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Continuing my quest to read all eleven volumes of Will Durant’s Opus, The Story of Civilization. Volume IX centers on science and philosophy overtaking religion through thinkers like Voltaire and Diderot. The church did its best to stop it, but in the end, the French Enlightenment steered the faithful away from religion toward the beginnings of existentialism. While this movement addressed religious corruption and the horrors of inquisitions, there is also a feeling of great loss as civilization let go of its rudder of morality and faith.
Highlights
A parliamentary committee reported that of all the children born in workhouses, or those received in infancy, in the years 1763–65, only seven per cent were alive in 1766. It was a hard century.
Employers complained that their workmen stopped work to attend fairs, prize fights, hangings, or wakes. To protect themselves against these and other irregularities the employers liked to have a pool of unemployed workers in the neighborhood, upon which they could draw in emergency or in times of quickened demand. 19 When times were slack, workers could be laid off and left to live on the credit of the local tradesmen.
– Note: Early 1700s England which became the basis for the labor union guilds of the 1750s
London was well situated to grow with English commerce and colonies. Oceangoing vessels could sail up the Thames, and though (till 1794) the docks could not berth them, an army of profane longshoremen, using a swarm of three hundred lighters, was available to transfer goods from ship to shore or other ships; so London became an animated entrepôt for the re-export, to the Continent, of imports from overseas. (Location 1441)
In England, as elsewhere in this period, life began with a high percentage of infantile mortality: fifty-nine per cent of all children born in London died before reaching the age of five, sixty-four per cent before reaching ten.
Bolingbroke’s Letters on the Study and Use of History (written in 1735) described history as a vast laboratory in which events have made countless experiments with men, economics, and states; hence it is the best guide to the nature of man, and therefore to the interpretation of the present and the anticipation of the future. “History is philosophy teaching by examples…. We see men at their whole length in history.” 37 We should “apply ourselves to it in a philosophical spirit,” aiming not merely to comprehend causes, effects, and uniform sequences, but to conduct ourselves in ways that have heretofore proved most propitious to human development and happiness.
“all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.” — Jonathan Swift
When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate, after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated; nor do I conceive what is further requisite to make me a perfect nonentity…. — David Hume
A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring. — Alexander Pope
History is a contest between art and war, and art plays the part of Sisyphus.
“All religions must be tolerated, and the government must see to it that none of them makes unjust encroachments on any other, for in this country every man must get to heaven in his own way.” —Frederick the great
“Tranquillity is a fine thing,” he wrote, “but ennui … belongs to the same family.” —Voltaire
THE growth of knowledge was impeded by inertia, superstition, persecution, censorship, and ecclesiastical control of education. (Location 10824)
Revolution came in France, and not in eighteenth-century England, partly because censorship by state or Church, which was mild in England, was so strong in France that the imprisoned mind could expand only by the violent destruction of its bonds.
As late as 1772 Edward Massey, an English clergyman, preached against “the dangerous and sinful practice of inoculation,” and stood stoutly by the old theological view that diseases are sent by Providence for the punishment of sin. 35 (Perhaps, like many old religious doctrines, this could be profanely rephrased: disease is often a punishment for ignorance or negligence.)
(The barber’s red-and-white-striped pole, symbolizing a bloody bandage, still recalls his surgical past.)
the faith in reason, which had had its chanticleer in Francis Bacon a century before, became the foundation and instrument of “liberal” thought—i.e., in this aspect, thought liberated from the myths of the Bible and the dogmas of the Church.
“Posterity is for the philosopher what the ‘other world’ is for the man of religion.” — Diderot
“I am maddened at being entangled in a devilish philosophy that my mind cannot help approving and my heart refuting.” — Diderot