§ 3
Alongside of the more popular and native influences, there were at work others, foreign and more academic; and even in professedly orthodox writers there are signs of the influence of deistic thought. Thus Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (written about 1634, published 1642) has been repeatedly characterized[131] as tending to promote deism by its tone and method; and there can be no question that it assumes a great prevalence of critical unbelief, to which its attitude is an odd combination of humorous cynicism and tranquil dogmatism, often recalling Montaigne,[132] and at times anticipating Emerson. There is little savour of confident belief in the smiling maxim that “to confirm and establish our belief ’tis best to argue with judgments below our own”; or in the avowal, “In divinity I love to keep the road; and though not in an implicit yet an humble faith, follow the great wheel of the Church, by which I move.”[133] The pose of the typical believer: “I can answer all the objections of Satan and my rebellious reason with that odd resolution I learned of Tertullian, Certum est quia impossibile est,”[134] tells in his case of no anxious hours; and such smiling incuriousness is not conducive to conviction in others, especially when followed by a recital of some of the many insoluble dilemmas of Scripture. When he reasons he is merely self-subversive, as in the saying, “’Tis not a ridiculous devotion to say a prayer before a game at tables; for even in sortileges and matters of greatest uncertainty there is a settled and pre-ordered course of effects”;[135] and after remarking that the notions of Fortune and astral influence “have perverted the devotion of many into atheism,” he proceeds to avow that his many doubts never inclined him “to any point of infidelity or desperate positions of atheism; for I have been these many years of opinion there never was any.”[136] Yet in his later treatise on Vulgar Errors (1645) he devotes a chapter[137] to the activities of Satan in instilling the belief that “there is no God at all ... that the necessity of his entity dependeth upon ours...; that the natural truth of God is an artificial erection of Man, and the Creator himself but a subtile invention of the Creature.” He further notes as coming from the same source “a secondary and deductive Atheism—that although men concede there is a God, yet should they deny his providence. And therefore assertions have flown about, that he intendeth only the care of the species or common natures, but letteth loose the guard of individuals, and single existences therein.”[138] Browne now asserts merely that “many there are who cannot conceive that there was ever any absolute Atheist,” and does not clearly affirm that Satan labours wholly in vain. The broad fact remains that he avows “reason is a rebel unto faith”; and in the Vulgar Errors he shows in his own reasoning much of the practical play of the new skepticism.[139] Yet it is finally on record that in 1664, on the trial of two women for witchcraft, Browne declared that the fits suffered from by the children said to have been bewitched “were natural, but heightened by the devil’s co-operating with the malice of the witches, at whose instance he did the villainies.”[140] This amazing deliverance is believed to have “turned the scale” in the minds of the jury against the poor women, and they were sentenced by the sitting judge, Sir Matthew Hale, to be hanged. It would seem that in Browne’s latter years the irrational element in him, never long dormant, overpowered the rational. The judgment is a sad one to have to pass on one of the greatest masters of prose in any language. In other men, happily, the progression was different.
The opening even of Jeremy Taylor’s Ductor Dubitantium, so far as it goes, falls little short of the deistic position.[141] A new vein of rationalism, too, is opened in the theological field by the great Cambridge scholar John Spencer, whose Discourse concerning Prodigies (1663; 2nd ed. 1665), though quite orthodox in its main positions, has in part the effect of a plea for naturalism as against supernaturalism. Spencer’s great work, De legibus Hebræorum (1685), is, apart from Spinoza, the most scientific view of Hebrew institutions produced before the rise of German theological rationalism in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Holding most of the Jewish rites to have been planned by the deity as substitutes for or safeguards against those of the Gentiles which they resembled, he unconsciously laid, with Herbert, the foundations of comparative hierology, bringing to the work a learning which is still serviceable to scholars.[142] And there were yet other new departures by clerical writers, who of course exhibit the difficulty of attaining a consistent rationalism.
One clergyman, Joseph Glanvill, is found publishing a treatise on The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661; amended in 1665 under the title Scepsis Scientifica),[143] wherein, with careful reservation of religion, the spirit of critical science is applied to the ordinary processes of opinion with much energy, and the “mechanical philosophy” of Descartes is embraced with zeal. Following Raleigh and Hobbes,[144] Glanvill also puts the positive view of causation[145] afterwards fully developed by Hume.[146] Yet he not only vetoed all innovation in “divinity,” but held stoutly by the crudest forms of the belief in witchcraft, and was with Henry More its chief English champion in his day against rational disbelief.[147] In religion he had so little of the skeptical faculty that he declared “Our religious foundations are fastened at the pillars of the intellectual world, and the grand articles of our belief as demonstrable as geometry. Nor will ever either the subtile attempts of the resolved Atheist, or the passionate hurricanes of the wild enthusiast, any more be able to prevail against the reason our faith is built on, than the blustering winds to blow out the Sun.”[148] He had his due reward in being philosophically assailed by the Catholic priest Thomas White as a promoter of skepticism,[149] and by an Anglican clergyman, wroth with the Royal Society and all its works, as an infidel and an atheist.[150]
This was as true as clerical charges of the kind usually were in the period. But without any animus or violence of interpretation, a reader of Glanvill’s visitation sermon on The Agreement of Reason and Religion[151] might have inferred that he was a deist. It sets forth that “religion primarily and mainly consists in worship and vertue,” and that it “in a secondary sense consists in some principles relating to the worship of God, and of his Son, in the ways of devout and vertuous living”; Christianity having “superadded” baptism and the Lord’s Supper to “the religion of mankind.” Apart from his obsession as to witchcraft—and perhaps even as to that—Glanvill seems to have grown more and more rationalistic in his later years. The Scepsis omits some of the credulous flights of the Vanity of Dogmatizing;[152] the re-written version in the collected Essays omits such dithyrambs as that above quoted; and the sermon in its revised form sets out with the emphatic declaration: “There is not anything that I know which hath done more mischief to religion than the disparaging of reason under pretence of respect and favour to it; for hereby the very foundations of Christian faith have been undermined, and the world prepared for atheism. And if reason must not be heard, the Being of a God and the authority of Scripture can neither be proved nor defended; and so our faith drops to the ground like an house that hath no foundation.” Such reasoning could not but be suspect to the orthodoxy of the age.
