Enlightenment and knowledge · c. 1750
The philosophes
Overview
A story that cannot be wrong has not explained anything. Tolerance means not crushing a person for a belief; stopping a harm is still allowed.
The philosophes were the writers of the French Enlightenment, among them Voltaire, Montesquieu and Diderot, whose Encyclopédie gathered their case for reason and reform. Voltaire’s century is full of systems that explain every wound in advance. Candide walks through them. The tutor keeps saying this is the best of all possible worlds, and the earthquakes, the hangings and the swindles keep arriving on time. A story that cannot be wrong is not yet an explanation. Consolation is not a cause.
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Tolerance is the other half, and it is not a shrug. In the treatise on tolerance and in the dictionary entry, the refusal is a refusal to crush the person for the belief. It is not a refusal to stop a harm. You can oppose the act, protect the people the act would injure, and still decline the bonfire for the speaker. The line attributed to him about disapproving of what you say is a later writer’s sentence. It is not his.
The garden at the end of Candide is the practical residue. Tend what is in front of you. The grand system did not feed anyone. The work might. On this climb that is a lesson about explanations that cannot fail, and about a tolerance that still has room to stop a wound.
Where it answers
How should we act?
Let people believe what you think is wrong. Step in only to stop a real harm.
Key terms
- Toleration
- Allowing beliefs and worship you think wrong, instead of persecuting them.
- Reason against dogma
- Testing authority and tradition by evidence and argument.
- Public criticism
- Using pamphlets, satire and books to show injustice to a wide public.
In their words
“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.”
Further reading
- Candide · Voltaire
- Treatise on Tolerance · Voltaire
- Encyclopédie · edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert
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Quest2Reason. “The philosophes.” https://quest2reason.com/learn/ideas/philosophes. Accessed 13 November 2026.