was no less her father's glory than was the fact that he was the
greatest financier of his time.

Clara Van den Ende was her father's helper and companion, and when he
was busied in other tasks she took charge of his classes.

Auerbach has written a charming story with Clara Van den Ende and
Spinoza as a central theme. In the tale is pictured with skilful
psychology the awakening of the sleeping soul of Spinoza as he was
introduced from a cheerless home, devoid of art and freedom, into the
beauties of undraped Greece and the fine atmosphere of a forum where
nothing human was considered alien.

From a love for Vergil, Cicero and Horace, to a love for each other, was
a very natural sequence. A growing indifference for the censure of
Judaism was quite a natural result. Auerbach would have us believe that
no man alone ever stood out against the revilings of kinsmen and the
stupidity of sectarians: we move in the line of least resistance and
only a very great passion makes it possible for a man calmly to face the
contumely of an angry world.

Zangwill, in his vivid sketch, "The Maker of Lenses," makes this single
love-episode in the life of Spinoza the controlling impulse of his life,
probably reasoning on the premise that men who mark epochs are ever and
always, without exception, those with the love nature strongly implanted
in their hearts. So thoroughly does Zangwill believe in the one passion
of Spinoza's life, that a score of years after the chief incident of it
had transpired, he pictures the philosopher trembling at mention of the
woman's name, coughing to conceal his agitation and clutching the
doorpost for support. And this a man who smilingly faced a mob that
howled for his life, and was only moved to philosophize on the nature of
human intellect when a flying stone grazed his cheek!

But the lady had ambitions--the lens-maker was penniless, and probably
always would be--his passion was passive--he lacked the show and dash
that made other women jealous. And so Oldenburg, a rival with love and
jewels, won the heart that could not be won by love alone. That the lady
soon knew she had erred did not help her case--Spinoza loved his ideal,
and he had thought it was the woman.

Follow Zangwill's stories of the Ghetto and your heart is wrung by the
injustice, cruelty and inhumanity visited upon the Jews by the people
who worship a Jew as God and make daily supplications to a Jewess.

But read between the lines and you will see that Israel Zangwill, child
of the Ghetto, knows that the Peculiar People are peculiar through
persecution, and not necessarily so through innate nature. Zangwill
knows that no religion is pure except in its stage of persecution, and
that Judaism, grown rich and powerful, would oppress and has oppressed.
Martyr and persecutor shift places easily.

The Jew arrives in a city at night, and in the morning takes down the
shutters and is doing business. The Jew winds his way into the life of
every city and becomes at once an integral part of it--a part, yet
separate and distinct, for his social and religious life is not colored
by his environment.

Children imitate unconsciously. The golden rule is not natural to
children: it has to be taught them. They do unto others as others have
done unto them, and have no question as to right or wrong. We are all
children, and have to think hard before we are conscious of any feeling
of the brotherhood of man. As soon as the Jews relaxed in Amsterdam--got
their breath, and felt secure--they did unto others as they had been
done by--they persecuted.

A Jew must be a Jew, and as they had been watched with suspicion in
Spain and Portugal by the Christians, so now they watched each other for
heresies. They compelled strictest obedience to every form and ceremony.
To the Jew the Law forms the firmament above and the earth beneath. All
is law to him, and his part and work in this life is obedience to law.

The Jewish religion is a concrete, unbroken mass of laws. The Jew is
bounded on the east by law; on the north by law; on the west by law; on
the south by law. There are set rules and laws that govern his getting
up, his going to bed, his eating, drinking, sleeping, and praying. There
is no phase of human relationship that is not covered by the Mishna and
Gemara. Being learned in the Law means being learned in the proper way
to kill chickens, to dress ducks, wear your vestments, go to prayers,
and what to say when you meet two Christians in an alley. If a Jew
quarrels with a neighbor and goes to his Rabbi for advice, the learned
man gets down his Talmud and finds the page. The relation of wife and
husband, child and parent, brother and sister, lover and sweetheart, are
covered by law, fixed, immovable. The learned men of Judah are men
learned in the Law, not learned in the science of life, and commonsense.
When these learned men meet they argue for six days and nights together
as to interpretations of the Law concerning whether it is right to make
a fire in your cook-stove on the Sabbath if a Christian is starving for
food on your doorstep, or what will become of you if you eat pork to
save your life.

Rational Jews are those who do what they think is right, but Orthodox
Jews are those who do what the Law prescribes. When Jesus plucked the
ears of corn on the Sabbath day, he proved himself a Rational Jew--he
set his own opinion higher than Law and thereby made himself an outcast.
Jewish Law provides curdling curses for just such offenses.

Plato's Republic was a scheme of life regulated absolutely by law; every
contingency was provided for. And Plato's plan was founded on the
hypothesis that it is the duty of wise men to do the thinking and
regulate the conduct of those who are supposed not to be wise enough to
think and to act for themselves. But Plato's idea lacked the "Thus saith
the Lord," with which Moses and Aaron enforced their edicts. So Plato's
Republic is still on paper, for no set of rules minutely regulating
conduct has ever been enforced except as the ruler made his subjects
believe he received his instructions direct from God.

Yet all the Jewish Laws are founded with an eye to a sanitary and
hygienic good--they are built on the basis of expediency. And that rule
of the Gemara which provides that if you have gravy on the table, you
can not also have butter, without sin, seems more of a move in the
direction of economics than a matter of ethics. Laws are good for the
people who believe that a blind obedience to a good thing is better than
to work your way alone and find out for yourself what is best and
right. The Jewish Law is based, like all religious codes, on the
assumption that man by nature is vile, and really prefers wrong to
right.

The thought that all men prefer the good, and think at the moment they
are doing what is best, no matter what they do, was first sharply and
clearly expressed by Spinoza. Truth, he said, could only be reached
through freedom--a man must even have the privilege of thinking wrong so
long as his actions do not jeopardize the life and immediate safety of
others.

For a people whose every act is governed by fixed laws there can be no
progression. Mistakes are the rungs of the ladder by which we reach the
skies. The man who allows the dead to regulate his life, and accepts
their thinking as final, satisfied to repeat what he is taught, remains
forever in the lowlands. His wings are leaden.

The Jews--most law-bound and priest-ridden of all peoples--are at home
everywhere because they have no home. They mix in the life of every
nation and remain forever separate and apart. They will run with you,
ride with you, trade with you, but they will not eat with you nor pray
with you. They build no Altars to the Unknown God, out of courtesy to
visitors and guests from distant climes. Mohammedans recognize the
divinity of Jesus, the Buddhists look upon him as one of many Christs,
the Universalist sees good in every faith, but the Jew regards all other
religions than his own as pestilence. If by chance, or in the line of
business, he finds himself in a heathen temple or Christian Church, his
Gemara orders that he shall present himself at his own temple for
purification.

Read Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, and you behold on every page
curses, revilings, threats and bitter scorn for all outside the pale.
Orders by Jehovah to burn, kill and utterly destroy are frequent. And we
must remember that every people make their god in their own image. A
man's God is himself at his best; his devil is himself at his worst.

The very expression, "The Chosen People," would be an insult to every
man outside the pale, were it not such a petulant and childish boast
that its serious assumption makes us smile.

Well does Moses Mendelssohn, the Jew, say: "The Ghetto is an arrangement
first contrived by Jews for keeping infidels out of a sacred precinct.
When the infidels were strong enough they turned the tables and forbade
the Jews to leave their Ghetto except at certain hours. For the misery,
poverty and squalor of the Ghetto the Jew is not to blame--if he could,
he would have the Ghetto a place of opulence, beauty and all that makes
for the good. Every undesirable thing he would bestow on the outsider.
In the twilight days of Jewish power, the Jew, with bigotry, arrogance
and intolerance unsurpassed, regulated the infidels and fixed their
goings and comings as they now do his, and he would do it again if he
had the power. The Jew never changes--once a Jew always a Jew."

This was written by a man who was not only a Jew, but a man. He was a
Jew in pride of race--in racial instinct, but he was great enough to
know that all men are God's children, and that to set up a fixed,
dogmatic standard regulating every act of life has its serious
penalties. He was a Jew so big that he knew that the cruelty and
inhumanity visited upon the Jews by Christians was first taught to these
Christians by Jews--it is all in the Old Testament. The villainy you
have taught me I will execute. It shall go hard, but I will better the
instruction.

The Christians who had persecuted Jews were really orthodox Jews in
disguise, and were actuated more by the Jewish Law expressed in the Old
Testament, than by the life of Jesus, who placed man above the Sabbath
and taught that the good is that which serves.

And so Benedict Spinoza, the Rabbi, gentle, spiritual, kind, heir to the
Jewish faith, learned in all the refinements of Jewish Law, knowing
minutely the history of the race, knowing that for which the curses of
Judaism were reserved, perceiving with unblinking eyes the absurdity and
folly of all dogmatic belief, gradually withdrew from practising and
following "Law," preferring his own commonsense. There were threats,
then attempts to bribe, and again threats and finally excommunication
and curses so terrible that if they were carried out, a man would walk
the earth an exile--unknown by brothers and sisters, shunned by the
mother that gave him birth, a moral leper to his father, despised,
rejected, turned away, spit upon by every being of his kind.

And here is the document:

     By the sentence of the angels, by the decree of the saints, we
     anathematize, cut off, curse, and execrate Baruch Spinoza, in the
     presence of these sacred books with the six hundred and thirteen
     precepts which are written therein, with the anathema wherewith
     Joshua anathematized Jericho; with the cursing wherewith Elisha
     cursed the children; and with all the cursings which are written in
     the Book of the Law; cursed be he by day, and cursed by night;
     cursed when he lieth down, and cursed when he riseth up; cursed
     when he goeth out, and cursed when he cometh in; the Lord pardon
     him never; the wrath and fury of the Lord burn upon this man, and
     bring upon him all the curses which are written in the Book of the
     Law. The Lord blot out his name under heaven. The Lord set him
     apart for destruction from all the tribes of Israel, with all the
     curses of the firmament which are written in the Book of the Law.
     There shall no one speak to him, no man write to him, no man show
     him any kindness, no man stay under the same roof with him, no man
     come nigh him.

When the Jewish congregation had placed its ban upon Spinoza, he dropped
the Jewish name Baruch, for the Latin Benedictus. In this action he
tokened his frame of mind: he was going to persist in his study of the
Latin language, and his new name stood for peace or blessing, just as
the other had, being essentially the same as our word benediction. The
man's purpose was firm. To perfect himself in Latin, he began a study of
Descartes' "Meditations," and this led to proving the Cartesian
philosophy by a geometrical formula. In his quiet home among the simple
Mennonites, five miles from Amsterdam, there gradually grew up around
him a body of students to whom he read his writings. The Cartesian
philosophy swings around the proposition that only through universal
doubt can we at last reach truth. Spinoza soon went beyond this and made
his plea for faith in a universal Good.

Five years went by--years of work at his lenses, helping his friends in
their farm work, and several hours daily devoted to study and writing.
Spinoza's manuscripts were handed around by his pupils. He wrote for
them, and in making truth plain to them he made it clear to himself. The
Jews at Amsterdam kept track of his doings and made charges to the
Protestant authorities to the effect that Spinoza was guilty of treason,
and his presence a danger to the State. Spies were about, and their
presence becoming known to the Mennonites, caused uneasiness. To
relieve his friends of a possible unpleasant situation, the gentle
philosopher packed up his scanty effects and moved away. He went to the
village of Voorburg, two miles from The Hague.

Here he lived for seven years, often for six months not going farther
than three miles from home. He studied, worked and wrote, and his
writings were sent out to his few friends who circulated them among
friends of theirs, and in time the manuscripts came back soiled and
dog-eared, proof that some one had read them. Persecution binds human
hearts, and at this time there was a brotherhood of thinkers throughout
the capitals and University towns of Europe. Spinoza's name became known
gradually to these--they grew to look for his monthly contribution, and
in many places when his manuscript arrived little bands of earnest
students would meet, and the manuscript would be read and discussed. The
interdict placed on free thought made it attractive. Spinoza became
recognized by the esoteric few as one of the world's great thinkers,
although the good people with whom he lived knew him only as a model
lodger, who kept regular hours and made little trouble. Occasionally
visitors would come from a distance and remain for hours discussing such
abstract themes as the freedom of the will or the nature of the
over-soul. And these visitors caused the rustic neighbors to grow
curious, and we find Spinoza moving into the city and renting a modest
back room. By a curious chance, his landlady, fifty years before, had
been a servant in the household of Grotius, and once had locked that
great man in a trunk and escorted him, right side up, across the border
into Switzerland to escape the heresy-hunters who were looking for human
kindling. This kind landlady, now grown old, and living largely in the
past, saw points of resemblance between her philosophic boarder and the
great Grotius, and soon waxed boastful to the neighbors. Spinoza noticed
that he was being pointed out on the streets. His record had followed
him. The Jews hated him because he was a renegade; the Christians hated
him because he was a Jew, and both Catholics and Protestants shunned him
when they ought not, and greeted him with howls when they should have
let him alone.

