1. We have seen France, in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, pervaded in its upper classes by a freethought partly born of the knowledge that religion counted for little but harm in public affairs, partly the result of such argumentation as had been thrown out by Montaigne and codified by Charron. That it was not the freethinking of mere idle men of the world is clear when we note the names and writings of La Mothe le Vayer (1588–1672), Gui Patin (1601–1671), and Gabriel NaudÉ (1600–1653), all scholars, all heretics of the skeptical and rationalistic order. The last two indeed, sided with the Catholics in politics, Patin approving of the Fronde, and NaudÉ of the Massacre, on which ground they are sometimes claimed as believers.1 But though in the nature of the case their inclusion on the side of freethought is not to be zealously contended for, they must be classed in terms of the balance of testimony. Patin was the admiring friend of Gassendi; and though he was never explicitly heretical, and indeed wrote of Socinianism as a pestilent doctrine,2 his habit of irony and the risk of written avowals to correspondents must be kept in view in deciding on his cast of mind. He is constantly anti-clerical;3 and the germinal skepticism of Montaigne and Charron clearly persists in him.

Certainly Patin and NaudÉ are of less importance for freethought than La Mothe le Vayer. That scholar, a “Conseiller d’Estat ordinaire,” tutor of the brother of Louis XIV, and one of the early members of the new Academy founded by Richelieu, is an interesting figure4 in the history of culture, being a skeptic of the school of Sextus Empiricus, and practically a great friend of tolerance. Standing in favour with Richelieu, he wrote at that statesman’s suggestion a treatise On the Virtue of the Heathen,5 justifying toleration by pagan example—a course which raises the question whether Richelieu himself was not strongly touched by the rationalism of his age. If it be true that the great Cardinal “believed as all the world did in his time,”6 there is little more to be said; for unbelief, as we have seen, was already abundant, and even somewhat fashionable. Certainly no ecclesiastic in high power ever followed a less ecclesiastical policy;7 and from the date of his appointment as Minister to Louis XIII (1624), for forty years, there was no burning of heretics or unbelievers in France. If he was orthodox, it was very passively.8

And Le Vayer’s way of handling the dicta of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas as to the virtues of unbelievers being merely vices is for its time so hardy that the Cardinal’s protection alone can explain its immunity from censure. St. Augustine and St. Thomas, says the critic calmly, had regard merely to eternal happiness, which virtue alone can obtain for no one. They are, therefore, to be always interpreted in this special sense. And so at the very outset the ground is summarily cleared of orthodox obstacles.9 The Petit discours chrÉtien sur l’immortalitÉ de l’Âme, also addressed to Richelieu, tells of a good deal of current unbelief on that subject; and the epistle dedicatory professes pain over the “philosopher of our day [Vanini] who has had the impiety to write that, unless one is very old, very rich, and a German, one should never expatiate on this subject.” But on the very threshold of the discourse, again, the skeptic tranquilly suggests that there would be “perhaps something unreasonable” in following Augustine’s precept, so popular in later times, that the problem of immortality should be solved by the dictates of religion and feeling, not of “uncertain” reason. “Why,” he asks, “should the soul be her own judge?”10 And he shows a distinct appreciation of the avowal of Augustine in his Retractationes that his own book on the Immortality of the Soul was so obscure to him that in many places he himself could not understand it.11 The “Little Christian Discourse” is, in fact, not Christian at all; and its arguments are but dialectic exercises, on a par with those of the Discours sceptique sur la musique which follows. He was, in short, a skeptic by temperament; and his Preface d’une histoire12 shows his mind to have played on the “Mississippi of falsehood called history” very much as did that of Bayle in a later generation.

Le Vayer’s Dialogues of Oratius Tubero (1633) is philosophically his most important work;13 but its tranquil Pyrrhonism was not calculated to affect greatly the current thought of his day; and he ranked rather as a man of all-round learning14 than as a polemist, being reputed “a little contradictory, but in no way bigoted or obstinate, all opinions being to him nearly indifferent, excepting those of which faith does not permit us to doubt.”15 The last phrase tells of the fact that it affects to negate: Le Vayer’s general skepticism was well known.16 He was not indeed an original thinker, most of his ideas being echoes from the skeptics of antiquity;17 and it has been not unjustly said of him that he is rather of the sixteenth century than of the seventeenth.18

2. On the other hand, the resort on the part of the Catholics to a skeptical method, as against both Protestants and freethinkers, which we have seen originating soon after the issue of Montaigne’s Essais, seems to have become more and more common; and this process must rank as in some degree a product of skeptical thought of a more sincere sort. In any case it was turned vigorously, even recklessly, against the Protestants. Thus we find DaillÉ, at the outset of his work On the True Use of the Fathers,19 complaining that when Protestants quote the Scriptures some Romanists at once ask “whence and in what way those books may be known to be really written by the prophets and apostles whose names and titles they bear.” This challenge, rashly incurred by Luther and Calvin in their pronouncements on the Canon, later Protestants did not as a rule attempt to meet, save in the fashion of La Placette, who in his work De insanibili EcclesiÆ RomanÆ Scepticismo (1688)20 undertakes to show that Romanists themselves are without any grounds of certitude for the authority of the Church. It was indeed certain that the Catholic method would make more skeptics than it won.

