Voltaire (Philosopher) DeWitt

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Voltaire (Philosopher) DeWitt
Posted by: Kevin W. DeWitt	Date: April 10, 2000 at 16:11:59
	of 2747

Voltaire and his writings were known to inspire revolutions throughout the world. What a honor for this great philosopher to mention the murder of the two brothers named DeWitt. Ask your librarian for the book called, The Story of Civilization IX, The Age of Voltaire, written by Will and Ariel Durant. Take the time to look this up and reflect on his point of view.

748 THE AGE OF VOLTAIRE (CRAP. XXII

common a matter to poison another as to invite him to supper. . . Faith, then, in a God who rewards good actions, punishes the bad, and for-gives lesser faults, is most useful to mankind.

Finally Voltaire inclined to see some sense in the doctrine of hell:

To those philosophers who in their writings deny a hell, I will say:
"Gentlemen, we do not pass our days with Cicero, Atticus, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, . . . nor with the too scrupulously virtuous Spinoza, who, although laboring under poverty and destitution, gave back to the children of the Grand Pensionary deWitt an allowance of 300 florins which had been granted him by that great statesman - whose heart, it may be remembered, the Hollanders devoured…… In a word, gentlemen, all men are not philosophers. We are obliged to hold intercourse and transact business and mix up in life with knaves possessing little or no reflection, with a vast number of persons addicted to brutality, intoxication, and rapine. You may, if you please, preach to them that the soul of man is mortal. As for myself, I shall be sure to thunder in their ears that if they rob me they will inevitably be damned.

We conclude that the Devil can quote Voltaire to his purpose. After appealing for a religion freed from fables, the great skeptic ended preaching the worst fable of all. He had asked for a religion confined to the inculcation of morality; now he admitted that common men cannot be kept from crime except by a religion of heaven and hell. The Church could claim that he had come to Canossa.
At the age of seventy-two he rephrased his faith under the chastened title The Ignorant Philosopher (1766). He confesses at the outset that he does not know what matter or mind is, nor how he thinks, nor how his thought can move his arm. He asks himself a question that apparently never occurred to him before: "Is it necessary for me to know?" But he adds: "I cannot divest myself of a desire of being instructed; my baffled curiosity is ever insatiable." He is now convinced that the will is not free; "the ignoramus who thinks thus did not always think so, but he is at length compelled to yield." "Is there a God?" Yes, as the Intelligence behind "the order, the prodigious art, and the mechanical and geometrical laws that reign in the universe"; but this Supreme Intelligence is known to us only in his existence, not in his nature. "Miserable mortal! If I cannot understand my own intelligence, if I cannot know by what I am animated, how can I have any acquaintance with that ineffable intelligence which visibly presides over the universe? . . . But we are his work." Voltaire is inclined to believe that there was never a creation in time, that the world

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