He again moved his lodgings to the suburbs of the city, where he lived
with the family of Van der Spijck, a worthy Dutch painter who smoked his
pipe in calm indifference to the Higher Criticism. For their quiet and
studious lodger Van der Spijck and his wife had a profound regard. They
did not understand him, but they believed in him. Often he would go to
church with them and coming home would discuss the sermon with them at
length. The Lutheran pastor who came to call on the family invited
Spinoza to join his flock, and they calmly discussed the questions of
baptism and regeneration by faith together; but genius only expresses
itself to genius, and the pastor went away mystified. Van der Spijck
did not produce great art, yet his pictures are now in demand because he
was the kind and loyal friend of Spinoza, and his heart, not his art,
fixes his place in history.

In his sketch, Zangwill has certain of his old friends, members of the
Van den Ende family, hunt out the philosopher in his obscure lodgings
and pay him a social visit. Then it was that he turned pale, and
stammeringly tried to conceal his agitation at mention of the name of
the only woman he had ever loved.

The image of that one fine flaming up of divine passion followed him to
the day of his death. It was too sacred for him to discuss--he avoided
women, kept out of society, and forever in his sad heart there burned a
shrine to the ideal. And so he lived, separate and apart. A single
little room sufficed--the work-bench where he made his lenses near the
window, and near at hand the table covered with manuscript where he
wrote. Renan says that when he died, aged forty-three, his passing was
like a sigh, he had lived so quietly--so few knew him--there were no
earthly ties to break.

The worthy Van der Spijcks, plain, honest people, had invited him to go
to church with them. He smilingly excused himself--he had thoughts he
must write out ere they escaped. When the good man and his wife returned
in an hour, their lodger was dead.

A tablet on the house marks the spot, and but a short distance away in
the open square sits his form in deathless bronze, pensively writing
out an idea which we can only guess--or is it a last love-letter to the
woman to whom he gave his heart and who pushed from her the gift?

Spinoza had courage, yet great gentleness of disposition. His habit of
mind was conciliatory: if strong opinions were expressed in his presence
concerning some person or thing, he usually found some good to say of
the person or an excuse for the thing. He was one of the most unselfish
men in history--money was nothing to him, save as it might minister to
his very few immediate wants or the needs of others.

He smilingly refused a pension offered him by a French courtier if he
would but dedicate a book to the King; and a legacy left him by an
admiring student, Simon de Vries, was declined for the reason that it
was too much and he did not wish the care of it. Later, he compromised
with the heirs by accepting an income of one hundred and twenty-five
dollars a year. "How unreasonable," he exclaimed, "they want me to
accept five hundred florins a year--I told them I would take three
hundred, but I will not be burdened by a stiver more." If he was
financially free from the necessity of earning his living at his trade,
he feared the quality of his thought might be diluted. You can not
think intently and intensely all of the time. Those who try it never are
able to dive deep nor soar high.... Good digestion demands a certain
amount of coarse food--refined and condensed aliment alone kills. Man
should work and busy himself with the commonplace, rest himself for his
flight, and when the moment of transfiguration comes, make the best of
it.

All he asked was to be given the privilege to work and to think. As for
expressing his thoughts, he made no public addresses and during his life
only one of his books was printed. This was the "Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus," which mentioned "Hamburg" on the title page, but
with the author's name wisely omitted. Trite enough now are the
propositions laid down--that God is everywhere and that man is brother
to the tree, the rock, the flower. Emerson states the case in his
"Over-Soul" and "Spiritual Laws" in the true, calm Spinozistic style--as
if the gentle Jew had come back to earth and dictated his thought,
refined, polished and smooth as one of his own little lenses, to the man
of Concord. Benedictus Concordia, blessing and peace be with thee!

But the lynx-eyed censors soon discovered this single, solitary book of
Spinoza's, and although they failed to locate the author, Spinoza had
the satisfaction of seeing the work placed on the Index and a general
interdict issued against it by Christendom and Judea as well. It was
really of some importance. It was so thoroughly in demand that it still
circulated with false title pages. In the Lenox Library, New York, is a
copy of the first edition, finely bound, and lettered thus: "A Treatise
on the Sailing of Ships against the Wind," which shows the straits
booksellers were put to in evading the censors, and also reveals a touch
of wit that doubtless was appreciated by the Elect.

His modesty, patience, kindness and freedom from all petty whim and
prejudice set Spinoza apart as a marked man. Withal he was eminently
religious, and the reference to him by Novalis as "the God-intoxicated
man" seems especially applicable to one who saw God in everything.

Renan said at the dedication of The Hague monument to Spinoza, "Since
the days of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius we have not seen a life so
profoundly filled with the sentiment of the divine."

When walking along the streets of The Hague and coarse voices called
after him in guttural, "Kill the renegade!" he said calmly, "We must
remember that these men are expressing the essence of their being, just
as I express the essence of mine."

Spinoza taught that the love of God is the supreme good; that virtue is
its own reward, and folly its own punishment; and that every one ought
to love his neighbor and obey the civil powers.

He made no enemies except by his opinions. He was infinitely patient,
sweet in temper--had respect for all religions, and never offended by
parading his heresies in the faces of others.

Nothing but the kicks of scorn and the contumely that came to Spinoza
could possibly have freed him to the extent he was free from Judaistic
bonds.

He had disciples who called him "Master," and who taught him nothing but
patience in answering their difficulties.

One is amazed at the hunger of the mind at the time of Spinoza. Men
seemed to think, and dare to grasp for "New Thought" to a marvelous
extent.

Spinoza says that "evil" and "good" have no objective reality, but are
merely relative to our feelings, and that "evil" in particular is
nothing positive, but a privation only, or non-existence.

Spinoza says that love consecrates every indifferent particular
connected with the object of affection. Good is that which we certainly
know to be useful to us. Evil is that which we certainly know stands in
the way of our command of good.

Good is that which helps. Bad is that which hinders our
self-maintenance and active powers.

A passage from Spinoza which well reveals his habit of thought and which
placed the censors on his track runs as follows:

     The ultimate design of the State is not to dominate men, to
     restrain them by fear, to make them subject to the will of others,
     but, on the contrary, to permit every one, as far as possible, to
     live in security. That is to say, to preserve intact the natural
     right which is his, to live without being harmed himself or doing
     harm to others. No, I say, the design of the State is not to
     transform men into animals or automata from reasonable beings; its
     design is to arrange matters that citizens may develop their minds
     and bodies in security, and to make free use of their reason. The
     true design of the State, then, is liberty. Whoever would respect
     the rights of the sovereign ought never to act in opposition to his
     decrees; but each has a right to think as he pleases and to say
     what he thinks, provided that he limits himself to speaking and to
     teaching in the name of pure reason, and that he does not attempt,
     in his private capacity, to introduce innovations into the State.
     For example, a citizen demonstrates that a certain law is repugnant
     to sound reason, and believing this, he thinks it ought to be
     abrogated. If he submits his opinion to the judgment of the
     sovereign, to which alone it belongs to establish and to abolish
     laws, and if, in the meantime, he does nothing contrary to law, he
     certainly deserves well of the State as being a good citizen.

     Let us admit that it is possible to stifle liberty of men and to
     impose on them a yoke, to the point that they dare not even
     murmur, however feebly, without the consent of the sovereign:
     never, it is certain, can any one hinder them from thinking
     according to their own free will. What follows hence? It is that
     men will think one way and speak another; that, consequently, good
     faith, so essential a virtue to a State, becomes corrupted; that
     adulation, so detestable, and perfidy, shall be held in honor,
     bringing in their train a decadence of all good and sound
     habitudes. What can be more fatal to a State than to exile, as
     malcontents, honest citizens, simply because they do not hold the
     opinion of the multitude, and because they are ignorant of the art
     of dissembling! What can be more fatal to a State than to treat as
     enemies and to put to death men who have committed no other crime
     than that of thinking independently! Behold, then, the scaffold,
     the dread of the bad man, which now becomes the glorious theater
     where tolerance and virtue blaze forth in all their splendor, and
     covers publicly with opprobrium the sovereign majesty! Assuredly,
     there is but one thing which that spectacle can teach us, and that
     is to imitate these noble martyrs, or, if we fear death, to become
     the abject flatterers of the powerful. Nothing hence can be so
     perilous as to relegate and submit to divine right things which are
     purely speculative, and to impose laws upon opinions which are, or
     at least ought to be, subject to discussion among men. If the right
     of the State were limited to repressing acts, and speech were
     allowed impunity, controversies would not turn so often into
     seditions.

AUGUSTE COMTE

     In the name of the Past and of the Future, the servants of
     Humanity--both its philosophical and its practical servants--come
     forward to claim as their due the general direction of the world.
     Their object is to constitute at length a real Providence in all
     departments--moral, intellectual and material.

                                                --_Auguste Comte_

[Illustration: AUGUSTE COMTE]

A little city girl asked of her country cousin, when honey was the topic
up for discussion, "Does your papa keep a bee?"

Let the statement go unchallenged, that a single bee has neither the
disposition nor the ability to make honey.

Bees accomplish nothing save as they work together, and neither do men.

Great men come in groups.

Six men, three living at the village of Concord, Massachusetts, and
three at Cambridge, fifteen miles away, supplied America really all her
literature, until Indiana suddenly loomed large on the horizon, and
assumed the center of the stage, like the spirit of the Brocken.

Five men made up the Barbizon school of painting, which has influenced
the entire art education of the world. And that those who have been
influenced and helped most, deny their redeemer with an oath, is a
natural phenomenon psychologists look for and fully understand.

Greece had a group of seven thinkers, in the time of Pericles, who made
the name and fame of the city deathless.

Rome had a similar group in the time of Augustus; then the world went
to sleep, and although there were individuals, now and then, of great
talent, their lights went out in darkness, for it takes bulk to make a
conflagration.

Florence had her group of thinkers and doers when Michelangelo and
Leonardo lived only a few miles apart, but never met. Yet each man
spurred the other on to do and dare, until an impetus was reached that
sent the names of both down the centuries.

Boswell gives us a group of a dozen men who made each other
possible--often helped by hate and strengthened by scorn.

The Mutual Admiration Society does not live in piping times of peace,
where glowing good-will strews violets; often the sessions of this
interesting aggregation are stormy and acrimonious, but one thing
holds--the man who arises at this board must have something to say.
Strong men, matched by destiny, set each other a pace. Criticism is full
and free. The most interesting and the most successful social experiment
in America owed its lease of life largely to its scheme of Public
Criticism, a plan society at large will adopt when it puts off
swaddling-clothes. Public Criticism is a diversion of gossip into a
scientific channel. It is a plan of healthful, hygienic, social
plumbing.

England produced one group of thinkers that changed the complexion of
the theological belief of Christendom--Darwin, Spencer, Wallace, Huxley
and Mill. But this group built on the French philosophers, who were
taught antithetically by the decaying and crumbling aristocracy of
France. Rousseau and Voltaire loved each other and helped each other, as
the proud Leonardo helped the humble and no less proud peasant,
Michelangelo--by absent treatment.

Victor Hugo says that when the skulls of Voltaire and Rousseau were
taken in a sack from the Pantheon and tumbled into a common grave, a
spark of recognition was emitted that the gravedigger did not see.

Voltaire was patronized by Frederick the Great, who, though a married
man, lived a bachelor life and forbade women his court, and protected
Kant with the bulging forehead and independent ways. Kant lived among a
group of thinkers he never saw, but reached out and touched finger-tips
with them over the miles that his feet never traversed.

To Kant are we indebted for Turgot, that practical and farseeing man of
affairs told of in matchless phrase in Thomas Watson's "Story of
France," the best book ever written in America, with possibly a few
exceptions. Condorcet kept step with him, and Auguste Comte calls
Condorcet his spiritual stepfather, and a wit of the time here said,
"Then Turgot is your uncle"; and Comte replied, "I am proud of the
honor, for if Turgot is my uncle, then indeed am I of royal blood."

Auguste Comte is the one bright particular star amid that milky way of
riotous thinkers which followed close upon the destruction of the French
Monarchy.

When Napoleon visited the grave of Rousseau, he mused in silence and
then said, "Perhaps it might have been as well if this man had never
lived."

And Marshal Ney, standing near, said, "It reveals small gratitude for
Napoleon Bonaparte to say so." Napoleon smiled and answered, "Possibly
the world would be as well off if neither of us had ever lived."

Auguste Comte thought that Napoleon was just as necessary in the social
evolution as Rousseau, and that both were needed--and he himself was
needed to make the matter plain in print.

Auguste Comte was born at Montpelier, France, in Seventeen Hundred
Ninety-eight. His father was receiver of taxes, an office that carried
with it much leisure and a fair income. Men of leisure seldom have time
to think--if you want a thing done it is safest and best not to pick a
publican. Only busy men have time to do things. The men who have good
incomes and work little are envied only by those with a mental
impediment.

The boy Auguste owed little to his parents for his peculiar evolution,
save as his father taught him by antithesis: the children of drunkards
make temperance fanatics, and shiftless fathers sometimes have sons who
are great financiers.

When nine years of age, the passion to know and to become was upon
Auguste Comte. He was small in stature, insignificant in appearance, and
had a great appetite for facts. Comte is a fine refutation of the maxim
that infant prodigies fall victims to arrested development.

