Vanini had refused to 
 discuss the immortality of the soul before he was 
 old, rich and a German. He was burned at 
 Toulouse. Campanella wrote a book against 
 heresies, and was tortured at Naples seven times 
 for his pains. 
 
io6 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 But the fangs of Romanism were being drawn. 
 The Pope Urban VIII. had written on his 
 brother's Xavah, Hie jacet pulvis et cinis , postea 
 nihil, and announced that the world governed 
 itself. Decidedly the influence of the Church was 
 on the wane, and yet the time was still far away 
 when thought was to be disenthralled. 
 
 Were it not for a handful of thinkers, the 
 seventeenth century might be catalogued among 
 the dark ages. The intellectual fecundity which 
 was the characteristic of the sixteenth gave way 
 to an era which was largely one of mental stag- 
 nation. The world seemed tired of disputes, and 
 .inclined, too, to accept old beliefs unquestioned. 
 The hand of scholasticism was still upon it. It 
 viewed speculation with uneasy dread, and kept 
 its anxious eyes fixed upon the past. 
 
 And yet there were a few whose instincts in- 
 vited to other vistas. In Holland was Spinoza ; 
 in England, Bacon and Hobbes ; in Germany, 
 Kepler and Leibnitz ; while in France was Gas- 
 sendi, Bayle, but first Descartes. " Give me 
 force and matter," he cried, " and I will refurbish 
 the world." Force and matter were not forth- 
 coming, but in that magnificent boast was the 
 accouchement of modern thought. One may 
 even say that its layette was already prepared. 
 A few years before, Europe had listened to 
 Galileo recanting his heresy ; but when, before 
 the assembled prelates, the prisoner muttered, 
 E pur si muove, a page of history was turned 
 down, and across it was written. Farewell to 
 Rome. 
 
The Dissent of The Seers. 107 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE DISSENT OF THE SEERS. 
 
 In one of the forgotten plays of Laberius, a 
 jester is represented as recommending a smug- 
 faced companion to get a foretaste of philosophy 
 in the latrinae. In one sense the jester was wise 
 in his generation and clairvoyant too. About 
 philosophy in general, and metaphysics in par- 
 ticular, the impolite have always discerned a bad 
 odor. And this not without reason. In lit- 
 erature there is nothing more unpleasant than an 
 attempt to prove something ; indeed, if ever a 
 proper penal code is devised, the dietary pro- 
 ducts of logic will be declared contraband, and 
 every ergo banished the realm. In the absence 
 of any criterion of truth, such a word as There- 
 fore has seemingly no raison d'etre. The sum of 
 all the angles of a triangle may be equal to two 
 right-angles, but however amply that fact or any 
 other be demonstrated, it cannot lift the inquisi- 
 tive beyond the limits of an experience which in 
 itself may be erroneous. Who shall say but that 
 in some other sphere, where perhaps there are 
 now such commodities as square fluids and moral 
 substances, — who shall say but that there the 
 sum of all the angles of a triangle may not be 
 equal to two right angles ; or, as Mill has sug- 
 
io8 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 gested, who shall say but that there is a land 
 where two and two make five ? Yet, waiving 
 such magnificent hypotheses, and granting that 
 deductions which follow from experience are not 
 erroneous, it must be admitted that they bring us 
 no nearer the truth ; the essence, the reason of 
 things is as intangible as before. 
 
 And metaphysics has yet another defect. The 
 eternal questions. What am I ? What "can I 
 know ? — questions which it purports to answer — 
 are left for all response as vague as the envelop- 
 ing scholia. But the good that comes of evil is 
 ever re-nascent, and out of the questions and an- 
 swers have sprung the three foremost systems of 
 modern anti-theistic thought. Of these. Panthe- 
 ism takes the precedence, which is the due of age. 
 Its nominal founder is Spinoza. 
 
 The life of Baruch Spinoza should be taught 
 to every school-boy. It is not only as uninterest- 
 ing as the ordinary studies of average youth, but 
 it holds a lesson of such gentleness, modesty and 
 abnegation of self, that in a search for a better 
 one the whole parade of history might be review- 
 ed in vain. 
 
 Like certain other notabilities, Spinoza was a 
 Jew. His parents were descendants of Portu- 
 guese Israelites, who had fled from the Inquisi- 
 tion and unfolded their tents behind the dykes 
 of the Netherlands. To-day, in Amsterdam, any 
 valet-de-place will designate the early home of 
 the philosopher, and every valet-de-place will 
 point to a different house. But when the sight- 
 seer is tired into satisfaction, discrepancies are of 
 
The Dissent of The Seers. j-op 
 
 small moment. Moreover, after exhausting his 
 imagination on the Burgwal, any valet-de-place 
 is competent to show the exact spot near the 
 synagogue where a fanatic believer aimed a dag- 
 ger at the thinker's heart. The aim was unsuc- 
 cessful, though it rent the coat; and this coat the 
 guide, if he is clever, will tell you that Spinoza 
 kept ever after among his memorabilia. But, 
 clever or not, give him a louis and let him go. 
 Spinoza's life is not such an one as should be 
 listened to in the streets. 
 
 In the library at Wolfenbeiitel there is a por- 
 trait of a grave, olive-skinned Hebrew, who stands 
 in the upright idleness which is peculiar to por- 
 traits in oil. The hair falls back and over the 
 shoulders in an expanding flood. The face is 
 nearly oval, and the eyes are large and patient. 
 This portrait, which is of Spinoza, was probably 
 painted toward the close of his life. He died, 
 it may be noted, at the age of forty-four, in the 
 year 1677. As has been hinted, his life is without 
 interest. If there was a tragedy in it, it was, as 
 Oscar Wilde would say, that there was none at all. 
 There is some mention of a little romance with 
 the daughter of his teacher. But Spinoza was 
 poor, and it is said that a wealthier student made 
 diamonds of indifferent water fall in miniature 
 cascades before the maiden's unresisting eyes. 
 It is possible that this legend, out of which 
 Auerbach has weaved one of his charming tales, 
 is not untrue. There is a quotation to the effect 
 that Mammon can win his way where angels 
 might despair ; and if an angel, then, a fortiori. 
 
no The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 a philosopher. In any event, Spinoza appears to 
 have been jilted, which probably vyas the best 
 thing that could have happened. A thinker 
 should have everything, even to sex, in his 
 brain. 
 
 Spinoza was educated to be a rabbi, but with 
 increasing years he grew too big for Jewish the- 
 ology and declined to visit the synagogue. It 
 was then that some zealot tried to stab him. 
 This argument being insufficient, the elders 
 offered him an annual pension of a thousand 
 florins, on condition that now and then he would 
 appear in the synagogue and keep his opinions 
 to himself. Spinoza was very poor, but his opin- 
 ions were to him more precious than money. 
 He refused therefore, and was excommunicated 
 at once. The great ban, the Schammatha, was 
 publicly pronounced upon him. For half-an- 
 hour, to the blare of trumpets, he was cursed 
 in the name which contains forty-two letters ; 
 in the name of Him who said, / am that I am 
 and who shall be ; in the name of the Lord of 
 Hosts, the Tetragrammaton ; in the name of 
 the Globes, the Wheels, Mysterious Beasts and 
 Ministering Angels ; in the name of the great 
 Prince Michael ; in the name of Metateron, 
 whose name is like that of his master ; in the 
 name of Achthariel Jah. The Seraphim and 
 Ofanim were called upon to give mouth to the 
 malediction. Jehovah was supplicated never to 
 forgive his sin, to let all the curses in the Book 
 of the Law fall upon and blot him from under 
 the heavens. Then, as the music swooned in a 
 
The Dissent of The Seers. iii 
 
 shudder of brass, the candles were reversed, and 
 through the darkness the whole congregation 
 chanted in unison, Amen ! 
 
 After that, Spinoza, being no longer a Jew, 
 changed his name from Baruch to Benedictus, 
 and turned his thoughts from the Kabbala to 
 Descartes. The life he thereafter led was one of 
 extreme simplicity. He earned his bread by pol- 
 ishing lenses, and expended on it but a trifle more 
 than the traditional obolus of Epicurus. When 
 his father died, his sisters, arguing that a heretic 
 had no right nor title to the property of the faith- 
 ful, tried to keep from him his inheritance. 
 Spinoza, however, appealed against them, won 
 his suit, and then gave back as free gift all the 
 contested property except one bed, which his 
 biographer Colerus admits, etaitenveritefortbon. 
 A few other instances of his magnanimity might 
 be given, and a few anecdotes of his gentleness 
 related ; but when they were told, the reader 
 would find himself as unacquainted with the 
 man as before. Properly speaking, he had no 
 biography ; his life was one of solitude ; its es- 
 sence was meditation ; and the Wolfenbeiitel 
 portrait would have served its purpose better, had 
 it represented the sombre face of one whose eyes 
 were lost in thought, and whose patient hand 
 polished a concave lens. 
 
 Spinoza's fame rests principally on two works 
 which shortly after his death were proscribed as 
 profane, atheistic and blasphemous. These works 
 are the Tractatiis Theologico-politicics and the 
 Ethica. The first in the key-note of rationalism, 
 
J 12 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 the second is the basis of modern philosophy. 
 The rationalism of the first and the philosophy 
 of the second stand in the closest connection. 
 In both, Nature is shown to be an omnipotent 
 ruler, in whose court such a parvenu as the super- 
 natural is not received. 
 
 Spinoza's negations are three-fold. He denied 
 the existence of an extra-mundane Deity ; he 
 denied that man is a free agent ; and he denied 
 the doctrine of final causes. 
 
 His negation of the existence of an extra-mun- 
 dane Deity is not always clearly understood. 
 The term Deus is strewn through his pages, and 
 its repetition has often misled the unwary. There 
 is, he taught, but one substance, and in this sub- 
 stance all things live, move and have their being. 
 It is at once cause and effect ; it is God. But the 
 term thus used has nothing in common with the 
 theistic idea of a Creator, who, having fashioned 
 the world, "sits aloft and sees it go." On the 
 contrary, God and the universe were to Spinoza 
 one and identical ; they were correlatives ; the 
 existence of the one made that of the other a log- 
 ical necessity. To him the primordial entity, the 
 fons et origo rerum, was God ; but God was 
 Nature, and Nature, Substance. The three terms 
 he used interchangeably ; the former predominate 
 in his earlier writings, the third in the Ethics. 
 His reason for making use of the first is not 
 entirely apparent, unless it be, as Dr. Martineau 
 has suggested, that even when the sun of Israel 
 had set, he still loved to linger in the mystical 
 penumbra of an earlier faith. But be this as 
 
The Dissent of The Seers. iij 
 
 it may, and however his use of the term may 
 be interpreted, it is tolerably clear that Spinoza, 
 far from lowering the Deity to Nature, exalted 
 Nature to a God. God was everywhere, and 
 every region was filled with the Divine. 
 
 Spinoza has been frequently blamed for reading 
 the banns over the unknowable and the known, 
 and perhaps the blame is not altogether unde- 
 served. But in this connection it may not be 
 amiss to call Goethe to his rescue. And Goethe, 
 it may be remembered, is the Spinoza of verse. 
 "To discuss God apart from Nature,'' said the 
 poet, " is both difficult and dangerous. It is as 
 though we separated the soul from the body. 
 We know the soul only through the medium of 
 the body, and God only through Nature. Hence 
 the absurdity of accusing of absurdity those who 
 philosophically unite the world with God." Vol- 
 taire, however, took a different view, the view 
 of an inconsequent historian who relies on his wit. 
 Now wit is little else than the commonplace in 
 fine clothes ; and Voltaire, who treated the hum- 
 drum with the skill of a modiste, drew the threads 
 of fancy, and worked an elaborate hemstitch : 
 
 ' ' Alors un petit Juif, au long nez, au teint bleme, 
 Pauvre, mais satisfait, pensif et retire, 
 Esprit subtil et creux, moins lu que celebrS, 
 Cache sous le manteau de Descartes son maitre, 
 Marchant k pas comptes, s'approcha du grand Etre : 
 ' Pardonnez moi, ' dit-il, ' en lui parlant tout bas, 
 Mais je crois entre nous, que vous n'existez pas.' " 
 
 That which is called Free-will had to Spinoza 
 
jz^ The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 a purely verbal existence. To him, the state of 
 mind at any given moment is the effect of some 
 definite cause, which itself is the effect o/ a pre- 
 ceding cause, and so on without end. His argu- 
 ment is to the point : " Imagine that a stone 
 which has been set in motion becomes conscious, 
 and, so far as it is able, endeavors to persist in 
 its motion. This stone, since it is conscious of 
 and interested in its endeavor, will believe that 
 it is free, and that it continues in motion for no 
 other reason than that it so wills. Now such is 
 the freedom of man, which every one boasts of 
 possessing, and which consists but in this, that 
 men are aware of their own desires, and ignorant 
 of the causes by which those desires are deter- 
 mined." * 
 
 This apt negation of free-will in man, Spinoza ex- 
 tended to broader spheres ; and in showing that 
 Nature has no alternatives, no standards of com- 
 parison of better or worse, and no appreciation of 
 antitheses, ofrightorofwrong — in fact, that every- 
 thing occurs in virtue and in accordance with 
 eternal laws which could not be otherwise — ar- 
 rived at the consoling deduction that he who un- 
 derstands that everything which happens, happens 
 necessarily, will find nothing worthy of hatred, 
 mockery or contempt, but rather will endeavor, so 
 far as human power permits, to do well, and, as the 
 phrase goes, to be of good cheer. 
 
 There is something in the foregoing theory 
 that seems to savor of Calvinistic predestination. 
 But it is only a savor. To the Calvinist, pre- 
 
 * Lettre 62. Traduction de Emile Saisset. 
 
The Dissent of The Seers. ii^ 
 
 destination is made endurable by the belief that 
 everything is ordained by the highest wisdom ; 
 while to the Pantheist, man is never the subject 
 of fate. The laws of necessity are identical with 
 his own nature, and it is through an understand- 
 ing of them that he finds himself at peace with 
 all the world. 
 
 Spinoza held the doctrine of Final Causes to 
 be untenable, because inconsistent with the per- 
 fection that resides in God. His argument, which 
 is advanced in the Ethica, has the charm which 
 attaches to brevity : " If God acts for a designed 
 end, it must be that He desireth something which 
 He hath not." 
 
 Spinoza was neither an optimist nor a pessi- 
 mist. He neither laughed at life nor grieved 
 over it. It is possible that he understood it. 
 Like many another before him, he had looked 
 about for happiness ; and in the search he saw 
 that such simulachres as wealth, distinction and 
 pleasure, even to \}azX grande dame whose name 
 is Glory, were smitten with one and the same 
 defect. The desire for them sprang from an 
 archaic source, the love of the transitory. But 
 happiness to be real, he argued, should be im- 
 perishable. And where could such happiness be 
 found ? — where, indeed, save in the love of the 
 eternal and the unending, in the love of truth, 
 which in purifying and exalting the heart shields 
 it from vain desires ? If Spinoza had not been a 
 geometrician, he would have been a poet. 
 
 In the Tractatus Theologico-politicus , Spinoza 
 noted, with great good sense, that a plain man 
 
ii6 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 who does not enter upon philosophy may without 
 harm and even with propfit believe whatever he 
 finds most edifying, provided he believes it sin- 
 cerely. And it is related that his hostess, a 
 simple-minded Lutheran, having asked him 
 whether the religion she professed was capable 
 of assuring her salvation, he advised her to seek 
 no other, nor to doubt of its efificiency. " Do 
 but good works," he said, " and endeavor so far 
 as it is possible to lead a peaceful and virtuous 
 life." 
 
 As Heine has well said, wherever a great mind 
 gives utterance to its thoughts, there too is Gol- 
 gotha. Spinoza was persecuted during his life- 
 time, and after death his works were condemned 
 as profane, blasphemous and atheistic. And yet 
 it is probable that few men more sincerely relig- 
 ious than he have ever lived and taught. His 
 doctrine was one of abnegation of self and patient 
 devotion to the eternal. He was in love with 
 the Infinite ; it was Nature that fluttered his 
 pulse ; it was the Spirit of the universe that 
 filled his heart with living springs. Nevertheless 
 there are to-day many warm-hearted and accom- 
 plished gentlemen whose views on Spinoza are a 
 trifle more than two hundred years behind the 
 age. To them he is still the blasphemer. But 
 in all sincerity one may ask which is the more 
 blasphemous, nay, which is the more vulgar, the 
 mind that pictures the Deity as a jealous tyrant 
 who keeps the world as a separate establishment, 
 or the thinker who seeks to banish the dream 
 that veils the part from the whole, and who 
 
The Dissent of The Seers. iij 
 
 shows the soul of man and of the universe to be 
 the same ? 
 
 In attempting to convey the higher view, 
 Spinoza admittedly transcended the limits of 
 experience. Indeed, there are contemporary 
 free-thinlcers who are ready to assert that he was 
 sunk in the grossest superstitions. Perhaps he 
 was ; yet his superstitions were so refined, that 
 in them there was room for nothing but the 
 ideal. 
 
 A few years after Spinoza's death, on the 22nd 
 day of November, 1694, Frangois Arouet and 
 Marie-Marguerite Daumart, his wife, caused to 
 be baptized at the church of St. Andr^ des Arcs 
 in Paris, a male child, who, born dying six months 
 before, lived long enough to christen himself 
 Voltaire. 
 
 The heart of the eighteenth century was like 
 a veilliebchen. As Michelet, who dissected it, 
 announced, it was double. One half was Diderot, 
 the other Voltaire ; but Rousseau was wedged 
 between. Voltaire wished superstition abolished 
 and the throne preserved; Rousseau wanted the 
 monarchy abolished and the altar upheld. Dide- 
 rot sought the overthrow of both. 
 
 The united works of Diderot and Voltaire form 
 a library of ninety volumes. But much of their 
 labor is uncatalogued. Their ninety-first achieve- 
 ment is the French Revolution, their ninety-second 
 is Modern Thought. If they are little read to-day, 
 it is because their ideas have become common 
 property, their daring seems less bold. Con- 
 cerning Diderot, a word will be said later on; 
 
Ii8 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 but no conjunction of phrases is rich enough to 
 paint Voltaire. His figure is as familiar as the 
 moon, yet the currents of his thought are almost 
 as intangible. Nature, who, as Malebranche 
 has said, speaks neither Latin nor Greek nor 
 Hebrew, had taught him the nothingness of 
 creeds. He had but one dogma, Reason. When 
 he preached God and liberty, the liberty was 
 freedom of thought, and God the deification of 
 common-sense. In his vague deism there was 
 room for many things. " Believe in God," he 
 said to a questioning rhymster ; " believe in God; 
 there is nothing more poetic." But to Madame 
 du Deffand, in whom he confided, he admitted 
 his acquaintanceship with a man who thoroughly 
 believed that when a bee died it ceased to hum. 
 That man was none other than himself. In those 
 days there were not a few who believed as he 
 did. Among them was that most anti-christian 
 of monarchs, the fat Frederick, who played badly 
 on the flute, wrote verses that limp after him 
 through history, but who possessed an enchanted 
 sword, a nimble wit, and a great fund of appre- 
 ciation for those whose views coincided with his 
 own. 
 
 From this monarch there came to Voltaire an 
 invitation requesting the pleasures of his society, 
 and this invitation Voltaire accepted. Voltaire 
 was never young. When he reached Berlin his 
 hair was white, and he looked, Madame de Stael 
 has said, like a wicked old monk come back from 
 another world to visit this ; but such a fascinating 
 pagan was he, that in winning him from the 
 
The Dissent of The Seers. up 
 
 fifteenth Louis of France, Frederick valued the 
 gain more highly than a province. 
 
 At the historic suppers of the king, Voltaire 
 likened the symposiasts to the seven sages of 
 Greece in a lupanar. " In no corner of the globe," 
 he said, " has liberty of speech been greater, or 
 have superstitions been treated with keener con- 
 tempt." Beside Voltaire and Frederick, the 
 usual guests were the Marquis d'Argens, Lamet- 
 trie, Maupertuis, Algarotti and d'Armand. The 
 last-named gentlemen are relatively unimportant, 
 but the others should not pass unnoticed. 
 
 D'Argens was not only the king's guest, he 
 was his nearest friend, a sort of dignified Tribou- 
 let. He was a Proven9al, an ex-free lance, hand- 
 some and dissipated, who after a riotous career, 
 during which he had explored most of the side 
 scenes of life, made love in five languages, and 
 fought over the better part of Europe, retired 
 suddenly to Holland and burned the midnight 
 oil. It was the old story of the devil turned 
 hermit. In Holland in those days, thought was 
 almost untrammelled. When a foreign author 
 was afraid of the printers in his own country, he 
 set those of the Netherlands at work, very much 
 as the ultra-naturalists of contemporary France 
 obtain to-day the assistance of Belgian publish- 
 ers. D'Argens therefore went to the Hague, 
 hired an apartment, shut himself up for six 
 months, and then walked out with the Lettres 
 Juives in his pockets. 
 
