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Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers

A. C. <h2> COMPTE DE VOLNEY. </h2> Constantine Francis Chasshboeuf, de Volney, was born on February 3rd, 1757, at Craon, in Anjou. His father, a distinguished advocate, not wishing his son to bear the name of Chasseboeuf, resolved that he should assume that of Boisgirais. With this name Constantine Francis was first known in the world, studying at the College of Ancenis and Angers. He afterwards commenced his Oriental travels, changing his name to Volney. At the age of seventeen, finding himself his own master, and possessed of £50 a-year, inherited from his mother, he went to Paris, in order to study the sciences, preferring the study of medicine and physiology, although giving great attention to history and the ancient languages. On inheriting a legacy of £240, he visited Egypt and Syria, starting on foot, a knapsack on his back, a gun on his shoulder, and his £240, in gold, concealed in a belt. When he arrived in Egypt, he shut himself up for eight months in a Coptic monastery, in order to learn Arabic; after which he commenced his travels through Egypt and Syria, returning to France after an absence of four years, and publishing his "Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie," which was acknowledged by the French army, on their conquering Egypt, to be the only book "that had never deceived them." The French Government named him Director of Commerce and Agriculture in Corsica, but being elected a deputy of the tiers-etat of the Senechausse of Anjou, he resigned the government appointment, holding the maxim, that a national deputy ought not in any way to be a pensioner. He opposed all secret deliberations, and wished to admit the constituents and the citizens. He was made secretary on the 23rd of November, 1790, and in the debates, which arose upon the power of the king to determine peace and war, Volney proposed and carried the resolution that "The French nation renounces from this moment the undertaking any war tending to increase their territory." In 1792, he accompanied Pozzo di Borgo to Corsica, in compliance with invitations from many influential inhabitants, who sought his information. In Corsica he became acquainted with Napoleon Buonaparte, who was then an artillery officer; and some years after, hearing that Buonaparte had obtained the command of the army of Italy, Volney exclaimed, "If circumstances favor him, we shall see the head of a Cæesar upon the shoulders of an Alexander." When Volney returned to Paris, he published an "Account of the State of Corsica." He was afterwards appointed Professor of History, attracting large audiences; but the Normal School being suppressed, he embarked for the United States of America, in 1795. He was received by Washington, who bestowed publicly on him marks of honor and friendship. In 1798, Volney returned to France, and gave up to his mother-in-law the property which he was entitled to from the death of his father, which had just occurred. During his absence, he had been chosen a member of the Institute. Buonaparte also, on Volney's return, tried to win his esteem and assistance, soliciting him as colleague in the consulship. But he refused the co-operation, as also the office of Minister of the Interior. Seldom do men find so many inducements to "accept office" as was offered to Volney; and seldom do men appear who are disinterested enough to reject the inducements then held out to him. Although he refused to work with the ruling powers of that day, he ever ceased to work for the people! He occupied himself till the last year of his life in giving to the world that literature which will never be forgotten. It would be impossible to notice all the works written by such an indefatigable thinker as the "heretic" of our sketch. We ought to mention, however, that subsequently to his being made Peer of France, by Louis XVIII.; and when there existed an intention of crowning Louis, Volney published "The History of Samuel, the inventor of Royal Coronations." This book represents Samuel as an impostor, Saul as the blind instrument of sacerdotal cunning, and David as an ambitious youth. In September, 1791, Volney presented to the Assembly "The Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires," a book which will immortalize him in the memory of Freethinkers. The originality of style, and the eloquence of expression, cannot fail to interest all who read it. We give the following extracts, from the above work, but as it contains so much that ought to be read, we must return to the subject in another number:— "Legislators, friends of evidence and of truth! "That the subject of which we treat should be involved in so many clouds, is by no means astonishing, since, beside the difficulties that are peculiar to it, thought itself has, till this moment, ever had shackles imposed upon it, and free inquiry, by the intolerance of every religious system, been interdicted. But now that thought is unrestrained, and may develope all its powers, we will expose in the face of day, and submit to the common judgment of assembled nations, such rational truths as unprejudiced minds have by long and laborious study discovered: and this, not with the design of imposing them as a creed, but from a desire of provoking new lights, and obtaining better information. "Chiefs and instructors of the people! you are not ignorant of the profound obscurity in which the nature, origin, and history of the dogmas you teach are enveloped. Imposed by force and authority, inculcated by education, maintained by the influence of example, they were perpetuated from age to age, and habit and inattention strengthened their empire. But if man, enlightened by experience and reflection, summon to the bar of mature examination the prejudices of his infancy, he presently