A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 06

"No person doubts," says Pegna, scholium 47, "that heretics ought to be put to death; but the particular method of execution may well be a topic of discussion." Alphonso de Castro, in the second book of his work, "On the Just Punishment of Heretics," considers it a matter of great indifference whether they are destroyed by the sword, by fire, or any other method; but Hostiensis Godofredus, Covarruvias, Simancas, Roxas, etc., maintain that they ought decidedly to be burned. In fact, as Hostiensis very well expressed it, execution by fire is the punishment appropriate to heresy. We read in St. John, "If any one remain not in me, he shall be cast forth, as a branch, and wither, and men shall gather it and cast it into the fire and burn it." "It may be added," continued 'Pegna, "that the universal custom of the Christian republic is in support of this opinion. Simancas and Roxas decide that heretics ought to be burned alive; but one precaution should always be taken in burning them, which is tearing out the tongue and keeping the mouth perfectly closed, in order to prevent their scandalizing the spectators by their impieties."

Finally, page 369, Eymeric enjoins those whom he addresses to proceed in matters of heresy straight forward, without any wranglings of advocates, and without so many forms and solemnities as are generally employed in criminal cases; that is, to make the process as short as possible, by cutting off useless delays, by going on with the hearing and trial of such causes, even on days when the labors of the other judges are suspended; by disallowing every appeal which has for its apparent object merely a postponement of final judgment; and by not admitting an unnecessary multitude of witnesses, etc.

This revolting system of jurisprudence has simply been put under some restriction in Spain and Portugal; while at Milan the Inquisition itself has at length been entirely suppressed.

SECTION II

The Inquisition is well known to be an admirable and truly Christian invention for increasing the power of the pope and monks, and rendering the population of a whole kingdom hypocrites.

St. Dominic is usually considered as the person to whom the world is principally indebted for this institution. In fact, we have still extant a patent granted by that great saint, expressed precisely in the following words: "I, brother Dominic, reconcile to the Church Roger, the bearer of these presents, on condition of his being scourged by a priest on three successive Sundays from the entrance of the city to the church doors; of his abstaining from meat all his life; of his fasting for the space of three Lents in a year; of his never drinking wine; of his carrying about him the 'san benito' with crosses; of his reciting the breviary every day, and ten paternosters in the course of the day, and twenty at midnight; of his preserving perfect chastity, and of his presenting himself every month before the parish priest, etc.; the whole under pain of being treated as heretical, perjured, and impenitent."

Although Dominic was the real founder of the Inquisition, yet Louis de Paramo, one of the most respectable writers and most brilliant luminaries of the Holy Office, relates, in the second chapter of his second book, that God was the first institutor of the Holy Office, and that he exercised the power of the preaching brethren, that is of the Dominican Order, against Adam. In the first place Adam is cited before the tribunal: "Adam ubi es?" – Adam, where art thou? "And in fact," adds Paramo, "the want of this citation would have rendered the whole procedure of God null."

The dresses formed of skins, which God made for Adam and Eve, were the model of the "san benito," which the Holy Office requires to be worn by heretics. It is true that, according to this argument, God was the first tailor; it is not, however, the less evident, on account of that ludicrous and profane inference, that he was the first inquisitor.

Adam was deprived of the immovable property he possessed in the terrestrial paradise, and hence the Holy Office confiscates the property of all whom it condemns.

Louis de Paramo remarks, that the inhabitants of Sodom were burned as heretics because their crime is a formal heresy. He thence passes to the history of the Jews: and in every part of it discovers the Holy Office.

Jesus Christ is the first inquisitor of the new law; the popes were inquisitors by divine right; and they afterwards communicated their power to St. Dominic.

He afterwards estimates the number of all those whom the Inquisition has put to death; he states it to be considerably above a hundred thousand.

His book was printed in 1589, at Madrid, with the approbation of doctors, the eulogiums of bishops, and the privilege of the king. We can, at the present day, scarcely form any idea of horrors at once so extravagant and abominable; but at that period nothing appeared more natural and edifying. All men resemble Louis de Paramo when they are fanatics.

