A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 / Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumes :: THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT ( Continued )

THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT ( Continued )

While France was thus passing from general fanaticism to a large measure of freethought, England was passing by a less tempestuous path to a hardly less advanced stage of opinion. It was indeed a bloody age; and in 1535 we have record of nineteen men and five women of Holland, apparently Anabaptists, who denied the “humanity” of Christ and rejected infant baptism and transubstantiation, being sentenced to be burned alive—two suffering at Smithfield, and the rest at other towns, by way of example. Others in Henry’s reign suffered the same penalty for the same offence; and in 1538 a priest named Nicholson or Lambert, refusing on the King’s personal pressure to recant, was “brent in Smithfield” for denying the bodily presence in the eucharist.1 The first decades of “Reformation” in England truly saw the opening of new vials of blood. More and Fisher and scores of lesser men died as Catholics for denying the King’s “supremacy” in religion; as many more for denying the Catholic tenets which the King held to the last; and not a few by the consent of More and Fisher for translating or circulating the sacred books. Latimer, martyred under Mary, had applauded the burning of the Anabaptists. One generation slew for denial of the humanity of Christ; the next for denial of his divinity. Under Edward VI there were burned no Catholics, but several heretics, including Joan Bocher and a Dutch Unitarian, George Van Pare, described as a man of saintly life.2 Still the English evolution was less destructive than the French or the German, and the comparative bloodlessness of the strife between Protestant and Catholic under Mary3 and Elizabeth, the treatment of the Jesuit propaganda under the latter queen as a political rather than a doctrinal question,4 prevented any such vehemence of recoil from religious ideals as took place in France. When in 1575 the law De hÆretico comburendo, which had slept for seventeen years, was set to work anew under Elizabeth, the first victims were Dutch Anabaptists. Of a congregation of them at Aldgate, twenty-seven were imprisoned, of whom ten were burned, and the rest deported. Two others, John Wielmacker and Hendrich Ter Woort, were anti-Trinitarians, and were burned accordingly. Foxe appealed to the Queen to appoint any punishment short of death, or even that of hanging, rather than the horrible death by burning; but in vain. “All parties at the time concurred” in approving the course taken.5 Orthodoxy was rampant.

Unbelief, as we have seen, however, there certainly was; and it is recorded that Walter, Earl of Essex, on his deathbed at Dublin in 1576, murmured that among his countrymen neither Popery nor Protestantism prevailed: “there was nothing but infidelity, infidelity, infidelity; atheism, atheism; no religion, no religion.”6 And when we turn aside from the beaten paths of Elizabethan literature we see clearly what is partly visible from those paths—a number of freethinking variations from the norm of faith. Ascham, as we saw, found some semblance of atheism shockingly common among the travelled upper class of his day; and the testimonies continue. Edward Kirke, writing his “glosses” to Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar in 1578, observes that “it was an old opinion, and yet is continued in some men’s conceit, that men of years have no fear of God at all, or not so much as younger folk,” experience having made them skeptical. Erasmus, he notes, in his Adages makes the proverb “Nemo senex metuit Jovem” signify merely that “old men are far from superstition and belief in false Gods.” But Kirke insists that, “his great learning notwithstanding, it is too plain to be gainsaid that old men are much more inclined to such fond fooleries than younger men,”7 apparently meaning that elderly men in his day were commonly skeptical about divine providence.

Other writers of the day do not limit unbelief to the aged. Lilly, in his Euphues (1578), referring to England in general or Oxford in particular as Athens, asks: “Be there not many in Athens which think there is no God, no redemption, no resurrection?” Further, he complains that “it was openly reported of an old man in Naples that there was more lightness in Athens than in all Italy ... more Papists, more Atheists, more sects, more schisms, than in all the monarchies in the world”;8 and he proceeds to frame an absurd dialogue of “Euphues and Atheos,” in which the latter, “monstrous, yet tractable to be persuaded,”9 is converted with a burlesque facility. Lilly, who writes as a man-of-the-world believer, is a poor witness as to the atheistic arguments current; but those he cites are so much better than his own, up to the point of terrified collapse on the atheist’s part, that he had doubtless heard them. The atheist speaks as a pantheist, identifying deity with the universe; and readily meets a simple appeal to Scripture with the reply that “whosoever denieth a godhead denieth also the Scriptures which testifie of him.”10 But in one of his own plays, played in 1584, Lilly puts on the stage a glimpse of current controversy in a fashion which suggests that he had not remained so contemptuously confident of the self-evident character of theism. In Campaspe (i, 3) he introduces, undramatically enough, Plato, Aristotle, Cleanthes, Crates, and other philosophers, who converse concerning “natural causes” and “supernatural effects.” Aristotle is made to confess that he “cannot by natural reason give any reason of the ebbing and flowing of the sea”; and Plato contends against Cleanthes, “searching for things which are not to be found,” that “there is no man so savage in whom resteth not this divine particle, that there is an omnipotent, eternal, and divine mover, which may be called God.” Cleanthes replies that “that first mover, which you term God, is the instrument of all the movings which we attribute to Nature. The earth ... seasons ... fruits ... the whole firmament ... and whatsoever else appeareth miraculous, what man almost of mean capacity but can prove it natural.” Nothing is concluded, and the debate is adjourned. Anaxarchus declares: “I will take part with Aristotle, that there is Natura naturans, and yet not God”; while Crates rejoins: “And I with Plato, that there is Deus optimus maximus, and not Nature.”

It is a curious dialogue to put upon the stage, by the mouth of children-actors, and the arbitrary ascription to Aristotle of high theistic views, in a scene in which he is expressly described by a fellow philosopher as a Naturalist, suggests that Lilly felt the danger of giving offence by presenting the supreme philosopher as an atheist. It is evident, however, both from Euphues and from Campaspe, that naturalistic views were in some vogue, else they had not been handled in the theatre and in a book essentially planned for the general reader. But however firmly held, they could not be directly published; and a dozen years later, over thirty years after the outburst of Ascham, we still find only a sporadic and unwritten freethought, however abundant, going at times in fear of its life.

Private discussion, indeed, there must have been, if there be any truth in Bacon’s phrase that “atheists will ever be talking of that opinion, as if they ... would be glad to be strengthened by the consent of others”11—an argument which would make short work of the vast literature of apologetic theism—but even private talk had need be cautious, and there could be no publication of atheistic opinions. Printed rationalism could go no further than such a protest against superstition as Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which, however, is a sufficiently remarkable expression of reason in an age in which a Bodin held angrily by the delusion.12 Elizabeth was herself substantially irreligious,13 and preferred to keep the clergy few in number and subordinate in influence;14 but her Ministers regarded the Church as part of the State system, and punished all open or at least aggressive heresy in the manner of the Inquisition. Yet the imported doctrine of the subjective character of hell and heaven,15 taken up by Marlowe, held its ground, and is denounced by Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses16 (1583); and other foreign philosophy of the same order found religious acceptance. A sect called the “Family of Love,” deriving from Holland (already “a country fruitfull of heretics”),17 went so far as to hold that “Christ doth not signify any one person, but a quality whereof many are partakers”—a doctrine which we have seen ascribed by Calvin to the libertins of Geneva a generation before;18 but it does not appear that they were persecuted.19 Some isolated propagandists, however, paid the last penalty. One Matthew Hamont or Hamond, a ploughwright, of Hetherset, was in 1579 tried by the Bishop and Consistory of Norwich “for that he denyed Christe,” and, being found guilty, was burned, after having had his ears cut off, “because he spake wordes of blasphemie against the Queen’s Maiistie and others of her Counsell.”20 The victim would thus seem to have been given to violence of speech; but the record of his negations, which suggest developments from the Anabaptist movement, is none the less notable. In Stow’s wording,21 they run:—

“That the newe Testament and Gospell of Christe are but mere foolishnesse, a storie of menne, or rather a mere fable.

“Item, that man is restored to grace by the meere mercy of God, wythout the meane of Christ’s bloud, death, and passion.

“Item, that Christe is not God, nor the Saviour of the world, but a meere man, a sinfull man, and an abhominable Idoll.

“Item, that al they that worshippe him are abhominable Idolaters; And that Christe did not rise agayne from death to life by the power of his Godhead, neither, that hee did ascende into Heaven.

“Item, that the holy Ghoste is not God, neither that there is any suche holy Ghoste.

“Item, that Baptisme is not necessarie in the Churche of God, neither the use of the sacrament of the body and bloude of Christ.”

There is record also of a freethinker named John Lewes burned at the same place in 1583 for “denying the Godhead of Christ, and holding other detestable heresies,” in the manner of Hamond.22 In the same year Elias Thacker and John Coping were hanged at St. Edmonsbury “for spreading certaine bookes, seditiously penned by one Robert Browne against the Booke of Common Prayer”; and “their bookes so many as could be found were burnt before them.”23 Further, one Peter Cole, an Ipswich tanner, was burned in 1587 (also at Norwich) for similar doctrine; and Francis Kett, a young clergyman, ex-fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, was burned at the same place in 1589 for heresy of the Unitarian order.24 Hamond and Cole seem, however, to have been in their own way religious men,25 and Kett a devout mystic, with ideas of a Second Advent.26 All founded on the Bible.

Most surprising of all perhaps is the record of the trial of one John Hilton, clerk in holy orders, before the Upper House of Convocation on December 22, 1584, on the charge of having “said in a sermon at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields that the Old and New Testaments are but fables.” (Lansdowne MSS. British Museum, No. 982, fol. 46, cited by Prof. Storojenko, Life of Robert Greene, Eng. tr. in Grosart’s “Huth Library” ed. of Greene’s Works, i, 39, note.) As Hilton confessed to the charge and made abjuration, it may be surmised that he had spoken under the influence of liquor. Even on that view, however, such an episode tells of a considerable currency of unbelieving criticism.

Apart from constructive heresy, the perpetual religious dissensions of the time were sure to stimulate doubt; and there appeared quite a number of treatises directed wholly or partly against explicit unbelief, as: The Faith of the Church Militant, translated from the Latin of the Danish divine Hemming (1581), and addressed “to the confutation of the Jewes, Turks, Atheists, Papists, Hereticks, and all other adversaries of the truth whatsoever”; “The Touchstone of True Religion ... against the impietie of Atheists, Epicures, Libertines, Hippocrites, and Temporisours of these times” (1590); An Enemie to Atheisme, translated by T. Rogers from the Latin of Avenar (1591); the preacher Henry Smith’s God’s Arrow against Atheists (1593, rep. 1611); an English translation of the second volume of La Primaudaye’s L’AcadÉmie FranÇaise, containing a refutation of atheistic doctrine; and no fewer than three “Treatises of the Nature of God”—all anonymous, the third known to be by Bishop Thomas Morton—all appearing in the year 1599.

All this smoke—eight apologetic treatises in eighteen years—implies some fire; and the translator of La Primaudaye, one “T. B.,” declares in his dedication that there has been a general growth of atheism in England and on the continent, which he traces to “that Monster Machiavell.” Among English atheists of that school he ranks the dramatist Robert Greene, who had died in 1592; and it has been argued, not quite convincingly, that it was to Machiavelli that Greene had pointed, in his death-bed recantation A Groatsworth of Wit (1592), as the atheistic instructor of his friend Marlowe,27 who introduces “Machiavel” as cynical prologist to his Jew of Malta. Greene’s own “atheism” had been for the most part a matter of bluster and disorderly living; and we find his zealously orthodox friend Thomas Nashe, in his Strange News (1592), calling the Puritan zealot who used the pseudonym of Martin Marprelate “a mighty platformer of atheism”; even as his own and Greene’s enemy, Gabriel Harvey, called Nashe an atheist.28 But Nashe in his Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem (1592), though he speaks characteristically of the “atheistical Julian,” discusses contemporary atheism in a fashion descriptive of an actual growth of the opinion, concerning which he alleges that there is no “sect now in England so scattered [i.e., so widely spread] as atheisme.” The “outward atheist,” he declares, “establishes reason as his God”; and he offers some sufficiently primitive arguments by way of confutation. “They follow the Pironicks [i.e., Pyrrhonists], whose position and opinion it is that there is no hell or misery but opinion. Impudently they persist in it, that the late discovered Indians show antiquities thousands before Adam.” For the rest, they not only reject the miracles of Moses as mere natural expedients misrepresented, but treat the whole Bible as “some late writers of our side” treat the Apocrypha. And Nashe complains feelingly that while the atheists “are special men of wit,” and that “the Romish seminaries have not allured unto them so many good wits as atheism,” the preachers who reply to them are men of dull understanding, the product of a system under which preferment is given to graduates on the score not of capacity but of mere gravity and solemnity. “It is the superabundance of wit,” declares Nashe, “that makes atheists: will you then hope to beat them down with fusty brown-bread dorbellism?”29 There had arisen, in short, a ferment of rationalism which was henceforth never to disappear from English life.

In 1593, indeed, we find atheism formally charged against two famous men, Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh, of whom the first is documentarily connected with Kett, and the second in turn with Marlowe. An official document,30 preserved by some chance, reveals that Marlowe was given—whether or not over the wine-cup—to singularly audacious derision of the received beliefs; and so explicit is the evidence that it is nearly certain he would have been executed for blasphemy had he not been privately killed (1593) while the proceedings were pending. The “atheism” imputed to him is not made out in any detail; but many of the other utterances are notably in keeping with Marlowe’s daring temper; and they amount to unbelief of a stringent kind. In Doctor Faustus31 he makes Mephistopheles affirm that “Hell hath no limits ... but where we are is hell”—a doctrine which we have seen to be current before his time; and in his private talk he had gone much further. Nashe doubtless had him in mind when he spoke of men of “superabundance of wit.” Not only did he question, with Raleigh, the Biblical chronology: he affirmed “That Moyses was but a juggler, and that one Heriots” [i.e., Thomas Harriott, or Harriots, the astronomer, one of Raleigh’s circle] “can do more than he”; and concerning Jesus he used language incomparably more offensive to orthodox feeling than that of Hamond and Kett. There is more in all this than a mere assimilation of Machiavelli; though the further saying “that the first beginning of religion was only to keep men in awe”—put also by Greene [if not by Marlowe], with much force of versification, in the mouth of a villain-hero in the anonymous play of Selimus32—tells of that influence. Marlowe was indeed not the man to swear by any master without adding something of his own. Atheism, however, is not inferrible from any of his works: on the contrary, in the second part of his famous first play he makes his hero, described by the repentant Greene as the “atheist Tamburlaine,” declaim of deity with signal eloquence, though with a pantheistic cast of phrase. In another passage, a Moslem personage claims to be on the side of a Christ who would punish perjury; and in yet another the hero is made to trample under foot the pretensions of Mohammed.33 It was probably his imputation of perjury to Christian rulers in particular that earned for Marlowe the malignant resentment which inspired the various edifying comments published after his unedifying death. Had he not perished as he did in a tavern brawl, he might have had the nobler fate of a martyr.

Concerning Raleigh, again, there is no shadow of proof of atheism, though his circle, which included the Earls of Northumberland and Oxford, was called a “school of atheism” in a Latin pamphlet by the Jesuit Parsons,34 published at Rome in 1593; and this reputation clung to him. It is matter of literary history, however, that he, like Montaigne, had been influenced by the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus;35 his short essay The Sceptick being a naÏf exposition of the thesis that “the sceptick doth neither affirm neither deny any position; but doubteth of it, and applyeth his Reason against that which is affirmed, or denied, to justifie his non-consenting.”36 The essay itself, nevertheless, proceeds upon a set of wildly false propositions in natural history, concerning which the adventurous reasoner has no doubts whatever; and altogether we may be sure that his artificial skepticism did not carry him far in philosophy. In the Discovery of Guiana (1600) he declares that he is “resolved” of the truth of the stories of men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders; and in his History of the World (1603–16) he insists that the stars and other celestial bodies “incline the will by mediation of the sensitive appetite.”37 In other directions, however, he was less credulous. In the same History he points out, as Marlowe had done in talk, how incompatible was such a phenomenon as the mature civilization of ancient Egypt in the days of Abraham with the orthodox chronology.38 This, indeed, was heresy enough, then and later, seeing that not only did Bishop Pearson, in 1659, in a work on The Creed which has been circulated down to the nineteenth century, indignantly denounce all who departed from the figures in the margin of the Bible; but Coleridge, a century and a half later, took the very instance of Egyptian history as triumphantly establishing the accuracy of the Bible record against the French atheists.39 As regards Raleigh’s philosophy, the evidence goes to show only that he was ready to read a Unitarian essay, presumably that already mentioned, supposed to be Kett’s; and that he had intercourse with Marlowe and others (in particular his secretary, Harriott) known to be freethinkers. A prosecution begun against him on this score, at the time of the inquiry concerning Marlowe (when Raleigh was in disgrace with the Queen), came to nothing. It had been led up to by a translation of Parsons’s pamphlet, which affirmed that his private group was known as “Sir Walter Rawley’s school of Atheisme,” and that therein “both Moyses and our Savior, the Old and the New Testaments, are jested at, and the scholars taught among other things to spell God backwards.”40 This seems to have been idle gossip, though it tells of unbelief somewhere; and Raleigh’s own writings always indicate41 belief in the Bible; though his dying speech and epitaph are noticeably deistic. That he was a deist, given to free discussion, seems the probable truth.

In passing sentence at the close of Raleigh’s trial for treason in 1603, in which his guilt is at least no clearer than the inequity of the proceedings, Lord Chief Justice Popham unscrupulously taunted him with his reputation for heresy. “You have been taxed by the world with the defence of the most heathenish and blasphemous opinions, which I list not to repeat, because Christian ears cannot endure to hear them, nor the authors and maintainers of them be suffered to live in any Christian commonwealth. You know what men said of Harpool.”42 If the preface to his History of the World, written in the Tower, be authentic, Raleigh was at due pains to make clear his belief in deity, and to repudiate alike atheism and pantheism. “I do also account it,” he declares, “an impiety monstrous, to confound God and Nature, be it but in terms.”43 And he is no more tolerant than his judge when he discusses the question of the eternity of the universe, then the crucial issue as between orthodoxy and doubt. “Whosoever will make choice rather to believe in eternal deformity [=want of form] or in eternal dead matter, than in eternal light and eternal life, let eternal death be his reward. For it is a madness of that kind, as wanteth terms to express it.”44 Inasmuch as Aristotle was the great authority for the denounced opinion, Raleigh is anti-Aristotelean. “I shall never be persuaded that God hath shut up all light of learning within the lantern of Aristotle’s brains.”45 But in the whole preface there is only one, and that a conventional, expression of belief in the Christian dogma of salvation; and as to that we may note his own words: “We are all in effect become comedians in religion.”46 Still, untruthful as he certainly was,47 we may take him as a convinced theist of the experiential school, standing at the ordinary position of the deists of the next century.

Notably enough, he anticipates the critical position of Hume as to reason and experience: “That these and these be the causes of these and these effects, time hath taught us and not reason; and so hath experience without art.”48 Such utterance, if not connected with professions of piety, might in those days give rise to such charges of unbelief as were so freely cast at him. But the charges seem to have been in large part mere expressions of the malignity which religion so normally fosters, and which can seldom have been more bitter than then. Raleigh is no admirable type of rectitude; but he can hardly have been a worse man than his orthodox enemies. And we must estimate such men in full view of the low standards of their age.

The belief about Raleigh’s atheism was so strong that we have Archbishop Abbot writing to Sir Thomas Roe on Feb. 19, 1618–1619, that Raleigh’s end was due to his “questioning” of “God’s being and omnipotence.” It is asserted by Francis Osborn, who had known Raleigh, that he got his title of Atheist from Queen Elizabeth. See the preface (Author to Reader) to Osborn’s Miscellany of Sundry Essays, etc., in 7th ed. of his Works, 1673. As to atheism at Elizabeth’s court see J. J. Tayler, Retrospect of Relig. Life of England, 2nd ed. p. 198, and ref. Lilly makes one of his characters write of the ladies at court that “they never jar about matters of religion, because they never mean to reason of them” (Euphues, Arber’s ed. p. 194).

A curious use was made of Raleigh’s name and fame after his death for various purposes. In 1620 or 1621 appeared “Vox Spiritus, or Sir Walter Rawleigh’s Ghost; a Conference between Signr. Gondamier ... and Father Bauldwine”—a “seditious” tract by one Captain Gainsford. It appears to have been reprinted in 1622 as “Prosopoeia. Sir Walter Rawleigh’s Ghost.” Then in 1626 came a new treatise, “Sir Walter Rawleigh’s Ghost, or England’s Forewarner,” published in 1626 at Utrecht by Thomas Scott, an English minister there, who was assassinated in the same year. The title having thus had vogue, there was published in 1631 “Rawleigh’s Ghost, or, a Feigned Apparition of Syr Walter Rawleigh to a friend of his, for the translating into English the Booke of Leonard Lessius (that most learned man), entituled De Providentia Numinis et animi immortalitate, written against the Atheists and Polititians of these days.” The translation of a Jesuit’s treatise (1613) thus accredited purports to be by “A. B.” In a reprint of 1651 the “feigned” disappears from the title-page; but “Sir Walter Rawleigh’s Ghost” remains to attract readers; and the translation, now purporting to be by John Holden, who claims to have been a friend of Raleigh’s, is dedicated to his son Carew. In the preface the Ghost adjures the translator (who professes to have heard him frequently praise the treatise of Lessius) to translate the work with Raleigh’s name on the title, so as to clear his memory of “a foul and most unjust aspersion of me for my presumed denial of a deity.”

