5
Cosmic Politics and Counterhypothetical Fictions

Nicht die Kinder bioß speist man Mit Märchen ab.
Lessing

PRELIMINARY

Bayle's empirical approach to the history of Roman toleration, as we saw in chapter 4, used the data of historical experience as an argument for the political value of religious diversity: a pluralistic religious polity had yielded a politically desirable result. Bayle's approach to history stood in sharp contrast with Bossuet's tendency to mine history for practices that were authoritative by dint of their venerable originary status rather than by dint of their actual effects. Thus in Bayle's hands historical empiricism was used to undermine both an authoritarian justification for intolerance and an archly traditional mode of legitimation.

This use of empiricism as an epistemological antidote to traditional modes of legitimation bears an ideological resemblance to "democratic" uses of Baconian inductivism, mentioned in chapter l, whereby those who lacked institutionalized intellectual authority could attack traditional knowledge claims by appealing to their own untutored powers of perception.

In this chapter and the next, we will look at two mid-eighteenth-century writers who embraced inductivist ideas without any apparent seditious intent and who, in fact, wished to allow inductivism to serve conservative ends. In the light of the historical principles that have been established in this study, it is not surprising that social conservatives could also be inductivists. Indeed, the principles established thus far provide at least two possible explanations as to how this might come to pass. On the one hand, since

the "scientific" status of ideas can be considered in disciplinary terms, independently of their social uses, it is possible that ideas about scientific or intellectual method could be embraced purely on technical grounds. And since empiricism in general, and Baconian inductivism in particular, had, by the middle of the eighteenth century, attained enormous prestige—thanks in large measure to the perception that Newton and others had made great discoveries by rejecting "hypothetical" or speculative reasoning in favor of observation and experimentation—it is possible to imagine that writers convinced of the efficacy of inductivism as an explanatory resource might embrace it independently of its possible role as a legitimating resource.

On the other hand, even if the prestige of inductivism should have derived from its apparent success as an explanatory instrument, such technical success could provide a strong incentive for attempting to harness this prestige by putting it into the service of one's ethico-social or sociopolitical convictions—that is, by treating one's own convictions as grounded in responsible, inductivist intellectual method and the convictions of one's enemies as products of illicit, noninductivist claims to knowledge.

It is important to recall, however, that the amenability of ideas to intellectual co-optation remains double-edged: the fact that one is motivated—for technical reasons, for ideological reasons, or for a combination of the two—to embrace an inductivist methodology does not preclude the possibility that this embrace, while being used to repel charges that one's beliefs are grounded in spurious knowledge claims, may give rise to new dangers. For example, even as one develops ways of appropriating inductivism on behalf of one's ethico-political commitments, one may come to realize that inductivism can be used to challenge other modes of cognition or legitimation that one is not prepared to give up. Indeed, one's enemies may threaten to employ one's newly appropriated mode of legitimation for alien or subversive purposes. Such dangers may give rise to techniques of secondary co-optation or counter co-optation, attempts to neutralize the intellectual or counterideological dangers that remain in ideas that one has already co-opted.

The analyses in this chapter and the following one will reveal two versions of such complex appropriations of inductivism, appropriations that run afoul of other commitments and that require either—as in the case of Voltaire—that the epistemologicai foun-

dations of the other commitments be reconciled with inductivism or—as in the case of Samuel Johnson—that the appropriated principles give way to more traditional conceptions of intellectual authority. Although this chapter will deal mainly with Voltaire, and the next mainly with Johnson, each writer will appear in the other's chapter. I expect this exchange of supporting roles to throw additional light on each writer's work.

Voltaire, in two works to be examined in this chapter—the Discours en vers sur l'homme and Micromégas —wishes to exhort his readers to submit to the universal order of things. Humanity's moral task is to accept the limitations of human nature and its appointed place in the universal hierarchy. Voltaire is echoing Pope, who, in turn, bases his exhortations on theories of cosmic optimism that centered on the concepts of the Great Chain of Being and the best of all possible worlds.

Like the deism that we encountered in chapter 2, the rationalistic theodicies excogitated by Leibniz (and others) and versified by Pope serve to justify the goodness of God by explaining apparent blemishes on that goodness. Lord Herbert of Cherbury and his followers were anxious to explain God's apparent willingness to deprive untold millions of the knowledge needed for salvation. Their solution was to claim that the necessary knowledge was less mysterious and less extensive than it had seemed and that it was universally available to human reason. The theodicean project with which we are concerned in this chapter, on the other hand, is to explain God's willingness to allow humanity in general to suffer the painful consequences of moral and physical evil, of human cruelty and rapacity, and of the natural disasters that are regularly unleashed upon the world. The explanation centers on the claim that our limitations and sufferings are a necessary part of an overarching whole that, in turn, is a necessary manifestation of God's goodness and wisdom. Those who complain about the order of things, or their place in it, are acting as if they have a greater knowledge of the overall system than they are capable of having:

He, who thro' vast immensity can pierce,
See worlds on worlds compose one universe,
Observe how system into system runs,
What other planets circle other suns,
What vary'd being peoples ev'ry star,
May tell why Heav'n has made us as we are.

But of this frame, the bearings, and the ties,
The strong connections, nice dependencies,
Gradations just, has thy pervading soul
Look'd thro'? or can a part contain the whole?2

Such a condemnation, based on the charge that the part cannot know the whole, of course paradoxically presupposes that the poet has enough understanding of the whole to see the fault of those who dare to complain. In order to be able to understand that partial evil is universal good, and to modify our behavior accordingly, the poet needs to appeal to a theory that takes us beyond our limited perspective and far beyond the teachings of revealed religion. The theory is derived from metaphysical speculation about the nature of absolute goodness and its relationship to cosmic creation.

There is thus a significant epistemological difference between the theodicean project discussed in chapter 2 and that with which we are concerned in this chapter. Lord Herbert was anxious to show that what we needed to know was much less than what we found in the Bible and in the libraries of theological disputation and that the handful of necessary maxims were inscribed on every human heart. Dryden's version of this rationalistic minimalism merely transferred the handful of religious truths back into the biblical text. Pope, on the other hand, unlike Herbert and Dryden, cannot content himself with simply rejecting the epistemological pretensions of his enemies. The complaints of those whom Pope attacks are attributable to their ignorance, and his corrective is grounded in a deep understanding of things. Voltaire, in turn, writing as an admirer and disciple of Pope, is anxious to embrace the moral teachings that Pope has set forth; but he is constrained by his commitment to an epistemological attitude that will not allow him to appeal to the metaphysical system in which Pope's moral teachings are inscribed.

Before examining Voltaire's epistemological principles, and the dilemma to which they give rise, we need to look more closely at the theory of the universe that these principles prevent him from embracing and at the relationship between this cosmic scheme and the social and political ideas of the time.

THE CHAIN OF BEING AND SOCIAL STRATIFICATION

The Discours en vers sur l'homme is Voltaire's Essay on Man, and it includes condemnations of two moral failings that Pope had condemned in his poem. The first is a cosmic anthropocentrism that Pope had attributed to human pride:

Ask for what end the heav'nly bodies shine,
Earth for whose use? Pride answers, "'Tis for mine:
For me kind Nature wakes her genial pow'r,
Suckles each herb, and spreads out ev'ry flow'r. . . .
Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise;
My foot-stool earth, my canopy the skies."
(Essay , l, 131-40)

And the second is a kind of presumptuous querulousness, a dissatisfaction with humankind's limited place in the scheme of things: "Presumptuous Man! the reason wouldst thou find, / Why form'd, so weak, so little, and so blind!" (Essay, 1, 35-56).