discovers a multitude of incongruities and contradictions, which awaken his sagacity, and call forth the exertion of his reasoning powers. "At first, remarking the various and opposite creeds into which nations are divided, we are led boldly to reject the infallibility claimed by each; and arming ourselves alternately with their reciprocal pretensions, to conceive that the senses and the understanding, emanating directly from God, are a law not less sacred, and a guide not less sure, than the indirect and contradictory codes of the prophets. "If we proceed to examine the texture of the codes themselves, we shall observe that their pretended divine laws, that is to say, laws immutable and eternal, have risen from the complexion of times, of places, and of persons; that these codes issue one from another in a kind of genealogical order, mutually borrowing a common and similar fund of ideas, which every institutor modifies agreeably to his fancy. "If we ascend to the source of those ideas, we shall find that it is lost in the night of time, in the infancy of nations, in the very origin of the world, to which they claim alliance: and there, immersed in the obscurity of chaos, and the fabulous empire of tradition, they are attended with so many prodigies as to be seemingly inaccessible to the human understanding. But this prodigious state of things gives birth to a ray of reasoning, that resolves the difficulty; for if the miracles held out in systems of religion have actually existed; if, for instance, metamorphoses, apparitions and the conversations of one or more Gods, recorded in the sacred books of the Hindoos, the Hebrews, and the Parses, are indeed events in real history, it follows that nature in those times was perfectly unlike the nature that we are acquainted with now; that men of the present age are totally different from the men that formerly existed; but, consequently, that we ought not to trouble our heads about them. "On the contrary, if those miraculous facts have had no real existence in the physical order of things, they must be regarded solely as productions of the human intellect: and the nature of man, at this day, capable of making the most fantastic combinations, explains the phenomenon of those monsters in history. The only difficulty is to ascertain how and for what purpose the imagination invented them. If we examine with attention the subjects that are exhibited by them, if we analyze the ideas which they combine and associate, and weigh with accuracy all their concomitant circumstances, we shall find a solution perfectly conformable to the laws of nature. Those fabulous stories have a figurative sense different from their apparent one; they are founded on simple and physical facts; but these facts being ill-conceived and erroneously represented, have been disfigured and changed from their original nature by accidental causes dependent on the human mind, by the confusion of signs made use of in the representation of objects, by the equivocation of words, the defect of language, and the imperfection of writing. These Gods, for example, who act such singular parts in every system, are no other than the physical powers of nature, the elements, the winds, the meteors, the stars, all which have been personified by the necessary mechanism of language, and the manner in which objects are conceived by the understanding. Their life, their manners, their actions, are only the operation of the same powers, and the whole of their pretended history no more than a description of their various phenomena, traced by the first naturalist that observed them, but taken in a contrary sense by the vulgar, who did not understand it, or by succeeding generations, who forgot it. In a word, all the theological dogmas respecting the origin of the world, the nature of God, the revelation of his laws, the manifestation of his person, are but recitals of astronomical facts, figurative and emblematical narratives of the motion and influence of the heavenly bodies. The very idea itself of the divinity, which is at present so obscure, abstracted, and metaphysical, was in its origin merely a composite of the powers of the material universe, considered sometimes analytically, as they appear in their agents and their phenomena, and sometimes synthetically, as forming one whole, and exhibiting an harmonious revelation in all its parts. Thus the name of God has been bestowed sometimes upon the wind, upon fire, water, and the elements; sometimes upon the sun, the stars, the planets, and their influences; sometimes upon the universe at large, and the matter of which the world is composed; sometimes upon abstract and metaphysical properties, such as space, duration, motion, and intelligence; but in every instance, the idea of a Deity has not flowed from the miraculous revelation of an invisible world, but has been the natural result of human reflection, has followed the progress and undergone the changes of the successive improvement of intellect, and has had for its subject the visible universe and its different agents. "It is then in vain that nations refer the origin of their religion to heavenly inspiration; it is in vain that they pretend to describe a supernatural state of things as first in order of events; the original barbarous state of mankind, attested by their own monuments, belies all their assertions. These assertions are still more victoriously refuted by considering this great principle, that man receives no ideas but through the medium of his senses: for from hence it appears that every system which ascribes human wisdom to any other source than experience and sensation, includes in it a ysteron vroteron, and represents the last results of understanding as earliest in the order of time. If we examine the different religious systems which have been formed respecting the actions of the Gods, and