Apart from the influence of Hobbes, who, like Descartes, shaped his thinking from the starting-point of Galileo, the Cartesian philosophy played in England a great transitional part. At the university of Cambridge it was already naturalized;[153] and the influence of Glanvill, who was an active member of the Royal Society, must have carried it further. The remarkable treatise of the anatomist Glisson,[154] De natura substantiæ energetica (1672), suggests the influence of either Descartes or Gassendi; and it is remarkable that the clerical moralist Cumberland, writing his Disquisitio de legibus Naturæ (1672) in reply to Hobbes, not only takes up a utilitarian position akin to Hobbes’s own, and expressly avoids any appeal to the theological doctrine of future punishments, but introduces physiology into his ethic to the extent of partially figuring as an ethical materialist.[155] In regard to Gassendi’s direct influence it has to be noted that in 1659 there appeared The Vanity of Judiciary Astrology, translated by “A Person of Quality,” from P. Gassendus; and further that, as is remarked by Reid, Locke borrowed more from Gassendi than from any other writer.[156]
[It is stated by Sir Leslie Stephen (English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. i, 32) that in England the philosophy of Descartes made no distinguished disciples; and that John Norris “seems to be the only exception to the general indifference.” This overlooks (1) Glanvill, who constantly cites and applauds Descartes (Scepsis Scientifica, passim). (2) In Henry More’s Divine Dialogues, again (1668), one of the disputants is made to speak (Dial. i, ch. xxiv) of “that admired wit Descartes”; and he later praises him even when passing censure (above, p. 65). More had been one of the admirers in his youth, and changed his view (cp. Ward’s Life of Dr. Henry More, pp. 63–64). But his first letter to Descartes begins: “Quanta voluptate perfusus est animus meus, Vir clarissime, scriptis tuis legendis, nemo quisquam præter te unum potest conjectare.” (3) There was published in 1670 a translation of Des Fourneillis’s letter in defence of the Cartesian system, with François Bayle’s General System of the Cartesian Philosophy. (4) The continual objections to the atheistic tendency of Descartes throughout Cudworth’s True Intellectual System imply anything but “general indifference”; and (5) Barrow’s tone in venturing to oppose him (cit. in Whewell’s Philosophy of Discovery, 1860, p. 179) pays tribute to his great influence. (6) Molyneux, in the preface to his translation of the Six Metaphysical Meditations of Descartes in 1680, speaks of him as “this excellent philosopher” and “this prodigious man.” (7) Maxwell, in a note to his translation (1727) of Bishop Cumberland’s Disquisitio de legibus Naturæ, remarks that the doctrine of a universal plenum was accepted from the Cartesian philosophy by Cumberland, “in whose time that philosophy prevailed much” (p. 120). See again (8) Clarke’s Answer to Butler’s Fifth Letter (1718) as to the “universal prevalence” of Descartes’s notions in natural philosophy. (9) The Scottish Lord President Forbes (d. 1747) summed up that “Descartes’s romance kept entire possession of men’s belief for fully fifty years” (Works, ii, 132). (10) And his fellow-judge, Sir William Anstruther, in his “Discourse against Atheism” (Essays, Moral and Divine, 1701, pp. 6, 8, 9), cites with much approval the theistic argument of “the celebrated Descartes” as “the last evidences which appeared upon the stage of learning” in that connection.
Cp. Berkeley, Siris, § 331. Of Berkeley himself, Professor Adamson writes (Encyc. Brit. iii, 589) that “Descartes and Locke ... are his real masters in speculation.” The Cartesian view of the eternity and infinity of matter had further become an accepted ground for “philosophical atheists” in England before the end of the century (Molyneux, in Familiar Letters of Locke and his Friends, 1708, p. 46). As to the many writers who charged Descartes with promoting atheism, see Mosheim’s notes in Harrison’s ed. of Cudworth’s Intellectual System, i, 275–76; Clarke, as above cited; Leibnitz’s letter to Philip, cited by Latta, Leibnitz, 1898, p. 8, note; and Brewster’s Memoirs of Newton, ii, 315.
Sir Leslie Stephen seems to have followed, under a misapprehension, Whewell, who contends merely that the Cartesian doctrine of vortices was never widely accepted in England (Philos. of Discovery, pp. 177–78; cp. Hist. of the Induct. Sciences, ed. 1857, ii, 107, 147–48). Buckle was perhaps similarly misled when he wrote in his note-book: “Descartes was never popular in England” (Misc. Works, abridged ed. i, 269). Whewell himself mentions that Clarke, soon after taking his degree at Cambridge, “was actively engaged in introducing into the academic course of study, first, the philosophy of Descartes in its best form, and, next, the philosophy of Newton” (Lectures on Moral Philosophy, ed. 1862, pp. 97–98). And Professor Fowler, in correcting his first remarks on the point, decides that “many of the mathematical teachers at Cambridge continued to teach the Cartesian system for some time after the publication of Newton’s Principia” (ed. of Nov. Org., p. xi).
It is clear, however, that insofar as new science set up a direct conflict with Scriptural assumptions it gained ground but slowly and indirectly. It is difficult to-day to realize with what difficulty the Copernican and Galilean doctrine of the earth’s rotation and movement round the sun found acceptance even among studious men. We have seen that Bacon finally rejected it. And as Professor Masson points out,[157] not only does Milton seem uncertain to the last concerning the truth of the Copernican system, but his friends and literary associates, the “Smectymnuans,” in their answer to Bishop Hall’s Humble Remonstrance (1641), had pointed to the Copernican doctrine as an unquestioned instance of a supreme absurdity. Glanvill, remarking in 1665 that “it is generally opinion’d that the Earth rests as the world’s centre,” avows that “for a man to go about to counter-argue this belief is as fruitless as to whistle against the winds. I shall not undertake to maintain the paradox that confronts this almost Catholic opinion. Its assertion would be entertained with the hoot of the rabble; the very mention of it as possible, is among the most ridiculous.”[158] All he ventures to do is to show that the senses do not really vouch the ordinary view. Not till the eighteenth century, probably, did the common run of educated people anywhere accept the scientific teaching.