Voltaire takes up these matters in the "Sixième discours," where he tells us that he admires Pope's rejection of such anthropocentrism and querulousness partly because it was joined to Pope's rejection of the opposite extreme, the tendency (presumably inspired by Voltaire's theological bête noir, the doctrine of original sin) to be excessive in one's condemnation of humankind. Thus Pope (along with Leibniz) represents a happy medium between two extreme views of human nature:

Despréaux et Pascal en [de l'homme] ont fait le satire;
Pope et le grand Leibnitz, moins enclins <à mèdire,
Semblent dans leurs écrits prendre un sage milieu.3

Despréaux [Boileau] and Pascal have mocked mankind; Pope and the great Leibniz, less apt to scorn, seem, in their work, to follow a wise middle course.

The "sage milieu" offered by Pope and Leibniz depends on the notion of the Great Chain of Being, according to which humanity occupies a middle rank in the general scheme of things and, rather than being fallen or favored, is merely a necessary part of a necessary whole.

Pope's attack on anthropocentrism and querulousness add up to an attack on what A. O. Lovejoy called "generic pride," which causes the entire human race to have too high an opinion of itself.4 This generic pride pertains to the status of the human race in the universe rather than to discontent that individuals or classes of people may feel regarding their rank in society. Nonetheless, since the Great Chain of Being, with its step-by-step descent from God down to nothingness, is rigidly and immutably hierarchical, it has been easy to suppose that this cosmological principle has social implications and that cosmic optimism thus serves the ideological function of justifying the social status quo. According to such an interpretation, an attack on those who complain about humanity's limited place in the cosmic order would apply equally to those who complain about their own inferior position in the social order. This would seem to be what Basil Willey had in mind when he dubbed the eighteenth-century vogue for the Great Chain of Being "cosmic Toryism" and derided it as follows:

Eighteenth-century optimism . . . was in essence an apologia for the status quo, presenting you with a God who loved abundance and variety better than happiness or progress, and a universe whose "goodness" consisted in its containing the greatest possible range of phenomena, many of which seemed evil to all but the philosophers. Cease then, nor order imperfection name! Submit! This glorification of Things as They Are, and of the God who wills them so, naturally had social implications (or shall we say, a social basis?).5

It would be hard to deny that a characterization of a hierarchical universe as the necessary embodiment of God's wisdom and goodness is potentially useful to the defenders of an immutable social hierarchy, and Willey's ideological critique might seem to find quick confirmation in the fact that Pope, in the Essay on Man, asserted not only that humankind had its necessary place in the great cosmic hierarchy but also that the social hierarchy was part of God's plan:

ORDER is Heav'n's first law; and this confest,
Some are, and must be, greater than the rest,
More rich, more wise. (Essay , 4, 49-51)

However, despite the resemblance between the hierarchy within society and the hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being, and despite

the fact that both are exalted in Pope's poem, it is interesting to note that Pope does not explicitly link the two. In fact, he presents them at opposite ends of his poem, in the first and the fourth epistles respectively, and treats them, as we will see in due course, in rather different ways. To see why he might have done this, it will be necessary to focus briefly on the relationship between the Great Chain as a justification for apparent evil in the world and Christian providential justifications of social inequality.

The concept of the Great Chain of Being depends on what A. O. Lovejoy has called the Principle of Plenitude, according to which divine wisdom and goodness requires the creation of the greatest possible amount of being.6 Since God's creation of anything beyond himself involves a diminution of perfection in favor of variety, the Principle of Plenitude assumes that the greatest amount of possible being requires the greatest number of possible kinds of being, that is to say the greatest possible number of species of plants and animals, as well as the most possible kinds of invisible spiritual entities stretching from the realm of living material beings to God himself, and the greatest variety of inanimate matter stretching down to nothingness. Thus the requirement that there be the greatest possible amount of being gives rise to a hierarchical system in which there must be no gaps between kinds or species. Accordingly, there must be such a creature as man with precisely the degree of imperfection that his flesh is heir to. Thus does the Great Chain of Being serve its theodicean role of justifying God's goodness.

We might be tempted to ask whether the Principle of Plenitude and the concept of the Great Chain entail the extension of the hierarchical structure within species, in such a way as to require that there be different social ranks or classes. But to pose such a question would be to presuppose that the doctrine of the Great Chain is a free-standing entity with its own immutable logic. Although the rise of cultural studies in general and ideological criticism in particular has made us increasingly suspicious of such attempts to isolate ideas, it is important to recognize that one need not appeal to the role of sodal context or ideological purposes in order to see the inadequacy of a decontextualized approach to ideas. Jaakko Hintikka, in opposing Lovejoy's notion that there are "unit ideas," of which the Principle of Plenitude is the prime example,7 has argued that the Principle itself has various faces,

depending on the intellectual context in which it is placed: "[The] interaction of different ideas is what lends to clearly formulated assumptions like the so-called Principle of Plenitude one of their most important roles in the history of ideas. The Principle is not independent of the surrounding ideas. It can serve as a mirror in which these other presuppositions can be seen, often implicitly held ones."8 If we extend this intellectual contextualism into the realm of the ideological, we can recognize that the decision to extend, or not to extend, the Great Chain to hierarchies within the human species has nothing to do with the logic of the doctrine—since the doctrine itself does not tell us whether to consider social classes as having an ontological basis. But it has everything to do with the social purposes of its advocates. For while there was no real logical impediment to such an extension, there were in fact ideological impediments. Whereas Willey and others have assumed that the homologies between the Great Chain and social conservatism pointed to an implicit link between them, the interesting historical question is this: During a period when social hierarchies were considered a fundamental requirement for social order, and when the Great Chain of Being was a fashionable theodicy that justified a hierarchical universe, why did Pope (and others) refrain from explicitly linking the justification of social inequality to the Great Chain?

To answer this question, I think, one needs to focus on the relationship between the Great Chain and more traditionally eschatological justifications for social inequality. To bring the Great Chain into the social sphere would be to imply not merely that social hierarchy is part of a universal order decreed by divine wisdom but—much more provocatively—that those who are higher in the social hierarchy are more perfect beings, more spiritual, closer to God. Christianity, quite to the contrary, had traditionally undertaken to protect the social status quo precisely by portraying it as transitory or illusory, as a highly unreliable index of the eternal disposition of souls. Eternal happiness was no less available to the poor than to the rich, and the consolation for the wretched lay not so much in the fact that their poverty was required by God as in the fact that it was a fleeting illusion. It has often been observed that the relationship between the theodicy of the Great Chain and traditional Christian theodicies was an uneasy one at best. But to

subsume social inequality under the Great Chain would be to bring that conflict into the open and give it a powerfully ideological dimension. For to extend the Great Chain's intrinsic hierarchical divisions to the social realm would have the effect of robbing the poor of their traditional solace and thus, paradoxically, could have ideological implications unfavorable to the material interests of ruling elites.