3. Between the negative development of the doctrine of Montaigne and the vogue of upper-class deism, the philosophy of Descartes, with its careful profession of submission to the Church, had at first an easy reception; and on the appearance of the Discours de la MÉthode (1637) it speedily affected the whole thought of France; the women of the leisured class, now much given to literature, being among its students.21 From the first the Jansenists, who were the most serious religious thinkers of the time, accepted the Cartesian system as in the main soundly Christian; and its founder’s authority had some such influence in keeping up the prestige of orthodoxy as had that of Locke later in England. Boileau, who wrote a satire in defence of the system when it was persecuted after Descartes’s death, is named among those whom he so influenced.22 But a merely external influence of this kind could not counteract the fundamental rationalism of Descartes’s thought, and the whole social and intellectual tendency towards a secular view of life. Soon, indeed, Descartes became suspect, partly by reason of the hostile activities of the Jesuits, who opposed him because the Jansenists generally held by him, though he had been a Jesuit pupil, and had always some adherents in that order;23 partly by reason of the inherent naturalism of his system. That his doctrine was incompatible with the eucharist was the standing charge against it,24 and his defence was not found satisfactory,25 though his orthodox followers obtained from Queen Christina a declaration that he had been largely instrumental in converting her to Catholicism.26 Pascal reproached him with having done his best to do without God in his system;27 and this seems to have been the common clerical impression. Thirteen years after his death, in 1663, his work was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, under a modified censure,28 and in 1671 a royal order was obtained under which his philosophy was proscribed in all the universities of France.29 Cartesian professors and curÉs were persecuted and exiled, or compelled to recant; among the victims being PÈre Lami of the Congregation of the Oratory and PÈre AndrÉ the Jesuit;30 and the Oratorians were in 1678 forced to undergo the humiliation of not only renouncing Descartes and all his works, but of abjuring their former Cartesian declarations, in order to preserve their corporate existence.31 Precisely in this period of official reaction, however, there was going on not merely an academic but a social development of a rationalistic kind, in which the persecuted philosophy played its part, even though some freethinkers disparaged it.

4. The general tendency is revealed on the one hand by the series of treatises from eminent Churchmen, defending the faith against unpublished attacks, and on the other hand by the prevailing tone in belles lettres. Malherbe, the literary dictator of the first quarter of the century, had died in 1628 with the character of a scoffer;32 and the fashion now lasted till the latter half of the reign of Louis XIV. In 1621, two years after the burning of Vanini, a young man named Jean Fontanier had been burned alive on the Place de GrÈve at Paris, apparently for the doctrines laid down by him in a manuscript entitled Le TrÉsor Inestimable, written on deistic and anti-Catholic lines.33 He was said to have been successively Protestant, Catholic, Turk, Jew, and atheist; and had conducted himself like one of shaken mind.34 But the cases of the poet ThÉophile de Viau, who about 1623 suffered prosecution on a charge of impiety,35 and of his companions Berthelot and Colletet—who like him were condemned but set free by royal favour—appear to be the only others of the kind for over a generation. Frivolity of tone sufficed to ward off legal pursuit. It was in 1665, some years after the death of Mazarin, who had maintained Richelieu’s policy of tolerance, that Claude Petit was burnt at Paris for “impious pieces”;36 and even then there was no general reversion to orthodoxy, the upper-class tone remaining, as in the age of Richelieu and Mazarin, more or less unbelieving. When Corneille had introduced a touch of Christian zeal into his Polyeucte (1643) he had given general offence to the dilettants of both sexes.37 MoliÈre, again, the disciple of Gassendi38 and “the very genius of reason,”39 was unquestionably an unbeliever;40 and only the personal protection of Louis XIV, which after all could not avail to support such a play as Tartufe against the fury of the bigots, enabled him to sustain himself at all against them.

5. Equally freethinking was his brilliant predecessor and early comrade, Cyrano de Bergerac (1620–1655), who did not fear to indicate his frame of mind in one of his dramas. In La Mort d’Agrippine he puts in the mouth of Sejanus, as was said by a contemporary, “horrible things against the Gods,” notably the phrase, “whom men made, and who did not make men,”41 which, however, generally passed as an attack on polytheism; and though there was certainly no blasphemous intention in the phrase, Frappons, voilÀ l’hostie [= hostia, victim], some pretended to regard it as an insult to the Catholic host.42 At times Cyrano writes like a deist;43 but in so many other passages does he hold the language of a convinced materialist, and of a scoffer at that,44 that he can hardly be taken seriously on the former head.45 In short, he was one of the first of the hardy freethinkers who, under the tolerant rule of Richelieu and Mazarin, gave clear voice to the newer spirit. Under any other government, he would have been in danger of his life: as it was, he was menaced with prosecutions; his Agrippine was forbidden; the first edition of his PÉdant jouÉ was confiscated; during his last illness there was an attempt to seize his manuscripts; and down till the time of the Revolution the editions of his works were eagerly bought up and destroyed by zealots.46 His recent literary rehabilitation thus hardly serves to realize his importance in the history of freethought. Between Cyrano and MoliÈre it would appear that there was little less of rationalistic ferment in the France of their day than in England. Bossuet avows in a letter to Huet in 1678 that impiety and unbelief abound more than ever before.47

6. Even in the apologetic reasoning of the greatest French prose writer of that age, Pascal, we have the most pregnant testimony to the prevalence of unbelief; for not only were the fragments preserved as PensÉes (1670), however originated,48 developed as part of a planned defence of religion against contemporary rationalism,49 but they themselves show their author profoundly unable to believe save by a desperate abnegation of reason, though he perpetually commits the gross fallacy of trusting to reason to prove that reason is untrustworthy. His work is thus one continuous paralogism, in which reason is disparaged merely to make way for a parade of bad reasoning. The case of Pascal is that of Berkeley with a difference: the latter suffered from hypochondria, but reacted with nervous energy; Pascal, a physical degenerate, prematurely profound, was prematurely old; and his pietism in its final form is the expression of the physical collapse.

Doubtless the levity and licence of the libertins in high places50 confirmed him in his revolt against unbelief; but his own credence was an act rather of despairing emotion than of rational conviction. The man who advised doubters to make a habit of causing masses to be said and following religious rites, on the score that cela vous fera croire et vous abÊtira—“that will make you believe and will stupefy you”51—was a pathological case; and though the whole Jansenist movement latterly stood for a reaction against freethinking, it can hardly be doubted that the PensÉes generally acted as a solvent rather than as a sustainer of religious beliefs.52 This charge was made against them immediately on their publication by the AbbÉ de Villars, who pointed out that they did the reverse of what they claimed to do in the matter of appealing to the heart and to good sense, since they set forth all the ordinary arguments of Pyrrhonism, denied that the existence of God could be established by reason or philosophy, and staked the case on a “wager” which shocked good sense and feeling alike. “Have you resolved,” asks this critic in dialogue, “to make atheists on pretext of combatting them?”53