On the other hand, however, there was growing up not a little Socinian and other Unitarianism, for some variety of which we have seen two men burned in 1612. Church measures had been taken against the importation of Socinian books as early as 1640. The famous Lord Falkland, slain in the Civil War, is supposed to have leant to that opinion;[159] and Chillingworth, whose Religion of Protestants (1637) was already a remarkable application of rational tests to ecclesiastical questions in defiance of patristic authority,[160] seems in his old age to have turned Socinian.[161] Violent attacks on the Trinity are noted among the heresies of 1646.[162] Colonel John Fry, one of the regicides, who in Parliament was accused of rejecting the Trinity, cleared himself by explaining that he simply objected to the terms “persons” and “subsistence,” but was one of those who sought to help the persecuted Unitarian Biddle. In 1652 the Parliament ordered the destruction of a certain Socinian Catechism; and by 1655 the heresy seems to have become common.[163] It is now certain that Milton was substantially a Unitarian,[164] and that Locke and Newton were at heart no less so.[165]
The temper of the Unitarian school appears perhaps at its best in the anonymous Rational Catechism published in 1686. It purports to be “an instructive conference between a father and his son,” and is dedicated by the father to his two daughters. The “Catechism” rises above the common run of its species in that it is really a dialogue, in which the rôles are at times reversed, and the catechumen is permitted to think and speak for himself. The exposition is entirely unevangelical. Right religion is declared to consist in right conduct; and while the actuality of the Christian record is maintained on argued grounds, on the lines of Grotius and Parker, the doctrine of salvation by faith is strictly excluded, future happiness being posited as the reward of good life, not of faith. There is no negation, the author’s object being avowedly peace and conciliation; but the Epistle Dedicatory declares that religious reasoners have hitherto “failed in their foundation-work. They have too much slighted that philosophy which is the natural religion of all men; and which, being natural, must needs be universal and eternal: and upon which therefore, or at least in conformity with which, all instituted and revealed religion must be supposed to be built.” We have here in effect the position taken up by Toland ten years later; and, in germ, the principle which developed deism, albeit in connection with an affirmation of the truth of the Christian records. Of the central Christian doctrine there is no acceptance, though there is laudation of Jesus; and reprints after 1695 bore the motto, from Locke:[166] “As the foundation of virtue, there ought very earnestly to be imprinted on the mind of a young man a true notion of God, as of the independent supreme Being, Author, and Maker of all things: And, consequent to this, instil into him a love and reverence of this supreme Being.” We are already more than half-way from Unitarianism to deism.
Indeed, the theism of Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding undermined even his Unitarian Scripturalism, inasmuch as it denies, albeit confusedly, that revelation can ever override reason. In one passage he declares that “reason is natural revelation,” while “revelation is natural reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries communicated by God immediately, which reason vouchsafes the truth of.”[167] This compromise appears to be borrowed from Spinoza, who had put it with similar vagueness in his great Tractatus,[168] of which pre-eminent work Locke cannot have been ignorant, though he protested himself little read in the works of Hobbes and Spinoza, “those justly decried names.”[169] The Tractatus being translated into English in the same year with the publication of the Essay, its influence would concur with Locke’s in a widened circle of readers; and the substantially naturalistic doctrine of both books inevitably promoted the deistic movement. We have Locke’s own avowal that he had many doubts as to the Biblical narratives;[170] and he never attempts to remove the doubts of others. Since, however, his doctrine provided a sphere for revelation on the territory of ignorance, giving it prerogative where its assertions were outside knowledge, it counted substantially for Unitarianism insofar as it did not lead to deism.
See the Essay, bk. iv, ch. xviii. Locke’s treatment of revelation may be said to be the last and most attenuated form of the doctrine of “two-fold truth.” On his principle, any proposition in a professed revelation that was not provable or disprovable by reason and knowledge must pass as true. His final position, that “whatever is divine revelation ought to overrule all our opinions” (bk. iv, ch. xviii, § 10), is tolerably elastic, inasmuch as he really reserves the question of the actuality of revelation. Thus he evades the central issue. Naturally he was by critical foreigners classed as a deist. Cp. Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, 1882, p. 36. The German historian Tennemann sums up that Clarke wrote his apologetic works because “the consequences of the empiricism of Locke had become so decidedly favourable to the cause of atheism, skepticism, materialism, and irreligion” (Manual of the Hist. of Philos. Eng. tr. Bohn ed. § 349).
In his “practical” treatise on The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) Locke played a similar part. It was inspired by the genuine concern for social peace which had moved him to write an essay on Toleration as early as 1667,[171] and to produce from 1685 onwards his famous Letters on Toleration, by far the most persuasive appeal of the kind that had yet been produced;[172] all the more successful so far as it went, doubtless, because the first Letter ended with a memorable capitulation to bigotry: “Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all. Besides, also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion can have no pretence of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration.” This handsome endorsement of the religion which had repeatedly “dissolved all” in a pandemonium of internecine hate, as compared with the one heresy which had never broken treaties or shed blood, is presumably more of a prudent surrender to normal fanaticism than an expression of the philosopher’s own state of mind;[173] and his treatise on The Reasonableness of Christianity is an attempt to limit religion to a humane ethic, with sacraments and mysteries reduced to ceremonies, while claiming that the gospel ethic was “now with divine authority established into a legible law, far surpassing all that philosophy and human reason had attained to.”[174] Its effect was, however, to promote rationalism without doing much to mitigate the fanaticism of belief.
Locke’s practical position has been fairly summed up by Prof. Bain: “Locke proposed, in his Reasonableness of Christianity, to ascertain the exact meaning of Christianity, by casting aside all the glosses of commentators and divines, and applying his own unassisted judgment to spell out its teachings.... The fallacy of his position obviously was that he could not strip himself of his education and acquired notions.... He seemed unconscious of the necessity of trying to make allowance for his unavoidable prepossessions. In consequence, he simply fell into an old groove of received doctrines; and these he handled under the set purpose of simplifying the fundamentals of Christianity to the utmost. Such purpose was not the result of his Bible study, but of his wish to overcome the political difficulties of the time. He found, by keeping close to the Gospels and making proper selections from the Epistles, that the belief in Christ as the Messiah could be shown to be the central fact of the Christian faith; that the other main doctrines followed out of this by a process of reasoning; and that, as all minds might not perform the process alike, these doctrines could not be essential to the practice of Christianity. He got out of the difficulty of framing a creed, as many others have done, by simply using Scripture language, without subjecting it to any very strict definition; certainly without the operation of stripping the meaning of its words, to see what it amounted to. That his short and easy method was not very successful the history of the deistical controversy sufficiently proves” (Practical Essays, pp. 226–27).
That Locke was felt to have injured orthodoxy is further proved by the many attacks made on him from the orthodox side. Even the first Letter on Toleration elicited retorts, one of which claims to demonstrate “the Absurdity and Impiety of an Absolute Toleration.”[175] On his positive teachings he was assailed by Bishop Stillingfleet; by the Rev. John Milner, B.D.; by the Rev. John Morris; by William Carrol; and by the Rev. John Edwards, B.D.;[176] his only assailant with a rationalistic repute being Dr. Thomas Burnet. Some attacked him on his Essays; some on his Reasonableness of Christianity; orthodoxy finding in both the same tendency to “subvert the nature and use of divine revelation and faith.”[177] In the opinion of the Rev. Mr. Bolde, who defended him in Some Considerations published in 1699, the hostile clericals had treated him “with a rudeness peculiar to some who make a profession of the Christian religion, and seem to pride themselves in being the clergy of the Church of England.”[178] This is especially true of Edwards, a notably ignoble type;[179] but hardly of Milner, whose later Account of Mr. Lock’s Religion out of his Own Writings, and in his Own Words (1700), pressed him shrewdly on the score of his “Socinianism.” In the eyes of a pietist like William Law, again, Locke’s conception of the infant mind as a tabula rasa was “dangerous to religion,” besides being philosophically false.[180] Yet Locke agreed with Law[181] that moral obligation is dependent solely on the will of God—a doctrine denounced by the deist Shaftesbury as the negation of morality.