 The Lettres Juives, which are nothing if not 
 liberal, were read and appreciated by the Crown 
 
I20 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 Prince of Prussia, who at once asked d'Argens 
 to pay him a visit. But d'Argens sent a regret. 
 The throne was occupied by Fredericlc Wilhelm, 
 and that monarch was not an agreeable person. 
 If he took a walk, everybody took to their heels. 
 Voltaire has given it to history that whenever he 
 met a woman in the street, he sent her about her 
 business : " Get thee hence, thou trull, thou trol- 
 lope ; thy place is at home ! " — a remonstrance 
 which was accompanied as often as not by a blow 
 or a kick ; and Voltaire adds that whenever a 
 minister of the gospel took it into his head to 
 view a parade, he was, if caught, treated in pre- 
 cisely the same manner. 
 
 D'Argens knew him by reputation, and de- 
 clined his son's invitation with thanks. "To 
 reach Potsdam," he wrote to the prince, " I 
 should have to pass three battalions ; and as I 
 am tall, well-built, and not altogether bad-looking, 
 I don't dare.'' But when the prince became king, 
 there was nothing to fear, and Potsdam counted 
 another guest. 
 
 It was not long before d'Argens became the 
 chamberlain, and, as has been hinted, the friend 
 of the king. He was a brilliant conversationalist, 
 epigrammatic, paradoxical, and possessed of great 
 opulence of imagination. And Frederick, who 
 at that time,. was possibly the only German in 
 Berlin who knew how to talk, knew, too, how to 
 appreciate that ability in another. The intimacy 
 increased with years. When the king, overcome 
 by public and private misfortunes, doubtful of the 
 morrow and uncertain even of the day, reflected 
 
The Dissent of The Seers lit 
 
 on the advantages which a bare bodkin can pro- 
 cure, d'Argens hurried to the rescue with com- 
 forting maxims. The king listened, but would 
 have his say ; " Philosophy, my dear Marquis, 
 is an excellent remedy against the ills of the past 
 or of the future, but it is powerless against those 
 of the present." " And what about the impassi- 
 bility that Zeno taught?" "Zeno,"' answered 
 the king, " was the philosopher of the gods, and I 
 am a man." Nevertheless he took heart again, 
 and all thoughts of the bodkin were dismissed. 
 But d'Argens was not always so comforting. On 
 the eve of the battle of Rosbach, Frederick hap- 
 pening to remark that if he lost it he would 
 go and practice medicine in Venice, Triboulet 
 steadied himself against a table and hissed. 
 " Toujours assassin." 
 
 D'Argens and Frederick grew old together. 
 They had disputes which made them faster 
 friends. They played practical jokes on one 
 another, and quarrelled noisily over trifles. The 
 king often acted like a school-boy, and d'Argens 
 not infrequently forgot that he was a philosopher. 
 He remembered, however, that he was not born 
 in Berlin. About Sans-Souci there circled at 
 times an icy wind that made him dream of Pro- 
 vence. Oneday he asked for his passport. Fred- 
 erick was vexed ; he did not like to be deserted ; 
 it diminished him in his own esteem. " Bah ! " 
 he exclaimed, " what is a prince born for, unless 
 it be to cause ingratitude ? " But he gave the 
 exeat, and d'Argens returned to his early home. 
 Soon after he died— a convert, so it was said. 
 
122 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 When Frederick heard the rumor, he laughed ; 
 he knew d'Argens too well to believe any such 
 gossip as that. " If he received the Last Sacra- 
 ment," he said, "it is because it was given to 
 him by main strength." 
 
 "D'Argens," said Voltaire, "has the wit of 
 Bayle and the charm of Montaigne." The doc- 
 trine which he displayed in the Philosophic du 
 boil sens is a half-hearted Pyrrhonisn. He, too, 
 saw that there was no criterion of truth, but he 
 could not always keep his eyes on the fact. 
 "How," he asked, "can men pretend to know 
 the essence of things when they are ignorant of 
 their own ? " That they cannot may be readily 
 admitted, unless it be that they are willing to 
 supersede judgment with faith, which proceeding 
 is the one that d'Argens recommended. He was 
 deeply purposeful, but he was circumspect. 
 What he shook with one hand, he steadied with 
 the other. When he showed the advantages of 
 belief, he was not in a greater hurry to do any- 
 thing else than to show its disadvantages. First 
 he honeycombed it with doubt and toppled it 
 over completely. Then he set to work and built 
 it up anew. After which he gave it another 
 shake, and soon indefinitely, until his ink blushed 
 and his pen refused its office. The method em- 
 ployed by M. Renan is not dissimilar. 
 
 There are few lands in Europe that have been 
 more fecund in myths than Brittany. The belief 
 in that lost city of Is, whose spires the fishers 
 sometimes saw, whose bells, rung by the waves, 
 clang through the winter nights, and whose mag- 
 
The Dissent of The Seers. 123 
 
 nificence was such that for the capital of France 
 no better name could be found than Par-Is, 
 equal to Is — the belief in that lost city was the 
 origin of many beautiful legends. In few other 
 lands has the faith in the weird and the super- 
 natural been preserved with greater simplicity. 
 Yet through one of those paradoxes of which 
 Nature alone holds the secret, Brittany has been 
 as fertile of doubt as of credulity. Many of the 
 foremost of French anti-theists claim it as their 
 home. Between Maupertuis and Renan there 
 is a parade of familiar names, and of these 
 names few are more significant than that of 
 Lamettrie. 
 
 Lamettrie appears to have been an unprincipled 
 saint, a rake without vices. He was brilliant and 
 whimsical, an excellent purveyor of the entremets 
 of the imagination ; and as it is the individual 
 and not the topic that makes or unmakes conver- 
 sation, the great Frederick held him in high 
 favor. Some years before Voltaire appeared in 
 Berlin, Lamettrie had written a book, VHistoire 
 naturelle de I'&me, which had created such a stir 
 that he had been obliged to leave France and 
 seek refuge in Holland. There he published an- 
 other book, V Homme machine, which created 
 even a greater stir ; and while he was wondering 
 where he should hide, Frederick, who had read 
 his writings, and who never let slip an opportu- 
 nity of adding another philosopher to his collec- 
 tion, invited him to Berlin. " He is a victim of 
 theologians and fools," said the monarch; "let 
 him come here and write what he pleases. I 
 
124 1^^ Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 am always sorry for a philosopher in difficul- 
 ties ; were I not born a prince, I would be one 
 myself." 
 
 Lamettrie was quite willing to accord to a king 
 the pleasures of his company, and took a seat at 
 the royal supper-table without delay. Frederick 
 was so charmed with him that he made him his 
 salaried reader. " I am delighted with my ac- 
 quisition," he said ; " Lamettrie is as light-hearted 
 and clever as any one can be. He is a sound 
 physician and hates doctors ; he is a materialist 
 and not material. He says scandalous things 
 now and then, but we weaken his Epicurean 
 wine with the water of Pythagoras." 
 
 Like some other gentlemen of a sceptical 
 turn, Lamettrie announced that vice and virtue 
 were purely relative — a platitude which has been 
 running about the book-shelves ever since books 
 were shelved. But he added something which 
 is worth larger attention : " Away with remorse ! " 
 he exclaimed ; "it is a weakness, an outcome of 
 education." And if virtue and vice are merely 
 questions of surroundings, it is indeed difficult 
 to view remorse otherwise than as a pre-medise- 
 val emotion. But virtue, to say nothing of vice, 
 is something more. According to the Buddha, 
 virtue is the agreement of the will and the con- 
 science, a definition which would be matchless 
 if the will were free. Marcus Aurelius called it 
 a living and enthusiastic sympathy with Nature ; 
 but if the boundless immorality of Nature be 
 conceded, as it should, the fine words of the 
 emperor are as empty as the wind. Virtue, said 
 
The Dissent of The Seers. 125 
 
 one who had eyed it narrowly, virtue is a name. 
 Perhaps. Yet virtue declines to be dismissed 
 with a phrase ; there is a disturbing magnificence 
 about it which routs the most skilful. In de- 
 scribing it, Raphael is a better lexicographer 
 than Shakespeare, though even Raphael, for all 
 his cunning, could not paint a temperament. 
 And virtue is little else than a question of dis- 
 position. It may be sunned and watered by a 
 thousand influences, it may be hedged and forti- 
 fied, but in its essence it is temperamental. 
 However great the outward success may appear, 
 the lessons and precepts of ages will not suffice 
 to keep it unspotted if the inner spirit be adverse. 
 And as with virtue, so too with vice. Standards 
 may differ with the climate, but in each case, it 
 is the conscience that elects itself judge. It is 
 the heart, memory aiding, that gives us a para- 
 dise or a hell. If we could hush the conscience 
 and still the heart, we might afford to listen to 
 Lamettrie ; and perhaps in future ages, when 
 through the progress of evolution man will lose 
 the lobes of his ears as he has already lost his 
 tail, when he will be as completely bald as he was 
 once entirely hirsute, perhaps then the conscience 
 will go the way of useless possessions ; but 
 meanwhile to declaim against it is as profitable 
 as asking alms of statues. We are perfectly free 
 to enjoy our remorse undisturbed. 
 
 Lamettrie admitted no other life than this, and 
 not unnaturally sought to make the most of the 
 worst. His ideas are contained in a treatise on 
 Happiness, which he prefixed to a translation of 
 
126 The Anaiomy of Negation. 
 
 Seneca's thoughts on the same subject. " Our 
 organs," he said, " are susceptible of sensations 
 which render life agreeable. When the impres- 
 sion which a sensation conveys is brief, it is 
 pleasure that we experience ; prolonged, it is 
 bliss ; permanent, it is happiness. But in every 
 case it is the same sensation, differing merely in 
 intensity and duration. The absence of fear and 
 desire is happiness in its primitive state ; but to 
 possess all that one wishes — to have beauty, wit, 
 talent, esteem, wealth, health and glory — that is 
 a happiness which is real and perfect." 
 
 The spectacle of a eudeemonist is as charming 
 as that of a ballerina. Both belong to the cate- 
 gory of the Delightful. But even though one be 
 pleasured by a Taglioni, there comes a moment 
 when the pleasure palls. Lamettrie, who was 
 fond of adventurous flights and incursions — not 
 perhaps to the unknowable, but to that which he 
 might have known and did not — was wont to 
 please his readers with the entrechats of a lawless 
 imagination. As a consequence, his views, if 
 entertaining, are valueless. The real and perfect 
 happiness of which he speaks is a will-o'-the-wisp 
 of fancy. The possession of all that one wishes, 
 whether the possession is concomitant, as in fairy 
 tales, with the wish, or obtained after years of 
 striving, does not and never will constitute hap- 
 piness. In its essence, happiness is intangible ; 
 the desire for it is insatiable ; and consequently, 
 and despite every possession, it -is ever unsatis- 
 fied. There may be a happiness which is tran- 
 sitory and fugitive, but there is none that is per- 
 
The Dissent of The Seers. I2J 
 
 manent. To say to the contrary is to announce 
 one of the most insolent absurdities that has 
 ever been proclaimed in the privileged aisles of 
 the insane. For the sake of example, let it be 
 supposed that in some one person are united all 
 the factors which Lamettrie mentions — beauty, 
 wit, talent, esteem, wealth, health and glory ; if 
 these possessions are what may be termed con- 
 genital, as in the case of a poet-prince, they are 
 taken by their possessor as a matter of course, 
 and have never served as preservatives from dis- 
 content ; on the other hand, if their re-union is 
 accomplished after more or less prolonged en- 
 deavors, their possessor, in obtaining them, finds 
 himself as poor as before ; he might be able to 
 call the world his own, and yet not know what 
 happiness is. The honors, the riches and glory 
 to which he aspired, are as empty as the hands 
 of the dead. If they are magnificent, it is only 
 from afar. The best that can be, the best that 
 ever has been, is in the discovery and mainte- 
 nance of contentment. Its factors are two-fold — 
 the first is health ; the second, indifference. 
 
 Lamettrie's chief titles to recognition rest on 
 the Histoire naturelle de I'&me and the Homme 
 machine. The first-mentioned work is an argu- 
 ment against the belief in the immortality of the 
 soul. With this doctrine ancient philosophy had 
 little to do. With the exception of Pythagoras 
 and Plato, the thinkers of classic antiquity agreed 
 in one particular — the soul was material. Even 
 to Tertullian its immateriality was unestablished. 
 " Animam nihil est," he said, "sed corpus non 
 
128 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 sit ;'■ and not a few of the fathers of the Church 
 held the same opinion. The masses of course 
 thought differently. The belief in a future life 
 was by them unquestioned. It probably arose 
 from the re-appearance of the dead in the dreams 
 of the living. But in Greece, as in the Roman 
 Empire, the life prefigured was one in which 
 there was little charm. The neglect of funeral 
 rites turned it into a dull and restless torture. 
 In this particular the observances of believers 
 were little else than precautionary safeguards, 
 and the Requiescat in pace which is to be seen on 
 contemporary tomb-stones is but a forlorn sur- 
 vival of their naive superstitions. Later, when 
 it was taught that the soul was imperishable, not 
 through an inherent indestructibility, but through 
 the influence of grace divine, its materiality was 
 still undoubted. The soul and the body were 
 considered inseparable. There were casuists 
 who thought otherwise, and their disputes are 
 legendary ; but their disputes occurred in an 
 era when faith was well-nigh universal. When 
 the distinction between the soul and the body 
 was at last satisfactorily established — that is, to 
 those who were interested in the establishment 
 of a satisfactory distinction — ^the believer found 
 himself turning back to Plato. The soul was 
 represented as a resultant of the forces of the 
 body, very much as harmony is known to be 
 won from the strings of the lyre. Yet, as Sim- 
 mias queried, when the strings are broken and 
 the wood reduced to dust, from what shall the 
 harmony be produced ? 
 
Tlie Dissent of The Seers. i2ip 
 
 In the Histoire naturelle de Vame, little is said 
 on this subject. It was not Lamettrie's intention 
 to narrate what had been thought ; what he 
 wished to do was to paint the soul's development, 
 and he put forth his best efforts to show that 
 that which is termed soul is but the outcome of 
 the perfectionment and education of the senses. 
 
 In r Homme machine it is again a question of 
 the soul, and the conclusion of course is the 
 same. In spite of Des'cartes, who taught of two 
 substances precisely as though he had seen and 
 counted them ; in spite of Leibnitz, who spiritual- 
 ized matter instead of materializing the spirit ; in 
 spite of every one and everything to the contrary, 
 Lamettrie, in broad paragraphs, proved to his 
 own satisfaction that to think, to feel, to distin- 
 guish right from wrong as readily as blue from 
 yellow, and to be but an animal, superior, per- 
 haps, but still a brute, is not a bit more contra- 
 dictory than it is for a parrot or a monkey to be 
 able to distinguish pleasure from pain. 
 
 " Man is a machine," he said, " wound up and 
 kept running by digestion. The soul is the main- 
 spring. Both, of course, are material. As to 
 thought, it is as much a property of matter as is 
 electricity, motricity, impenetrability and breadth. 
 To query with Locke whether matter can think, 
 is tantamount to wondering whether it can tell 
 time. In brief, man is a machine, and through- 
 out the universe there is but one substance di- 
 versely modified. Such," he concluded "is my 
 idea, or rather such is the truth. Dispute qui 
 voudra." 
 
I JO The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 Another Breton who found a seat at the royal 
 supper-table was Maupertuis. Before he found 
 it, there had been some discussion among the 
 erudite concerning the sphericity of the globe, 
 and two separate expeditions were sent from 
 France to measure different degrees of longi- 
 tude. One went to Lapland, the other to Peru. 
 Maupertuis, who was a geometrician, was placed 
 at the head of the Polar expedition. He set out 
 at once for Sweden, and after sixteen months of 
 fatiguing adventures, returned to Paris to find 
 himself the hero of the day. But in a city like 
 Paris, a knowledge of the meridian, however 
 exact, is not an attainment apt to make a man 
 ceaselessly admired ; and Maupertuis, who had 
 taken the admiration quite seriously, and had 
 had himself painted, mantled in fur, in the act of 
 flattening the globe, soon found that his glory 
 was so much vapor. Now Maupertuis was not 
 only a geometrician, he was a philosopher, and 
 the occupant of the Prussian throne was, as has 
 been hinted, ever ready to add a new one to his 
 collection ; consequently, while Maupertuis was 
 wondering at the inconstancy of his compa- 
 triots, a note was brought to him from Frederick. 
 "Come to Berlin," it ran. "You have taught 
 the world the form of the earth ; you shall learn 
 from a king how much you are appreciated." 
 
 The king at that time, however, happened to 
 be in a battle-field ; and to the battle-field .Mau- 
 pertuis, with the true spirit of a courtier, di- 
 rected his steps. Unfortunately for him, Fred- 
 erick was obliged to retreat, and Maupertuis 
 
The Dissent of The Seers. iji 
 
 was taken prisoner. At first it was tliought that 
 he had been killed ; but when it was learned that 
 he had been conducted to Vienna and there 
 Kted at court, Voltaire took occasion to say a 
 few smart things, and the world smiled with 
 amusement and relief. 
 
 At Vienna, the Queen asked him what his 
 philosophy taught him to think of two princes 
 who wrangled over patches of a planet which he 
 had measured. " I have no right," he answered 
 sedately, "to be more philosophic than kings.'' 
 To change the subject, her Majesty deigned to 
 inquire whether the Queen of Sweden was not 
 the most beautiful princess in Europe. To which 
 Maupertuis, who was nothing if not rggence, 
 answered, with his best bow, " I had always 
 thought so until now." After that, he was 
 returned unransomed to Frederick. 
 
 At Berlin, a young Pomeranian lady fell in 
 love with him. His conversation, it appears, 
 was so lively, that women never suspected him 
 of being a savant. The young Pomeranian be- 
 came his bride ; while he, through the king's 
 good offices, was made President of the Berlin 
 Academy, — a sort of Minister of Literature, much 
 as d'Argens was Minister of the Stage. Vol- 
 taire, meanwhile, was lounging at Sans-Souci. 
 Maupertuis had not forgotten the smart things 
 he had said, and Voltaire was perhaps a little 
 jealous of the favor shown to a rival. But, be 
 this as it may, it is a part of history that no love 
 was lost between them. When Voltaire had the 
 king's ear, he poured into it scurrilous anecdotes 
 
132 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 about his compatriot ; and when Maupertuis en-, 
 joyed a similar privilege, the tale of his griev- 
 ances never tarried. " Theytakeme for asewer,'' 
 said Frederick, with the indulgent smile of a man 
 who has said a good thing. 
 
 Frederick sided with Maupertuis. It is pos- 
 sible that in some kingly fashion he, too, was 
 jealous, though in his case the jealousy was of 
 one whose royalty threatened at times to over- 
 shadow his own. Voltaire was irascible ; he was 
 annoyed at the preference ; and after brooding 
 over his discontent, he composed and published 
 a pamphlet entitled Docteitr Akakia. 
 
 In this trifle Maupertuis was lampooned as 
 no one had ever been before ; his pet theories — 
 to wit, that there is no other proof of God than 
 an algebraic formula, and that nothing which we 
 see is as we see it — were held up to the laughter 
 of the world. Frederick caused the edition to be 
 seized and burned by the headsman. Voltaire, 
 however, was not easily circumvented. A few 
 copies escaped the auto-da-fg and went careering 
 over Europe. Maupertuis was forever ridicu- 
 lous, but Voltaire was still unsatisfied. He kept 
 pricking him with his pen, until Maupertuis, out- 
 wearied with his struggle with an ogre, took to 
 his bed and died of mortification — "between two 
 monks," said the relentless Arouet. "What do 
 you think of him ? " he asked d'Alembert ; " he 
 has been suffering for a long time from a replie 
 tion of pride, but I did not take him either for a 
 hypocrite or an imbecile." 
 
 Maupertuis was one of the first of the modern 
 
The Dissent of The Seers. ijj 
 
 thinkers that have ventured to add up the bal- 
 ance-sheet of pleasure and pain, and also one 
 of the first to discover that the latter largely 
 exceeds the former ; indeed, so large did the 
 excess seem, that he had no hesitation in an- 
 nouncing that were all that is painful in life 
 suppressed and only the pleasurable moments 
 counted, the duration of the happiest existence 
 would not exceed a few hours. 
 
 He had scanned the pay sages de tristesse as 
 carefully as another, and the fairest vista that he 
 saw was behind the delinquent hands of death. 
 " Post mortem nihil est ; ipsaque mors nihil," — 
 After death is nothing ; death itself is naught, — 
 said Seneca ; and Maupertuis, who agreed with 
 him thoroughly, advocated suicide, and praised 
 the stoics for teaching that it was a permissible 
 remedy, and one that was most useful, against 
 the ills of life. " If," he argued, " a man believes 
 in a religion which offers eternal rewards to those 
 that suffer, and which threatens with eternal 
 punishment those that die to avoid suffering, it 
 is not bravery on his part to commit suicide, nor 
 is it cowardice, it is idiocy. On the other hand, 
 a man who has no belief in a future life, and who 
 is solely occupied in making this one as little 
 unpleasant as possible, sees neither rhyme nor 
 reason in submitting to misfortunes from which 
 he can free himself in a trice." Nevertheless, 
 Maupertuis died a natural death, and, as Voltaire 
 said, between two monks at that. 
 
 Maupertuis, Lamettrie, d'Argens, even to the 
 philosopher king himself, were dominated and 
 
134 ^^ Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 overshadowed by Voltaire. Though purposeful, 
 their influence was slight ; it had barely strength 
 enough to cross the Rhine. But on the other side 
 of that muddy river there was then a group of 
 thinkers whose influence can be felt in some of 
 the currents of contemporary thought, and con- 
 cerning whom a word or two may now be said. 
 