JENYNS, JOHNSON, AND THE CONFLICT OF LEGITIMATIONS

The uneasy relationship between the traditional eschatological consolation, on the one hand, and the Great Chain, on the other hand, is a salient feature of Soame Jenyns's A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil and of Johnson's famous, devastating review of Jenyns's book. Although Johnson characterized the Free Inquiry, at least in part, as "little more than a paraphrase" of Pope's Essay on Man, "yet less than a paraphrase, a mere translation of poetry into prose,"9 Jenyns had in fact gone beyond Pope insofar as he had made a greater attempt to correlate the doctrine of the Great Chain with traditional Christian doctrines:

the Supreme Being, infinitely good as well as powerful, desirous to diffuse happiness by all possible means, has created innumerable ranks and orders of beings, all subservient to each other by proper subordination. One of these is occupied by man, a creature endued with such a certain degree of knowledge, reason, and freewill, as is suitable to his situation, and placed for a time, on this globe, as in a school of probation and education. Here he has an opportunity given him of improving or debasing his nature, in such a manner, as to render himself fit for a rank of higher perfection and happiness, or to degrade himself to a state of greater imperfection and misery; necessary, indeed, towards carrying on the business of the universe, but very grievous and burdensome to those individuals who, by their misconduct, are obliged to submit to it.10

The reward for obedience to the divine will is here characterized not as eternal heavenly bliss but as elevation in the next life to a higher rank in the Chain of Being, one above that occupied by mere mortals; and the torments of hell are here translated into "a state of greater imperfection or misery." It is to be noted that in this

merger of the Great Chain—which, by its nature, does not allow movement from one rank to another—with the Christian view of eternal rewards and punishments, Jenyns, while explicitly placing humankind in one rank, seems to be implicitly presupposing that there are not different ranks of being or perfection within the species. For the role of earthly existence as a "school of probation or education," as a testing ground for souls, would make sense in a Christian culture only if souls, qua souls, were on an equal footing, and it would be vitiated if differential rankings were handed out before the test had even begun. All this would seem to be consistent with the.traditional Christian idea that social stratification, however necessary or laudable it might be, is not tied to ontological differentia or to the eternal disposition of souls.

Johnson, despite the fact that he repeatedly casts doubt on the general plausibility of the Great Chain, does not offer a critique of the passage from the Free Inquiry just quoted; indeed, he himself quotes it approvingly.11 Perhaps Johnson sees the notions that heavenly reward is elevation to a higher rank on the Chain of Being and that infernal punishment is relegation to a lower one as basically consistent with the doctrines of heaven and hell and is here willing to pass over Jenyns's metaphysical special pleading. In any event, since Johnson believes in the necessity of social subordination as well as in its independence from the eternal disposition of souls, he has reason to be tolerant of Jenyns's formulation.

He is much less tolerant, however, when Jenyns, elsewhere in his treatise, undertakes to defend enforced ignorance as an opiate of the poor. Jenyns had invoked divine providence in justifying depriving the poor of education: "Ignorance, . . . the appointed lot of all born to poverty, and the drudgeries of life, is the only opiate capable of infusing that insensibility which can enable them to endure the miseries of the one, and the fatigues of the other. It is a cordial administered by the gracious hand of providence; of which they ought never to be deprived by an ill-judged and improper education. It is the basis of all subordination, the support of society" (FIE, 49-50).12

In response, Johnson undertakes, in effect, to remind us of the availability of another opiate besides ignorance—namely, the "knowledge" that comprises Christianity's traditional consolation:

Concerning the portion of ignorance necessary to make the condition of the lower classes of mankind safe to the publick, and tolerable to themselves, both morals and policy exact a nicer inquiry than will be very soon or very easily made. There is, undoubtedly, a degree of knowledge which will direct a man to refer all to providence, and to acquiesce in the condition with which omnisdent goodness has determined to allot him; to consider this world as a phantom, that must soon glide from before his eyes, and the distresses and vexations that encompass him, as dust scattered in his path, as a blast that chills him for a moment, and passes off for ever. ("Review," 55-56)

Johnson's invocation of the traditional view that this earthly existence is a transitory phantom is not so resolutely otherworldly as it seems. For Johnson also insists on the need for some degree of social mobility. Just as all souls need to be equally eligible for salvation, people, in their earthly existence, Johnson feels, should not be condemned to inescapable poverty. Although Jenyns refrained from claiming that the imposition of this opiate on the poor is connected to their intrinsic inferiority, Johnson recognizes that to condemn the poor to ignorance is, so to speak, to lock them into their social status for all eternity:

Though it should be granted, that those who are born to poverty and drudgery, should not be deprived, by an improper education, of the opiate of ignorance; even this concession will not be of much use to direct our practice, unless it be determined, who are those that are born to poverty. To entail irreversible poverty upon generation after generation, only because the ancestor happened to be poor, is, in itself, cruel, if not unjust, and is wholly contrary to the maxims of a commercial nation, which always suppose and promote a rotation of property, and offer every individual a chance of mending his condition by his diligence. ("Review" 56-57)

Johnson thus embraces the traditional notion that earthly poverty, like the phenomenal world itself, is a mere phantom, a blast that chills for but a moment; but he also embraces an early version of the capitalist dogma that poverty can be overcome by education and hard work. The wretchedness of poverty, in this double perspective, is something essentially escapable, whether in this world or in the next. Seen in this light, social mobility appears as a secular pendant to the equality of souls before God.

Johnson's rejection of Jenyns's justification of the opiate of ignorance, along with his rejection of the doctrine of the Great Chain of Being, does not imply any opposition on Johnson's part to the necessity of social hierarchy. There is no doubt that Johnson, like most of his literary and philosophical contemporaries,13 believed that subordination is a precondition for social harmony and that a leveling of social distinctions would give rise to discord and strife.14 What Johnson could not accept is a justification of social inequality that told individuals that their class status was necessary and inescapable. The Great Chain of Being, of course, justifies the cosmic rank of humankind in general precisely in fatalistic terms—insofar as one's rank is fixed simply because that particular link in the chain needed to be filled—and provides metaphysical arguments against any attempt to raise oneself above the rank to which one has been assigned. Johnson's unease with a caste system is thus consonant with his rejection of the Great Chain.

It might seem as if Jenyns, conversely, embraced both the Great Chain and a fatalistic caste system because the two are part of the same general way of looking at things. But it needs to be noted that even Jenyns himself, while embracing the Great Chain and many other ideas that Johnson considered dubious or silly,15 and while treating the poor in terms that Johnson found objectionably fatalistic, still held back from arguing that social inequality was grounded in the ontology of the Great Chain. He refrained, that is, from claiming that those who are higher in the social order are more perfect or closer to God.

Given the disjunction between the Christian providential justification of social inequality—with its equal access to eternal bliss—and the rigid inequality decreed by the Principle of Plenitude, we may observe that Jenyns employed two different techniques in bringing two traditions of legitimation together.16 Sometimes, as in the notion that, after death, the virtuous soul rises in the Chain of Being and the vicious soul descends, he attempts to bridge the differences. In other instances, the ones that elicit most of Johnson's scorn, he simply ignores the differences.

Meanwhile, Johnson, as we have seen, does not merely content himself with attacking Jenyns from the standpoint of orthodoxy. Rather, while he does not offer his own solution for the general problem of evil, he does proffer positive justifications for social

inequality—by cunningly linking the upward mobility of the soul in the next world to an upward mobility of the body in this one. By thus linking Christian eschatology to the worldly social mobility that is consonant with the needs of a "commercial nation," Johnson is bridging metaphysical gaps—between a world that is a mere phantom and a world in which the requirements of commerce are of pressing importance—that are not less formidable than those faced by Jenyns. But he does so in a manner that is more ideologically consistent than what is found in Jenyns's Free Inquiry. In place of Jenyns's more or less feudal conception of social hierarchy, in a word, Johnson offers a capitalistic fluidity that both expresses Christian sympathy with human misery and legitimates the structural inequality of the status quo.17

POPE, VOLTAIRE, AND THE CONFLICT OF THEODICIES

I said that Jenyns went further than Pope in attempting to reconcile the Great Chain with Christianity. In fact, with regard to the question of social inequality it seems fair to say that Pope makes no attempt at all to reconcile the two systems. I mentioned earlier that Pope's discussion of social inequality and his discussion of the Great Chain appear at opposite ends of the poem. More striking than this physical separation is the fact that the attack on generic pride and the attendant exhortation to accept one's place in the Chain of Being rest on premises that differ radically from the premises that underlie the later exhortation to accept one's place in the social hierarchy. Humanity is exhorted, in the first epistle, to accept limitations as necessary; in the fourth epistle, we learn that limitations that appear to result from social inequality are, in some significant sense, illusory.

