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John Morley
Published by Good Press, 2019
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Let us remember that Voltairism was primarily and directly altogether an intellectual movement, for this reason, that it was primarily and directly a reaction against the subordination of the intellectual to the moral side of men, carried to an excess that was at length fraught with fatal mischief. Are our opinions true, provably answering to the facts of the case, consistent with one another; is our intelligence radiant with genuine light and knowledge; and are we bent more than all else on testing and improving and diffusing this knowledge and the instruments for acquiring it? The system to which this was the powerful counter-formula, even in its least dark shapes, always reserved a large class of most important facts from the searching glare of that scrutiny which Voltairism taught men to direct upon every proposition that was presented to them.
For many centuries truth had been conceived as of the nature of a Real Universal, of which men had full possession by the revelation of a supreme divinity. All truth was organically one; and the relations of men to something supernatural, their relations to one another, the relations of outward matter, were all comprehended in a single synthesis, within which, and subject to which, all intellectual movement proceeded. An advancing spirit of inquiry dissolved this synthesis; and the philosophers, as distinguished from the steadfast and single students of science, ceasing to take it for granted as an indisputable starting-point that truth was an assured possession, went off on two different lines. Men of one cast of mind fell into doubt whether truth was a reality after all, and the discovery of it accessible to mankind. Thinkers of a different cast accepted this doctrine of the impotence of the human understanding to discover knowledge and prove truth, but they proceeded to the retrograde inference that therefore the ancient tradition of knowledge actually contains that approved truth, which had just been pronounced unattainable. This oblique mode of regaining a position of which they had been by their own act dispossessed, was impossible for so keen and direct a spirit as Voltaire’s. However filled his mind may have been with the false notions of the Tribe, of the Market, and above all of the Cave, at all events it was more free than most, certainly than most of those subalterns of the schools, from the Idols of the Theatre, and from either kind of that twofold excess, ‘one sort of which too hastily constitutes sciences positive and hierarchic, while the other presents scepticism and the pursuit of a vague inquiry that has no limit.’6
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