 When the foremost of England's sceptics, 
 David Hume, visited Paris, he found a warm 
 welcome at the house of the Baron d'Holbach. 
 it was there. Burton says, that professing he had 
 never met an atheist, Hume was told that he 
 was in the company of seventeen. Of these, 
 the more noteworthy were Diderot, d'Alembert, 
 Naigeon and the host. 
 
 The Baron d'Holbach was a German who had 
 been educated in France. He was a man of 
 large wealth, wise, liberal and charitable. His 
 house in the Rue Royale, which was called the 
 CafS de I'Europe, was a free academy of the 
 freest thinkers ; and of free-thinkers, domiciled 
 and transient, d'Holbach was known as the 
 maitre d'hdtel. But d'Holbach was something 
 more ; he was one of the field-marshals of the 
 little army of materialists who were the forerun- 
 ners of the Revolution, and a lord in the litera- 
 ture of anti-theism. His erudition is said to 
 have been practically unbounded. There was 
 nothing of value written or suggested with which 
 he was unfamiliar. " No matter what system I 
 may imagine," said Diderot, "I am always sure 
 that my friend d'Holbach can find me with facts 
 and authorities to support it." 
 
The Dissent of The Seers. ijj 
 
 The doctrine which d'Holbach advocated was 
 as liberal as the sea. It was a doctrine of free- 
 dom in all things — in speech, in thought, in poli- 
 tics and in religion. Its tenets are displayed at 
 length in the Systeme de la Nature, a work pub- 
 lished in Holland, and, through a literary trick- 
 ery then not infrequent, attributed to a gentleman 
 who, being dead, could not be prosecuted. 
 
 "Lost at nightfall in a forest, I have," said 
 Diderot, "but a feeble light to guide me. A 
 stranger happens along : ' Blow out your candle,' 
 he says, 'and you will see your way the better.' 
 That stranger is a theologian.'' 
 
 This squib might have served as epigraph to 
 th^ Systeme de la Nature. 
 
 " Man,'' said d'Holbach, " is miserable, simply 
 because he is ignorant. His mind is so infected 
 with prejudices, that one might think him for- 
 ever condemned to err. ... It is error that has 
 forged the chains with which tyrants and priests 
 have manacled nations. ... It is error that has 
 evoked the religious fears which shrivel up men 
 with fright, or make them butcher each other for 
 chimeras. The hatreds, persecutions, massacres 
 and tragedies of which, under pretext of the 
 interest's of Heaven, the earth has been the 
 repeated theatre, are one and all the outcome 
 of error." 
 
 These bold words were the prelude to the 
 frankest exposition of anti-theism that France 
 had ever read. Its audacity terrified, but its 
 austerity repelled. Its paragraphs were as Cim- 
 merian to the chamber-maids and hair-dressers 
 
yj(5 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 of Paris, as the gayeties of Lamettrie had been 
 shocking to the pedantry of Beriin. Then, too, 
 it was rich and elaborate in its materialism. 
 To-day it seems a trifle antiquated ; the world 
 has thought more deeply since ; but with its 
 general outlines contemporary thinkers have had 
 no fault to find. In these outlines Nature is rep- 
 resented as the one-in-all, beyond which is noth- 
 ing. The main propositions tend to show that 
 throughout the length and breadth of space there 
 is merely force and matter, the infinite intercon- 
 nection of cause and effect ; and that it is through 
 an ignorance of natural laws that divinities have 
 been imagined and made the objects of hope and 
 fear. 
 
 On the subject of hope and fear, d'Holbach 
 had much to say. The gist of it may be sum- 
 marized in the fatalist axiom, Whatever will be, 
 is. Everything that happens, happens neces- 
 sarily, and in virtue of immutable laws. As to 
 order or disorder, they are empty terms ; like 
 time and space, they belong to the' categories of 
 thought ; there is nothing outside of us which 
 corresponds to them. It is all very well for man 
 to see order in that which is in conformity with 
 his state of being, and disorder in that which is 
 contrary to it ; to call one the effect of an Intel- 
 ligence acting toward a determined end, and the 
 other the play of hazard. But order and dis- 
 order are but words used to designate certain 
 states and conditions of being, which if perma- 
 nent are called after the one, and if transitory 
 after the other. Beside, Nature can have no 
 
The Dissent of The Seers. 137 
 
 aim, for there is nothing beyond it to which it 
 can strive. As to hazard, it is meaningless, save 
 in contradistinction to that Intelhgence which man 
 himself has conceived. Now man, d'Holbach ex- 
 plains, has always fancied himself the central 
 fact in the universe. He has connected with him- 
 self everything that he has seen, and modelled 
 everything after his own image. In this way he 
 grew to believe that the universe is governed by 
 an intelligence like unto his own ; yet, being at 
 the same time convinced of his individual inca- 
 pacity to cause the multiform effects of which he 
 stood a witness, he was forced to distinguish be- 
 tween himself and the invisible producer, and he 
 thought to overcome the difficulty by attributing 
 to that intelligence an aggrandizement of the 
 prowess which he himself possessed. 
 
 The belief in the supernatural, which in man 
 is inherent, d'Holbach regarded as a disease 
 to which humanity's greatest misfortunes are 
 attributable. Truth, he was fond of saying, can 
 never harm. Nor can it. But that does not 
 make it a welcome guest. The whole history of 
 religion goes to prove that man would rather be 
 wrong in his beliefs than have none at all. Then, 
 too, the majority have never been provided with 
 such leisure as would enable them to dispense 
 with illusions. The thinker may wave them 
 away, but his gestures leaves the masses unaf- 
 fected. Perhaps if the world were merely learned, 
 it would be anti-theistic ; but fortunately, or un- 
 fortunately, as the actual status of affairs may be 
 viewed, it is something more or something less ; 
 
13S The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 there is an unstillable longing, an unconquerable 
 expectation of better things, which so exalts the 
 heart, that the serenest of atheists can never wit- 
 ness its effects without experiencing some sudden 
 pang of envy. 
 
 In the polite society in which d'Holbach 
 moved, disbelief was so prevalent that it is pos- 
 sible he had no occasion to experience a twinge. 
 And if he did, the emotion has been unrecorded. 
 He was squarely opposed to the idea of God, and 
 at the same time a living contradiction to the 
 theory that an atheist is necessarily a man of lax 
 principles. Walmar, in the Nouvelle Heloise, 
 is the portrait which Rousseau took of him. 
 Yet, as has been already intimated, it is the 
 temperament, and not the point of view, that 
 guides us into paths that are those of virtue or 
 its opposite. And it was d'Holbach's tempera- 
 ment that made him shame the Jew devil as Satan 
 had never been shamed before. On this point 
 the testimony of his contemporaries is unani- 
 mous. The purity of his life, and that, too, in 
 a century when immorality was less a vice than 
 a grace, has never been questioned. He was 
 a simple-mannered gentleman, warm of heart, 
 sweet-tempered, endowed with great delicacy of 
 sentiment, and possessed of such tact that even 
 Rousseau, who would have quarrelled with an 
 archangel, was unable to find in him any other 
 cause of grievance than his wealth. " He is too 
 rich for me," he said ; but he added, " He is a. 
 better man, and one more really charitable than 
 
The Dissent of TTie Seers. ijg 
 
 many a Christian. He does good without the 
 hope of reward." 
 
 The only immortality in which d'Holbach be- 
 lieved was fame. In life there is certainly noth- 
 ing more exquisite. As Schopenhauer said, it is 
 the Golden Fleece of the elect. But after death, 
 and true glory comes but then, fame and ig- 
 nominy are to the recipient equally unmeaning. 
 And even were it otherwise, when it is remem- 
 bered what are the limitations of fame, and 
 when it is considered how small a value can be 
 accorded to public opinion, the immortality in 
 which d'Holbach believed does not seem worth 
 an effort. 
 
 D'Holbach was one of the few writers that 
 have had the courage to advocate suicide, and 
 he advocated it as boldly to those who cowered 
 at death, as he advocated virtue to a century 
 whose vice is historic. His main argument in 
 its favor is to the effect that the engagements 
 between man and Nature are neither voluntary 
 on the part of the one nor reciprocal on the 
 part of the other. Man is therefore in nowise 
 bound ; and should he find himself unsupported, 
 he can desert a position which has become un- 
 pleasant and irksome. As to the citizen, he can 
 hold to his country and associates only by the 
 mortgage on his well-being. If the lien is paid 
 off, he is free. "Would a man be blamed," he 
 asks, "a man who, finding himself useless and 
 without resources in his native place, should 
 withdraw into solitude ? Well, then, with what 
 right can a man be blamed who kills himself 
 
140 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 from despair ? And what is death but an isola- 
 tion ? " 
 
 Maxims such as these are considered danger- 
 ous and provocative. But maxims have never 
 caused a suicide. A man may cut his throat or 
 hang himself to put an end to the agonies of 
 grief or boredom, but not because he has hap- 
 pened on a suggestive quotation. He will look 
 for the great quietus if he wants to, but not be- 
 cause it is recommended. In any case the con- 
 tempt of death is a useful possession ; and it 
 is well for every one to understand that while 
 virtue and happiness are supposed to go hand- 
 in-hand, and that to do good is to receive it, yet 
 after the loss of any one of us the world will go 
 on in quite the same manner as before. 
 
 In the days when d'Holbach was giving din- 
 ner-parties in the Rue Royale, the flag of France 
 was noticeably black. Some said that it was 
 from the dye of the cassock ; others, that it had 
 caught the grime of mediaeval institutions. At 
 d'Holbach's dinner-table, however, in the salons 
 of Madame Geoffrin^she who was so plain that 
 Greuze exclaimed, " My God, if she annoys me 
 I'll paint her ! " — in the salons of Mesdames du 
 Deffand, de Lespinasse and Necker, there assem- 
 bled from time to time a handful of thinkers 
 who were determined to give the flag of France 
 another hue. These gentlemen were resolute 
 and aggressive. The century they saw, was 
 hungry for ideas, and it was in an effort to give 
 it food of the right quality that the Encyclopaedia 
 was produced. 
 
The Dissent of The Seers. 141 
 
 The Encyclopaedia — a name coined by Rabelais 
 ■ — displayed the genealogy of thought. It was 
 at once a storehouse of knowledge, an attack on 
 ignorance, an appeal to common-sense, and a 
 plea for liberty. It opposed every abuse, politi- 
 cal, theological, ecclesiastical, industrial, fiscal, 
 legal and penal. It sought to establish tolera- 
 tion, to abolish sacerdotal thaumaturgy, to banish 
 the supernatural, and thwart the subornation of 
 the understanding. It was in no sense free from 
 error, and its erudition presents to-day a most 
 mildewed appearance ; but it served its purpose, 
 and from out its wide bindings burst the torrents 
 of the Revolution. 
 
 In its opposition to everything that savored 
 of the illiberal, the Encyclopsedia encountered 
 many an obstacle and not a few embarrassments ; 
 indeed, the history of the government and litera- 
 ture of the third quarter of the last century is 
 interwoven with that of its vicissitudes and final 
 triumph. Every man of brains wrote for it, and 
 those who had none and. wanted some sub- 
 scribed. The responsibility of its publication 
 was assumed by Diderot and d'Alembert. 
 
 Diderot was a giant, whose head was in the 
 clouds and whose feet were in the mud. He 
 wrote obscene stories and anticipated Lamark, 
 Darwin's precursor. History, art, science and 
 philosophy he held in fee, and yet he was not 
 erudite. He had drunk oft, not deep. " I 
 know a great many things," he said, " but there 
 is hardly a man that does not know some one 
 thing better than I." In the activity of his mind 
 
142 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 may be found the reason of the admiration of 
 his contemporaries and that of posterity's neglect. 
 He has left us twenty volumes of essays and 
 digressions, but not a single book. Yet no one 
 was ever so prodigal with his pen as he. He 
 gave it to any one that asked, to an enemy as 
 readily as to a friend. Grimm asked his opinion 
 on an exhibition of paintings ; he gave it in an 
 in-octavo. " I have written a satire against you," 
 said a young man to him one day. " I am poor ; 
 will you buy it ? " " Ah ! sir," he exclaimed, 
 " what a pitiable vocation is yours ! but," he con- 
 tinued, " I will tell you what to do. The Duke 
 of Orleans honors me with his dislike ; dedicate 
 your book to him ; he will pay you well." 
 "A good dedication is a difficult job,'' said the 
 young black-mailer. " Well, sit down," Diderot 
 answered, " and I will write it for you." And he 
 did, and the youth received his pay. 
 
 Diderot being without ambition was known as 
 the Philosopher, but he was so poor that he could 
 hardly buy the cloak. When he wished to dower 
 his daughter, he found that he had nothing except 
 his library, and his library to him was life itself. 
 Nevertheless, he determined to sell it. Catharine 
 of Russia learned of the determination and bought 
 the library ; but with a true sense of what is 
 royal, she left him the use of his books and made 
 him their salaried custodian beside. 
 
 At the beginning of his literary career, Diderot 
 was a sincere deist, which, as some one has said, 
 is a proof of what education may do. It was not 
 long, however, before he saw that scepticism is 
 
The Dissent of The Seers. i^j 
 
 the first step to philosophy ; and when the step 
 was taken, he descended without a compunction 
 the precipitate stair of negation. The stages of 
 his thought are well defined. "Aggrandize God," 
 he shouted in his first enthusiasm ; " free Him 
 from the captivity of temples and creeds. See 
 Him everywhere, or say that he does not exist.'' 
 Later — in the " Letter on the Blind for the Use of 
 those who See " — he manifested a classic indif- 
 ference on the whole subject. " Ask an Indian 
 how the world is suspended in the air, and he 
 will tell you that it rests on the back of an ele- 
 phant. ' And the elephant ? ' ' On a turtle.' You 
 pity the Indian, yet one might say to you as to 
 him, ' Admit your ignorance, and don't bother me 
 with a menagerie." 
 
 But his indifference was transient. " Among 
 the difficulties (of believing in God), there is 
 one," he noted, " which has been agitated since 
 the world began. It is that men suffer without 
 having deserved to do so. To this there has 
 never been an answer. The existence of a Su- 
 preme Being is incompatible with evils, moral 
 and physical. What, then, is the safest course ? 
 The one which we have taken. Whatever the 
 optimist may say, we answer that if the world 
 could not exist without sentient beings, and sen- 
 tient beings without pain, the Almighty would 
 have done better to keep quiet." Thereafter he 
 became firmly anti-theistic. " It is," he said, 
 " highly important not to mistake hemlock for 
 parsley, but it is entirely unnecessary to believe 
 in God." " The Christian religion," he added, 
 
144 Th'^ Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 " is atrocious in its dogmas. It is unintelligible, 
 metaphysical, intertwisted and obscure. It is 
 mischievous to tranquillity, dangerous in its dis- 
 cipline, puerile and unsociable in its ethics, and 
 in its ceremonial dreary, flat, Gothic and most 
 gloomy. . . If my ideas please no one," he con- 
 cluded, " it is possible that they are poor ; but it" 
 they pleased everybody, I would consider them 
 detestable." Yet as he preached tolerance, he 
 practised it, and was never known to refuse a 
 crutch to those who had no legs. 
 
 Among the EncyclopEedists, where Diderot was 
 king, d'Alembert was prime minister, a Mazarin, 
 as one may say ; but a Mazarin who grew faint- 
 hearted, and, fearing the Bastille, left his mon- 
 arch in the lurch. 
 
 D'Alembert was more a mathematician than 
 a philosopher. His mistress was Algebra. His- 
 tory has given the same title to Mile, de I'Espi- 
 nasse ; but if he was unfaithful, the lady in 
 question appears to have paid him back in a 
 better coin than his own. He was not a cheerful 
 person, yet when alone with his books he was 
 happy as though he were dead. " Qui est-ce qui 
 est heureux ? " some one ksked him. " Quelque 
 miserable," he replied. He was an invalid, too ; 
 but he hated medicine, and held a physician to 
 be like a blind man who armed with a cudgel 
 strikes at random, and, according as he strikes, 
 annihilates the disease or — the patient. 
 
 As has been hinted, he was timid, or perhaps 
 merely cautious, a trait which found little favor 
 with Voltaire. " Philosophers are too lukewarm," 
 
The Dissent of Tlte Seers. 14.5 
 
 he said ; " instead of shrugging their shoulders 
 at the errors of mankind, they ought to wipe 
 them out." But apparently d'Alembert did not 
 agree with him. " Philosophers," he retorted, 
 " should be like children, who, when they have 
 done anything wrong, put the blame on the cat." 
 But if for one reason or another he thought it 
 best to keep his views from the public, he had 
 no hesitation in whispering them to the sympa- 
 thetic ear of Frederick the Great. The latter 
 had written what he called a refutation of the 
 naturalism conveyed in d'Holbach's Systeme de la 
 Nature. The book had annoyed him ; but what 
 probably annoyed him most was not its natural- 
 ism, but its attack on the sacred caste of royalty. 
 At the same time, as he himself said, if d'Holbach 
 were condemned to be burned, he would be the 
 first to play the hose on the stake. 
 
 In the eyes of the liberal monarch, d'Alembert, 
 when answering the refutation, brandished the 
 historic doubt. "Montaigne's motto. What do 
 I know ? seems to me,'' he wrote, "the answer 
 that should be made to all questions in metaphys- 
 ics. . . . Those who deny the existence of a 
 Supreme Intelligence advance more than they can 
 prove. In treating such a subject, scepticism is 
 the only reasonable standpoint. No one, for in- 
 stance, can deny that throughout the universe, and 
 particularly in the formation of plants and ani- 
 mals, there are combinations which seem to reveal 
 an Intelligence. That they prove it, as a watch 
 proves a watch-maker, is incontestable. But sup- 
 posing that one wishing to go further asks, What 
 10 
 
146 The Anaiomy of Negation. 
 
 is this Intelligence ? Did it create, or did it 
 merely arrange matter ? Is creation possible, or, 
 if it be not, is matter eternal ? And if matter 
 is eternal and needed an Intelligence simply to 
 arrange it, is that Intelligence united to matter, 
 or is it distinct ? If it is united, matter, prop- 
 erly speaking, is God, and God is matter. If it 
 is distinct, how can that which is material be 
 fashioned by that which is not ? Besides, if this 
 Intelligence is infinitely wise and infinitely power- 
 ful, why is the world, which is its work, so filled 
 with physical and moral imperfections ? Why 
 are not all men happy ? Why are not all men 
 just ? Your Majesty assures me that this question 
 is answered by the world's eternity. And so 
 perhaps it is, but seemingly merely in this sense, 
 that the world being eternal, and in consequence 
 necessary, everything which is, must be as it is ; 
 and at once we enter into a system of fatality and 
 necessity which-does not in the least accord with 
 the idea of a God infinitely wise and infinitely 
 powerful. Sire, when these questions arise, we 
 should repeat ' Que sais-je ? ' an hundred times. 
 Then, too, there is a consolation for ignorance 
 in the thought that, as we know nothing, it is un- 
 necessary for us to know more." 
 
 To which Frederick, who gave a nickname as 
 readily as a pension, answered : 
 
 " But, my dear Diagoras, if you fancy that I can 
 give a detailed explanation of the Intelligence 
 that I marry to Nature, you, over-estimate my 
 ability. I can say merely that I perceive it as I 
 
The Dissent of The Seers. 14/ 
 
 would an object of which I mig-ht happen to 
 catch a glimpse through a mist." 
 
 D'Alembert, however^ was not to be played 
 with, and he returned to the charge and routed 
 the fat king with a fresh arsenal of queries. 
 
 " With the exception of the animal kingdom, 
 the realms of matter with which we are acquaint- 
 ed appear deprived of sentiency, volition and 
 thought. Is it possible that intelligence resides in 
 them without our knowledge ? Of this there is 
 no evidence, and I am inclined to think that the 
 block of marble, as well as the plants that are 
 the most delicately and ingeniously organized, 
 are without thought and feeling. But, it is ob- 
 jected, the organization of these bodies discloses 
 visible traces of an intelligence. This I do not 
 deny ; but I would be glad to know what has 
 become of this intelligence since these bodies 
 were organized. If it resided within them while 
 they were being formed and in order to form 
 them, and if, as it is supposed, this intelligence 
 is not distinct from them, what has .become of it 
 since its work is done ? Has the very perfection 
 of the organization been annihilated ? To me, 
 such a supposition seems untenable. If, then, 
 the intelligence whose effects we admire in man 
 is merely a resultant of organization, why, in 
 other realms of matter, may we not -admit a 
 structure and an arrangement as necessary and 
 as natural as matter itself, and from which, with- 
 out the intervention of any intelligence, would 
 result the very effects which surround and sur- 
 prise us ? Lastly, in admitting the doctrine that 
 
148 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 an Intelligence presided over the formation of 
 the world and still watches over its well-being, it 
 is hard to reconcile the theory of that Intelligence 
 with the idea of infinite wisdom and power. For, 
 to the misfortune of humanity, this world of ours, 
 is very far from being the best one possible. 
 With the best of intentions, we are therefore 
 unable to recognize any other God than one who, 
 at most, is material, limited and dependent. I 
 do not know whether this view is the correct one, 
 but certainly it is not that of the Deity's partizans, 
 who would much prefer to have us atheists than 
 the Spinozists that we are. To mollify them, let 
 us turn sceptic and repeat with Montaigne, Que 
 sais-je ? " 
 
 This amiable agnosticism was shared by few 
 of the Encyclopedists. To Naigeon, who would 
 have nothing to do with half-way measures, it 
 seemed little less than revolting. Naigeon was 
 a Puritan without beliefs ; his atheism was as 
 fervent as his life was austere. When he first 
 sat, a stripling, at d'Holbach's table, he was 
 largely ridiculed. He was a pretty boy, with 
 fair skin and curled blonde hair. Diderot's 
 monkey. La Harpe called him, for it was through 
 Diderot that he was brought into notice. But 
 with age the comely lad developed into a tiger. 
 To him Diderot left the care of his unpublished 
 manuscripts, and these Naigeon edited, together 
 with the memoirs of the author. He, too, was 
 a voluminous writer, and scattered essays and 
 treatises with a prodigality which he had caught 
 from his master. But the work which caused 
 
TTie Dissent of The Seers. ,14^ 
 
 the greatest number of people to turn about and 
 look after him in the street was the Theologie 
 portative. In it the beliefs and tenets of Chris- 
 tendom were treated in a manner that reminds 
 one of Col. Ingersoll. In the subsequent Ency- 
 clopedic inethodique he wrote again on these and 
 adjacent subjects, though this time from a broader 
 and more serious standpoint. 
 
