The Philosophy of Voltaire - Collected Works: Treatise On Tolerance, Philosophical Dictionary, Candide, Letters on England, Plato's Dream, Dialogues, The Study of Nature, Ancient Faith and Fable…. Вольтер
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that this is the country of Colchis and the golden fleece is a proof of it. It is a pity that things have changed so much for Mingrelia; that beautiful country, so famous for the loves of Medea and Jason, now produces gold and Bdellium no more than bulls which vomit fire and flame, and dragons which guard the fleece. Everything changes in this world; and if we do not skilfully cultivate our lands, and if the state remain always in debt, we shall become a second Mingrelia.
BEARD.
Certain naturalists assure us that the secretion which produces the beard is the same as that which perpetuates mankind. An entire hemisphere testifies against this fraternal union. The Americans, of whatever country, color, or stature they may be, have neither beards on their chins, nor any hair on their bodies, except their eyebrows and the hair of their heads, I have legal attestations of official men who have lived, conversed, and combated with thirty nations of South America, and they attest that they have never seen a hair on their bodies; and they laugh, as they well may, at writers who, copying one another, say that the Americans are only without hair because they pull it out with pincers; as if Christopher Columbus, Fernando Cortes, and the other adventurers had loaded themselves with the little tweezers with which our ladies remove their superfluous hairs, and had distributed them in all the countries of America.
I believed for a long time that the Esquimaux were excepted from the general laws of the new world; but I am assured that they are as free from hair as the others. However, they have children in Chile, Peru, and Canada, as well as in our bearded continent. There is, then, a specific difference between these bipeds and ourselves, in the same way as their lions, which are divested of the mane, and in other respects differ from the lions of Africa.
It is to be remarked that the Orientals have never varied in their consideration for the beard. Marriage among them has always existed, and that period is still the epoch of life from which they no longer shave the beard. The long dress and the beard impose respect. The Westerns have always been changing the fashion of the chin. Mustaches were worn under Louis XIV. towards the year 1672. Under Louis XIII. a little pointed beard prevailed. In the time of Henry IV. it was square. Charles V., Julius II., and Francis I. restored the large beard to honor in their courts, which had been a long time in fashion. Gownsmen, through gravity and respect for the customs of their fathers, shaved themselves; while the courtiers, in doublets and little mantles, wore their beards as long as they could. When a king in those days sent a lawyer as an ambassador, his comrades would laugh at him if he suffered his beard to grow, besides mocking him in the chamber of accounts or of requests,—But quite enough upon beards.
BEASTS.
What a pity and what a poverty of spirit to assert that beasts are machines deprived of knowledge and sentiment, which effect all their operations in the same manner, which learn nothing, never improve, etc.
What is this bird, who makes its nest in a semicircle when he attaches it to a wall; and in a circle on a tree—this bird does all in the same blind manner! The hound, which you have disciplined for three months, does he not know more at the end of this time than he did before? Does the canary, to which you play an air, repeat ft directly? Do you not employ a considerable time in teaching it? Have you not seen that he sometimes mistakes it, and that be corrects himself?
Is it because I speak to you that you judge I have sentiment, memory, and ideas? Well, suppose I do not speak to you; you see me enter my room with an afflicted air, I seek a paper with disquietude, I open the bureau in which I recollect to have shut it, I hid it and read it with joy. You pronounce that I have felt the sentiment of affliction and of joy; that I have memory and knowledge.
Extend the same judgment to the dog who has lost his master, who has sought hum everywhere with grievous cries, and who enters the house agitated and restless, goes upstairs and down, from room to room, and at last finds in the closet the master whom he loves, and testifies his joy by the gentleness of his cries, by his leaps and his caresses.
Some barbarians seize this dog, who so prodigiously excels man in friendship, they nail him to a table and dissect him living to show the mesenteric veins. You discover in him the same organs of sentiment which are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the springs of sentiment in this animal that he should not feel? Has he nerves, and is he incapable of suffering? Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in mature.
But the masters of this school ask, what is the soul of beasts? I do not understand tins question. A tree has the faculty of receiving in its fibres the sap which circulates, of evolving its buds, its leaves, and its fruits. You will ask me what is the soul of this tree? It has received these gifts. The animal has received those of sentiment, memory, and a certain number of ideas. Who has bestowed these gifts; who has given these faculties? He who has made the herb of the field to grow, and who makes the earth gravitate towards the sun.
The souls of beasts are substantial forms, says Aristotle; and after Aristotle, the Arabian school; and after the Arabian school, the Angelical school; and after the Angelical school, the Sorbonne; and after the Sorbonne, every one in the world.
The souls of beasts are material, exclaim other philosophers. These have not been more fortunate than the former. They are in vain asked what is a material soul? They say that it is a matter which has sensation; but who has given it this sensation? It is a material soul, that is to say, it is composed of a matter which gives sensation to matter. They cannot get out of this circle.
Listen to one kind of beasts reasoning upon another; their soul is a spiritual being, which dies with the body; but what proof have you of it? What idea have you of this spiritual being, which has sentiment, memory, and its share of ideas and combinations, but which can never tell what made a child of six years old? On what ground do you imagine that this being, which is not corporeal, perishes with the body? The greatest beasts are those who have suggested that this soul is neither body nor spiritan excellent system! We can only understand by spirit something unknown, which is not body. Thus the system of these gentlemen amounts to this, that the soul of beasts is a substance which is neither body, nor something which is not body. Whence can proceed so many contradictory errors? From the custom which men have of examining what a thing is before they know whether it exists. They call the speech the effect of a breath of mind, the soul of a sigh. What is the soul? It is a name which I have given to this valve which rises and falls, which lets the air in, relieves itself, and sends it through a pipe when I move the lungs.
There is not, then, a soul distinct from the machine. But what moves the lungs of animals? I have already said, the power that moves the stars. The philosopher who said, "Deus est animâ brutorum."—God is the soul of the brutes—is right; but he should have gone much further.
BEAUTIFUL (THE).
Since we have quoted Plato on love, why should we not quote him on "the beautiful," since beauty causes love. It is curious to know how a Greek spoke of the beautiful more than two thousand years since.
"The man initiated into the sacred mysteries, when he sees a beautiful face accompanied by a divine form, a something more than mortal, feels a secret emotion, and I know not what respectful fear. He regards this figure as a divinity.... When the influence of beauty enters into his soul by his eyes he burns; the wings of his soul are bedewed; they lose the hardness which retains their germs and liquefy themselves; these germs, swelling beneath the roots of its wings, they expand from every part of the soul (for soul had wings formerly)," etc.
I am willing to believe that nothing is finer than this discourse of the divine Plato; but it does not give us very clear ideas of the nature of the beautiful.