At twelve years of age he was filled with the idea that the social order
was all wrong. To the utter astonishment of his parents and tutors, he
argued that the world could not be bettered until mankind was taught the
lesson that history, languages, theology and polite etiquette were not
learning at all; and as long as educated men centered on these things,
there was no hope for the race.

The birch was brought in to disannex the boy from his foolishness, but
this only seemed to make him cling the closer to what he was pleased to
call his convictions.

He read books that wearied the brains of grown-ups, and took a hearty
interest in the abstruse, the obscure and the complex.

At thirteen, that peculiar time when the young turn to faith, this
perverse rareripe was so filled with doubt that it ran over and he stood
in the slop. He offered to publicly debate the question of Freewill with
the local curé; and on several occasions stood up in meeting and
contradicted the preacher.

His parents, thinking to divert his mind from abstractions to useful
effort, sent him to the Polytechnic School at Paris, that excellent
institution founded by Napoleon, which served America most nobly as a
model for the Boston School of Technology, only the French
"Polytechnique" was purely a government institution--a sample of the
Twentieth Century sent for the benefit of the Nineteenth.

But institutions are never much beyond the people--they can not be, for
the people dilute everything until it is palatable. Laws that do not
embody public opinion can never be enforced. No man who expresses
himself is really much ahead of his time--if he is, the times snuff him
out, and quickly.

In Eighteen Hundred Fourteen, the Polytechnic School was well saturated
with the priestly idea of education, and the attempt was made to
produce an alumni of cultured men, rather than a race of useful ones.

Revolt was rife in the ranks of the students. It is still debatable
whether revolution and riot in colleges are actuated by a passion for
truth or a love of excitement. Anyway, the "Techs" laid deep places to
the effect that when a certain professor appeared at chapel, a unique
reception would be in store for him.

He appeared, and a fusillade of books, rulers and ink-wells shot at his
learned head from every quarter of the room. Other professors appeared
and sought to restore order. Riot followed--seats were torn up, windows
broken, and there was much loud talk and gesticulation peculiarly
Gallic.

It was Ninety-three done in little.

Instead of expelling the delinquents, the National Assembly took the
matter in hand and simply voted to close the school.

Auguste Comte went home a hero, proud as a Heidelberg student, with a
sweeping scar on his chin and the end of his nose gone. "I have dealt
the Old Education its deathblow," he solemnly said, mistaking a
cane-rush for a revolution.

Against the direct command of his parents, he went back to Paris. He had
now reached the mature age of eighteen. He resolved to write out truth
as it occurred to him, and incidentally he would gain a livelihood by
teaching mathematics.

At Paris, the mental audacity of the youth won him recognition; he
picked up a precarious living, and was a frequenter at scientific
lectures and discussions, and in gatherings where great themes were up
for debate, he was always present.

Benjamin Franklin was his ideal. In his notebook he wrote this:
"Franklin at twenty-five resolved he would become great and wise. I now
vow the same at twenty." He had five years the start!

Franklin, calm, healthy, judicial, wise--the greatest man America has
produced--worked his philosophy up into life. He did not think much
beyond his ability to perform. To him, to think was to do. And he did
things that to many men were miracles.

Comte once said, "I would have followed the venerable Benjamin Franklin
through the street, and kissed the hem of the homespun overcoat, made by
Deborah." These men were very unlike. One was big, gentle, calm and
kind; the other was small, dyspeptic, excitable and full of challenge.
Yet the little man had times of insight and abstraction, when he tracked
reasons further than the big, practical man could have followed them.

Franklin's habit of life--the semi-ascetic quality of getting your
gratification by doing without things--especially pleased Comte. He
lived in a garret on two meals a day, and was happy in the thought that
he could endure and yet think and study. The old monastic impulse was
upon him, minus the religious features--or stay! why may not science
become a religion? And surely science can become dogmatic, and even
tyrannically build a hierarchy on a hypothesis no less than theology.

A friend, pitying young Comte's hard lot, not knowing its sweet
recompense, got him a position as tutor in the household of a nobleman;
like unto the kind man who caught the sea-gulls roosting on an iceberg,
and in pity, transferred them to the warm delights of a compost-pile in
his barnyard.

Comte held the place for three weeks and then resigned. He went back to
the garret and sweet liberty--having had his taste of luxury, but
miserable in it all--wondering how a gavotte or a minuet could make a
man forget that he was living in a city where thirty thousand human
beings were constantly only one meal beyond the sniff of starvation.

At this time Comte came into close relationship with a man who was to
have a very great influence in his life--this was Count Henri of
Saint-Simon, usually spoken of as Saint-Simon.

Saint-Simon was rich, gently proud, and fondly patronizing. He was a
sort of scientific Mæcenas--and be it known that Mæcenas was a poet and
philosopher of worth, and one Horace was his pupil.

Saint-Simon was an excellent and learned man who wrote, lectured and
taught on philosophic themes. He had a garden-school, modeled in degree
after that of Plato. Saint-Simon became much interested in young Comte,
invited him to his classes, supplied him books, clothing, and tickets to
the opera. Part of the time Comte lived under Saint-Simon's roof, and
did translating and copying in partial payment for his meal-ticket. The
teacher and the pupil had a fine affection for each other. What Comte
needed, he took from Saint-Simon as if it were his own.

In writing to friends at this time, Comte praises Saint-Simon as the
greatest man who ever lived--"a model of patience, generosity, learning
and love--my spiritual father!" There was fifty years' difference in
their ages, but they studied, read and rambled the realm of books
together, with mutual pleasure and profit.

The central idea of the "Positive Philosophy" is that of the three
stages through which man passes in his evolution. This was gotten from
Saint-Simon, and together they worked out much of the thought that Comte
afterward carried further and incorporated in his book.

But about this time, Saint-Simon, in one of his lectures, afterward
printed, made use of some of the thoughts that Comte had expressed, as
if they were his own--and possibly they were. There is no copyright on
an idea, no caveat can be filed on feeling, and at the last there is no
such thing as originality, except as a matter of form.

Young Comte now proved his humanity by accusing his teacher of stealing
his radium. A quarrel followed, in which Comte was so violent that
Saint-Simon had to put the youth out of his house.

The wrangles of Grub Street would fill volumes: both sides are always
right, or wrong--it matters little, and is simply a point of view. But
the rancor of it all, if seen from heaven, must serve finely to dispel
the monotony of the place--a panacea for paradisiacal ennui.

From lavish praise, Comte swung over to words of bitterness and
accusation. Having sat at the man's table and partaken of his
hospitality for several years, he was now guilty of the unpardonable
offense of ridiculing and berating him.

He speaks of the Saint as a "depraved quack," and says that the time he
spent with him was worse than wasted. If Saint-Simon was the rogue and
pretender that Comte avers, it is no certificate of Comte's insight that
it took him four years to find it out.

In Eighteen Hundred Twenty-five Comte married. The ceremony was
performed civilly, on a sudden impulse of what Schopenhauer would call
"the genius of the genus." The lady was young, agreeable; and having no
opinions of her own, was quite willing to accept his. Comte
congratulated himself that here was virgin soil, and he laid the
flattering unction to his soul that he could mold the lady's mind to
match his own. She would be his helpmeet. Comte had not read Ouida, who
once wrote that when God said, "I will make a helpmeet for him," He was
speaking ironically.

Comte had associated but very little with women--he had theories about
them. Small men, with midget minds, know femininity much better than do
the great ones. Traveling salesmen, with checkered vests, gauge women as
Herbert Spencer never could.

Comte's wife was pretty and she was astute--as most pretty women are.
John Fiske, in his lecture on "Communal Life," says that astute persons
add nothing of value to the community in which they live--their mission
being to be the admired glass of fashion for the non-cogitabund. The
value of astuteness is that it protects us from the astute.

Samuel Johnson and his wife had their first quarrel on the way from the
church, and Auguste Comte and his wife tiffed going down the steps from
the notary's. Comte had no use for ecclesiastical forms, and the lady
agreed with him until after the notary had earned his fee. Then she
suddenly had qualms, like those peculiar ladies told of by Robert Louis
Stevenson, who turn the Madonna's face to the wall.

The couple went to Montpelier on their wedding-tour, to visit Comte's
parents. The new wife agreed with the old folks on but one point--the
marriage should be solemnized by a priest. Having won them on this
point, they stood a solid phalanx against the husband; but the lady took
exceptions to Montpelier on all other grounds--she hated it thoroughly
and said so.

Instead of molding her to his liking, Comte was being kneaded into
animal crackers for her amusement.

Then we find him writing to a friend, confessing that his hopes were
ashes; but in his misery he grows philosophical and says, "It is all
good, for now I am driven back to my work, and from now on my life is
dedicated to science."

No doubt the lady was as much disappointed in the venture as was the
husband, but he, being literary, eased his grief by working it up into
art, while her side of the story lies buried deep in silence glum.

In choosing the names of philosophers for this series, no thought was
given in the selection beyond the achievements of the men. But it now
comes to me with a slight surprise that seven out of the twelve were
unmarried, and probably it would have been as well--certainly for the
wives--if the other five had remained bachelors, too. Xantippe would
have been the gainer, even if Socrates did miss his discipline.

To center on science and devote one's thought to philosophy produces a
being more or less deformed. There is great danger in specialization:
Nature sacrifices the man in order to get the thing done. Abstract
thought unfits one for domestic life; for, to a degree, it separates a
man from his kind.

The proper advice to a woman about to marry a philosopher would be,
"Don't!"

The advantage of a little actual hardship in one's life is that it makes
existence real and not merely literary. Comte was inclined to thrive on
martyrdom. His restless, eager mind invented troubles, if there were no
real ones, but he was wise enough to know this, as he once said: "The
trials of life are all of one size--imaginary pains are as bad as real
ones, and men who have no actual troubles usually conjure forth a few.
Thus far, happily, I am not reduced to this strait."

We thus see that the true essence of philosophy was there. Comte got a
gratification by dissecting, analyzing and classifying his emotions. All
was grist that came to his mill.

When he was twenty-eight the Positive Philosophy had assumed such
proportions in his mind that he announced a course of twelve lectures on
the subject.

He was jealous of his discoveries, and was intent on getting all the
credit that was due him. Money he cared little for; power and reputation
to him were the only gods worth appeasing. The thought of domestic joy
was forever behind, but philosophy came as a solace. A prospectus was
sent out and tickets were issued. The landlady where he boarded offered
her parlor and her boarder, second floor back, for the benefit of
science. Several zealous denizens of the Latin Quarter made a canvass,
and enough tickets were sold so that the philosopher felt that at last
the world was really at his feet.

When the afternoon for the first lecture arrived, no carriages blocked
the street, and as only about half of those who had purchased tickets
appeared, the difficulties of the landlady and her nervous boarder were
much lessened.

There was one man at this first lecture who was profoundly impressed,
and if we had his testimony, and none other, we might well restrain our
smiles. That man was Alexander von Humboldt. In various passages
Humboldt does Comte the honor of quoting from him, and in one instance
says, "He has summed up certain phases of truth better than they have
ever been expressed before."

Little did the landlady guess that her crusty, crabbed boarder was
firing a shot that would be heard 'round the world, and surely the
gendarme on that particular beat never heard it--so small and
commonplace are the beginnings of great things!

Comte was so saturated with this theme--so immersed in it--that it
consumed him like a fever. Three lectures were given, but at the third,
without warning, the man's nerves snapped--he stopped, sat down, and the
audience filed out perplexed, thinking they had merely seen an
exhibition of one of the eccentricities of genius. The philosopher's
mind was a blank, and kind friends sent him away to a hospital.

It was two years before he regained his reason. The enforced rest did
him good. Nervous Prostration is heroic treatment on the part of Nature.
It is an intent to do for the man what he will never do for himself.

Unkind critics, hotly intent on refuting the Positive Philosophy, seized
upon the fact of Comte's mental trouble and made much of it. "Look you!"
said they, "the man is insane!"

This is convenient, but not judicial. Comte's philosophy stands or falls
on its own merits, and what the author did before, after, or during the
writing of his theses matters not. Madmen are not mad all the time, and
the fact that Sir Isaac Newton was for a time unbalanced does not lessen
our regard for the "Principia," nor consign to limbo the law of
gravitation. Ruskin's work is not the less thought of because the man
had his pathetic spells of indecision. Martin Luther had visions of
devils before he saw the truth, and Emerson's love for Longfellow need
not be disparaged because he looked down on his still, white face and
said, "A dear gentle soul, but I really can not remember his name."

Men write on physiology, and then die, but this does not disprove the
truth they expressed, but failed, possibly, to fully live. The great man
always thinks further than he can travel--even the rest of us can do
that. We can think "Chicago" in a second, but to go there takes time,
strength and money.

