THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

VOLTAIRE 175
of men, Candide settles down as a farmer in Turkey; and the story ends
with a final dialogue between master and pupil:
Pangloss sometimes said to Candida:
"There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for
if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle; ... if you had not
been put into the Inquisition; if you had not walked over America; ... if
>ou had not lost all your gold; . . . you would not be here eating preserved
citrons and pistachio-nuts."
"All that is very well," answered Candide; "but let us cultivate our
garden."
VII. THE ENCYCLOPEDIA AND THE PHILOSOPHIC
DICTIONARY
The popularity of so irreverent a book as Candide gives us some sense
of the spirit of the age. The lordly culture of Louis XIVs time, despite
the massive bishops who spoke so eloquent a part in it, had learned to
smile at dogma and tradition. The failure of the Reformation to capture
France had left for Frenchmen no half-way house between infallibility
and infidelity; and while the intellect of Germany and England moved
leisurely in the lines of religious evolution, the mind of France leaped
from the hot faith which had massacred the Huguenots to the cold hos-
tility with which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach and Diderot turned
upon the religion of their fathers. Let us look for a moment at the intellectual
environment in which the later Voltaire moved and had his
being.
La Mettrie (1709-51) was an army physician who had lost his post
by writing a Natural History of the Soul, and had won exile by a work
called Man a Machine. He had taken refuge at the court of Frederick,
who was himself something of an advanced thinker and was resolved to
have the very latest culture from Paris. La Mettrie took up the idea of
mechanism where the frightened Descartes, like a boy who has burned his
fingers, had dropped it; and announced boldly that all the world, not
excepting man, was a machine. The soul is material, and matter is soul-
ful; but whatever they are they act upon each other, and grow and decay
with each other in a way that leaves no doubt of their essential similarity
and interdependence. If the soul is pure spirit, how can enthusiasm warm
the body, or fever in the body disturb the processes of the mind? All
organisms have evolved out of one original germ, through the reciprocal
action of organism and environment. The reason why animals have intelligence,
and plants none, is that animals move about for their food,
while plants take what comes to them. Man has the highest intelligence
because he has the greatest wants and the widest mobility; "beings \vith-
out wants are also without mind.'*