Paramo was a plain, direct man, very exact in dates, omitting no interesting fact, and calculating with precision the number of human victims immolated by the Holy Office throughout the world.

He relates, with great naïveté, the establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal, and coincides perfectly with four other historians who have treated of that subject. The following account they unanimously agree in:

Singular. Establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal.

Pope Boniface had long before, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, delegated some Dominican friars to go to Portugal, from one city to another, to burn heretics, Mussulmans, and Jews; but these were itinerant and not stationary; and even the kings sometimes complained of the vexations caused by them. Pope Clement VII. was desirous of giving them a fixed residence in Portugal, as they had in Aragon and Castile. Difficulties, however, arose between the court of Rome and that of Lisbon; tempers became irritated, the Inquisition suffered by it, and was far from being perfectly established.

In 1539, there appeared at Lisbon a legate of the pope, who came, he said, to establish the holy Inquisition on immovable foundations. He delivered his letters to King John III. from Pope Paul III. He had other letters from Rome for the chief officers of the court; his patents as legate were duly sealed and signed; and he exhibited the most ample powers for creating a grand inquisitor and all the judges of the Holy Office. He was, however, in fact an impostor of the name of Saavedra, who had the talent of counterfeiting hand-writings, seals, and coats-of-arms. He had acquired the art at Rome, and was perfected in it at Seville, at which place he arrived in company with two other sharpers. His train was magnificent, consisting of more than a hundred and twenty domestics. To defray, at least in part, the enormous expense with which all this splendor was attended, he and his associates borrowed at Seville large sums in the name of the apostolic chamber of Rome; everything was concerted with the most consummate art.

The king of Portugal was at first perfectly astonished at the pope's despatching a legate to him without any previous announcement to him of his intention. The legate hastily observed that in a concern so urgent as that of establishing the Inquisition on a firm foundation, his holiness could admit of no delays, and that the king might consider himself honored by the holy father's having appointed a legate to be the first person to announce his intention. The king did not venture to reply. The legate on the same day constituted a grand inquisitor, and sent about collectors to receive the tenths; and before the court could obtain answers from Rome to its representations on the subject, the legate had brought two hundred victims to the stake, and collected more than two hundred thousand crowns.

However, the marquis of Villanova, a Spanish nobleman, of whom the legate had borrowed at Seville a very considerable sum upon forged bills, determined, if possible, to repay himself the money with his own hands, instead of going to Lisbon and exposing himself to the intrigues and influence of the swindler there. The legate was at this time making his circuit through the country, and happened very conveniently to be on the borders of Spain. The marquis unexpectedly advanced upon him with fifty men well armed, carried him off prisoner, and conducted him to Madrid.

The whole imposture was speedily discovered at Lisbon; the Council of Madrid condemned the legate Saavedra to be flogged and sent to the galleys for ten years; but the most admirable circumstance was, that Pope Paul IV. confirmed subsequently all that the impostor had established; out of the plenitude of his divine power he rectified all the little irregularities of the various procedures, and rendered sacred what before was merely human. Of what importance the arm which God employs in His sacred service? – "Qu'importe de quel bras Dieu daigne se servir?"

Such was the manner in which the Inquisition became established at Lisbon; and the whole kingdom extolled the wisdom and providence of God on the occasion.

To conclude, the methods of procedure adopted by this tribunal are generally known; it is well known how strongly they are opposed to the false equity and blind reason of all other tribunals in the world. Men are imprisoned on the mere accusation of persons the most infamous; a son may denounce his father, and the wife her husband; the accused is never confronted with the accusers; and the property of the person convicted is confiscated for the benefit of the judges: such at least was the manner of its proceeding down to our own times. Surely in this we must perceive something decidedly divine; for it is absolutely incomprehensible that men should have patiently submitted to this yoke.

At length Count Aranda has obtained the blessings of all Europe by paring the nails and filing the teeth of the monster in Spain; it breathes, however, still.

INSTINCT

"Instinctus, impulsus," impulse; but what power impels us?