Whereas Johnson sought to assuage the wretchedness of poverty by considering it something that could be transcended, whether by the prospect of eternity or by the prospect of some degree of social mobility, Pope undertook to deny that poverty was wretched. In his defense of social inequality in the fourth epistle of the Essay, Pope claims that there is a perfectly equal distribution of human happiness in this life.18 Although "Some are, and must be greater than the rest," anyone who

infers from hence

That such are happier, shocks all common sense.
Heav'n to Mankind impartial we confess,
If all are equal in their Happiness:
But mutual wants this Happiness increase;
All Nature's diff'rence keeps all Nature's peace.
Condition, circumstance is not the thing;
Bliss is the same in subject or in king.
(Essay , 4, 51-58)

Indeed, the equitable distribution of human happiness is tied to what seems to be a claim that the human species is a single unified entity: "Heav'n breathes thro' ev'ry member of the whole / One common blessing, as one common soul" (4, 61-62).

Now, one could assume that this expression of the unity of the human race indicates that Pope sees the Great Chain as not functioning within species.19 To console the dispossessed by assuring them that they are no less happy than those who rule over them in power and opulence is to run the danger of defying plausibility, but at least this sort of legitimation has the advantage—provided that one can accept it as true—of leaving no doubt as to why it ought to be consoling. If those who are envied by the dispossessed are indeed no happier than the dispossessed themselves, then it is perfectly clear why one is being asked to accept one's lot.

Under the scheme of cosmic optimism, on the other hand, even if I accept the claim that the overall scheme of goodness requires that someone fill the rank that I am occupying, it's not clear why this fact should keep me from repining over the fact that someone else has not been given my assignment and that I have not been assigned to a higher rank in the Great Chain. In other words, once one accepts the Principle of Plenitude, then it is clear why the anthropocentric hypothesis needs to be rejected: if the Chain of Being is the necessary result of perfect divine benevolence, then it must be factually incorrect that the world was made for the particular benefit of humankind. The attack on the querulousness of generic pride, on the other hand, is a purely moral one, whose force is less easily grasped. For even if we are constrained to recognize that we occupy a middle state between animals and angels, why should that prevent us from wishing that we could occupy a higher state? Christian eschatology, after all, would seem

to be premised on precisely such a wish. This gap between cosmic necessity and Christian psychology is precisely what Jenyns would try to close by substituting for heaven an elevation on the Chain of Being as the reward for a virtuous life.

These considerations suggest why Pope's justification of social inequality on the ground that there is an equal distribution of happiness might be more consoling than a justification based on the cosmic notion that differences in degree are necessary. But although, as I have indicated, Pope stresses the cosmic necessity of gradation in the first epistle and the illusory nature of gradation in the fourth epistle, he does not altogether ignore the concept of divine necessity in his justification of social inequality. Instead, he tries to have it both ways. Thus the passages just quoted, to the effect that differences in happiness are illusory and that humanity receives "One common blessing, as one common soul" are prefaced by a statement of the necessity of social hierarchy:

ORDER is Heav'n's first law; and this confest,
Some are, and must be greater than the rest,
More rich, more wise. (Essay, 4, 49-51)

Since Pope does not indicate that these necessary differences in status correspond to ontological differences, we cannot ascertain whether the Chain of Being is here being extended to the social realm. Indeed, Pope's formulation is too vague to allow us to say just what kind of order and just what kind of necessity require that there be social hierarchy. This vagueness allows Pope to use both kinds of justification for inequality without having to worry about their precise relationship to traditional Christian eschatology.20

It was once a popular sport for theologians and philosophers to examine the degree to which Pope was guilty of departing from orthodoxy or from coherence and consistency. Our focus on the ideological uses of divergent theodicies yields a rather different picture. It suggests that Pope was trying to get as much mileage as possible from each competing conception while avoiding any overt clashes between them. Thus, while the Great Chain of Being might have resonances that justify social hierarchy, Pope can exploit those resonances while stopping short of allowing the concept of a hierarchy of being to subvert the traditional Christian idea of an equality of souls before God.21

Having seen how Pope, in order to avoid an overt clash between two separate and potentially antagonistic traditions, stops short of merging his defense of social hierarchy with his invocation of the Great Chain, we are now in a position to examine Voltaire's "version" of Pope's essay. I have been using quotation marks in referring to Voltaire's Discours as a "version" of Pope's poem because, while the similarities between the two works leap out for the casual reader, the less apparent differences will turn out to have profound importance for this study.

The title of the "Premier discours" is "De l'égalité des conditions," and in it Voltaire sets out to argue that "Les mortels sont égaux; leur masque est different'(DVH, 379). Humans suffer from the same limitations and have equal access to happiness regardless of their social station. This claim gives rise to an objection that Voltaire puts into the mouth of an incredulous interlocutor, an objection based on the conventional perception that differences in social status result in differences in happiness:

N'est-il aucun état plus fortuné qu'un autre?
Le ciel a-t-il rangé les mortels au niveau?
……………………………
Sous un triple mortier n'est-on pas plus heureux
Qu'un clerc enseveli dans un greffe poudreux?
(DVH, 379-80)

Is it that no station is happier than another, that heaven has placed all mortals at the same level? . . . Isn't M. le President happier under his triple mortier than a clerk entombed in his dusty cubicle?

Voltaire's immediate response to this objection is premised on God's goodness:

Non: Dieu serait injuste; et la sage nature
Dans ses dons partagés garde plus de mesure.
Pense-t-on qu'ici-bas son aveugle faveur
Au char de la fortune attache le bonheur?
(DVH, 380)

No! God would be unjust; wise nature, in parcelling out its gifts, has a greater sense of equity. Can one think that here below, God makes happiness dependent on the blind course of fate?

If differences in happiness were linked to differences in social

status, then, as Pope had argued, God's goodness would be thrown into question. Hence such differences in happiness must be illusory.

Voltaire's discussion of the equal distribution of human happiness certainly sounds very much like a French version of Pope's discussion of the equality of happiness. Moreover, as in Pope's poem, this discussion is separated from the discussion of the Great Chain of Being. In Voltaire's case, however, the order is reversed: the discussion of human happiness takes place at the beginning ("Premier discours"), while the discussion of the Great Chain and the critique of anthropocentrism and querulousness takes place toward the end ("Sixième discours").

More puzzling, perhaps, than this difference is the fact that Voltaire's discussion of the equality of happiness suppresses the Popean assertion that social hierarchy is a necessary function of divine order. The reason I say that Voltaire's omission amounts to a "suppression" is that an earlier version of Voltaire's poem, from which he had quoted in a letter of 13 November 1738, had included the notion that people were morally obliged to remain in the social rank to which they have been assigned:

Quiqonque en dirigeant la course de sa vie
Ecoute prudemment la voix de son génie,
N'entend point dans son coeur les cris de repentir:
Enfermé dans sa sphere il n'en doit point sortir.22

Whoever directs the course of his life by listening prudently to the voice of his nature will not hear the cries of discontent in his heart. He should stay in the sphere where he has been confined.

These lines certainly seem to imply that differences in rank are necessary or, at least, that they ought not to be challenged. But why does Voltaire omit them from the final version of his poem? After all, since Voltaire, unlike Pope, is not concerned with protecting any pretensions to Christian orthodoxy, he would seem to have less need than Pope to avoid the claim that social hierarchy is necessary or that it is somehow implicated with the Great Chain.