The same question arises concerning the famous Lettres Provinciales (1656), written by Pascal in defence of Arnauld against the persecution of the Jesuits, who carried on in Arnauld’s case their campaign against Jansen, whom they charged with mis-stating the doctrine of Augustine in his great work expounding that Father. Once more the Catholic Church was swerving from its own established doctrine of predestination, the Spanish Jesuit Molina having set up a new movement in the Pelagian or Arminian direction. The cause of the Jansenists has been represented as that of freedom of thought and speech;54 and this it relatively was insofar as Jansen and Arnauld sought for a hearing, while the Jesuit-ridden Sorbonne strove to silence and punish them. Pascal had to go from printer to printer as his Letters succeeded each other, the first three being successively prosecuted by the clerical authorities; and in their collected form they found publicity only by being printed at Rouen and published at Amsterdam, with the rubric of Cologne. All the while Jansenism claimed to be strict orthodoxy; and it was in virtue only of the irreducible element of rationalism in Pascal that the school of Port Royal made for freethought in any higher or more general sense. Indeed, between his own reputation for piety and that of the Jansenists for orthodoxy, the Provincial Letters have a conventional standing as orthodox compositions. It is strange, however, that those who charge upon the satire of the later philosophers the downfall of Catholicism in France should not realize the plain tendency of these brilliant satires to discredit the entire authority of the Church, and, further, by their own dogmatic weaknesses, to put all dogma alike under suspicion.55 Few thoughtful men can now read the Provinciales without being impressed by the utter absurdity of the problem over which the entire religious intelligence of a great nation was engrossed.

It was, in fact, the endless wrangles of the religious factions over unintelligible issues that more than any other single cause fostered the unbelief previously set up by religious wars;56 and Pascal’s writings only deepened the trouble. Even Bossuet, in his History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches (1688), did but throw a new light on the hollowness of the grounds of religion; and for thoughtful readers gave a lead rather to atheism than to Catholicism. The converts it would make to the Catholic Church would be precisely those whose adherence was of least value, since they had not even the temperamental basis which, rather than argument, kept Bossuet a believer, and were Catholics only for lack of courage to put all religion aside. When “variation” was put as a sign of error by a Churchman the bulk of whose life was spent in bitter strifes with sections of his own Church, critical people were hardly likely to be confirmed in the faith. Within ten years of writing his book against the Protestants, Bossuet was engaged in an acrid controversy with FÉnelon, his fellow prelate and fellow demonstrator of the existence and attributes of God, accusing him of holding unchristian positions; and both prelates were always fighting their fellow-churchmen the Jansenists. If the variations of Protestants helped Catholicism, those of Catholics must have helped unbelief.

7. A similar fatality attended the labours of the learned Huet, Bishop of Avranches, whose Demonstratio Evangelica (1678) is remarkable (with Boyle’s Discourse of Things above Reason) as anticipating Berkeley in the argument from the arbitrariness of mathematical assumptions. He too, by that and by his later works, made for sheer philosophical skepticism,57 always a dangerous basis for orthodoxy.58 Such an evolution, on the part of a man of uncommon intellectual energy, challenges attention, the more so seeing that it typifies a good deal of thinking within the Catholic pale, on lines already noted as following on the debate with Protestantism. Honestly pious by bent of mind, but always occupied with processes of reasoning and research, Huet leant more and more, as he grew in years, to the skeptical defence against the pressures of Protestantism and rationalism, at once following and furthering the tendency of his age. That the skeptical method is a last weapon of defence can be seen from the temper in which the demonstrator assails Spinoza, whom he abuses, without naming him, in the fashion of his day, and to whose arguments concerning the authorship of the Pentateuch he makes singularly feeble answers.59 They are too worthless to have satisfied himself; and it is easy to see how he was driven to seek a more plausible rebuttal.60 A distinguished English critic, noting the general movement, pronounces, justly enough, that Huet took up philosophy “not as an end, but as a means—not for its own sake, but for the support of religion”; and then adds that his attitude is thus quite different from Pascal’s.61 But the two cases are really on a level. Pascal too was driven to philosophy in reaction against incredulity; and though Pascal’s work is of a more bitter and morbid intensity, Huet also had in him that psychic craving for a supernatural support which is the essence of latter-day religion. And if we credit this spirit to Pascal and to Huet, as we do to Newman, we must suppose that it partly touched the whole movement of pro-Catholic skepticism which has been above noted as following on the Reformation. It is ascribing to it as a whole too much of calculation and strategy to say of its combatants that “they conceived the desperate design of first ruining the territory they were prepared to evacuate; before philosophy was handed over to the philosophers the old Aristotelean citadel was to be blown into the air.”62 In reality they caught, as religious men will, with passion rather than with policy, at any plea that might seem fitted to beat down the presumption of “the wild, living intellect of man”;63 and their skepticism had a certain sincerity inasmuch as, trained to uncritical belief, they had never found for themselves the grounds of rational certitude.

Inasmuch too as Protestantism had no such ground, and rationalism was still far from having cleared its bases, Huet, as things went, was within his moral rights when he set forth his transcendentalist skepticism in his QuÆstiones AlnetanÆ in 1690. Though written in very limpid Latin,64 that work attracted practically no attention; and though, having a repute for provincialism in his French style, Huet was loth to resort to the vernacular, he did devote his spare hours through a number of his latter years to preparing his TraitÉ Philosophique de la faiblesse de l’esprit humain, which, dying in 1722, he left to be published posthumously (1723). The outcry against his criticism of Descartes and his Demonstratio had indisposed him for further personal strife; but he was determined to leave a completed message. Thus it came about that a sincere and devoted Catholic bishop “left, as his last legacy to his fellow-men, a work of the most outrageous skepticism.”65