 Politically, socially and morally untrammelled, 
 he had, meanwhile, been keeping a finger on the 
 public pulse, and he felt that some great, if un- 
 determined; change was at hand. So soon, then, 
 as the National Assembly got to work on its 
 declaration of the rights of man, Naigeon issued 
 an address, in which he prayed the Assembly to 
 banish from the proclamation any suggestion of 
 religion, and in its place to assert man's right to 
 entire freedom of thought and speech. But the 
 petition was unnoticed. It is possible that he 
 made a second appeal to Robespierre; but if he 
 did, it was as unsuccessful as the first. And 
 there is an anecdote that one day during the 
 Terror he looked so much alarmed, that some 
 asked him if he were on the list of the con- 
 demned. " Worse than that," he cried. " That 
 monster Robespierre has decreed the e.xistence of 
 a Supreme Being ! " To Robespierre, an atheist 
 was an aristocrat. 
 
 While Naigeon was addressing the Assembly, 
 a young man named Sylvain Mar^chal passed 
 out of Saint-Lazare. A few months previous, he 
 had published a little book entitled, V Almanack 
 des honngtes gens, in which wise men were given 
 
ISO The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 precedence over saints. This disregard of eti- 
 quette procured for Mar^chal an opportunity to 
 meditate on the proprieties of life. When the 
 prison-doors were opened, he passed his time 
 in succoring' the indigent and housing the pur- 
 sued. He fed and sheltered priests and royalists 
 alike, and even paid masses for the repose of 
 the soul of an old vs^oman because he knew that 
 such had been her wish. 
 
 Yet Mar^chal was one of the fanatics of atheism, 
 and as proud of negation as though he had in- 
 vented it. The devil, one may see, is rarely as 
 red as he appears on the stage. The thinkers 
 with whom this chapter has had to deal were 
 fervent in their disbelief; but in their disbelief 
 there was room for such charity, tolerance and 
 broad good-will, that one looks in vain for a 
 stone that shall hit them. Perhaps, as some one 
 has said, it is only the just that have a right to 
 be athiests. And yet they were not impeccable ; 
 with one exception, they were guilty of a grievous 
 sin against good manners — they were dogmatic. 
 One may fancy that their voices were seldom 
 modulated ; it is probable that they shouted, 
 and there are few among us that care to be 
 shouted at. Then, too, there was a confidence 
 and an assurance in their atheism which is as 
 unpleasant as bigotry. They forgot Montaigne, 
 and they let Pyrrho fall asleep. Margchal was 
 not better than the others ; one^may even say 
 that he was worse, for he was dogmatic in rhyme. 
 Since Lucretius, atheism had been without a 
 poet. Leopardi's father was then a bachelor, 
 
The Dissent of The Seers. 13 1 
 
 and Shelley was in the cradle. It was Margchal 
 that the irreverent muse first ordered to hold 
 the lute. And Margchal kissed the Muse full 
 upon the mouth, and sang loudly in a strain of 
 boyish bravado. Whether or not Margchal's 
 notes were listened to, is relatively a matter of 
 small importance. A little later, the Being whose 
 existence Robespierre had decreed was publicly 
 deposed. The cathedral of Notre-Dame was 
 consecrated to the worship of Reason, the crosier 
 and the ring were trampled under foot, and an 
 ass, crowned with a mitre, was led through exult- 
 ing crowds. 
 
rja The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE PROTESTS OF YESTERDAY. 
 
 The lives of philosophers are dull. Descartes 
 might figure as the hero of a romance, but Des- 
 cartes is an exception. Fichte belongs to the 
 rule. The story of his manhood is one of poverty 
 which is not poignant, and of successes v\'hich 
 were not great. 
 
 In a worlc on this thinker, Professor Adamson 
 notes one fact which is palpitant in truth and 
 lucidity ; it is to the effect that Europe to-day 
 does not hold ten students of that marvellous 
 sophist. And yet Fichte is one of the most in- 
 solent of dissenters. To the ordinary reader his 
 negations are inexplicable ; they comprise the 
 denial of the reality of the external world. This 
 denial, which is known as akosmism, is panthe- 
 ism's twin-sister. Pantheism admits no other- 
 reality than Nature ; and akosmism, taking one 
 step further, declines to admit any reality at all. 
 Of the two, pantheism has been the more fruit- 
 ful. It began with the Vedas ; ran through Elea- 
 tic and Neo-platonic philosophy ; was caught 
 up by Scott Erigena and handed to Bruno, who 
 passed it to Spinoza. Another thread or two 
 runs through the Talmud, the Kabbala, the the- 
 ories of Maimonides, Gerson and Chesdai Cres- 
 
The Protests of Yesterday. t^j 
 
 kas ; and there are tangles of it in the beliefs 
 of medieval communities, in the heresies of 
 the Beghards and Beguines, the Turlupins and 
 Adamites ; but with their unravelment the reader 
 need not be wearied. Akosmism has found fewer 
 adherents. Like pantheism, it began with the 
 Vedas, or, more correctly, with the Vedanta 
 philosophy ; left broad traces in Greece ; revived 
 for a moment during the Renaissance ; and then 
 sank back into obscurity until Fichte, Kant aid- 
 ing, brought it to light anew. Between the two 
 systems there is this cardinal distinction. Pan- 
 theism and science have never been other than 
 the best of friends. There is nothing in the one 
 that has ever been seriously opposed by the 
 other. But akosmism and science look at each 
 other askant. They have as much in common 
 as have the poet and the mathematician. 
 
 The clearest idea of Fichte's akosmism, or 
 rather the clearest idea of its charm and futility, 
 is conveyed in a work entitled the Bestimmung 
 des Menscken, the Vocation of Man. The work 
 is divided into three parts : Doubt, Knowledge 
 and Faith. The first part. Doubt, opens with 
 an inquiry concerning that mystery within us 
 that calls itself " I," and an examination of Na- 
 ture that vaunts itself real. From this inquiry 
 and from this examination, Fichte discovers that 
 man is but a link in a chain of necessity, a part 
 of -that force which, amid the everlasting revo- 
 lution and mutation of things, is the sum and 
 substance of all that is. 
 
 And that chain of necessity ! Was there ever 
 
154 ^^ Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 anything more delicately interconnected ? One 
 has but to look at it to see that its rivets are so 
 neatly joined that they make it impossible for any- 
 thing to be other than it is. Take, for instance, a 
 single grain of sand on the sea-shore, and fancy 
 that it lies a few feet further inland than it actu- 
 ally does. The mental operation is, admittedly, 
 most easy to perform ; but note the consequences. 
 For that grain of sand to be a few feet further 
 inland, then must the wind which bore it have 
 been stronger than it was ; then must the state 
 of the atmosphere which occasioned the wind have 
 been different from what it was, and the pre- 
 vious changes different ; in fact, it is necessary 
 to presuppose an entirely different temperature 
 from that which actually existed. We must also 
 suppose a different constitution of the bodies 
 which influence the temperature, the barren- 
 ness or fertility of countries, on which depend 
 the health of man and the duration of life. Inter- 
 fere, therefore, with that grain of sand, and it is 
 within the range of possibilities that in such a 
 state of weather as was necessary to move it but 
 a few feet further inland, some one, long ago, 
 may have died of cold or hunger — long ago, be- 
 fore the birth of that son from whom the sophist 
 himself descended ; and behold, Fichte would 
 have been spared the trials of life, and prevented, 
 too, from solving every problem, and leaving 
 the student nothing to do but to bore himself to 
 death. 
 
 From Fichte's logic, therefore, the necessity 
 which compels everything to be precisely as it 
 
Tlie Protests of Yesterday. i^^ 
 
 is, is amply demonstrated. Nevertheless, doubt 
 is not yet banished. It is true he has proved 
 the existence of man to be but a manifestation 
 of a force whose operation is determined by the 
 whole of the universe, but into the nature of 
 that force he is unable to look. And even could 
 he, of what use would it be ? It would not help 
 him to regulate his actions. Nature is the last 
 one to contradict herself, and she allows no one 
 to contradict her. The force that acts on us and 
 in us makes us what we are ; and to attempt to 
 make ourselves otherwise than it has been ap- 
 pointed we should be, is a task which may be 
 pleasant, but which assuredly is useless. In the 
 chain of necessity we are all interlinked : fight 
 free who may. They who have done so have 
 reached that bourne from which no traveller 
 returns. 
 
 We may rejoice and repent, we may form good 
 resolutions ; but the joy and the repentance and 
 the good resolutions come to us of themselves, 
 and not until it is appointed that they shall do 
 so. When they do come, however sincere the 
 repentance may be, however magnificent the 
 resolutions, the course of things moves on un- 
 changed and changeless as before. We lie in 
 the lap of necessity. Should Nature destine one 
 man to be wise and to be brave, wise and brave 
 he will be. Should she destine another to be 
 scatterbrained and imbecile, scatterbrained and 
 imbecile will he become. There is no merit, no 
 blame, to be ascribed to her or to them. The 
 wishes that throb in our hearts may rebel, but 
 
1^6 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 the great Mother snuffs them out like a candle. 
 She is governed herself. Her laws are ours. 
 
 It is in musings of this description that Fichte 
 stretches his hand to Spinoza and denies that 
 man is a free agent. At best he is a conscious 
 automaton. But what if he were not even that ? 
 Is there any one thing of which he is certain ? 
 
 ' ' Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live 
 in dreams ? ' ' 
 
 Fichte asks himself the same question, and 
 looking with introspective eye for an answer, 
 discovers the purely subjective character of all 
 human knowledge. He sees that he has no con- 
 sciousness of things in themselves, only a con- 
 sciousness of a consciousness of them. Were he 
 blind, what would he know of color ? Were he 
 deaf, what would he know of song ? Were he 
 without imagination, doubt, hope and fear would 
 have no meaning. Such knowledge as man pos- 
 sesses is merely a knowledge of himself; beyond 
 it, consciousness never goes. When it seems to 
 do otherwise, when man assumes to be conscious 
 of an object — the sun, for instance — he has mere- 
 ly the consciousness of a supposition of an object, 
 which supposition he identifies with sensation 
 and takes for the object itself 
 
 It has been hinted that akosmism and science 
 are at odds, but on this point they agree. As 
 a matter of fact, and one admitted by all deco- 
 rous scholars, we none of us see the sun. What 
 we do see are certain modifications of light in 
 immediate relation to our organ of vision. And 
 in this connection it is not improper to note that 
 
The Protests of Yesterday. i^j 
 
 no two persons see the same modifications of the 
 same light, and that for the reason that each per- 
 son sees a different complement of rays acting on 
 his own individual retina. 
 
 But to return to Fichte, and to put his idea 
 less technically, it is a self-evident proposition 
 that we neither see our sight, feel our touch, nor 
 yet have a higher sense by which things affecting 
 the organs of sense are perceived. It is therefore 
 not difficult to accept the axiom that our con- 
 sciousness of external existence is merely the 
 product of our presentative faculty. The diffi- 
 culty lies in the application, for with it all reality 
 vanishes. In that which we call intuitive knowl- 
 edge, we contemplate only ourselves, and our 
 consciousness is and can be only a consciousness 
 of the modifications of our own existence. If, 
 therefore, the external world arises before us 
 only through our own consciousness, it follows 
 that what is particular and multiform in the 
 external world can arise in no other way ; and 
 if the connection between ourselves and what is 
 external to us is simply a connection of thought, 
 then is the connection of the multifarious objects 
 of the external world simply this and no other. 
 
 The whole of the material world is, then, but a 
 cerebral phenomenon. There is no being, no 
 real existence. The only things that exist are 
 pictures, and these pictures know themselves 
 after the fashion of pictures. They are pictures 
 which float past, without there being anything 
 past which they float — -pictures which picture 
 nothing, images without significance and without 
 
1^8 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 an aim. Reality is a dream, without a world of 
 which the dream might be, or a mind that might 
 dream it. It is a dream which is woven together 
 in a dream of itself. Intuition is the dream ; 
 thought, the source of fancied reality, is the dream 
 of that dream. 
 
 In this charming manner, Fichte, after divest- 
 ing himself of doubt and attaining perfect knowl- 
 edge, mounts into a higher sphere which he 
 terms Faith. Into the austerities of this abstrac- 
 tion it is unnecessary to follow him ; and it will 
 perhaps suffice to note that the conclusion 
 amounts to the assertion that where the canaille 
 believe that things are as they appear, because 
 they must, the philosopher believes because he 
 will. After a deduction such as that, one may 
 well e.xclaim against the uselessness of philos- 
 ophy in general, and the Fichtean branch in par- 
 ticular. 
 
 Fichte's metaphysical hysterics excited the 
 wildest hilarity. His formula I ^ I, on which in 
 an earlier work he had sounded all the changes, 
 was popularly supposed to mean his own indi- 
 vidual ego. Fichte, however, meant nothing of 
 the sort. The "I" he used in the impersonal 
 sense which is conveyed in such expressions as 
 "it rains," "it snows." The "I" represented 
 the force that pervades all things, and which in 
 man arrives at a consciousness of self. But 
 Fichte was not a clear writer — few Germans are ; 
 and if he was taken au pied de la lettre, the 
 fault was his own. In any event, his philosophy 
 was largely ridiculed. Heine is witness to the 
 
The Protests of Yesterday. i^g 
 
 fact that a cartoon was circulated which repre- 
 sented a g-oose whose liver had become so big 
 that the bird was undecided whether she was all 
 goose or all liver. Across her Fichtean breast 
 ran the legend 1=1. The reality of his idealism, 
 however, was not taken so easily. The Philis- 
 tines waxed wroth. Heine represents a burgo- 
 meister as exclaiming, " That man thinks I don't 
 exist, does he ? Why, I'm stouter than he and 
 his superior, too ! " The ladies asked, " Doesn't 
 he at least believe in the existence of his wife ? " 
 " Of course not." "And does Madame Fichte 
 permit that ?" 
 
 But with whatever facetiousness the matter 
 may be viewed, the question of an external world 
 has been, and is still, one of the great battle-fields 
 of metaphysics. The realists clamor that their 
 opponents are colossal in their errors ; the ideal- 
 ists answer, " Tu quoque." Among the latter, 
 few have been more vehement than Fichte. He 
 defended his belief with all the heavy artillery 
 of the German dictionary, and entrenched him- 
 self with logic. It was, however, merely on 
 speculative principles that he contended that 
 our knowledge of mind and matter is only a 
 consciousness of what Sir William Hamilton 
 has christened "various bundles of baseless 
 appearances." He did not deny the veracity 
 of consciousness ; he denied the veracity of its 
 testimony, a distinction as subtle as it is valid. 
 For all practical purposes the material world — 
 including Madame Fichte — was to him not only 
 thoroughly real, but it went spinning through 
 
i6o The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 space at the rate of nineteen miles a second. 
 And it was merely the certainty of uncertainty, 
 the haunting conviction of the unreliability of 
 the perceptions which in earlier days led Socrates 
 to maintain that the only thing he knew was 
 that he knew nothing, which caused Fichte to 
 discriminate between what he believed and what 
 he saw. 
 
 But however unreal the world might be in 
 theory, he was quite sure that for every-day 
 purposes it was the worst one possible. Indeed, 
 Fichte was not only an akosmist, he was a pessi- 
 mist too, a combination which seemed so alluring 
 to Lammenais, that after a debauch in Fichteana 
 he was pleased to describe the world as a shadow 
 of that which is not, an echoless sound from 
 nowhere, the chuckle of Satan in chaos. 
 
 Fichte 's successor was Schelling. In place of 
 the abstractions of his precursor, this gentleman 
 presented an adventurous mysticism. Both were 
 idealists ; but where the one extracted the real 
 from the ideal, the other reversed the proceeding. 
 The transcendentalism which they professed in 
 common, is the history of consciousness to the 
 highest degree of its development. Fichte tiara'd 
 his system with faith ; Schelling crowned his 
 own with aesthetics. To the latter, the universe 
 was a poem whose strophes were writ in meta- 
 physical formulas, a phrase which may be taken 
 to mean that he was exquisitely alive to the 
 beauties of Nature and yet unable to picture them 
 in readable prose. His real master was Spinoza, 
 
The Protests of Yesterday. i6i 
 
 and his philosophy in consequence presents some 
 of the serenest forms of pantheistic belief. 
 
 The harmony to which he was alive prefigured 
 to him the agency of a supreme Principle ; of a 
 Being eternally unconscious ; veiled from the 
 sight of man by the purity of enveloping light, 
 and apprehensible only through intellectual in- 
 tuition. On the skirts of this intuition he sus- 
 pended knowledge. Above it he poised art — ■ 
 "the revelation of that Absolute in which subject 
 and object coincide ; in which the conscious and 
 the unconscious unite." 
 
 "That which we call Nature," he said, "is a 
 poem writ in mysterious hieroglyphics, but in 
 which, were they decipherable, whoso lists might 
 read the Odyssey of the Spirit, preyed upon by 
 illusion, ever seeking, ever fleeing itself. . . . Na- 
 ture is to the artist that which it is to the phil- 
 osopher ; the ideal world ceaselessly appearing 
 in finite forms : the wan reflection of a universe 
 which does not stretch beyond the mind, but rests 
 within it." 
 
 The fundamental idea of the entire system 
 amounts in brief to this : earth, sea and sky, and 
 all that in them is, are, in their essence, emana. 
 tions, or, as Leibnitz has it, fulgurations of an 
 eternal and unconscious activity. Detached from 
 the primordial matrix, these manifestations, 
 though interconnected, are without permanent 
 reality. The finite world is an illusion. The 
 infinite alone exists. 
 
 This idea, while not unalluring, is passably 
 vague. But vagueness has no terrors for those 
 JJ 
 
i62 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 who wish to be mystified, and that there were 
 many such is evident from contemporary ac- 
 counts of the enthusiasm with which it was 
 greeted. The enthusiasm, however, was as im- 
 permanent as Schelling's own reality. His disci- 
 ples flocked to a rival teacher, to Hegel, whose 
 name has the sound of a knell. 
 
 The doctrine which this gentleman advanced, 
 and which to-day is to be sought for in seven- 
 teen massive in-octavos, may be regarded as the 
 apotheosis of the arriere-pensee. Hegel was the 
 chameleon of philosophy. He believed in nothing ; 
 and not only did he believe in nothing, but he 
 possessed no fixity of disbelief. Whenever it is 
 possible to pin him down, it is always on a con- 
 tradiction that the pinning is accomplished. He 
 was an anatomist of thought, a midwife of para- 
 dox. No phase, no flutter of consciousness, 
 escaped his diagnostic. He analyzed and dis- 
 sected, but he did not build, or at least only on 
 negations. He created doubts, not convictions. 
 He made disbelievers, not converts. It was he 
 who should have said, " Ich bin der Geist der 
 stets verneint." 
 
 It may be noted, parenthetically, that the prop- 
 osition of which Plato caught a glimpse, and 
 which Descartes dimly perceived, the proposi- 
 tion that man is the one centre of thought, 
 formed the sum and substance of Kent's teach- 
 ing. " Look," he admonished the reader, "look 
 at time and at space. They are but categories 
 of thought. Time is not, nor yet is space. They 
 are appearances which the mind creates, and 
 
The Protests of Yesterday. i6j 
 
 with which we envelope the universe." This ideal- 
 ism, which in Kant was partial, in Fichte subjec- 
 tive, and in Schelling objective, became absolute 
 with Hegel. To-him, illusion was the one perma- 
 nency, the one cause, and man but the shadow 
 of its effects. 
 
 In its widest sense, Hegel's philosophy is an 
 attempt to make the acquaintence of Schelling's 
 primordial entity — the Absolute. As a necessary 
 preparation he annihilated the finite, or, to use 
 his own language, the categories of the finite 
 which stood in his way ; and when he had done 
 so, behold, the Absolute had crumbled with 
 them. The heavens were void. There has been 
 nothing, there is nothing, there will be nothing, 
 save a constant evolution, a continuous develop- 
 ment, with death for a goal. And, after all, what 
 is the lesson that history conveys ? What, in- 
 deed, if it be not this, that whatever is born, is 
 born to die. 
 