But it turns out that Voltaire, while unconcerned with Christian orthodoxy, is very concerned to protect his newfound epistemological orthodoxy. And the idea of the Great Chain in particular, and that of necessity grounded in abstract reasoning in general, is a threat to that orthodoxy. Accordingly, as we will see in some detail

below, Voltaire, in his "Sixième discours,' does not embrace the doctrine of the Great Chain but attempts to circumvent it; that is, he attempts precisely to repeat Pope's attacks on cosmic anthropocentrism and querulousness without invoking the metaphysical system on which these attacks are based.

Voltaire's departures from his poetic model point to a very significant feature of his logical and rhetorical strategy, both in the Discours en vers sur l'homme and elsewhere. Our excurses on the relationships between cosmic hierarchy and social hierarchy have prepared us for the notion that Voltaire's discomfort with the Great Chain will not necessarily entail any questioning of hierarchical social structures in general or the necessity of poverty in particular.23 In fact, I will argue that Voltaire's departure from Pope amounts to an attempt to produce a more epistemologically respectable justification of both hierarchy and poverty. But before we can examine his strategy, we need to understand the dilemma that it attempts to resolve. Here some background will be useful.

THE REJECTION OF HYPOTHESIS

In the fourteenth Lettre philosophique, Voltaire capped his attack on Descartes's philosophy with the withering charge that it was nothing more than a "roman ingénieux."24 Voltaire's famous rejection of Descartes in favor of Newton and Locke involved more than a preference for a physics of attraction over one of vortices or for a psychology of the tabula rasa over one of innate ideas. What Voltaire admired about the revolutionary English thinkers, at least as much as their results, was their intellectual method—or what he took to be their method. Descartes uncovered the errors of antiquity, we are told in the thirteenth Lettre philosophique, only to replace them with errors of his own invention. For, like many other thinkers, Descartes was blinded by the esprit systématique.25

From the point of view of empiricist philosophy, the esprit systématique —or the esprit de système as it came to be called—is generally characterized as a taste for rationalistic metaphysics, with its attendant habit of intricate reasoning from dubious first principles.26 But in Voltaire's mind, and in the minds of many of his contemporaries, these faults were intimately connected to the fault of hypothesizing.27 Hypothesizing and speculative reasoning in fact were often

seen not as two different sorts of deviations from responsible method but as one and the same. To hypothesize was precisely to engage in speculative reasoning, to fall into the esprit de système. This general conception of improper intellectual method is clearly reflected in Johnson's definition of hypothesis: "A supposition; a system formed upon some principle not proved."28

From the perspective of the late-twentieth-century philosophy of science, this conflation of hypothesis and speculative metaphysics seems odd. For hypothesis formation has come to be seen as the fundamental imaginative component of scientific discovery. Nor was the eighteenth century unanimous on the issue. In 1765, for example, we find the author of the Encyclopédie article "Hy-pothèse" insisting on the indispensability of hypotheses:

Les hypotheses doivent donc trouver place dans les sciences, puisqu'elles sont propres á faire dècouvrir la vérité et à nous donner de nouvelles vues. . . .
Il y a deux excès à èviter au sujet des hypotheses, celui de les estimer trop, et celui de les proscrire entièrement. Descartes, qui avait établi une bonne pattie de sa philosophie sur des hypothèses , mit tout le monde savant dans le goût de ces hypothèses, et l'on ne fut pas longtemps sans tomber dans celui des fictions. Newton et surtout ses disciples, se sont jettés dans l'extrémité contraire.29

Hypotheses therefore must play a role in the sciences since they allow us to discover the truth and afford us new perspectives. . . .
With regard to hypotheses, there are two extremes to be avoided, that of valuing them too much and that of banishing them altogether. Descartes, who based a good portion of his philosophy upon hypotheses, gave the entire learned world a taste for these hypotheses, which gave way before long to a taste for fictions. Newton, and especially his disciples, have fallen into the opposite extreme.

For Voltaire, however, whose admiration for Newton was much less qualified than that of the anonymous encyclopedist, hypothesizing was not part of responsible scientific method; it was its utter antithesis. Francis Bacon's Novum Organum had proposed an inductive method that would move gradually, step by step, from the particulars of experience to more and more general explanatory axioms. One would diligently begin with observation and experimentation, and the general explanations would eventually emerge as the reward for diligence. This careful procedure, based on sense

perception and the resistance of any temptation to hypothesize, was seen to have borne its greatest fruit in Newton's optics and celestial mechanics. For Newton was an avowed Baconian, who had explicitly declared "hypotheses non fingo." To hypothesize was to ignore the lessons to be learned from observing reality, and to presume to invent one's own reality.

Since this pure-induction model of scientific method has come to be seen as a distortion of what really goes on in scientific discovery,30 contemporary scholars have set about to argue that Bacon wasn't really an inductivist31 and that when Newton seemed to be rejecting the feigning of hypotheses, he must have really meant something else.32 But in the case of Voltaire, at least, any such scholarly revisionism would seem to be doomed to failure. For whatever Newton really meant, Voltaire seems to have taken him literally and to have seen his superiority over Descartes to reside precisely in his refusal to "feign hypotheses." Writing against the Cartesian theory of tourbillons, in his Elémens de la philosophie de Newton, Voltaire asserts:

Il n'y a pas la moindre experience, pas la moindre analogie dans les choses que nous connaissons un peu, qui puisse fonder une pré-somption légère en faveur de ce tourbillon de matière subtile: ainsi de cela seul que ce système est une pure hypothèse, il doit être rejeté.33

There is not the slightest experimental evidence, not the faintest analogy among things with which we are even slightly familiar, that would allow us to grant even the slimmest credibility to this vortex of subtle matter: this theory must be rejected for the simple reason that it is purely hypothetical.

A few pages later, to explain why hypotheses lead into error, why they need to be rejected, Voltaire employs the metaphor of the search for the source of a river:

N'allons donc point d'abord imaginer des causes et faire des hypotheses: c'est le stir moyen de s'égarer; suivons pas h pas ce qui se passe réelement dans la nature. Nous sommes des voyageurs arrives à l'embouchure d'un fleuve: il faut le remonter avant que d'imaginer où est la source.34

Let us not proceed then by first imagining causes and making hypotheses; that is the sure way to go astray; let us follow step by

step that which actually happens in nature. We are travelers who have arrived at the mouth of a river; our task is to follow the river to its source, not to imagine where the source may be.

The notion that responsible intellectual method should resemble the tracing of a river from its mouth to its source illustrates the seductiveness, for Voltaire, of the inductive model, according to which results are gradual and inevitable. It follows that the rejection of hypothesis is the rejection of imaginative guesswork, which attempts, presumptuously, to leap over the painstaking efforts of a conscientious investigator.

Consistent with this view of things, Voltaire's rejection of Descartes in the Lettres philosophiques centers on the taint of imagination. Descartes was born with a vivid and powerful imagination, Voltaire tells us, which "ne put se cacher même dans ses ouvrages philosophiques."35 This would account for the English view of the difference between Descartes and Newton (as it is characterized by Voltaire)—"le premier était un rêveur. . . . l'autre était un sage"36 —an opinion that is soon followed by the one quoted above, that Descartes's philosophy was nothing more than a "roman ingénieux."