All feeling is instinct. A secret conformity of our organs to their respective objects forms our instinct. It is solely by instinct that we perform numberless involuntary movements, just as it is by instinct that we possess curiosity, that we run after novelty, that menaces terrify us, that contempt irritates us, that an air of submission appeases us, and that tears soften us.

We are governed by instinct, as well as cats and goats; this is one further circumstance in which we resemble the mere animal tribes – a resemblance as incontestable as that of our blood, our necessities, and the various functions of our bodies.

Our instinct is never so shrewd and skilful as theirs, and does not even approach it; a calf and a lamb, as soon as they are born, rush to the fountain of their mother's milk; but unless the mother of the infant clasped it in her arms, and folded it to her bosom, it would inevitably perish.

No woman in a state of pregnancy was ever invincibly impelled to prepare for her infant a convenient wicker cradle, as the wren with its bill and claws prepares a nest for her offspring. But the power of reflection which we possess, in conjunction with two industrious hands presented to us by nature, raises us to an equality with the instinct of animals, and in the course of time places us infinitely above them, both in respect to good and evil – a proposition condemned by the members of the ancient parliament and by the Sorbonne, natural philosophers of distinguished eminence, and who, it is well known, have admirably promoted the perfection of the arts.

Our instinct, in the first place, impels us to beat our brother when he vexes us, if we are roused into a passion with him and feel that we are stronger than he is. Afterwards, our sublime reason leads us on to the invention of arrows, swords, pikes, and at length muskets, to kill our neighbors with.

Instinct alone urges us all to make love – "Amor omnibus idem;" but Virgil, Tibullus, and Ovid sing it. It is from instinct alone that a young artisan stands gazing with respect and admiration before the superfine gilt coach of a commissioner of taxes. Reason comes to the assistance of the young artisan; he is made a collector; he becomes polished; he embezzles; he rises to be a great man in his turn, and dazzles the eyes of his former comrades as he lolls at ease in his own carriage, more profusely gilded than that which originally excited his admiration and ambition.

What is this instinct which governs the whole animal kingdom, and which in us is strengthened by reason or repressed by habit? Is it "divinæ particula auræ?" Yes, undoubtedly it is something divine; for everything is so. Everything is the incomprehensible effect of an incomprehensible cause. Everything is swayed, is impelled by nature. We reason about everything, and originate nothing.

INTEREST

We shall teach men nothing, when we tell them that everything we do is done from interest. What! it will be said, is it from motives of interest that the wretched fakir remains stark naked under the burning sun, loaded with chains, dying with hunger, half devoured by vermin, and devouring them in his turn? Yes, most undoubtedly it is; as we have stated elsewhere, he depends upon ascending to the eighteenth heaven, and looks with an eye of pity on the man who will be admitted only into the ninth.

The interest of the Malabar widow, who burns herself with the corpse of her husband, is to recover him in another world, and be there more happy even than the fakir. For, together with their metempsychosis, the Indians have another world; they resemble ourselves; their system admits of contradictions.

Were you ever acquainted with any king or republic that made either war or peace, that issued decrees, or entered into conventions, from any other motive than that of interest?

With respect to the interest of money, consult, in the great "Encyclopædia," the article of M. d'Alembert, on "Calculation," and that of M. Boucher d'Argis, on "Jurisprudence." We will venture to add a few reflections.

1. Are gold and silver merchandise? Yes; the author of the "Spirit of Laws" does not think so when he says: "Money, which is the price of commodities, is hired and not bought."

It is both lent and bought. I buy gold with silver, and silver with gold; and their price fluctuates in all commercial countries from day to day.

The law of Holland requires bills of exchange to be paid in the silver coin of the country, and not in gold, if the creditor demands it. Then I buy silver money, and I pay for it in gold, or in cloth, corn, or diamonds.