the origin of the world, we shall discover at every turn an anticipation in the order of narrating things, which could only be suggested by subsequent reflection. Reason, then, emboldened by these contradictions, hesitates not to reject whatever does not accord with the nature of things, and accepts nothing for historical truth that is not capable of being established by argument and ratiocination. Its ideas and suggestions are as follows:— "Before any nation received from a neighbor nation dogmas already invented; before one generation inherited the ideas of another, none of these complicated systems had existence. The first men, the children of nature, whose consciousness was anterior to experience, and who brought no preconceived knowledge into the world with them, were born without any idea of those articles of faith which are the result of learned contention; of those religious rites which had relation to arts and practices not yet in existence; of those precepts which suppose the passions already developed; of those laws which have reference to a language and a social order hereafter to be produced; of that God, whose attributes are abstractions of the knowledge of nature, and the idea of whose conduct is suggested by the experience of a despotic government; in fine, of that soul and those spiritual existences which are said not to be the object of the senses, but which, however, we must forever have remained unacquainted with, if our senses had not introduced them to us. Previously to arriving at these notions, an immense catalogue of existing facts must have been observed. Man, originally savage, must have learned from repeated trials the use of his organs. Successive generations must have invented and refined upon the means of subsistence; and the understanding, at liberty to disengage itself from the wants of nature, must have risen to the complicated art of comparing ideas, digesting reasonings, and seizing upon abstract similitudes. "It was not till after having surmounted those obstacles, and run a long career in the night of history, that man, reflecting on his state, began to perceive his subjection to forces superior to his own and independent of his will. The sun gave him light and warmth; fire burned, thunder terrified, the winds buffeted, water overwhelmed him; all the various natural existences acted upon him in a manner not to be resisted. For a long time an automaton, he remained passive, without inquiring into the cause of this action; but the very moment he was desirous of accounting to himself for it, astonishment seized his mind; and passing from the surprise of a first thought to the reverie of curiosity, he formed a chain of reasoning. "At first, considering only the action of the elements upon him, he inferred relatively to himself, an idea of weakness, of subjection, and relatively to them, an idea of power, of domination; and this idea was the primitive and fundamental type of all his conceptions of the divinity. "The action of the natural existences, in the second place, excited in him sensations of pleasure or pain, of good or evil; by virtue of his organization, he conceived love or aversion for them, he desired or dreaded their presence: and fear or hope was the principle of every idea of religion. "Afterwards, judging everything by comparison, and remarking in those beings a motion spontaneous like his own, he supposed there to be a will, an intelligence inherent in that motion, of a nature similar to what existed in himself; and hence, by way of inference, he started a fresh argument. Having experienced that certain modes of behavior towards his fellow-creatures wrought a change in their affections and governed their conduct, he applied those practices to the powerful beings of the universe. 'When my fellow-creature of superior strength,' said he to himself, 'is disposed to injure me, I humble myself before him, and my prayer has the art of appeasing him. I will pray to the powerful beings that strike me. I will supplicate the faculties of the planets, the waters, and they will hear me. I will conjure them to avert the calamities, and to grant me the blessings which are at their disposal. My tears will move, my offerings propitiate them, and I shall enjoy complete felicity.' "And, simple in the infancy of his reason, man spoke to the sun and the moon; he animated with his understanding and his passions the great agents of nature; he thought by vain sounds and useless practices to change their inflexible laws. Fatal error! He desired that the water should ascend, the mountains be removed, the stone mount in the air; and substituting a fantastic to a real world, he constituted for himself beings of opinion, to the terror of his mind and the torment of his race. "Thus the ideas of God and religion sprung, like all others, from physical objects, and were in the understanding of man, the products of his sensations, his wants, the circumstances of his life, and the progressive state of his knowledge. "As these ideas had natural beings for their first models, it resulted from hence that the divinity was originally as various and manifold as the forms under which he seemed to act: each being was a power, a genius, and the first men found the universe crowded with innumerable Gods. "In like manner the ideas of the divinity having had for motors the affections of the human heart, they underwent an order of division calculated from the sensations of pain: and pleasure, of love and hatred: the powers of nature, the Gods, the genii, were classed into benign and maleficent, into good and evil ones: and this constitutes the universality of these two ideas in every system of religion. "These ideas, analogous to the condition of their inventors, were for a long time confused and cross. Wandering in woods, beset with wants, destitute of resources, men in their savage