VOLTAIRE'S DILEMMA: METHOD VERSUS METAPHYSICS

We have seen that in the "Sixième discours" of the Discours en vers sur l'homme, Voltaire endorses Pope's condemnation of generic pride, a condemnation that was grounded on the doctrine of the Great Chain of Being. The Great Chain, however, flies in the face of Voltaire's Newtonianism in more than one respect. Newton's theory of gravitation, unlike Descartes's theory of vortices and the older Aristotelian physics, postulates a universe that is not a plenum but that contains empty space, and a principle of attraction that, accordingly, can operate across vacuums. The Great Chain of Being, which presupposes plenitude and the absence of gaps, on the other hand, may be seen to be tied to the older conception of physics. And indeed, when Voltaire eventually came to reject the Chain of Being outright, he, like Johnson, would do so partly on the ground that it was inconsistent with the Newtonian physics of vacuity.37 But when he wrote the Discours, Voltaire had not yet rejected the

Great Chain, and although he had attacked the Cartesian plenum at length in the Elémens de la philosophie de Newton,38 he was not yet ready to bring the critique of the plenum to bear on the philosophy of cosmic optimism.

Although the Voltaire of the Discours is not yet ready to discard the Great Chain of Being or to confront its relationship to Newtonian physics, he is acutely troubled by its relationship to Newtonian and Baconian epistemology. The Chain is not observable; it is not verifiable by any experimental procedures. It is the product of a grandiose leap beyond the data of experience.

Voltaire's view of intellectual method, as we have seen, does not allow him to accept this sort of reasoning. He would like to be able to invoke the Great Chain in support of his view of human nature, but he cannot. The poet challenges himself by means of an interlocutor:

"Montre-moi, si tu peux, cette chaîne invisible
Du monde des esprits et du monde sensible;
Cet ordre si cach<A0233. de rant d'êtres divers,
Que Pope après Platon crut voir dans l'univers."

Show me, if you can, this invisible chain, stretching from the spiritual world to the one that we perceive, this hidden order, made up of so many diverse beings, which Pope, following Plato, thought that he could see.

But he cannot answer this challenge:

Vous me pressez en vain; cette vaste science,
Ou passe ma portée, ou me force au silence.
Mon esprit, reserré sous le compas français,
N'a point la liberté des Grecs et des Anglais.

You press me in vain; this vast knowledge is either beyond my ken or humbles me into silence. My mind, enclosed by narrow French horizons, is not as freewheeling as the minds of the Greeks and the English.

Unable to rise to the metaphysical heights of Pope, Voltaire is forced into silence: "Pope adroit de tout dire, et moi je dois me taire" (DVH, 415; 416) (Pope can say whatever he pleases, but I must hold my tongue).

This, then, is Voltaire's dilemma: he accepts Pope's view of

human nature and of humanity's place in the order of things, but he is prevented from setting forth the theoretical foundation upon which this view is built. If he remains silent, he leaves his entire poem without its philosophical justification. But how can he embrace Pope's metaphysical hypothesis unless, like Pope, he hypothesizes?

Voltaire's solution comes immediately after the line just quoted, "moi je dois me taire," and it comes in the form of a fable. The fable has as its most significant antecedent a couplet from Pope's Essay: "While Man exclaims, 'See all things for my use!' / 'See man for mine!' replies a pampered goose" (Essay, 3, 44-45). While Voltaire's elaboration of this conceit follows Pope in undermining the anthropocentric hypothesis, it does so in such a way as to avoid asserting the hypothesis that stands in opposition to the foolish self-importance of men and geese—namely, the hypothesis of the Chain of Being.

Purporting to be a translation, by a Jesuit in Peking, of a Chinese book, the fable deals in the first place with various animals that think the world was created for their benefit. The mouse thinks that

"Ces montagnes de lard, éternels aliments,
Sont pour nous en ces lieux jusqu'à ia fin des temps."

"These mountains of bacon, endless supply of food, have been placed here for our everlasting benefit."

and that mice are God's masterpiece, "la fin, le but de tes ouvrages." As for cats, they have been put on earth for the benefit of mice:

"Les chats sont dangereux et prompts à nous manger;
Mais c'est pour nous instruire et pour nous corriger."
(DVH, 416)

"Cats are dangerous and eager to eat us; but this serves to instruct us and to correct our faults."

The mouse is followed by other animals who make the same sorts of claims for their respective species. The ass's claim that the world was made for the benefit of asses is based largely on the fact that the members of his species are served by humans:

"L'homme est né mon esclave, il me panse, il me ferre,
Il m'étrille, il me lave, il prévient roes désirs,
Il bâtit mon sérail, il conduit mes plaisirs."

"Man is born to serve me. He grooms me, he gives me shoes, he combs me, he washes me, he anticipates my desires, he provides me with a harem, he arranges my pleasures."

This human being who grooms him and ministers to his needs is seen by the pampered ass as envious of the gifts that nature has conferred upon asses:

"Et je ris, quand je vois cet esclave orgueilleux
Envier l'heureux don que j'ai reçu des cieux."

"And I laugh when I see this proud slave envying the blessed gift that I have received from heaven."

The series of presumptuous animals is capped with the appearance of man, who makes his anthropocentric claims, reminiscent of those that Pope had put into the mouth of pride:

"Je suis puissant et sage;
Cieux, terres, éléments, tout est pour mon usage:
L'océan fut formé pour porter mes vaisseaux;
Les vents sont mes courriers, les astres mes flambeaux.
Ce globe qui des nuits blanchit les sombres voiles
Croît, décroît, fuit, revient, et préside aux étoiles:
Moi, je préside à tout." (DVH, 416; 417)

I am powerful and wise; the sky, the earth, the elements, everything exists for my benefit. The ocean was formed to carry my ships. The winds are my couriers, the stars my torches. Like the orb that brightens the dark veils of night, that waxes, wanes, departs, and returns, that rules over the stars, so do I rule over everything.

At this point in Voitaire's "récit veritable," we are in a position to see how the "Chinese" fable represents a resolution of Voltaire's dilemma. It must first be noted, however, that the resolution cannot lie in the mere fictionality of the fable. For according to the traditional view, a fable's fictionality is merely a veneer over its deeper philosophical truth. Houdar de la Motte, in his Discours sur la fable (1719), put the matter as follows:

Il faut donc se proposer d'abord quelque verité à faire entendre; et c'est l'avantage particulier de la fable d'y forcer, pour ainsi dire, son auteur. En beaucoup d'autres ouvrages on peut se déterminer parce que les faits ont d'agréable ou de touchant . . . sans aucune vûe d'y renfermer quelque instruction. Mais ce serait une chose monstrueuse d'imaginer une fable sans dessein d'instruire. Son essence est de . . . signifier . . . quelqu'autre chose que ce qu'elle dit à la lettre. . . . La fable est une philosophie déguisée, qui ne badine que pour instruire, et qui instruit toujours d'autant mieux qu'elle amuse.39

One must begin by having in mind some truth that one wishes to transmit; the spedal advantage of the fable is that it demands this, as it were, of the author. With many other genres, it is enough for the author to have in mind some incidents that are charming or touching . . . without any design to include some sort of lesson. But to imagine a fable that is not designed to instruct is to imagine something monstrous. A fable's very essence is to . . . signify . . . something other than what it says literally. . . . The fable is a disguised philosophy, one that is fun only in order to be instructive and that is more instructive than it is amusing.

What the fable says "á la lettre' is, of course, what it says about particular characters and events. The reader of La Fontaine's "Le Corbeau et le Renard," for example, recognizes that the particular characters and events are fictive, that statements about the fox and the crow and their activities do not ask to be believed. But the reader also recognizes that when the fox makes general assertions about the nature of flattery, these assertions are meant to be seen as the author's own and as claiming to be true. Thus, the essence of the traditional fable is its implicit or explicit generalizations about the world.

Since the fable was conventionally recognized as a vehicle for making general statements that purported to be true, Voltaire could not avoid hypothesizing simply by placing his hypotheses in a fable. To resolve his dilemma, he needed to produce a special sort of fable, one that not only refrained from claiming to be true with regard to its particular assertions about individual characters and events but that even went so far as to refrain from claiming to be true with regard to its larger hypotheses, its generalizations about the world. And it needed to do so in such a way as to underline Voltaire's sympathy for Pope's hypothesis. It needed, in short, to support a hypothesis without hypothesizing. Voltaire began to

develop such a fable, though in a tentative and partial form, in the "Chinese tale" that we have been examining.