The latest documentary evidence as to the case of Marlowe is produced by Mr. F. S. Boas in his article, “New Light on Marlowe and Kyd,” in the Fortnightly Review, February, 1899, reproduced in his edition of the works of Thomas Kyd (Clarendon Press, 1901). In addition to the formerly known data as to Marlowe’s “atheism,” it is now established that Thomas Kyd, his fellow dramatist, was arrested on the same charge, and that there was found among his papers one containing “vile hereticall conceiptes denyinge the divinity of Jhesus Christe our Saviour.” This Kyd declared he had had from Marlowe, denying all sympathy with its view. Nevertheless, he was put to the torture. The paper, however, proves to be a vehement Unitarian argument on Scriptural grounds, and is much more likely to have been written by Francis Kett than by Marlowe. In the MSS. now brought to light, one Cholmeley, who “confessed that he was persuaded by Marlowe’s reasons to become an Atheiste,” is represented by a spy as speaking “all evil of the Counsell, saying that they are all Atheistes and Machiavillians, especially my Lord Admirall.” The same “atheist,” who imputes atheism to others as a vice, is described as regretting he had not killed the Lord Treasurer, “sayenge that he could never have done God better service.”

For the rest, the same spy tells that Cholmeley believed Marlowe was “able to shewe more sound reasons for Atheisme than any devine in Englande is able to geve to prove devinitie, and that Marloe told him that he hath read the Atheist lecture to Sir Walter Raleigh and others.” On the last point there is no further evidence, save that Sir Walter, his dependent Thomas Harriott, and Mr. Carewe Rawley, were on March 21, 1593–1594, charged upon sworn testimonies with holding “impious opinions concerning God and Providence.” There was, however, no prosecution. Harriott had published in 1588 a work on his travels in Virginia, at the close of which is a passage in the devoutest vein telling of his missionary labours (quoted by Mr. Boas, art. cited, p. 225). Yet by 1592 he had, with his master, a reputation for atheism; and that it was not wholly on the strength of his great scientific knowledge is suggested by the statement of Anthony À Wood that he “made a philosophical theology, wherein he cast off the Old Testament.”

Of this no trace remains; but it is established that he was a highly accomplished mathematician, much admired by Kepler; and that he “applied the telescope to celestial purposes almost simultaneously with Galileo” (art. Harriott in Dict. of Nat. Biog.; cp. art. in Encyc. Brit.). “Harriott ... was the first who dared to say A=B in the form A – B = 0, one of the greatest sources of progress ever opened in algebra” (Prof. A. De Morgan, Newton, his Friend and his Niece, 1885, p. 91). Further, he improved algebraic notation by the use of small italic letters in place of Roman capitals, and threw out the hypothesis of secondary planets as well as of stars invisible from their size and distance. “He was the first to verify the results of Galileo.” Rev. Baden Powell, Hist. of Nat. Philos. 1834, pp. 126, 168. Cp. Rigaud, as cited by Powell; Ellis’s notes on Bacon, in Routledge’s 1-vol. ed. 1905, pp. 674–76; and Storojenko, as above cited, p. 38, note.

Against the aspersion of Harriott at Raleigh’s trial may be cited the high panegyric of Chapman, who terms him “my admired and soul-loved friend, master of all essential and true knowledge,”49 and one “whose judgment and knowledge, in all kinds, I know to be incomparable and bottomless, yea, to be admired as much as his most blameless life, and the right sacred expense of his time, is to be honoured and reverenced”; with a further “affirmation of his clear unmatchedness in all manner of learning.”50

The frequency of such traces of rationalism at this period is to be understood in the light of the financial and other scandals of the Reformation; the bitter strifes of Church and dissent; and the horrors of the wars of religion in France, concerning which Bacon remarks in his essay Of Unity in Religion that the spectacle would have made Lucretius “seven times more Epicure and atheist than he was.” The proceedings against Raleigh and Kyd, accordingly, did not check the spread of the private avowal of unbelief. A few years later we find Hooker, in the Fifth Book of his Ecclesiastical Polity (1597), bitterly declaring that the unbelievers in the higher tenets of religion are much strengthened by the strifes of believers;51 as a dozen years earlier Bishop Pilkington told of “young whelps” who “in corners make themselves merry with railing and scoffing at the holy scriptures.”52 And in the Treatise of the Nature of God, by Bishop Thomas Morton (1599), a quasi-dialogue in which the arguing is all on one side, the passive interlocutor indicates, in the process of repudiating them, a full acquaintance with the pleas of those who “would openly profess themselves to be of that [the atheistic] judgment, and as far as they might without danger defend it by argument against any whatever.” The pleas include the lack of moral control in the world, the evidences of natural causation, the varieties of religious belief, and the contradictions of Scripture. And such atheists, we are told, “make nature their God.”53

From Hooker’s account also it is clear that, at least with comparatively patient clerics like himself, the freethinkers would at times deliberately press the question of theism, and avow the conviction that belief in God was “a kind of harmless error, bred and confirmed by the sleights of wiser men.” He further notes with even greater bitterness that some—an “execrable crew”—who were themselves unbelievers, would in the old pagan manner argue for the fostering of religion as a matter of State policy, herein conning the lesson of Machiavelli. For his own part Hooker was confessedly ill-prepared to debate with the atheists, and his attitude was not fitted to shake their opinions. His one resource is the inevitable plea that atheists are such for the sake of throwing off all moral restraint54—a theorem which could hardly be taken seriously by those who knew the history of the English and French aristocracies, Protestant and Catholic, for the past hundred years. Hooker’s own measure of rationalism, though remarkable as compared with previous orthodoxy, went no further than the application of the argument of Pecock that reason must guide and control all resort to Scripture and authority;55 and he came to it under stress of dispute, as a principle of accommodation for warring believers, not as an expression of any independent skepticism. When his pious antagonist Travers cited him as saying that “his best author was his own reason”56 he was prompt to reply that he meant “true, sound, divine reason; ... reason proper to that science whereby the things of God are known; theological reason, which out of principles in Scripture that are plain, soundly deduceth more doubtful inferences.”57 Of the application of rational criticism to Scriptural claims he had no idea. The unbelievers of his day were for him a frightful portent, menacing all his plans of orthodox toleration; and he would have had them put down by force—a course which in some cases, as we have seen, had in that age been actually taken, and was always apt to be resorted to. But orthodoxy all the while had a sure support in the social and political conditions which made impossible the publication of rationalistic opinions. While the whole machinery of public doctrine remained in religious hands or under ecclesiastical control, the mass of men of all grades inevitably held by the traditional faith. What is remarkable is the amount of unbelief, either privately explicit or implicit in the higher literature, of which we have trace.

Above all there remains the great illustration of the rationalistic spirit of the English literary renascence of the sixteenth century—the drama of Shakespeare. Of that it may confidently be said that every attempt to find for it a religious foundation has failed.58 Gervinus, while oddly suggesting that “in not only not seeking a reference to religion in his works, but in systematically avoiding it even when opportunity offered,” Shakespeare was keeping clear of an embroilment with the clergy, nevertheless pronounces the plays to be wholly secular in spirit. While contending that “in action the religious and divine in man is nothing else than the moral,” the German critic admits that Shakespeare “wholly discarded from his works ... that which religion enjoins as to faith and opinion.”59 And, while refusing the inference of positive unbelief on the poet’s part, he pronounces that, “Just as Bacon banished religion from science, so did Shakespeare from art.... From Bacon’s example it seems clear that Shakespeare left religious matters unnoticed on the same grounds.”60 The latest and weightiest criticism comes to the same conclusion; and it is only on presupposition that any other can be reached. One of the ablest of Shakespearean critics sums up that “the Elizabethan drama was almost wholly secular; and while Shakespeare was writing he practically confined his view to the world of non-theological observation and thought, so that he represents it in substantially one and the same way whether the period of the story is pre-Christian or Christian.”

This perhaps somewhat understates the case. The Elizabethan drama was not wholly secular;61 and certainly the dramatists individually were not. Peele’s David and Bethsabe is wholly Biblical in theme, and, though sensual in sentiment, substantially orthodox in spirit; and elsewhere he has many passages of Protestant and propagandist fervour.62 Greene and Lodge give a highly Scriptural ring to their Looking-Glass for London; and Lodge, who uses religious expressions freely in his early treatise, A Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage Plays,63 later translated Josephus. Kyd in Arden of Feversham64 accepts the Christian view at the close, though The Spanish Tragedy is pagan; and the pre-Shakespearean King Leir and his Three Daughters (1594), probably the work of Kyd and Lodge, has long passages of specifically Christian sentiment. Nashe, again, was a hot religious controversialist despite his Bohemian habits and his indecorous vein; Greene on his repentant deathbed was profusedly censorious of atheism;65 Lilly, as we have seen, is combatively theistic in his Campaspe; while Jonson, as we shall see, girds at skeptics in Volpone and The Magnetick Lady, and further wrote a quantity of devotional verse. Even the “atheist” Marlowe, as we saw, puts theistic sentiment into the mouth of his “atheist Tamburlaine”; and of Doctor Faustus, despite incidental heresy, the dÉnouement is religiously orthodox. Thomas Heywood may even be pronounced a religious man,66 as he was certainly a strong Protestant,67 though an anti-Puritan; and his prose treatise The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels (1635) exhibits a religious temperament. The same may be said of Dekker, who is recorded to have written at least the prologue and the epilogue for a play on Pontius Pilate,68 and is believed to be the author of the best scenes in The Virgin Martyr, in which he collaborated with Massinger. He too uses supererogatory religious expressions,69 and shows his warm Protestantism in The Whore of Babylon, as he does his general religious sentiment in his treatise The Seven Deadly Sins. Chapman was certainly a devout theist, and probably a Christian. In the “domestic” tragedy, A Warning for Fair Women (1599), which is conjecturally ascribed to Lodge, the conclusion is on Christian lines, as in Arden; and the same holds of The Witch of Edmonton, by Dekker and others. Of none of these dramatists could it be said, on the mere strength of his work, that he was “agnostic,” though Marlowe was certainly a freethinker. The others were, first or last, avowedly religious. Shakespeare, and Shakespeare alone, after Marlowe, is persistently non-religious in his handling of life. Lear, his darkest tragedy, is predominantly pagan; and The Tempest, in its serener vein, is no less so. But indeed all the genuine plays alike ignore or tacitly negate the idea of immortality; even the conventional religious phrases of Macbeth being but incidental poetry.

In the words of a clerical historian, “the religious phrases which are thinly scattered over his work are little more than expressions of a distant and imaginative reverence. And on the deeper grounds of religious faith his silence is significant.... The riddle of life and death ... he leaves ... a riddle to the last, without heeding the common theological solutions around him.”70 The practical wisdom in which he rose above his rivals no less than in dramatic and poetic genius, kept him prudently reticent on his opinions, as it set him upon building his worldly fortunes while the others with hardly an exception lived in shallows and miseries. As so often happens, it was among the ill-balanced types that there was found the heedless courage to cry aloud what others thought; but Shakespeare’s significant silence reminds us that the largest spirits of all could live in disregard of contemporary creeds. For, while there is no record of his having privately avowed unbelief, and certainly no explicit utterance of it in his plays,71 in no genuine work of his is there any more than bare dramatic conformity to current habits of religious speech; and there is often significantly less. In Measure for Measure the Duke, counselling as a friar the condemned Claudio, discusses the ultimate issues of life and death without a hint of Christian credence.

So silent is the dramatist on the ecclesiastical issues of his day that Protestants and Catholics are enabled to go on indefinitely claiming him as theirs; the latter dwelling on his generally kindly treatment of friars; the former citing the fact that some Protestant preacher—evidently a protÉgÉ of his daughter Susannah—was allowed lodging at his house. But the preacher was not very hospitably treated;72 and other clues fail. There is good reason to think that Shakespeare was much influenced by Montaigne’s Essays, read by him in Florio’s translation, which was issued when he was recasting the old Hamlet; and the whole treatment of life in the great tragedies and serious comedies produced by him from that time forward is even more definitely untheological than Montaigne’s own doctrine.73 Nor can he be supposed to have disregarded the current disputes as to fundamental beliefs, implicating as they did his fellow-dramatists Marlowe, Kyd, and Greene. The treatise of De Mornay, of which Sir Philip Sidney began and Arthur Golding finished the translation,74 was in his time widely circulated in England; and its very inadequate argumentation might well strengthen in him the anti-theological leaning.

A serious misconception has been set up as to Shakespeare’s cast of mind by the persistence of editors in including among his works without discrimination plays which are certainly not his, as the Henry VI group, to which he contributed little, and in particular the First Part, of which he wrote probably nothing. It is on the assumption that that play is Shakespeare’s work that Lecky (Rationalism in Europe, ed. 1887, i, 105–106) speaks of “that melancholy picture of Joan of Arc which is perhaps the darkest blot upon his genius.” Now, whatever passages Shakespeare may have contributed to the Second and Third Parts, it is certain that he has barely a scene in the First, and that there is not a line from his hand in the La Pucelle scenes. Many students think that Dr. Furnivall has even gone too far in saying that “the only part ... to be put down to Shakespeare is the Temple Garden scene of the red and white roses” (Introd. to Leopold Shakespeare, p. xxxviii); so little is there to suggest even the juvenile Shakespeare there. (The high proportion of double-endings is a ground for reckoning it a late sample of Marlowe, who in his posthumously published translation of Lucan had approached that proportion. Cp. the author’s vol. on Titus Andronicus, p. 190.) But that any critical and qualified reader can still hold him to have written the worst of the play is unintelligible. The whole work would be a “blot on his genius” in respect of its literary weakness. The doubt was raised long before Lecky wrote, and was made good a generation ago. When Lecky further proceeds, with reference to the witches in Macbeth, to say (id. note) that it is “probable that Shakespeare ... believed with an unfaltering faith in the reality of witchcraft,” he strangely misreads that play. Nothing is clearer than that it grounds Macbeth’s action from the first in Macbeth’s own character and his wife’s, employing the witch machinery (already used by Middleton) to meet the popular taste, but never once making the witches really causal forces. An “unfaltering” believer in witchcraft who wrote for the stage would surely have turned it to serious account in other tragedies. This Shakespeare never does. On Lecky’s view, he is to be held as having believed in the fairy magic of the Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Tempest, and in the actuality of such episodes as that of the ghost in Macbeth. But who for a moment supposes him to have had any such belief? It is probable that the entire undertaking of Macbeth (1605?) and later of the Tempest (1610?) was due to a wish on the part of the theatre management to please King James, whose belief in witchcraft and magic was notorious. Even the use of the Ghost in Hamlet is an old stage expedient, common to the pre-Shakespearean play and to others of Kyd’s and Peele’s. Shakespeare significantly altered the dying words of Hamlet from the “heaven receive my soul” of the old version to “the rest is silence.” The bequest of his soul to the Deity in his will is merely the regulation testamentary formula of the time. In his sonnets, which hint his personal cast if anything does, there is no real trace of religious creed or feeling. And it is clearly the hand of Fletcher, a no less sensual writer than Peele, that penned the part of Henry VIII in which occurs the Protestant tag: “In her [Elizabeth’s] days ... God shall be truly known.”75

While, however, Shakespeare is notably naturalistic as compared with the other Elizabethan dramatists, it remains true that their work in the mass tells little of a habitually religious way of thinking. Apart from the plays above named, and from polemic passages and devotional utterances outside their plays, they hint as little of Christian dogma as of Christian asceticism. Hence, in fact, the general and bitter hostility of the Puritans to the stage. Even at and after Shakespeare’s death, the drama is substantially “graceless.” Jonson, who was for a time a Catholic, but reverted to the Church of England, disliked the Puritans, and in Bartholomew Fair derides them. The age did not admit of a pietistic drama; and when there was a powerful pietistic public, it made an end of drama altogether. To Elizabeth’s reign probably belongs the Atheist’s Tragedy of Cyril Tourneur, first published in 1611, but evidently written in its author’s early youth—a coarse and worthless performance, full of extremely bad imitations of Shakespeare.76 But to the age of Elizabeth also belongs, perhaps, the sententious tragedy of Mustapha by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, first surreptitiously published in 1609. A century and a half later the deists were fond of quoting77 the concluding Chorus Sacerdotum, beginning:

O wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity;
Created sick, commanded to be sound:
If nature did not take delight in blood,
She would have made more easy ways to good.

It is natural to suspect that the author of such lines was less orthodox than his own day had reputed him; and yet the whole of his work shows him much pre-occupied with religion, though perhaps in a deistic spirit. But Brooke’s introspective and undramatic poetry is an exception: the prevailing colour of the whole drama of the Shakespearean period is pre-Puritan and semi-pagan; and the theological spirit of the next generation, intensified by King James, was recognized by cultured foreigners as a change for the worse.78 The spirit of free learning for the time was gone, expelled by theological rancours; and when Selden ventured in his History of Tythes (1618) to apply the method of dispassionate historical criticism to ecclesiastical matters he was compelled to make a formal retractation.79 Early Protestants had attacked, as a papal superstition, the doctrine that tithes were levied jure divino: Protestants had now come to regard as atheistic the hint that tithes were levied otherwise.80

Not that rationalism became extinct. The “Italianate” incredulity as to a future state, which Sir John Davies had sought to repel by his poem, Nosce Teipsum (1599), can hardly have been overthrown even by that remarkable production, which in the usual orthodox way pronounces all doubters to be “light and vicious persons,” who, “though they would, cannot quite be beasts.”81 And there were other forms of doubt. In 1602 appeared The Unmasking of the Politique Atheist, by J. H. [John Hull], Batchelor of Divinitie, which, however, is in the main a mere attempt to retort upon Catholics the charge of atheism laid by them against Protestants. Soon after, in 1605, we find Dr. John Dove producing a Confutation of Atheisme in the manner of previous continental treatises, making the word “atheism” cover many shades of theism; and an essayist writing in 1608 asserts that, on account of the self-seeking and corruption so common among churchmen, “prophane Atheisme hath taken footing in the hearts of ignorant and simple men.”82 The orthodox Ben Jonson, in his Volpone (1607), puts in the mouth of a fool83 the lines:—

And then, for your religion, profess none,
But wonder at the diversity of all;
And, for your part, protest, were there no other
But simply the laws o’ th’ land, you would content you.
Nic Machiavel and Monsieur Bodin both
Were of this mind.

But the testimony is not the less significant; as is the account in The Magnetick Lady (1632) of

A young physician to the family
That, letting God alone, ascribes to Nature
More than her share; licentious in discourse,
And in his life a profest voluptuary.84

Such statements of course prove merely a frequent coolness towards religion, not a vogue of reasoned unbelief. But the existence of rationalizing heresy is attested by the burning of two men, Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wightman, for avowing Unitarian views, in 1612. These, the last executions for heresy in England, were results of the theological zeal of King James, stimulated by the Calvinistic fanaticism of Archbishop Abbot, the predecessor of Laud.

James’s career as a persecutor began characteristically in a meddlesome attack upon a professor in Holland. A German theologian of Socinian leanings, named Conrad Vorstius, professor at Steinfurth, had produced in 1606 a somewhat heretical treatise, De Deo, but had nevertheless been appointed in 1610 professor of theology at Leyden, in succession to Arminius. It was his acceptance of Arminian views, joined with his repute as a scholar,85 that secured him the invitation, which was given without the knowledge that at a previous period he had been offered a similar appointment by the Socinians. In his Anti-Bellarminus contractus, “a brief refutation of the four tomes of Bellarmin,” he had taken the Arminian line, repudiating the Calvinist positions which, in the opinion of Arminius, could not be defended against the Catholic attack. But he was too speculative and ratiocinative to be safe in an age in which the fear of spreading Socinianism and the hate of Calvinists towards Arminianism had set up a reign of terror. Vorstius was both “unsettling” and heterodox. His opinions were “such as in our own day would certainly disqualify him from holding such an office in any Christian University”;86 and James, worked upon by Abbot, went so far as to make the appointment of Vorstius a diplomatic question. The stadhouder Maurice and the bulk of the Dutch clergy being of his view, the more tolerant statesmen of Holland, and the mercantile aristocracy, yielded from motives of prudence, and Vorstius was dismissed in order to save the English alliance. Remaining thenceforth without employment, he was further denounced in 1619 by the Synod of Dort, and banished by the States General. Thereafter he lived for two years in hiding; and soon after obtaining a refuge in Holstein, died, worn out by his troubles. In England, meantime, James drew up with his own hands a catalogue of the heresies found by him in Vorstius’s treatise, and caused the book to be burned in London and at the two Universities.87

On the heels of this amazing episode came the cases of Wightman and Legate. Finding, in a personal conversation, that Legate had “ceased to pray to Christ,” the King had him brought before the Bishop of London’s Consistory Court, which sentenced the heretic to Newgate. Being shortly released, he had the imprudence to threaten an action for false imprisonment, whereupon he was re-arrested. Chief Justice Coke held that, technically, the Consistory Court could not sentence to burning; but Hobart and Bacon, the law officers of the Crown, and other judges, were of opinion that it could. Legate, accordingly, was duly tried, sentenced, and burned at Smithfield; and Wightman a few days later was similarly disposed of at Lichfield.88

Bacon’s share in this matter is obscure, and has not been discussed by either his assailants or his vindicators. As for the general public, the historian records that “not a word was uttered against this horrible cruelty. As we read over the brief contemporary notices which have reached us, we look in vain for the slightest intimation that the death of these two men was regarded with any other feelings than those with which the writers were accustomed to hear of the execution of an ordinary murderer. If any remark was made, it was in praise of James for the devotion which he showed to the cause of God.”89 That might have been reckoned on. It was not twenty years since Hamond, Lewis, Cole, and Kett had been burned on similar grounds; and there had been no outcry then. For generations “direness” had been too familiar to men’s thoughts to admit of their being shocked by a judicial murder or two the more. Catholic priests had been executed by the score: why not a pair of Unitarians?90 Little had gone on in the average intellectual life in the interim save religious discussion and Bibliolatry, and not from such culture could there come any growth of human kindness or any clearer conception of the law of reciprocity. But, whether by force of recoil from a revival of the fires of Smithfield or from a perception that mere cruelty did not avail to destroy heresy, the theological ultima ratio was never again resorted to on English ground.