 The idolatry, the infatuation of Hegel's dis- 
 ciples was without precedent or parallel. The 
 streets and beer-halls echoed with discussions 
 on the identity of contradictories. The Idea, the 
 Absolute, the Ich and the non-Ich, were every- 
 night topics. Metaphysics hung over Berlin like 
 a London fog. Hegel was not only a popular 
 teacher, he was a national idol. His dialectic 
 prestidigitations had all the charm which at- 
 taches to the unfathomable. That he was a 
 charlatan is clear, but that he was revered is cer- 
 tain. Among the group of mourners that as- 
 sembled about his tomb, one, a theologian, likened 
 
164 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 him to Jesus. More recently, Scherer compared 
 him to Napoleon. Yet on his death-bed Hegel 
 was heard to mutter, " Only one man under- 
 stood my philosophy, and he only half-caught 
 its import." 
 
 After such a confession, one might well offer 
 him the viaticum and hum a requiem over his 
 seventeen in-octavos. And yet in vain. Hegel's 
 influence is too substantial to be quieted by any 
 requiescat, however determined. In spite of the 
 hilarity of the impolite, his spectre looms through 
 the most rational forms of contemporary nega- 
 tion. In the core of his philosophy there broods 
 a sphinx that still defies. 
 
 When the bewilderment which Hegel excited 
 subsided, the faith which he had inculcated was 
 questioned ; belief soon gave way to heresies, and 
 the metaphysical assembly divided itself into dis- 
 senting camps. From one of these issued the 
 philosophy which counted Emerson and Carlyle 
 among its exponents. In the uproar of another, 
 Strauss, Feuerbach, Bruno and Stirner have point- 
 ed to an eternal grave and taken the nimbus from 
 a god. It is owing to the instruction of a third 
 that Vacherot has occupied his time in showing 
 that the idea of perfection is God, and that per- 
 fection does not exist ; and it was something of 
 the original spirit that smoothed the way for the 
 amiable fumisteries of Ernest Renan. 
 
 In the days when Hegelism was at its apogee, 
 there appeared in Berlin a young man who de- 
 clined to take any other part in the general intoxi- 
 cation than that of spectre at the feast. His 
 
The Protests of Yesterday. i6j 
 
 contempt for the sophist, the pachyderm hydro- 
 cephali, and all the pedantic eunuchs who made 
 up what he was wont to term the apocalyptic 
 retinue of the bestia trionfante, was sumptuous 
 in its magnificence. So sumptuous even, that he 
 took counsel from an attorney as to the exact 
 limit his contempt might reach without making 
 him amenable to a suit for defamation. Then, 
 reassured, he began an attack. " Hegel's philo- 
 sophy," he said, " is sufficient to cause an at- 
 rophy of the intellect. It is a crystallized para- 
 logism, an abracadabra, a puff of bombast, and 
 a wishwash of phrases which in its monstrous 
 construction compels the mind to form impos- 
 sible contradictions." For its preparation he 
 offered a receipt which is homeopathic in its 
 simplicity. " Dilute a minimum of thought in 
 five hundred pages of nauseous phraseology, and 
 for the rest trust to the Teuton patience of the 
 reader." 
 
 A few years before, this violent yet cautious 
 young man had written a work which he signed 
 in fullletters, Arthur Schopenhauer, and entitled, 
 Die Welials Willeund Vorstellung. This work, 
 which he thought would shake the sophistry of 
 all civilization, had been left unnoticed and neg- 
 lected on the back book-shelves of its Leipzig 
 publisher. It is said that he smarted at this in- 
 attention, and that his aggressiveness and con- 
 tempt of Hegel, and not of Hegel alone, but of 
 Fichte and Schelling, the three sophists, as he 
 was pleased to call them, was the outcome of 
 envy. Whether or not this statement is true, is 
 
i66 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 a matter of small importance. The point to be 
 noted is, that thirty years later Hegel was largely 
 forgotten, and the works of his obscure opponent 
 were welcomed with an enthusiasm which has 
 been expanding ever since. 
 
 " The world as Will and Idea" is an atheology 
 compounded of Buddhism, Tauism and Epicur- 
 ism, a mosaic of Oriental and classic negations 
 worked out by an original and brilliant thinker. 
 If the seventeen in-octavos already alluded to 
 may be regarded as the apotheosis of the arriere- 
 pensee, then, in comparison, this philosophy, to- 
 gether with its complementary monographs, rep- 
 resents the renaissance of common-sense. 
 
 Schopenhauer was not a pantheist. Had he 
 
 possessed any of the viewsof ordinary orthodoxy, 
 
 the belief, for instance, in 
 
 "L'univers 
 OQ regne un Jehovah dont Satan estl'envers, " 
 
 he might possibly have read the banns over Na- 
 ture and Satan, but he never would have identi- 
 fied the former with God. Nor was Schopen- 
 hauer a materialist. He was a theorematist of 
 force, but atoms found no place in his system. 
 Yet if he must be catalogued, it will perhaps be 
 safest to say that he was an idealist who saw the 
 inutility of dream. Kant's Kritik, from which 
 all German metaphysics proceeds, had shown 
 him that reason must either be confined within 
 the limits of experience, or else let loose into an 
 absolute idealism. The three sophists had dis- 
 gusted him with the supersensible, and yet he felt 
 suffocated in the narrow limits of the real. There 
 
The Protests of Yesterday. 167 
 
 was yet a middle course, and that course he took. 
 It was useless to ask whence the world comes or 
 whither it tends, but it would not be impertinent 
 to state -what it is j and the statement which 
 Schopenhauer made to the public was to the ef- 
 fect that the world is but the perception of a per- 
 ceiver, a simple representation, a mere idea which 
 man carries with him to the tomb, and which in 
 the absence of a thinker to think it would not 
 exist at all. 
 
 In the Cogita, a note-book of which extracts 
 have been selected by Schopenhauer's literary 
 executor,* is the following passage : " Two things 
 were before me, two bodies, regularly formed, 
 beautiful to see. One was a vase of jaspar, with 
 a border and handles of gold. The other was an 
 organism, a man. When I had admired them 
 sufficiently from without, I begged the genie who 
 accompanied me to let me visit within. This 
 permission was accorded. In the vase I found 
 nothing save the pressure of weight, and between 
 the parts some obscure reciprocal tendency which 
 I have heard designated as cohesion and affinity. 
 But when I entered the other object, my surprise 
 was so great as to be almost untellable : in legends 
 and fairy-tales there is nothing more unbelievable 
 than the spectacle which I beheld. In this object, 
 or rather in its upper end, called the head, and 
 which from without looks like anything else, I 
 saw nothing less than the world itself ; I saw the 
 immensity of space in which all is contained, the 
 
 * Arthur Schopenhauer. Von ihni Ueber ihn, Frauenstadt. 
 
1 68 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 immensity of time us. which everything moves, 
 and therewith the prodigious variety of objects 
 that fill both space and time ; but, what is most 
 astounding, I saw myself coming and going ! 
 That is what I discovered in this object that was 
 barely larger than a large fruit ; in this object 
 which the headsman can dissever with a single 
 blow, and that, too, in such wise as to plunge 
 into sudden and eternal night the whole of the 
 world that it contains. And the amusing part of 
 it all is, that if objects of this sort did not sprout 
 like mushrooms, continuously prepared to re- 
 ceive a universe that is ever ready to subside into 
 chaos, and did not give and take like a ball the 
 great idea (Vorstellung) which is identical in 
 each, and of which the identity is expressed with 
 the word objectivity, the world would no longer 
 exist." 
 
 Schopenhauer was not far from agreeing with 
 Berkeley that the world is a phantasmagoria, a 
 transformation-scene existing in fancy, or, as the 
 Brahmins declared, a mirage evoked for the en- 
 tertainment of the Supreme. The source and 
 origin of the exterior world lay in the representa- 
 tive faculty which creates it and with which it 
 disappears. Matter, according to him, is a lie 
 that is truth ; it is not an illusion, it is correlative 
 with the intelligence ; the two rise and fall to- 
 gether ; separated, they could not exist ; one is a 
 reflection of the other. Properly speaking, they 
 are the same thing examined from different points. 
 But what is this same thing ? Schopenhauer an- 
 swers with a word. It is Will. 
 
The Protests of Yesterday. i6g 
 
 This Will should not be taken to mean the con- 
 scious act of a higher Intelligence. It is a force, 
 invariable, identical and equal, of which gravi- 
 tation, electricity, heat — in fact, every form of 
 activity from the fall of an apple to the founding 
 of a monarchy, from a cataclysm to a blade of 
 grass, from the choir of planets to the invisible 
 molecule — is merely a derivative and nothing 
 more. In Nature, it is a blind, unconscious 
 power ; in man, it is the foundation of being. 
 
 This theory, which Schopenhauer expounded 
 with a great luxuriance of vivid argument, and in 
 a style that is crystal in its clarity, coincides in 
 the aptest manner with the doctrine of evolution. 
 During the early ages of the world's formation, 
 the objectivity of this force was, he says, limited 
 to inferior forms ; but when the conflict of chem- 
 ical forces had ended, and the granite, like a 
 tombstone, covered the combatants, it irrupted 
 in the world of plant and forest. The air, decar- 
 bonized, was then prepared for animal life, and 
 the Will's objectivity realized a new form. Fish 
 and crustaceans filled the sea, gigantic reptiles 
 covered the earth, and gradually through innu- 
 merable forms, each more perfect than the last, 
 the propulsion ascended to man. 
 
 Schopenhauer declined to believe that either 
 here or in another planet a being superior to man 
 could possibly exist ; and that for the reason that 
 with enlarged intelligence he would consider life 
 too deplorable to be supported for a moment. 
 As a consequence, the Will's objectivity can 
 ascend no higher. Its latest manifestation is 
 
lyo The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 even the final term of its progress, for with it has 
 come the possibility of its denial, the possibility 
 that some day it may be throttled into extinc- 
 tion and choked back into the chaos from which 
 it sprang. 
 
 In all the grades of its manifestations, Will, he 
 taught, dispenses with any end or aim. It simply 
 and ceaselessly strives, for striving is its sole 
 nature. But as any hindrance of this striving, 
 through an obstacle placed between it and its 
 temporary aim, is called suffering, and the ab- 
 sence of any obstacle, satisfaction- — it follows, if 
 the obstacles it meets outnumber the facilities 
 it encounters, that, having no final end or aim, 
 there can be no end and no measure of suffering. 
 
 That pain does outbalance pleasure is a fact 
 too well established to need discussion here. 
 Pain begins with the lowest types of animal life, 
 becomes acute with the nervous system of the 
 vertebrates, increases in proportion to the devel- 
 opment of the intelligence ; and as intelligence 
 attains distinctness, pain advances with it, until 
 what Mr. Swinburne calls the gift of tears finds 
 its supreme expression in man. And man is not 
 a being to be envied. He is the concretion of a 
 thousand necessities. His life, as Schopenhauer 
 has it, is a fight for existence, with the certainty 
 of defeat in the end ; and even when his exist- 
 ence is assured, there comes a struggle with a 
 shadowy burden, an effort to kill time, and a vain 
 attempt to escape ennui. 
 
 Nor is ennui a minor evil. It is not every 
 one who can get away from himself. Schopen- 
 
The Protests of Yestmrday. 171 
 
 hauer could, it is true ; but in so doing he noted 
 that its ravages depicted on the human counte- 
 nance an expression of absolute despair, and 
 made beings who love each other as little as 
 men do, seek eagerly the society of each other. 
 In this way, between effort and attainment, the 
 life of man rolls on. The wish is in its nature 
 pain, and satisfaction soon begets satiety. No 
 matter what fortune may have done, no matter 
 what a man may be or what he may possess, 
 pain can never be avoided. Efforts to banish it 
 effect, if successful, only a change of form. It 
 may appear as want or care for the maintenance 
 of life. If this preoccupation be removed, back 
 it comes again in the mask of love, jealousy, 
 hatred or ambition ; and if It gain entrance 
 through none of these avatars, it comes as simple 
 boredom, against which we strive as best we 
 may. Even in this latter case, if we get the 
 upper hand, we shall hardly do so, Schopenhauer 
 says, without letting pain in again in one of its 
 earlier forms. And then the dance begins afresh ; 
 for life, like a pendulum, swings ever backward 
 and forward between pain and ennui. 
 
 The one relief, a relief which at best is momen- 
 tary and accidental, is in that impersonal con- 
 templation in which the individual is effaced, and 
 only the pure, knowing subject subsists. This 
 condition Schopenhauer praises as the painless 
 state which Epicurus described as the highest 
 good, the bliss of the gods. Therein man is freed 
 from the yoke of Will ; the penal servitude of 
 daily life ceases as for a Sabbath ; the wheel of 
 
I'/ 2 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 Ixion stands still. The cause of this he was at no 
 loss to explain, and he did so, it may be added, 
 in a manner poetically logical and peculiar to 
 himself. 
 
 " Every desire is born of a need, of a privation 
 or of a suffering-. When satisfied, it is lulled ; 
 but for one that is satisfied, how many are unap- 
 peased ! Desire, moreover, is of long duration ; 
 its exigencies are infinite ; while pleasure is brief 
 and narrowly measured. Pleasure, too, is but 
 an apparition that is destined to be succeeded 
 by another. The first is a vanished illusion ; 
 the second an illusion that lingers still. Nothing 
 is capable of appeasing Will, nor of permanently 
 arresting it. The best we can do is like the alms 
 tossed to a beggar, which, in preserving his life 
 to-day, prolongs his misery to-morrow. While, 
 then, we are dominated by desires and ruled by 
 Will, so long as we give ourselves up to hopes 
 that delude and fears that alarm, we have neither 
 peace nor happiness. But when an accident, an 
 interior harmony lifting us for the moment from 
 out the torrent of desire, delivers the spirit from 
 the oppression of Will, turns our attention from 
 everything that solicits it, and all things seem as 
 freed from the allurements of hope and personal 
 interest, then repose, vainly pursued, yet ever 
 intangible, comes to us of itself, bearing with 
 open hands the plenitude of the gift of peace." 
 
 Contemplation is then an affranchisement. It 
 delivers us for a moment from ourselves ; it sus- 
 pends the activity of Will ; and in raising man 
 out of misery into the pure world of ideas, brings 
 
The Prolests of Yesterday. lyj 
 
 him a foretaste of that repose which is the freedom 
 of the non-existent. But the liberation from the 
 trammels of Will which is found in art and dis- 
 interested contemplation, is a solace that is 
 momentary and accidental. That which is more 
 desirable is a complete and unfettered freedom. 
 The cause of evil is known ; it is the affirmation 
 of the Will-to-live. The remedy is its denial. 
 The Will affirms itself when, after an acquaint- 
 ance with life, it persists as much in willing as in 
 the first moment when it was a mere blind neces- 
 sity. The Will denies itself when it renounces 
 life, when it frees itself through a persistent ab- 
 dication, and abolishes itself of its own accord. 
 
 In this there is no question of suicide. For 
 suicide, far from being a denial of the Will-to- 
 live, is one of its strongest affirmations. The 
 man who takes his own life really wants to live. 
 
 What he does not want are the miseries and 
 trials attendant on his particular existence. He 
 abolishes the individual, but not the race. The 
 species continues, and pain with it. To be scien- 
 tifically annihilated, life should be abolished not 
 only in its suffering, but in its empty pleasures 
 as well. Its entire inanity should be recognized, 
 and the whole root cut once and for all. In ex- 
 plaining in what manner this is to be accom- 
 plished, Schopenhauer carried his reader far off 
 into the shadows of the Orient. On the one 
 side is the lethargy of the Rishis ; on the other, 
 the Tauists drugged with opium ; while above 
 all rises the phantasy of the East, the dogma of 
 metempsychosis. 
 
1^4 Th^ Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 As the present writer has elsewhere explained,* 
 Schopenhauer gives the name of Will to that 
 force which in Indian philosophy is held to 
 resurrect with man across successive lives, and 
 with which the horror of ulterior existence re- 
 appears. It is from this nightmare that we are 
 summoned to awake, but in the summons we 
 are told that the awakening can only come with 
 a recognition of the true nature of the dream. 
 The work to be accomplished is therefore less 
 physical than moral. We are not to strangle 
 ourselves in sleep ; we are to rise out of it in 
 meditation. 
 
 " In man," Schopenhauer says, " the Will-to- 
 live advances to consciousness, to that point 
 where it can choose between its continuance or 
 abolition. Man is the Saviour. Nature awaits 
 her redemption through him. He is at once the 
 priest and the victim." 
 
 If, then, in the succeeding generations the 
 appetite for liberty has been so highly cultivated 
 that a widespread and united compassion is felt 
 for all things, then through continence absolute 
 and universal, that condition will be produced in 
 which subject and object disappear, and — the 
 sigh of the egotist Will once choked thereby 
 into a death-rattle — the world, delivered from 
 pain, will pass into that peace which passeth all 
 understanding, into the Prajna-Paramita, the 
 "beyond all knowledge," the Buddhist goal 
 where nothing is. 
 
 " It is this," Schopenhauer exclaims in his 
 
 * The Philosophy of Disenchantment. Belford, Clarke & Co. 
 
TTie Protests of Yesterday. ly^ 
 
 concluding paragraph, " it istliis thatttie Hindus 
 have expressed in the empty terms of NirvSna 
 and re-absorption in Brahm. I am, of course, 
 aware that what remains after the abolition of 
 the Will, is without effect on those in whom it 
 still works. But to those in whom it has been 
 crushed, what is this world of ours, with its suns 
 and stellar systems ? Nothing." 
 
 Among thinking people, Schopenhauer's ad- 
 mirers are to-day sufficiently frequent to defy 
 enumeration. The theory of force, which was 
 his chief originality, has found few serious adhe- 
 rents ; fewer still are they who pin any faith to 
 his plan for the extinction of humanity ; it is his 
 classic insistance on the immedicable misery of 
 life, it is the pessimism which he expounded, 
 but which was no more his own invention than 
 is atheism, that has multiplied the translations 
 and editions of his works. For thirty years these 
 works were unnoticed. But Schopenhauer, who 
 was very blithe in his misanthropy, snapped his 
 fingers at the inattention of the public ; he knew 
 that Time, who is at least a gentleman, would 
 bring him his due unasked. " My death," he 
 said, " will be a canonization, the extreme unc- 
 tion, a baptism." Yet before he died, fame and 
 honors came and found him unsurprised. " Time 
 has brought his roses at last," he said. "But 
 see," he added, touching his silvered hair, " they 
 are white." 
 
 The most prominent of Schopenhauer's suc- 
 cessors is Dr. Eduard von Hartmann. On many 
 points this gentleman separates widely from the 
 
i'/6 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 master. In matters ontological and teleological 
 there is a variance that is noticeably large. But 
 their pessimism is the same ; if any difference is 
 discernable, it is merely in this, that the tone of 
 the later comer has gained from recent science the 
 steadiness and assurance that comes of broader 
 knowledge. 
 
 Dr. von Hartmann, who sits at the head of 
 contemporary metaphysicians, is a transcendental 
 realist. His doctrine is a pantheism, or, as he 
 prefers to call it, a monism, in which nihilism and 
 idealism are found in equal parts, and one which 
 has given to Hegelism a new and unexpected 
 activity. Nature to him is truly divine ; but the 
 misery of existence is irremediable, or at least 
 will continue to be so until advancing science 
 has taught in what way the clamor of life may 
 be quelled. That which the Hindu termed Atma, 
 that which Spinoza designated as Substance — in 
 short, the universal and indetectable force which 
 has made all things what they are, is called by 
 him the Unconscious. The Unconscious is sov- 
 ereignly wise, and the world is admirable in every 
 respect ; it is existence that is irreclaimable in its 
 misery. 
 
 The originality of this philosophy consists in a 
 theory of optimistic evolution as counterbalanced 
 by a pessimistic analysis of life ; but the origi- 
 nality is not lost in its conclusion, in which it is 
 argued that, as the world's progressus tends nei- 
 ther to universal nor individual happiness, the 
 great aim of science should be to emancipate 
 man from a love of life, and in this wise lead the 
 
The Protests of Yesterday. i-^y 
 
 world back to chaos. The interest of the Un- 
 conscious is opposed to our own. It is to our 
 advantage not to live ; it is to the advantage of 
 the Unconscious that we should do so, and that 
 others should be brought into existence through 
 us. The Unconscious, therefore, in the further- 
 ment of its aims, has surrounded man with such 
 illusions as are capable of deluding him into a 
 belief that life is a pleasant thing well worth the 
 living. The instincts within us are the different 
 forms beneath which the desire to live is at work, 
 and with which the Unconscious moulds man to 
 its profit. Hence the energy witlessly expended 
 for the protection of an existence which is but 
 the right to suffer ; hence the erroneous idea 
 which is formed of the happiness derivable from 
 life ; and hence, too, the modification of past dis- 
 enchantments through the influence of fresh and 
 newer hopes. But when in the old age of the 
 world, when humanity has divested itself of the 
 belief that happiness is obtainable in this life, 
 when it has lost all faith in the promise of another 
 — in fact, when every illusion has been dis- 
 sipated, when hope, love, ambition and gold are 
 recognized as chimeras, or at least as incentives 
 to activity which cause more pain than pleasure 
 — then, science aiding, humanity will perform 
 its own execution, and Time at last will cease 
 to be. 
 