We can more readily understand the significance of Voltaire's procedure if we compare his view of hypothesis to the modern one. As I indicated earlier, modern theories of the role of hypothesis in scientific or, more generally, intellectual method, while insisting that hypotheses are indispensable, would not challenge Voltaire's contention that a hypothesis is an imaginative leap, a fiction. According to W. V. Quine and J. S. Ullian, for example, "What we try to do in framing a hypothesis is to explain some otherwise unexplained happenings by inventing a plausible story, a plausible description or history of a relevant portion of the world."40 A conventional extension of this view would be that the best hypothesis is the best story, the one that is most plausible. Accordingly, an efficient way to attack a given hypothesis would be by offering a better hypothesis, a second story that is more plausible than the first.

But a more plausible hypothesis, in addition to attacking a prior hypothesis, may also advance its own truth claims. Rather than merely undermining the other hypothesis, it may offer to supplant it. Such a double function, however, would be unwelcome, if, like Voltaire, one considered hypothesizing to be a violation of proper intellectual method. It is also possible, however, for a second hypothesis to be no more and no less plausible than the hypothesis that it is contesting. Such a counterhypothesis, while making no truth claims of its own, would undermine the plausibility of the original hypothesis. For if two opposing hypotheses are equally plausible, then there are no rational grounds for accepting either one as an adequate explanation of the data. Thus, one can undermine a hypothesis without seriously offering one's own alternative and without accepting the validity of hypothetical reasoning.

In the first part of his fable, the part described thus far, Voltaire attacks the hypothesis that the world and everything in it exist for the benefit of humankind. He does so by inventing other stories, counterhypotheses, to the effect that the world exists for the sake of mice, or ducks, or sheep, or asses. The poet does not subscribe to any of these stories; rather, he is suggesting that it is no more reasonable to believe that the world was created for humans than to believe that it was created for mice or asses. The stories serve to cancel one another out and thus to undermine the plausibility of the anthropocentric hypothesis.

The sort of fable that emerges from my analysis is one that is fictional not only at the level at which fables are conventionally fictional namely, the level of assertions about particular characters and events—but also at the deeper level at which fables conventionally make assertions about the world. This deeper fiction, however, while not purporting to be true, purports to be no less true than some other assertions about the world, which it thereby undermines. Such fables I call counterhypothetical fictions.41

Voltaire's counterhypothetical fictions, his stories about presumptuous animals, allow him, as we have seen, to attack the anthropocentric hypothesis without implicating himself in the crime of framing positive hypotheses. But they do nothing against the other hypothesis that Voltaire, following Pope, wished to attack—namely, the querulous view that humans could be and ought to be free of their limitations and hence happier than they are. For although anthropocentric claims are rendered ridiculous by the equally plausible claims of the representatives of other species, the assorted animals say nothing about what they could be or ought to be, and their pronouncements have no logical or rhetorical force vis-à-vis human dissatisfaction. When, therefore, the human character, after making his anthropocentric claim, goes on to say, "Je ne suis point encor ce que je devrais être" (I am not yet that which I should be), he steps outside the counterhypothetical structure of the fable.

In undertaking to answer this complaint, and a longer version of it spoken by another character, the remainder of the "Chinese Tale" employs the procedures of traditional fables; it has characters who, speaking for the author, utter general assertions that purport to be true. Thus the Chinese divinity Tien responds to the man's complaint by pointing out that it is he, the god, for whom all else has been made. Everything is as it should be, he declares:

"D'un parfait assemblage instruments imparfaits,
Dans votre rang places demeurez satisfaits."

"An imperfect part of a perfect whole, you should be content with the rank in which you have been placed."

But despite this injunction, a Chinese philosopher sees fit to complain about man's place in the scheme of things:

"Pourquoi suis-je en un point reserré par le temps?
Mes jours devraient aller par delà vingt mille ans;

Ma taille pour le moins dut avoir cent coudées;
D'où vient que je ne puls, plus prompt que mes idées,
Voyager dans la lune, et réformer son cours?
Pourquoi faut-il dormir un grand tiers de mes jours?
Pourquoi ne puis-je, au gré de ma pudique flamme,
Faire au moins en trois mois cent enfants à ma femme?
Pourquoi fus-je en un jour si las de ses attraits?"
(DVH, 417; 417-18)

Why should I be confined to a moment of time? I should be able to live twenty thousand years and more. I should be at least a hundred cubits tall. Why should I not be able, in the twinkle of an eye, to travel to the moon, and to change its orbit? Why should I have to sleep through a full third of my life? Why shouldn't my wife be able to gratify my modest passion and have a hundred or more of my children in three months' time? Why must I lose my desire for her after only a day?

In response, the exasperated god has an angel instruct the philosopher as to why things are the way they are. The angel explains, in words rather reminiscent of the Leibnizian doctrine of compossibility, that to fulfill the philosopher's grandiose desires would not be consistent with other features of the universe, that the earth, for example, would not be able to provide nourishment for the gigantic creatures that the philosopher would have humans become. In sum, the angel explains

"Que l'homme n'est point fait pour ces vastes désirs . . .
Que le travail, les maux, la mort sont nécessaires."
(DVH, 418)

That man is not made for such extravagant desires . . . that toil, disease, and death are his necessary lot.

Thus, through a Chinese god and his angel in a "Chinese" fable, Voltaire has, without explicitly mentioning the Great Chain of Being, nonetheless introduced important aspects of the speculative theodicy upon which both Leibniz and Pope had based their views of human nature. And in so doing, he has dropped the counter-hypothetical procedure by which he had, in the first part of his fable, begun to resolve his dilemma.

Now, I have already pointed out that Voltaire's counterhypothetical fiction of the proud animals is effective only against the anthropocentric hypothesis and not against the querulous hypothesis that human beings could be (and ought to be) free of limitations and

hence happier than they are. It may be that, in the absence of an appropriate counterhypothesis to deal with this second hypothesis, Voltaire felt the need to fall back on philosophizing through the procedure of conventional fables—even though this procedure compromised his attempt to avoid hypothesizing. But, without committing ourselves to speculations concerning Voltaire's motivations for this shift, we may observe that if Voltaire could have devised a better story, a counterhypothetical fiction that could undermine both uncongenial hypotheses at once, there would have been no need to fall back on positive hypothesizing. With such a fiction, the resolution of the dilemma of the Discours would be complete. And it is precisely such a fiction that we find in Micromégas.

THE DILEMMA RESOLVED

Ira Wade has argued in some detail that Micromégas was the first Conte philosophique, having been written in 1739, at Cirey.42 If Wade is right, then Micromégas would have come at the end of the period during which Voltaire had labored over Newton, metaphysics, and intellectual method and only a few months after the completion of the Discours sur l'homme. Whether or not Wade is right, there seems to be no doubt that by July 1739 Voltaire had sent Prince Friedrich of Prussia a manuscript entitled Voyage du Baron de Gangan and that this manuscript was, to some extent at least, a forerunner of the Micromégas that was finally published in 1752.43

But whatever the temporal distance between the Discours and Micromégas, the logical connection between the two is striking and unmistakable. In Micromégas we find not only the culmination of Voltaire's progression from the rejection of hypothesis, on the grounds that it is mere fiction, to the adoption of fiction as counterhypothesis but also a recapitulation of this entire progression.