When Comte's mental trouble was at its height, and two men were required
to care for him, Lamennais persuaded his wife to have their marriage
solemnized by the Church, and this was done. This performance was such
a violation of sanctity and decency that in after-years Comte could not
believe it was true, until he consulted the church records. "They might
as well have had me confirmed," said Comte, grimly. And we can well
guess that the action did not increase his regard for either his wife or
the Church. The trick seems quite on a par with that of the astute
colored gentleman who anxiously asks for love-powders at the corner
drugstore; or the good wives who purchase harmless potions from red-dyed
rogues to place in the husband's coffee to cure him of the liquor habit.

However, the incident gives a clew to the mental processes of Madame
Comte--she would accomplish by trickery what she had failed to do by
moral suasion, and this in the name of religion!

Two years of enforced rest, and the glowing mind of the philosopher
awoke with a start. He rubbed his eyes after his Rip-Van-Winkle sleep,
and called for his manuscripts--he must prepare for the fourth lecture!

The rest of the course was given, and in Eighteen Hundred Thirty the
first volume of Positive Philosophy was issued.

The sixth and last volume appeared in Eighteen Hundred Forty-two--twelve
years of intense application and ceaseless work. This was the happiest
time of Comte's life; he had the whole scheme in his head from the
start, but he now saw it gradually taking form, and it was meeting with
appreciation from a few earnest thinkers, at least. His services were
in demand for occasional lectures on scientific subjects. In astronomy,
especially, he excelled, and on this theme he was able to please a
popular assembly.

The Polytechnic School had now grown to large proportions, and the
institution that Comte had helped to slide into dissolution now called
him back to serve as examiner and professor.

The constant misunderstandings with his wife had increased to such a
point that both felt a separation desirable. Married people do not
separate on slight excuse--they go because they must. That Comte thought
much more of the lady when they were several hundred miles apart than
when they were together, there is no doubt. He wrote to her at regular
intervals, one-half of his income was religiously sent to her, and he
practised the most painstaking economy in order that he might feel that
she was provided for.

One letter, especially, to his wife reveals a side of Comte's nature
that shows he had the instinct of a true teacher. He says, "I hardly
dare disclose the sweet and softened feeling that comes over me when I
find a scholar whose heart is thoroughly in his work."

The Positive Philosophy was taken up by John Stuart Mill, who wrote a
fine essay on it. It was Mill who introduced the work to Harriet
Martineau. Mr. and Mrs. Mill had intended to translate and condense the
philosophy of Comte for English readers, but when Miss Martineau
expressed her intention of attempting the task, they relinquished the
idea, but backed her up in her efforts.

Miss Martineau condensed the six volumes into two, and what is most
strange, Comte thought so well of the work that he wrote a glowing
acknowledgment of it.

The Martineaus were of good old Huguenot stock, and the French language
came easy to Harriet. For the plain people of France she had a profound
regard, and being sort of a revolutionary by prenatal instincts, Comte's
work from the start appealed to her. James Martineau had such a
bristling personality--being very much like his sister Harriet--that
when this sister wrote a review of a volume of his sermons, showing the
fatuity and foolishness of the reasoning, and calling attention to much
bad grammar, the good man cut her off with a shilling--"which he will
have to borrow," said Harriet.

James hugged the idea to his death that his sister had insulted his
genius--"But I forgive her," he said, which remark proves that he
hadn't, for if he had, he would not have thought to mention the matter.
James Martineau was a great man, but if he had been just a little
greater he would have taken a profound pride in a sister who was so
sharp a shooter that she could puncture his balloon. James Martineau was
a theologian; Harriet was a Positivist. But Positivity had a lure for
him, and so there is a long review, penned largely with aqua fortis, on
Miss Martineau's translation, done by her brother for the "Edinburgh
Review," wherein Harriet is not once mentioned.

When Robert Ingersoll's wife would occasionally, under great stress of
the servant-girl problem, break over a bit, as good women will, and say
things, Robert would remark, "Gently, my dear, gently--I fear me you
haven't yet gotten rid of all your Christian virtues."

The Reverend Doctor James Martineau never quite got rid of his Christian
virtues, which perhaps proves that a little hate, like strychnin, is
useful as a stimulant when properly reduced, for Doctor Martineau died
only a few years ago, having nearly rounded out a century run.

Harriet Martineau was in much doubt about how Comte would regard her
completed work, but was greatly relieved when he gave it his unqualified
approval. On his earnest invitation she visited him in Paris.
Fortunately, she did not have to resort to the Herbert Spencer expedient
of wearing ear-muffs for protection against loquacious friends. She
liked Comte first-rate, until he began to make love to her. Then his
stock dropped below par.

Comte was always much impressed by intellectual women. His wife had
given him a sample of the other kind, and caused him to swing out and
idealize the woman of brains.

So that, when Harriet Martineau admired the Positive Philosophy, it was
proof sufficient to Comte of her excellence in all things. She knew
better, and started soon for Dover.

Mr. and Mrs. Mill had called on Comte a few months before, and given him
a glimpse of the ideal--an intellectual man mated with an intellectual
woman. But Comte didn't see that it was plain commonsense that made them
great. Comte prided himself on his own commonsense, but the article was
not in his equipment, else he would not have put the blame of all his
troubles upon his wife. A man with commonsense, married to a woman who
hasn't any, does not necessarily forfeit his own.

Mr. or Mrs. Mill would have been great anywhere--singly, separately,
together, or apart. Each was a radiant center. Weakness multiplied by
two does not give strength, and naught times naught equals naught.

Having finished the Positive Philosophy, Comte's restless mind began to
look around for more worlds to conquer.

In the expenditure of money he was careful, and in his accounts exact;
but the making of money and its accumulation were things that to him
could safely be delegated to second-class minds. A haughty pride of
intellect was his, not unmixed with that peculiar quality of the prima
donna which causes her to cut fantastic capers and make everybody kiss
her big toe.

Comte had done one thing superbly well. England had recognized his merit
to a degree that France had not, and to his English friends he now made
an appeal for financial help, so he could have freedom to complete
another great work he had in his mind. To John Stuart Mill he wrote,
outlining in a general way his new book on a social science, to be
called "The Positive Polity." It was, in a degree, to be a sequel to the
Positive Philosophy.

Mill communicated with Grote, the banker, known to us through his superb
history of Greece, and with the help of George Henry Lewes and a mite
from Herbert Spencer to show his good-will, a purse equal to about
twelve hundred dollars was sent to Comte.

Matters went along for a year, when Comte wrote a brief letter to Mill
suggesting that it was about time for another remittance. Mill again
appealed to Grote, and Grote, the man of affairs, wrote to his Paris
correspondent, who ascertained that Comte, now believing he was free
from the bread-and-butter bugaboo, was giving his services to the
Polytechnic, gratis, and also giving lectures to the people wherever
some one would simply pay for the hall.

To advance money to a man that he might write a book showing how the
nation should manage its finances, when the author could not look after
his own, reminded Grote of the individual who wrote from the Debtors'
Prison to the Secretary of the Exchequer, giving valuable advice. All
publishers are familiar with the penniless person who writes a book on
"How to Achieve Success," expecting to achieve success by publishing it.

Grote wrote to Mill, expressing the wholesome truth that the first duty
of every man was to make a living for himself--a fact which Mill states
in "On Liberty." Mill hadn't the temerity to pass Grote's maxim along to
Comte, and so sent a small contribution out of his own pocket. This was
very much like the Indian who, feeling that his dog's tail should be
amputated, cut it off a little at a time, so as not to hurt the animal.
We have all done this, and got the ingratitude we deserved.

Comte wrote back a most sarcastic letter, accusing Mill and Grote with
having broken faith with him.

He now treated them very much as he had Saint-Simon; and in his lectures
seldom failed to tell in pointed phrase what a lot of money-grubbing
barbarians inhabited the British Isles. To the credit of Mill be it
said that he still believed in the value of the Positive Philosophy, and
did all he could to further Comte's reputation and help the sale of his
books.

In Eighteen Hundred Forty-five, when Comte was forty-seven years old, he
met Madame Clothilde de Vaux. Her husband was in prison, serving a
life-sentence for political offenses, and Comte was first attracted to
her through pity. Soon this evolved into a violent attachment, and Comte
began to quote her in his lectures.

Comte was now most busy with his "Polity" in collaboration with Madame
De Vaux. Her part of the work seems to have been to listen to Comte
while he read her his amusing manuscript: and she, being a good woman
and wise, praised the work in every part. They were together almost
daily, and she seemed to supply him the sympathy he had all of his life
so much craved.

In one short year Madame De Vaux died, and Comte for a time was
inconsolable. Then his sorrow found surcease in an attempt to do for her
in prose what Dante had done for Beatrice in poetry. But the vehicle of
Comte's thoughts creaked. The exact language of science when applied to
a woman becomes peculiarly non-piquant and lacking in perspicacity and
perspicuity. No woman can be summed up in an algebraic formula, and when
a mathematician does a problem to his lady's eyebrow, he forgets
entirely that femininity forever equals _x_. Those who can write Sonnets
from the Portuguese may place their loves on exhibition--no others
should. Sweets too sweet do cloy.

For the rest of his life, Comte made every Wednesday afternoon sacred
for a visit to the grave of Madame De Vaux, and three times every day,
with the precision of a Mussulman, he retired to his room, locked the
door, and in silence apostrophized to her spirit. Comte now continued as
industrious as ever, but the quality of his writing lamentably declined.
His popular lectures to the people on scientific themes were always
good, and his work as a teacher was satisfactory, but when he endeavored
to continue original research, then his hazards of mind lacked steady
flight.

The Positive Polity degenerated into a dogmatic scheme of government
where the wisest should rule. The determination of who was wisest was to
be left to the wise ones themselves, and Comte himself volunteered to be
the first Pope.

The worship of Humanity would be the only religion, and women would
shine as the high priests. Comte thought it all out in detail, and
arranged a complete scheme of life, and actually wished to form a
political party and overthrow the government, founding a gynecocracy on
the ruins. His ebbing mind could not grasp the thought that tyranny
founded on goodness is a tyranny still, and that a despotic altruism is
a despotism nevertheless. Slavery blocks evolution.

So thus rounded out the life of Auguste Comte--beginning in childhood,
he traversed the circle, and ended where he began.

He died in his sixtieth year. M. Littre, his most famous pupil,
touchingly looked after his wants to the last, ministered to his
necessities, advancing money on royalties that were never due. M. Littre
occasionally apologized for the meagerness of the returns, and was
closely questioned and even doubted by Comte, who died unaware of the
unflinching loyalty of a friendship that endured distrust and contumely
without resentment. Such love and patience and loyalty as were shown by
M. Littre redeem the race.

The best certificate to the worth of Auguste Comte lies in the fact
that, in spite of marked personal limitations and much petty
querulousness, he profoundly influenced such men as Littre, Humboldt,
Mill, Lewes, Grote, Spencer and Frederic Harrison.

To have helped such men as these, and cheered them on their way, was no
small achievement. Comte's sole claim for immortality lies in the
Positive Philosophy. The word "positive," as used by Comte, is similar
in intent to pose, poise--fixed, final. So, besides a positive present
good, Comte believed he was stating a final truth; to-wit: that which is
good here is good everywhere, and if there is a future life, the best
preparation for it is to live now and here, up to your highest and best.
Comte protested against the idea of "a preparation for a life to
come"--now is the time, and the place is here.

The essence of Positive Philosophy is that man passes through three
mental periods--the Theological or fictitious; the Metaphysical or
abstract; the Positive or scientific.

Hence, there are three general philosophies or systems of conceptions
concerning life and destiny.

The Theological, or first system, is the necessary starting-point of the
human intellect. The Positive, or third period, is the ultimate goal of
every progressive, thinking man; the second period is merely a state of
transition that bridges the gulf between the first and the third.

Metaphysics holds the child by the hand until he can trust his feet--it
is a passageway between the fictitious and the actual. Once across the
chasm, it is no longer needed. Theology represents the child;
Metaphysics the youth; Science the man.

The evolution of the race is mirrored in the evolution of the
individual. Look back on your own career--your first dawn of thought
began in an inquiry, "Who made all this--how did it all happen?"

And Theology comes in with a glib explanation: the fairies, dryads,
gnomes and gods made everything, and they can do with it all as they
please. Later, we concentrate all of these personalities in one god,
with a devil in competition, and this for a time satisfies.

Later, the thought of an arbitrary being dealing out rewards and
punishments grows dim, for we see the regular workings of Cause and
Effect. We begin to talk of Energy, the Divine Essence, and the Reign of
Law. We speak, as Matthew Arnold did, of "a Power, not ourselves, that
makes for righteousness." But Emerson believed in a power that was in
himself that made for righteousness.

Metaphysics reaches its highest stage when it affirms "All is One," or
"All is Mind," just as Theology reaches its highest conception when it
becomes Monotheistic--having one God and curtailing the personality of
the devil to a mere abstraction.

But this does not long satisfy, for we begin to ask, "What is this One?"
or "What is Mind?"

