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Deism and the morality of feeling in the 18th century

It is in the absolute that the rationalism of the seventeenth century sought to found the rules of thought and action: Cartesian reason seeks “true natures” whose immutability is guaranteed by God himself; it is in God that Malebranche sees ideas; and the principles of knowledge are, in Leibniz, the very principles of divine action: this rationalism therefore keeps the idea that the rule of thinking, like the rule of acting, is transcendent to the individual; it also admits apriorism or innateness, not wanting to make these rules depend on chance and the encounters of individual experience.

The rationalism of the 18th century is quite different: many literary critics attribute it to Descartes, on the pretext that he was the first to assert the rights of thought against authority; we shall see how wrong they are. We now seek the rules of thought and action at the very heart of our own experience and our own reasoning, which are the judges of last appeal and have no need of other guarantors: it is by our own efforts that man must find his way in the midst of chaos, and organize his science and his action. It is true that many of the thinkers of this period are inclined to find in this experience a principle of order, a benevolent reality which helps their efforts or makes them possible, whether this reality be nature or God, whether it manifests itself in the regularity of external things or in the deepest tendencies with which we are endowed: and there is a curious contrast between the debauchery of finalism of the unbelieving century and the reserve with which the believing century treated the designs of God. But this finalism is not at all a rational principle; it is rather a sort of divine complicity; and this is why the God who is its support can fade away to the point of becoming, in materialistic systems, simple nature, our very nature. Of the transcendental, whether this transcendent be an external authority like that of the Church or the king, or an internal authority like that of innate ideas, we no longer want to see anything but arbitrariness, a human invention that is justified only by too human reasons, the cunning of priests and politicians, philosophical prejudices: we think we find the true generality, the rule, by going precisely in the opposite direction, towards nature, as it presents itself to an observation without prejudices; God himself, according to Lord Bolingroke, is a sort of English monarch who always acts according to the convenience that results from the nature of things: he is limited by the rules that his infinite wisdom prescribes to his infinite power. (1) Deism and the morality of sentiment provide us with remarkable examples of this state of mind.

(1) Henry St. John Bolingbroke, Lettres sur l’esprit de patriotisme, trad. fr., London, 1750, p. 90.

Source: Émile Bréhier(1951). Histoire de la philosophie, Presses Universitaires de France. Translation and adaptation by © 2024 Nicolae Sfetcu

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