I am in want of money, corn, or diamonds, for the space of a year; the corn, money, or diamond merchant says – I could, for this year, sell my money, corn, or diamonds to advantage. Let us estimate at four, five, or six per cent., according to the usage of the country, what I should lose by letting you have it. You shall, for instance, return me at the end of the year, twenty-one carats of diamonds for the twenty which I now lend you; twenty-one sacks of corn for the twenty; twenty-one thousand crowns for twenty thousand crowns. Such is interest. It is established among all nations by the law of nature. The maximum or highest rate of interest depends, in every country, on its own particular law. In Rome money is lent on pledges at two and a half per cent., according to law, and the pledges are sold, if the money be not paid at the appointed time. I do not lend upon pledges, and I require only the interest customary in Holland. If I were in China, I should ask of you the customary interest at Macao and Canton.

2. While the parties were proceeding with this bargain at Amsterdam, it happened that there arrived from St. Magliore, a Jansenist (and the fact is perfectly true, he was called the Abbé des Issarts); this Jansenist says to the Dutch merchant, "Take care what you are about; you are absolutely incurring damnation; money must not produce money, 'nummus nummum non parit.' No one is allowed to receive interest for his money but when he is willing to sink the principal. The way to be saved is to make a contract with the gentleman; and for twenty thousand crowns which you are never to have returned to you, you and your heirs will receive a thousand crowns per annum to all eternity."

"You jest," replies the Dutchman; "you are in this very case proposing to me a usury that is absolutely of the nature of an infinite series. I should (that is, myself and heirs would) in that case receive back my capital at the end of twenty years, the double of it in forty, the four-fold of it in eighty; this you see would be just an infinite series. I cannot, besides, lend for more than twelve months, and I am contented with a thousand crowns as a remuneration."

THE ABBÉ DES ISSARTS. – I am grieved for your Dutch soul; God forbade the Jews to lend at interest, and you are well aware that a citizen of Amsterdam should punctually obey the laws of commerce given in a wilderness to runaway vagrants who had no commerce.

THE DUTCHMAN. – That is clear; all the world ought to be Jews; but it seems to me, that the law permitted the Hebrew horde to gain as much by usury as they could from foreigners, and that, in consequence of this permission, they managed their affairs in the sequel remarkably well. Besides, the prohibition against one Jew's taking interest from another must necessarily have become obsolete, since our Lord Jesus, when preaching at Jerusalem, expressly said that interest was in his time one hundred per cent.; for in the parable of the talents he says, that the servant who had received five talents gained five others in Jerusalem by them; that he who had two gained two by them; and that the third who had only one, and did not turn that to any account, was shut up in a dungeon by his master, for not laying it out with the money-changers. But these money-changers were Jews; it was therefore between Jews that usury was practised at Jerusalem; therefore this parable, drawn from the circumstances and manners of the times, decidedly indicates that usury or interest was at the rate of a hundred per cent. Read the twenty-fifth chapter of St. Matthew; he was conversant with the subject; he had been a commissioner of taxes in Galilee. Let me finish my argument with this gentleman; and do not make me lose both my money and my time.

THE ABBÉ DES ISSARTS. – All that you say is very good and very fine; but the Sorbonne has decided that lending money on interest is a mortal sin.

THE DUTCHMAN. – You must be laughing at me, my good friend, when you cite the Sorbonne as an authority to a merchant of Amsterdam. There is not a single individual among those wrangling railers themselves who does not obtain, whenever he can, five or six per cent, for his money by purchasing revenue bills, India bonds, assignments, and Canada bills. The clergy of France, as a corporate body, borrow at interest. In many of the provinces of France, it is the custom to stipulate for interest with the principal. Besides, the university of Oxford and that of Salamanca have decided against the Sorbonne. I acquired this information in the course of my travels; and thus we have authority against authority. Once more, I must beg you to interrupt me no longer.

THE ABBÉ DES ISSARTS. – The wicked, sir, are never at a loss for reasons. You are, I repeat, absolutely destroying yourself, for the Abbé de St. Cyran, who has not performed any miracles, and the Abbé Paris, who performed some in St. Médard…

3. Before the abbé had finished his speech, the merchant drove him out of his counting-house; and after having legally lent his money, to the last penny, went to represent the conversation between himself and the abbé, to the magistrates, who forbade the Jansenists from propagating a doctrine so pernicious to commerce.