8. Meanwhile the philosophy of Descartes, if less strictly propitious to science at some points than that of Gassendi, was both directly and indirectly making for the activity of reason. In virtue of its formal “spiritualism,” it found access where any clearly materialistic doctrine would have been tabooed; so that we find the Cartesian ecclesiastic RÉgis not only eagerly listened to and acclaimed at Toulouse in 1665, but offered a civic pension by the magistrates66—this within two years of the placing of Descartes’s works on the Index. After arousing a similar enthusiasm at Montpellier and at Paris, RÉgis was silenced by the Archbishop, whereupon he set himself to develop the Cartesian philosophy in his study. The result was that he ultimately went beyond his master, openly rejecting the idea of creation out of nothing,67 and finally following Locke in rejecting the innate ideas which Descartes had affirmed.68 Another young Churchman, Desgabets, developing from Descartes and his pupil Malebranche, combined with their “spiritist” doctrine much of the virtual materialism of Gassendi, arriving at a kind of pantheism, and at a courageous pantheistic ethic, wherein God is recognized as the author alike of good and evil69—a doctrine which we find even getting a hearing in general society, and noticed in the correspondence of Madame de SÉvignÉ in 1677.70

Malebranche’s treatise De la Recherche de la VÉritÉ (1674) was in fact a development of Descartes which on the one hand sought to connect his doctrine of innate ideas with his God-idea, and on the other hand headed the whole system towards pantheism. The tendency had arisen before him in the congregation of the Oratory, to which he belonged, and in which the Cartesian philosophy had so spread that when, in 1678, the alarmed superiors proposed to eradicate it, they were told by the members that, “If Cartesianism is a plague, there are two hundred of us who are infected.”71 But if Cartesianism alarmed the official orthodox, Malebranche wrought a deeper disintegration of the faith. In his old age his young disciple De Mairan, who had deeply studied Spinoza, pressed him fatally hard on the virtual coincidence of his philosophy with that of the more thoroughgoing pantheist; and Malebranche indignantly repudiated all agreement with “the miserable Spinoza,”72 “the atheist,”73 whose system he pronounced “a frightful and ridiculous chimera.”74 “Nevertheless, it was towards this chimera that Malebranche tended.”75 On all hands the new development set up new strife; and Malebranche, who disliked controversy, found himself embroiled alike with Jansenists and Jesuits, with orthodox and with innovating Cartesians, and with his own Spinozistic disciples. The Jansenist Arnauld attacked his book in a long and stringent treatise, Des vrayes at des fausses idÉes (1683),76 accumulating denials and contradictions with a cold tenacity of ratiocination which never lapsed into passion, and was all the more destructive. For the Jansenists Malebranche was a danger to the faith in the ratio of his exaltation of it, inasmuch as reference of the most ordinary beliefs back to “faith” left them no ground upon which to argue up to faith.77 This seems to have been a common feeling among his readers. For the same reason he made no appeal to men of science. He would have no recognition of secondary causes, the acceptance of which he declared to be a dangerous relapse into paganism.78 There was thus no scientific principle in the new doctrine which could enable it to solve the problems or absorb the systems of other schools. Locke was as little moved by it as were the Jansenists. Malebranche won readers everywhere by his charm of style;79 but he was as much of a disturber as of a reconciler. The very controversies which he set up made for disintegration; and FÉnelon found it necessary to “refute” Malebranche as well as Spinoza, and did his censure with as great severity as Arnauld’s.80 The mere fact that Malebranche put aside miracles in the name of divine law was fatal from the point of view of orthodoxy.

9. Yet another philosophic figure of the reign of Louis XIV, the Jesuit PÈre Buffier (1661–1737), deserves a passing notice here—out of his chronological order—though the historians of philosophy have mostly ignored him.81 He is indeed of no permanent philosophic importance, being a precursor of the Scottish school of Reid, nourished on Locke, and somewhat on Descartes; but he is significant for the element of practical rationalism which pervades his reasoning, and which recommended him to Voltaire, Reid, and Destutt de Tracy. On the question of “primary truths in theology” he declares so boldly for the authority of revelation in all dogmas which pass comprehension, and for the non-concern of theology with any process of rational proof,82 that it is hardly possible to suppose him a believer. On those principles, Islam has exactly the same authority as Christianity. In his metaphysic “he rejects all the ontological proofs of the existence of God, and, among others, the proof of Descartes from infinitude: he maintains that the idea of God is not innate, and that it can be reached only from consideration of the order of nature.”83 He is thus as much of a force for deism as was his master, Locke; and he outgoes him in point of rationalism when he puts the primary ethic of reciprocity as a universally recognized truth,84 where Locke had helplessly fallen back on “the will of God.” On the other hand he censures Descartes for not admitting the equal validity of other tests with that of primary consciousness, thus in effect putting himself in line with Gassendi. For the rest, his Examen des prÉjugÉs vulgaires, the most popular of his works, is so full of practical rationalism, and declares among other things so strongly in favour of free discussion, that its influence must have been wholly in the direction of freethought. “Give me,” he makes one of his disputants say, “a nation where they do not dispute, do not contest: it will be, I assure you, a very stupid and a very ignorant nation.”85 Such reasoning could hardly please the Jesuits,86 and must have pleased freethinkers. And yet Buffier, like Gassendi, in virtue of his clerical status and his purely professional orthodoxy, escaped all persecution.

While an evolving Cartesianism, modified by the thought of Locke and the critical evolution of that, was thus reacting on thought in all directions, the primary and proper impulse of Descartes and Locke was doing on the Continent what that of Bacon had already done in England—setting men on actual scientific observation and experiment, and turning them from traditionalism of every kind. The more religious minds, as Malebranche, set their faces almost fanatically against erudition, thus making an enemy of the all-learned Huet,87 but on the other hand preparing the way for the scientific age. For the rest we find the influence of Descartes at work in heresies at which he had not hinted. Finally we shall see it taking deep root in Holland, furthering a rationalistic view of the Bible and of popular superstitions.