 Such is Dr. von Hartmann's conception of life, 
 
 and such is the idea he has formed of the destiny 
 
 of the world. In regard to the latter, nothing 
 
 need now be said ; but it may be noted that to 
 
 13 
 
i'/8 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 the general public his theory of pleasure and pain 
 has not seemed wholly satisfactory. There have 
 been many attempts to confute his pessimism, 
 and many attempts to show that life, so far from 
 being immedicable in its misery, is a well-spring 
 of delight. And to many, doubtless, it has so 
 seemed. But a point of view is not an argument. 
 Whether life is held to be valuable, or whether 
 it is held to be valueless, its nature in either case 
 remains unchanged. To the obtuse it is usually 
 the one ; to the sensitive it is generally the other. 
 But to the impersonal observer, the disinterested 
 witness, to him who looks back through the shud- 
 ders of history, and who gazes into a future that 
 will be as inexplicable as the past, to him who 
 feels some sympathy for the suffering, some 
 compassion for the distressed and some pity for 
 those in pain, life seldom seems other than an 
 immense, an unnecessary affliction. 
 
 Why, asked Voltaire, with that leer which de 
 Musset has made immortal. Why is there any- 
 thing ? An answer often given to this question 
 is, that the ultimate reason of things is discover- 
 able only in matter and motion. In theological 
 circles the advocates of this explanation are not 
 in good repute. In polite society it is considered 
 as bad form to hold such theories as it is to 
 carve salad or guillotine asparagus. In fact, 
 beyond the jurisdiction of the scientific world 
 the materialist has a bad name. The pantheist, 
 passe encore. Pantheism is vague and poetic, and 
 apprehended with difficulty. But the materialist 
 
The Protests of Yesterday. z^p 
 
 brings a different guitar. His conception of 
 the universe demands but little study to seem 
 tolerably clear. Besides, in his heart he seems 
 to say, There is no God, and the appearance of 
 that inward speech is not compatible with good 
 manners. Society has a stronger leaning to 
 affirmations than to negations ; in fact as Rous- 
 seau has pointed out, the average intellect prefers 
 to be wrong in its belief than to have none at all. 
 The materialist, standing as he does in oppo- 
 sition to theological tenets, is therefore eyed 
 askant, and what is more, is called an atheist 
 when his back is turned. 
 
 Parenthetically it may be noted that the histor- 
 ical definition of an atheist is a citizen who re- 
 fuses to worship the gods which the authorities 
 of the state have appointed as worthy of worship. 
 In modern parlance the word has acquired a 
 sharper tone, and is generally used in reference 
 towhomso disbelieves in thesupernatural. In the 
 coming centuries it is possible that it will cease 
 to be a term of reproach. Indeed, its rehabilita- 
 tion has in certain quarters already begun. But 
 be this as it may, there are still few thinkers who 
 hear themselves called atheists without experi- 
 encing some bewilderment. " Tell a philosopher," 
 Heine said, "that his theories are atheistic, and 
 he will be as much surprised as would a geome- 
 trician on learning that his triangles were red." 
 
 The denomination is as impertinent to the 
 views of the one, as the color is to the triangles 
 of the other. Not every one, however, has had 
 the privilege of sitting at Heine's feet, and the 
 
i8o The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 expression continues to be flung, with more or less 
 vigor, at all systems of rationalistic thought, 
 though at none more virulently than at mate- 
 rialism. 
 
 As has been hinted in earlier chapters, mate- 
 rialism is as old as philosophy itself. In India, 
 it was a precursor of Buddhism ; in China, it an- 
 tedates Laou-tze. In classic antiquity, Democ- 
 ritus, Epicurus and Lucretius were among its 
 advocates. Arrested by Christianity, it was im- 
 prisoned all through the middle ages ; but when, 
 over a century ago, it at last escaped, thrones 
 and altars fell before it. It is, however, only 
 within recent years that materialism received the 
 endorsements of science. The standard-bearer 
 of this movement, a movement all the more sig- 
 nificant in that it was a reaction against Hegel- 
 ian abstractions, was Moleschott. His principal 
 work, the Krieslauf des Lehens, awoke Germany 
 from her stupor. It was attacked, applauded and 
 abused. The thinking world, which since Hegel's 
 death had been twirling its thumbs, turned toward 
 it expectant eyes. The hypothesis of an indefi- 
 nite circulation of matter passing ceaselessly from 
 life to death and from death to life, was old 
 enough to seem quite new, and the axiom. With- 
 out force, no matter ; without matter, no force, 
 was listened to with grave attention. 
 
 The Kreislauf des Zif^i?«j- inspired any number 
 of affiliated works. Vogt, Lowenthal, Czolbe 
 and Rudolphe Wagner made themselves promi- 
 nent in its defence. Old-fashioned methods were 
 abandoned. Psychology was put aside, Since 
 
The Protests of Yesterday. i8 1 
 
 there was no psyche, of what use could it be ? 
 Metaphysics was relegated to the night from 
 which it had sprung. Modern materialism de- 
 termined to support its dogmas with the sciences 
 which are called exact. And Biichner, mailed 
 with astronomy, chemistry, geology, physiology 
 and natural history, produced in Kraft und Staff 
 the text-book of the new belief. Thereafter it 
 only needed a hymnal to be complete. The de- 
 ficiency has been supplied by Richepin's Blas- 
 phemes. 
 
 The first principle of scientific materialism is 
 the inseparability of matter and force. Matter is 
 not a vague substance on which force grapples 
 from without. In the absence of the one, the 
 other is inconceivable, save perhaps by way of 
 hypothesis. Without force, matter would enter 
 at once into a formless void. Without matter, 
 force would fade into a region of pure abstrac- 
 tions. Endeavor, for instance, to represent 
 matter without force, that is, without the power 
 of cohesion or affinity, attraction or repulsion, 
 and, presto ! the very idea of matter disappears. 
 In like measure, an effort to represent force 
 without matter results in a similar denouement. 
 
 The second principle is that force and matter 
 are indestructible. There are transformations, 
 there are varieties in their manifestations, but in 
 the sum of their effects the intensity is undi- 
 minished. Burn a log of wood, and the scales of 
 a chemist will show that not a particle of matter 
 has been destroyed. "Annihilate a particle of 
 matter,'' said Spinoza, " and the world will 
 
i82 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 crumble." Not an atom can lose itself in im- 
 mensity, and to immensity not an atom can be 
 added. The flux and reflux of things show be- 
 neath incessant variations the same persistent 
 and invariable aggregate. There is a circulation 
 of materials of which each fortuitous combina- 
 tion has its beginning and its end, but in some 
 one form or another the materials meet again 
 and interconnect anew. 
 
 As with matter, so with force. What disap- 
 pears on one side re-appears on another. Fric- 
 tion produces fire, motion is obtained by steam. 
 The amount of movement expended is recov- 
 ered in the amount of heat ; the amount of 
 heat dissipated is recovered in the amount of 
 motion. Force, then, like matter, is immortal. 
 It may be transformed, but never destroyed. 
 From these considerations, materialism concludes 
 that, as that which is indestructible can have had 
 no beginning, matter and force cannot have been 
 created. Ex nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil posse 
 reverti. The transformation of something into 
 nothing is as inconceivable, says Lebon, as is the 
 creation of something from nothing. And Taine 
 adds, " There is nothing but matter and motion. 
 Space is the infinity of matter, as time is the 
 eternity of motion." Matter and force are, then, 
 eternal. But eternity is shared alone by them. 
 Dust we are, to dust we shall return. 
 
 Matter and force being eternal, their laws are 
 immutable. Were it otherwise, the properties of 
 matter would change, and on the tablets of ex- 
 perience no change is recorded. Nature has 
 
The Protests of Yesterday. iSj 
 
 never varied. Her laws are the mechanical rela- 
 tion of forces which, in disclosing no trace of a 
 higher Will, turn superstition into a vagabond 
 that has not where to lay its head. Time, in 
 which all things unroll, is the great, the one 
 creator. 
 
 The novelty of modern materialism, a novelty 
 which distinguishes it from other systems, is that 
 it claims to rest its affirmations on a basis which 
 is strictly scientific. Its explanation of the uni- 
 verse by means of the action of natural forces, its 
 reduction of natural forces to the variable modes 
 of the force inherent in nature, are indeed sup- 
 ported by physics, chemistry and physiology. 
 But into certain regions that it attempts to pene- 
 trate, it has not been preceded by any avant- 
 courier that at all resembles exact knowledge. 
 
 The hypothesis that the attraction of all pon- 
 derable matter which maintains the planets in 
 their orbits, must at one time have been in a con- 
 dition to mould the universe from the cosmic 
 dust spread through space, is the starting-point 
 of materialistic cosmogony. This hypothesis, 
 hazarded by Kant, signed by Laplace and attested 
 by Herschel, is crowned by another, which is as 
 opulent in vistas as is the retrospect of the first. 
 It is to the effect that the earth, like her lost sat- 
 ellite whose fragments have deluged the globe, 
 will in turn be disembowelled and tossed through 
 space. Historically these hypotheses are not new. 
 Entertaining as the conjunction may appear, they 
 are part of Buddhist lore. But they are a part of 
 Buddhism which is as vague as it is poetic. In 
 
184 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 materialism, if there is less vagueness, there is 
 also less poetry. Materialism is nothing' if not 
 matter-of-fact. Starting, then, from the hypo- 
 thesis that a mass of cosmic matter originally 
 filled the space which our planetary system oc- 
 cupies, and that, in accordance with the laws of 
 gravitation which draw the parts to the centre, 
 the sun was formed by the gradual concentration 
 of its elements, it is not difficult to fancy a frag- 
 ment of nebulosity detached from the centre and 
 shot through space, developing first in a collec- 
 tion of gases, then into molecules that the rota- 
 tory movement fused and ignited, and which in 
 cooling formed a crust above an interior furnace. 
 This flight of fancy accomplished, it is yet easier 
 to imagine the condensation of vapors into rain, 
 the growth of plants and the birth of the monera 
 from which man descends. 
 
 And life ? Is it then, as Marcus Aurelius in 
 his sceptred melancholy suggested, but a halt be- 
 tween two eternities .? Bah ! Away with phrases ! 
 A bottle containing carbonate of ammonia, chlo- 
 ride of potassium, phosphate of soda, chalk, mag- 
 nesia, sulphuric acid and silex, is life in its most 
 ideal, in its completest expression. 
 
 Some sixty million years ago, when primitive 
 man blinked at a brighter sky than ours, he thought 
 of the archeolithic ape, if he thought at all, as an 
 inferior animal. And, indeed, there could have 
 been little in common between the shudderino- 
 orang-outang and the speechless yet ferocious 
 troglodyte who with an uprooted tree crushed 
 
The Protests of Yesterday. 185 
 
 the skull of a lion and then sucked the fuming 
 brain. x 
 
 The link between the two was as undiscernible 
 to him as to the theologian of to-day. And yet, 
 as Huxley has pointed out, the anatomical differ- 
 ence between man and a gorilla is less than be- 
 tween a gorilla and an inferior ape. And, to pursue 
 the same line of argument, the difference between 
 a Shakespeare and a savage is infinitely greater 
 than between a savage and a brute. Why, a 
 magpie is cleverer than the aboriginal Australian ; 
 but at the same time the cleverness of a magpie 
 is not a proof of the evolution of man. 
 
 The old coquette, this world of ours, conceals 
 her age, but her biography is under our feet. As 
 we read backwards through it, her years mount 
 up into ten hundred millions. The date of that 
 initial catastrophe, her birth, is yet unreached ; 
 biit we know enough of her past to be sure that 
 it has been long enough and sufficiently immoral 
 for many things to happen of which our philoso- 
 phy may dream though it cannot prove. Among 
 these things are spontaneous generation and the 
 descent of man. When these are substantiated, 
 materialism will have proved its claims ; its sway' 
 will be undisputed ; but until then, its arguments 
 have as much evidential value as so many astro- 
 gals. 
 
 In attempting to explain the organic by the 
 inorganic, the main argument was the alleged 
 birth of insects in putrefied matter. This argu- 
 ment was routed by Redi, who enveloped some 
 meat in a light gauze, on which, a little later. 
 
j86 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 eggs were found to have been deposited by pass- 
 ing flies, and at once the mystery was explained. 
 The discovery of the microscope brought new 
 hopes to the materialists. The animalculse which 
 were found in certain infusions appeared to have 
 been produced without the assistance of antece- 
 dent germs. The falsity of this conclusion was 
 demonstrated by Schwann, and the hypothesis 
 of abiogenesis was abandoned, until Pouchet 
 brought it again into fashion. But experiments 
 recently made by M. Pasteur contradict those 
 made by Pouchet ; and so far as contemporary 
 science is competent to give a decision, the argu- 
 ments of the anti-vitalists are inadequate to sup- 
 port their case. 
 
 But though the theory of spontaneous gen- 
 eration must be abandoned, at least for the 
 moment, the materialists are by no means at 
 their wits'-end. Life has arisen in some manner, 
 and why not from the interaction of molecular 
 forces ? 
 
 One of the most charming hypotheses on this 
 subject was advanced a few years ago by Sir 
 William Thomson. To this gentleman, life or 
 perhaps it would be better to say a germ poten- 
 tially alive, that is, having within itself the ten- 
 dency to assume a definite living form, first vis- 
 ited the earth in a meteor. If it is proper to as- 
 sume that meteors are fragments of shattered 
 and once peopled worlds, it may be assumed 
 with equal propriety that some of these fragments 
 are partially intact. The moment, then, that it 
 is admitted that beside our own there are a 
 
The Protests of Yesterday. 187 
 
 number of life-supporting worlds and that other 
 worlds have existed in anterior epochs, it would 
 not seem improbable that germ-bearing meteors 
 have moved and do still move through space. 
 As a consequence, any germ-bearing meteor 
 which fell upon the earth during the time when 
 it was destitute of life may have been the uncon- 
 scious cause of the failure which we are now 
 enjoying. 
 
 Dr. Zoellner, a German scientist trained in all 
 the illiberalities of official optimism, attempted 
 to refute this hypothesis on the ground that when 
 a meteor enters our atmosphere, the friction of 
 the air makes it incandescent and consequently 
 incapable of preserving and transporting any 
 germ, however potentially alive. To this refuta- 
 tion Helmholtz made answer, that only the surface 
 of meteors becomes heated, and that germs might 
 readily remain unharmed in interior crevices, or 
 if on the surface might on reaching our atmos- 
 phere be blown from their conveyance by the 
 wind, and that, too, before the heat was great 
 enough to cause their destruction. But if this 
 solution be accepted, the origin of life on other 
 planets remains still to be explained. It may be 
 then, as Helmholtz has suggested, that life is co- 
 eternal with matter, and its germs, transported 
 from one planet to another, develop wherever 
 they find a propitious spot. But this, too, is 
 merely an hypothesis, and one that has not the 
 slightest evidence in its favor. The enigma of 
 life is for the present a part of the unknowable. 
 But whether it will always remain so is another 
 
i88 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 question. The differences which once were sup- 
 posed to constitute a barrier between the verte- 
 brate and the non-vertebrate no longer exist. The 
 modifications by which the quadrupedal reptile 
 became a bipedal bird have been clearly shown. 
 Forty years ago, there was no evidence that such 
 a demonstration would ever be made. Forty 
 years hence, who shall say but that the missing 
 link may be discovered, or the manufacture of 
 the organic from the inorganic begun ? As Pro- 
 fessor Huxley has hinted, no one who has watch- 
 ed the gradual development of a complicated 
 animal from the protoplasm which constitutes 
 the e.^^^ of a frog or a hen, will deny that a simi- 
 lar evolution of the whole animal world from a 
 like foundation is at least within the bounds of 
 possibility. 
 
 Of the various creeds which man has been 
 pleased to invent, the youngest is positivism. 
 The position which this system of thought has 
 acquired is due to its own merit. It cannot, like 
 pantheism, look back through the terraces of 
 time and claim the quarterings of race. Nor can 
 it, like materialism, bedeck itself with Greek 
 insignia. Among philosophies, positivism is a 
 parvenu. As such, it is viewed with scorn, enthu- 
 siasm and indifference. 
 
 Positivism made its d^but a little over forty 
 years ago. Its name was its fortune. There was 
 in the sound of it an invitation to nearer acquaint- 
 ance. But when the acquaintance was made, 
 the name was found to partake of the nature of 
 
The Protests of Yesterday. i8g 
 
 a lure. Relativism, if less attractive, would have 
 been a clearer description. For positivism, if 
 positive at all, is positive that there is nothing 
 positive. Its sponsor was Auguste Comte. 
 
 If the realization of the ambitions of youth 
 may be regarded as the criterion of a successful 
 career, the life of this thinker cannot be con- 
 sidered a failure. At a comparatively early age 
 the outlines of his doctrine appear to have been 
 clearly defined. The outlines sprang of a sug- 
 gestion of Saint-Simon, who was wont to declare 
 that all knowledge should be co-ordinated into 
 one vast and comprehensive synthesis, but their 
 development was accomplished without material 
 indebtedness. In synthetizing knowledge into a 
 single system of thought, Comte proposed nothing 
 less than the abolishment of theology and meta- 
 physics, and the re-organization of the Occident 
 through a philosophy of his own manufacture. 
 In 1842, the sixth and last volume of this philos- 
 ophy was given to the public, and with it the 
 knell of all religions was supposed to have been 
 rung. Ten years later, to the utter bewilderment 
 of his disciples, Comte proclaimed the necessity 
 of founding anew religion, of which the sovereign 
 pontiff was to be none other than himself. 
 
 In an earlier paragraph it has been hinted that 
 positivism is positive that there is nothing posi- 
 tive, a phrase which, from a Comtist stand-point, 
 may be taken to mean that the essence of things 
 escapes us. We can understand the interconnec- 
 tion of facts — that is, their direct antecedents and 
 immediate sequences — but the initial causes and 
 
igo The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 ultimate results are inaccessible to the intellect. 
 In a word, there is nothing except material phe- 
 nomena and the laws thereof. As this principle 
 is the pivot on which the entire philosophy turns, 
 a momentary examination may not be without 
 benefit. 
 
 Many a sceptic has filled his hours in showing 
 that things are not what they seem, but none of 
 them, however revolutionary, has disputed the 
 reality of consciousness, or denied the phenomena 
 that are manifest in thought, feeling and volition. 
 In affirming, therefore, that the objects appre- 
 hended by the senses are the only apprehensible 
 phenomena, positivism apparently displays a 
 radicalism which is as audacious as it is novel. It 
 is of course possible and even proper to regard 
 thought, feeling and volition as products of the 
 body, but it would be a misuse of language to 
 assert that they are material phenomena ; and, 
 as positivism's first tenet is that there is nothing 
 except material phenomena, it would seem that, 
 like any other screw, the before-mentioned pivot 
 is loose. On the other hand, it may be objected 
 that the phenomena called internal are unob- 
 servable, and that any attempt to distinguish 
 them from their external elements results merely 
 in demonstrating the vainness of the endeavor. 
 If this view be accepted, positivism is found less 
 rickety than it first appeared, and the introduc- 
 tory statement may be welcomed at once and 
 without further hesitation. 
 
 If, then, as positivism asserts, the essence of 
 things escapes us, any speculation on the origin 
 
The Protests of Yesterday. i^i 
 
 and purpose of the world is profitless. On such 
 and kindred subjects the mind should be without 
 conjecture. It is only natural that man should 
 have been on the qui vive in his effort to discover 
 efficient and final causes, but his effort has never 
 been successful. " If God did not exist," said 
 Voltaire, "the world would have invented him." 
 " Which," a wit replied, " is precisely what the 
 world has done." 
 
 The mobility of phenomena, the fugitiveness 
 of sensations, the impermanency of the actual, 
 the real which each moment ends and begins 
 anew, have, in all ages, incited to a knowledge 
 of the unknowable. But the knowledge has not 
 been obtained, and it was in view of the imprac- 
 ticability of the attempt that Comte ventured to 
 suggest what may be termed a middle course. 
 In the effort to pierce the impenetrable, humanity, 
 he said, has passed and is still passing through 
 certain stages of thought which correspond to 
 those of childhood, adolescence and maturity. 
 The first is the age of theology ; the second, of 
 metaphysics ; and the third, of science. This 
 doctrine, which is known as the law of the three 
 states, conveys the suggestion alluded to, together 
 with a theory which is as liberal as the sea. It 
 runs somewhat as follows : 
 
 In the infancy of thought. Nature is dowered 
 with the same illusions to which man himself is 
 subjected. Every object is animated, and the 
 government of the universe is ascribed, not to 
 invariable laws, but to sentient and intelligent 
 beings. In everything that occurs is seen the 
 
1(^2 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 manifestation of a direct intention, and each par- 
 ticular event is attributed to forces which are 
 but the aggrandizements of those of man. In 
 the advance of thought, these forces, whose 
 prowess is discernible in effects which man is 
 impotent to produce, become the gods, invisible 
 yet multitudinous. Then, gradually, as arises 
 the capacity of co-ordinating phenomena into 
 separate groups, the number of divinities dimin- 
 ishes, until, through processes of generalization, 
 they are reduced to one, and behold, man has 
 passed out of fetishism into polytheism, and from 
 thence to a belief in a unique Creator. 
 
