THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

VOLTAIRE 169
Voltaire sought was a unifying principle by which the whole history of
civilization in Europe could be woven on one thread; and he was con-
vinced that this thread was the history of culture. He was resolved that
his history should deal not with kings but with movements, forces, and
masses; not with nations but with the human race; not with wars but
with the march of the human mind. "Battles and revolutions are the
smallest part of the plan; squadrons and battalions conquering or being
conquered, towns taken and retaken, are common to all . . .
history.
Take away the arts and the progress of the mind, and you will find noth-
ing" in any age "remarkable enough to attract the attention of posterity."
44 "I wish to write a history not of wars, but of society; and to
ascertain how men lived in the interior of their families, and what were
the arts which they commonly cultivated. . . , My object is the history
of the human mind, and not a mere detail of petty facts; nor am I concerned
with the history of great lords . . . but I want to know what
were the steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilization." 45
This rejection of Kings from history was part of that democratic up-
rising which at last rejected them from government; the Essai sur les
Mceurs began the dethronement of the Bourbons.
And so he produced the first philosophy of history the first systematic
attempt to trace the streams of natural causation in the development of
the European mind; it was to be expected that such an experiment
should follow upon the abandonment of supernatural explanations: his-
tory could not come into its own until theology gave way. According
to Buckle, Voltaire's book laid the basis of modern historical science;
Gibbon, Niebuhr, Buckle and Grote were his grateful debtors and fol-
lowers; he was the caput Nili of them all, and is still unsurpassed in the
field which he first explored.
But why did his greatest book bring him exile? Because, by telling the
truth, it offended everybody. It especially enraged the clergy by taking the
view later developed by Gibbon, that the rapid conquest of paganism by
Christianity had disintegrated Rome from within and prepared it to fall
an easy victim to the invading and immigrating barbarians. It enraged
them further by giving much less space than usual to Judea and Christen-
dom, and by speaking of China, India and Persia, and of their faiths,
with the impartiality of a Martian; in this new perspective a vast and
novel world was revealed; every dogma faded into relativity; the endless
East took on something of the proportions given it by geography; Europe
suddenly became conscious of itself as the experimental peninsula of a
continent and a culture greater than its own. How could it forgive a
European for so unpatriotic a revelation? The King decreed that this
Frenchman who dared to think of himself as a man first and a Frenchman
afterward should never put foot upon the soil of France again.
"Voltaire in His Letters, 40-41. ^In Buckle, History of Civilization, I, 580.
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