10. Yet another new departure was made in the France of Louis XIV by the scholarly performance of Richard Simon (1638–1712), who was as regards the Scriptural texts what Spencer of Cambridge was as regards the culture-history of the Hebrews, one of the founders of modern methodical criticism. It was as a devout Catholic refuting Protestants, and a champion of the Bible against Spinoza, that Simon began his work; but, more sincerely critical than Huet, he reached views more akin to those of Spinoza than to those of the Church.88 The congregation of the Oratory, where Simon laid the foundations of his learning, was so little inclined to his critical views that he decided to leave it; and though persuaded to stay, and to become for a time a professor of philosophy at Julli, he at length broke with the Order. Then, from his native town of Dieppe, came his strenuous series of critical works—L’histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678), which among other things decisively impugned the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch; the Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament (Rotterdam, 1689); numerous other volumes of critical studies on texts, versions, and commentators; and finally a French translation of the New Testament with notes. His BibliothÈque Critique (4 vols. under the name of Saint-Jore) was suppressed by an order in council; the translation was condemned by Bossuet and the Archbishop of Paris; and the two first-named works were suppressed by the Parlement of Paris and attacked by a host of orthodox scholars; but they were translated promptly into Latin and English; and they gave a new breadth of footing to the deistic argument, though Simon always wrote as an avowed believer.

Before Simon, the Protestant Isaac la PeyrÈre, the friend of La Mothe le Vayer and Gassendi, and the librarian of CondÉ, had fired a somewhat startling shot at the Pentateuch in his PrÆadamitÆ89 and Systema Theologica ex PrÆ-adamitarum Hypothesi (both 1655: printed in Holland90), for which he was imprisoned at Brussels, with the result that he recanted and joined the Church of Rome, going to the Pope in person to receive absolution, and publishing an Epistola ad Philotimum (Frankfort, 1658), in which he professed to explain his reasons for abjuring at once his Calvinism and his treatise. It is clear that all this was done to save his skin, for there is explicit testimony that he held firmly by his Preadamite doctrine to the end of his life, despite the seven or eight confutations of his work published in 1656.91 Were it not for his constructive theses—especially his idea that Adam was a real person, but simply the father of the Hebrews and not of the human race—he would deserve to rank high among the scientific pioneers of modern rationalism, for his negative work is shrewd and sound. Like so many other early rationalists, collectively accused of “destroying without replacing,” he erred precisely in his eagerness to build up, for his negations have all become accepted truths.92 As it is, he may be ranked, after Toland, as a main founder of the older rationalism, developed chiefly in Germany, which sought to reduce as many miracles as possible to natural events misunderstood. But he was too far before his time to win a fair hearing. Where Simon laid a cautious scholarly foundation, PeyrÈre suddenly challenged immemorial beliefs, and failed accordingly.

11. Such an evolution could not occur in France without affecting the neighbouring civilization of Holland. We have seen Dutch life at the beginning of the seventeenth century full of Protestant fanaticism and sectarian strife; and in the time of Descartes these elements, especially on the Calvinist side, were strong enough virtually to drive him out of Holland (1647) after nineteen years’ residence.93 He had, however, made disciples; and his doctrine bore fruit, finding doubtless some old soil ready. Thus in 1666 one of his disciples, the Amsterdam physician Louis Meyer, published a work entitled Philosophia Sacrae Scripturae Interpres,94 in which, after formally affirming that the Scripture is the infallible Word of God, he proceeds to argue that the interpretation of the Word must be made by the human reason, and accordingly sets aside all meanings which are irreconcilable therewith, reducing them to allegories or tropes. Apart from this, there is somewhat strong evidence that in Holland in the second half of the century Cartesianism was in large part identified with a widespread movement of rationalism, of a sufficiently pronounced kind. Peter von Mastricht, Professor of Theology at Utrecht, published in 1677 a Latin treatise, Novitatum Cartesianarum GangrÆna, in which he made out a list of fifty-six anti-Christian propositions maintained by Cartesians. Among them are these: That the divine essence, also that of angels, and that of the soul, consists only in Cogitation; That philosophy is not subservient to divinity, and is no less certain and no less revealed; That in things natural, moral, and practical, and also in matters of faith, the Scripture speaks according to the erroneous notions of the vulgar; That the mystery of the Trinity may be demonstrated by natural reason; That the first chaos was able of itself to produce all things material; That the world has a soul; and that it may be infinite in extent.95 The theologian was thus visibly justified in maintaining that the “novelties” of Cartesianism outwent by a long way those of Arminianism.96 It had in fact established a new point of view; seeing that Arminius had claimed for theology all the supremacy ever accorded to it in the Church.97

12. As Meyer was one of the most intimate friends of Spinoza, being with him at death, and became the editor of his posthumous works, it can hardly be doubted that his treatise, which preceded Spinoza’s Tractatus by four years, influenced the great Jew, who speedily eclipsed him.98 Spinoza, however (1632–1677), was first led to rationalize by his Amsterdam friend and teacher, Van den Ende, a scientific materialist, hostile to all religion;99 and it was while under his influence that he was excommunicated by his father’s synagogue. From the first, apparently, Spinoza’s thought was shaped partly by the medieval Hebrew philosophy100 (which, as we have seen, combined Aristotelean and Saracen influences), partly by the teaching of Bruno, though he modified and corrected that at various points.101 Later he was deeply influenced by Descartes, whom he specially expounded for a pupil in a tractate.102 Here he endorses Descartes’s doctrine of freewill, which he was later to repudiate and overthrow. But he drew from Descartes his retained principle that evil is not a real existence. In a much less degree he was influenced by Bacon, whose psychology he ultimately condemned; but from Hobbes he took not only his rationalistic attitude towards “revelation,” but his doctrine of ecclesiastical subordination.103 Finally evolving his own conceptions, he produced a philosophic system which was destined to affect all European thought, remaining the while quietly occupied with the handicraft of lens-grinding by which he earned his livelihood. The Grand Pensionary of the Netherlands, John de Witt, seems to have been in full sympathy with the young heretic, on whom he conferred a small pension before he had published anything save his Cartesian Principia (1663).

