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Updated: September 28, 2025
I perceive that I am not very explicit; but you will reflect and discern my meaning. Montesquieu said he wrote to make people think, and not to make them read and why may not A. Br. Perhaps, however, there may be no collisions; and then your good sense will teach you not to wear out good-will.
The foundations are overturned; what will the good man do?" Good men had themselves sometimes lent a hand to the work, beyond what they had intended or foreseen, perhaps; Montesquieu, despite the wise moderation of his great and strong mind, had been the first to awaken that yearning for novelty and reforms which had been silently brooding at the bottom of men's hearts.
He must first demonstrate that the will is sovereign. Man is the creature of necessity, and the nexus of cause and effect governs the moral world like the physical. We are the product of our conditions. But among conditions some are within the power of the will to change and others are not. Montesquieu had insisted that it is climate which ultimately differentiates the races of mankind.
Bearing in some exaggerations the marks of the excessive violence with which its author's mind had recoiled from assumptions usually suffered to pass without scrutiny, yet showing in some ambiguities the traces of a desire to compromise with existing prejudice, the book of Montesquieu, with all its defects, still proceeded on that Historical Method before which the Law of Nature has never maintained its footing for an instant.
They were only following the English Whigs, who gave Great Britain its modern constitution. Not that those Englishmen analyzed the matter, or had any theory about it; Englishmen care little for theories. It was a Frenchman, Montesquieu, who pointed out to them how faithfully they had copied Newton's description of the mechanism of the heavens.
General Dumouriez, who was also wandering in obscurity and exile, at this time wrote to General Montesquieu, who was a friend of the Duke of Chartres, and a gentleman possessed of much influence and power in Switzerland: "Embrace for me our excellent young friend. What you are doing to serve him is worthy of you. Let him derive instruction and strength from his adversity.
I refer to the physical determinism of Montesquieu, Buckle and Metschnikoff, and to the anthropological determinism of the ethnologists who find the explanation of the events of history in the organic and psychical characteristics of the various races of men. Karl Marx sums up, combines and completes these two theories by his economic determinism.
Of him Montesquieu could not have said, with even epigrammatic truth: Il a plus que personne l'esprit que tout le monde a. Voltaire was the cleverest of all past and present men; but a great man is something more, and this he surely was not. As poets, the two live not in the same hemisphere, not in the same world.
Yet Montesquieu has no great liking for any form of dogmatic religion; in this he belongs distinctly with the Philosophers; morality is, in his eyes, the great, perhaps the only thing to be desired; obedience to law, love to men, filial piety, those, he says, are the first acts of all religions; ceremonies are good only on the supposition that God has commanded them; but about the commands of God it is easy to be mistaken, for there are two thousand religions, each of which puts in its claim.
His interpretation of history was confined to the discovery of particular causes; he did not consider the operation of those larger general causes which Montesquieu investigated. Montesquieu sought to show that the vicissitudes of societies were subject to law; Voltaire believed that events were determined by chance where they were not consciously guided by human reason.
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