"Gentlemen," said the chief bailiff, "give us of efficacious grace as much as you please, of predestination as much as you please, and of communion as little as you please; on these points you are masters; but take care not to meddle with the laws of commerce."

INTOLERANCE

Read the article on "Intolerance" in the great "Encyclopædia." Read the treatise on "Toleration" composed on occasion of the dreadful assassination of John Calas, a citizen of Toulouse; and if, after that, you allow of persecution in matters of religion, compare yourself at once to Ravaillac. Ravaillac, you know, was highly intolerant. The following is the substance of all the discourses ever delivered by the intolerant:

You monster; you will be burned to all eternity in the other world, and whom I will myself burn as soon as ever I can in this, you really have the insolence to read de Thou and Bayle, who have been put into the index of prohibited authors at Rome! When I was preaching to you in the name of God, how Samson had killed a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass, your head, still harder than the arsenal from which Samson obtained his arms, showed me by a slight movement from left to right that you believed nothing of what I said. And when I stated that the devil Asmodeus, who out of jealousy twisted the necks of the seven husbands of Sarah among the Medes, was put in chains in upper Egypt, I saw a small contraction of your lips, in Latin called cachinnus (a grin) which plainly indicated to me that in the bottom of your soul you held the history of Asmodeus in derision.

And as for you, Isaac Newton; Frederick the Great, king of Prussia and elector of Brandenburg; John Locke; Catherine, empress of Russia, victorious over the Ottomans; John Milton; the beneficent sovereign of Denmark; Shakespeare; the wise king of Sweden; Leibnitz; the august house of Brunswick; Tillotson; the emperor of China; the Parliament of England; the Council of the great Mogul; in short, all you who do not believe one word which I have taught in my courses on divinity, I declare to you, that I regard you all as pagans and publicans, as, in order to engrave it on your unimpressible brains, I have often told you before. You are a set of callous miscreants; you will all go to gehenna, where the worm dies not and the fire is not quenched; for I am right, and you are all wrong; and I have grace, and you have none. I confess three devotees in my neighborhood, while you do not confess a single one; I have executed the mandates of bishops, which has never been the case with you; I have abused philosophers in the language of the fish-market, while you have protected, imitated, or equalled them; I have composed pious defamatory libels, stuffed with infamous calumnies, and you have never so much as read them. I say mass every day in Latin for fourteen sous, and you are never even so much as present at it, any more than Cicero, Cato, Pompey, Cæsar, Horace, or Virgil, were ever present at it – consequently you deserve each of you to have your right hand cut off, your tongue cut out, to be put to the torture, and at last burned at a slow fire; for God is merciful.

Such, without the slightest abatement, are the maxims of the intolerant, and the sum and substance of all their books. How delightful to live with such amiable people!

INUNDATION

"Was there ever a time when the globe was entirely inundated? It is physically impossible.

It is possible that the sea may successively have covered every land, one part after another; and even this can only have happened by very slow gradation, and in a prodigious number of centuries. In the course of five hundred years the sea has retired from Aigues-Mortes, Fréjus, and Ravenna, which were considerable ports, and left about two leagues of land dry. According to the ratio of such progression, it is clear that it would require two million and two hundred and fifty thousand years to produce the same effect through the whole circuit of the globe. It is a somewhat remarkable circumstance that this period of time nearly falls in with that which the axis of the earth would require to be raised, so as to coincide with the equator; a change extremely probable, which began to be considered so only about fifty years since, and which could not be completed in a shorter period of time than two million and three hundred thousand years.

The beds or strata of shells, which have been discovered at the distance of some leagues from the sea, are an incontestable evidence that it has gradually deposited these marine productions on tracts which were formerly shores of the ocean; but that the water should have ever covered the whole globe at once is an absurd chimera in physics, demonstrated to be impossible by the laws of gravitation, by the laws of fluids, and by the insufficient quantity of water for the purpose. We do not, however, by these observations, at all mean to impeach the truth of the universal deluge, related in the Pentateuch; on the contrary, that is a miracle which it is our duty to believe; it is a miracle, and therefore could not have been accomplished by the laws of nature.