The much more daring and powerful Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670104) was promptly condemned by a Dutch clerical synod, along with Hobbes’s Leviathan, which it greatly surpassed in the matter of criticism of the scriptural text. It was the most stringent censure of supernaturalism that had thus far appeared in any modern language; and its preface is an even more mordant attack on popular religion and clericalism than the main body of the work. What seems to-day an odd compromise—the reservation of supra-rational authority for revelation, alongside of unqualified claims for the freedom of reason105—was but an adaptation of the old scholastic formula of “twofold truth,” and was perhaps at the time the possible maximum of open rationalism in regard to the current creed, since both Bacon and Locke, as we have seen, were fain to resort to it. As revealed in his letters, Spinoza in almost all things stood at the point of view of the cultivated rationalism of two centuries later. He believed in a historical Jesus, rejecting the Resurrection;106 disbelieved in ghosts and spirits;107 rejected miracles;108 and refused to think of God as ever angry;109 avowing that he could not understand the Scriptures, and had been able to learn nothing from them as to God’s attributes.110 The Tractatus could not go so far; but it went far enough to horrify many who counted themselves latitudinarian. It was only in Holland that so aggressive a criticism of Christian faith and practice could then appear; and even there neither publisher nor author dared avow himself. Spinoza even vetoed a translation into Dutch, foreseeing that such a book would be placed under an interdict.111 It was as much an appeal for freedom of thought (libertas philosophandi) as a demonstration of rational truth; and Spinoza dexterously pointed (c. 20) to the social effects of the religious liberty already enjoyed in Amsterdam as a reason for carrying liberty further. There can be no question that it powerfully furthered alike the deistic and the Unitarian movements in England from the year of its appearance; and, though the States-General felt bound formally to prohibit it on the issue of the second edition in 1674, its effect in Holland was probably as great as elsewhere: at least there seems to have gone on there from this time a rapid modification of the old orthodoxy.

Still more profound, probably, was the effect of the posthumous Ethica (1677), which he had been prevented from publishing in his lifetime,112 and which not only propounded in parts an absolute pantheism (= atheism113), but definitely grounded ethics in human nature. If more were needed to arouse theological rage, it was to be found in the repeated and insistent criticism of the moral and mental perversity of the defenders of the faith114—a position not indeed quite consistent with the primary teaching of the treatise on the subject of Will, of which it denies the entity in the ordinary sense. Spinoza was here reverting to the practical attitude of Bacon, which, under a partial misconception, he had repudiated; and he did not formally solve the contradiction. His purpose was to confute the ordinary orthodox dogma that unbelief is wilful sin; and to retort the charge without reconciling it with the thesis was to impair the philosophic argument.115 It was not on that score, however, that it was resented, but as an unpardonable attack on orthodoxy, not to be atoned for by any words about the spirit of Christ.116 The discussion went deep and far. A reply to the Tractatus which appeared in 1674, by an Utrecht professor (then dead), is spoken of by Spinoza with contempt;117 but abler discussion followed, though the assailants mostly fell foul of each other. Franz Cuper or Kuyper of Amsterdam, who in 1676 published an Arcana Atheismi Revelata, professedly refuting Spinoza’s Tractatus, was charged with writing in bad faith and with being on Spinoza’s side—an accusation which he promptly retorted on other critics, apparently with justice.118

13. The appearance in 1678 of a Dutch treatise “against all sorts of atheists,”119 and in 1681, at Amsterdam, of an attack in French on Spinoza’s Scriptural criticism,120 points to a movement outside of the clerical and scholarly class. All along, indeed, the atmosphere of the Arminian or “Remonstrant” School in Holland must have been fairly liberal.121 Already in 1685 Locke’s friend Le Clerc had taken up the position of Hobbes and Spinoza and Simon on the Pentateuch in his Sentimens de quelques thÉologiens de Hollande (translated into English and published in 1690 as “Five Letters Concerning the Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures”).122 And although Le Clerc always remained something of a Scripturalist, and refused to go the way of Spinoza, he had courage enough to revive an ancient heresy by urging, in his commentary on the fourth Gospel (1701), that “the Logos” should be rendered “Reason”—an idea which he probably derived from the Unitarian Zwicker without realizing how far it could take him. His ultimate recantation, on the subject of the authorship of the Pentateuch, served only to weaken his credit with freethinkers, and came too late to arrest the intellectual movement which he had forwarded.

A rationalizing spirit had now begun to spread widely in Holland; and within twenty years of Spinoza’s death there had arisen a Dutch sect, led by Pontiaan van Hattem, a pastor at Philipsland, which blended Spinozism with evangelicalism in such a way as to incur the anathema of the Church.123 In the time of the English Civil War the fear of the opponents of the new multitude of sects was that England should become “another Amsterdam.”124 This very multiplicity tended to promote doubt; and in 1713 we find Anthony Collins125 pointing to Holland as a country where freedom to think has undermined superstition to a remarkable degree. During his stay, in the previous generation, Locke had found a measure of liberal theology, in harmony with his own; but in those days downright heresy was still dangerous. Deurhoff (d. 1717), who translated Descartes and was accused of Spinozism, though he strongly attacked it,126 had at one time to fly Holland, though by his writings he founded a pantheistic sect known as Deurhovians; and Balthasar Bekker, a Cartesian, persecuted first for Socinianism, incurred so much odium by publishing in 1691 a treatise denying the reality of witchcraft that he had to give up his office as a preacher.

14. No greater service was rendered in that age to the spread of rational views than that embodied in the great Dictionnaire Historique et Critique127 of Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), who, born in France, but driven out by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, spent the best part of his life and did his main work at Rotterdam. Persecuted there for his freethinking, to the extent of having to give up his professorship, he yet produced a virtual encyclopedia for freethinkers in his incomparable Dictionary, baffling hostility by the Pyrrhonian impartiality with which he handled all religious questions. In his youth, when sent by his Protestant father to study at Toulouse, he had been temporarily converted, as was the young Gibbon later, to Catholicism;128 and the retrospect of that experience seems in Bayle’s case, as in Gibbon’s, to have been a permanent motive to practical skepticism.129 But, again, in the one case as in the other, skepticism was fortified by abundant knowledge. Bayle had read everything and mastered every controversy, and was thereby the better able to seem to have no convictions of his own. But even apart from the notable defence of the character of atheists dropped by him in the famous PensÉes diverses sur la ComÈte (1682), and in the Éclaircissements in which he defended it, it is abundantly evident that he was an unbeliever. The only alternative view is that he was strictly or philosophically a skeptic, reaching no conclusions for himself; but this is excluded by the whole management of his expositions.130 It is recorded that it was his vehement description of himself as a Protestant “in the full force of the term,” accompanied with a quotation from Lucretius, that set the clerical diplomatist Polignac upon re-reading the Roman atheist and writing his poem Anti-Lucretius.131 Bayle’s ostensible Pyrrhonism was simply the tactic forced on him by his conditions; and it was the positive unbelievers who specially delighted in his volumes. He laid down no cosmic doctrines, but he illuminated all; and his air of repudiating such views as Spinoza’s had the effect rather of forcing Spinozists to leave neutral ground than of rehabilitating orthodoxy.