state had no leisure to make comparisons and draw conclusions. Suffering more ills than they tasted enjoyments, their most habitual sentiment was fear, their theology terror, their worship was confined to certain modes of salutation, of offerings which they presented to beings whom they supposed to be ferocious and greedy like themselves. In their state of equality and independence, no one took upon him the office of mediator with Gods as insubordinate and poor as himself. No one having any superfluity to dispose of, there existed no parasite under the name of priest, nor tribute under the name of victim, nor empire under the name of altar; their dogmas and morality, jumbled together, were only self-preservation; and their religion, an arbitrary idea without influence on the mutual relations existing between men, was but a vain homage paid to the visible powers of nature. "Such was the first and necessary origin of every idea of the divinity...." "In reality, when the vulgar heard others talk of a new heaven and another world, they gave a body to these fictions; they erected on it a solid stage and real scenes; and their notions of geography and astronomy served to strengthen, if they did not give rise to the delusion. "On the one hand, the Phoenician navigators, those who passed the pillars of Hercules to fetch the pewter of Thule and the amber of the Baltic, related that at the extremity of the world, the boundaries of the ocean (the Mediterranean,) where the sun sets to the countries of Asia, there were Fortunate Islands, the abode of an everlasting spring; and at a farther distance, hyperborean regions, placed under the earth (relatively to the tropics,) where reigned an eternal night. From those stories, badly understood, and no doubt confusedly related, the imagination of the people composed the Elysian Fields, delightful spots in a world below, having their heaven, their sun, and their stars; and Tartarus, a place of darkness, humidity, mire, and chilling frost. Now, inasmuch as mankind, inquisitive about all that of which they are ignorant, and desirous of a protracted existence, had already exerted their faculties respecting what was to become of them after death; inasmuch, as they had early reasoned upon that principle of life which animates the body, and which quits it without changing the form of the body, and had conceived to themselves airy substances, phantoms and shades, they loved to believe that they should resume in the subterranean world that life which it was so painful to lose; and this abode appeared commodious for the reception of those beloved objects which they could not prevail on themselves to renounce. "On the other hand, the astrological and philosophical priests told such stories of their heavens as perfectly quadrated with these fictions. Having, in their metaphorical language, denominated the equinoxes and solstices the gates of heaven, or the entrance of the seasons, they explained the terrestrial phenomena by saying, that through the gate of horn (first the bull, afterwards the ram,) vivifying fires descended, which, in spring, gave life to vegetation, and aquatic spirits, which caused, at the solstice, the overflowing of the Nile: that through the gate of ivory (originally the bowman, or Sagittarius, then the balance,) and through that of Capricorn, or the urn, the emanations or influences of the heavens returned to their source and re-ascended to their origin; and the Milky Way which passed through the doors of the solstices, seemed to them to have been placed there on purpose to be their road and vehicle. The celestial scene farther presented, according to their Atlas, a river (the Nile, designated by the windings of the Hydra;) together with a barge (the vessel Argo,) and the dog Sirius, both bearing relation to that river, of which they foreboded the overflowing. These circumstances, added to the preceding ones, increased the probability of the fiction; and thus to arrive at Tartarus or Elysium, souls were obliged to cross the rivers Styx and Acheron, in the boat of Charon the ferryman, and to pass through the doors of horn and ivory, which were guarded by the mastiff Cerberus. At length a civil usage was joined to all these inventions, and gave them consistency. "The inhabitants of Egypt having remarked that the putrefaction of dead bodies became in their burning climate the source of pestilence and diseases, the custom was introduced in a great number of States, of burying the dead at a distance from the inhabited districts, in the desert which lies at the West. To arrive there it was necessary to cross the canals of the river in a boat, and to pay a toll to the ferryman, otherwise the body remaining unburied, would have been left a prey to wild beasts. This custom suggested to her civil and religious legislators, a powerful means of affecting the manners of her inhabitants, and addressing savage and uncultivated men with the motives of filial piety and reverence for the dead; they introduced, as a necessary condition, the undergoing that previous trial which should decide whether the deceased deserved to be admitted upon the footing of his family honors into the black city. Such an idea too well accorded with the rest of the business not to be incorporated with it; it accordingly entered for an article into religious creeds, and hell had its Minos and its Radamanthus, with the wand, the chair, the guards, and the urn, after the exact model of this civil transaction. The divinity then, for the first time, became a subject of moral and political consideration, a legislator, by so much the more formidable as, while his judgment was final and his decrees without appeal, he was unapproachable to his subjects. This mythological and fabulous creation, composed as it was of scattered and discordant parts, then became a source of future punishments and rewards, in