Though no public protest was made, the retrospective Fuller testifies that “such burning of heretics much startled common people, pitying all in pain, and prone to asperse justice itself with cruelty, because of the novelty (!) and hideousness of the punishment.”91 It is noteworthy that within a few years of the burning of Legate and Wightman there appeared quite a cluster of treatises explicitly contending for toleration. In 1614 came Religion’s Peace: or, a Plea for Liberty of Conscience, by Leonard Busher, the first English book of the kind. In 1615 came Persecution for Religion Judged and Condemned; and in 1620 An Humble Supplication to the King’s Majesty, pressing the same doctrine.92 There is no record of any outcry over these works, though they are tolerably freespoken in their indictment of the coercive school; and they had all to be reprinted a generation later, their point having never been carried; but it may be surmised that their appeal, which is substantially well reasoned from a secular as well as from a theological point of view, had something to do with the abandonment of persecution unto death. Even King James, in opening the Parliament of 1614, professed to recognize that no religion or heresy was ever extirpated by violence.

That an age of cruel repression of heresy had promoted unbelief is clear from the Atheomastix of Bishop Fotherby (1622), which notes among other things that as a result of constant disputing “the Scriptures (with many) have lost their authority, and are thought onely fit for the ignorant and idiote.”93 On this head the bishop attempts no answer; and on his chosen theme he is perhaps the worst of all apologists. His admission that there can be no À priori proof of deity94 may be counted to him for candour; but the childishness of his reasoning À posteriori excludes the ascription of philosophic insight. He does but use the old pseudo-arguments of universal consent and design, with the simple device of translating polytheistic terms into monotheistic. All the while he makes the usual suggestions that there are few or no atheists to convert, and these not worth converting—this at a folio’s length. The book tells only of difficulties evaded by vociferation. And while the growing stress of the strife between the ecclesiasticism of the Crown and the forces of nonconformity more and more thrust to the front religio-political issues, there began alongside of those strifes the new and powerful propaganda of deism, which, beginning with the Latin treatise, De Veritate, of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1624), was gradually to leaven English thought for over a century.

Further, there now came into play the manifold influence of Francis Bacon, whose case illustrates perhaps more fully than any other the difficulties, alike external and internal, in the way of right thinking. Taken as a whole, his work is on account of those difficulties divided against itself, insisting as he does alternately on a strict critical method and on the subjection of reason to the authority of revelation. He sounds a trumpet-call to a new and universal effort of free and circumspect intelligence; and on the instant he stipulates for the prerogative of Scripture. Though only one of many who assailed alike the methodic tyranny of Aristotelianism95 and the methodless empiricism of the ordinary “scientific” thought of the past, he made his attack with a sustained and manifold force of insight and utterance which still entitles him to pre-eminence as the great critic of wrong methods and the herald of better. Yet he not only transgresses often his own principal precepts in his scientific reasoning; he falls below several of his contemporaries and predecessors in respect of his formal insistence on the final supremacy of theology over reason, alike in physics and in ethics. Where Hooker is ostensibly seeking to widen the field of rational judgment on the side of creed, Bacon, the very champion of mental emancipation in the abstract, declares the boundary to be fixed.

Of those lapses from critical good faith, part of the explanation is to be found in the innate difficulty of vital innovation for all intelligences; part in the special pressures of the religious environment. On the latter head Bacon makes such frequent and emphatic protest that we are bound to infer on his part a personal experience in his own day of the religious hostility which long followed his memory. “Generally,” he wrote of himself in one fragment, “he perceived in men of devout simplicity this opinion, that the secrets of nature were the secrets of God, and part of that glory whereinto the mind of man if it seek to press shall be oppressed;... and on the other side, in men of a devout policy he noted an inclination to have the people depend upon God the more when they are less acquainted with second causes, and to have no stirring in philosophy, lest it may lead to innovation in divinity or else should discover matter of further contradiction to divinity”96—a summary of the whole early history of the resistance to science.97 In the works which he wrote at the height of his powers, especially in his masterpiece, the Novum Organum (1620), where he comes closest to the problems of exact inquiry, he specifies again and again both popular superstition and orthodox theology as hindrances to scientific research, commenting on “those who out of faith and veneration mix their philosophy with theology and traditions,”98 and declaring that of the drawbacks science had to contend with “the corruption of philosophy by superstition and an admixture of theology is far the more widely spread, and does the greatest harm, whether to entire systems or to their parts. For the human understanding is obnoxious to the influence of the imagination no less than to the influence of common notions.”99 In the same passage he exclaims at the “extreme levity” of those of the moderns who have attempted to “found a system of natural philosophy on the first chapter of Genesis, on the book of Job, and other parts of the sacred writings”;100 and yet again, coupling as obstinate adversaries of Natural Philosophy “superstition, and the blind and immoderate zeal of religion,” he roundly affirms that “by the simpleness of certain divines access to any philosophy, however pure, is well nigh closed.”101 These charges are repeatedly salved by such claims as that “true religion” puts no obstacles in the way of science;102 that the book of Job runs much to natural philosophy;103 and, in particular, in the last book of the De Augmentis Scientiarum, redacted after his disgrace, by the declaration—more emphatic than those of the earlier Advancement of Learning—that “Sacred Theology ought to be derived from the word and oracles of God, and not from the light of nature or the dictates of reason.”104 In this mood he goes so far as to declare, with the thorough-going obscurantists, that “the more discordant and incredible the divine mystery is, the more honour is shown to God in believing it, and the nobler is the victory of faith.”

[It was probably such deliverances as these that led to the ascription to Bacon of The Christian Paradoxes, first published (surreptitiously), without author’s name, in 1645. As has been shown by Dr. Grosart (Lord Bacon NOT the Author of “The Christian Paradoxes,” 1865) that treatise was really by Herbert Palmer, B.D., who published it in full in part ii of his Memorials of Godliness and Christianity, 5th ed. 1655. The argument drawn from this treatise as to Bacon’s skepticism is a twofold mystification. The Paradoxes are the deliberate declaration of a pietist that he believes the dogmas of revelation without rational comprehension. The style is plainly not Bacon’s; but Bacon had said the same thing in the sentence quoted above. Dr. Grosart’s explosive defence against the criticism of Ritter (work cited, p. 14) is an illustration of the intellectual temper involved.]

Yet even in the calculated extravagance of this last pronouncement there is a ground for question whether the fallen Chancellor, hoping to retrieve himself, and trying every device of his ripe sagacity to avert opposition, was not straining his formal orthodoxy beyond his real intellectual habit. As against such wholesale affirmation we have his declarations that “certain it is that God worketh nothing in nature but by second causes,” and that any pretence to the contrary “is mere imposture as it were in favour towards God, and nothing else but to offer to the author of truth the unclean sacrifice of a lie”;105 his repeated objection to the discussion of Final Causes;106 his attack on Plato and Aristotle for rejecting the atheistic scientific method of Democritus;107 his peremptory assertion that motion is a property of matter;108 and his almost Democritean handling of the final problem, in which he insists that primal matter is, “next to God, the cause of causes, itself only without a cause.”109 Further, though he speaks of Scriptural miracles in a conventional way,110 he drily pronounces in one passage that, “as for narrations touching the prodigies and miracles of religions, they are either not true or not natural, and therefore impertinent for the story of nature.”111 Finally, as against the formal capitulation to theology at the close of the De Augmentis, he has left standing in the first book of the Latin version the ringing doctrine of the original Advancement of Learning (1605), that “there is no power on earth which setteth up a throne or chair in the spirits and souls of men, and in their cogitations, imaginations, opinions, and beliefs, but knowledge and learning”;112 and in his Wisdom of the Ancients113 he has contrived to turn a crude myth into a subtle allegory in behalf of toleration.

Thus, despite his many resorts to and prostrations before the Scriptures, the general effect of his writings in this regard is to set up in the minds of his readers the old semi-rationalistic equivoque of a “two-fold truth”; reminding us as they do that he “did in the beginning separate the divine testimony from the human.” When, therefore, he announces that “we know by faith” that “matter was created from nothing,”114 he has the air of juggling with his problem; and his further suggestion as to the possibility of matter being endowed with a force of evolution, however cautiously put, is far removed from orthodoxy. Accordingly, the charge of atheism—which he notes as commonly brought against all who dwell solely on second causes115—was actually cast at his memory in the next generation.116 It was of course false: on the issue of theism he is continually descanting with quite conventional unction; as in the familiar essay on atheism.117 His dismissal of final causes as “barren” meant merely that the notion was barren of scientific result;118 and he refers the question to metaphysic.119 But if his theism was of a kind disturbing to believers in a controlling Providence, as little was it satisfactory to Christian fervour: and it can hardly be doubted that the main stream of his argument made for a non-Biblical deism, if not for atheism; his dogmatic orthodoxies being undermined by his own scientific teaching.

Lechler (Gesch. des englischen Deismus, pp. 23–25) notes that Bacon involuntarily made for deism. Cp. Amand Saintes, Hist. de la philos. de Kant, 1844, p. 69; and Kuno Fischer, Francis Bacon, Eng. tr. 1857, ch. xi, pp. 341–43. Dean Church (Bacon, in “Men of Letters” series, pp. 174, 205) insists that Bacon held by revelation and immortality; and can of course cite his profession of such belief, which is not to be disputed. (Cp. the careful judgment of Prof. Fowler in his Bacon, pp. 180–91, and his ed. of the Novum Organum, 1878, pp. 43–53.) But the tendency of the specific Baconian teaching is none the less to put these beliefs aside, and to overlay them with a naturalistic habit of mind. At the first remove from Bacon we have Hobbes.

As regards his intellectual inconsistencies, we can but say that they are such as meet us in men’s thinking at every new turn. Though we can see that Bacon’s orthodoxy “doth protest too much,” with an eye on king and commons and public opinion, we are not led to suppose that he had ever in his heart cast off his inherited creed. He shows frequent Christian prejudice in his references to pagans; and can write that “To seek to extinguish anger utterly is but the bravery of the Stoics,”120 pretending that the Christian books are more accommodating, and ignoring the Sermon on the Mount. In arguing that the “religion of the heathen” set men upon ending “all inquisition of nature in metaphysical or theological discourse,” and in charging the Turks with a special tendency to “ascribe ordinary effects to the immediate workings of God,”121 he is playing not very scrupulously on the vanity of his co-religionists. As he was only too well aware, both tendencies ruled the Christian thought of his own day, and derive direct from the sacred books—not from “abuse,” as he pretends. And on the metaphysical as on the common-sense side of his thought he is self-contradictory, even as most men have been before and since, because judgment cannot easily fulfil the precepts it frames for itself in illuminated hours. Latter-day students have been impressed, as was Leibnitz, by the original insight with which Bacon negated the possibility of our forming any concrete conception of a primary form of matter, and insisted on its necessary transcendence of our powers of knowledge.122 On the same principle he should have negated every modal conception of the still more recondite Something which he put as antecedent to matter, and called God.123 Yet in his normal thinking he seems to have been content with the commonplace formula given in his essay on Atheism—that we cannot suppose the totality of things to be “without a mind.” He has here endorsed in its essentials what he elsewhere calls “the heresy of the Anthropomorphites,”124 failing to apply his own law in his philosophy, as elsewhere in his physics. When, however, we realize that similar inconsistency is fallen into after him by Spinoza, and wholly escaped perhaps by no thinker, we are in a way to understand that with all his deflections from his own higher law Bacon may have profoundly and fruitfully influenced the thought of the next generation, if not that of his own.

The fact of this influence has been somewhat obscured by the modern dispute as to whether he had any important influence on scientific progress.125 At first sight the old claim for him in that regard seems to be heavily discounted by the simple fact that he definitely rejected the Copernican system of astronomy.126 Though, however, this gravely emphasizes his fallibility, it does not cancel his services as a stimulator of scientific thought. At that time only a few were yet intelligently convinced Copernicans; and we have the record of how, in Bacon’s day, Harvey lost heavily in credit and in his medical practice by propounding his discovery of the circulation of the blood,127 which, it is said, no physician over forty years old at that time believed in. For the scientific men of that century—and only among them did Copernicanism find the slightest acceptance—it was thus no fatal shortcoming in Bacon to have failed to grasp the true scheme of sidereal motion, any more than it was in Galileo to be wrong about the tides and comets. They could realize that it was precisely in astronomy, for lack of special study and expert knowledge, that Bacon was least qualified to judge. Intellectual influence on science is not necessarily dependent on actual scientific achievement, though that of course furthers and establishes it; and the fact of Bacon’s impact on the mind of the next age is abundantly proved by testimonies.

For a time the explicit tributes came chiefly from abroad; though at all times, even in the first shock of his disgrace, there were Englishmen perfectly convinced of his greatness. To the winning of foreign favour he had specially addressed himself in his adversity. Grown wary in act as well as wise in theory, he deleted from the Latin De Augmentis a whole series of passages of the Advancement of Learning which disparaged Catholics and Catholicism;128 and he had his reward in being appreciated by many Jesuit and other Catholic scholars.129 But Protestants such as Comenius and Leibnitz were ere long more emphatic than any Catholics;130 and at the time of the Restoration we find Bacon enthusiastically praised among the more open-minded and scientifically biassed thinkers of England, who included some zealous Christians.131 It was not that his special “method” enabled them to reach important results with any new facility; its impracticability is now insisted on by friends as well as foes.132 It was that he arraigned with extraordinary psychological insight and brilliance of phrase the mental vices which had made discoveries so rare; the alternate self-complacency and despair of the average indolent mind; the “opinion of store” which was “cause of want”; the timid or superstitious evasion of research. In all this he was using his own highest powers, his comprehension of human character and his genius for speech. And though his own scientific results were not to be compared with those of Galileo and Descartes, the wonderful range of his observation and his curiosity, the unwearying zest of his scrutiny of well-nigh all the known fields of Nature, must have been an inspiration to multitudes of students besides those who have recorded their debt to him. It is probable that but for his literary genius, which though little discussed is of a very rare order, his influence would have been both narrower and less durable; but, being one of the great writers of the modern world, he has swayed men down till our own day.

Certain it is that alongside of his doctrine there persisted in England, apart from all printed utterance, a movement of deistic rationalism, of which the eighteenth century saw only the fuller development. Sir John Suckling (1609–1641), rewriting about 1637 his letter to the Earl of Dorset, An Account of Religion by Reason, tells how in a first sketch it “had like to have made me an Atheist at Court,” and how “the fear of Socinianism at this time renders every man that offers to give an account of religion by reason, suspected to have none at all”;133 but he also mentions that he knows it “still to be the opinion of good wits that the particular religion of Christians has added little to the general religion of the world.”134 Himself a young man of talent, he offers quasi-rational reconciliations of faith with reason which can have satisfied no real doubter, and can hardly have failed to introduce doubt into the minds of some of his readers.

Of popular freethought in the rest of Europe there is little to chronicle for a hundred and fifty years after the Reformation. The epoch-making work of Copernicus, published in 1543, had little or no immediate effect in Germany, where, as we have seen, physical and verbal strifes had begun with the ecclesiastical revolution, and were to continue to waste the nation’s energy for a century. In 1546, all attempts at ecclesiastical reconciliation having failed, the emperor Charles V, in whom Melanchthon had seen a model monarch,135 decided to put down the Protestant heresy by war. Luther had just died, apprehensive for his cause. Civil war now raged till the peace of Augsburg in 1555; whereafter Charles abdicated in favour of his son Philip. Here were in part the conditions which in France and elsewhere were later followed by a growth of rational unbelief; and there are some traces even at this time of partial skepticism in high places in the German world, notably in the case of the Emperor Maximilian II, who, “grown up in the spirit of doubt,”136 would never identify himself with either Protestants or Catholics.137 But in Germany there was still too little intellectual light, too little brooding over experience, to permit of the spread of such a temper; and the balance of forces amounted only to a deadlock between the ecclesiastical parties. Protestantism on the intellectual side, as already noted, had sunk into a bitter and barren polemic138 among the reformers themselves; and many who had joined the movement reverted to Catholicism.139 Meanwhile the teaching and preaching Jesuits were zealously at work, turning the dissensions of the enemy to account, and contrasting its schism upon schism with the unity of the Church. But Protestantism was well welded to the financial interest of the many princes and others who had acquired the Church lands confiscated at the Reformation; since a return to Catholicism would mean the surrender of these.140 Thus there wrought on the one side the organized spirit of anti-heresy141 and on the other the organized spirit of Bibliolatry, neither gaining ground; and between the two, intellectual life was paralysed. Protestantism saw no way of advance; and the prevailing temper began to be that of the Dark Ages, expectant of the end of the world.142 Superstition abounded, especially the belief in witchcraft, now acted on with frightful cruelty throughout the whole Christian world;143 and in the nature of the case Catholicism counted for nothing on the opposite side.

The only element of rationalism that one historian of culture can detect is the tendency of the German moralists of the time to turn the devil into an abstraction by identifying him with the different aspects of human folly and vice.144 There was, as a matter of fact, a somewhat higher manifestation of the spirit of reason in the shape of some new protests against the superstition of sorcery. About 1560 a Catholic priest named Cornelius Loos Callidius was imprisoned by a papal nuncio for declaring that witches’ confessions were merely the results of torture. Forced to retract, he was released; but again offended, and was again imprisoned, dying in time to escape the fate of a councillor of TrÈves, named Flade, who was burned alive for arguing, on the basis of an old canon (mistakenly named from the Council of Ancyra), that sorcery is an imaginary crime.145 Such an infamy explains a great deal of the stagnation of many Christian generations. But courage was not extinct; and in 1563 there appeared the famous John Wier’s treatise on witchcraft,146 a work which, though fully adhering to the belief in the devil and things demoniac, argued against the notion that witches were conscious workers of evil. Wier147 was a physician, and saw the problem partly as one in pathology. Other laymen, and even priests, as we have seen, had reacted still more strongly against the prevailing insanity; but it had the authority of Luther on its side, and with the common people the earlier protests counted for little.

Reactions against Protestant bigotry in Holland on other lines were not much more successful, and indeed were not numerous. One of the most interesting is that of Dirk Coornhert (1522–1590), who by his manifold literary activities148 became one of the founders of Dutch prose. In his youth Coornhert had visited Spain and Portugal, and had there, it is said, seen an execution of victims of the Inquisition,149 deriving thence the aversion to intolerance which stamped his whole life’s work. It does not appear, however, that any such peninsular experience was required, seeing that the Dutch Inquisition became abundantly active about the same period. Learning Latin at thirty, in order to read Augustine, he became a translator of Cicero and—singularly enough—of Boccaccio. An engraver to trade, he became first notary and later secretary to the burgomaster of Haarlem; and, failing to steer clear of the strifes of the time, was arrested and imprisoned at the Hague in 1567. On his release he sought safety at Kleef in Santen, whence he returned after the capture of Brill to become secretary of the new national Government at Haarlem; but he had again to take to flight, and lived at Kleef from 1572 to 1577. In 1578 he debated at Leyden with two preachers of Delft on predestination, which he declared to be unscriptural; and was officially ordered to keep silence. Thereupon he published a protest, and got into fresh trouble by drawing up, as notary, an appeal to the Prince of Orange on behalf of his Catholic fellow-countrymen for freedom of worship, and by holding another debate at the Hague.150 Always his master-ideal was that of toleration, in support of which he wrote strongly against Beza and Calvin (this in a Latin treatise published only after his death), declaring the persecution of heretics to be a crime in the kingdom of God; and it was as a moralist that he gave the lead to Arminius on the question of predestination.151 “Against Protestant and Catholic sacerdotalism and scholastic he set forth humanist world-wisdom and Biblical ethic,”152 to that end publishing a translation of BoËthius (1585), and composing his chief work on Zedekunst (Ethics). Christianity, he insisted, lay not in profession or creed, but in practice. By way of restraining the ever-increasing malignity of theological strifes, he made the quaint proposal that the clergy should not be allowed to utter anything but the actual words of the Scriptures, and that all works of theology should be sequestrated. For these and other heteroclite suggestions he was expelled from Delft (where he sought finally to settle, 1587) by the magistrates, at the instance of the preachers, but was allowed to die in peace at Gouda, where he wrote to the last.153

All the while, though he drew for doctrine on Plutarch, Cicero, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius equally with the Bible, Coornhert habitually founded on the latter as the final authority.154 On no other footing could any one in his age and country stand as a teacher. It was not till after generations of furious intolerance that a larger outlook was possible in the Netherlands; and the first steps towards it were naturally taken independently of theology. Although Grotius figured for a century as one of the chief exponents of Christian evidences, it is certain that his great work on the Law of War and Peace (1625) made for a rationalistic conception of society. “Modern historians of jurisprudence, like Lerminier and Bluntschli, represent it as the distinctive merit of Grotius that he freed the science from bondage to theology.”155 The breach, indeed, is not direct, as theistic sanctions are paraded in the Prolegomena; but along with these goes the avowal that natural ethic would be valid even were there no God, and—as against the formula of Horace, Utilitas justi mater—that “the mother of natural right is human nature itself.”156

