Voltaire - A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 07

We sincerely ask pardon of our well-informed and respectable readers for introducing such names as those of the ex-Jesuits Paulian, Nonnotte, and Patouillet; but after having trampled to death serpents, we shall probably be excused for crushing fleas.

Who has given us the perception of just and unjust? God, who gave us a brain and a heart. But when does our reason inform us that there are such things as vice and virtue? Just at the same time it teaches us that two and two make four. There is no innate knowledge, for the same reason that there is no tree that bears leaves and fruit when it first starts above the earth. There is nothing innate, or fully developed in the first instance; but – we repeat here what we have often said – God causes us to be born with organs, which, as they grow and become unfolded, make us feel all that is necessary for our species to feel, for the conservation of that species.

How is this continual mystery performed? Tell me, ye yellow inhabitants of the Isles of Sunda, ye black Africans, ye beardless Indians; and you – Plato, Cicero, and Epictetus. You all equally feel that it is better to give the superfluity of your bread, your rice, or your manioc, to the poor man who meekly requests it, than to kill him or scoop his eyes out. It is evident to the whole world that a benefit is more honorable to the performer than an outrage, that gentleness is preferable to fury.

The only thing required, then, is to exercise our reason in discriminating the various shades of what is right and wrong. Good and evil are often neighbors; our passions confound them; who shall enlighten and direct us? Ourselves, when we are calm and undisturbed. Whoever has written on the subject of human duties, in all countries throughout the world, has written well, because he wrote with reason. All have said the same thing; Socrates and Epictetus, Confucius and Cicero, Marcus Antoninus and Amurath II. had the same morality.

We would repeat every day to the whole of the human race: Morality is uniform and invariable; it comes from God: dogmas are different; they come from ourselves.

Jesus never taught any metaphysical dogmas; He wrote no theological courses; He never said: I am consubstantial; I have two wills and two natures with only one person. He left for the Cordeliers and the Jacobins, who would appear twelve hundred years after Him, the delicate and difficult topic of argument, whether His mother was conceived in original sin. He never pronounced marriage to be the visible sign of a thing invisible; He never said a word about concomitant grace; He instituted neither monks nor inquisitors; He appointed nothing of what we see at the present day.

God had given the knowledge of just and unjust, right and wrong, throughout all the ages which preceded Christianity. God never changed nor can change. The constitution of our souls, our principles of reason and morality, will ever be the same. How is virtue promoted by theological distinctions, by dogmas founded on those distinctions, by persecutions founded on those dogmas? Nature, terrified and horror-struck at all these barbarous inventions, calls aloud to all men: Be just, and not persecuting sophists.

You read in the " Zend-Avesta ," which is the summary of the laws of Zoroaster, this admirable maxim: "When it is doubtful whether the action you are about to perform is just or unjust, abstain from doing it." What legislator ever spoke better? We have not here the system of "probable opinions", invented by people who call themselves "the Society of Jesus".

That "justice" is often extremely unjust, is not an observation merely of the present day; " summum jus, summa injuria ," is one of the most ancient proverbs in existence. There are many dreadful ways of being unjust; as, for example, that of racking the innocent Calas upon equivocal evidence, and thus incurring the guilt of shedding innocent blood by a too strong reliance on vain presumptions.

Another method of being unjust is condemning to execution a man who at most deserves only three months' imprisonment; this species of injustice is that of tyrants, and particularly of fanatics, who always become tyrants whenever they obtain the power of doing mischief.

We cannot more completely demonstrate this truth than by the letter of a celebrated barrister, written in 1766, to the marquis of Beccaria, one of the most celebrated professors of jurisprudence, at this time, in Europe:

Letter To The Marquis Of Beccaria, Professor Of Public Law At Milan, On The Subject Of M. De Morangies, 1772.

Sir: – You are a teacher of laws in Italy, a country from which we derive all laws except those which have been transmitted to us by our own absurd and contradictory customs, the remains of that ancient barbarism, the rust of which subsists to this day in one of the most flourishing kingdoms of the earth.

Your book upon crimes and punishments opened the eyes of many of the lawyers of Europe who had been brought up in absurd and inhuman usages; and men began everywhere to blush at finding themselves still wearing their ancient dress of savages.

Your opinion was requested on the dreadful execution to which two young gentlemen, just out of their childhood, had been sentenced; one of whom, having escaped the tortures he was destined to, has become a most excellent officer in the service of the great king, while the other, who had inspired the brightest hopes, died like a sage, by a horrible death, without ostentation and without pusillanimity, surrounded by no less than five executioners. These lads were accused of indecency in action and words, a fault which three months' imprisonment would have sufficiently punished, and which would have been infallibly corrected by time. You replied, that their judges were assassins, and that all Europe was of your opinion.

I consulted you on the cannibal sentences passed on Calas, on Sirven, and Montbailli; and you anticipated the decrees which you afterwards issued from the chief courts and officers of law in the kingdom, which justified injured innocence and re-established the honor of the nation.

I at present consult you on a cause of a very different nature. It is at once civil and criminal. It is the case of a man of quality, a major-general in the army, who maintains alone his honor and fortune against a whole family of poor and obscure citizens, and against an immense multitude consisting of the dregs of the people, whose execrations against him are echoed through the whole of France. The poor family accuses the general officer of taking from it by fraud and violence a hundred thousand crowns.

The general officer accuses these poor persons of trying to obtain from him a hundred thousand crowns by means equally criminal. They complain that they are not merely in danger of losing an immense property, which they never appeared to possess, but also of being oppressed, insulted, and beaten by the officers of justice, who compelled them to declare themselves guilty and consent to their own ruin and punishment. The general solemnly protests, that these imputations of fraud and violence are atrocious calumnies. The advocates of the two parties contradict each other on all the facts, on all the inductions, and even on all the reasonings; their memorials are called tissues of falsehoods; and each treats the adverse party as inconsistent and absurd, – an invariable practice in every dispute.

When you have had the goodness, sir, to read their memorials, which I have now the honor of sending to you, you will, I trust, permit me to suggest the difficulties which I feel in this case; they are dictated by perfect impartiality. I know neither of the parties, and neither of the advocates; but having, in the course of four and twenty years, seen calumny and injustice so often triumph, I may be permitted to endeavor to penetrate the labyrinth in which these monsters unfortunately find shelter.