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Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/271

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COSMOPOLITAN LITERATURE
257

to make Frenchmen familiar with Locke and Newton—that is, with English philosophy and science. But, though an Englishman may make mathematical discoveries, mathematics cannot be especially English. Two and two make four in Paris as well as in London: and the reasoning of Newton's Principia was as valid in French as in English or Latin. Art, as M. Texte says, 'is infinitely various'; philosophy is (or ought to be) 'one.' Though art, therefore, may be national, philosophy must be cosmopolitan. The glory of discovering some new principle may be assigned to this or that country; but once discovered it loses all trace of its origin. How far, in point of fact, Voltaire learnt his doctrine from Locke or from Bayle or elsewhere is disputable. In any case, the doctrine, once reached, had to live or die mainly by its logic. The philosophy, indeed, had attracted Voltaire to other characteristics. It was one product of the English character. Britons, he thought, were philosophers because they were free men, resolved to think as they pleased and to say what they thought. To the earlier generation it only occurred that a race which could kill its king must be more savage than its own mastiffs. Now its fierceness, its rough energy and sturdy indepen-