right. He assembles a host of needy adventurers, dresses them in coarse blue cloth, borders their hats with a broad white binding, instructs them how to wheel to the right and to the left, and marches them to glory. Other princes hearing of this adventure come to take part in it, each according to his power, and cover the country with more mercenary murderers than Zenghis Khan, Tamerlane, or Bajazet employed in their train. People at a distance hear that fighting is going on, and that by joining the ranks they may earn five or six sous a day. They divide themselves into bands, like reapers, and offer their services to whoever I will hire them. These hordes fall upon one another, not only without having the least interest in the affray, but without knowing the reason of it. There appear, therefore, five or six belligerent powers, sometimes three against three, sometimes two against four, and sometimes one against five,-all equally detesting one another, supporting and attacking by turns; all agreed in a single point only, that of doing as much harm as possible.

The most amazing part of this infernal enterprise is that each. murderous chief causes his colors to be blessed, and solemnly invokes God, before he goes to exterminate his neighbors! If it is his luck to kill only two or three thousand men, he does not return thanks for it; but when he has destroyed say ten thousand by fire and sword, and to make a good job leveled some town with the ground, then they sing a hosanna in four parts, composed in a language unknown to the fighters, and full of barbarity. The same pæan serves for marriages and births, as well as for murders; which is unpardonable, particularly in a nation famous for song-writing. Natural religion has a thousand times prevented men from committing crime. A well-trained mind is not inclined to brutality; a tender mind is appalled by it, remembering that God is just. But conventional religion encourages whatever cruelties are practiced in droves,-conspiracies, seditions, pillages, ambuscades, surprisals of towns, robberies, and murder. Men march gayly to crime, each under the banner of his saint.

A certain number of dishonest apologists is everywhere paid to celebrate these murderous deeds: some are dressed in a long black close coat, with a short cloak; others have a shirt above a gown; some wear two variegated streamers over their shirts. All of them talk a long time, and quote what was done of old in Palestine, as applicable to a combat in Veteravia. The rest of

the year these people declaim against vice. They prove in three arguments and by antitheses that ladies who lay a little carmine. on their cheeks will be the eternal objects of eternal vengeance; that 'Polyeucte' and 'Athalie' are works of the evil one; that a man who for two hundred crowns a day furnishes his table with fresh sea-fish during Lent, works out his salvation; and that a poor man who eats two and a half sous' worth of mutton will go to perdition. Miserable physicians of souls! You exclaim for five quarters of an hour on some prick of a pin, and say nothing on the malady which tears us into a thousand pieces! Philosophers, moralists! burn all your books, while the caprices of a few men force that part of mankind consecrated to heroism, to murder without question millions of our brethren! Can there be anything more horrible in all nature? What becomes of, what signifies to me, humanity, beneficence, modesty, temperance, mildness, wisdom, and piety, whilst half a pound of lead, sent from the distance of a hundred steps, pierces my body, and I die at twenty years of age in inexpressible torments, in the midst of five or six thousand dying men; whilst my eyes, opening for the last time, see the town in which I was born destroyed by fire and sword, and the last sounds which reach my ears are the cries of women and children dying beneath the ruins, all for the pretended interests of a man whom I never knew?

APPEARANCES

From the Philosophical Dictionary›

RE all appearances deceitful? Have our senses been given us

A only to delude us? Is everything error?

Is everything error? Do we live in a

dream, surrounded by shadowy chimeras? We see the sun setting, when he is already below the horizon; before he has yet risen, we see him appear. A square tower seems to be round. A straight stick, thrust into the water, seems to be bent.

You see your face in a mirror, and the image appears to be behind the glass; it is, however, neither behind nor before it. This glass, to the sight and touch so smooth and even, is in fact an unequal congregation of projections and cavities. The finest and fairest skin is a kind of bristled network, the openings of which are incomparably larger than the threads, and inclose an infinite number of minute hairs. Under this network, fluids

incessantly pass, and from it there issue continual exhalations. which cover the whole surface.

What we call large is to an elephant very small; and what we call small is to insects a world. The motion which a snail finds swift would be slow in the eye of an eagle. This rock, which is impenetrable by steel, is a sieve consisting of more pores than matter, and containing a thousand avenues leading to its centre, in which are lodged multitudes of animals, which may, for aught we know, think themselves the masters of the universe.

Nothing is either as it appears to be, or in the place where we believe it to be.

Some philosophers, tired of the constant deceptions of bodies, have in their spleen pronounced that bodies do not exist, and that nothing is real but mind. As well might they conclude that, appearances being false, and the nature of the soul being as little known as that of matter, there is no reality in either body or soul.