See the Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit, pt. iii, § 2; and the Letters to a Student, under date June 3, 1709 (p. 403 in Rand’s Life, Letters, etc., of Shaftesbury, 1900). The extraordinary letter of Newton to Locke, written just after or during a spell of insanity, first apologizes for having believed that Locke “endeavoured to embroil me with women and by other means,” and goes on to beg pardon “for representing that you struck at the root of morality, in a principle you laid down in your book of ideas.” In his subsequent letter, replying to that of Locke granting forgiveness and gently asking for details, he writes: “What I said of your book I remember not.” (Letters of September 16 and October 5, 1693, given in Fox Bourne’s Life of Locke, ii, 226–27, and Sir D. Brewster’s Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton, 1855, ii, 148–51.) Newton, who had been on very friendly terms with Locke, must have been repeating, when his mind was disordered, criticisms otherwise current. After printing in full the letters above cited, Brewster insists, on his principle of sacrificing all other considerations to Newton’s glory (cp. De Morgan, Newton: his Friend: and his Niece, 1885, pp. 99–111), that all the while Newton was “in the full possession of his mental powers.” The whole diction of the first letter tells the contrary. If we are not to suppose that Newton had been temporarily insane, we must think of his judgment as even less rational, apart from physics, than it is seen to be in his dissertations on prophecy. Certainly Newton was at all times apt to be suspicious of his friends to the point of moral disease (see his attack on Montague, in his letter to Locke of January 26, 1691–1692; in Fox Bourne, ii, 218; and cp. De Morgan, as cited, p. 146); but the letter to Locke indicates a point at which the normal malady had upset the mental balance. It remains, nevertheless, part of the evidence as to bitter orthodox criticism of Locke.
On the whole, it is clear, the effect of his work, especially of his naturalistic psychology, was to make for rationalism; and his compromises furthered instead of checking the movement of unbelief. His ideal of practical and undogmatic Christianity, indeed, was hardly distinguishable from that of Hobbes,[182] and, as previously set forth by the Rev. Arthur Bury in his Naked Gospel (1690), was so repugnant to the Church that that book was burned at Oxford as heretical.[183] Locke’s position as a believing Christian was indeed extremely weak, and could easily have been demolished by a competent deist, such as Collins,[184] or a skeptical dogmatist who could control his temper and avoid the gross misrepresentation so often resorted to by Locke’s orthodox enemies. But by the deists he was valued as an auxiliary, and by many latitudinarian Christians as a helper towards a rationalistic if not a logical compromise.
Rationalism of one or the other tint, in fact, seems to have spread in all directions. Deism was ascribed to some of the most eminent public men. Bishop Burnet has a violent passage on Sir William Temple, to the effect that “He had a true judgment in affairs, and very good principles with relation to government, but in nothing else. He seemed to think that things are as they were from all eternity; at least he thought religion was only for the mob. He was a great admirer of the sect of Confucius in China, who were atheists themselves, but left religion to the rabble.”[185] The praise of Confucius is the note of deism; and Burnet rightly held that no orthodox Christian in those days would sound it. Other prominent men revealed their religious liberalism. The accomplished and influential George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, often spoken of as a deist, and even as an atheist, by his contemporaries,[186] appears clearly from his own writings to have been either that or a Unitarian;[187] and it is not improbable that the similar gossip concerning Lord Keeper Somers was substantially true.[188]
That Sir Isaac Newton was “some kind of Unitarian”[189] is proved by documents long withheld from publication, and disclosed only in the second edition of Sir David Brewster’s Memoirs. There is indeed no question that he remained a mere scripturalist, handling the texts as such,[190] and wasting much time in vain interpretations of Daniel and the Apocalypse.[191] Temperamentally, also, he was averse to anything like bold discussion, declaring that “those at Cambridge ought not to judge and censure their superiors, but to obey and honour them, according to the law and the doctrine of passive obedience”[192]—this after he had sat on the Convention which deposed James II. In no aspect, indeed, apart from his supreme scientific genius, does he appear as morally[193] or intellectually pre-eminent; and even on the side of science he was limited by his theological presuppositions, as when he rejected the nebular hypothesis, writing to Bentley that “the growth of new systems out of old ones, without the mediation of a Divine power, seems to me apparently absurd.”[194] There is therefore more than usual absurdity in the proclamation of his pious biographer that “the apostle of infidelity cowers beneath the implied rebuke”[195] of his orthodoxy. The very anxiety shown by Newton and his friends[196] to checkmate “the infidels” is a proof that his religious work was not scientific even in inception, but the expression of his neurotic side; and the attempt of some of his scientific admirers to show that his religious researches belong solely to the years of his decline is a corresponding oversight. Newton was always pathologically prepossessed on the side of his religion, and subordinated his science to his theology even in the Principia. It is therefore all the more significant of the set of opinion in his day that, tied as he was to Scriptural interpretations, he drew away from orthodox dogma as to the Trinity. Not only does he show himself a destructive critic of Trinitarian texts and an opponent of Athanasius[197]: he expressly formulates the propositions (1) that “there is one God the Father ... and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus”; (2) that “the Father is the invisible God whom no eye hath seen or can see. All other beings are sometimes visible”; and (3) that “the Father hath life in himself, and hath given the Son to have life in himself.”[198] Such opinions, of course, could not be published: under the Act of 1697 they would have made Newton liable to loss of office and all civil rights. In his own day, therefore, his opinions were rather gossipped-of than known;[199] but insofar as his heresy was realized, it must have wrought much more for unbelief than could be achieved for orthodoxy by his surprisingly commonplace strictures on atheism, which show the ordinary inability to see what atheism means.
The argument of his Short Scheme of True Religion brackets atheism with idolatry, and goes on: “Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by accident that all birds, beasts, and men have their right side and left side alike shaped (except in their bowels), and just two eyes, and no more, on either side of the face?” etc. (Brewster, ii, 347). The logical implication is that a monstrous organism, with the sides unlike, represents “accident,” and that in that case there has either been no causation or no “purpose” by Omnipotence. It is only fair to remember that no avowedly “atheistic” argument could in Newton’s day find publication; but his remarks are those of a man who had never contemplated philosophically the negation of his own religious sentiment at the point in question. Brewster, whose judgment and good faith are alike precarious, writes that “When Voltaire asserted that Sir Isaac explained the prophecies in the same manner as those who went before him, he only exhibited his ignorance of what Newton wrote, and what others had written” (ii, 331, note; 355). The writer did not understand what he censured. Voltaire meant that Newton’s treatment of prophecy is on the same plane of credulity as that of his orthodox predecessors.