On one theme he spoke without any semblance of doubt. Above all men who had yet written he is the champion of toleration.132 At a time when in England the school of Locke still held that atheism must not be tolerated, he would accept no such position, insisting that error as such is not culpable, and that, save in the case of a sect positively inciting to violence and disorder, all punishment of opinion is irrational and unjust.133 On this theme, moved by the memory of his own life of exile and the atrocious persecution of the Protestants of France, he lost his normal imperturbability, as in his Letter to an AbbÉ (if it be really his), entitled Ce que c’est que la France toute catholique sous le rÈgne de Louis le Grand, in which a controlled passion of accusation makes every sentence bite like an acid, leaving a mark that no dialectic can efface. But it was not only from Catholicism that he suffered, and not only to Catholics that his message was addressed. One of his most malignant enemies was the Protestant Jurieu, who it was that succeeded in having him deprived of his chair of philosophy and history at Rotterdam (1693) on the score of the freethinking of his PensÉes sur la ComÈte. This wrong cast a shadow over his life, reducing him to financial straits in which he had to curtail greatly the plan of his Dictionary. Further, it moved him to some inconsistent censure of the political writings of French Protestant refugees134—Jurieu being the reputed author of a violent attack on the rule of Louis XIV, under the title Les Soupirs de la France esclave qui aspire aprÈs la libertÉ (1689).135 Yet again, the malicious Jurieu induced the Consistory of Rotterdam to censure the Dictionary on the score of the tone and tendency of the article “David” and the renewed vindications of atheists.

But nothing could turn Bayle from his loyalty to reason and toleration; and the malice of the bigots could not deprive him of his literary vogue, which was in the ratio of his unparalleled industry. As a mere writer he is admirable: save in point of sheer wit, of which, however, he has not a little, he is to this day as readable as Voltaire. By force of unfailing lucidity, wisdom, and knowledge, he made the conquest of literary Europe; and fifty years after his death we find the Jesuit Delamare in his (anonymous) apologetic treatise, La Foi justifiÉe de tout reproche de contradiction avec la raison (1761), speaking of him to the deists as “their theologian, their doctor, their oracle.”136 He was indeed no less; and his serene exposure of the historic failure of Christianity was all the more deadly as coming from a master of theological history.

15. Meantime, Spinoza had reinforced the critical movement in France,137 where decline of belief can be seen proceeding after as before the definite adoption of pietistic courses by the king, under the influence of Madame de Maintenon. Abbadie, writing his TraitÉ de la veritÉ de la religion chrÉtienne at Berlin in 1684, speaks of an “infinity” of prejudiced deists as against the “infinity” of prejudiced believers138—evidently thinking of northern Europeans in general; and he strives hard to refute both Hobbes and Spinoza on points of Biblical criticism. In France he could not turn the tide. That radical distrust of religious motives and illumination which can be seen growing up in every country in modern Europe where religion led to war, was bound to be strengthened by the spectacle of the reformed sensualist harrying heresy in his own kingdom in the intervals of his wars with his neighbours. The crowning folly of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes139 (1685), forcing the flight from France of some three hundred thousand industrious140 and educated inhabitants for the offence of Protestantism, was as mad a blow to religion as to the State. Less paralysing to economic life than the similar policy of the Church against the Moriscoes in Spain, it is no less striking a proof of the paralysis of practical judgment to which unreasoning faith and systematic ecclesiasticism can lead. Orthodoxy in France was as ecstatic in its praise of the act as had been that of Spain in the case of the expulsion of the Moriscoes. The deed is not to be laid at the single door of the king or of any of his advisers, male or female: the act which deprived France of a vast host of her soundest citizens was applauded by nearly all cultured Catholicism.141 Not merely the bishops, Bossuet and FÉnelon142 and Masillon, but the Jansenist Arnauld; not merely the female devotees, Mademoiselle de ScudÉry and Madame DeshouliÈres, but Racine, La BruyÈre, and the senile la Fontaine—all extolled the senseless deed. The not over-pious Madame de SÉvignÉ was delighted with the “dragonnades,” declaring that “nothing could be finer: no king has done or will do anything more memorable”; the still less mystical Bussy, author of the Histoire amoureuse des Gaules, was moved to pious exultation; and the dying Chancelier le Tellier, on signing the edict of revocation, repeated the legendary cry of Simeon, Nunc dimitte servum tuum, Domine! To this pass had the Catholic creed and discipline brought the mind of France. Only the men of affairs, nourished upon realities—the Vaubans, Saint Simons, and Catinats—realized the insanity of the action, which Colbert (d. 1683) would never have allowed to come to birth.

The triumphers, doubtless, did not contemplate the expatriation of the myriads of Protestants who escaped over the frontiers in the closing years of the century in spite of all the efforts of the royal police, “carrying with them,” as a later French historian writes, “our arts, the secrets of our manufactures, and their hatred of the king.” The Catholics, as deep in civics as in science, thought only of the humiliation and subjection of the heretics—doubtless feeling that they were getting a revenge against Protestantism for the Test Act and the atrocities of the Popish Plot mania in England. The blow recoiled on their country. Within a generation, their children were enduring the agonies of utter defeat at the hands of a coalition of Protestant nations every one of which had been strengthened by the piously exiled sons of France; and in the midst of their mortal struggle the revolted Protestants of the CÉvennes so furiously assailed from the rear that the drain upon the king’s forces precipitated the loss of their hold on Germany.