Perhaps it is this despair of knowing anything which has led some Chinese philosophers to declare Nothing the beginning and the end of all things.

This destructive philosophy was well known in Molière's time. Doctor Macphurius represents the school: when teaching Sganarelle, he says, "You must not say, 'I am come,' but 'It seems to me that I am come;' for it may seem so to you, without being really the case."

But at the present day, a comic scene is not an argument (though it is sometimes better than an argument), and there is often as much pleasure in seeking after truth as in laughing at philosophy.

You do not see the network, the cavities, the threads, the inequalities, the exhalations, of that white and delicate skin which you admire. Animals a thousand times less than a mite discern these objects which escape your vision; they lodge, feed, and travel about in them, as in an extensive country, and those on the right arm are entirely ignorant that creatures of their own species live on the left. Were you so unfortunate as to see what they see, this charming skin would strike you with horror.

The harmony of a concert which delights you must have on certain classes of minute animals the effect of terrible thunder; and perhaps it kills them. We see, touch, hear, feel things, only

in the way in which they ought to be seen, touched, heard, or felt, by ourselves.

All is in due proportion. The laws of optics, which show you an object in the water where it is not, and break a right line, are in entire accordance with those which make the sun appear to you with a diameter of two feet, although he is a million times larger than the earth. To see him in his true dimensions would require an eye capable of collecting his rays at an angle. as great as his disk, which is impossible. Our senses, then, assist much more than they deceive us.

Motion, time, hardness, softness, dimensions, distance, approximation, strength, weakness, appearances of whatever kind,—all is relative. And who has created these relations?

THE

ON THE CONTRADICTIONS OF THIS WORLD

From the Philosophical Dictionary›

HE more one knows this world of ours, the more contradictions and inconsistencies he finds. To begin with the Grand Turk: he is under an indispensable necessity to cut off the head of whoever displeases him, and he can at the same time hardly preserve his own.

If from the Grand Turk we pass to St. Peter, his Holiness confirms the election of emperors, he has kings for his vassals, but has no more power than a Duke of Savoy. He sends his commands into America and the East Indies; yet can he not take away one privilege from the republic of Lucca. The Emperor is King of the Romans; but his whole right and prerogative consists in holding the Pope's stirrup, and the basin for him to dip his hands at mass.

The English serve their monarch on the knee; but then they depose him, imprison him, behead him.

Men who are vowed to poverty, obtain, by the very virtue of that vow, an estate of two hundred thousand crowns yearly revenue; and by means of their humility, become absolute sovereigns.

At Rome they rigorously condemn pluralities of benefices, while at the same instant they will issue bulls to enable some German to hold half a dozen bishoprics at once. It is, say they, because the German bishops have no church cures. The

chancellor of France is the second person in the State, and yet he is never permitted to eat at the king's table; at least it has never happened hitherto: while a colonel, who is scarce a gentleman, enjoys that honor. An intendant's lady is a queen in her husband's province, and at court no more than a simple country madam.

Men convicted of the heinous sin of nonconformity are publicly burnt: whilst the second Eclogue of Virgil, in which is that warm declaration of love which Corydon makes the beauteous . Alexis, "Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexin," is gravely expounded in every college; and pupils are asked to note that though Corydon was fair and Amyntas swarthy, yet still Amyntas had the preference.

Should a poor, harmless philosopher, who never dreamed of doing the least harm to any one, take it into his head that the earth moves, that light comes from the sun, that matter might have other properties than those we are acquainted with, immediately the hue and cry is raised against him; he is an impious disturber of the public peace: though his persecutors have translated and published, in usum Delphini, Lucretius, and Cicero's "Tusculan Questions,' which are two complete bodies of irreligion.

Our courts of justice have rejected the belief in evil spirits, and witches are subjects of laughter: but Gaufredy and Grandier were both burnt for witchcraft; and lately, by a majority of voices, a monk was condemned to the stake by one of our Parliaments for having bewitched a young damsel of eighteen years by breathing upon her.

The skeptical philosophy of Bayle was persecuted even in Holland. La Motte le Vayer, a still greater skeptic, though not near so good a philosopher, was preceptor to Louis XIV. and his brother. Gourville was hanged in effigy at Paris, whilst he was the ambassador of France in Germany.

The famous atheist Spinoza lived and died in peace. Vanini, whose only crime was writing against Aristotle, was burnt for an atheist; in this character he has the honor to fill a considerable space in the history of the republic of letters, as well as in all the dictionaries,- those enormous archives of lies, with a small mixture of truth. Do but open those books, you will find it recorded that Vanini not only taught atheism in his writings, but also that twelve professors of the same creed had actually set