Then Positivity comes in and says that the highest wisdom lies in
knowing that we do not know anything, and never can, concerning a First
Cause. All we find is phenomena and behind phenomena, phenomena. The
laws of Nature do not account for the origin of the laws of Nature.
Spencer's famous chapter on the Unknowable was derived largely from
Comte, who attempted to define the limits of human knowledge. And it is
worth noting that the one thing which gave most offense in both Comte's
and Spencer's works was their doctrine of the Unknowable. This, indeed,
forms but a small part of the work of these men, and if it were all
demolished there would still remain their doctrine of the known. The
bitterness of Theology toward Science arises from the fact that as we
find things out we dispense with the arbitrary god, and his business
agent, the priest, who insists that no transaction is legal unless he
ratifies it.

Men begin by explaining everything, and the explanations given are
always first for other people. Parents answer the child, not telling him
the actual truth, but giving him that which will satisfy--that which he
can mentally digest. To say, "The fairies brought it," may be all right
until the child begins to ask who the fairies are, and wants to be shown
one, and then we have to make the somewhat humiliating confession that
there are no fairies.

But now we perceive that this mild fabrication in reference to Santa
Claus, and the fairies, is right and proper mental food for the child.
His mind can not grasp the truth that some things are unknowable; and he
is not sufficiently skilled in the things of the world to become
interested in them--he must have a resting-place for his thought, so the
fairy-tale comes in as an aid to the growing imagination. Only this: we
place no penalty on disbelief in fairies, nor do we make special offers
of reward to all who believe that fairies actually exist. Neither do we
tell the child that people who believe in fairies are good, and that
those who do not are wicked and perverse.

Comte admits that the theological and metaphysical stages are necessary,
but the sooner man can be graduated out of them the better. He brought
vast research to bear in order to show the growth and death of
theological conceptions. Hate, fear, revenge and doubt are all
theological attributes, detrimental to man's best efforts. That moral
ideas were an afterthought, and really form no part of theology, Comte
emphasized at great length, and shows from much data where these ideas
were grafted on to the original tree.

And the sum of the argument is, that all progress of mind, body and
material things has come to man through the study of Cause and Effect.
And just in degree as he has abandoned the study of Theology as futile
and absurd, and centered on helping himself here and now, has he
prospered.

Positivism is really a religion. The object of its worship is Humanity.
It does not believe in a devil or any influence that works for harm, or
in opposition to man. Man's only enemy is himself, and this is on
account of his ignorance of this world, and his superstitious belief in
another. Our troubles, like diseases, all come from ignorance and
weakness, and through our ignorance are we weak and unable to adjust
ourselves to conditions. The more we know of this world the better we
think of it, and the better are we able to use it for our advancement.

So far as we can judge, the Unknown Cause that rules the world by
unchanging laws is a movement forward toward happiness, growth, justice,
peace and right. Therefore, the Scientist, who perceives that all is
good when rightly received and rightly understood, is really the priest
or holy man--the mediator and explainer of the mysteries. As fast as we
understand things they cease to be supernatural, for the supernatural is
the natural not yet understood. The theological priest who believes in
a god and a devil is the real modern infidel. Such a belief is
fallacious, contrary to reason, and contrary to all the man of courage
sees and knows.

The real man of faith is the one who discards all thought of "how it
first happened," and fixes his mind on the fact that he is here. The
more he studies the conditions that surround him, the greater his faith
in the truth that all is well.

If men had turned their attention to Humanity, discarding Theology,
using as much talent, time, money and effort to wring from the skies the
secrets of the Unknowable, this world would now be a veritable paradise.
It is Theology that has barred the entrance to Eden, by diverting the
attention of men from this world to another. Heaven is Here.

All religious denominations now dimly perceive the trend of the times,
and are gradually omitting theology from their teachings and taking on
ethics and sociology instead. A preacher is now simply Society's walking
delegate. We are evolving theology out and sociology in. Theology has
ever been the foe of progress and the enemy of knowledge. It has
professed to know all and has placed a penalty on advancement. The Age
of Enlightenment will not be here until every church has evolved into a
schoolhouse, and every priest is a pupil as well as a teacher.

VOLTAIRE

     We are intelligent beings; and intelligent beings can not have been
     formed by a blind, brute, insensible being. There is certainly some
     difference between a clod and the ideas of Newton. Newton's
     intelligence came from some greater Intelligence.

                                        --_The Philosophical Dictionary_

[Illustration: VOLTAIRE]

The man, Francois Marie Arouet, known to us as Voltaire (which name he
adopted in his twenty-first year), was born in Paris in Sixteen Hundred
Ninety-four. He was the second son in a family of three children. During
his babyhood he was very frail; in childhood sickly and weak; and
throughout his whole life he suffered much from indigestion and
insomnia.

In all the realm of writers no man ever had a fuller and more active
career, touching life at so many points, than Voltaire.

The first requisite in a long and useful career would seem to be, have
yourself born weak and cultivate dyspepsia, nervousness and insomnia.
Whether or not the good die young is still a mooted question, but
certainly the athletic often do. All those good men and true, who at
grocery, tavern and railroad-station eat hard-boiled eggs on a wager,
and lift barrels of flour with one hand, are carried to early graves,
and over the grass-grown mounds that cover their dust, consumptive,
dyspeptic and neurotic relatives, for twice or thrice a score of years,
strew sweet myrtle, thyme and mignonette.

Voltaire died of an accident--too much Four-o'Clock--cut off in his
prime, when life for him was at its brightest and best, aged
eighty-three.

The only evidence we have that the mind of Voltaire failed at the last
came from the Abbe Gaultier and the Curé of Saint Sulpice. These good
men arrived with a written retraction, which they desired Voltaire to
sign. Waiting in the anteroom of the sick-chamber they sent in word that
they wished to enter. "Assure them of my respect," said the stricken
man. But the holy men were not to be thus turned away, so they entered.
They approached the bedside, and the Curé of Saint Sulpice said: "M. de
Voltaire, your life is about to end. Do you acknowledge the divinity of
Jesus Christ?"

And the dying man stretched out a bony hand, making a gesture that they
should depart, and murmured, "Let me die in peace."

"You see," said the Curé to the Abbe, as they withdrew, "you see that he
is out of his head!"

The father of Voltaire, Francois Arouet, was a notary who looked after
various family estates and waxed prosperous on the crumbs that fell from
the rich man's table.

He was solicitor to the Duc de Richelieu, the Sullys, and also the
Duchesse de Saint-Simon, mother of the philosopher, Saint-Simon, who
made the mistake of helping Auguste Comte, thus getting himself hotly
and positively denounced by the man who formulated the "Positive
Philosophy."

Arouet belonged to the middle class and never knew that he sprang from a
noble line until his son announced the fact. It was then too late to
deny it.

He was a devout Churchman, upright in all his affairs, respectable, took
snuff, walked with a waddle and cultivated a double chin. M. Arouet
pater did not marry until his mind was mature, so that he might avoid
the danger of a mismating. He was forty, past. The second son, Francois
fils, was ten years younger than his brother Armand, so the father was
over fifty when our hero was born. Francois fils used to speak of
himself as an afterthought--a sort of domestic postscript--"but," added
he musingly, "our afterthoughts are often best."

One of the most distinguished clients of M. Arouet was Ninon de Lenclos,
who had the felicity to be made love to by three generations of
Frenchmen. Ninon has been likened for her vivacious ways, her flashing
intellect, and her perennial youth, to the divine Sara, who at sixty
plays the part of Juliet with a woman of thirty for the old nurse. Ninon
had turned her three-score and ten, and swung gracefully into the
home-stretch, when the second son was born to M. Arouet. She was of a
deeply religious turn of mind, for she had been loved by several
priests, and now the Abbe de Chateauneuf was paying his devotions to
her.

Ninon was much interested in the new arrival, and going to the house of
M. Arouet, took to bed, and sent in haste for the Abbe de Chateauneuf,
saying she was in sore trouble. When the good man arrived, he thought it
a matter of extreme unction, and was ushered into the room of the
alleged invalid. Here he was duly presented with the infant that later
was to write the "Philosophical Dictionary." It was as queer a case of
kabojolism as history records.

Doubtless the Abbe was a bit agitated at first, but finally getting his
breath, he managed to say, "As there is a vicarious atonement, there
must also be, on occasion, vicarious births, and this is one--God be
praised."

The child was then baptized, the good Abbe standing as godfather.

There must be something, after all, in prenatal influences, for as the
little Francois grew up he evolved the traits of Ninon de Lenclos and
the Abbe much more than those of his father and mother.

When the boy was a little over six years old the mother died. Of her we
know absolutely nothing. In her son's writings he refers to her but
once, wherein he has her say that "Boileau was a clever book, but a
silly man."

The education of the youngster seemed largely to have been left to the
Abbe, his godfather, who very early taught him to recite the "Mosiad," a
metrical effusion wherein the mistakes of Moses were related in churchly
Latin, done first for the divertisement of sundry pious monks in idle
hours.

At ten years of age Francois was sent to the College of Louis-le-Grand,
a Jesuit school where the minds of youth were molded in things sacred
and secular.

In only one thing did the boy really excel, and that was in the matter
of making rhymes. The Abbe Chateauneuf had taught him the trick before
he could speak plainly, and Ninon had been so pleased with the wee poet
that she left him two thousand francs in her will for the purchase of
books. As Ninon insisted on living to be ninety, Voltaire discounted the
legacy and got it cashed on dedicating a sonnet to the divine Ninon. In
this sonnet Voltaire suggests that a life of virtue conduces largely to
longevity, as witness the incomparable Ninon de Lenclos, to which
sentiment Ninon filed no exceptions.

In one of the school debates young Francois presented his argument in
rhyme, and evidently ran in some choice passages from the "Mosiad," for
Father le Jay, according to Condorcet, left his official chair, and
rushing down the aisle, grabbed the boy by the collar, and shaking him,
said, "Unhappy boy! you will one day be the standard-bearer of deism in
France!"--a prophecy, possibly, made after its fulfilment.

Young Francois remained at the college until he was seventeen years old.
From letters sent by him while there, it is evident that the chief
characteristic of his mind was already a contempt for the clergy. Of two
of his colleagues who were preparing for the priesthood, he says, "They
had reflected on the dangers of a world of the charms of which they were
ignorant; and on the pleasures of a religious life of which they knew
not the disagreeableness." Already we see he was getting handy in
polishing a sentence with the emery of his wit. Continuing, he says: "In
a quarter of an hour they ran over all the Orders, and each seemed so
attractive that they could not decide. In which predicament they might
have been left like the ass, which died of starvation between two
bundles of hay, not knowing which to choose. However, they decided to
leave the matter to Providence, and let the dice decide. So one became a
Carmelite and the other a Jesuit."

Arouet, at first intent on having his son become a priest, now fell back
on the law as second choice. The young man was therefore duly articled
with a firm of advocates and sent to hear lectures on jurisprudence. But
his godfather introduced him into the Society of the Temple, a group of
wits, of all ages, who could take snuff and throw off an epigram on any
subject. The bright young man, flashing, dashing and daring, made
friends at once through his skill in writing scurrilous verse upon any
one whose name might be mentioned. This habit had been begun in college,
where it was much applauded by the underlings, who delighted to see
their unpopular teachers done to a turn. The scribbling habit is a
variant of that peculiar propensity which finds form in drawing a
portrait on the blackboard before the teacher gets around in the
morning. If the teacher does not happen to love art for art's sake,
there may be trouble; but verses are safer, for they circulate secretly
and are copied and quoted anonymously.

The thing we do best in life is that which we play at most in youth.

Ridicule was this man's weapon. For the benefit of the Society of the
Temple he paid his respects to the sham piety and politics of
Versailles. He had been educated by priests, and his father was a
politician feeding at the public trough. The young man knew the faults
and foibles of both priest and politician, and his keen wit told truths
about the court that were so well expressed the wastebasket did not
capture them. One of these effusions was printed, anonymously, of
course, but a copy coming into the hands of M. Arouet, the old gentleman
recognized the literary style and became alarmed. He must get the young
man out of Paris--the Bastile yawned for poets like this!

A brother of the Abbe de Chateauneuf was Ambassador at The Hague, and
the great man, being importuned, consented to take the youth as clerk.

Life at The Hague afforded the embryo poet an opportunity to meet many
distinguished people.

In Francois there was none of the bourgeois--he associated only with
nobility--and as he had an aristocracy of the intellect, which served
him quite as well as a peerage, he was everywhere received. In his
manner there was nothing apologetic--he took everything as his divine
right.

In this brilliant little coterie at The Hague was one Madame Dunoyer, a
writer of court gossip and a social promoter of ability, separated from
her husband for her husband's good. Francois crossed swords with her in
an encounter of wit, was worsted, but got even by making love to her;
and later he made love to her daughter, a beautiful girl of about his
own age.

The air became surcharged with gossip. There was danger of an explosion
any moment. Madame Dunoyer gave it out that the brilliant subaltern was
to marry the girl. The Madame was going to capture the youth, either
with her own charms or those of her daughter--or combined. Rumblings
were heard on the horizon. The Ambassador, fearing entanglement, bundled
young Arouet back to Paris, with a testimonial as to his character,
quite unnecessary. A denial without an accusation is equal to a plea of
guilty; and that the young man had made the mistake of making violent
love to the mother and daughter at the same time there is no doubt. The
mother had accused him and he said things back; he even had shown the
atrocious bad taste of references in rhyme to the mutual interchange of
confidences that the mother and daughter might enjoy. The Ambassador had
acted none too soon.