Even within the sphere of the Church the Unitarian tendency, with or without deistic introduction, was traceable. Archbishop Tillotson (d. 1694) was often accused of Socinianism; and in the next generation was smilingly spoken of by Anthony Collins as a leading Freethinker. The pious Dr. Hickes had in fact declared of the Archbishop that “he caused several to turn atheists and ridicule the priesthood and religion.”[200] The heresy must have been encouraged even within the Church by the scandal which broke out when Dean Sherlock’s Vindication of Trinitarianism (1690), written in reply to a widely-circulated antitrinitarian compilation,[201] was attacked by Dean South[202] as the work of a Tritheist. The plea of Dr. Wallis, Locke’s old teacher, that a doctrine of “three somewhats”—he objected to the term “persons”—in one God was as reasonable as the concept of three dimensions,[203] was of course only a heresy the more. Outside the Church, William Penn, the great Quaker, held a partially Unitarian attitude;[204] and the first of his many imprisonments was on a charge of “blasphemy and heresy” in respect of his treatise The Sandy Foundation Shaken, which denied (1) that there were in the One God “three distinct and separate persons”; (2) the doctrine of the need of “plenary satisfaction”; and (3) the justification of sinners by “an imputative righteousness.” But though many of the early Quakers seem to have shunned the doctrine of the Trinity, Penn really affirmed the divinity of Christ, and was not a Socinian but a Sabellian in his theology. Positive Unitarianism all the while was being pushed by a number of tracts which escaped prosecution, being prudently handled by Locke’s friend, Thomas Firmin.[205] A new impulse had been given to Unitarianism by the learning and critical energy of the Prussian Dr. Zwicker, who had settled in Holland;[206] and among those Englishmen whom his works had found ready for agreement was Gilbert Clerke (b. 1641), who, like several later heretics, was educated at Sidney College, Cambridge. In 1695 he published a Unitarian work entitled Anti-Nicenismus, and two other tracts in Latin, all replying to the orthodox polemic of Dr. Bull, against whom another Unitarian had written Considerations on the Explications of the Doctrine of the Trinity in 1694, bitterly resenting his violence.[207] In 1695 appeared yet another treatise of the same school, The Judgment of the Fathers concerning the Doctrine of the Trinity. Much was thus done on Unitarian lines to prepare an audience for the deists of the next reign.[208] But the most effective influence was probably the ludicrous strife of the orthodox clergy as to what orthodoxy was. The fray over the doctrine of the Trinity waxed so furious, and the discredit cast on orthodoxy was so serious,[209] that in the year 1700 an Act of Parliament was passed forbidding the publication of any more works on the subject.
Meanwhile the so-called Latitudinarians,[210] all the while aiming as they did at a non-dogmatic Christianity, served as a connecting medium for the different forms of liberal thought; and a new element of critical disintegration was introduced by a speculative treatment of Genesis in the Archæologiæ Philosophiæ (1692) of Dr. Thomas Burnet, a professedly orthodox scholar, Master of the Charterhouse and chaplain in ordinary to King William, who nevertheless treated the Creation and Fall stories as allegories, and threw doubt on the Mosaic authorship of parts of the Pentateuch. Though the book was dedicated to the king, it aroused so much clerical hostility that the king was obliged to dismiss him from his post at court.[211] His ideas were partly popularized through a translation of two of his chapters, with a vindicatory letter, in Blount’s Oracles of Reason (1695); and that they had considerable vogue may be gathered from the Essay towards a Vindication of the Vulgar Exposition of the Mosaic History of the Fall of Adam, by John Witty, published in 1705. Burnet, who published three sets of anonymous Remarks on the philosophy of Locke (1697–1699), criticizing its sensationist basis, figured after his death (1715), in posthumous publications, as a heretical theologian in other regards; and then played his part in the general deistic movement; but his allegorical view of Genesis does not seem to have seriously affected speculation in his time, the bulk of the debate turning on his earlier Telluris Theoria Sacra (1681; trans. 1684), to which there were many rejoinders, both scientific and orthodox. On this side he is unimportant, his science being wholly imaginative; and in the competition between his Theory and J. Woodward’s Essay towards a Natural History of the Earth (1695) nothing was achieved for scientific progress.
Much more remarkable, but outside of popular discussion, were the Evangelium medici (1697) of Dr. B. Connor, wherein the gospel miracles were explained away, on lines later associated with German rationalism, as natural phenomena; and the curious treatise of Newton’s friend, John Craig,[212] Theologiæ christianæ principia mathematica (1699), wherein it is argued that all evidence grows progressively less valid in course of time;[213] and that accordingly the Christian religion will cease to be believed about the year 3144, when probably will occur the Second Coming. Connor, when attacked, protested his orthodoxy; Craig held successively two prebends of the Church of England;[214] and both lived and died unmolested, probably because they had the prudence to write in Latin, and maintained gravity of style. About this time, further, the title of “Rationalist” made some fresh headway as a designation, not of unbelievers, but of believers who sought to ground themselves on reason. Such books as those of Clifford and Boyle tell of much discussion as to the efficacy of “reason” in religious things; and in 1686, as above noted, there appears A Rational Catechism,[215] a substantially Unitarian production, notable for its aloofness from evangelical feeling, despite its many references to Biblical texts in support of its propositions. In the Essays Moral and Divine of the Scotch judge, Sir William Anstruther, published in 1701, there is a reference to “those who arrogantly term themselves Rationalists”[216] in the sense of claiming to find Christianity not only, as Locke put it, a reasonable religion, but one making no strain upon faith. Already the term had become potentially one of vituperation, and it is applied by the learned judge to “the wicked reprehended by the Psalmist.”[217] Forty years later, however, it was still applied rather to the Christian who claimed to believe upon rational grounds than to the deist or unbeliever;[218] and it was to have a still longer lease of life in Germany as a name for theologians who believed in “Scripture” on condition that all miracles were explained away.
