[Sidenote: Championed reason against traditions,]
[Sidenote: and undertook to transplant English scientific movement.]
=Voltaire and the Encyclopedists.=--The rationalistic and scientific tendency was chiefly developed by Diderot, Voltaire, Condillac, D’Alembert, and others interested in the production of the French _Encyclopédie_. Of all these ‘encyclopedists’ the most keen and brilliant was Voltaire (1694-1778), who may well serve as the type of the whole movement. With matchless wit and literary skill, in a remarkable range of poems, epistles, epigrams, and other writings, he championed reason against the traditional institutions of State and Church. His chief object of attack was the powerful Roman Catholic Church, which seemed to him to stand seriously in the way of all liberty, individuality, and progress, and the slogan with which he often closed his letters was,--“crush the infamous thing.” The Protestant beliefs he likewise condemned as hysterical and irrational. While an exile in England, as the result of a quarrel with a member of the nobility, he became acquainted with the work of Newton, Harvey, Bacon, Locke, and others (see pp. 164 f.), and undertook to transplant the English scientific movement to France, and make it the basis of a new régime in society, religion, and education.
[Sidenote: Degenerated into skepticism and license.]
The other rationalistic writers had similar doctrines and purposes, and, although details of their ideas are hardly worthy of consideration here, most of them produced treatises upon education. In these they freely criticised the traditional school systems, and proposed new theories of organization, content, and method, which must later have assisted to demolish the existing theory and practice in France. Thus rationalism sought to destroy despotism and superstition, and to establish in their place freedom in action, social justice, and religious toleration. But in casting away the old, it swung to the opposite extreme and often degenerated into skepticism, anarchy, and license. In their fight against despotic ecclesiasticism, the rationalists often failed to distinguish it from Christianity, and they opposed the Church because it was irrational rather than because it was not sincere. They felt that it might have a mission with the masses who were too dull and uneducated to be able to reason. So while rationalism wielded a mighty weapon against the fettering of the human intellect, it cared little about improving the condition of the lower classes, who were sunk in poverty and ignorance, and were universally oppressed.