Where Grotius, defender of the faith, figured as a heretic, unbelief could not speak out, though there are traces of its underground life. The charge of atheism was brought against the Excercitationes PhilosophicÆ of GorlÆus, published in 1620; but, the book being posthumous, conclusions could not be tried. Views far short of atheism, however, were dangerous to their holders; for the merely Socinian work of Voelkel, published at Amsterdam in 1642, was burned by order of the authorities, and a second impression shared the same fate.157 In 1653 the States of Holland forbade the publication of all Unitarian books and all Socinian worship; and though the veto as to books was soon evaded, that on worship was enforced.158 Still, Holland was relatively tolerant as beside other countries; and when the Unitarian physician Daniel Zwicker (1612–1678), of Dantzig, found his own country too hot to hold him, he came to Holland (about 1652) “for security and convenience.”159 He was able to publish at Amsterdam in 1658 his Latin Irenicum Irenicorum, wherein he lays down three principles for the settlement of Christian difficulties, the first being “the universal reason of mankind,” while Scripture and tradition hold only the second and third places. His book is a remarkable investigation of the rise of the doctrines of the Logos and the Trinity, which he traced to polytheism, making out that the first Christians, whom he identified with the Nazarenes, regarded Jesus as a man. The book evoked many answers, and it is somewhat surprising that Zwicker escaped serious persecution, dying peacefully in Amsterdam in 1678, whereas writers much less pronounced in their heresy incurred aggressive hostility. Descartes, as we shall see, during his stay in Holland was menaced by clerical fanaticism. Some fared worse. In the generation after Grotius, one Koerbagh, a doctor, for publishing (1668) a dictionary of definitions containing advanced ideas, had to fly from Amsterdam. At Culenberg he translated a Unitarian work and began another; but was betrayed, tried for blasphemy, and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, to be followed by ten years’ banishment. He compromised by dying in prison within the year. Even as late as 1678 the juri-consult Hadrian Beverland (afterwards appointed, through Isaac Vossius, to a lay office under the Church of England) was imprisoned and struck off the rolls of Leyden University for his Peccatum Originale, in which he speculated erotically as to the nature of the sin of Adam and Eve. The book was furiously answered, and publicly burned.160 It was only after an age of such intolerance that Holland, at the end of the seventeenth century, began to become for England a model of freedom in opinion, as formerly in trade. And it seems to have been through Holland, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, that there came the fresh Unitarian impulse which led to the considerable spread of the movement in England after the Revolution of 1688.161

Unitarianism, which we have seen thus invading Holland somewhat persistently during half a century, was then as now impotent beyond a certain point by reason of its divided allegiance, though it has always had the support of some good minds. Its denial of the deity of Jesus could not be made out without a certain superposing of reason on Scripture; and yet to Scripture it always finally appealed. The majority of men accepting such authority have always tended to believe more uncritically; and the majority of men who are habitually critical will always repudiate the Scriptural jurisdiction. In Poland, accordingly, the movement, so flourishing in its earlier years, was soon arrested, as we have seen, by the perception that it drove many Protestants back to Catholicism; among these being presumably a number whose critical insight showed them that there was no firm standing-ground between Catholicism and Naturalism. Every new advance within the Unitarian pale terrified the main body, many of whom were mere Arians, holding by the term Trinity, and merely making the Son subordinate to the Father. Thus when one of their most learned ministers, Simon Budny, followed in the steps of Ferencz Davides (whom we have seen dying in prison in Transylvania in 1579), and represented Jesus as a “mere” man, he was condemned by a synod (1582) and deposed from his office (1584). He recanted, and was reinstated,162 but his adherents seem to have been excommunicated. The sect thus formed were termed Semi-Judaizers by another heretic, Martin Czechowicz, who himself denied the pre-existence of Jesus, and made him only a species of demi-god;163 yet Fausto Sozzini, better known as Faustus Socinus, who also wrote against them, and who had worked with Biandrata to have Davides imprisoned, conceded that prayer to Christ was optional.164

Faustus, who arrived in Poland in 1579, seems to have been moved to his strenuously “moderate” policy, which for a time unified the bulk of the party, mainly by a desire to keep on tolerable terms with Protestantism. That, however, did not serve him with the Catholics; and when the reaction set in he suffered severely at their hands. His treatise, De Jesu Christu Servatore, created bitter resentment; and in 1598 the Catholic rabble of Cracow, led “as usual by the students of the university,” dragged him from his house. His life was saved only by the strenuous efforts of the rector and two professors of the university; and his library was destroyed, with his manuscripts, whereof “he particularly regretted a treatise which he had composed against the atheists”;165 though it is not recorded that the atheists had ever menaced either his life or his property. He seems to have been zealous against all heresy that outwent his own, preaching passive obedience in politics as emphatically as any churchman, and condemning alike the rising of the Dutch against Spanish rule and the resistance of the French Protestants to their king.166

This attitude may have had something to do with the better side of the ethical doctrines of the sect, which leant considerably to non-resistance. Czechowicz (who was deposed by his fellow-Socinians for schism) seems not only to have preached a patient endurance of injuries, but to have meant it;167 and to the Socinian sect belongs the main credit of setting up a humane compromise on the doctrine of eternal punishment.168 The time, of course, had not come for any favourable reception of such a compromise in Christendom; and it is noted of the German Socinian, Ernst Schoner (Sonerus), who wrote against the orthodox dogma, that his works are “exceedingly scarce.”169 Unitarianism as a whole, indeed, made little headway outside of Poland and Transylvania.

In Spain, meantime, there was no recovery from the paralysis wrought by the combined tyranny of Church and Crown, incarnate in the Inquisition. The monstrous multiplication of her clergy might alone have sufficed to set up stagnation in her mental life; but, not content with the turning of a vast multitude170 of men and women away from the ordinary work of life, her rulers set themselves to expatriate as many more on the score of heresy. A century after the expulsion of the Jews came the turn of the Moors, whose last hold in Spain, Granada, had been overthrown in 1492. Within a generation they had been deprived of all exterior practice of their religion;171 but that did not suffice, and the Inquisition never left them alone. Harried, persecuted, compulsorily baptized, deprived of their Arabic books, they repeatedly revolted, only to be beaten down. At length, in the opening years of the seventeenth century (1610–1613), under Philip III, on the score that the great Armada had failed because heretics were tolerated at home, it was decided to expel the whole race; and now a million Moriscoes, among the most industrious inhabitants of Spain, were driven the way of the Jews. It is needless here to recall the ruinous effect upon the material life of Spain:172 the aspect of the matter which specially concerns us is the consummation of the policy of killing out all intellectual variation. The Moriscoes may have counted for little in positive culture; but they were one of the last and most important factors of variation in the country; and when Spain was thus successively denuded of precisely the most original and energetic types among the Jewish, the Spanish, and the Moorish stocks, her mental arrest was complete.

To modern freethought, accordingly, she has till our own age contributed practically nothing. Huarte seems to have had no Spanish successors. The brilliant dramatic literature of the reigns of the three Philips, which influenced the rising drama alike of France and England, is notably unintellectual,173 dealing endlessly in plot and adventure, but yielding no great study of character, and certainly doing nothing to further ethics. Calderon was a thorough fanatic, and became a priest;174 Lope de Vega found solace under bereavement in zealously performing the duties of an Inquisitor; and was so utterly swayed by the atrocious creed of persecution which was blighting Spain that he joined in the general exultation over the expulsion of the Moriscoes. Even the mind of Cervantes had not on this side deepened beyond the average of his race and time;175 his old wrongs at Moorish hands perhaps warping his better judgment. His humorous and otherwise kindly spirit, so incongruously neighboured, must indeed have counted for much in keeping life sweet in Spain in the succeeding centuries of bigotry and ignorance. But from the seventeenth century till the other day the brains were out, in the sense that genius was lacking. That species of variation had been too effectually extirpated during two centuries to assert itself until after a similar duration of normal conditions. The “immense advantage of religious unity,” which even a modern Spanish historian176 has described as a gain balancing the economic loss from the expulsion of the Moriscoes, was precisely the condition of minimum intellectual activity—the unity of stagnation. No kind of ratiocinative thought was allowed to raise its head. A Latin translation of the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus had been permitted, or at least published, in Catholic France; but when Martin Martinez de Cantatapiedra, a learned orientalist and professor of theology, ventured to do the same thing in Spain—doubtless with the idea of promoting faith by discouraging reason—he was haled before the Inquisition, and the book proscribed (1583). He was further charged with Lutheran leanings on the score that he had a preference for the actual text of Scripture over that of the commentators.177 In such an atmosphere it was natural that works on mathematics, astronomy, and physics should be censured as “favouring materialism and sometimes atheism.”178 It has been held by one historian that at the death of Philip II there arose some such sense of relief throughout Spain as was felt later in France at the death of Louis XIV; that “the Spaniards now ventured to sport with the chains which they had not the power to break”; and that Cervantes profited by the change in conceiving and writing his Don Quixote.179 But the same historian had before seen that “poetic freedom was circumscribed by the same shackles which fettered moral liberty. Thoughts which could not be expressed without fear of the dungeon and the stake were no longer materials for the poet to work on. His imagination, instead of improving them into poetic ideas ... had to be taught to reject them. But the eloquence of prose was more completely bowed down under the inquisitorial yoke than poetry, because it was more closely allied to truth, which of all things was the most dreaded.”180 Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderon proved that within the iron wall of Catholic orthodoxy, in an age when conclusions were but slowly being tried between dogma and reason, there could be a vigorous play of imaginative genius on the field of human nature; even as in Velasquez, sheltered by royal favour, the genius of colour and portraiture could become incarnate. But after these have passed away, the laws of social progress are revealed in the defect of all further Spanish genius. Even of Cervantes it is recorded—on very doubtful authority, however—that he said “I could have made Don Quixote much more amusing if it were not for the Inquisition”; and it is matter of history that a passage in his book181 disparaging perfunctory works of charity was in 1619 ordered by the Holy Office to be expunged as impious and contrary to the faith.

See H. E. Watts, Miguel de Cervantes, p. 167. Don Quixote was “always under suspicion of the orthodox.” Id. p. 166. Mr. Watts, saying nothing of Cervantes’s approval of the expulsion of the Moriscoes, claims that his “head was clear of the follies and extravagances of the reigning superstition” (id. p. 231). But the case is truly summed up by Mr. Ormsby when he says: “For one passage capable of being tortured into covert satire” against things ecclesiastical, “there are ten in Don Quixote and the novels that show—what indeed is very obvious from the little we know of his life and character—that Cervantes was a faithful son of the Church” (tr. of Don Quixote, 1885, introd. i, 57).

When the total intellectual life of a nation falls ever further in the rear of the world’s movement, even the imaginative arts are stunted. Turkey excepted, the civilized nations of Europe which for two centuries have contributed the fewest great names to the world’s bead-roll have been Spain, Austria, Portugal, Belgium, and Greece, all noted for their “religious unity.” And of all of these Spain is the supreme instance of positive decadence, she having exhibited in the first half of the sixteenth century a greater complex of energy than any of the others.182 The lesson is monumental.

It remains to trace briefly the movement of scientific and speculative thought which constituted the transition between the Scholastic and the modern philosophy. It may be compendiously noted under the names of Copernicus, Bruno, Vanini, Galileo, Ramus, Gassendi, Bacon, and Descartes.

The great performance of Copernicus (Nicolaus Koppernigk, 1473–1543), given to the world with an editor’s treacherous preface as he lay paralysed on his deathbed, did not become a general possession for over a hundred years. The long reluctance of its author to let it be published, despite the express invitation of a cardinal in the name of the pope, was well founded in his knowledge of the strength of common prejudice; and perhaps partly in a sense of the scientific imperfection of his own case.183 Only the special favour accorded to his first sketch at Rome—a favour which he had further carefully planned for in his dedicatory epistle to Pope Paul—saved his main treatise from prohibition till long after its work was done.184 It was in fact, with all its burden of traditional error, the most momentous challenge that had yet been offered in the modern world to established beliefs, alike theological and lay, for it seemed to flout “common sense” as completely as it did the cosmogony of the sacred books. It was probably from scraps of ancient lore current in Italy in his years of youthful study there that he first derived his idea; and in Italy none had dared publicly to propound the geocentric theory. Its gradual victory, therefore, is the first great modern instance of a triumph of reason over spontaneous and instilled prejudice; and Galileo’s account of his reception of it should be a classic document in the history of rationalism.

It was when he was a student in his teens that there came to Pisa one Christianus Urstitius of Rostock, a follower of Copernicus, to lecture on the new doctrine. The young Galileo, being satisfied that “that opinion could be no other than a solemn madness,” did not attend; and those of his acquaintance who did made a jest of the matter, all save one, “very intelligent and wary,” who told him that “the business was not altogether to be laughed at.” Thenceforth he began to inquire of Copernicans, with the result inevitable to such a mind as his. “Of as many as I examined I found not so much as one who told me not that he had been a long time of the contrary opinion, but to have changed it for this, as convinced by the strength of the reasons proving the same; and afterwards questioning them one by one, to see whether they were well possessed of the reasons of the other side, I found them all to be very ready and perfect in them, so that I could not truly say that they took this opinion out of ignorance, vanity, or to show the acuteness of their wits.” On the other hand, the opposing Aristoteleans and Ptolemeans had seldom even superficially studied the Copernican system, and had in no case been converted from it. “Whereupon, considering that there was no man who followed the opinion of Copernicus that had not been first on the contrary side, and that was not very well acquainted with the reasons of Aristotle and Ptolemy, while, on the contrary, there was not one of the followers of Ptolemy that had ever been of the judgment of Copernicus, and had left that to embrace this of Aristotle,” he began to realize how strong must be the reasons that thus drew men away from beliefs “imbibed with their milk.”185 We can divine how slow would be the progress of a doctrine which could only thus begin to find its way into one of the most gifted scientific minds of the modern world. It was only a minority of the Élite of the intellectual life who could receive it, even after the lapse of a hundred years.

The doctrine of the earth’s two-fold motion, as we have seen, had actually been taught in the fifteenth century by Nicolaus of Cusa (1401–1464), who, instead of being prosecuted, was made a cardinal, so little was the question then considered (Ueberweg, ii, 23–24). See above, vol. i, p. 368, as to Pulci. Only very slowly did the work even of Copernicus make its impression. Green (Short History, ed. 1881, p. 297) makes first the mistake of stating that it influenced thought in the fifteenth century, and then the further mistake of saying that it was brought home to the general intelligence by Galileo and Kepler in the later years of the sixteenth century (id. p. 412). Galileo’s European notoriety dates from 1616; his Dialogues of the Two Systems of the World appeared only in 1632; and his Dialogues of the New Sciences in 1638. Kepler’s indecisive Mysterium Cosmographicum appeared only in 1597; his treatise on the motions of the planet Mars not till 1609.

One of the first to bring the new cosmological conception to bear on philosophic thought was Giordano Bruno of Nola (1548–1600), whose life and death of lonely chivalry have won him his place as the typical martyr of modern freethought.186 He may be conceived as a blending of the pantheistic and naturalistic lore of ancient Greece,187 assimilated through the Florentine Platonists, with the spirit of modern science (itself a revival of the Greek) as it first takes firm form in Copernicus, whose doctrine Bruno early and ardently embraced. Baptized Filippo, he took Giordano as his cloister-name when he entered the great convent of S. Domenico Maggiore at Naples in 1563, in his fifteenth year. No human being was ever more unfitly placed among the Dominicans, punningly named the “hounds of the Lord” (domini canes) for their work as the corps of the Inquisition; and very early in his cloister life he came near being formally proceeded against for showing disregard of sacred images, and making light of the sanctity of the Virgin.188 He passed his novitiate, however, without further trouble, and was fully ordained a priest in 1572, in his twenty-fourth year. Passing then through several Neapolitan monasteries during a period of three years, he seems to have become not a little of a freethinker on his return to his first cloister, as he had already reached Arian opinions in regard to Christ, and soon proceeded to substitute a mystical and Pythagorean for the orthodox view of the Trinity.189

For the second time a “process” was begun against him, and he took flight to Rome (1576), presenting himself at a convent of his Order. News speedily came from Naples of the process against him, and of the discovery that he had possessed a volume of the works of Chrysostom and Jerome with the scholia of Erasmus—a prohibited thing. Only a few months before Bartolomeo Carranza, Bishop of Toledo, who had won the praise of the Council of Trent for his index of prohibited books, had been condemned to abjure for the doctrine that “the worship of the relics of the saints is of human institution,” and had died in the same year at the convent to which Bruno had now gone. Thus doubly warned, he threw off his priestly habit, and fled to the Genoese territory,190 where, in the commune of Noli, he taught grammar and astronomy. In 1578 he visited successively Turin, Venice, Padua, Bergamo, and Milan, resuming at the last-named town his monk’s habit. Thereafter he again returned to Turin, passing thence to ChambÉry at the end of 1578, and thence to Geneva early in 1579.191 His wish, he said, was “to live in liberty and security”; but for that he must first renounce his Dominican habit; other Italian refugees, of whom there were many at Geneva, helping him to a layman’s suit. Becoming a corrector of the press, he seems to have conformed externally to Calvinism; but after a stay of two and a-half months he published a short diatribe against one Antonio de La Faye, who professed philosophy at the Academy; and for this he was arrested and sentenced to excommunication, while his bookseller was subjected to one day’s imprisonment and a fine.192 After three weeks the excommunication was raised; but he nevertheless left Geneva, and afterwards spoke of Calvinism as the “deformed religion.” After a few weeks’ sojourn at Lyons he went to Toulouse, the very centre of inquisitional orthodoxy; and there, strangely enough, he was able to stay for more than a year,193 taking his degree as Master of Arts and becoming professor of astronomy. But the civil wars made Toulouse unsafe; and at length, probably in 1581 or 1582, he reached Paris, where for a time he lectured as professor extraordinary.194 In 1583 he reached England, where he remained till 1585, lecturing, debating at Oxford on the Copernican theory, and publishing a number of his works, four of them dedicated to his patron Castelnau de MauvissiÈre, the French ambassador. Oxford was then a stronghold of bigoted Aristotelianism, where bachelors and masters deviating from the master were fined, or, if openly hostile, expelled.195 In that camp Bruno was not welcome. But he had other shelter, at the French Embassy in London, and there he had notable acquaintances. He had met Sir Philip Sidney at Milan in 1578; and his dialogue, Cena de le Ceneri, gives a vivid account of a discussion in which he took a leading part at a banquet given by Sir Fulke Greville. His picture of “Oxford ignorance and English ill-manners”196 is not lenient; and there is no reason to suppose that his doctrine was then assimilated by many;197 but his stay in the household of Castelnau was one of the happiest periods of his chequered life. While in England he wrote no fewer than seven works, four of them dedicated to Castelnau, and two—the Heroic Fervours and the Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast—to Sir Philip Sidney.

Returning to Paris on the recall of Castelnau in 1585, he made an attempt to reconcile himself to the Church, but it was fruitless; and thereafter he went his own way. After a public disputation at the university in 1586, he set out on a new peregrination, visiting first Mayence, Marburg, and Wittemberg. At Marburg he was refused leave to debate; and at Wittemberg he seems to have been carefully conciliatory, as he not only matriculated but taught for over a year (1586–1588), till the Calvinist party carried the day over the Lutheran.198 Thereafter he reached Prague, Helmstadt, Frankfort, and Zurich. At length, on the fatal invitation of the Venetian youth Mocenigo, he re-entered Italian territory, where, in Venice, he was betrayed to the Inquisition by his treacherous and worthless pupil.199

What had been done for freethought by Bruno in his fourteen years of wandering, debating, and teaching through Europe it is impossible to estimate; but it is safe to say that he was one of the most powerful antagonists to orthodox unreason that had yet appeared. Of all men of his time he had perhaps the least affinity with the Christian creed, which was repellent to him alike in the Catholic and the Protestant versions. The attempt to prove him a believer on the strength of a non-autograph manuscript200 is idle. His approbation of a religion for the discipline of uncivilized peoples is put in terms of unbelief.201 In the Spaccio della bestia trionfante he derides the notion of a union of divine and human natures, and substantially proclaims a natural (theistic) religion, negating all “revealed” religions alike. Where Boccaccio had accredited all the three leading religions, Bruno disallows all with paganism, though he puts that above Christianity.202 And his disbelief grew more stringent with his years. Among the heretical propositions charged against him by the Inquisition were these: that there is transmigration of souls; that magic is right and proper; that the Holy Spirit is the same thing as the soul of the world; that the world is eternal; that Moses, like the Egyptians, wrought miracles by magic; that the sacred writings are but a romance (sogno); that the devil will be saved; that only the Hebrews are descended from Adam, other men having descended from progenitors created by God before Adam; that Christ was not God, but was a notorious sorcerer (insigne mago), who, having deceived men, was deservedly hanged, not crucified; that the prophets and the apostles were bad men and sorcerers, and that many of them were hanged as such. The cruder of these propositions rest solely on the allegation of Mocenigo, and were warmly repudiated by Bruno: others are professedly drawn, always, of course, by forcing his language, but not without some colourable pretext, from his two “poems,” De triplice, minimo, et mensura, and De monade, numero et figura, published at Frankfort in 1591, in the last year of his freedom.203 But the allusions in the Sigillus Sigillorum204 to the weeping worship of a suffering Adonis, to the exhibition of suffering and miserable Gods, to transpierced divinities, and to sham miracles, were certainly intended to contemn the Christian system.

Alike in the details of his propaganda and in the temper of his utterance, Bruno expresses from first to last the spirit of freethought and free speech. Libertas philosophica205 is the breath of his nostrils; and by his life and his death alike he upholds the ideal for men as no other before him did. The wariness of Rabelais and the non-committal skepticism of Montaigne are alike alien to him; he is too lacking in reticence, too explosive, to give due heed even to the common-sense amenities of life, much more to hedge his meaning with safeguarding qualifications. And it was doubtless as much by the contagion of his mood as by his lore that he impressed men.

His personal and literary influence was probably most powerful in respect of his eager propaganda of the Copernican doctrine, which he of his own force vitally expanded and made part of a pantheistic conception of the universe.206 Where Copernicus adhered by implication to the idea of an external and limitary sphere—the last of the eight of the Ptolemaic theory—Bruno reverted boldly to the doctrine of Anaximandros, and declared firmly for the infinity of space and of the series of the worlds. In regard to biology he makes an equivalent advance, starting from the thought of Empedocles and Lucretius, and substituting an idea of natural selection for that of creative providence.207 The conception is definitely thought out, and marks him as one of the renovators of scientific no less than of philosophic thought for the modern world; though the special paralysis of science under Christian theology kept his ideas on this side pretty much a dead letter for his own day. And indeed it was to the universal and not the particular that his thought chiefly and most enthusiastically turned. A philosophic poet rather than a philosopher or man of science, he yet set abroad for the modern world that conception of the physical infinity of the universe which, once psychologically assimilated, makes an end of the medieval theory of things. On this head he was eagerly affirmative; and the merely Pyrrhonic skeptics he assailed as he did the “asinine” orthodox, though he insisted on doubt as the beginning of wisdom.