[1] Jenkin Thomasius in his Historia Atheismi (1692) joins Herbert with Bodin as having five points in common with him (ed. 1709, ch. ix, § 2, pp. 76–77). [↑]
[2] It might have been supposed that he was recalled on account of his book; but it was not so. He was recalled by letter in April, returned home in July, and seems to have sent his book thence to Paris to be printed. [↑]
[3] Autobiography, Sir S. Lee’s 2nd ed. p. 132. [↑]
[4] The book was reprinted at London in Latin in 1633; again at Paris in 1636; and again at London in 1645. It was translated and published in French in 1639, but never in English. [↑]
[5] Compare the verdict of Hamilton in his ed. of Reid, note A, § 6, 35 (p. 781). [↑]
[6] For a good analysis see Pünjer, Hist. of the Christ. Philos. of Religion, Eng. trans. 1887, pp. 292–99; also Noack, Die Freidenker in der Religion, Bern, 1853, i, 17–40; and Lechler, Geschichte des englischen Deismus, pp. 36–54. [↑]
[7] See his Autobiography, as cited, pp. 133–34. [↑]
[8] De causis errorum, una cum tractate de religione laici et appendice ad sacerdotes (1645); De religione gentilium (1663). The latter was translated into English in 1705. The former are short appendices to the De Veritate. In 1768 was published for the first time from a manuscript, A Dialogue between a Tutor and his Pupil, which, despite the doubts of Lechler, may confidently be pronounced Herbert’s from internal evidence. See the “Advertisement” by the editor of the volume, and cp. Lee, p. xxx, and notes there referred to. The “five points,” in particular, occur not only in the Religio Gentilium, but in the De Veritate. The style is clearly of the seventeenth century. [↑]
[9] Sir Sidney Lee can hardly be right in taking the Dialogue to be the “little treatise” which Herbert proposed to write on behaviour (Autobiography, Lee’s 2nd ed. p. 43). It does not answer to that description, being rather an elaborate discussion of the themes of Herbert’s main treatises, running to 272 quarto pages. [↑]
[11] More Reasons for the Christian Religion, 1672, p. 79. [↑]
[12] It is to be remembered that the doctrine of the supremacy of the civil power in religious matters (Erastianism) was maintained by some of the ablest men on the Parliamentary side, in particular Selden. [↑]
[13] Leviathan, ch. iv, H. Morley’s ed. p. 26. [↑]
[14] Cp. his letter to an opponent, Considerations upon the Reputation, etc., of Thomas Hobbes, 1680, with chs. xi and xii of Leviathan, and De Corpore Politico, pt. ii, c. 6. One of his most explicit declarations for theism is in the De Homine, c. 1, where he employs the design argument, declaring that he who will not see that the bodily organs are a mente aliqua conditas ordinatasque ad sua quasque officia must be himself without mind. This ascription of “mind,” however, he tacitly negates in Leviathan, ch. xi, and De Corpore Politico, pt. ii, c. 6. [↑]
[15] De Corpore, pt. ii, c. 8, § 20. [↑]
[16] Cp. Bentley’s letter to Bernard, 1692, cited in Dynamics of Religion, pp. 82–83. [↑]
[17] Leviathan, pt. i, ch. vi. Morley’s ed. p. 34. [↑]
[18] Leviathan, pt. iii, ch. xxxiii. [↑]
[20] On this see Lange, Hist. of Materialism, sec. iii, ch. ii. [↑]
[21] Molyneux, an anti-Hobbesian, in translating Hobbes’s objections along with the Meditations (1680) claims that the slightness of Descartes’s replies was due to his unacquaintance with Hobbes’s works and philosophy in general (trans. cited, p. 114). This is an obviously lame defence. Descartes does parry some of the thrusts of Hobbes; others he simply cannot meet. [↑]
[22] E.g., Leviathan, pt. iv, ch. xlvii. [↑]
[23] Kuno Fischer, Descartes and his School, pp. 232–35. Cp. Bentley, Sermons on Atheism (i.e., his Boyle Lectures), ed. 1724, p. 8. [↑]
[24] Hobbes also was of Mersenne’s acquaintance, but only as a man of science. When, in 1647, Hobbes was believed to be dying, Mersenne for the first time sought to discuss theology with him; but the sick man instantly changed the subject. In 1648 Mersenne died. He thus did not live to meet the strain of Leviathan (1651), which enraged the French no less than the English clergy. (Croom Robertson’s Hobbes, pp. 63–65.) [↑]
[25] Hobbes lived to see this law abolished (1677). There was left, however, the jurisdiction of the bishops and ecclesiastical courts over cases of atheism, blasphemy, heresy, and schism, short of the death penalty. [↑]
[26] Croom Robertson, Hobbes, p. 196; Pepys’s Diary, Sept. 3, 1668. [↑]
[27] Leviathan, ch. ii; Morley’s ed. p. 19; chs. xiv, xv, pp. 66, 71, 72, 78; ch. xxix, pp. 148, 149. [↑]
[28] Leviathan, chs. xv, xvii, xviii. Morley’s ed. pp. 72, 82, 83, 85. [↑]
[29] “For two generations the effort to construct morality on a philosophical basis takes more or less the form of answers to Hobbes” (Sidgwick, Outlines of the History of Ethics, 3rd ed. p. 169). [↑]
[30] As when he presents the law of Nature as “dictating peace, for a means of the conservation of men in multitudes” (Leviathan, ch. xv. Morley’s ed. p. 77). [↑]
[31] See the headings, Council, Religion, etc. [↑]
[32] G. W. Johnson, Memoirs of John Selden, 1835, pp. 348, 362. [↑]
[33] G. W. Johnson, p. 264. [↑]
[35] G. W. Johnson, pp. 258, 302. [↑]
[36] Id. p. 302. Cp. in the Table Talk, art. Trinity, his view of the Roundheads. [↑]
[37] Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. 1810, i, 181. Cp. i, 292; ii, 44. [↑]
[38] Cp. Overton’s pamphlet, An Arrow against all Tyrants and Tyranny (1646), cited in the History of Passive Obedience since the Reformation, 1689, i, 59; pt. ii of Thomas Edwards’s Gangræna: or a Catalogue and Discovery of many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies, and pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this time, etc., 2nd ed. 1646, pp. 33–34 (Nos. 151–53). [↑]
[39] Lords Journals, January 16, 1645–1646; Gangræna, as cited, p. 150; cp. Gardiner, Hist. of the Civil War, ed. 1893, iii, 11. [↑]
[40] Green, Short Hist. ch. viii, § 8, pp. 551–52; Gardiner, Hist. of the Civil War, iv, 22. [↑]
[42] In 1644 he had been imprisoned at Bury St. Edmunds for “dipping” adults, and after six months’ durance had been released on a recantation and promise of amendment. Gangræna, as cited, pp. 104–105. [↑]
[43] Rev. James Cranford, Hæreseo-Machia, a Sermon, 1646, p. 10. [↑]
[45] Cranford, as cited, p. 11 sq. [↑]
