Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/266

 244. THE FRENCH ILL VMINA TION. equality and frugality. While republics are destroyed by extravagance, lust, and self-seeking, a monarchy can dispense with civil virtue, patriotism, and moral disinterestedness, since in it false honor, luxury, and wantonness subserve the public good. Great states tend toward despotism ; smaller ones toward aristocracy, or a democratic republicanism ; for those of medium size monarchy, which is intermediate between the two former, is the best form of constitution. Although Montesquieu, in his Lettres Persanes, shows himself enthusiastic for the federal republics of Switzerland and the Netherlands, his opinions are different after his return from England, and in his Esprit des Lois he praises the English form of government as the ideal of civil liberty. Political freedom consists in liberty to do (not what we wish, but) what we ought, or in doing that which the laws allow. Such lawful freedom is possible only where the constitution of the state and criminal legislation inspire the citizen with a sense of security. In order to prevent misuse of the supreme power, the different authorities in the state must be divided so that they shall hold one another in check. In particular Montesquieu demands for the judicial power absolute independence of the executive power (which Locke had termed the federative) as well as of the legislative power. The last belongs to parliament, which includes in its two houses an aristocratic and a democratic element. Voltaire* (1694-1778) — he himself had made this anagram from his name, Arouet 1(e) j(eune) — seemed by his many- sided receptivity almost made to be the interpreter of English ideas; in the words of Windelband, he "combines Newton's mechanical philosophy of nature, Locke's noetical empiricism, and Shaftesbury's moral philosophy under the deistic point of view." The same qualities which made him the first journalist, enabled him to free philo- sophy from its scholastic garb, and, by concentrating it on the problems which press most upon the lay mind (God, freedom, immortality), to make it a living force among the people. His superficiality, as Erdmann acutely remarks, was his strength. True religion, so reason teaches us, consists in loving God and in being just and for-
 * David Friedrich Strauss, Voltaire, sechs Vortrdge, 1870.