The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Voltaire—his name was possibly an anagram for his proba- ble real name, Franзois-Marie Arouet—handled his career, including his business affairs, with the capacity of a Shaw. But he made one error. He wrote Candide. By doing so he obscured the remainder of his vast production. So much else is brilliant and well worth reading—the Philosophical Dictionary, Zadig, Micromйgas, The Age of Louis XIV, the Letters Concerning the English Nation. Yet Candide is what we read, for it is perfection.

Also it is so lucid as to need little commentary. It was partly inspired by one of the events it chronicles, the devas- tating Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Voltaire uses this—as well as ali the other misfortunes of poor Candide, Dr. Pangloss, and their companions—to make fun of what he conceived to be the smug optimism of the famous philosopher Leibniz, caricatured in the figure of Pangloss. As philosophy Candide is oversimplified, indeed shallow, for Voltaire's intelligence was quick and comprehensive rather than deep. But as light- ning narrative, flashing with wit, as a pitiless yet funny indict- ment of the follies and cruelties of mankind, it has not yet been surpassed.

Its form is a favorite one of Voltaire^ century, that of the philosophical romance. Gullivers Traveis [52] belongs to this category, and a good modern example is Thornton Wilders The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It anticipates also another of the forms later fiction was to assume, that of the development novel, tracing the education of a young man. We shall meet this form again when we discuss The Red and the Black [67], and we will see it extended and deepened in The Magic Mountain [107]. Candide's education of course was of a uniquely violent nature, so violent that one can hardly help sympathizing with his rather mournful conclusion that, in this far from the best of ali possible worlds, the most sensible thing we can do is to "cultivate our garden."

The reader, however, must not be misled by this jewel of wicked irony into thinking that Voltaire was no more than a genius of mockery. Like Shaw he could not help being witty;

and like Shaw he was a very serious, courageous, and humane fighter for the liberation of the human mind.

C.F.

54

DAVI D HUME

I7II-I776

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

In proportion to its population Scotland has probably produced more first-rate minds than any country in the world except ancient Greece. Of these minds David Hume is surely one.

Intended by nature for abstract reflection, Hume, after short tries, sensibly rejected both the law and a business career. He spent three years in France, wrote his Treatise of Human Nature (of whose first part the Enquiry is a development), and watched it fali "dead-born from the press." The first volume of his Essays (1741) brought him greater success. Following their publication he occupied a number of official posts and one unofficial one, that of tutor to a certified lunatic, who was however a peer. One for- eign service job netted him almost a thousand pounds, and he increased this small fortune with the profits from his triumphant and highly partisan History of Engjнand. In 1769, a rich man, he retired to his new house in Edinburgh and became a sort of Dr. Johnson [59] to that brilliant little capital.

In his interesting Autobiography he describes himself as "a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, and of an open, social, and cheerful humor, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity; and of great moderation in ali my passions. Even my love of literary fame, my ruling passion, never soured my temper, notwithstanding my frequent disap- pointments.^,>

Hume developed Locke's antimetaphysical position and so helped to clear the way for British utilitarianism in the nine- teenth century (see John Stuart Mill [72]). His Enquiry, clear

but not easy reading, deals with the original sensations he calls impressions. "Ali probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation." He is, as the quotation would indicate, a skeptic. He sees no rational connection between cause and effect, cau- sation in his system being equal to mere sequence.

This central skepticism he applies to the self, which he deems unknowable; to morality, which he separates from reli- gion; and to religion, coming "from the incessant hopes and fears which actuate the human mind."

Hume's balance and commonsensical temperament would have rejected the great romantics of the century following his. Yet they might well justify their position by appealing to Hume^ total skepticism with respect to the existence of ratio­nal belief.