Of his extensive literary output not much is stamped with lasting scientific fitness or literary charm; and some of his treatises, as those on mnemonics, have no more value than the product of his didactic model, Raymond Lully. As a writer he is at his best in the sweeping expatiation of his more general philosophic treatises, where he attains a lifting ardour of inspiration, a fervour of soaring outlook, that puts him in the front rank of the thinkers of his age. And if his literary character is at times open to severe criticism in respect of his lack of balance, sobriety, and self-command, his final courage atones for such shortcomings.

His case, indeed, serves to remind us that at certain junctures it is only the unbalanced types that aid humanity’s advance. The perfectly prudent and self-sufficing man does not achieve revolutions, does not revolt against tyrannies; he wisely adapts himself and subsists, letting the evil prevail as it may. It is the more impatient and unreticent, the eager and hot-brained—in a word, the faulty—who clash with oppression and break a way for quieter spirits through the hedges of enthroned authority. The serenely contemplative spirit is rather a possession than a possessor for his fellows; he may inform and enlighten, but is not in himself a countering or inspiriting force: a Shelley avails more than a Goethe against tyrannous power. And it may be that the battling enthusiast in his own way wins liberation for himself from “fear of fortune and death,” as he wins for others liberty of action.208 Even such a liberator, bearing other men’s griefs and taking stripes that they might be kept whole, was Bruno.

And though he quailed at the first shock of capture and torture, when the end came he vindicated human nature as worthily as could any quietist. It was a long-drawn test. Charged on the traitor’s testimony with many “blasphemies,” he denied them all,209 but stood to his published writings210 and vividly expounded his theories,211 professing in the usual manner to believe in conformity with the Church’s teachings, whatever he might write on philosophy. It is impossible to trust the Inquisition records as to his words of self-humiliation;212 though on the other hand no blame can rationally attach to anyone who, in his place, should try to deceive such enemies, morally on a level with hostile savages. It is certain that the Inquisitors frequently wrung recantations by torture.213

What is historically certain is that Bruno was not released, but sent on to Rome, and was kept there in prison for seven years. He was not the sort of heretic likely to be released; though the fact of his being a Dominican, and the desire to maintain the Church’s intellectual credit, delayed so long his execution. Certainly not an atheist (he called himself in several of his book-titles Philotheus; he consigns insano ateismo to perdition;214 and his quasi-pantheism or monism often lapses into theistic modes),215 he yet was from first to last essentially though not professedly anti-Christian in his view of the universe. If the Church had cause to fear any philosophic teaching, it was his, preached with the ardour of a prophet and the eloquence of a poet. His doctrine that the worlds in space are innumerable was as offensive to orthodox ears as his specific negations of Christian dogma, outgoing as it did the later idea of Kepler and Galileo. He had, moreover, finally refused to make any fresh recantation; and the only detailed document extant concerning his final trial describes him as saying to his judges: “With more fear, perchance, do you pass sentence on me than I receive it.”216 According to all accessible records, he was burned alive at Rome in February, 1600, in the Field of Flowers, near where his statue now stands. As was probably customary, they tied his tongue before leading him to the stake, lest he should speak to the people;217 and his martyrdom was an edifying spectacle for the vast multitude of pilgrims who had come from all parts of Christendom for the jubilee of the pope.218 At the stake, when he was at the point of death, there was duly presented to him the crucifix, and he duly put it aside.

An attempt has been made by Professor Desdouits in a pamphlet (La lÉgende tragique de Jordano Bruno; Paris, 1885) to show that there is no evidence that Bruno was burned; and an anonymous writer in the Scottish Review (October, 1888, Art. II), rabidly hostile to Bruno, has maintained the same proposition. Doubt on the subject dates from Bayle. Its main ground is the fewness of the documentary records, of which, further, the genuineness is now called in question. But no good reason is shown for doubting them. They are three.

1. The Latin letter of Gaspar Schopp (Scioppius), dated February 17, 1600, is an eye-witness’s account of the sentencing and burning of Bruno at that date. (See it in full, in the original Latin, in Berti, p. 461 sq., and in App. V to Frith, Life of Bruno, and partly translated in Prof. Adamson’s lectures, as cited. It was rep. by Struvius in his Acta Literaria, tom. v, and by La Croze in his Entretiens sur divers sujets in 1711, p. 287.) It was not printed till 1621, but the grounds urged for its rejection are totally inadequate, and involve assumptions, which are themselves entirely unproved, as to what Scioppius was likely to do. Finally, no intelligible reason is suggested for the forging of such a document. The remarks of Prof. Desdouits on this head have no force whatever. The writer in the Scottish Review (p. 263, and note) suggests as “at least as possible an hypothesis as any other that he [Bruno] was the author of the forged accounts of his own death.” Comment is unnecessary.

2. There are preserved two extracts from Roman news-letters (Avvisi) of the time; one, dated February 12, 1600, commenting on the case; the other, dated February 19, relating the execution on the 17th. (See both in S. R., pp. 264–65. They were first printed by Berti in Documenti intorno a Giordano Bruno, Rome, 1880, and are reprinted in his Vita, ed. 1889, cap. xix; also by Levi, as cited.) Against these testimonies the sole plea is that they mis-state Bruno’s opinions and the duration of his imprisonment—a test which would reduce to mythology the contents of most newspapers in our own day. The writer in the Scottish Review makes the suicidal suggestion that, inasmuch as the errors as to dates occur in Schopp’s letter, “the so-called Schopp was fabricated from these notices, or they from Schopp”—thus admitting one to be historical.

3. There has been found, by a Catholic investigator, a double entry in the books of the Lay Brotherhood of San Giovanni Decollato, whose function was to minister to prisoners under capital sentence, giving a circumstantial account of Bruno’s execution. (See it in S. R., pp. 266, 269, 270.) In this case, the main entry being dated “1600. Thursday. February 16th,” the anonymous writer argues that “the whole thing resolves itself into a make-up,” because February 16 was the Wednesday. The entry refers to the procedure of the Wednesday night and the Thursday morning; and such an error could easily occur in any case. Whatever may be one day proved, the cavils thus far count for nothing. All the while, the records as to Bruno remain in the hands of the Catholic authorities; but, despite the discredit constantly cast on the Church on the score of Bruno’s execution, they offer no official denial of the common statement; while they do officially admit (S. R., p. 252) that on February 8 Bruno was sentenced as an “obstinate heretic,” and “given over to the Secular Court.” On the other hand, the episode is well vouched; and the argument from the silence of ambassadors’ letters is so far void. No pretence is made of tracing Bruno anywhere after February, 1600.

Since the foregoing note appeared in the first edition I have met with the essay of Mr. R. Copley Christie, “Was Giordano Bruno Really Burned?” (Macmillan’s Magazine, October, 1885; rep. in Mr. Christie’s Selected Essays and Papers, 1902). This is a crushing answer to the thesis of M. Desdouits, showing as it does clear grounds not only for affirming the genuineness of the letter of Scioppius, but for doubting the diligence of M. Desdouits. Mr. Christie points out (1) that in his book Ecclesiasticus, printed in 1612, Scioppius refers to the burning of Bruno almost in the words of his letter of 1600; (2) that in 1607 Kepler wrote to a correspondent of the burning of Bruno, giving as his authority J. M. Wacker, who in 1600 was living at Rome as the imperial ambassador; and (3) that the tract Machiavellizatio, 1621, in which the letter of Scioppius was first printed, was well known in its day, being placed on the Index, and answered by two writers without eliciting any repudiation from Scioppius, who lived till 1649. As M. Desdouits staked his case on the absence of allusion to the subject before 1661 (overlooking even the allusion by Mersenne, in 1624, cited by Bayle), his theory may be taken as exploded.

Bruno has been zealously blackened by Catholic writers for the obscenity of some of his writing219 and the alleged freedom of his life—piquant charges, when we remember the life of the Papal Italy in which he was born. Lucilio Vanini (otherwise Julius CÆsar Vanini), the next martyr of freethought, also an Italian (b. at Taurisano, 1585), is open to the more relevant charges of an inordinate vanity and some duplicity. Figuring as a Carmelite friar, which he was not, he came to England (1612) and deceitfully professed to abjure Catholicism,220 gaining, however, nothing by the step, and contriving to be reconciled to the Church, after being imprisoned for forty-nine days on an unrecorded charge. Previously he had figured, like Bruno, as a wandering scholar at Amsterdam, Brussels, Cologne, Geneva, and Lyons; and afterwards he taught natural philosophy for a year at Genoa. His treatise, Amphitheatrum Æterna ProvidentiÆ (Lyons, 1615), is professedly directed against “ancient philosophers, Atheists, Epicureans, Peripatetics, and Stoics,” and is ostensibly quite orthodox.221 In one passage he untruthfully tells how, when imprisoned in England, he burned with the desire to shed his blood for the Catholic Church.222 In another, after declaring that some Christian doctors have argued very weakly against the Epicureans on immortality, he avows that he, “Christianus nomine cognomine Catholicus,” could hardly have held the doctrine if he had not learned it from the Church, “the most certain and infallible mistress of truth.”223 As usual, the attack leaves us in doubt as to the amount of real atheism current at the time. The preface asserts that “??e?t?t? autem secta pestilentissima quotidie, latius et latius vires acquirit eundo,” and there are various hostile allusions to atheists in the text;224 but the arguments cited from them are such as might be brought by deists against miracles and the Christian doctrine of sin; and there is an allusion of the customary kind to “Nicolaus Machiavellus Atheorum facile princeps,”225 which puts all in doubt. The later published Dialogues, De Admirandis NaturÆ Arcanis,226 while showing a freer critical spirit, would seem to be in part earlier in composition, if we can trust the printer’s preface, which represents them as collected from various quarters, and published only with the reluctant consent of the author.227 This, of course, may be a mystification; in any case the Dialogues twice mention the Amphitheatrum; and the fourth book, in which this mention occurs, may be taken on this and other grounds to set forth his later ideas. Even the Dialogues, however, while discussing many questions of creed and science in a free fashion, no less profess orthodoxy; and, while one passage is pantheistic,228 they also denounce atheism.229 And whereas one passage does avow that the author in his Amphitheatrum had said many things he did not believe, the context clearly suggests that the reference was not to the main argument, but to some of its dubious facts.230 In any case, though the title—chosen by the editors—speaks daringly enough of “Nature, the queen and goddess of mortals,” Vanini cannot be shown to be an atheist;231 and the attacks upon him as an immoral writer are not any better supported.232 The publication of the dialogues was in fact formally authorized by the Sorbonne,233 and it does not even appear that when he was charged with atheism and blasphemy at Toulouse that work was founded on, save in respect of its title.234 The charges rested on the testimony of a treacherous associate as to his private conversation; and, if true, it only amounted to proving his pantheism, expressed in his use of the word “Nature.” At his trial he expressly avowed and argued for theism. The judges, by one account, did not agree. Yet he was convicted, by the voices of the majority, and burned alive (February 9, 1619) on the day of his sentence. Drawn on a hurdle, in his shirt, with a placard on his shoulders inscribed “Atheist and Blasphemer of the name of God,” he went to his death with a high heart, rejoicing, as he cried in Italian, to die like a philosopher.235 A Catholic historian,236 who was present, says he hardily declared that “Jesus facing death sweated with fear: I die undaunted.” But before burning him they tore out his tongue by the roots; and the Christian historian is humorous over the victim’s long cry of agony.237 No martyr ever faced death with a more dauntless courage than this

Lonely antagonist of Destiny

That went down scornful before many spears;238

and if the man had all the faults falsely imputed to him,239 his death might shame his accusers.

Vanini, like Bruno, can now be recognized and understood as an Italian of vivacious temperament, studious without the student’s calm, early learned, alert in debate, fluent, imprudent, and ill-balanced. By his own account he studied theology under the Carmelite Bartolomeo Argotti, phoenix of the preachers of the time;240 but from the English Carmelite, John Bacon, “the prince of AverroÏsts,”241 he declares, he “learned to swear only by AverroËs”; and of Pomponazzi he speaks as his master, and as “prince of the philosophers of our age.”242 He has criticized both freely in his Amphitheatrum; but whereas that work is a professed vindication of orthodoxy, we may infer from the De Arcanis that the arguments of these skeptics, like those of the contemporary atheists whom he had met in his travels, had kept their hold on his thought even while he controverted them. For it cannot be disputed that the long passages which he quotes from the “atheist at Amsterdam”243 are put with a zest and cogency which are not infused into the professed rebuttals, and are in themselves quite enough to arouse the anger and suspicion of a pious reader. A writer who set forth so fully the acute arguments of unbelievers, unprintable by their authors, might well be suspected of writing at Christianity when he confuted the creeds of the pagans. As was noted later of Fontenelle, he put arguments against oracles which endangered prophecy; his dismissal of sorcery as the dream of troubled brains appeals to reason and not to faith; and his disparagement of pagan miracles logically bore upon the Christian.

When he comes to the question of immortality he grows overtly irreverent. Asked by the interlocutor in the last dialogue to give his views on the immortality of the soul, he begs to be excused, protesting: “I have vowed to my God that that question shall not be handled by me till I become old, rich, and a German.” And without overt irreverence he is ever and again unserious. Perfectly transparent is the irony of the appeal, “Let us give faith to the prescripts of the Church, and due honour to the sacrosanct Gregorian apparitions,”244 and the protestation, “I will not invalidate the powers of holy water, to which Alexander, Doctor and Pontifex of the Christians, and interpreter of the divine will, accorded such countless privileges.”245 And even in the Amphitheatrum, with all the parade of defending the faith, there is a plain balance of cogency on the side of the case for the attack,246 and a notable disposition to rely finally on lines of argument to which faith could never give real welcome. The writer’s mind, it is clear, was familiar with doubt. In the malice of orthodoxy there is sometimes an instinctive perception of hostility; and though Vanini had written, among other things,247 an Apologia pro lege mosaÏcÂ et christianÂ, to which he often refers, and an Apologia pro concilio Tridentino, he can be seen even in the hymn to deity with which he concludes his Amphitheatrum to have no part in evangelical Christianity.

He was in fact a deist with the inevitable leaning of the philosophic theist to pantheism; and whatever he may have said to arouse priestly hatred at Toulouse, he was rather less of an atheist than Spinoza or Bruno or John Scotus. On his trial,248 pressed as to his real beliefs by judges who had doubtless challenged his identification of God with Nature, he passed from a profession of orthodox faith in a trinity into a flowing discourse which could as well have availed for a vindication of pantheism as for the proposition of a personal God. Seeing a straw on the ground, he picked it up and talked of its history; and when brought back again from his affirmation of Deity to his doctrine of Nature, he set forth the familiar orthodox theorem that, while Nature wrought the succession of seeds and fruits, there must have been a first seed which was created. It was the habitual standing ground of theism; and they burned him all the same. It remains an open question whether personal enmity on the part of the prosecuting official249 or a real belief that he had uttered blasphemies against Jesus or Mary was the determining force, or whether even less motive sufficed. A vituperative Jesuit of that age sees intolerable freethinking in his suggestion of the unreality of demoniacal possession and the futility of exorcisms.250 And for that much they were not incapable of burning men in Catholic Toulouse in the days of Mary de Medici.

There are in fact reasons for surmizing that in the cases alike of Bruno and of Vanini it was the attitude of the speculator towards scientific problems that primarily or mainly aroused distrust and anger among the theologians. Vanini is careful to speak equivocally of the eternity of the universe; and though he makes a passing mention of Kepler,251 he does not name Copernicus. He had learned something from the fate of Bruno. Yet in the Dialogue De coeli forma et motore252 he declares so explicitly for a naturalistic explanation of the movements of the heavenly bodies that he must have aroused in some orthodox readers such anger as was set up in Plato by a physical theory of sun and stars. After an À priori discussion on Aristotelian lines, the querist in the dialogue asks what may fitly be held, with an eye to religion, concerning the movements of the spheres. “This,” answers Vanini, “unless I am in error: the mass of the heaven is moved in its proper gyratory way by the nature of its elements.” “How then,” asks the querist, “are the heavens moved by certain and fixed laws, unless divine minds, participating in the primal motion, there operate?” “Where is the wonder?” returns Vanini. “Does not a certain and fixed law of motion act in the most paltry clockwork machines, made by a drunken German, even as there works silently in a tertian and quartan fever a motion which comes and goes at fixed periods without transgressing its line by a moment? The sea also at certain and fixed times, by its nature, as you peripatetics affirm, is moved in progressions and regressions. No less, then, I affirm the heaven to be forever carried by the same motion in virtue of its nature (a sua pura forma) and not to be moved by the will of intelligence.” And the disciple assents. Kepler had seen fit, either in sincerity or of prudence, to leave “divine minds” in the planets; and Vanini’s negation, though not accompanied by any assertion of the motion of the earth, was enough to provoke the minds which had only three years before put Copernicus on the Index, and challenged Galileo for venting his doctrine.

It is at this stage that we begin to realize the full play of the Counter-Reformation, as against the spirit of science. The movement of mere theological and ecclesiastical heresy had visibly begun to recede in the world of mind, and in its stead, alike in Protestant and in Catholic lands, there was emerging a new activity of scientific research, vaguely menacing to all theistic faith. Kepler represented it in Germany, Harriott and Harvey and Gilbert and Bacon in England; from Italy had come of late the portents of Bruno and Galileo; even Spain yielded the Examen de Ingenios of Huarte (1575), where with due protestation of theism the physicist insists upon natural causation; and now Vanini was exhibiting the same incorrigible zest for a naturalistic explanation of all things. His dialogues are full of such questionings; the mere metaphysic and theosophy of the Amphitheatrum are being superseded by discussions on physical and physiological phenomena. It was for this, doubtless, that the De Arcanis won the special vogue over which the Jesuit Garasse was angrily exclaiming ten years later.253 Not merely the doubts cast upon sorcery and diabolical possession, but the whole drift, often enough erratic, of the inquiry as to how things in nature came about, caught the curiosity of the time, soon to be stimulated by more potent and better-governed minds than that of the ill-starred Vanini. And for every new inquirer there would be a hostile zealot in the Church, where the anti-intellectual instinct was now so much more potent than it had been in the days before Luther, when heresy was diagnosed only as a danger to revenue.

It was with Galileo that there began the practical application of the Copernican theory to astronomy, and, indeed, the decisive demonstration of its truth. With him, accordingly, began the positive rejection of the Copernican theory by the Church; for thus far it had never been officially vetoed—having indeed been generally treated as a wild absurdity. Almost immediately after the publication of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (1610) his name is found in the papers of the Inquisition, with that of Cremonini of Padua, as a subject of investigation.254 The juxtaposition is noteworthy. Cremonini was an Aristotelian, with AverroÏst leanings, and reputed an atheist;255 and it was presumably on this score that the Inquisition was looking into his case. At the same time, as an Aristotelian he was strongly opposed to Galileo, and is said to have been one of those who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope.256 Galileo, on the other hand, was ostensibly a good Catholic; but his discovery of the moons of Jupiter was a signal confirmation of the Copernican theory, and the new status at once given to that made a corresponding commotion in the Church. Thus he had against him both the unbelieving pedants of the schools and the typical priests.

In his book the great discoverer had said nothing explicitly on the subject of the Copernican theory; but in lectures and conversations he had freely avowed his belief in it; and the implications of the published treatise were clear to all thinkers.257 And though, when he visited Rome in 1611, he was well received by Pope Paul V, and his discoveries were favourably reported of by the four scientific experts nominated at the request of Cardinal Bellarmin to examine them,258 it only needed that the Biblical cry should be raised to change the situation. The Church still contained men individually open to new scientific ideas; but she was then more than ever dominated by the forces of tradition; and as soon as those forces had been practically evoked his prosecution was bound to follow. The cry of “religion in danger” silenced the saner men at Rome.

The fashion in which Galileo’s sidereal discoveries were met is indeed typical of the whole history of freethought. The clergy pointed to the story of Joshua stopping the sun and moon; the average layman scouted the new theory as plain folly; and typical schoolmen insisted that “the heavens are unchangeable,” and that there was no authority in Aristotle for the new assertions. With such minds the man of science had to argue, and in deference to such he had at length to affect to doubt his own demonstrations.259 The Catholic Reaction had finally created as bitter a spirit of hostility to free science in the Church as existed among the Protestants; and in Italy even those who saw the moons of Jupiter through his telescope dared not avow what they had seen.260 It was therefore an unfortunate step on Galileo’s part to go from Padua, which was under the rule of Venice, then anti-papal,261 to Tuscany, on the invitation of the Grand Duke. When in 1613 he published his treatise on the solar spots, definitely upholding Copernicus against Jesuits and Aristotelians, trouble became inevitable; and his letter262 to his pupil, Father Castelli, professor of mathematics at Pisa, discussing the Biblical argument with which they had both been met, at once evoked an explosion when circulated by Castelli. New trouble arose when Galileo in 1615 wrote his apology in the form of a letter to his patroness the Dowager Grand Duchess Cristina of Tuscany, extracts from which became current. An outcry of ignorant Dominican monks263 sufficed to set at work the machinery of the Index,264 the first result of which (1616) was to put on the list of condemned books the great treatise of Copernicus, published seventy-three years before. Galileo personally escaped for the present through the friendly intervention of the Pope, Paul V, on the appeal of his patron, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, apparently on the ground that he had not publicly taught the Copernican theory. It would seem as if some of the heads of the Church were at heart Copernicans;265 but they were in any case obliged to disown a doctrine felt by so many others to be subversive of the Church’s authority.

