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.It was a buried treasure whose existence Bacon suspect-ed, and that all philosophers, encouraged by his assertions, exertedthemselves to unearth.Now, what surprised me most was to find in his book a clear state-ment of this new attractive force that Mr.Newton, it is thought, wasthe first to discover. We must examine, said Bacon,  whether there is not some mag-netic force that operates between the earth and heavy objects,between the moon and the ocean, between the planets, etc.In another place he said,  Either heavy bodies must be carriedtoward the center of the earth, or each attracts the other, and in thelatter case it is clear that the closer the falling bodies come to theearth, the more strongly will they be attracted.We must, he contin-ued,  test whether the same pendulum clock will go faster upon amountain or in the depths of a mine; if the force of the pendulum12_Voltaire_Letter12 1/10/07 12:43 PM Page 4040 Philosophical Lettersdiminishes on the mountain and increases in the mine, it would seemthat the earth does have attractive force.This precursor of philosophy was also an elegant writer, a histori-an, a witty and considerable thinker.His essays on morality are highly esteemed, but they are writtenrather to instruct than to please; and being neither satires of humannature like the Maxims of M.de La Rochefoucauld, nor based inskepticism like the essays of Montaigne, they are less frequently readthan these two ingenious works.11His History of Henry VII is considered a masterwork, but I doubtthat it can be compared to the work of our own illustrious de Thou.12Writing of that famous impostor Parkins,13 a Jew by birth who,encouraged by the Duchess of Burgundy, so boldly took the name ofRichard IV, King of England, and who challenged the claim ofHenry VII to the throne, here is what Chancellor Bacon said: At about this time King Henry was possessed by evil spirits gen-erated by the magic of the Duchess of Burgundy, who summonedfrom Hades the ghost of Edward IV to torment King Henry. After the Duchess of Burgundy had instructed Parkins, shebegan to think about where in the heavens she should make thiscomet appear, and she decided it should first burst forth on the Irishhorizon.It seems to me that our wise de Thou does not succumb to suchinflated language, which some used to consider sublime and whichnow is rightly called nonsense.13_Voltaire_Letter13 1/10/07 12:45 PM Page 41Thirteenth LetterOn Mr.LockePerhaps there never was a wiser, more methodical, more logical mindthan that of Mr.Locke, and yet he was not a great mathematician.1He had never been able to submit to the fatigue of calculation nor tothe dryness of mathematical truths, which at first produce nothingperceptible to the spirit, and no one has demonstrated better than hethat one could have the spirit of a mathematician without the help ofgeometry.Before his time, great philosophers had announcedunequivocally what constitutes the soul of man; but, since they knewnothing about it, it is understandable that all had different opinions.In Greece, the cradle of arts and errors, where wisdom and fool-ishness had been so much developed, all reasoned as we do about thesoul.The great Anaxagoras,2 to whom an altar was dedicated becausehe taught men that the sun was larger than the Peloponnese, thatsnow was black and that the heavens were made of stone, affirmedthat the soul was an airy spirit and nonetheless immortal.Diogenes, different from the one who became a cynic after hav-ing been a counterfeiter, insisted that the soul is a part of God s sub-stance, and this idea was at the least a brilliant one.Epicurus imagined that the soul, like the body, was composed ofvarious parts.Aristotle, whose work has been interpreted in thou-sands of ways because it is unintelligible, believed, according to someof his disciples, that all human understanding is of one and the samesubstance.The divine Plato, teacher of the divine Aristotle, and the divineSocrates, teacher of the divine Plato, claimed that the soul was cor-poreal and eternal; Socrates daimon no doubt told him what itsnature was.There are, indeed, those who believe that a man whoboasted of having a familiar spirit was undoubtedly either a fool or aknave; but those folks are too demanding.As for our Church fathers, many in the first centuries believedthat the human soul, the angels, and God were corporeal.The world improves all the time.Saint Bernard, according toFather Mabillon s testimony,3 taught that the soul after death did not4113_Voltaire_Letter13 1/10/07 12:45 PM Page 4242 Philosophical Letterssee God in Heaven but only conversed with the humanity of JesusChrist; his word was not enough to convince his hearers.The mis-adventures of the Crusades had somewhat discredited his assertions.Thousands of Scholastics succeeded him, like the Irrefutable Doctor,the Subtle Doctor, the Angelic Doctor, the Seraphic Doctor, theCherubic Doctor,4 all of whom were certain that they knew the soulquite clearly, but who did not hesitate to discuss it as if they hopedthat no one would understand.Our Descartes, born to uncover Antiquity s errors, if only to sub-stitute for them his own, dragged along by that systematic spirit thatblinds the greatest of men, imagined that he had demonstrated thatthe soul was the same thing as thought, just as matter according tohim is the same thing as extension.He assured us that we alwaysthink, and that the soul comes to the body provided with all meta-physical ideas, knowing God, space, infinity, and having all abstractideas filled, in fact, with perfect knowledge, which sadly it loses asit emerges from the womb of its mother.Mr.Malebranche, of the Oratory, in his sublime illusions, notonly embraced innate ideas, but did not doubt that we see all in God,and that God, so to speak, is but our soul.After so many thinkers had written the romance of the soul, therecame a wise man who modestly described its history.Locke explainedhuman reason to man as an excellent anatomist explains the mechan-ics of the human body [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]