The father was frantic with alarm--the boy had disgraced him, and even
his own position seemed to be threatened when some wit adroitly accused
the parent of writing the doggerel for his son.

M. Arouet denied it with an oath--while the son refused to explain, or
to say anything beyond that he loved his father, thus carrying out the
idea that the stupid old notary was really a wit in disguise, masking
his intellect by a seeming dulness. No more biting irony was ever put
out by Voltaire than this, and the pathos of it lies in the fact that
the father was quite unable to appreciate the quip.

It was a sample of filial humor much more subtle than that indulged in
by Charles Dickens, who pilloried his parents in print, one as Mr.
Micawber and the other as Mrs. Nickleby. Dickens told the truth and
painted it large, but Francois Arouet dealt in indiscreet fallacy when
he endeavored to give his father a reputation for raillery.

A peculiarly offensive poem, appearing about this time, with the Regent
and his daughter, the Duchesse de Berri, for a central theme, a rescript
was issued which indirectly testified to the poetic skill of young
Arouet. He was exiled to a point three hundred miles from Paris and
forbidden to come nearer on penalty, like unto the injunction issued by
Prince Henry against the blameless Falstaff. Rumor said that the father
had something to do with the matter.

But the exile was not for long. The young poet wrote a most adulatory
composition to the Regent, setting forth his innocence. The Regent was a
mild and amiable man and much desired peace with all his
subjects--especially those who dipped their quills in gall. He was
melted by the rhyme that made him out such a paragon of virtue, and made
haste to issue a pardon.

The elder Arouet now proved that he was not wholly without humor, for he
wrote to a friend, "The exile of my dear son distressed me much less
than does this precipitate recall."

In order to protect himself the father now refused a home to the son,
and Francois became a lodger at a boarding-house. He wrote plays and
acted in them, penned much bad poetry, went in good society and had a
very rouge time. Up to this period he knew little Latin and less Greek,
but now he had an opportunity to furbish up on both. He found himself an
inmate of the Bastile, on the charge of expressing his congratulations
to the people of France on the passing of Louis the Fourteenth. In
America libel only applies to live men, but the world had not then
gotten this far along.

In the prison it was provided that Sieur Arouet fils should not be
allowed pens and paper on account of his misuse of these good things
when outside. He was given copies of Homer, however, in Greek and Latin,
and he set himself at work, with several of the other prisoners, to
perfect himself in these languages. We have glimpses of his dining with
the governor of the prison, and even organizing theatrical performances,
and he was finally allowed writing materials on promise that he would
not do anything worse than translate the Bible, so altogether he was
very well treated.

In fact, he himself referred to this year spent in prison as "a pious
retreat, that I might meditate, and chasten my soul in quiet thought."

He was only twenty-one, and yet he had set Paris by the ears, and his
name was known throughout France. "I am as well known as the Regent and
will be remembered longer," he wrote--a statement and a prophecy that
then seemed very egotistical, but which time has fully justified.

It was in prison that he decided to change his name to Voltaire, a
fanciful word of his own coining. His pretended reason for the change
was that he might begin life anew and escape the disgrace he had
undergone of being in prison. There is reason to believe, however, that
he was rather proud of being "detained," it was proof of his power--he
was dangerous outside. But his family had practically cast him off--he
owed nothing to them--and the change of name fostered a mysterious noble
birth, an idea that he allowed to gain currency without contradiction.
Moliere had changed his name from Poquolin--and was he not really
following in Moliere's footsteps, even to suffering disgrace and public
odium?

The play of "Oedipe" was presented by Voltaire at the Theater
Francaise, November Eighteenth, Seventeen Hundred Eighteen. This play
was written before the author's sojourn in prison, but there he had
sandpapered its passages, and hand-polished the epigrams.

It was rehearsed at length with the help of the "guests" at the Bastile,
and once Voltaire wrote a note of appreciation to the Prefect of Police,
thanking him for his thoughtfulness in sending such excellent and
pure-minded people to help him in his work.

These things had been managed so they discreetly leaked out, and the
cafes echoed with the name of Voltaire.

Very soon after his release the play was presented to a crowded house.
It was a success from the start, for into its lines the audience was
allowed to read many veiled allusions to Paris public characters. It ran
for forty-five nights, and was the furore. On one occasion when interest
seemed to lag, Voltaire, on a sudden inspiration, dressed up as a
bumpkin page, and attended the Pontiff, carrying his train, playing
various and sundry sly pranks in pantomime, a la Francis Wilson.

In one of the boxes sat a famous beauty, the Duchesse de Villars. "Who
is this strange person who is intent upon spoiling the play?" she asked.
On being told that he was the author of the drama, her censure turned to
approbation and she sent for the young man. His appearance in her box
was duly noted. The Regent and his daughter, the Duchesse de Berri,
could not resist the temptation to attend the play, and see how much
they were satirized. Voltaire did his little train-bearing act for their
benefit, with a few extra grimaces, which pleased them very much, and
seeing his opportunity, wrote a gracious letter of thanks to His
Highness for having deigned to visit his play, winding up with thanks
for the years in the Bastile where, "God wot, all of my evil
inclinations were duly chastened and corrected."

It had the desired effect--each side feared the other. The Regent wanted
the ready writers on his side, and the playwright who was opposed by the
party in power could not hope for success. The Regent sent a present of
a thousand crowns to Voltaire and also fixed on him a pension of twelve
hundred livres a year. At once every passage in the play that could be
construed as bearing on royalty was revised into words of adulation, and
all went merry as a marriage-bell. Financially the play was a success,
and better yet was the pension and the good-will of the young King and
his Regent.

Thus at twenty-two did Voltaire have the world at his feet.

When Voltaire was twenty-four, his father died. The will provided that
the property should be equally divided between his three children, but
it was stipulated that the second son should not come into possession of
his share until he was thirty-five, and not then unless he was able to
show the Master in Chancery that he was capable of wisely managing his
own affairs.

This doubt of the father concerning the son's financial ability has
often been commented upon ironically, in view of the pronounced thrift
shown by Voltaire in later life.

But who shall say whether the father by that provision in his will did
not drive home a stern lesson in economy? Commodore Vanderbilt had so
much distrust of his son William's capacity for business that he exiled
him to a Long Island farm, on an allowance. Years after, when William
had shown his ability to outstrip his father, he rebuked a critic who
volunteered a suggestion to the effect that the father had erred in the
boy problem. Said William, "My father was right in this, as in most
other things--I was a fool, and he knew it."

Voltaire's vacation of a year in the Bastile had done him much good.
Then the will of his father, with its cautious provisions, tended to
sober the youth to a point where he was docile enough for society's
needs.

A good deal of ballast in way of trouble was necessary to hold this man
down.

Marriage might have tamed him. Bachelors are of two kinds--those who are
innocent of women, and those who know women too well. The second class,
I am told, outnumbers the first as ten to one.

Voltaire had been a favorite of various women--usually married ladies,
and those older than himself. He had plagiarized Franklin, saying, fifty
years before the American put out his famous advice, "If you must fall
in love, why, fall in love with a woman much older than yourself, or at
least a homely one--for only such are grateful."

In answer to a man who said divorce and marriage were instituted at the
same time, Voltaire said: "This is a mistake: there is at least three
days' difference. Men sometimes quarrel with their wives at the end of
three days, beat them in a week and divorce them at the end of a month."

Voltaire was small and slight in stature, but his bubbling wit and
graceful presence more than made amends for any deficiency in way of
form and feature. Had he desired, he might have taken his pick among the
young women of nobility, but we see the caution of his nature in
limiting his love-affairs to plain women, securely married. "Gossip
isn't busy with the plain women--that is why I like you," he once said
to Madame de Bernieres. What the Madame's reply was, we do not know, but
probably she was not displeased. If a woman knows she is loved, it
matters little what you say to her. Compliments by the right oblique
are construed into lavish praise when expressed in the right tone of
voice by the right person.

The Regent had allowed Voltaire another pension of two thousand francs,
at the same time intimating that he hoped the writer's income was
sufficient so he could now tell the truth. Voltaire took the hint, so
subtly veiled, to the effect that if he again affronted royalty by
unkind criticisms, his entire pension would be canceled.

From this time on to the end of his life, he was full of lavish praise
for royalty. He was needlessly loyal, and dedicated poems and pamphlets
to nobility, right and left, in a way that would have caused a smile
were not nobility so hopelessly bound in three-quarters pachyderm. He
also wrote religious poems, protesting his love for the Church. And here
seems a good place to say that Voltaire was a member of the Catholic
Church to his death. Many of his worst attacks on the priesthood were
put in way of defense for outrageous actions which he enumerated in
detail. He kept people guessing as to what he meant and what he would do
next.

Immediately after the death of President McKinley there was a fine
scramble among the editors of certain saffron sheets--to get in line and
shake their ulsters free from all taint of anarchy. Some writers, in
order to divert suspicion from themselves, hotly denounced other men as
anarchists.

Throughout his life Voltaire had spasms of repentance, prompted by
caution, possibly, when he warmly denounced atheists, and swore, i'
faith, that one object of his life was to purify the Church and cleanse
it of its secret faults.

In his twenty-sixth year, when he was trying hard to be good, he got
into a personal altercation with the Chevalier de Rohan, an
insignificant man bearing a proud name. The Chevalier's wit was no match
for the other's rapier-like tongue, but he had a way of his own in which
to get even. He had his servants waylay the luckless poet and chastise
him soundly with rattans.

Voltaire was furious; he tried to get the courts to take it up, but the
prevailing idea was that he had gotten what he deserved, and the fact
that the whole affair occurred after dark and the Chevalier did not do
the beating in person, made conviction impossible.

But Voltaire now quit the anapest and dactyl and devoted his best hours
to taking fencing lessons. His firm intent was to baptize the soil with
Rohan's blood. Voltaire was of enough importance so the secret police
knew of all his doings. Suddenly he found himself taking a post-graduate
course in the Bastile. I am not sure that the fiery little man was
entirely displeased with the procedure. It proved to the world that he
was a dangerous character, and it also gave him a respite from the
tyranny of the fencing-master, and allowed him to turn to his first,
last and only love--literature. In Voltaire's cosmos was a good deal of
the Bob Acres quality.

There were plenty of reasons for locking him up--heresy and treason have
ever been first cousins--and pamphlets lampooning Churchmen high in
office were laid at his door. No doubt some of the anonymous literature
was not his--"I would have done the thing better or not at all," he once
said in reference to a scurrilous brochure. The real fact was, that that
particular pamphlet was done by a disciple, and if Voltaire's writings
were vile, then was his offense doubled in that he vitalized a ravenous
brood of scribblers. They played Caliban to his Setebos.

Voltaire's most offensive contributions were always attributed by him to
this bishop or that, and to various dignitaries who had no existence
save in the figment of his own fertile pigment.

He once carried on a controversy between the Bishop of Berlin and the
Archbishop of Paris, each man thundering against the other with a
monthly pamphlet wherein each one gored the other without mercy, and
revealed the senselessness of the other's religion. They flung the
literary stinkpot with great accuracy. "The other man's superstition is
always ridiculous to us--our own is sacred," said Voltaire, and so he
allowed his controversialists to fight it out for his own quiet joy, and
the edification of the onlookers.

Then his plan of printing an alleged sermon, giving some unknown prelate
due credit on the title-page, starting in with a pious text and a page
of trite nothings and gradually drifting off into ridicule of the things
he had started in to defend--all this gives a comic tinge to his wail
that "some evil-minded person is attributing things to me I never
wrote," If an occasional sly Churchman got after him with his own
weapon, writing things in his style more hazardous than he dare express,
surely he should not have complained.

But this was a fact--the enemy could not follow him long with a literary
fusillade--they hadn't the mental ammunition.

Well has Voltaire been called "the father of all those who wear
shovel-hats."

A few months in the Bastile, and Voltaire's indeterminate sentence was
commuted to exile. He was allowed to leave his country for his country's
good. Early in the year Seventeen Hundred Twenty-six he landed in
England, evidently knowing nobody there except one merchant, a man of no
special prominence.

Voltaire belonged to the nobility by divine right--as much as did
Disraeli. Both had an inward contempt for titles, but they knew the
hearts of the owners so well that they simply played a game of chess,
and the "men" they moved were live knights, bishops, kings and queens,
with rollers under the castles. The pawns they pushed here and there
were the literary puppets of the time.

The first thing Voltaire had to master in England was the language, and
this he did passably inside of three months. He took Grub Street by
storm; dawdled at Dodsley's; met Dean Swift, and these worthies
respected each other's wit so much that they simply took snuff, grimaced
and let it go at that; Pope came in for a visit, and the French poet
crossed Twickenham ferry and offered a handmade sonnet in admiration of
the "Essay on Man," which he had probably never read. Gay gave Voltaire
"The Beggar's Opera," in private, and together they called on Congreve,
who interrupted the Frenchman's flow of flattery long enough to say that
he wished to be looked on as a gentleman, not a poet. And Voltaire
replied that there were many gentlemen but few poets, and if Congreve
had had the misfortune to be simply a gentleman he would not have
troubled to call on him at all. Congreve, who really regarded himself as
the peer of Shakespeare, was won, and sent Voltaire on his way with
letters to Horace Walpole of Strawberry Hill. Thomson, who lived at
Hammersmith, and wrote his "Seasons" in a "public" next door to
Kelmscott, corrected and revised some of Voltaire's attempts at English
poetry. Young evolved some of his "Night Thoughts" while on a visit with
Voltaire at Bubb Dodington's.