See the details of the procedure in Domenico Berti, Il Processo Originale de Galileo Galilei, ed. 1878, cap. iv; in Fahie, ch. viii; and in Gebler, ch. vi. The last-cited writer claims to show that, of two records of the “admonition” to Galileo, one, the more stringent in its terms, was false, though made at the date it bears, to permit of subsequent proceedings against Galileo. But the whole thesis is otiose. It is admitted (Gebler, p. 89) that Galileo was admonished “not to defend or hold the Copernican doctrine.” Gebler contends, however, that this was not a command to keep “entire silence,” and that therefore Galileo is not justly to be charged with having disobeyed the injunction of the Inquisition when, in his Dialogues on the Two Principal Systems of the World, the Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632), he dealt dialectically with the subject, neither affirming nor denying, but treating both theories as hypotheses. But the real issue is not Galileo’s cautious disobedience (see Gebler’s own admissions, p. 149) to an irrational decree, but the crime of the Church in silencing him. It is not likely that the “enemies” of Galileo, as Gebler supposes (pp. 90, 338), anticipated his later dialectical handling of the subject, and so falsified the decision of the Inquisition against him in 1616. Gebler had at first adopted the German theory that the absolute command to silence was forged in 1632; and, finding the document certainly belonged to 1616, framed the new theory, quite unnecessarily, to save Galileo’s credit. The two records are quite in the spirit and manner of Inquisitorial diplomacy. As Berti remarks, “the Holy Office proceeded with much heedlessness (legerezza) and much confusion” in 1616. Its first judgment, in either form, merely emphasizes the guilt of the second. Cp. Fahie, pp. 167–69.

Thus officially “admonished” for his heresy, but not punished, in 1616, Galileo kept silence for some years, till in 1618 he published his (erroneous) theory of the tides, which he sent with an ironical epistle to the friendly Archduke Leopold of Austria, professing to be propounding a mere dream, disallowed by the official veto on Copernicus.266 This, however, did him less harm than his essay Il Saggiatore (“The Scales”), in which he opposed the Jesuit Grassi on the question of comets. Receiving the imprimatur in 1623, it was dedicated to the new pope, Urban VIII, who, as the Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, had been Galileo’s friend. The latter could now hope for freedom of speech, as he had all along had a number of friends at the papal court, besides many priests, among his admirers and disciples. But the enmity of the Jesuits countervailed all. They did not succeed in procuring a censure of the Saggiatore, though that subtly vindicates the Copernican system while professing to hold it disproved by the fiat of the Church;267 but when, venturing further, he after another lapse of years produced his Dialogues on the Two Systems, for which he obtained the papal imprimatur in 1632, they caught him in their net. Having constant access to the pope, they contrived to make him believe that Galileo had ridiculed him in one of the personages of his Dialogues. It was quite false; but one of the pope’s anti-Copernican arguments was there unconsciously made light of; and his wounded vanity was probably a main factor in the impeachment which followed.268 His Holiness professed to have been deceived into granting the imprimatur;269 a Special Commission was set on foot; the proceedings of 1616 were raked up; and Galileo was again summoned to Rome. He was old and frail, and sent medical certificates of his unfitness for such travel; but it was insisted on, and as under the papal tyranny there was no help, he accordingly made the journey. After many delays he was tried, and, on his formal abjuration, sentenced to formal imprisonment (1633) for teaching the “absurd” and “false doctrine” of the motion of the earth and the non-motion of the sun from east to west. In this case the pope, whatever were his motives, acted as a hot anti-Copernican, expressing his personal opinion on the question again and again, and always in an anti-Copernican sense. In both cases, however, the popes, while agreeing to the verdict, abstained from officially ratifying it,270 so that, in proceeding to force Galileo to abjure his doctrine, the Inquisition technically exceeded its powers—a circumstance in which some Catholics appear to find comfort. Seeing that three of the ten cardinals named in the preamble to the sentence did not sign, it has been inferred that they dissented; but there is no good reason to suppose that either the pope or they wilfully abstained from signing. They had gained their point—the humiliation of the great discoverer.

Compare Gebler, p. 241; Private Life, p. 257, quoting Tiraboschi. For an exposure of the many perversions of the facts as to Galileo by Catholic writers see Parchappe, GalilÉe, sa vie, etc., 2e Partie. To such straits has the Catholic Church been reduced in this matter that part of its defence of the treatment of Galileo is the plea that he unwarrantably asserted that the fixity of the sun and the motion of the earth were taught in the Scriptures. Sir Robert Inglis is quoted as having maintained this view in England in 1824 (Mendham, The Literary Policy of the Church of Rome, 2nd ed. 1830, p. 176), and the same proposition was maintained in 1850 by a Roman cardinal. See Galileo e l’Inquisizione, by Monsignor Marini, Roma, 1850, pp. 1, 53–54, etc. Had Galileo really taught as is there asserted, he would only have been assenting to what his priestly opponents constantly dinned in his ears. But in point of fact he had not so assented; for in his letter to Castelli (see Gebler, pp. 46–50) he had earnestly deprecated the argument from the Bible, urging that, though Scripture could not err, its interpreters might misunderstand it; and even going so far as to argue, with much ingenuity, that the story of Joshua, literally interpreted, could be made to harmonize with the Copernican theory, but not at all with the Ptolemaic.

The thesis revived by Monsignor Marini deserves to rank as the highest flight of absurdity and effrontery in the entire discussion (cp. Berti, Giordano Bruno, 1889, p. 306, note). Every step in both procedures of the Inquisition insists on the falsity and the anti-scriptural character of the doctrine that the earth moves round the sun (see Berti, Il Processo, p. 115 sq.; Gebler, pp. 76–77, 230–34); and never once is it hinted that Galileo’s error lay in ascribing to the Bible the doctrine of the earth’s fixity. In the Roman Index of 1664 the works of Galileo and Copernicus are alike vetoed, with all other writings affirming the movement of the earth and the stability of the sun; and in the Index of 1704 are included libri omnes docentes mobilitatem terrae et immobilitatem solis (Putnam, The Censorship of the Church of Rome, 1906–1907, i, 308, 312).

The stories of his being tortured and blinded, and saying “Still it moves,” are indeed myths.271 The broken-spirited old man was in no mood so to speak; he was, moreover, in all respects save his science, an orthodox Catholic,272 and as such not likely to defy the Church to its face. In reality he was formally in the custody of the Inquisition—and this not in a cell, but in the house of an official—for only twenty-two days. After the sentence he was again formally detained for some seventeen days in the Villa Medici, but was then allowed to return to his own rural home at Acatri,273 on condition that he lived in solitude, receiving no visitors. He was thus much more truly a prisoner than the so-called “prisoner of the Vatican” in our own day. The worst part of the sentence, however, was the placing of all his works, published and unpublished, on the Index Expurgatorius, and the gag thus laid on all utterance of rational scientific thought in Italy—an evil of incalculable influence. “The lack of liberty and speculation,” writes a careful Italian student, “was the cause of the death first of the Accademia dei Lincei, an institution unique in its time; then of the Accademia del Cimento. Thus Italy, after the marvellous period of vigorous native civilization in the thirteenth century, after a second period of civilization less native but still its own, as being Latin, saw itself arrested on the threshold of a third and not less splendid period. Vexations and prohibitions expelled courage, spontaneity, and universality from the national mind; literary style became uncertain, indeterminate; and, forbidden to treat of government, science, or religion, turned to things frivolous and fruitless. For the great academies, instituted to renovate and further the study of natural philosophy, were substituted small ones without any such aim. Intellectual energy, the love of research and of objective truth, greatness of feeling and nobility of character, all suffered. Nothing so injures a people as the compulsion to express or conceal its thought solely from motives of fear. The nation in which those conditions were set up became intellectually inferior to those in which it was possible to pass freely in the vast regions of knowledge. Her culture grew restricted, devoid of originality, vaporous, umbratile; there arose habits of servility and dissimulation; great books, great men, great purposes were denaturalized.”274

It was thus in the other countries of Europe that Galileo’s teaching bore its fruit, for he speedily got his condemned Dialogues published in Latin by the Elzevirs; and in 1638, also at the hands of the Elzevirs, appeared his Dialogues of the New Sciences [i.e., of mechanics and motion], the “foundation of mechanical physics.” By this time he was totally blind, and then only, when physicians could not help him save by prolonging his life, was he allowed to live under strict surveillance in Florence, needing a special indulgence from the Inquisition to permit him even to go to church at Easter. The desire of his last blind days, to have with him his best-beloved pupil, Father Castelli, was granted only under rigid limitation and supervision, though even the papacy could not keep from him the plaudits of the thinkers of Europe. Finally he passed away in his rural “prison”—after five years of blindness—in 1642, the year of Newton’s birth. At that time his doctrines were under anathema in Italy, and known elsewhere only to a few. Hobbes in 1634 tried in vain to procure for the Earl of Newcastle a copy of the earlier Dialogues in London, and wrote: “It is not possible to get it for money.... I hear say it is called-in, in Italy, as a book that will do more hurt to their religion than all the books of Luther and Calvin, such opposition they think is between their religion and natural reason.”275 Not till 1757 did the papacy permit other books teaching the Copernican system; in 1765 Galileo was still under ban; not until 1822 was permission given to treat the theory as true; and not until 1835 was the work of Copernicus withdrawn from the Index.276

While modern science was thus being placed on its special basis, a continuous resistance was being made in the schools to the dogmatism which held the mutilated lore of Aristotle as the sum of human wisdom. Like the ecclesiastical revolution, this had been protracted through centuries. Aristotelianism, whether theistic or pantheistic, whether orthodox or heterodox,277 had become a dogmatism like another, a code that vetoed revision, a fetter laid on the mind. Even as a negation of Christian superstition it had become impotent, for the Peripatetics were not only ready to make common cause with the Jesuits against Galileo, as we have seen; some of them were content even to join in the appeal to the Bible.278 The result of such uncritical partisanship was that the immense service of Aristotle to mental life—the comprehensive grasp which gave him his long supremacy as against rival system-makers, and makes him still so much more important than any of the thinkers who in the sixteenth century revolted against him—was by opponents disregarded and denied, though the range and depth of his influence are apparent in all the polemic against him, notably in that of Bacon, who is constantly citing him, and relates his reasoning to him, however antagonistically, at every turn.

Naturally, the less sacrosanct dogmatism was the more freely assailed; and in the sixteenth century the attacks became numerous and vehement. Luther was a furious anti-Aristotelian,279 as were also some Calvinists; but in 1570 we find Beza declaring to Ramus280 that “the Genevese have decreed, once and for ever, that they will never, neither in logic nor in any other branch of learning, turn away from the teaching of Aristotle.” At Oxford the same code held.281 In Italy, Telesio, who notably anticipates the tone of Bacon as to natural science, and is largely followed by him, influenced Bruno in the anti-Aristotelian direction,282 though it was in a long line from Aristotle that he got his principle of the eternity of the universe. The Spaniard Ludovicus Vives, too (1492–1540), pronounced by Lange one of the clearest heads of his age, had insisted on progress beyond Aristotle in the spirit of naturalist science.283 But the typical anti-Aristotelian of the century was Ramus (Pierre de la RamÉe, 1515–1572), whose long and strenuous battle against the ruling school at Paris brought him to his death in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.284 Ramus hardily laid it down that “there is no authority over reason, but reason ought to be queen and ruler over authority.”285 Such a message was of more value than his imperfect attempt to supersede the Aristotelian logic. Bacon, who carried on in England the warfare against the Aristotelian tradition, never ventured so to express himself as against the theological tyranny in particular, though, as we have seen, the general energy and vividness of his argumentation gave him an influence which undermined the orthodoxies to which he professed to conform. On the other hand, he did no such service to exact science as was rendered in his day by Kepler and Galileo and their English emulators; and his full didactic influence came much later into play.

Like fallacies to Bacon’s may be found in Descartes, whose seventeenth-century reputation as a champion of theism proved mainly the eagerness of theists for a plausible defence. Already in his own day his arguments were logically confuted by both Gassendi and Hobbes; and his partial success with theists was a success of partisanism. It was primarily in respect of his habitual appeal to reason and argument, in disregard of the assumptions of faith, and secondarily in respect of his real scientific work, that he counts for freethought. Ultimately his method undermined his creed; and it is not too much to say of him that, next to Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo,286 he laid a good part of the foundation of modern philosophy and science,287 Gassendi largely aiding. Though he never does justice to Galileo, from his fear of provoking the Church, it can hardly be doubted that he owes to him in large part the early determination of his mind to scientific methods; for it is difficult to believe that the account he gives of his mental development in the Discours de la MÉthode (1637) is biographically true. It is rather the schemed statement, by a ripened mind, of how it might best have been developed. Nor did Descartes, any more than Bacon, live up to the intellectual idea he had framed. All through his life he anxiously sought to propitiate the Church;288 and his scientific as well as his philosophic work was hampered in consequence. In England Henry More, who latterly recoiled from his philosophy, still thought his physics had been spoiled by fear of the Church, declaring that the imprisonment of Galileo “frighted Des Cartes into such a distorted description of motion that no man’s reason could make good sense of it, nor modesty permit him to fancy anything nonsense in so excellent an author.”289

But nonetheless the unusual rationalism of Descartes’s method, avowedly aiming at the uprooting of all his own prejudices290 as a first step to truth, displeased the Jesuits, and could not escape the hostile attention of the Protestant theologians of Holland, where Descartes passed so many years of his life. Despite his constant theism, accordingly, he had at length to withdraw.291 A Jesuit, PÈre Bourdin, sought to have the Discours de la MÉthode at once condemned by the French clergy, but the attempt failed for the time being. France was just then, in fact, the most freethinking part of Europe;292 and Descartes, though not so unsparing with his prejudices as he set out to be, was the greatest innovator in philosophy that had arisen in the Christian era. He made real scientific discoveries, too, where Bacon only inspired an approach and schemed a wandering road to them. He first effectively applied algebra to geometry; he first scientifically explained the rainbow; he at once accepted and founded on Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, which most physiologists of the day derided; and he welcomed Aselli’s discovery of the lacteals, which was rejected by Harvey.293 And though as regards religion his timorous conformities deprive him of any heroic status, it is perhaps not too much to pronounce him “the great reformer and liberator of the European intellect.”294 One not given to warm sympathy with freethought has avowed that “the common root of modern philosophy is the doubt which is alike Baconian and Cartesian.”295

Only less important, in some regards, was the influence of Pierre Gassend or Gassendi (1592–1655), who, living his life as a canon of the Church, reverted in his doctrine to the philosophy of Epicurus, alike in physics and ethics.296 It seems clear that he never had any religious leanings, but simply entered the Church on the advice of friends who pointed out to him how much better a provision it gave, in income and leisure, than the professorship he held in his youth at the university of Aix.297 Professing like Descartes a strict submission to the Church, he yet set forth a theory of things which had in all ages been recognized as fundamentally irreconcilable with the Christian creed; and his substantial exemption from penalties is to be set down to his position, his prudence, and his careful conformities. The correspondent of Galileo and Kepler, he was the friend of La Mothe le Vayer and NaudÉ; and Gui Patin was his physician and intimate.298 Strong as a physicist and astronomer where Descartes was weak, he divides with him and Galileo the credit of practically renewing natural philosophy; Newton being Gassendist rather than Cartesian.299 Indeed, Gassendi’s youthful attack on the Aristotelian physics (1624) makes him the predecessor of Descartes; and he expressly opposed his contemporary on points of physics and metaphysics on which he thought him chimerical, and so promoted unbelief where Descartes made for orthodoxy.300 Of the criticisms on his MÉditations to which Descartes published replies, those of Gassendi are, with the partial exception of those of Hobbes, distinctly the most searching and sustained. The later position of Hume, indeed, is explicitly taken up in the first objection of CratÉrus;301 but the persistent pressure of Gassendi on the theistic and spiritistic assumptions of Descartes reads like the reasoning of a modern atheist.302 Yet the works of Descartes were in time placed on the Index, condemned by the king’s council, and even vetoed in the universities, while those of Gassendi were not, though his early work on Aristotelianism had to be stopped after the first volume because of the anger it aroused.303 Himself one of the most abstemious of men,304 like his master Epicurus (of whom he wrote a Life, 1647), he attracted disciples of another temperamental cast as well as many of his own; and as usual his system is associated with the former, who are duly vilified by orthodoxy, although certainly no worse than the average orthodox.

Among his other practical services to rationalism was a curious experiment, made in a village of the Lower Alps, by way of investigating the doctrine of witchcraft. A drug prepared by one sorcerer was administered to others of the craft in presence of witnesses. It threw them into a deep sleep, on awakening from which they declared that they had been at a witches’ Sabbath. As they had never left their beds, the experiment went far to discredit the superstition.305 One significant result of the experiment was seen in the course later taken by Colbert in overriding a decision of the Parlement of Rouen as to witchcraft (1670). That Parlement proposed to burn fourteen sorcerers. Colbert, who had doubtless read Montaigne as well as Gassendi, gave Montaigne’s prescription that the culprits should be dosed with hellebore—a medicine for brain disturbance.306 In 1672, finally, the king issued a declaration forbidding the tribunals to admit charges of mere sorcery;307 and any future condemnations were on the score of blasphemy and poisoning. Yet further, in the section of his posthumous Syntagma Philosophicum (1658) entitled De Effectibus Siderum,308 Gassendi dealt the first great blow on the rationalist side to the venerable creed of astrology, assailed often, but to little purpose, from the side of faith; bringing to his task, indeed, more asperity than he is commonly credited with, but also a stringent scientific and logical method, lacking in the polemic of the churchmen, who had attacked astrology mainly because it ignored revelation. It is sobering to remember, however, that he was one of those who could not assimilate Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, which Descartes at once adopted and propounded.

Such anomalies meet us many times in the history of scientific as of other lines of thought; and the residual lesson is the recognition that progress is infinitely multiplex in its causation. Nothing is more vital in this regard than scientific truth, which is as a light-house in seas of speculation; and those who, like Galileo and Descartes, add to the world’s exact knowledge, perform a specific service not matched by that of the Bacons, who urge right method without applying it. Yet in that kind also an incalculable influence has been wielded. Many minds can accept scientific truths without being thereby led to scientific ways of thought; and thus the reasoners and speculators, the Brunos and the Vaninis, play their fruitful part, as do the mentors who turn men’s eyes on their own vices of intellectual habit. And in respect of creeds and philosophies, finally, it is not so much sheer soundness of result as educativeness of method, effectual appeal to the thinking faculty and to the spirit of reason, that determines a thinker’s influence. This kind of impact we shall find historically to be the service done by Descartes to European thought for a hundred years.

From Descartes, then, as regards philosophy, more than from any professed thinker of his day, but also from the other thinkers we have noted, from the reactions of scientific discovery, from the terrible experience of the potency of religion as a breeder of strife and its impotence as a curber of evil, and from the practical freethinking of the more open-minded of that age in general, derives the great rationalistic movement, which, taking clear literary form first in the seventeenth century, has with some fluctuations broadened and deepened down to our own day.

1 Stow’s Annals, ed. 1615, pp. 570, 575.?

2 Burnet, Hist. of the Reformation, ed. Nares, ii, 179; iii, 289; Strype, Memorials of Cranmer, ed. 1848–54, ii, 100.?

3 The Marian persecutions undoubtedly did much to stimulate Protestantism. It is not generally realized that many of the burnings of heretics under Mary were quasi-sacrifices on her behalf. On each occasion of her hopes of pregnancy being disappointed, some victims were sent to the stake. See Strype, ed. cited, iii, 196, and Peter Martyr, there cited; Froude, ed. 1870, v, 521 sq., 539 sq. The influence of Spanish ecclesiastics may be inferred. The expulsions of the Jews and the Moriscoes from Spain were by way of averting the wrath of God. Still, a Spanish priest at Court preached in favour of mercy. Lingard, ed. 1855, v, 231.?

4 The number slain was certainly not small. It amounted to at least 190, perhaps to 204. Soames, Elizabethan Religious History, 1839, p. 596–98. Under Mary there perished some 288. Durham Dunlop, The Church under the Tudors, 1869, p. 104 and refs.?

5 Soames, as cited, pp. 213–18, and refs.?

6 Froude, Hist. of England, ed. 1870, x, 545 (ed. 1875, xi, 199), citing MSS. Ireland.?

7 Gloss to February in the Shepherd’s Calendar, Globe ed. pp. 451–52.?

8 Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, Arber’s reprint, pp. 140, 153. That the reference was mainly to Oxford is to be inferred from the address “To my verie good friends the Gentlemen Schollers of Oxford,” prefixed to the ed. of 1581. Id. p. 207.?

9 Id. p. 158.?

10 Id. pp. 161, 166.?

11 Essay Of Atheism.?

12 Lecky, Rationalism, i, 103–104. Scot’s book (now made accessible by a reprint, 1886) had practically no influence in his own day; and King James, who wrote against it, caused it to be burned by the hangman in the next. Scot inserts the “infidelitie of atheists” in the list of intellectual evils on his title-page; but save for an allusion to “the abhomination of idolatrie” all the others indicted are aspects of the black art.?

13 “No woman ever lived who was so totally destitute of the sentiment of religion” (Green, Short History, ch. vii, § 3, p. 369).?

14 Cp. Soames, Elizabethan Religious History, 1839, p. 225. Yet when Morris, the attorney of the Duchy of Lancaster, introduced in Parliament a Bill to restrain the power of the ecclesiastical courts, she had him dismissed and imprisoned for life, being determined that the control should remain, through those courts, in her own hands. Heylyn, Hist. of the Reformation, ed. 1849, pref. vol. i, pp. xiv–xv.?

