It was, indeed, chiefly
owing to this treatise of Voltaire's that the system became known in
France nearly twenty years after Newton's death. Until then a firm,
resolute, and patriotic stand was made by the Cartesian _Vortices_;
whilst only forty years previously, this same Cartesian philosophy had
been forbidden in the French schools; and now in turn d'Agnesseau, the
Chancellor, refused Voltaire the _Imprimatur_ for his treatise on the
Newtonian doctrine. On the other hand, in our day Newton's absurd
theory of color still completely holds the field, forty years after
the publication of Goethe's. Hume, too, was disregarded up to his
fiftieth year, though he began very early and wrote in a thoroughly
popular style. And Kant, in spite of having written and talked all his
life long, did not become a famous man until he was sixty.
[Footnote 1: See especially Sec.Sec. 35, 113, 118, 120, 122, 128.]
Artists and poets have, to be sure, more chance than thinkers, because
their public is at least a hundred times as large. Still, what was
thought of Beethoven and Mozart during their lives? what of Dante?
what even of Shakespeare? If the latter's contemporaries had in any
way recognized his worth, at least one good and accredited portrait of
him would have come down to us from an age when the art of painting
flourished; whereas we possess only some very doubtful pictures, a
bad copperplate, and a still worse bust on his tomb.
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