A call on the Duchess of Marlborough led to a dinner at Lord
Chesterfield's. Next he met Queen Caroline and assured her that she
spoke French like a Parisian. King George the Second quite liked
Voltaire, because Voltaire quite liked Lady Sandon, his mistress. Only a
Frenchman could have successfully paid court to the King, Queen and Lady
Sandon at the same time, as Voltaire did. His great epic poem,
"Henriade," that he had been sandpapering for ten years, was now
published, dedicated to the Queen. The King headed the subscription-list
with more copies than he needed, at five guineas each, on agreement.
Voltaire afterward said that he would not be expected to read the poem.
The Queen's good offices were utilized--she became for the time a royal
book-agent, and her signature and the author's adorned all deluxe
copies. A suggestion from the Queen was equal to an order, and the
edition was soon worked off.

Voltaire now spent three years in England. He had written his "Life of
Charles the Twelfth," several plays, an "English Note-Book," and best of
all, had gotten together a thousand pounds good money as proceeds of
"Henriade," a stiff and stilted piece of pedantic bombast, written with
sweat and lamp-smoke.

The "Letters on the English" were published a few years later in Paris
with good results, considering it was only a by-product. It is a deal
better-natured than Dickens' "American Note-Book," and had more humor
than Emerson's "English Traits." Among other things quite Voltairesque
in the "Letters" is this: "The Anglican Church has retained many of the
good old Catholic customs--not the least of which is the collection of
tithes with great regularity."

The priestly habit of Voltaire's life manifested itself even to the
sharp collecting from the world all that the world owed him.

The snug little sum he had secured in England would have shown his
ability, but there was something better in store, awaiting his return to
France. It seems the Controller of Finance had organized a lottery to
help pay the interest on the public debt. A considerable sum of money
had been realized, but there was still a large number of tickets unsold,
and the drawing was soon to take place. Voltaire knew the officials who
had the matter in charge and they knew him. He organized a syndicate
that would take all tickets there were left, on guarantee that among the
tickets purchased would be the one that called for the principal prize
of forty thousand pounds. Just how it was known in advance what ticket
would win must be left to those good people who understand these little
things in detail. In any event, Voltaire put in every sou he had--and
his little fortune was then a matter of about ten thousand dollars.
Several of his friends contributed a like sum.

The drawing took place, and the prize of forty thousand pounds was
theirs. It is said that Voltaire took twenty-five thousand pounds as his
share--the whole scheme was his anyway--and his friends were quite
satisfied with having doubled their money in a fortnight.

Immediately on securing this money, Voltaire presented himself at the
office of the President of Accounts, and asked for the legacy left him
by his father. As proof of his financial ability, and as a guarantee of
good faith, he opened a hand-satchel and piled on the President's table
a small mountain of gold and bank-notes. The first question of the
astonished official was, "Will M. de Voltaire have the supreme goodness
to explain where he stole all this money?"

This was soon followed by an apology, as the visitor explained the
reason of his visit.

The father's legacy amounted to nearly four thousand pounds, and this
was at once paid over to Voltaire with a flattering letter expressing
perfect faith in his ability to manage his own finances.

There is a popular opinion that Voltaire made considerable money by his
pen, but the fact is, that at no period of his life did literature
contribute in but a very scanty way to his prosperity.

After the lottery scheme, Voltaire embarked in grain speculations,
importing wheat from Barbary for French consumption. In this he made a
fair profit, but when war broke out between Italy and France, he entered
into an arrangement with Duverney, who had the army commissariat in his
hands, to provision the troops. It was not much of a war, but it lasted
long enough, as most wars do, for a few contractors to make much moneys.
The war spirit is usually fanned by financiers, Kuhn, Loeb and Company
giving the ultimatum.

Voltaire cleared about twenty thousand pounds out of his provision
contract.

Thus we find this thrifty poet at forty with a fortune equal to a
half-million dollars. This money he loaned out in a way of his own--a
way as original as his literary style. His knowledge of the upper
circles again served him well. Among the proud scions of nobility there
were always a few who, through gambling proclivities, and other royal
qualities, were much in need of funds. Voltaire picked the men who had
only a life interest in their estates, and made them loans, secured by
the rentals. The loans were to be paid back in annuities as long as both
men lived.

All insurance is a species of gambling--the company offers to make you a
bet that your house will burn within a year.

In life-insurance, the company's expert looks you over, and if your
waist measurement is not too great for your height, a bargain is entered
into wherein you agree to pay so much now, and so much every year as
long as you live, in consideration that the company will pay your heirs
so much at your death.

The chief value of life-insurance lies in the fact that it insures a man
against his own indiscretion, a thing supposedly under his own
control--but which never is. Voltaire's scheme banked on the man's
weakness, and laid his indiscretion open before the world. It was
life-insurance turned wrong side out, and could only have been devised
and carried out by a man of courage with an actuary's bias for
mathematics.

Instead of agreeing to pay the man so much at death, Voltaire paid him
the whole sum in advance, and the man agreed to pay, say, ten per cent
interest until either the lender or the borrower died. No principal was
to be paid, and on the death of either party, the whole debt was
canceled.

Voltaire picked only men younger than himself. It was a tempting offer
to the borrower, for Voltaire looked like a consumptive, and it is said
that on occasion he evolved a wheezy cough that helped close the deal.
The whole scheme, for Voltaire, was immensely successful. On some of the
risks he collected his yearly ten per cent for over forty years, or
until his death.

On Voltaire's loan of sixteen hundred pounds to the Marquis du Chatelet,
however, it is known that he collected nothing either in way of
principal or interest. This was as strange a piece of financiering as
was ever consummated; and the inside history of the matter, with its
peculiar psychology, has never been written. The only two persons who
could have told that story in its completeness were Voltaire and the
Madame du Chatelet, and neither ever did.

Madame du Chatelet--the divine Emilie--was twenty-seven and Voltaire was
thirty-nine when they first met.

He was living in obscure lodgings in Paris for prudential reasons, the
executioner having just burned, in the public street, all the copies of
his last book that could be found.

The Madame called on him to express her sympathy--and congratulations.
She had written a book, but it had not been burned--not even read! She
was tall, thin, angular, far from handsome, but had beaming eyes and a
face that tokened intellect. And best of all, her voice was low, finely
modulated, and was not exercised more than was meet.

She leaned her chin upon her hand and looked at him.

She had met Voltaire when she was a child--at least she said so, and he,
being a gentleman, remembered perfectly. She read to him a little
manuscript she had just dashed off. It was deep, profound and full of
reasons--that is the way learned women write--they write like professors
of rhetoric. Really great men write lightly, suggestively, and with a
certain amount of indifference, dash, froth and foam. When women evolve
literary foam, it is the sweet, cloying, fixed foam of the charlotte
russe--not the bubbling, effervescent Voltaire article.

Could M. de Voltaire suggest a way in which her manuscript might be
lightened up so the public executioner would deign to notice it?

M. de Voltaire responded by reading to her a little thing of his own.

The next day she called again.

Some say that Madame called on Voltaire to secure a loan on her
husband's estate at Civey. No matter--she got the loan.

Doubtless she did not know where she was going--none of us do. We are
all sailing under sealed orders.

The Madame had been married eight years. She was versed in Latin and
knew Italian literature. She was educated; Voltaire was not. She offered
to teach him Italian if he would give her lessons in English.

They read to each other things they had recently written. When men and
women read to each other and mingle their emotions, the danger-line is
being reached. Literary people of the opposite sex do not really love
each other. All they desire is to read their manuscript aloud to a
receptive listener.

Thus are the literary germs vitalized--by giving our thoughts to another
we really make them our own. Only well-sexed people produce
literature--poetry is the pollen of the mind. Meter, rhythm, lilt and
style are stamen, pistil and stalk swaying in the warm breeze of
springtime.

An order for arrest was out for Voltaire. Pamphlets which he had been
refused permission to publish in Paris were printed at Rouen and were
setting all Paris by the ears.

With Madame du Chatelet he fled to Civey, where was the tumbledown
chateau of the Marquis--the Madame's complaisant husband. Voltaire
advanced the Marquis sixteen hundred pounds to put the place in order,
and then on his own account fitted up two sumptuous apartments, one for
himself and one for Madame. The Marquis went away with his regiment, and
occasionally came back and lounged about the chateau. But Voltaire was
the real master of the place.

Voltaire was neither domestic nor rural in his tastes, but the Du
Chatelet seemed to fill his cup to the brim, and made him enjoy what
otherwise would have been exile. He wrote incessantly--poems, essays,
plays--and fired pamphlets at a world of fools.

All that he wrote during the day he read to Madame at night. One of her
maids has given us a vivid little picture of how Voltaire, at exactly
eleven o'clock each night, would come out of hiding, and entering the
Madame's room, would partake of the dainty supper that was always
prepared for him. The divine Emilie had the French habit of receiving
her visitors in bed, and as her hours were much more regular than
Voltaire's, she usually enjoyed a nap before he entered. After his
supper he would read aloud to her all he had written since they last
met. If the piece was dramatic he would act it out with roll of r's,
striding walk, grimace and gesticulations gracefully done, for the man
was an actor of rare talent.

Emerson says, "Let a man do a thing incomparably well, and the world
will make a path to his door, though he live in a forest." There was no
lack of society at Civey--the writers, poets and philosophers found
their way there. Voltaire fitted up a little private theater, where his
plays were given, and concerts and lectures held from time to time.

The divine Emilie's forte was science and mathematics--and on these
themes she wrote much, competing for prizes and winning the recognition
of various learned societies. It will be seen that the man and the woman
were not in competition with each other, which, perhaps, accounts, in
degree, for their firm friendship.

Yet they did quarrel, too, as true lovers will, I am told. But their
quarreling was all done in English, so the servants and His Inertia, the
Marquis, did not know the purpose of it. It is probable that the
accounts of their misunderstandings are considerably exaggerated, as the
rehearsal of a tragedy by this pair of histrions would be taken by the
servants for a sure-enough fight.

And they were always acting--often beginning breakfast with a "stunt."
The Madame sang well, and her little impromptu arias pleased her thin
little lover immensely and he would improvise and answer in kind, and
then take the part of an audience and applaud, calling loudly, "Bravo!
Bravo!"

Mornings they would ride horseback through the winding woods, or else
hunt for geological and botanical specimens. About all of Voltaire's
science he got from the lady and this was true of languages as well.

To a nervous, irritable and intense thinker a certain amount of solitude
seems necessary. Voltaire occasionally grew weary of the delicious quiet
of Civey, and the indictment against him having been quashed, he would
go away to Paris or elsewhere. On these trips if he did not take Madame
along she would grow furious, then lacrimose and finally
submissive--with a weepy protest. If he failed to write her daily she
grew hysterical. Two winters they spent together in Paris and another at
Brussels.

A lawsuit involving the estate of the Marquis du Chatelet, that had been
in the courts for eighty years, was pushed to a successful issue by
Voltaire and Madame. Four hundred fifty thousand dollars were secured,
but of this Voltaire, strangely enough, took nothing.

That the bond between Emilie and Voltaire was very firm is shown by the
fact that, after they had been together ten years, he declined to leave
her to accept an invitation to visit Frederick the Great at Berlin.
Frederick was a married man, but his was a strictly bachelor court--for
prudential reasons. Frederick and Emilie had carried on a spirited
correspondence, but this was as close as he cared for her to come to
him. All of his communications with females were limited to letters,
and Voltaire once said that that was the reason he was called Frederick
the Great.

Madame du Chatelet died when she was forty-two; Voltaire was fifty-five.
For fifteen years this strange and most romantic friendship had
continued, and to a degree it had worn itself out. Toward the last the
lady had been exacting and dictatorial, and thinking that Voltaire had
slighted her by not taking her more into his confidence, she had
accepted another lover, a man ten years her junior. If she had thought
to make Voltaire jealous, she had reckoned without her host--he was
relieved to find her fierce supervision relaxed.

When she passed away he worked his woe up into a pretty panegyric,
closed up his affairs at Civey, and left there forever.

So far as the government was concerned, Voltaire seems to have passed
his days in accepting rewards and receiving punishments. Interdict,
exile, ostracism were followed by honors, pension and office.

His one lasting love was the drama. About every two years a swirl of
excitement was caused at Paris by the announcement of a new play by
Voltaire. These plays seemed to appeal mostly to the nobility, the
clergy and those in public office. And the object in every instance was
to get even with somebody, and place some one in a ridiculous light.
Innocent historical dramas were passed by the censor, and afterward it
was found that in them some local bigwig was flayed without mercy. Then
the play had to be withdrawn, and all printed copies were burned in
public, and Voltaire would flee to Brussels or Geneva to escape summary
punishment.