15 See above, vol. i, pp. 435, 446, 459.?

16 Collier’s Reprint, p. 190.?

17 Camden, Annals of Elizabeth, sub. ann. 1580; 3rd ed. 1635, p. 218. Cp. Soames, p. 214.?

18 Hooker, Pref. to Ecclesiastical Polity, ch. iii, § 9, ed. 1850. Camden (p. 219) states that the Dutch teacher Henry Nichalai, whose works were translated for the sect, “gave out that he did partake of God, and God of his humanity.”?

19 See above, i, 458, as to a much more pronounced heresy in 1549, which also seems to have escaped punishment. Camden tells that the books of the “Family of Love” were burnt in 1580, but mentions no other penalties. Stow records that on October 9, 1580, “proclamation was published at London for the apprehension and severe punishing of all persons suspected to be of the family of love.” Ed. 1615, p. 687. Five of them had been frightened into a public recantation in 1575. Id. p. 679.?

20 May 13, 1579. The burning was on the 20th.?

21 Stow’s Annals, ed. 1580, pp. 1, 194–95. Ed. 1615, p. 695.?

22 Stow, ed. 1615, p. 697; David’s Evidence, by William Burton, Preacher of Reading, 1592 (?), p. 125.?

23 Stow, ed. 1615, p. 696.?

24 Burton, as cited. See below, pp. 7, 12, as to Kett’s writings.?

25 Art. Matthew Hamond, in Dict. of Nat. Biog.?

26 Art. Francis Kett, in Dict. of Nat. Biog.?

27 Prof. Storojenko, Life of Greene, Eng. tr. in Grosart’s “Huth Library” ed. of Greene’s Works, i, 42–50. It is quite clear that Malone and the critics who have followed him were wrong in supposing the unnamed instructor to be Francis Kett, who was a devout Unitarian. Prof. Storojenko speaks of Kett as having been made an Arian at Norwich, after his return there in 1585, by the influence of Lewes and Haworth. Query Hamond??

28 In Pierce’s Supererogation, Collier’s ed. p. 85.?

29 Rep. of Nashe’s Works in Grosart’s “Huth Library” ed. vol. iv, pp. 172, 173, 178, 182, 183. etc. Ed. McKerrow. 1904, ii, 114–129.?

30 MS. Harl. 6853, fol. 320. It is given in full in the appendix to the first issue of the selected plays of Marlowe in the Mermaid Series, edited by Mr. Havelock Ellis: and, with omissions, in the editions of Cunningham, Dyce, and Bullen.?

31 Act II, sc. i.?

32 Grosart’s ed. in “Temple Dramatists” series, 11. 246–371. There is plenty of “irreligion” in the passage, but not atheism, though there is a denial of a future state (365–70). The lines in question strongly suggest Marlowe’s influence or authorship, which indeed is claimed by Mr. C. Crawford for the whole play. But all the external evidence ascribes the play to Greene.?

33 Tamburlaine, Part II, Act II, sc. ii, iii; V, sc. i.?

34 Writing as Andrew Philopater. See Dict. of Nat. Biog., art. Robert Parsons, and Storojenko, as cited, i, 36, and note.?

35 Translated into Latin by Henri Estienne in 1562.?

36 Remains of Sir Walter Raleigh, ed. 1657, p. 123.?

37 Bk. i, ch. i, sec. 11.?

38 Bk. ii, ch. i, sec. 7.?

39 Essay on the Prometheus.?

40 Art. Raleigh, in Dict. of Nat. Biog., xlvii, 192.?

41 Id. pp. 200–201.?

42 Report in 1736 ed. of History of the World, p. ccxlix. “Harpool” seems an error for Harriott. Cp. Edwards, Life of Sir Walter Raleigh, 1868, i, 432, 436. It is after naming “Harpool” that the judge says: “Let not any devil persuade you to think there is no eternity in heaven.”?

43 Ed. cited, p. xxviii.?

44 Id. p. xxiv.?

45 Id. p. xxii.?

46 Id. p. xvi.?

47 Cp. Gardiner, History of England, 1603–1642, 10-vol. ed. i, 132–35; iii, 150, 152.?

48 Ed. cited, p. xxii.?

49 Title of verses appended to trans. of Achilles Shield, 1598. Chapman spells the name Harriots.?

50 Pref. to complete trans. of Iliad.?

51 Bk. v, ch. ii, §§ 1–4. Works, ed. 1850, i, 432–36.?

52 Exposition upon Nehemiah (1585) in Parker Soc. ed. of Works, 1812, p. 401.?

53 Work cited, pp. 8–11, 22.?

54 Works, i, 432; ii, 762–63.?

55 Eccles. Pol. bk. i, ch. vii; bk. ii, ch. i, vii; bk. iii, ch. viii, § 16; bk. v, ch. viii; bk. vii, ch. xi; bk. viii, § 6 (Works, i, 165, 231, 300, 446; ii, 388, 537). See the citations in Buckle, 3-vol. ed. iii, 341–42; 1-vol. ed. pp. 193–94.?

56 Supplication of Travers, in Hooker’s Works, ed. 1850, ii, 662.?

57 Answer to Travers, id. p. 693.?

58 Some typical attempts of the kind are discussed in the author’s two lectures on The Religion of Shakespeare, 1887 (South Place Institute).?

59 Shakespeare Commentaries, Eng. tr. 1863, ii, 618–19.?

60 Id. ii, 586.?

61 In the last edition I had written to that effect; but I have modified the opinion.?

62 The allusion to “popish ceremonies” in Titus Andronicus is probably from his hand. See the author’s work, Did Shakespeare Write “Titus Andronicus”?, where it is argued that the play in question is substantially Peele’s and Greene’s.?

63 Shakespeare Soc. rep. 1853, pp. 14, 16–17, 18, 24, 28, etc.?

64 This has been shown to be his by Fleay and Mr. Crawford.?

65 See his Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance.?

66 Compare the Jane Shore portions of his Edward IV with the close of A Woman Killed with Kindness. Note also the conclusion of The English Traveller.?

67 See the poem England’s Elizabeth, 1631.?

68 Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, i, fol. 96.?

69 E.g., the lines,

The best of men
That e’er wore earth about him, was a sufferer,
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit,
The first true gentleman that ever breathed,

at the close of Part I of The Honest Whore; and the phrase, “Heaven’s great arithmetician,” at the close of Old Fortunatus.?

70 Green, Short Hist. ch. vii, § 7 end. Cp. Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, Lect. iii, § 115.?

71 The old work of W. J. Birch, M.A., An Inquiry into the Philosophy and Religion of Shakspere (1848), is an unjudicial ex parte statement of the case for Shakespeare’s unbelief; but it is worth study.?

72 The town paid for his bread and wine, no doubt by way of compliment.?

73 Cp. the author’s Montaigne and Shakespeare, 2nd ed. sec. viii.?

74 A Woorke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian Religion, 1587. Reprinted in 1592, 1604, and 1617.?

75 As to the expert analysis of this play, which shows it to be in large part Fletcher’s, see Furnivall, as cited, pp. xciii–xcvi.?

76 Cp. Seccombe and Allen, The Age of Shakspere, 1903, ii, 189.?

77 Alberti, Briefe betreffende den Zustand der Religion in Gross-Britannien, Hanover, 1752, ii, 429. Alberti reads “God” at the end of the passage; I follow Grosart’s edition.?

78 Hallam, Lit. Europe, ii, 371, 376; Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, 2nd ed. p. 286 sq.?

79 Pattison, as cited, p. 290; G. W. Johnson, Memoirs of John Selden, 1835, pp. 56–70.?

80 Memoirs cited, pp. 60–61. On the whole question see the Review appended by Selden to his History after a few copies had been distributed.?

81 Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Grosart, 1876, i, 82, 83.?

82 Essaies Politicke and Morall, by D. T. Gent, 1608, fol. 9.?

83 Act iv, sc. 1.?

84 Act i, sc. 1. Jonson himself could have been so indicted on the strength of certain verses.?

85 He had been offered professorships of divinity at Saumur and Marburg.?

86 Gardiner, History of England, 1603–1642, 4th ed. ii, 128. Cp. Bayle, art. Vorstius, Note N. By his theological opponents and by James, Vorstius was of course called an atheist. He was in reality not a Socinian, but a “strict Arian, who believed that the Son of God was at first created by the Father, and then delegated to create the universe—a sort of inferior deity, who was nevertheless entitled to religious homage” (James Nichols, note to App. P. on Brandt’s Life of Arminius in Works of Arminius, 1825, i, 218). Nichols gives a full survey of the subject, pp. 202–237. Fuller (Ch. Hist. B. x, cent. 17, sec. iv, §§ 1–5) tells the story, and pronounces the opinions of Vorstius “fitter to be remanded to hell than committed to writing.”?

87 Bayle (art. cited, Note F) says both Universities, as does Fuller. At the Synod of Dort, however, the British representatives read only, it seems, a decree (dated Sept. 21, 1611) of the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, ordering the burning of the book there. (Nichols, Account of the Synod of Dort, in Works of Arminius, i, 497).?

88 Gardiner, pp. 129–30. Fuller (as last cited, §§ 6–14) gives a list of Legate’s “damnable tenets.” See it in Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner’s Penalties upon Opinion, pp. 12–14.?

89 Gardiner, as cited. Fuller is cheerfully acquiescent, though he notes the private demurs, which he denounces. “God,” he says, “may seem well pleased with this seasonable severity.”?

90 In 1580 Stow records how one Randall was put on trial for “conjuring to know where treasure was hid in the earth and goods feloniously taken were become”; and four others were tried “for being present.” Four were found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. Randall was executed, and the others reprieved. (Ed. 1615, p. 688.)?

91 Fuller actually alleges that “there was none ever after that openly avowed these heretical doctrines”—an unintelligible figment.?

92 All reprinted in 1816 for the Hanserd Knollys Society, with histor. introd. by E. B. Underhill, in the vol. Tracts on Liberty of Conscience and Persecution, 1614–1661. They do not speak of Legate or Wightman.?

93 Atheomastix, 1622, pref. Sig. B. 3, verso. The work was posthumous and incomplete.?

94 Bk. i, ch. i, p. 5.?

95 In the Advancement of Learning, bk. i (Routledge ed. p. 54), he himself notes how, long before his time, the new learning had in part discredited the schoolmen.?

96 Filum Labyrinthi—an English version of the Cogitata et Visa—§ 7.?

97 Cp. Huarte, cited above, p. 471.?

98 Nov. Org. bk. i. Aph. 62 (Works, Routledge ed. p. 271).?

99 Id. Aph. 65.?

100 Id. ib. Cp. the Advancement of Learning, bk. ii, and the De Augmentis, bk. ix, near end. (Ed. cited, pp. 173, 634.)?

101 Nov. Org. Aph. 89. Cp. Aph. 46, 49, 96; the Valerius Terminus, ch. xxv; the English Filum Labyrinthi, § 7; and the De Principiis atque Originibus (ed. cited, p. 650).?

102 Valerius Terminus, cap. i. (Ed. cited, p. 188.)?

103 Id. p. 187; Filum Labyrinthi, p. 209.?

104 Bk. ix, ch. i. (Ed. cited, p. 631.) Compare Valerius Terminus, ch. i (p. 186), and De Aug. bk. iii, ch. ii (p. 456), as to the impossibility of knowing the will and character of God from Nature, though (De Aug. last cit.) it reveals his power and glory.?

105 Advancement, bk. i (ed. cited, p. 45). Cp. Valerius Terminus, ch. i (p. 187).?

106 Advancement, bk. ii; De Augmentis, bk. iii, chs. iv and v; Valerius Terminus, ch. xxv; Novum Organum, bk. i, Aph. 48; bk. ii, Aph. 2. (Ed. cited, pp. 96, 205, 266, 302, 471, 473.)?

107 De Principiis atque Originibus. (Ed. cited, pp. 649–50.) Elsewhere (De Aug. bk. iii, ch. iv, p. 471) he expressly puts it that the system of Democritus, which “removed God and mind from the structure of things,” was more favourable to true science than the teleology and theology of Plato and Aristotle.?

108 Id. pp. 651, 657.?

109 Id. p. 648.?

110 De Augmentis, bk. iii, ch. ii; bk. iv, ch. ii. (Ed. cited, pp. 456, 482.)?

111 Id. bk. ii, ch. i. (Ed. cited, p. 428.)?

112 De Augmentis, ed. cited, p. 73.?

113 No. xviii, Diomedes. Ed. cited, p. 841.?

114 De Principiis atque Originibus, p. 664.?

115 Nov. Org. i. 89; Filum Labyrinthi, § 7; Essay 16.?

116 Francis Osborn, pref. to his “Miscellany,” in Works, 7th ed. 1673.?

117 Cp. Valerius Terminus, ch. i.?

118 This is noted by Glassford in his tr. of the Novum Organum (1844, p. 26); and by Ellis in his and Spedding’s edition of the Works. (Routledge ed. pp. 32, 473, note.)?

119 De Augmentis, bk. iii, ch. iv, end.?

120 Essay 57, Of Anger.?

121 Valerius Terminus, ch. xxv.?

122 De Principiis, ed. cited, pp. 648–49. Cp. pp. 612–43.?

123 Id. p. 648.?

124 Valerius Terminus, ch. ii; De Augmentis, bk. v, ch. iv. Ed. cited, pp. 199, 517.?

125 Cp. Brewster, Life of Newton, 1855, ii, 400–404; Draper, Intel. Devel. of Europe, ed. 1875, ii, 258–60; Dean Church, Bacon, pp. 180–201; Fowler, Bacon, ch. vi; Lodge, Pioneers of Science, pp. 145–51; Lange, Gesch. d. Materialismus, i, 197 sq. (Eng. tr. i, 236–37), and cit. from Liebig—as to whom, however, see Fowler, pp. 133, 157.?

126 Novum Organum, ii, 46 and 48, § 17; De Aug. iii, 4; Thema Coeli. Ed. cited, pp. 364, 375, 461, 705, 709. Whewell (Hist. of Induct. Sciences, 3rd ed. i, 296, 298) ignores the second and third of these passages in denying Hume’s assertion that Bacon rejected the Copernican theory with “disdain.” It is true, however, that Bacon had vacillated. The facts are fairly faced by Prof. Fowler in his Bacon, 1881, pp. 151–52, and his ed. of Novum Organum, Introd. pp. 30–36. See also the summing-up of Ellis in notes to passages above cited, and at p. 675.?

127 Aubrey, Lives of Eminent Persons, ed. 1813, vol. ii, pt. ii, p. 383.?

128 See notes in ed. cited, pp. 50, 53, 61, 63, 68, 75, 76, 84, 110.?

129 Fowler, ed. of Nov. Org. § 14, pp. 101–104.?

130 Id. § 14, p. 108; Ellis in ed. cited, p. 643.?

131 Rawley’s Life, in ed. cited, p. 9; Osborn, as above cited; Fowler, ed. of Nov. Org. Introd. § 14; T. Martin, Character of Bacon, 1835, pp. 216, 227, 222–23.?

132 Cp. Fowler, Bacon, pp. 139–41; Mill, Logic, bk. vi, ch. v, § 5; Jevons, Princ. of Science, 1-vol. ed. p. 576; Tyndall, Scientific Use of the Imagination, 3rd ed. pp. 4, 8–9, 42–43; T. Martin, as cited, pp. 210–38; Bagehot, Postulates of Eng. Polit. Econ. ed. 1885, pp. 18–19; Ellis and Spedding, in ed. cited, pp. x, xii, 22, 389. The notion of a dialectic method which should mechanically enable any man to make discoveries is an irredeemable fallacy, and must be abandoned. Bacon’s own remarkable anticipation of modern scientific thought in the formula that heat is a mode of motion (Nov. Org. ii, 20) is not mechanically yielded by his own process, noteworthy and suggestive though that is.?

133 Pref. Epistle.?

134 Works, ed. Dublin. 1766, p. 159; ed. 1910, p. 344.?

135 Kohlrausch, Hist. of Germany, Eng. tr. p. 385.?

136 Moritz Ritter, Geschichte der deutschen Union, 1867–73, ii, 55.?

137 Menzel, Geschichte der Deutschen, 3te Aufl. Cap. 416.?

138 Cp. Gardiner, Thirty Years’ War, pp. 12–13; Kohlrausch, p. 438; Pusey, Histor. Enq. into Ger. Rationalism, pp. 9–25; Henderson, Short Hist. of Germany, i, ch. xvi.?

139 Kohlrausch, p. 439. A specially strong reaction set in about 1573. Ritter, Geschichte der deutschen Union, i, 19. Cp. Menzel, Cap. 433.?

140 Cp. Gardiner, Thirty Years’ War, pp. 16, 18, 21; Kohlrausch, p. 370.?

141 As to this see Moritz Ritter, as cited, i, 9, 27; ii, 122 sq.; Dunham, Hist. of the Germanic Empire, iii, 186; Henderson, i, 411 sq.?

142 Freytag, Bilder aus d. deutschen Vergangenheit, Bd. ii, 1883, p. 381; Bd. iii, ad init.?

143 Cp. Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, i, 53–83.?

144 Freytag, Bilder, Bd. ii, Abth. ii, p. 378.?

145 The Pope and the Council, Eng. tr. p. 260; French tr. p. 285.?

146 De Praestigiis Daemonum, 1563. See it described by Lecky, Rationalism, i, 85–87; Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii, 76.?

147 By Dutch historians Wier is claimed as a Dutchman. He was born at Grave, in North Brabant, but studied medicine at Paris and Orleans, and after practising physic at Arnheim in the Netherlands was called to DÜsseldorf as physician to the Duke of JÜlich, to whom he dedicated his treatise. His ideas are probably traceable to his studies in France.?

148 His collected works (1632) amount to nearly 7,000 folio pages. J. Ten Brink, Kleine Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Letteren, 1882, p. 91.?

149 Ten Brink, p. 86. Jonckbloet (Beknopte Geschiedenis der Nederl. Letterkunde, ed. 1880, p. 148) is less specific.?

150 Ten Brink, pp. 89–90.?

151 Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii, 83.?

152 Ten Brink, p. 87.?

153 Jonckbloet, Beknopte Geschiedenis, p. 149; Ten Brink, p. 91; Bayle, Dictionnaire, art. Koornhert; PÜnjer, Hist. of the Chr. Philos. of Religion, Eng. tr. p. 269; Dr. E. Gosse, art. on Dutch Literature in Encyc. Brit. 9th ed. xii, 93.?

154 Ten Brink, p. 91.?

155 Flint, Vico, p. 142.?

156 De Jure Belli et Pacis, proleg. §§ 11, 16.?

157 Bayle, art. Voelkel.?

158 Schlegel’s note on Mosheim, Reid’s ed. p. 862.?

159 Nelson, Life of Bishop Bull, 2nd ed. 1714, p. 392.?

160 NicÉron, MÉmoires pour servir, etc., xiv (1731), 340 sq. One of the replies is the Justa Detestatio sceleratissimi libelli Adriani Beverlandi De Peccato Originali, by Leonard Ryssen, 1680. A very free version of Beverland’s book appeared in French in 1714 under the title Etat de l’Homme dans le PechÉ Originel. It reached a sixth edition in 1741.?

161 Nelson, Life of Bishop Bull, as cited, p. 280.?

162 Krasinski, Ref. in Poland, 1840, ii, 363; Mosheim, 16 Cent. sec. iii, pt. ii, ch. iv, § 22. Budny translated the Bible, with rationalistic notes.?

163 Krasinski, p. 361.?

164 Mosheim, last cit. § 23, note 4.?

165 Krasinski, p. 367; Wallace, Antitrin. Biog. 1850, ii, 320.?

166 Bayle, art. Fauste Socin. Krasinski, p. 374.?

167 Krasinski, pp. 361–62. Fausto Sozzini also could apparently forgive everybody save those who believed less than he did.?

168 Cp. the inquiry as to Locke’s Socinianism in J. Milner’s Account of Mr. Lock’s Religion out of his own Writings, 1706, and Lessing’s Zur Geschichte und Literatur, i, as to Leibnitz’s criticism of Sonerus.?

169 Enfield’s History of Philosophy (an abstract of Brucker), ed. 1840, p. 537.?

170 In the dominions of Philip II there are said to have been 58 archbishops, 684 bishops, 11,400 abbeys, 23,000 religious fraternities, 46,000 monasteries, 13,500 nunneries, 312,000 secular priests, 400,000 monks, 200,000 friars and other ecclesiastics. H. E. Watts, Miguel de Cervantes, 1895, pp. 67–68. Spain alone had 9,088 monasteries.?

171 Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 484; 1-vol. ed. p. 564, and refs.?

172 Cp. Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 497–99; 1-vol. ed. pp. 572–73; La RigaudiÈre, Hist. des PersÉc. Relig. en Espagne, 1860, pp. 220–26.?

173 Cp. Lewes, Spanish Drama, passim.?

174 “He inspires me only with horror for the faith which he professes. No one ever so far disfigured Christianity; no one ever assigned to it passions so ferocious, or morals so corrupt” (Sismondi, Lit. of South of Europe, Bohn tr. ii, 379).?

175 Ticknor, Hist. of Spanish Lit. 6th ed. ii, 501; Don Quixote, pt. ii, ch. liv; Ormsby, tr. of Don Quixote, 1885, introd. i, 58.?

176 Lafuente, Historia de EspaÑa, 1856, xvii, 340. It is not quite certain that Lafuente expressed his sincere opinion.?

177 Llorente, ii. 433.?

178 Id. p. 420.?

179 Bouterwek, Hist. of Spanish and Portuguese Literature, Eng. tr. 1823, i, 331.?

180 Id. p. 151.?

181 Part II, ch. xxxvi.?

182 Bouterwek, whose sociology, though meritorious, is ill-clarified, argues that the Inquisition was in a manner congenital to Spain because before its establishment the suspicion of heresy was already “more degrading in Spain than the most odious crimes in other countries.” But the same might have been said of the other countries also. As to earlier Spanish heresy see above, vol. i, p. 337 sq.?

