Three Generations: A Plausible Interpretation of the French Philosophes? (1973)

America and the EighteenthCentury Community of Learning' Henry Steele Commager E THINK OF our own time as an Age of Enlightenment, but it flouts and even repudiates two essential principles of the Enlight­ enment: first the priority of the claims of science and culture over those of politics, and second the cosmopolitan and even uni­ versal nature of science and culture. The philosophes of the eighteenth century—the word embraces not only philosophers but scientists and statesmen, men of letters and critics—did not worship at the altar of nationalism; they were a fellowship bound together by common devotion to Reason in all of its manifestations, and they were sure that its primary and its most pervasive manifestation was in the realm of science, art, and learning. They believed in the universality of morals and of art. When they wrote history it was world history, as with Voltaire; when they studied religion it tended to be comparative religion, as with Christian Wolff; when they celebrated law it was the Spirit of the Laws, as with Montesquieu; when they contemplated art they sought the Universal in art, as with Winckelmann or Sir Joshua Reynolds; and their most characteristic poem was called quite simply an Essay on Man. Their scientists and men of learn­ ing were cosmopolitan, at home in every country, moving easily from country to country and from university to university—or more often than not, from academy to academy, for the univer- * Portions of this essay have appeared as ’'Science, Learning, and the Claims of Nationalism,” The American Heritage, April 1972. In its present form it first appeared in Thoughts from the Lake of Time (Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation). Copyright (c) by Henry Steele Commager. All rights reserved. 13 Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century sities of that day were, many of them, in the doldrums. They knew that the commonwealth of learning was older than the common­ wealth of political nations; for the learned academy and the uni­ versity had flourished some centuries before the rise of the modern state. With most of them the claims of science took precedence over the claims of the nation-state, for they equated science with truth; and as truth was universal and could never conflict with other truth, they held that the sciences were never at war—the phrase is from Edward Jenner. Condorcet, himself a victim of the new nationalism, spoke for all of his generation when he said that The philosophers of different nations who considered the in­ terests of the whole of humanity without distinction of country, race or creed, formed a solid phalanx banded together against all forms of error, all manifestations of tyranny. Animated by feelings of universal philanthropy they fought injustice when it occurred in countries other than their own. We have come a long way from this philosophy of the Enlight­ enment—the philosophy of Franklin and Jefferson and Tom Paine in America, of Joseph Banks and Edward Jenner and Joseph Priestley in England, of Rumford in Bavaria, of Linnaeus in Sweden, of Haller in Switzerland, and of Buffon and Lavoisier and Diderot in France—and it is by now increasingly clear that our shift in position represents a retreat rather than an advance. Consider some of the characteristics of that world where the sciences were never at war, not even in time of war. It was an age when the United States, speaking through Benjamin Franklin, and the French government, speaking through Jacques Necker, could proclaim immunity in time of war for Captain Cook because he was "engaged in work beneficial to humanity"; when a Hessian officer, about to put to flame the house of Francis Hopkinson— one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence—was so impressed by the library and scientific apparatus that he ordered the flames extinguished, writing in the flyleaf of a book: "This man is clearly a traitor but he is a man of learning and science and must be protected"; when Frederick the Great could retain French as the language of his court while fighting France; when Napo­ 14 America and the Community of Learning leon’s mother could safely put her money into British consols; when...