However, he never fooled all of the people all of the time. There was
always a goodly number of dignitaries who richly enjoyed the drubbing he
gave the other fellow, and these would gloat in inward glee over the
Voltaire ribaldry until it came their turn. Then the other side would
laugh. The fact is, Voltaire always represented a constituency,
otherwise his punishment might have been genuine, instead of forty
lashes with a feather, well laid on.

About the time Madame du Chatelet passed away, Voltaire seemed to be
enjoying a period of kingly favor. He had been made a Knight of the
Bedchamber and also Historiographer of France. The chief duty of the
first office consisted in signing the monthly voucher for salary, and
the other was about the same as Poet Laureate--with salary in inverse
ratio to responsibility. It was considered, however, that the holder of
these offices was one of the King's family, and therefore was bound to
indulge in no unseemly antics.

On June Twenty-sixth, Seventeen Hundred Fifty, Voltaire applied to the
King in person for permission to visit Frederick of Prussia.

Tradition has it that the King replied promptly, "You may go--the sooner
the better--and you may remain as long as you choose."

Voltaire pocketed the veiled acerbity without a word, and bowing himself
out, made hot haste to pack up and be on his way before an order
rescinding the permission was issued.

Frederick was a freethinker, a scientist, a poet, and a wit well worthy
of the companionship of Voltaire. In fact, they were very much alike.
Both had the dual qualities of being intensely practical and yet
iconoclastic. Both were witty, affable, seemingly indifferent and
careless, but yet always with an eye on the main chance. Each was small,
thin and bony, but both had the intellect of the lean and hungry Cassius
that looked quite through the deeds of man.

Frederick received Voltaire with royal honors. Princes, ministers of
state, grandees and generals high in office, knelt on one knee as he
passed. Frederick tried to make it appear that France had failed to
appreciate her greatest philosopher, and so he had come to Prussia--the
home of letters. His pension was fixed at twenty thousand francs a year,
he was given the Golden Key of Chamberlain, and the Grand Cross of the
Order of Merit. He was a member of the King's household, and was the
nearest and dearest friend of the royal person.

Frederick thought he had bound the great man to him for life.

Personality repels as well as attracts. Voltaire's viper-like pen was
never idle. He wrote little plays for the court, and these were
presented with much eclat, the author superintending their presentation,
and considerately taking minor parts himself, so as to divide the
honors. But amateur theatricals stand for heart-burnings and jealousy.
The German poets were scored, other writers ridiculed, and big
scientists came in for their share of pen-pricking.

Voltaire corrected the King's manuscript and taught him the secret of
literary style. Then they fell into a controversy, done in Caslon
old-style, thundering against each other's theories in pamphlets across
seas of misundertandings. Neither side publicly avowed the authorship,
but nobody was deceived. The King and Voltaire met daily at meals, and
carefully avoided the topics they were fighting out in print.

Voltaire was rich and all of his wants were supplied, but he entered the
financial lists, and taking advantage of his inside knowledge,
speculated in scrip and got into a disgraceful lawsuit over the proceeds
with a man he should never have known. Frederick was annoyed--then
disturbed. He personally chided Voltaire for his folly in mixing with
the King's enemies.

Voltaire had tired of the benevolent assimilation--he craved freedom. A
friend who loves you, if he spies upon your every action, will become
intolerable. Voltaire intimated to Frederick that he would like to go.

But Frederick had a great admiration for the man--he considered Voltaire
the greatest living thinker, and to have such a one in the court would
help give the place an atmosphere of learning. He recognized that there
were two Voltaires--one covetous, quibbling, spiteful and greedy; and
the other the peerless poet and philosopher--the man who hated shams and
pretense, and had made a brave fight for liberty; the charming
companion, the gracious friend. Frederick was philosopher enough to
realize that he could not have the one without the other--if he had the
angel he must also tolerate the demon. This he would do--he must have
his Voltaire, and so he refused the passports asked for, and sought to
interest his literary lion in new projects. Finally, court life became
intolerable to Voltaire, as life is to anybody when he realizes that he
is being detained against his will. Voltaire packed his effects,
secured a four-horse carriage, and with his secretary, departed by
night, without leaving orders where his mail should be forwarded.

When Frederick found that his singing bird had flown, he was furious.
Fear had much to do with the matter, for Voltaire had taken various
manuscripts written by the King, wherein potentates in high places were
severely scored. The first thought of Frederick evidently was that
Voltaire had really been a spy in the employ of the French government.
He sent messengers after him in hot haste--the fugitive was overtaken,
and arrested. His luggage was searched, and after being detained at
Frankfort for three weeks he was allowed to depart for pastures new.

The news of his flight, arrest and disgrace became the gossip of every
court of Christendom. Who was disgraced more by the arrest--Voltaire or
Frederick--the world has not yet decided. Carlyle deals with the subject
in detail in his "Life of Frederick," and exonerates the King. But Taine
says Carlyle wrote neither history nor poetry, and certainly we do not
consider the sage of Cheyne Row an impartial judge.

Voltaire took time to cool, and then wrote a history of the affair which
is published in his "My Private Life," that is one of the most delicious
pieces of humor ever written. That he should have looked forward to life
at the Prussian Court as the ideal, and then after bravely enduring it
for three years, make his escape by night, was only a huge joke.
Nothing else could have been expected, he says. Men of fifty should know
that environment does not make heaven, and people who expect other
people to make paradise for them are forever doomed to wander without
the walls.

Voltaire acknowledges that he got better treatment than he deserved, and
makes no apology for working the whole affair up into good copy. The
final proof that Voltaire was a true philosopher is that he was able to
laugh at himself.

When Voltaire left Prussia, it was voluntary exile. Paris was
forbidden--all of France was for him unsafe; England he had hopelessly
offended. By slow stages he made his way to Switzerland. But on the way
there his courage failed him and he wrote back to Frederick, suggesting
reconciliation. But Frederick promptly reminded him that he had
repeatedly broken promises by writing about Frederick's personal
friends, and "Voltaire and Frederick had better keep apart, that their
love for each other might not grow cold"--a subtle bit of sarcasm.

At Geneva, where Calvin had instituted a little tyranny of his own,
Voltaire was made welcome. Nominally no Catholics were allowed in
Geneva, and when Voltaire wrote to the authorities, explaining that he
was a good Catholic, the matter was taken as a great joke. He bought a
beautiful little farm a few miles away, on the banks of the river Rhone,
overlooking the city of Geneva and the lake. It was an ideal spot, and
rightly he called it "Delices." Here he was going to end his days amid
flowers and birds and books and bees, an onlooker and possibly a
commentator on the times, but not a doer. His days of work were over. Of
the world of strife he had had enough--thus he wrote to Frederick.

Visitors of a literary turn of mind at Geneva began to come his way. He
established an inn, and later built a theater out of the ruins of an old
church that he had bought and dismantled. "This is what I am going to
do with all the churches in France," he explained with a smile.

His pen was never idle. He wrote plays that were presented at his own
little theater, and on such occasions he would send word to his Geneva
friends not to come, as they could not be accommodated. Of course they
came.

He wrote a history of Peter the Great, and this brought him into
communication with Queen Catherine of Russia, with whom he carried on
quite an animated correspondence. This worthy widow invited him to Saint
Petersburg, and he slyly wrote to Frederick for advice as to whether he
should go or not. It is said that Frederick advised him to go, pay court
to the Queen, marry her, seize the throne, and get his head cut off for
his pains, thus achieving immortality and benefiting the world at one
stroke.

Voltaire had no intention of going to Saint Petersburg; he had created a
little Court of Letters, of which he himself was the Czar, and for the
first time in his life he was experiencing a degree of genuine content.
His flowers, bees, manuscripts and theater filled every moment of the
day from six in the morning until ten at night. He had arrived in
Switzerland broken in health, with mind dazed, his frail body undone.
There at the little farm at Delices, overlooking the lake, health came
back and youth seemed to return to this man of three-score.

Some of the nobility in Paris, to whom he had loaned money, took
advantage of his exile to withhold payments, but Voltaire secured an
agent to look after his affairs, so his losses were not great.

He bought the tumbledown chateau of Tournay, near at hand, which carried
with it the right to call himself Count Tournay. Frederick, with mock
respect, so addressed his letters.

His next financial venture, begun when he was sixty-eight, might well
have tested the strength of a much younger man. A few miles from Geneva,
at Ferney, just over the border from Switzerland, Voltaire had bought a
large tract of waste land, intending to use it for pasturage. Here he
built a cottage and lived a part of the time when visitors were too
persistent at Delices. Ferney was on French soil, Delices in
Switzerland. Voltaire had criticized the Protestants of Geneva, and
given it as his opinion that a Calvinistic tyranny was in no wise
preferable to one built on Catholicism. Some then said, "This man is
really what he professes--a Catholic." There had also been a
demonstration to drive him out of Switzerland, since it was pretty well
known that Voltaire's crowds of visitors were neither Catholic nor
Protestant. "Delices is infidelic," was the cry, and this doubtless had
something to do with Voltaire's establishing himself at Ferney. If
Protestant Switzerland drove this Catholic over to France, why, Catholic
France would not molest him.

Every country, no matter how tyrannical its government, prides itself on
being the home of the exile, just as every man thinks of himself as
being sincere and without prejudice.

It is now believed that Voltaire had much to do with inciting the civil
riots in Geneva against the Catholics. He had circulated pamphlets
purporting to be written by a Catholic, upholding the Pope, and
ridiculing most unmercifully the pretenses of Protestantism, declaring
it a compromise with the devil, made up of the scum of the Catholic
Church. This pamphlet declared Calvin a monster, and arraigned him for
burning Servetus, and hinted that all Calvinists would soon be paid back
in their own coin. No one else could have penned this vitriolic pamphlet
but Voltaire--he knew both sides. But since Geneva regarded Voltaire as
an infidel, it never occurred to the authorities that he would take up
the cudgel of the Catholic Church that had burned his books. The real
fact was, the pamphlet wasn't a defense of Catholicism--it was only a
drubbing of Calvinism, and the wit was too subtle for the Presbyterians
to digest.

Very soon another pamphlet appeared, answering the first. It arraigned
the Catholics in scathing phrase, suggested that they were getting ready
to burn the city--hinted at a repetition of Saint Bartholomew, and
declared the order had gone forth from Rome to scourge and kill. It was
as choice an A.P.A. document as was ever issued by a relentless joker.
The result was that the workers in the watch-factory and silk-mills who
were Catholics found themselves ostracized by the Protestant workmen. I
do not find that the authorities drove the Catholics out of Geneva, it
was simply a species of labor trouble--Protestants would not work with
Catholics.

At this juncture Voltaire comes in, and invites all persecuted Catholic
watch-workers and silk-weavers to move to Ferney. Here Voltaire laid out
a town--erected houses, factories, churches and schools. In two years he
had built up a town of twelve hundred people, and had a watch-factory
and silk-mill in full and paying operation.

The problem of every manufacturer is to sell his wares--Voltaire knew
how to release purse-strings of friends and enemies alike. He sent
watches to all of his enemies in Paris, bishops, priests and potentates,
explaining that he had quit literature forever, and was now engaged in
helping struggling, exiled Catholics to get an honest living--he was
doing penance as foreman of a watch-factory--would the Most Reverend not
help in this worthy work? Money flowed in on Ferney--Frederick ordered a
consignment of watches, Queen Catherine did the same, and the Bishop of
Paris sent his blessing and an order for enough silk to keep Voltaire's
factory going for six months.

Voltaire really got the pick of the workmen of Geneva--the goods made
were of the best, and while at first Catholics only were employed, yet
in five years Ferney was quite as much Protestant as Catholic. Voltaire
respected the religious beliefs of his workmen, and there was liberty
for all. He paid better wages and treated his workers better than they
had ever been treated in Geneva. Voltaire built houses for his people
and allowed them to pay him in monthly instalments. And not only did he
himself make much money out of his Ferney investment, but he established
the town upon such a safe financial basis that its prosperity endures
even unto this day.

It was at Ferney, in his old age, that Voltaire first made open war upon
"revealed religion." All religions that professed a miraculous origin
were to him baneful in the extreme, the foes of light and progress, the
enemies of mankind. He did not perceive, as modern psychology does, that
the period of supernaturalism is the childhood of the mind. Myths and
fairy-tales are not of themselves base--the injury lies with the men who
seek to profit by these things, and build up a tyranny founded on
innocence and ignorance--seeking to perpetuate these things, issuing
threats against growth, and offers of reward to all who stand still.

Voltaire called superstition "The Infamy," and he summoned the thinkers
of the world to crush it beneath a heel of scorn. Letters, pamphlets,
plays, essays, were sent out in various languages, by his own
printing-presses. The wit of the man--his scathing mockery--were weapons
no one could wield in reply. The priests and preachers did not answer
him--they could not--they only grew purple with wrath and hissed.

Says Victor Hugo, "Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled." To which Bernard Shaw
has recently rejoined, "Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled; William Morris
worked."

From the prosperity, peace and security of Ferney, Voltaire pointed a