Bernard de Fontenelle: The Idea of Science in the French Enlightenment
1959; Volume: 49; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1005860
ISSN2325-9264
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Literary Studies
Resumoreason unaided cannot effect reform in men's mental habits. He drew attention to the complex workings of the mind when he had Raphael declare that prejudice filled an essential need: Reason will chase all these old opinions from our mind and will put no new ones in their place. That will cause a kind of void and who can suffer that? No, no, given so little reason among men, .they must have as many prejudices as they are accustomed to having. Prejudices are reason's supplement; whatever one fails to supply the other provides.20 That the false has its uses is so even in science. All the sciences have their chimeras which they pursue without success; but they pick up quite useful information along the way. If chemistry has its philosopher's stone, geometry has its squaring of the circle, astronomy its longitude, mechanics, perpetual movement. It is impossible to attain any of these, but quite useful to try.21 The fact that there are many twistings and turnings by which we arrive at truth should dispose us to judge our failures less harshly. Therefore, despite the ignorance of men, the limitations of reason, and the uncertainty of our enterprise, we do make progress, if only because we are no worse off as individuals than our predecessors, and accumulated knowledge has set us ahead of them. The mere passage of time has enhanced the reputations of the ancients. Socrates tells Montaigne that we favor antiquity, Because we are displeased with our own century, and antiquity benefits in consequence. Our posterity will esteem us more than we merit. But our ancestors, ourselves and our posterity are all equal, 22 and such equality is an intrinsic feature of the idea of progress. One of the things which prevented progress for so long was the blind worship of antiquity, caused in part by the reverence of the Renaissance for the classics. Fontenelle, while affirming the excellence of the ancients in literature, asserted the superiority of the moderns in science. The progressive nature of science caused the moderns to be the true ancients, adult heirs to the achievements of the Greeks who lived in the infancy of mankind. Although Fontenelle held to the belief in the possibility of intellectual progress, nothing seemed so clear to him as the fact that man's morals remain forever the same. He did not believe in the unlimited perfectibility of man: clothes may change, but that does not mean that the shape of bodies does. Manners or the lack of them, science or ignorance, more or less of a certain naivete, these are only man's externals, and they all change, but 20 Ibid., 356. 21 Ibid., 336. 22 Ibid., 238. the heart never changes, and all of man is contained in the heart.23 However, this fact too may be cause for rejoicing. Perhaps it is the heart, after all, that occasions progress, for from the heart springs the aspiration to accomplishment, no less a part of man than his reason. Truly it gets us no nearer to perfection, but men would never accomplish what they do if they did not, propose a goal for themselves beyond their capacities. They would never start out if they knew that they would arrive only where they do. They must have before their eyes an imaginary goal which animates them . . . for they would lose courage if they were not sustained by false ideas. 24 Once again we are told that illusion has its uses. However, the impossibility of our goal ought not to prevent us from approaching it, nor does it any way diminish the value of our aspiration, which derives from its being an essential component of the human personality. If aspiration sometimes leads us astray, it is also the stuff from which our achievements spring, and in this regard it is one of the passions in that it provides the spur to thought and action. Without the divine discontent which accompanies aspiration we are not likely to produce those things of the mind which are alike man's justification for living and society's hope for the future. None of the foregoing can be equated with the charge of personal egoism, pessimism, or disenchantment that some of Fontenelle's critics have leveled against him. Fontenelle has neither declared life to be unsupportable, nor has he ceased participating in it. The skepticism that he appropriated from antiquity does not lead him to detachment, nor his Stoicism to renunciation. We are indeed passionate animals, but if this fact causes us pain and difficulty, it is also the source of our spiritual glory. It is this glory to be found partly in scientific achievement which Fontenelle regards as the real reward for living. Although our bodies generate our impulses, our minds direct them, imposing order upon a collection of random impulses. Fontenelle neither denied nor undervalued the intelligence but sought to preserve its preeminence by limiting it, for in that way is its essential structure preserved. The balance of mind and body was Fontenelle's prescription for happiness in the Dialogues; his acceptance of the human condition was in the last analysis hopeful. To talk about an achievement of mind arrived at in the quietude of resignation is a contradiction in terms, he argued. There is a form of skepticism in the Dialogues, but of a different kind from Montaigne's. Although the slogan of Que scai-je? was accepted in seventeenthcentury France as part of the cultural if not the political fabric of the time, it remained for Fontenelle to show how science might broaden and deepen Montaigne's
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