 But there is a further advance of thought, and 
 in its train comes the suggestion that the uni- 
 formity noticeable in the universe is incompatible 
 with the theory of an arbitrary Will. The initial 
 conceptions are dismissed, the celestial and. in- 
 accessible reason of things is banished, and real- 
 ized abstractions are accepted instead. Nature 
 is governed, not by an external power, but by in- 
 ternal and occult qualities. The reign of dryads 
 and nymphs is passed, and their place is usurped 
 by entities, by theories which deal with a plastic 
 force and a vital principle. This is the second, 
 or metaphysical state, which is of advantage in 
 being a negation of the first and a preparation 
 for the third, which latter is reached when men, 
 weary of explanations that explain nothing, dis- 
 cover that what is necessary for the mind is not 
 obligatory for things, and that a cause which is 
 conceived by the one need not have a place among 
 the others. Such is the positive, or scientific 
 
The Protests of Yesterday. igj 
 
 state of mind, to which, according to Comte.all 
 humanity tends ; and such, too, is the middle 
 course which he recommended to thoughtful and 
 decorous persons. 
 
 Stripped of its verbal husks, the law of the 
 three states may be reduced to a truism. In 
 seeking the reason of things, men look first above, 
 then within, and finally confess themselves van- 
 quished. 
 
 The law of the three states which Stuart Mill 
 called the backbone of the entire philosophy, but 
 which is not particularly new nor particularly 
 convincing — not new, because sketched by Kant 
 in outline, and not convincing, because Comte 
 himself declined to be bound by it — is supple- 
 mented by a classification of sciences from out of 
 which was drawn a fresh one, called sociology. 
 
 In the study of facts, the interpretation of the 
 experience which is written between the lines of 
 history, sociology was to be the lever in the substi- 
 tution of science for religion. It was to terminate 
 the conflict between theology, which demands 
 order without progress, and metaphysics, which 
 aims at progress and turns its back on order. 
 It was to arrest the retrogression of the one, and 
 still the anarchy of the other. In the government 
 of life it was to replace religion with science, and 
 give to intelligence the guiding-strings of the 
 world. 
 
 in mapping this programme, Comte fancied 
 
 that sociology could be raised to the level of an 
 
 exact science, and that through its influence all 
 
 enlightened nations would join hands in the 
 
 13 
 
ig4 TJ^^ Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 profession of identical doctrines. In the Utopias 
 in which he then lost himself, he planned a reor- 
 ganization of society on a basis which, if sug- 
 gestive of Plato's Republic, is otherwise without 
 value or allurement. There is, he pointed out, 
 no such thing as liberalism in astronomy, physics 
 or chemistry ; and if it be otherwise in ethics and 
 politics, it is because neither of them possess 
 established principles. When they acquire them, 
 as they will do when positivism begins its sway, 
 the force of public opinion will disappear. A 
 corporation of philosophers, salaried by the State 
 and treated with the greatest respect, will have 
 the entire charge of education, together with the 
 right to counsel and direct each citizen in his 
 private and public life, and enjoy, moreover, such 
 an amount of authority over students and thinkers 
 as will enable them to prevent the latter from 
 squandering their time and knowledge in spec- 
 ulations that are valueless to humanity, and 
 oblige them to apply themselves to such investi- 
 gations as may be deemed most important to gen- 
 eral prosperity. The decrees which the corpora- 
 tion may formulate are not to be questioned, and, 
 as the idea of the sovereignty of the people is one 
 of the most pernicious that civilization has ad- 
 vanced, but slight attention will be paid to the 
 inclinations of the masses. In each nation there 
 will be a governing body and a body governed, 
 in which latter the citizen will occupy the position 
 for which his abilities have fitted him. There- 
 after religion and metaphysics will disappear. 
 Scientific dissidence will be effaced, and an 
 
The Protests of Yesterday. igS 
 
 invariable and uniform political dogma will at 
 last be accepted by united and peaceful nations. 
 
 To the clear-headed and matter-of-fact audience 
 which was Comte's, theories such as these were 
 viewed with suspicion. The idea that there is 
 no God had in it nothing that was alarming ; the 
 prophecy of the overthrow of superstition and the 
 general adoption of positivist tenets seemed not 
 unreasonable ; the prohibition against idle spec- 
 ulations and the complimentary recommenda- 
 tion to treat only with the real were received 
 with open favor ; but the sturdiest could not look 
 without terror on a future governed by philoso- 
 phers. 
 
 When this horizon was disclosed, it is probable 
 that Comte had al ready entered into what is known 
 as his pathological period. In earlier years he 
 suddenly lost his reason, and as suddenly recov- 
 ered it. The border-lands of genius and insanity 
 are never well defined, and it is not unlikely that 
 before the Cours de philosophie positive was 
 completed, something of that of which he had too 
 much, something of that weight of thought which 
 obscures the vision and tips the scales of common- 
 sense, was again at work, though this time more 
 dumbly and dimly than before. Thereafter the 
 champion of the actual who had wished to lead 
 God to the frontiers, and there thank him kindly 
 for his provisory services, lapsed into a morbid 
 mysticism. The sceptre of the world which he 
 had given to intellect was transferred to senti- 
 ment. It was for the heart to rule and for the 
 intellect to obey. 
 
ig6 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 The Philosophie politique, in which his ideas 
 on this subject are conveyed, shows, even amid 
 the luxuriance of luminous thought, the same evi- 
 dence of mental decadence as is noticeable in 
 Kant's Kritik der Practischen Vernunft. Both 
 belong to the senilia of great minds. During the 
 year that intervened between its appearance and 
 the publication of his chief work, Comte con- 
 ceived what his biographers term a platonic 
 affection for a lady whose influence over him was 
 of such a nature, that, aided by the historical 
 meditations in which his life had been passed, 
 he dreamed of a happiness that should be uni- 
 versal, and of a world that should be ruled, not 
 by a corporation of-salaried philosophers, but by 
 love in its purest and most disinterested form. 
 
 The pompous Religion of Humanity which he 
 then evolved, and which has no more connection 
 with positivism fhan an opera-bouffe has with 
 logarithms, saddened the boldest among his ad- 
 herents. It found adepts — what vagary has not ? 
 The altruism which it inculcated is certainly not 
 without charm ; but the deification of humanity 
 past and future, the transformation of earth into 
 a fetish, space into fate and numbers into virtues, 
 are among the most deplorable instances of the 
 aberrations of genius. After shutting out the 
 unknowable, the door was opened to superstition ; 
 after banishing metaphysics, sentiment was beck- 
 oned in to occupy its place ; religion was super- 
 seded by idolatry ; and the heavens, that no 
 longer told of the glory of God, were set ablaze 
 with the memories of great men. 
 
TTie Protests of Yesterday. zp/ 
 
 In its uncorrupted form, positivism is a modifi- 
 cation of materialism. Among tlieologians tiiere 
 is a disposition to regard both in the same light. 
 But no positivist likes to be called a materialist. 
 He shows as much displeasure at the term as he 
 would were he called a .theist or a pantheist. 
 And, indeed, the lines of demarcation, if not al- 
 ways broad, are none the less apparent. At the 
 origin of things, theism places a personal and 
 infinite Being ; pantheism sees in all things the 
 immanency of a Being that is infinite but imper- 
 sonal ; and materialism asserts that the cause of 
 all things lies in the arrangement and properties of 
 force and matter. Positivism, on the other hand, 
 knows nothing of an infinite Being, whether 
 personal or impersonal ; in the spheres that are 
 inaccessible to it, it recognizes nothing but matter 
 and the properties of matter ; but, unlike mate- 
 ialism, it draws no conclusions. According to 
 Littr^, positivism is simply a methodical, hierar- 
 chic arrangement of the general facts of science, 
 excluding every subjective element, and accept- 
 ing nothing that is not drawn from experience. 
 
 A positivist, moreover, shows no evidence of 
 delight at being called an atheist. As Littr^ has 
 described him, an atheist is in a certain meas- 
 ure a theologian. He is not entirely emanci- 
 pated. He has his explanations of things ; he 
 knows how they began. He believes in the 
 chance clash of atoms, or in occult forces, or in 
 a first cause. Of all this the positivist knows 
 nothing. He ignores productive atoms as well 
 as a creating and ordaining force. But whoso 
 
jg8 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 thinks that history follows a development that is 
 obedient to a natural law — whoso thinks that 
 the origin of societies, the establishment or mu- 
 tation of religion, the founding of empires, cities, 
 castes, aristocracies, governments, oracles, ffroph- 
 ecies, revelations, theologies, arts and indus- 
 tries, are due, one and all, to the faculties of 
 man — whoso accepts this view has fully accom- 
 plished the cycle of mental emancipation. The 
 moment that he leaves no place for the super- 
 natural either in the organic or the inorganic, 
 either among cosmic phenomena or among those 
 of history, that moment he passes initiate into 
 the brotherhood of positivism. 
 
 The charm of positivism is the matter-of-fact 
 position which it assumes before the insolvable. 
 If it cuts no old knots, it brings no new tangles. 
 It treats metaphysics with the respect which is 
 due to all that is venerable ; in the presence of 
 religion it puts the dialectic broadsword softly 
 back in its sheath. It leaves the great query 
 where it found it. And in this is its wisdom ; its 
 agnosticism is its strength. Clamor as we may, 
 there is no answer to our whys and wherefores. 
 There is in us, about and beyond us, an enigma 
 that will defy the ChampoUions of the future as 
 it has routed the seers of the past. The reason 
 of things lies beyond the sphere of knowledge, 
 and the nearest approach that can be made is in 
 a suspicion that all is relative. 
 
A Poet's Verdici. rpp 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 A POET'S VERDICT. 
 
 There have been clays in the history of the 
 world when the poet was regarded with respect 
 that approached veneration. He was considered 
 the oracle of the gods, and his voice was listened 
 to with reverence. This pleasant custom has 
 fallen into disuse. The gods have disappeared 
 and carried the divine afflatus with them. In an 
 age like the present, the demand for poets is 
 slight. Their titles have been examined, and it 
 has been found that to be useless is their one 
 patent of nobility. As a consequence, the poet's 
 vocation has seemed to many a synonym of the 
 ridiculous. And yet, as Gautier with a charming 
 affectation of naivety remarked, an inability to 
 write in verse can scarcely be considered as con- 
 stituting a special talent. But there is another 
 inconvenience : a poet is never rightly appre- 
 ciated save by his peers ; and as his peers are 
 infrequent, the majesty which resides within him 
 often lacks the trumpetings of a herald. Then, 
 too, in an era of remorseless activity, it is only 
 quiet people who live in the country that find 
 leisure to listen to the footfalls of the Muse. For 
 the benefit of such as they, verse may be divided 
 into three broad classes : that which pleases the 
 
200 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 author's enemies, that which pleases the author's 
 contemporaries, and that which passes unob- 
 served to pleasure the idlesse of posterity. Of 
 these classes, the verse of Leconte de Lisle 
 belongs to the third. 
 
 Any one who has taken an interest in French 
 literature during- the last decade can hardly have 
 failed to notice the number of new writers that 
 have come into being, and more particularly the 
 inferiority of their work. In explanation of this 
 surge of mediocrity, many theories might be 
 advanced ; but perhaps the most palpable would 
 be that the literature of our expiring century, 
 after having passed from youth to virility, has 
 begun to experience the maladies and garrulities 
 of old age. But however the subject may be 
 viewed, it is at least evident that the paladins of 
 1830, who were as revolutionary in literature as 
 their ancestors were in religion, have passed away, 
 and also that their methods have so far disap- 
 peared with them that the day before yesterday 
 Victor Hugo seemed like a living anachronism. 
 Readers latterly have refused to be interested in 
 the phantasies of the romantics, and perhaps their 
 pages were a trifle over-colored ; but their excuse 
 lay in the fact that literature had become im- 
 poverished through conventionalities ; there were 
 synonyms instead of words ; and in place of 
 ample vocabularies there were small niceties of 
 expression. All this the romantics did away with. 
 They breathed health and vigor into an enervated 
 dictionary, and startled Europe with the opu- 
 lence of their adjectives. 
 
A Poet's Verdict. 201 
 
 It was in those victorious days that Gautier 
 threw aside his brush and went in a famous red 
 waistcoat to guy the philistines at the birth-night 
 of Hernani. In graver years Gautier complained 
 that in the eyes of the bourgeois he had never 
 ceased to wear that crimson garment, and some- 
 how, save among the liberal few, he has always 
 been looked upon more or less askant. It has 
 been said that it was his purpose to seek the 
 hazardous and display it, but it must be admitted 
 that what he had to say he told with a grace 
 such as had been seldom heard before. He chose 
 his words for their color, for their aroma, as one 
 may say ; and it is related that he objected now 
 and then to an accent because it took away some- 
 thing from the charm which the grouping of cer- 
 tain letters otherwise conveyed. 
 
 Through those days, too, Alfred de Musset 
 passed with the indolence of a dissolute young 
 god. He joined the ranks of the romantics, as 
 did all men of talent, but he joined them more 
 as an amateur than a professional : the familiar 
 ballad in which the moon is represented as sus- 
 pended over a steeple like a dot over an i, 
 opened for him the doors of the c^nacle with- 
 out even giving him the trouble to knock. In 
 a subsequent poem he asked forgiveness for that 
 misdeed ; and though he boasted that his Muse 
 went bare of foot like Truth, she might still have 
 been pictured as shod with buskins of gold. 
 
 Another of the heroes of this epoch was Alfred 
 de Vigny. Some one has said that the face of a 
 poet is never known until years and sorrow have 
 
202 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 marred its original beauty ; but to this rule de 
 Vigny was an exception. He was famous when 
 quite young, and his bust, as it stands to-day in 
 the lobby of the Theatre Fran5ais, arrests the 
 attention even of the indifferent. At the time to 
 which allusion is made, he mingled but little 
 with his fellows, appearing only when the moral 
 support of his presence was needed. In later 
 years, in spite of his talent, his beauty and his 
 position, de Vigny, devoured by melancholy, 
 turned his back entirely upon the world, and re- 
 tired into what Sainte-Beuve has termed his tour 
 dHvoire. 
 
 In the wake of these poets came the familiar 
 figure of Charles Baudelaire. Recently he has 
 been described as having had the appearance 
 of a delicate prelate, a trifle depraved. This de- 
 scription might be suggested by the mere reading 
 of his verse. In the work of every poet there is 
 something of the individual, and it is probable 
 that few have studied the chiselled lines which he 
 worked up with even a shrewder eye for the Sa- 
 tanic than that which was given to Edgar Poe, 
 without calling up some such picture of their 
 author. Baudelaire entered the ranks when the 
 battle was won, but nevertheless he managed to 
 flaunt a standard that has troubled the vision of 
 many an after-comer. 
 
 So swiftly does timego by, that of these writers 
 little more than tradition now remains. In the 
 eyes of contemporary critics, de Musset is a dis- 
 locator of Alexandrines, de Vigny is a memory, 
 Baudelaire a curiosity, and Gautier a model. Yet 
 
A Poet's Verdict. 20 j 
 
 each of them left a legacy that is still disputed. 
 From de Musset descends the gift of eloquence ; 
 in Baudelaire's testament is the heirloom of lurid 
 effect ; de Vigny has devised his morbidity ; while 
 Gautier's bequest is perfection in form. Taken 
 together, they were the poetic embodiment of 
 the agitation of which Voltaire, Holbach and 
 Diderot were the heralds. "Je ne crois pas, 6 
 Christ, a ta parole sainte," cried de Musset, and 
 the cry was echoed by his fellow-workers. 
 
 In a literary sense, these poets were, on their 
 first appearance, very generally looked upon as 
 impertinent innovators, and in their assault upon 
 the classicists they caused much rage and rhetoric. 
 Viewed at this distance, the disturbance seems 
 unnecessary ; for, after all, what is romanticism 
 but the art of pleasing one's contemporaries, and 
 what is classicism but the art which delighted 
 earlier generations ? Turn about is always fair 
 play. In a little while Hugo will be a classic, 
 precisely as Racine is beginning to be considered 
 a romantic. But be this as it may, the seething 
 passion which in 1830 seemed more alluring 
 than the chill restrictions of former years, grad- 
 ually disappeared, and its place was taken by the 
 serene impassibility of another group of poets 
 who were called the Parnassians. 
 
 The advent of this new school was necessarily 
 less boisterous than that of their predecessors : 
 for that matter, they excited more ridicule than 
 anger ; and it is related that a cabman in a street 
 row, after having called his adversary everything 
 that was unpleasant, hurled at him with withering 
 
204 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 contempt as last and supreme reproach, the un- 
 avengeable insult, " Parnassien, va/ " 
 
 Of the poets who made up, this group, the 
 better known are MM. Sully-Prudhomme and 
 Frangois Copp^e. Sully-Prudhomme is an avowed 
 materialist and frankly pessimistic. His poems 
 may be summarized as a series of very delicate 
 impressions intermingled with a fair amount of 
 philosophic suggestion. His repertory is not 
 extensive. It consists in three or four themes 
 and their variations — such, for instance, as the 
 familiar aspiration toward the infinite, man's 
 sentiment of notliingness before the immensity 
 of the universe, the agony of doubt, and the 
 usual communion with Nature. The limits of 
 this range do not necessarily imply a lack of 
 ability. The art in any form of verse consists 
 merely in the skill with which one or more of 
 half-a-dozen old-fashioned sentiments is rendered, 
 and in this respect the work of Sully-Prudhomme 
 is generally irreproachable. In his treatment of 
 purely personal dramas, the mental and moral 
 combats which we all of us wage with ourselves, 
 he leaves little to be desired, and it would be 
 difficult to mention a poet who has entered more 
 deeply than he into the psychological develop- 
 ments of the century. For all this he has re- 
 ceived much praise, and if his verse is ever crit- 
 icised, it is because it is at times a trifle vague. 
 Sully-Prudhomme has been as honestly puzzled 
 by the discord between the real and the ideal as 
 any writer of his class ; but in his perplexity his 
 thought floats away to uncertain heights, and 
 
A Poet's Verdict. 205 
 
 there disappears with a flutter of restless inqui- 
 etude. To put the matter briefly, Sully-Prud- 
 homme very oftea seems as though he were about 
 to say something well worth the telling, but be- 
 fore he has gotten it safely on paper the force of 
 the idea has vanished. 
 
 Frangots CoppSe is another of the dispersed 
 Parnassians. His negations, if more carefully 
 veiled than those of Sully-Prudhomme, are none 
 the less discernible. He is at times dramatic, but 
 his sadness is always insistent. To be sad is 
 admittedly the poet's privilege ; yet to be simply 
 sad, and to express such a state- of being as who 
 should say, " I hunger " or " I thirst," is not nec- 
 essarily poetic ; rather is it commonplace. To be 
 worth the telling, grief should express a thought 
 that is neither humdrum nor familiar ; it should 
 lay bare fresh possibilities or set new limits to 
 resignation : if it does not do this, then, however 
 readily the tears may flow, however gracefully 
 the grief be told, it is what a boulevardier would 
 call le vieux jeu — the old story, of which we are 
 most of us thoroughly tired. It is this old story 
 that M. Copp^e re-tells ; and though the telling is 
 managed with much refinement, it is impossible 
 to call it novel. M. Copp6e has also much to say 
 about his boredom. Boredom, however, is not a 
 flexible topic ; indeed, unless it is handled with 
 unusual dexterity, there is a danger that the reader 
 will find it even more irritating than the writer, 
 and thereupon withdraw his attention and sup- 
 port. Boredom also is more of a fine art than is 
 generally supposed, and not to every one is it 
 
2o6 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 given to disentangle original ideas from that which 
 is flat and unprofitable. Leopardi and Baudelaire 
 have done so, it is true ; but between them they 
 managed to throttle the subject and share the 
 booty. For a later comer like M. Copped, noth- 
 ing was left. 
 
 MM. Prudhomme and Copp^e have both sat at 
 the feet of Leconte de Lisle. To-day they are 
 better known than he, but neither of them has 
 ventured to rate his work above that of the mas- 
 ter. In this modesty much good taste is shown. 
 He has none of their faults, and, moreover, he 
 has genius, which both of them lack. In com- 
 parison with him they are as concettists to Dante. 
 
 Laconte de Lisle is perhaps the most perfect 
 poet of France. It is he who is the rightful heir 
 to the legacies of the romantics, and these posses- 
 sions he has rounded and improved with an eru- 
 dition which embraces history, philology, archae- 
 ology, anthropology, and doubtless much more 
 beside. In spite of this, or perhaps on that ac- 
 count, his literary luggage is scant. He has trans- 
 lated a few ancient authors, written a drama or 
 two, and published three compact volumes of 
 verse. In speaking of the latter, it is difficult to 
 describe them in a phrase, though this perhaps 
 may be accomplished in s,^ying that they do not 
 contain a commonplace line. The three volumes 
 are respectively entitled, Pohnes antiques, Poemes 
 barbares, and Poemes tragiques. The first divis- 
 ion, which is largely made up of Vedic hymns 
 and Greek idyls, is one in which the character- 
 istics of the author are best displayed, and in 
 
2o8 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 color and yet with such austerity that the reader 
 shudders as he reads and admires as he shudders. 
 Beside them, the declamations of that dissolute 
 Greuze of literature, Alfred de Musset, sound 
 cracked and thin — like a man's laughter, as Mr. 
 Swinburne has it, heard in hell. 
 
 The Poemes tragiques are not as satisfactory as 
 are the others. They are made up of a dozen 
 or more recitals which have much to do with the 
 shedding of blood, a few ballads, villanelles, pan- 
 toums andsestines, together with a bar or two of 
 pure harmony. 
 