[46] See G. P. Gooch’s Hist. of Democ. Ideas in England in the 17th Century, 1898, ch. vi. [↑]
[48] In the British Museum copy the name Richardson is penned, not in a contemporary hand, at the end of the preface; and in the preface to vol. ii of the Phenix, 1708, in which the treatise is reprinted, the same name is given, but with uncertainty. The Richardson pointed at was the author of The Necessity of Toleration in Matters of Religion (1647). E. B. Underhill, in his collection of that and other Tracts on Liberty of Conscience for the Hanserd Knollys Society, 1846, remains doubtful (p. 247) as to the authorship of the tract on hell. [↑]
[49] The fourth English edition appeared in 1754. [↑]
[50] Gangræna, ep. ded. (p. 5). Cp. pp. 47, 151, 178–79; and Bailie’s Letters, ed. 1841, ii, 234–37; iii, 393. The most sweeping plea for toleration seems to have been the book entitled Toleration Justified, 1646. (Gangræna, p. 151.) The Hanserd Knollys collection, above mentioned, does not contain one of that title. [↑]
[51] Gangræna, pp. 152–53. [↑]
[53] Id. p. 15. As to other sects mentioned by him cp. Tayler, p. 194. [↑]
[54] On the intense aversion of most of the Presbyterians to toleration see Tayler, Retrospect of Relig. Life of Eng. p. 136. They insisted, rightly enough, that the principle was never recognized in the Bible. [↑]
[55] See the citations in Buckle, 3-vol. ed. i, 347; 1-vol. ed. p. 196. [↑]
[56] Alex. Ross, Pansebeia, 4th ed. 1672, p. 379. [↑]
[57] Cp. the present writer’s Buckle and his Critics, 1895, ch. viii, § 2. [↑]
[58] See above, vol. i, p. 5. [↑]
[59] Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, 3rd ed. i, 200. [↑]
[60] Heresiography: The Heretics and Sectaries of these Times, 1614. Epist. Ded. [↑]
[61] Discourse, ed. 1857, p. 226. [↑]
[62] Dr. J. Brown’s pref. to ed. of 1857, p. xxii. [↑]
[63] More, Collection of Philosophical Writings, 4th ed. 1692, p. 95. [↑]
[64] Fabricius, Delectus Argumentorum et Syllabus Scriptorum, 1725, p. 341. [↑]
[65] No copy in British Museum. [↑]
[66] Urwick, Life of John Howe, with 1846 ed. of Howe’s Select Works, pp. xiii, xix. Urwick, a learned evangelical, fully admits the presence of “infidels” on both sides in the politics of the time. [↑]
[67] Discourse Concerning Union Among Protestants, ed. cited, pp. 146, 156, 158. In the preface to his treatise, The Redeemer’s Tears Wept over Lost Souls, Howe complains of “the atheism of some, the avowed mere theism of others,” and of a fashionable habit of ridiculing religion. This sermon, however, appears to have been first published in 1684; and the date of its application is uncertain. [↑]
[68] Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography, Art. 285. [↑]
[69] The preface begins: “It is neither to satisfie the importunity of friends, nor to prevent false copies (which and such like excuses I know are expected in usual prefaces), that I have adventured abroad this following treatise: but it is out of a just resentment of the affronts and indignities which have been cast on religion, by such who account it a matter of judgment to disbelieve the Scriptures, and a piece of wit to dispute themselves out of the possibility of being happy in another world.” [↑]
[70] See bk. ii, ch. x. Page 338, 3rd ed. 1666. [↑]
[71] Cp. Glanvill, pref. Address to his Scepsis Scientifica, Owen’s ed. 1885, pp. lv–lvii; and Henry More’s Divine Dialogues, Dial. i, ch. xxxii. [↑]
[72] Cp. Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, i. 109. [↑]
[73] The Reformed Pastor, abr. ed. 1826, pp. 236, 239. [↑]
[74] Work cited, ed. 1667, p. 136. The proposition is reiterated. [↑]
[76] Reasons of the Christian Religion, pp. 388–89. [↑]
[77] Religio Stoici, Edinburgh, 1663. p. 19. The essay was reprinted in 1665, and in London in 1693 under the title of The Religious Stoic. [↑]
[82] Religio Stoici, p. 116. [↑]
[84] This last is interesting as a probable echo of opinions he had heard from some of his older contemporaries: “Opinion kept within its proper bounds is an [ = the Scottish “ane”] pure act of the mind; and so it would appear that to punish the body for that which is a guilt of the soul is as unjust as to punish one relation for another” (pref. pp. 10–11). He adds that “the Almighty hath left no warrand upon holy record for persecuting such as dissent from us.” [↑]
[85] Reason: an Essay, ed. 1690, p. 21. Cp. p. 152. [↑]
[86] Id. p. 82. It is noteworthy that Mackenzie puts in a protest against “implicit Faith and Infallibility, those great tyrants over Reason” (p. 88). But the essay as a whole is ill-planned and unimpressive. [↑]
[87] Work cited, 2nd ed. pt. ii, pp. 106–15. [↑]
[88] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 86–87, 89–90. This explanation is also given by Bishop Wilkins in his treatise on Natural Religion, 7th ed. p. 354. [↑]
[89] Replying to Herbert’s De Veritate, which he seems not to have read before. [↑]
[90] Pref. to Obs. upon the United Prov. of the Netherlands, in Works, ed. 1814, i, 36. [↑]
[91] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 87, 94–98, 111, 112. [↑]
[92] As to the religious immoralism see Mosheim, 17 Cent. sec. ii, pt. ii, ch. ii, § 23, and Murdock’s notes. [↑]
[93] Compare the picture of average Protestant deportment given by Benjamin Bennet in his Discourses against Popery, 1714, p. 377. [↑]
[94] More, Coll. of Philos. Writings, 4th ed. 1712, gen. pref. p. 7. [↑]
[95] Compare some of the extracts in Thomas Bennet’s Defence of the Discourse of Schism, etc., 2nd ed. 1704, from the sermons of R. Gouge (1688). The description of men as “mortal crumbling bits of dependency, yesterday’s start-ups, that come out of the abyss of nothing, hastening to the bosom of their mother earth” (work cited, p. 93) is a reminder that the resonant and cadenced rhetoric of the Brownes and Taylors and Cudworths was an art of the age, at the command of different orders of propaganda. [↑]
[96] Cited by Bonnet, A Defence of the Discourse of Schism, etc., as cited, p. 41. [↑]
[97] Thus Henry More’s biographer, the Rev. Richard Ward, says “the late Mr. Chiswel told a friend of mine that for twenty years together after the return of King Charles the Second the Mystery of Godliness, and Dr. More’s other works, ruled all the booksellers in London” (Life of More, 1710, pp. 162–63). We have seen the nature of some of More’s “other works.” [↑]