which divine justice was supposed to correct the vices and errors of this transitory state. A spiritual and mystical system, such as I have mentioned, acquired so much the more credit as it applied itself to the mind by every argument suited to it. The oppressed looked thither for an indemnification, and entertained the consoling hope of vengeance; the oppressor expected by the costliness of his offerings to secure to himself impunity, and at the same time employed this principle to inspire the vulgar with timidity; kings and priests, the heads of the people, saw in it a new source of power, as they reserved to themselves the privilege of awarding the favors or the censure of the great Judge of all, accord-ing to the opinion they, should inculcate of the odiousness of crimes and the meritoriousness of virtue. "Thus, then, an invisible and imaginary world entered into competition with that which was real. Such, O Persians! was the origin of your renovated earth, your city of resurrection, placed under the equator, and distinguished from all other cities by this singular attribute, that the bodies of its inhabitants cast no shade. Such, O Jews and Christians! disciples of the Persians, was the source of your New Jerusalem, your paradise and your heaven, modelled upon the astrological heaven of Hermes. Meanwhile your hell, O ye Musselmans! a subterraneous pit surmounted by a bridge, your balance of souls and good works, your judgment pronounced by the angels Monkir and Nekir, derives its attributes from the mysterious ceremonies of the cave of Mithra; and your heaven is exactly coincident with that of Osiris, Ormuzd, and Brama.".... "It is evident, that it is not truth for which you contend; that it is not her cause you are jealous of maintaining, but the cause of your own passions and prejudices; that it is not the object as it really exists that you wish to verify, but the object as it appears to you; that it is not the evidence of the thing that you are anxious should prevail, but your personal opinion, your mode of seeing and judging. There is a power that you want to exercise, an interest that you want to maintain, a prerogative that you want to assume: in short, the whole is a struggle of vanity. And as every individual, when he compares himself with every other, finds himself to be his equal and fellow, he resists by a similar feeling of right; and from this right, which you all deny to each other, and from the inherent consciousness of your equality, spring your disputes, your combats, and your intolerance. "Now the only way of restoring unanimity is by returning to nature, and taking the order of things which she has established for your director and guide, and this farther truth will then appear from your uniformity of sentiment. "If we would arrive at uniformity of opinion, we must previously establish certainty, and verify the resemblance which our ideas have to their models. Now, this cannot be obtained, except so far as the objects of our inquiry can be referred to the testimony, and subjected to the examination of our senses. Whatever cannot be brought to this trial is beyond the limits of our understanding: we have neither rule to try it by, nor measure by which to institute a comparison, nor source of demonstration and knowledge concerning it. "Whence it is obvious that, in order to live in peace and harmony, we must consent not to pronounce upon such objects, nor annex to them importance; we must draw a line of demarcation between such as can be verified and such as cannot, and separate, by an inviolable barrier, the world of fantastic beings from the world of realities: that is to say, all civil effect must be taken away from theological and religious opinions. "This, O nations! is the end that a great people, freed from their fetters and prejudices, have proposed to themselves; this is the work in which, by their command, and under their immediate auspices, we were engaged, when your kings and your priests came to interrupt our labors.... Kings and priests! you may yet for awhile suspend the solemn publication of the laws of nature; but it is no longer in your power to annihilate or to subvert them." We conclude with the following:—"Investigate the laws which nature, for our direction, has implanted in our breasts, and form from thence an authentic and immutable code. Nor let this code be calculated for one family, or one nation only, but for the whole with-out exception. Be the legislators of the human race, as ye are the interpreters of their common nature. Show us the line that separates the world of chimeras from that of realities: and teach us, after so many religions of error and delusion, the religion of evidence and truth." Our space prohibits further quotation in this number; but when we return to the subject, we shall notice chapter xxi., "Problem of Religious Contradictions," and also "The Law of Nature; or Principles of Morality." Few men wrote more on various topics than Volney; and few have been more respected while living, and esteemed when dead, by those whose respect and esteem it is always an honor to possess. At the age of fifty-three, after much travel and great study, Volney consoled his latter days by marrying his cousin—the hope of his youth—Mdlle. de Chassebouf. A disorder of the bladder, contracted when traversing the Arabian deserts, caused his death at the age of sixty-three. He was buried in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise, when Laya, Director of the French Academy, pronounced a noble panegyric over his grave; and months after his death he was spoken highly of by some of the most illustrious men of France. Thus ended the days of one of the Freethinkers of the past whose works, despite all suppression, will never die. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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