 Leconte de Lisle is the Goya of verse, and yet, 
 through a delicious contradiction, one of the 
 most noteworthy characteristics of his work is its 
 constant evocation and suggestion of the beau- 
 tiful. No other modern pOet, except perhaps 
 Mr. Swinburne, has shown a better acquaintance 
 with the road to Paphus. And it would be a 
 task full of charm to follow him from the jungles 
 of the Indian peninsula to the cool lakes of Nor- 
 way, to fan Leilah and kiss Glauc^. Unfortu- 
 nately, the purpose of these pages will not permit 
 of such pleasant digressions, and the beautiful 
 must be neglected that the poet's anti-theism may 
 be the more quickly understood. By way of in- 
 troduction, a momentary examination of the poem 
 Qa:in will not, it is imagined, cause any after 
 reproach of time misspent. 
 
 The scenario is simple and audacious. The 
 son of Elam, Thogorma the seer, a captive among 
 the Assyrians, dreams of a night in the mysterious 
 ages when the voice of God echoed through the 
 
A Poet's Verdict. 2og 
 
 universe, and in his dream he sees Henokhia, 
 the city of giants, in whose highest tower is the 
 tomb of Cain. Cain's descendants are wending 
 their way homewards from the chase. Thogorma 
 sees them disappear in the immense orb of the 
 ramparts, while night, bringing a vague terror 
 and dumb dread, mantles the great stairways 
 that turn in red broad spirals to the winds. He 
 hears the roar of lions, chained on the ascending 
 steps, and beneath the porticos the clamors of 
 crocodiles rise from the reservoirs. Then, ab- 
 ruptly, from the confines of the outlying desert', 
 a spectre, loosed from Gehenna, surges through 
 the shadows, and Thogorma hears the spirits 
 anathematize Cain and all his race. 
 
 Cain awakened, stands upright in the granite 
 sepulchre where for ten centuries he had slept 
 with his face to the sky. His eyes, haunted by 
 one supreme remembrance, contemplate through 
 the preceding epochs the vanished days when the 
 world was young ; and with his thoughts rich 
 with the memory of the earth's primal innocence 
 and beauty, he calls to the phantom to be silent 
 and narrates his sombre history. Conceived 
 while his parents were laboring under the divine 
 malediction, his mother. Eve, swooning in the 
 brambles, gave birth with a shriek of horror to 
 Jehovah's victim, to him who was Cain. Nursed 
 with tears, his boyhood knew no smile. What 
 had he done, he wondered, to be punished too ? 
 And so, later, in the knowledge of his exile he 
 accosts the angel on guard at the gates of Eden, 
 and learns that on the morrow he is to know the 
 14 
 
210 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 reason of his birth. On the morrow the reason is 
 made apparent. Jehovah arms his hand against 
 Abel, and incites him to l:ill the brother whom he 
 tenderly loved. 
 
 Here ends Cain's account of his life ; but im- 
 mediately, in his awakened thirst for vengeance, 
 he prophesies that when Jehovah is wearied with 
 the world and shall seek by means of the deluge 
 to destroy it, he, Cain, will save the ark — which 
 the poet represents as constructed in spite of 
 Jehovah — whereupon man, no longer brave, but 
 cowardly and envious, will rise from the flood 
 with its mud in his heart. Cain, the avenger, 
 continues : 
 
 -- Dieu triste, Dieu jaloux qui derobes ta face, 
 Dieu qui mentals, disant que ton oeuvre etait bon, 
 Mon souffle,6 Petrisseur de I'antique limon, 
 Un jour redressera ta victime vivace. 
 Tu lui diras : Adore ! EUe repondra : Non ! 
 
 Afin d'exterminer le monde qui te nie, 
 Tu feras ruisseler le sang comme una mer, 
 Tu feras s'acharner les tenailles de fer, 
 Tu feras flamboyer, dans I'horreur infinie, 
 Pres des buchers hurlants le gouffre de 1' Enfer : 
 
 Mais 
 
 Je ressusciterai les cites submergees, 
 
 Et celles dont le sable a couvert les monceaux : 
 
 Dans leur lit ecumeux j'enfermerai les eaux : 
 
 Et les petits enfants des nations vengees, 
 
 Ne sachant plus ton nom, riront dans leurs berceaux ! 
 
 J'effonderai des cieux la voflte derisoire. 
 Par deU I'epaisseur de ce sepulchre bas 
 Sur qui gronde le bruit sinistre de ton pas, 
 Je ferai bouillonner les mondes dans leur gloire : 
 Et qui t'y cherchera ne t'y trouvera pas. 
 
A Poet's Verdici. 211 
 
 Et ce sera mon jour ! Et d'etoile en etoile, 
 Le bienheureux Eden longuement regrette 
 Verra renaitre Abel sur mon cceur abrite; 
 Et toi, mort et cousu sous la funebre toile. 
 Tu t'angantiras dans ta sterility." 
 
 Apart from the wonder and majesty of the 
 language, and apart, too, from the intuition which 
 in earlier stanzas enabled the poet to call again 
 into being the life of the past, Qa'in, on a first 
 reading, seems to be merely a work of cultured 
 and harmonious blasphemy, and, indeed, so far 
 as the blasphemy is concerned, nothing more 
 vehement has been penned since yEschylus ; but 
 yet on a re-reading Qa'in is found to be little else 
 than an allegory of the protestation of the intel- 
 lect against the unintelligible, a revolt at the mys- 
 tery of pain. 
 
 This protestation, which is as old as philosophy, 
 and which in recent years seems to have increased 
 in volume and significance, has been conveyed 
 by Leconte de Lisle in other poems with great 
 originality, and with particular power in the par- 
 able of the Corbeau. Through this poem, as 
 through Qa'in, there is a running accompaniment 
 of muffled discontent, which in other verses finds 
 a clear and decided note. Something of this 
 same dissatisfaction was expressed by de Vigny 
 and Alfred de Musset, and yet in their case one 
 is inclined to fancy that the grievance was less 
 reasoned than instinctive ; they were at odds, so 
 to speak, with the inevitable ; life failed to hold 
 what it had seemed to promise, and in conse- 
 quence their complaints were more or less 
 
212 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 personal. But in Leconte de Lisle there is no 
 evidence of personal disappointment, and nothing 
 that can be construed as the outcome of an in- 
 dividual grievance. It is a part of his doctrine 
 that an expression of pleasure or pain deforms 
 the human visage, that the poet's correct attitude 
 is the one which most nearly approaches the im- 
 passibility of the statue, and it is this theory which 
 he has carried into his work. 
 
 It is difficult to say to what category of anti- 
 theism Leconte de Lisle belongs. His pantheism 
 is too evident to permit of his being called a ma- 
 terialist, and yet his materialism is so marked 
 that it is difficult to suspect him of any other 
 sympathies with the ideal than those which are 
 purely poetic. He is too aggressive for an agn6s- 
 tic, and yet there are moments when, he might 
 be taken for a positivist. Perhaps it will be 
 safest to say that he is a theoretic pessimist, a 
 denomination which is broad enough to include 
 any of the others, and at the same time is ser- 
 viceable in conveying the exact shade of his 
 thought. 
 
 The pessimism which is manifest in the verse 
 of Leconte de Lisle has nothing of Renan's se- 
 renity, and none of the calculations of Von Hart- 
 mann. In his case it is the formal protest against 
 the enigma of grief which characterizes the phil- 
 osophy- of the earliest thinkers, but one which is 
 entirely free from the shackles with which they 
 delayed the hope of ultimate emancipation. It is 
 not that the idea of absorption in Brahm, or the 
 extinction in Pari- Nirvana, is disagreeable to 
 
A Poet's Verdict. 21 j 
 
 him ; on the contrary, they are dreams through 
 which he lovingly trails his verse, but they are 
 dreams. 
 
 " Pleurez, contemplateurs ! Votre sagesse est veuve 
 Vi9nou ne siege plus sur le lotus d'azur. " 
 
 That of which he seems best convinced is the 
 irremediable existence of what apparently has no 
 reason for being. History is little else than the 
 tale of an uninterrupted shudder ; chronicles of 
 private life are merely accounts of combats that 
 individuals have waged with fate : and Leconte 
 de Lisle, who is a patient student, has noted com- 
 passionately in both the persistence of the law of 
 evil. He should not, however, be considered a 
 follower of Schopenhauer ; the majority of his 
 poems were published before the Welt ah Wille 
 unci Vorstellung had crossed the Rhine ; more- 
 over, Schopenhauer did not invent pessimism ; 
 Kapila was as much occupied with pain as was that 
 Emerson in black ; indeed, it is curious to note 
 that the first metaphysician as well as the latest 
 of great poets are agreed that life is an affliction, 
 and it is also curious to note that the tendency of 
 modern thought is to an agreement with their 
 views. 
 
 The soul, whose immortality Robespierre de- 
 creed in the law known as that of the i8th 
 Flor^al, year II. ; the soul, which all antiquity, 
 Plato included, accorded to beasts, but whose 
 possession Christianity has limited to man ; the 
 soul, which is reported to come no one knows 
 whence, and to depart no one knows whither. 
 
214 ^^ Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 has for Leconte de Lisle a purely verbal existence. 
 Robespierre, it is true, knew nothing about prinm- 
 itive man ; but Leconte de Lisle does, and he 
 knows, too, that a gorilla to which a soul is 
 refused to-day is not a whit more elevated than 
 was man in the sylvan age — in that age, in fact, 
 when he had no other weapons than the branches 
 which he tore from a tree. And if a soul be re- 
 fused to primitive man, at what epoch was the 
 gift bestowed ? Is it a result of evolution, or, as 
 certain theologasters have asserted, is it naturally 
 one with the body, and only separable and capa- 
 ble of immortality through the influence of grace 
 divine ? The last century combatted these theo- 
 ries with logic. Leconte de Lisle has at his dis- 
 posal not alone the logic of yesterday, but the 
 science of to-day, and to him the soul is a phantom 
 evoked by the conscience. 
 
 " If you do not believe in a soul and in a future 
 life," said some one to Goethe, " what do you 
 consider to be the object of the present ? " To 
 which Goethe, with Olympian egotism, answered 
 tersely, "Self-improvement." One may fancy 
 that to Leconte de Lisle the object of life is none 
 other. He was born in the Isle de Bourbon 
 something over sixty years ago, and came to Paris 
 when quite young. From his early home he 
 brought little else than memories of the beauty 
 of Nature and the invincible immensity of her 
 forces, memories that have since served as frames 
 and backgrounds to his verse. In Paris he fol- 
 lowed the developments of science, and studied 
 history, religions and life. From them he learned 
 
A Poet's Verdict. 215 
 
 that man has two antagonists, himself and the 
 exterior world ; he found, too, that man is a prey 
 to influences which mould him to their profit, and 
 that humanity had aggravated its misfortunes by 
 inventing explanations which it termed beliefs. 
 Since then, in the quietest ways, he has passed 
 his hours in satiating that vague curiosity which 
 besets even the most indifferent, and in convinc- 
 ing himself not only of the nothingness of creeds, 
 but of the nothingness of life. Life, he says : 
 
 "■ La vie est comme I'onde ofi tombe un corps pesant : 
 Un cercle ^troit s'y forme et va s'filargissant, 
 Et disparait eniin dans sa grandeur sans terme. 
 La Maya te seduit, mais, si ton coeur est ferme, 
 Tu verras s'envoler comme un peu de vapeur 
 La coldre, I'amour, le d^sir et la peur, 
 Et le Monde illusoire aux formes innombrables 
 S'ecroulera sous toi comme un monceau de sables." 
 
 Gibbon, who was fond of fine paragraphs, de- 
 clared all religions to be equally true to the vul- 
 gar, equally false to the philosopher, and to the 
 statesman equally useful. But Gibbon omitted 
 the poet ; and to such an one as Leconte de Lisle 
 no religion can be true, if for no other reason 
 than that there is no criterion of truth ; no relig- 
 ion can be wholly false, for every religion has 
 enjoyed an hour of undeniable actuality ; and no 
 religion can be deemed useful if the need of it has 
 disappeared. To his thinking, religions have 
 served their purpose. Compounded of fables 
 more or less absurd, and of ethics more or less 
 wholesome, in their obscure origins they were 
 
2l6 he Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 intended to be explanations of natural phenomen a 
 with which to-day we are better acquainted. As 
 to Christianity, it is to Leconte de Lisle an artistic 
 creation, powerfully conceived, venerable in its 
 antiquity, and one whose place is now marked 
 in the museum of history. 
 
 It has been objected, that should this view be 
 accepted, no one would turn to the Bible for in- 
 struction, and as a consequence the gateways to 
 immorality would be opened wide. Now Plato 
 said that we should esteem it of the g-reatest im- 
 portance that the fictions which children first hear 
 should be adapted in the most perfect manner to 
 the promotion of virtue. There are, however, 
 not a few grave thinkers who have asserted that 
 the Bible is inapt to serve such an end. Admit- 
 tedly the morality which is displayed in the Syn- 
 optic Gospels is admirable, but it is sometimes 
 forgotten that it is an integral part of the teach- 
 ing of Socrates and the Socratics. M. Havet 
 has shown its sweetest precepts flowing from 
 their lips. In other portions of the Bible there 
 are verses that exalt the spirit like wine ; there 
 are delicacies of thought and felicities of expres- 
 sion that both soothe and charm ; but one must 
 needs be a paradoxist to claim either as an aid to 
 the promotion of virtue. Beside, as has been 
 hinted in earlier pages, morality is more a ques- 
 tion of temperament than of instruction. For 
 that matter, we are most of us well aware that 
 the instruction sometimes defeats its aim. Mr. 
 Froude relates that when St. Patrick preached 
 the gospel on Tarah Hill, the Druids shook their 
 
A Poet's Verdict. 2jj 
 
 heads. The king, Leoghaire, marked their dis- 
 approval wonderingly, and asked, " Why is it 
 that that which the cleric preaches seems so 
 dangerous to you ? " " Because," they answered, 
 " he preaches repentance, and the law of repent- 
 ance is such that a man shall say, ' I may com- 
 mit a thousand sins, and if I repent it will be not 
 worse with me ; I shall be forgiven ; therefore 
 will I continue to sin." Leconte de Lisle has 
 therefore put the Bible reverently aside, and in 
 looking back through the dreams from which it 
 came and into the visions which it has evoked, 
 he has murmured with the sadness of the tender- 
 hearted : 
 
 " O songe, desirs vains, inutiles souhaits, 
 Ceci ne sera point, maintdnant ni jamais." 
 
 There is no help there, nor is there any else- 
 where. The Orient is asleep in the ashes of her 
 gods. The star of Ormuzd has burned out in 
 the skies. On the banks of her sacred seas, 
 Greece, hushed for evermore, rests on the divine 
 limbs of her white immortals. In the sepulchre 
 of the pale Nazarene, humanity guards its last 
 divinity. Every promise is unfulfilled. There 
 is no light save perchance in death. One torture 
 more, one more throb of the heart, and after it 
 nothing. The grave opens, a little flesh falls in, 
 and the weeds of forgetfulness which soon hide 
 the tomb grow eternally above its vanities. And 
 still the voice of the living, of the just and of the 
 unjust, of kings, of felons and of beasts, will be 
 raised unsilenced, until humanity, unsatisfied as 
 
2i8 The Anatomy of Negation. 
 
 before and yet impatient for the peace which 
 life has disturbed, is tossed at last, with its shat- 
 tered globe and forgotten gods, to fertilize the 
 furrows of space where worlds ferment. 
 
 On this vista the curtain may be drawn. 
 Neither poet nor seer can look beyond. Nature, 
 who is unconscious in her immorality, entrancing 
 in her beauty, savage in her cruelty, imperial in 
 her prodigality, and appalling in her convulsions, 
 is not only deaf, but dumb. There is no answer 
 to any appeal. The best we can do, the best 
 that has ever been done, is to recognize the im- 
 placability of the laws that rule the universe, and 
 contemplate as calmly as we can the nothingness 
 from which we are come and into which we shall 
 all disappear. The one consolation that we hold, 
 though it is one which may be illusory too, con- 
 sists in the belief that when death comes, fear 
 and hope are at an end. Then wonder ceases ; 
 the insoluble no longer perplexes ; space is lost ; 
 the infinite is blank ; the farce is done. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 In addition to the authorities cited in the text, 
 the writer desires to express his indebtedness for 
 facts and suggestions derived from the follow- 
 ing works : " Hindu Philosophy," Da vies ; " Bud- 
 dhism " (Hibbert Lectures), Rhys-Davids ; " Sa- 
 cred Books of the East," edited by Max Miiller ; 
 "Hinduism," Monier- Williams ; " Buddha, sein 
 Leben, u. s. w.," Oldenburg; "Traduction du 
 Tao-te-King," Stanislas Julien ; " Le G^nie des 
 Religions," Quinet ; " Geschichte des Material- 
 ismus," Lange ; " Pyrrhon," Waddington ; "La 
 Religion Romaine," Boissier ; " Histoire des Ori- 
 gines du Christianisme," Renan ; " Histoire Na- 
 turelle des Religions," V^ron ; " Doctrines So- 
 ciales," Guyot ; ■- Histoire du Diable," R^ville 
 "History of Rationalism," Lecky ; "La Renais- 
 sance," Marc-Monnier ; " L'Allemagne," Heine 
 " Le Mat^rialisme," Janet ; " Auguste Comte et la 
 Philosophic Positive," Littrd ; " Diderot," Scherer 
 -■■ Memoires pour servir k I'Histoiredela Philoso- 
 phie," etc., Damiron ; " Le Roi Voltaire," Hous- 
 saye ; " Les Contemporains," Lemaitre ; "His- 
 toire du Christianisme," Leconte de Lisle ; " His- 
 tory of Philosophy," Lewes; " Dictionnaire des 
 Sciences Philosophiques." 
 
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 clever, and Bmuaing fjishion, that reminds one a good deal of By ton's '* Beppo.° Inciden- 
 tally, he patirizes society iu a light vein of humor, and in a style that is graceful and epi 
 grammatic. The volume contains over forty illustrations, and ia an admirable specimen of 
 the bookmaker's art. 
 
 A NEW AND EXTRAORDINARY STUDY OF HUMAN NATURE. 
 
 THE ROMANCE OF A QUIET WATERING PLACE. 
 
 Being the unpremeditated Confessions of a not altogether frivolous girl (ex- 
 tracted from the private correspondence of Miss Evelyn J. Dwyer). By 
 Nora Helen Warddel. 13mo. Cloth, $1.00. Paper covers, 50 cents. 
 Thirty beautiful Illustrations by Graves. 
 
 "Thestory is very readable." — y. 7. Sun. 
 
 "Cleverly conceived and as cleverly told, and has a dash of French flavor in it." — 
 Bartford Courant. 
 
 " No American novel has been so beautifully illnstrated. * • * An original work, 
 bracing and piquant as Worcestershire sauce or a bottle of thirty years old sherry." — The 
 Argus, Baltimore. 
 
 BELFORD, CLARKE &. CO., PulDlishers, 
 
 CHICAGO, NEW" YORK, and SAN FRANCISCO. 
 
JUVENILES. 
 
 ONE SYLLABLE HISTORIES OF THE STATES. 
 
 Histories of tlie States in Words oE One Syllable. 
 SPECIALLY DESIGNED FOR THE YOtrNQ. 
 
 A HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAJSTD 
 
 In Words of One Syllable. By Mrs. H. N. Cadt. Bichly Illustrated. Illu- 
 minated Board Cover. Boards, $1.00. Cloth, $1.50. 
 
 A HISTORY OF NEW YORK 
 
 In Words of One Syllable. By Mrs. J. H. Walworth. Richly Illustrated. 
 Illuminated Board Cover. Boards, $1.00. Cloth, $1.50. 
 
 A HISTORY OF ILLINOIS 
 
 In Words of One Syllable. By Thos. W. Handpord. Richly Illustrated. 
 Illuminated Board Cover. Boards, $1.00. Cloth, $1.50. 
 
 A HISTORY C^ OHIO 
 
 In Words of One Syllable. By Mrs. H. N. CadiT. Richly Illustrated. Illu- 
 minated Board Cover. Boards, $1.00. Cloth, $1.50. 
 
 WHAT JESUS SAID. 
 
 The Words of the Lord Jesus, Expounded, Classified; and Arranged in Con- 
 venient Positions Suitable for Committal to Memory. A Book Specially 
 for the Little Ones. By Thomas W. Handford. With 20 Illustrations 
 from Drawings by Qustave Dore. Illuminated Board Cover, 50 cents. 
 
 POETRY AND PICTURES. 
 
 Poems and Legends from the Old World and the New. For the Boys and 
 Girls of America. Edited by Thomas W. Handford. Beautifully Illus- 
 trated. Illuminated Board Cover. Price, 50 cents. 
 
 ANIMALS AND BIRDS. 
 
 Stories and Studies Concerning the Habits of Animals and Birds, Profusely 
 Illustrated. Edited by Thomas W. Handford. Illuminated Board 
 Cover. Price, 50 cents. 
 
 CHRISTMAS DAY. 
 
 Stories, Legends, and Poems of the Merry Christmas Tide. Christmas Games 
 and Reading.s suitable for Christmas Festivities. Book for the Young. 
 By Thomas W. H.\ndford. Fully Illustrated. Illuminated Board 
 Cover. Price, 50 cents. 
 
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Illlliiliil