183 Despite the many fallacies retained by Copernicus from the current astronomy, he must be pronounced an exceptionally scientific spirit. Trained as a mathematician, astronomer, and physician, he showed a keen and competent interest in the practical problem of currency; and one of the two treatises which alone he published of his own accord was a sound scheme for the rectification of that of his own government. Though a canon of Frauenburg, he never took orders; but did manifold and unselfish secular service.?

184 It was shielded by thirteen popes—from Paul III to Paul V.?

185 Galileo, Dialogi dei due massimi sistemi del mondo, ii (Opere, ed. 1811, xi, 303–304).?

186 A good study of Bruno is supplied by Owen in his Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance. He has, however, omitted to embody the later discoveries of Dufour and Berti, and has some wrong dates. The Life of Giordano Bruno, by I. Frith (Mrs. Oppenheim), 1887, gives all the data, but is inadequate on the philosophic side. A competent estimate is given in the late Prof. Adamson’s lectures on The Development of Modern Philosophy, etc., 1903, ii, 23 sq.; also in his art. in Encyc. Brit. For a hostile view see Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii, 105–111. The biography of BartholmÈss, Jordano Bruno, 1846, is extremely full and sympathetic, but was unavoidably loose as to dates. Much new matter has since been collected, for which see the Vita di Giordano Bruno of Domenico Berti, rev. and enlarged ed. 1889; Prof. J. L. McIntyre, Giordano Bruno, 1903; Dufour, Giordano Bruno À GÉnÈve: Documents InÉdits, 1884; David Levi, Giordano Bruno, o la religione del pensiero: l’uomo, l’apostolo e il martire, 1887; Dr. H. Brunnhofer’s Giordano Bruno’s Weltanschauung und VerhÄngniss, 1882; and the doctoral treatise of C. Sigwart, Die Lebensgeschichte Giordano Brunos, TÜbingen, 1880. For other authorities see Owen’s and I. Frith’s lists, and the final Literaturnachweis in Gustav Louis’s Giordano Bruno, seine Weltanschauung und Lebensverfassung, Berlin, 1900. The study of Bruno has been carried further in Germany than in England; but Mr. Whittaker (Essays and Notices, 1895) and Prof. McIntyre make up much leeway.?

187 Cp. BartholmÈss, i, 49–53; Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 191–94 (Eng. tr. i, 232); Gustav Louis, as cited, pp. 11, 88.?

188 Berti, Vita di Giordano Bruno, 1889, pp. 40–41, 420. Bruno gives the facts in his own narrative before the Inquisitors at Venice.?

189 Berti, pp. 42–43, 47; Owen, p. 265.?

190 Not to Genoa, as Berti stated in his first ed. See ed. 1889, pp. 54, 392.?

191 Berti, p. 65. Owen has the uncorrected date, 1576.?

192 Dufour, Giordano Bruno À GÉnÈve: Documents InÉdits, 1884; Berti, pp. 95–97; Gustav Louis, Giordano Bruno, pp. 73–75. Owen (p. 269) has overlooked these facts, set forth by Dufour in 1884. The documents are given in full in Frith, Life, 1887, p. 60 sq.?

193 The dates are in doubt. Cp. Berti, p. 115, and Frith, p. 65.?

194 See his own narrative before the Inquisitors in 1592. Berti, p. 394.?

195 McIntyre, Giordano Bruno, 1907, pp. 21–22.?

196 Frith, Life, p. 121, and refs.; Owen, p. 275; BartholmÈss, Jordano Bruno, i, 136–38.?

197 Cp. Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii, 111, note. As to Bruno’s supposed influence on Bacon and Shakespeare, cp. BartholmÈss, i, 134–35; Frith, Life, pp. 104–48; and the author’s Montaigne and Shakspere, pp. 132–38. Here there is no case; but there is much to be said for Mr. Whittaker’s view (Essays and Notices, p. 94) that Spenser’s late Cantos on Mutability were suggested by Bruno’s Spaccio. Prof. McIntyre supports.?

198 His praise of Luther, and his compliments to the Lutherans, are in notable contrast to his verdict on Calvinism. What happened was that at Wittemberg he was on his best behaviour, and was well treated accordingly.?

199 As to the traitor’s motives cp. McIntyre, p. 66 sq.; Berti, p. 262 sq.?

200 Noroff, as cited in Frith, p. 345.?

201 De l’Infinito, ed. Wagner, ii, 27; Cena de la Ceneri, ed. Wagner, i, 173; Acrotismus, ed. GfrÖrer, p. 12.?

202 Cp. Berti, pp. 187–88; Whittaker, Essays and Notices, 1895, p. 89; and Louis’s section, Stellung zu Christenthum und Kirche.?

203 Berti, pp. 297–98. It takes much searching in the two poems to find any of the ideas in question, and Berti has attempted no collation; but, allowing for distortions, the Inquisition has sufficient ground for outcry.?

204 Sigillus Sigillorum: De duodecima contractionis speciae. Cp. F. J. Clemens, Giordano Bruno und Nicolaus von Cusa, 1847, pp. 176, 183; and H. Brunnhofer, Giordano Bruno’s Weltanschauung und VerhÄngniss, 1882, pp. 227, 237.?

205 In the treatise De Lampade combinatoria Lulliana (1587). According to Berti (p. 220) he is the first to employ this phrase, which becomes the watchword of Spinoza (libertas philosophandi) a century later.?

206 Berti, cap. iv; Owen, p. 249; Ueberweg, ii, 27; PÜnjer, p. 93 sq.; Whittaker, Essays and Notices, p. 66. As to Bruno’s debt to Nicolaus of Cusa cp. Gustav Louis, as cited, p. 11; PÜnjer, as cited; Carriere, Die philosophische Weltanschauung der Reformationszeit, p. 25; and Whittaker, p. 68. The argument of Carriere’s second edition is analysed and rebutted by Mr. Whittaker, p. 253 sq.?

207 De Immenso, vii, c. 18, cited by Whittaker, Essays and Notices, p. 70.?

208 As to Bruno’s own claim in the Eroici Furori, cp. Whittaker, Essays, p. 90.?

209 Documents in Berti, pp. 407–18; McIntyre, p. 75 sq.?

210 See the document in Berti, p. 398 sq.; Frith, pp. 270–81.?

211 Berti, p. 400 sq.?

212 See Berti, p. 396; Owen, pp. 285–86; Frith, pp. 282–83.?

213 The controversy as to whether Galileo was tortured leaves it clear that torture was common. See Dr. Parchappe, GalilÉe, sa vie, etc., 1866, Ptie. ii, ch. 7.?

214 Spaccio della bestia trionfante, ed. Wagner, ii, 120.?

215 Prof. Carriere has contended that a transition from pantheism to theism marks the growth of his thought; but, as is shown by Mr. Whittaker, he is markedly pantheistic in his latest work of all, though his pantheism is not merely naturalistic. Essays and Notices, pp. 72, 253–58.?

216 Italian versions differ verbally. Cp. Levi, p. 379; Berti, p. 386. That inscribed on the Bruno statue at Rome is a close rendering of the Latin: Majori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam, preserved by Scioppius.?

217 Avviso, in Berti, p. 329; in Levi, p. 386.?

218 Levi, pp. 384–92. Levi relates (p. 390) that Bruno at the stake was heard to utter the words: “O Eterno, io fo uno sforzo supremo per attrarre in me quanto vi tra di piÙ divino nell’universo.” He cites no authority. An Avviso reports that Bruno said his soul would rise with the smoke to Paradise (p. 386; Berti, p. 330), but does not state that this was said at the stake. And Levi accepts the other report that Bruno was gagged.?

219 Notably his comedy Il Candelaio.?

220 Owen, Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance, p. 357. A full narrative, from the documents, is given in R. C. Christie’s essay, “Vanini in England,” in the English Historical Review of April, 1895, reprinted in his Selected Essays and Papers, 1902.?

221 See it analysed by Owen, pp. 361–68, and by Carriere, Weltanschauung, pp. 496–504.?

222 Amphitheatrum, 1615, Exercit. xix, pp. 117–18.?

223 Amphitheatrum, Exercit. xxvii, p. 161.?

224 Id. pp. 72, 73, 78, 113, etc.?

225 P. 35. Machiavelli is elsewhere attacked. Pp. 36, 50.?

226 Julii CÆsaris Vanini Neapolitani, Theologi, Philosophi, et juris utriusque Doctoris, de Admirandis NaturÆ ReginÆque DeÆque Mortalium Arcanis, libri quatuor. LutetiÆ, 1616.?

227 Mr. Owen makes a serious misstatement on this point, by which I was formerly misled. He writes (p. 369) that from the publisher’s preface we “learn that the Dialogues were not written by Vanini, but by his disciples. They are a collection of discursive conversations embodying their master’s opinions.” This is not what the preface says. It tells, after a high-pitched eulogy of Vanini, that “nos publicÆ utilitatis solliciti, alia eius monumenta, quÆ avarius retinebat, per idoneos ex scriptores nancisci curavimus.” In ascribing the matter of the dialogues to Vanini’s young days, Mr. Owen forgets the references to the Amphitheatrum.?

228 “Alex. Sed in qua nam Religione verÈ et piÈ Deum coli vetusti Philosophi existimarunt? Vanini. In unica NaturÆ lege, quam ipsa Natura, quÆ Deus est (est enim principium motus)....” De Arcanis, as cited, p. 366. Lib. iv, Dial. 50. See Rousselot’s French tr. 1842, p. 227. This passage is cited by Hallam (Lit. Hist. ii, 461) as avowing “disbelief of all religion except such as Nature ... has planted in the minds of men”—a heedless perversion.?

229 De Arcanis, pp. 354–60, 420–22 (Dial. 50, 56); Rousselot, pp. 219–23, 271–73.?

230 The special reference (lib. iv, dial. 56, p. 428) is to a story of an infant prophesying when only twenty-four hours old. (Amphitheatrum, Ex. vi, p. 38; cp. Owen, p. 368, note.) On this and on other points Cousin (cited by Owen, pp. 368, 371, 377) and Hallam (Lit. Hist. ii, 461) make highly prejudiced statements. Quoting the final pages on which the dialoguist passes from serious debate to a profession of levity, and ends by calling for the play-table, the English historian dismisses him as “the wretched man.”?

231 Cp. Carriere’s analysis of the Dialogues, pp. 505–59; and the Apologia pro Jul. CÆsare Vanino (by Arpe), 1712.?

232 See Owen’s vindication, pp. 371–74. Renan’s criticism (AverroÈs, pp. 420–23) is not quite judicial. See many others cited by Carriere, p. 516.?

233 It is difficult to understand how the censor could let pass the description of Nature in the title; but this may have been added after the authorization. The book is dedicated by Vanini to Marshal Bassompierre, and the epistle dedicatory makes mention of the Serenissima Regina aeterni nominis Maria MedicÆa, which would disarm suspicion. In any case the permit was revoked, and the book condemned to be burned.?

234 Owen, p. 395.?

235 Mercure FranÇais, 1619, tom. v, p. 64.?

236 Gramond (BarthÉlemi de Grammont), Historia GalliÆ ab excessu Henrici IV, 1643, p. 209. Carriere translates the passage in full, pp. 500–12, 515; as does David Durand in his hostile Vie et Sentimens de Lucilio Vanini, 1717. As to Gramond see the Lettres de Gui Patin, who (Lett. 428, ed. ReveillÉ-Parise) calls him Âme foible et bigote, and guilty of falsehood and flattery.?

237 Gramond, p. 210. Of Vanini, as of Bruno, it is recorded that at the stake he repelled the proffered crucifix. Owen and other writers, who justly remark that he well might, overlook the once received belief that it was the official practice, with obstinate heretics, to proffer a red-hot crucifix, so that the victim should be sure to spurn it with open anger.?

238 Stephen Phillips, Marpessa.?

239 Cp. Owen, pp. 389, 391, and Carriere, pp. 512–13, as to the worst calumnies. It is significant that Vanini was tried solely for blasphemy and atheism. What is proved against him is that he and an associate practised a rather gross fraud on the English ecclesiastical authorities, having apparently no higher motive than gain and a free life. Mr. Christie notes, however, that Vanini in his writings always speaks very kindly of England and the English, and so did not add ingratitude to his act of imposture.?

240 De Arcanis, p. 205. Lib. iii, dial. 30.?

241 Amphitheatrum, p. 17.?

242 De Arcanis, lib. iv, dial. 52, p. 379; dial. 51, p. 373. Cp. Amphitheatrum, p. 36; and De Arcanis, p. 20.?

243 De Arcanis, dial. 50 and 56. In the Amphitheatrum he adduces an equally skilful German atheist (p. 73).?

244 Dial. li, p. 371.?

245 Dial. liv, p. 407.?

246 Cp. Rousselot, notice, p. xi.?

247 Durand compiles a list of ten or eleven works of Vanini from the allusions in the Amphitheatrum and the De Arcanis.?

248 Reported by Gramond, as cited.?

249 Owen, pp. 393–94.?

250 Garasse, Doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits, 1623.?

251 De Arcanis, dial. vii, p. 36.?

252 Dial. iv, p. 21.?

253 Doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps, 1623, p. 848.?

254 Karl von Gebler, Galileo Galilei and the Roman Curia, Eng. tr. 1879, pp. 36–37.?

255 This appears from the letters of Sagredo to Galileo. Gebler, p. 37. Cp. Gui Patin, Lett. 816, ed. ReveillÉ-Parise, 1846, iii, 758; Bayle, art. Cremonin, notes C and D; and Renan, AverroÈs, 3e Édit. pp. 408–13. Patin writes that his friend NaudÉ “avoit ÉtÉ intime ami de Cremonin, qui n’Étoit point meilleur ChrÉtien que Pomponace, que Machiavel, que Cardan et telles autres ... dont le pays abonde.”?

256 Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 183 (Eng. tr. i, 220); Gebler, p. 25. Libri actually made the refusal; but all that is proved as to Cremonini is that he opposed Galileo’s discoveries À priori. As to the attitude of such opponents see Galileo’s letter to Kepler. J. J. Fahie, Galileo: his Life and Work, 1903. pp. 101–102.?

257 Fahie, Galileo, p. 100.?

258 Id. p. 127.?

259 Gebler, pp. 54, 129, and passim; The Private Life of Galileo (by Mrs. Olney), Boston, 1870, pp. 67–72.?

260 Galileo’s letter to Kepler, cited by Gebler, p. 26.?

261 The Jesuits were expelled from Venice in 1616, in retaliation for a papal interdict.?

262 See it summarized by Gebler, pp. 46–60, and quoted in the Private Life, pp. 83–85.?

263 The measure of reverence with which the orthodox handled the matter may be inferred from the fact that the Dominican Caccini, who preached against Galileo in Florence, took as one of his texts the verse in Acts i: “Viri Galilaei, quid statis aspicientes in coelum,” making a pun on the Scripture.?

264 See this summarized by Gebler, pp. 64–70.?

265 See The Private Life of Galileo, pp. 86–87, 91, 99; Gebler, p. 44; Fahie, pp. 169–70; Berti, Il Processo Originale de Galileo Galilei, 1878, p. 53.?

266 Gebler (p. 101) solemnly comments on this letter as a lapse into “servility” on Galileo’s part.?

267 Gebler, pp. 112–13.?

268 Private Life, pp. 216–18; Gebler, pp. 157–62.?

269 Berti, pp. 61–64; Private Life, pp. 212–13; Gebler, p. 162.?

270 Gebler, p. 239; Private Life, p. 256.?

271 Gebler, pp. 249–63; Private Life, pp. 255–56; Marini, pp. 55–57. The “e pur si muove” story is first heard of in 1774. As to the torture, it is to be remembered that Galileo recanted under threat of it. See Berti, pp. 93–101; Marini, p. 59; Sir O. Lodge, Pioneers of Science, 1893, pp. 128–31. Berti argues that only the special humanity of the Commissary-General, Macolano, saved him from the torture. Cp. Gebler, p. 259, note.?

272 Gebler, p. 281.?

273 Private Life, pp. 265–60, 268; Gebler, p. 252.?

274 Berti, Il Processo di Galileo, pp. 111–12.?

275 Letter of Hobbes to Newcastle, in Report of the Hist. Mss. Comm. on the Duke of Portland’s Papers, 1892, ii. Hobbes explains that few copies were brought over, “and they that buy such books are not such men as to part with them again.” “I doubt not,” he adds, “but the translation of it will here be publicly embraced.”?

276 Gebler, pp. 312–15; Putnam, Censorship of the Church of Rome, i, 313–14.?

277 See Ueberweg, ii, 12, as to the conflicting types. In addition to Cremonini, several leading Aristotelians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were accused of atheism (Hallam, Lit. Hist. ii, 101–102), the old charge against the Peripatetic school. Hallam (p. 102) complains that Cesalpini of Pisa “substitutes the barren unity of pantheism for religion.” Cp. Ueberweg, ii, 14; Renan, AverroÈs, 3e Édit. p. 417. An AverroÏst on some points, he believed in separate immortality.?

278 Gebler, pp. 37, 45. Gebler appears to surmise that Cremonini may have escaped the attack upon himself by turning suspicion upon Galileo, but as to this there is no evidence.?

279 Ueberweg, ii, 17.?

280 Epist. 36.?

281 See above, p. 45.?

282 BartholmÈss, Jordano Bruno, i, 49.?

283 Lange, Gesch. des Mater. i, 189–90 (Eng. tr. i, 228). Born in Valencia and trained at Paris, Vives became a humanist teacher at Louvain, and was called to England (1523) to be tutor to the Princess Mary. During his stay he taught at Oxford. Being opposed to the divorce of Henry VIII, he was imprisoned for a time, afterwards living at Bruges.?

284 See the monograph, Ramus, sa vie, ses Écrits, et ses opinions, par Ch. Waddington, 1855. Owen has a good account of Ramus in his French Skeptics.?

285 ScholÆ math. l. iii, p. 78, cited by Waddington, p. 343.?

286 “In many respects Galileo deserves to be ranked with Descartes as inaugurating modern philosophy.” Prof. Adamson, Development of Mod. Philos. 1903, i, 5. “We may compare his [Hobbes’s] thought with Descartes’s, but the impulse came to him from the physical reasonings of Galileo.” Prof. Croom Robertson, Hobbes, 1886, p. 42.?

287 Buckle, 1-vol. ed. pp. 327–36; 3-vol. ed. ii, 77–85. Cp. Lange, i, 425 (Eng. tr. i, 248, note); Adamson, Philosophy of Kant, 1879, p. 194.?

288 Cp. Lange, i, 425 (Eng. tr. i, 248–49, note); Bouillier, Hist. de la philos. cartÉsienne, 1854, i, 40–47, 185–86; BartholmÈss, Jordano Bruno, i, 354–55; Memoir in Garnier ed. of Œuvres Choisies, p. v, also pp. 6, 17, 19, 21. Bossuet pronounced the precautions of Descartes excessive. But cp. Dr. Land’s notes in Spinoza: Four Essays, 1882, p. 55.?

289 Coll. of Philos. Writings, ed. 1712, pref. p. xi.?

290 Discours de la MÉthode, pties. i, ii, iii, iv (Œuvres Choisies, pp. 8, 10, 11, 22, 24); Meditation I (id. pp. 73–74).?

291 Full details in Kuno Fischer’s Descartes and his School, Eng. tr. 1890, bk. i, ch. vi; Bouillier, i, chs. xii, xiii.?

292 Buckle, 1-vol. ed. pp. 337–39; 3-vol. ed. ii, 94, 97.?

293 Buckle, pp. 327–30; ii, 81.?

294 Id. p. 330; ii, 82. The process is traced hereinafter.?

295 Kuno Fischer, Francis Bacon, Eng. tr. 1857, p. 74.?

296 For an exact summary and criticism of Gassendi’s positions see the masterly monograph of Prof. Brett of Lahore, The Philosophy of Gassendi, 1908—a real contribution to the history of philosophy.?

297 Cp. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. v, ch. i (McCulloch’s ed. 1839, pp. 364–65). It is told of him, with doubtful authority, that when dying he said: “I know not who brought me into the world, neither do I know what was to do there, nor why I go out of it.” Reflections on the Death of Freethinkers, by Deslandes (Eng. tr. of the RÉflexions sur les grands hommes qui sont morts en plaisantant), 1713, p. 105.?

298 For a good account of Gassendi and his group (founded on Lange, § iii, ch. i) see Soury, BrÉviaire de l’hist. de matÉrialisme, ptie. iii, ch. ii.?

299 Voltaire, ÉlÉments de philos. de Newton, ch. ii; Lange, i, 232 (Eng. tr. i, 267) and 269.?

300 Bayle, art. Pomponace, Notes F. and G. The complaint was made by Arnauld, who with the rest of the Jansenists was substantially a Cartesian.?

301 See it in Garnier’s ed. of Descartes’s Œuvres Choisies, p. 145.?

302 Id. pp. 158–64.?

303 Apparently just because the Jansenists adopted Descartes and opposed Gassendi. But Gassendi is extremely guarded in all his statements, save, indeed, in his objections to the MÉditations of Descartes.?

304 See Soury, pp. 397–98, as to a water-drinking “debauch” of Gassendi and his friends.?

305 Rambaud, as cited, p. 154.?

306 Id. p. 155.?

307 Voltaire, SiÈcle de Louis XIV, ed. Didot, p. 366. “On ne l’eÛt pas osÉ sous Henri IV et sous Louis XIII,” adds Voltaire. Cp. Michelet, La SorciÈre, Éd. SÉailles, 1903, p. 302.?

308 Tr. into English in 1659, under the title The Vanity of Judiciary Astrology.?

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