For every Protestant who crossed the frontiers between 1685 and 1700, perhaps, a Catholic neared or crossed the line between indifferentism and active doubt. The steady advance of science all the while infallibly undermined faith; and hardly was the bolt launched against the Protestants when new sapping and mining was going on. Fontenelle (1657–1757), whose Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) popularized for the elegant world the new cosmology, cannot but have undermined dogmatic faith in some directions; above all by his graceful and skilful Histoire des Oracles (also 1686), where “the argumentation passes beyond the thesis advanced. All that he says of oracles could be said of miracles.”143 The Jesuits found the book essentially “impious”; and a French culture-historian sees in it “the first attack which directs the scientific spirit against the foundations of Christianity. All the purely philosophic arguments with which religion has been assailed are in principle in the work of Fontenelle.”144 In his abstract thinking he was no less radical, and his TraitÉ de la LibertÉ145 established so well the determinist position that it was decisively held by the majority of the French freethinkers who followed. Living to his hundredth year, he could join hands with the freethought of Gassendi and Voltaire,146 Descartes and Diderot. Yet we shall find him later, in his official capacity of censor of literature, refusing to pass heretical books, on principles that would have vetoed his own. He is in fact a type of the freethought of the age of Louis XIV—Epicurean in the common sense, unheroic, resolute only to evade penalties, guiltless of over-zeal. Not in that age could men generate an enthusiasm for truth.

16. Of the new Epicureans, the most famous in his day was Saint-Evremond,147 who, exiled from France for his politics, maintained both in London and in Paris, by his writings, a leadership in polite letters. In England he greatly influenced young men like Bolingbroke; and a translation (attributed to Dryden) of one of his writings seems to have given Bishop Butler the provocation to the first and weakest chapter of his Analogy.148 As to his skepticism there was no doubt in his own day; and his compliments to Christianity are much on a par with those paid later by the equally conforming and unbelieving Shaftesbury, whom he also anticipated in his persuasive advocacy of toleration.149 Regnard, the dramatist, had a similar private repute as an “Epicurean.” And even among the nominally orthodox writers of the time in France a subtle skepticism touches nearly all opinion. La BruyÈre is almost the only lay classic of the period who is pronouncedly religious; and his essay on the freethinkers,150 against whom his reasoning is so forcibly feeble, testifies to their numbers and to the stress of debate set up by them. Even he, too, writes as a deist against atheists, hardly as a believing Christian. If he were a believer he certainly found no comfort in his faith: whatever were his capacity for good feeling, no great writer of his age betrays such bitterness of spirit, such suffering from the brutalities of life, such utter disillusionment, such unfaith in men. And a certain doubt is cast upon all his professions of opinion by the sombre avowal: “A man born a Christian and a Frenchman finds himself constrained151 in satire: the great subjects are forbidden him: he takes them up at times, and then turns aside to little things, which he elevates by his ... genius and his style.”152

If the apologetics of Huet and Pascal, Bossuet and FÉnelon, had any influence on the rationalistic spirit, it was but in the direction of making it more circumspect, never of driving it out. It is significant that whereas in the year of the issue of the Demonstratio the Duchesse d’OrlÉans could write that “every young man either is or affects to be an atheist,” Le Vassor wrote in 1688: “People talk only of reason, of good taste, of force of mind, of the advantage of those who can raise themselves above the prejudices of education and of the society in which one is born. Pyrrhonism is the fashion in many things: men say that rectitude of mind consists in ‘not believing lightly’ and in being ‘ready to doubt.’”153 Pascal and Huet between them had only multiplied doubters. On both lines, obviously, freethought was the gainer; and in a Jesuit treatise, Le Monde condamnÉ par luymesme, published in 1695, the PrÉface contre l’incrÉdulitÉ des libertins sets out with the avowal that “to draw the condemnation of the world out of its own mouth, it is necessary to attack first the incredulity of the unbelievers (libertins), who compose the main part of it, and who under some appearance of Christianity conceal a mind either Judaic [read deistic] or pagan.” Such was France to a religious eye at the height of the Catholic triumph over Protestantism. The statement that the libertins formed the majority of “the world” is of course a furious extravagance. But there must have been a good deal of unbelief to have moved a priest to such an explosion. And the unbelief must have been as much a product of revulsion from religious savagery as a result of direct critical impulse, for there was as yet no circulation of positively freethinking literature. For a time, indeed, there was a general falling away in French intellectual prestige,154 the result, not of the mere “protective spirit” in literature, as is sometimes argued, but of the immense diversion of national energy under Louis XIV to militarism;155 and the freethinkers lost some of the confidence as well as some of the competence they had exhibited in the days of MoliÈre.156 There had been too little solid thinking done to preclude a reaction when the king, led by Madame de Maintenon, went about to atone for his debaucheries by an old age of piety. “The king had been put in such fear of hell that he believed that all who had not been instructed by the Jesuits were damned. To ruin anyone it was necessary only to say, ‘He is a Huguenot, or a Jansenist,’ and the thing was done.”157 In this state of things there spread in France the revived doctrine or temper of Quietism, set up by the Spanish priest, Miguel de Molinos (1640–1697), whose Spiritual Guide, published in Spanish in 1675, appeared in 1681 in Italian at Rome, where he was a highly influential confessor. It was soon translated into Latin, French, and Dutch. In 1685 he was cited before the Inquisition; in 1687 the book was condemned to be burned, and he was compelled to retract sixty-eight propositions declared to be heretical; whereafter, nonetheless, he was imprisoned till his death in 1696. In France, whence the attack on him had begun, his teaching made many converts, notably Madame Guyon, and may be said to have created a measure of religious revival. But when FÉnelon took it up (1697), modifying the terminology of Molinos to evade the official condemnation, he was bitterly attacked by Bossuet as putting forth doctrine incompatible with Christianity; the prelates fought for two years; and finally the Pope condemned FÉnelon’s book, whereupon he submitted, limiting his polemic to attacks on the Jansenists. Thus the gloomy orthodoxy of the court and the mysticism of the new school alike failed to affect the general intelligence; there was no real building up of belief; and the forward movement at length recommenced.