Despite their prodigious size and their multitudinous sense organs, both Micromégas and his relatively dwarfish Saturnian traveling companion at first manifest the foolish habit of hypothesizing (concerning, appropriately enough, human nature), instead of looking carefully at the facts:

Le Saturnien et le Sirien s'épuiserent en conjectures: après beaucoup de raisonnements fort ingénieux et fort incertains, il en fallut venir aux faits. (Micromégas , 2, ll. 34-37)44

The Saturnian and the Sirian wore themselves out in conjecturing; after a good deal of very ingenious and very inconclusive reasoning, they were forced to come back to the facts of experience.

Once the travelers arrive on the planet Earth, it is the Saturnian who makes judgments "quelquefois un peu trop vite," who, that is, tends to leap from scanty facts to erroneous hypotheses. Since he could, at first glance, perceive no inhabitants on earth, he decides that the planet is uninhabited (4, ll. 31-33). When, through an improvised microscope, he subsequently manages to see a whale, he decides that the Earth is populated solely by whales; and, being a "grand raisonneur," he goes on to speculate about whether whales have ideas, a will, and other attributes of rational creatures (4, ll. 78-81). Micromégas, on the other hand, rather than speculating, engages in patient observation, by dint of which he determines that there is no reason to believe that whales have souls (4, ll. 83-85). By the time the travelers discover the existence of human beings, and the fact that they are endowed with speech, the Saturnian has finally learned his lesson:

"Je n'ose plus ni croire, ni nier," dit le Nain, "je n'ai plus d'opinion. ll faut tficher d'examiner ces insectes, nous raisonnerons apres." (6, ll. 21-23)

"I no longer dare to affirm or to deny," said the Dwarf; "I no longer have any opinion. We need to examine these insects; we'll reason about them afterward."

Thus Voltaire has dramatized the antipathy toward conjecture, which, in the Discours sur l'homme, had prevented him from embracing the Great Chain of Being. But beyond reminding us of Voltaire's dilemma in the Discours, the story of Micromégas and the Saturnian also reenacts and improves upon the earlier resolution of that dilemma. In the Discours, the anthropocentric hypothesis, that the universe was created for the benefit of humankind, was opposed by the counterhypothesis that the universe was created for the benefit of other earthly species. But, as we have seen, the animals did not dispose of the second manifestation of human pride—namely, the querulous hypothesis that humans could and ought to be larger than they are, to live longer, to be able "voyager dans la lune.' The disposal of this hypothesis required the final

intervention of the philosophizing angel. But in Micromégas we are given precisely those vastly superior versions of humanity, capable of traveling to the moon and of much more; and Voltaire manages to undermine both hypotheses at once with the single counterhypothesis, the single fiction, that, in an infinite universe, the larger the planet, the larger and more intelligent are the inhabitants. The inhabitants of Saturn have seventy-two senses; yet they complain that they are too limited (Micromégas, 2, ll. 19-20). Micromégas is not surprised to hear this:

"car dans notre Globe nous avons près de mille sens, et il nous reste encore je ne sçai quel désir vague, je ne sçai quelle inquietude, qui nous avertit sans cesse que nous sommes peu de chose, et qu'il y a des êtres beaucoup plus parfaits." (2, ll. 25-28)

“for on our planet, we have nearly a thousand senses, and we are still left with a vague, indefinable desire, an indefinable uneasiness, which constantly reminds us that we are not much, and that there are other beings more perfect than we."

Thus, instead of opposing man's complaints about his limitations (and the implicit assumption that he could be happier than he is) with the positive metaphysical claims of the Discours, that everything is as it must be and that our limitations are necessary, Voltaire provides a counterhypothesis, a fiction, according to which those imaginary beings that we imagine to be better off than ourselves see themselves as equally shackled with limitations.

It goes without saying that the same relativistic counterhypoth-esis that seeks to confound the querulous philosopher of the sixth discourse also throws into question the anthropocentric view that the universe was created for the benefit of human beings. To the extent that the story of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is plausible, the hypothesis of creation for the sake of Earthlings becomes implausible.45 Hence, by the time the anthropocentric Thomist, at the end of Micromégas, comes to claim that the Sirian and the Saturnian, along with their suns and stars, were made "uniquement pour l'homme' (Micromégas, 7, 1. 133), there is no need for refutation; the "tire inextinguible' of Micromégas and the Saturnian is sufficient.

Thus a single fiction serving as a counterhypothesis has eliminated the need for the poetic philosophizing that had remained in

the Chinese fable of the sixth Discours sur l'homme .46 The development of the counterhypothetical fiction is now complete.47

CONCLUSION: INDUCTIVIST TORYISM

We saw earlier that although the doctrine of the Great Chain of Being offers a potential cosmic paradigm for social hierarchy and subordination, Voltaire, in his discussion of social inequality in the "Premier Discours," passes up the opportunity to apply this paradigm. He even suppresses his initial impulse to echo Pope's notion that social stratification is a necessity to which one ought to submit. Instead of arguing for the necessity of social difference and subordination, Voltaire limits himself to a reworking of Pope's argument for sameness; like Pope, he claims that all members of society have the same limitations and the same capacity for happiness.

Having in the meantime examined Voltaire's epistemological principles and the counterhypothetical fables with which he attempts to avoid violating those principles, we are finally in a position to place that opening argument in a larger framework. I suggested earlier that Voltaire might have been unwilling to invoke an analogy with cosmic hierarchies in his discussion of society because he was unwilling—for reasons that have since become clear—to invoke cosmic hierarchies in general.

But if we suppose that Voltaire avoided bringing the concepts of cosmic optimism to bear on his defense of the social status quo because he wished not to infect that defense with the esprit systématique, then we must also suppose that he saw his story of the equal distribution of happiness across the social spectrum to be consistent with his Baconian principles. Nor would it be implausible to make such a supposition. For it would be easy to claim that that account of human equality is based on the observation of individual instances and on the gradual and unbroken rise from individual observations to higher levels of generalization. Such a supposition would explain why Voltaire's version of Pope's Essay on Man does not, like Pope's poem, move from the cosmic to the social but begins with the social, and later, in the penultimate discourse, finally grapples uneasily with the cosmic. In a word, Voltaire structures his poem so as to turn Pope's procedure around, to replace a rationalistic discourse that moves from high-flown

principles to the observable world with a discourse that claims to be an empirical one. Seen in this light, the omission of the lines that would have asserted that one ought not to be dissatisfied with one's social station is readily explicable. The canceled lines, while not invoking the Great Chain of Being, appealed to some sort of a priori necessity instead of appealing to the empiricist category of the observable. They therefore needed to be removed for epistemological reasons.

Finally, this analysis, in turn, throws an interesting light on the two counterhypothetical fables that we have examined. In the animal fable of the "Sixième discours," Voltaire undermines man's claim that the world was made for him by putting the same claim into the mouths of other animals. In the counterhypothetical fable of Micromégas, he undermines man's claim that he could and ought to be happier than he is by putting the same claim into the mouths of superior beings. These counterhypothetical fables, while not claiming to be true, duplicate the structure of the fable that does claim to be true—namely, Voltaire's "empirical fable" of psychological sameness cutting across hierarchical divisions. Instead of applying the cosmic model of hierarchy to the social microcosm, Voltaire thus extends his social vision outward into the universe. While withholding any truth claims about these secondary, counterhypothetical fables, Voltaire has them echo the message of his "empirical fable," that there is an observable psychological sameness underlying all material differences. Instead of following Pope in appealing to an ought that is grounded in metaphysical speculation, Voltaire appeals to what purports to be an is, grounded in the observation of the empirical world. He treats submission to the social order as submission to reality, thus making protest seem not only transgressive, but pointless. He thus transforms the traditional appeal to divine will and moral necessity into a "scientific" appeal to the "facts of experience."