[98] The Reasonableness of Scripture Belief, 1672, Epist. Ded. [↑]
[99] Rep. 1675; 2nd ed. 1691; rep. in the Phœnix, vol. ii, 1708; 3rd ed. 1736. [↑]
[100] A very hostile account of him is given in Dict. of Nat. Biog. He was, however, the friend of Cowley, and the “M. Clifford” to whom Sprat addressed his sketch of Cowley’s Life. He was also a foe of Dryden—the “malicious Matt Clifford” of Dryden’s Sessions of the Poets; and he attacked the poet in Notes on Dryden’s Poems (published 1687), and is supposed to have had a hand in the Rehearsal. He was befriended by Shaftesbury. [↑]
[101] Tract. Theol. Polit. c. 15. [↑]
[102] Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, ii, 381–82; Granger, Biog. Hist. of England, 5th ed. v, 293. [↑]
[103] Johnson’s Life of Dr. Watts, 1785, App. i. [↑]
[104] Toulmin, Hist. of the Prot. Dissenters, 1814, citing Johnson’s Life of Dr. Watts. [↑]
[105] It has been suggested that this was really written by Clifford, for posthumous publication. The humorous sketch of “His Character” at the close, suggesting that his vices seem to the writer to have outweighed his virtues, hints of ironical mystification. [↑]
[106] Work cited, pp. 10, 14, 30, 55. [↑]
[107] Dr. Urwick, Life of Howe, as cited, p. xxxii. [↑]
[108] A Demonstration of the Divine Authority of the Law of Nature and of the Christian Religion, by Samuel Parker, D.D., 1681, pref. The first part of this treatise is avowedly a popularization of the argument of Cumberland’s Disquisitio de Legibus Naturæ, 1672. Parker had previously published in Latin a Disiputatio de Deo et Providentia Divina, in which he raised the question, An Philosophorum ulli, et quinam Athei fuerunt (1678). [↑]
[109] Work cited, 2nd ed. 1682, pp. 32, 38–40, 45–48. [↑]
[112] Twelve Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions, 1692, pp. 438–39. [↑]
[113] This has been ascribed, without any good ground, to Charles Blount. It does not seem to me to be in his style. [↑]
[114] Premonition to the Candid Reader. [↑]
[116] Pamphlet cited, pp. 20, 21. [↑]
[118] Concerning whom see Macaulay’s History, ch. xix, ed. 1877, ii, 411–12—a very prejudiced account. Blount is there spoken of as “one of the most unscrupulous plagiaries that ever lived,” and as having “stolen” from Milton, because he issued a pamphlet “By Philopatris,” largely made up from the Areopagitica. Compare Macaulay’s treatment of Locke, who adopted Dudley North’s currency scheme (ch. xxi, vol. ii, p. 547). [↑]
[119] Bayle (art. Apollonius, note), who is followed by the French translator of Philostratus with Blount’s notes in 1779 (J. F. Salvemini de Castillon), says the notes were drawn from the papers of Lord Herbert of Cherbury; but of this Blount says nothing. [↑]
[120] As to these see the Dict. of Nat. Biog. The statements of Anthony Wood as to the writings of Blount’s father, relied on in the author’s Dynamics of Religion, appear to be erroneous. Sir Thomas Pope Blount, Charles’s eldest brother, shows a skeptical turn of mind in his Essays (3rd ed. 1697, Essay 7). Himself a learned man, he disparages learning as checking thought; and, professing belief in the longevity of the patriarchs (p. 187), pronounces popery and pagan religion to be mere works of priestcraft (Essay 1). He detested theological controversy and intolerance, and seems to have been a Lockian. [↑]
[121] All that is known of this tragedy is that Blount loved his deceased wife’s sister and wished to marry her; but she held it unlawful, and he was in despair. According to Pope, a sufficiently untrustworthy authority, he “gave himself a stab in the arm, as pretending to kill himself, of the consequence of which he really died” (note to Epilogue to the Satires, i, 123). An overstrung nervous system may be diagnosed from his writing. [↑]
[122] Boyle Lectures on Atheism, ed. 1724, p. 4. [↑]
[123] Reflexions upon the Books of the Holy Scriptures to establish the Truth of the Christian Religion, by Peter Allix, D.D., 1688, i, 6–7. [↑]
[124] As cited by Leslie, Truth of Christianity Demonstrated, 1711, pp. 17–21. [↑]
[125] Characteristics, ii, 263 (Moralists, pt. ii, § 3). One of the most dangerous positions from the orthodox point of view would be the thesis that while religion could do either great good or great harm to morals, atheism could do neither. (Bk. I, pt. iii, § 1.) Cp. Bacon’s Essay, Of Atheism. [↑]
[126] Blount, after assailing in anonymous pamphlets Bohun the licenser, induced him to license a work entitled King William and Queen Mary Conquerors, which infuriated the nation. Macaulay calls the device “a base and wicked scheme.” It was almost innocent in comparison with Blount’s promotion of the “Popish plot” mania. See Who Killed Sir Edmund Godfrey Berry? by Alfred Marks. 1905, pp. 133–35, 150. [↑]
[127] See the text in Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner’s Penalties upon Opinion, pp. 19–21. Macaulay does not mention this measure. [↑]
[128] The Act had been preceded by a proclamation of the king, dated Feb. 24. 1697. [↑]
[129] As to an earlier monopoly of the London booksellers, see George Herbert’s letters to the Archbishop of Canterbury and to Bacon, Jan. 29, 1620. In Works of George Herbert, ed. 1841, i. 217–18. [↑]
[130] See Locke’s notes on the Licensing Act in Lord King’s Life of Locke, 1829, pp. 203–206; Fox Bourne’s Life of Locke, ii. 313–14; Macaulay’s History, ii, 504. [↑]
[131] Trinius, Freydenker-Lexicon, 1759, p. 120; Pünjer, i, 291, 300–301. Browne was even called an atheist. Arpe, Apologia pro Vanino, 1712, p. 27, citing Welschius. Mr. A. H. Bullen, in his introduction to his ed. of Marlowe (1885, vol. i, p. lviii), remarks that Browne, who “kept the road” in divinity, “exposed the vulnerable points in the Scriptural narratives with more acumen and gusto than the whole army of freethinkers, from Anthony Collins downwards.” This is of course an extravagance, but, as Mr. Bullen remarks in the Dict. of Nat. Biog. vii, 66, Browne discusses “with evident relish” the “seeming absurdities in the Scriptural narrative.” [↑]
[132] Browne’s Annotator points to the derivation of his skepticism from “that excellent French writer Monsieur Mountaign, in whom I often trace him” (Sayle’s ed. 1904, i, p. xviii). [↑]
[133] Religio Medici, i, 6. [↑]
[136] Religio Medici, i, 20. [↑]
[138] Here we have a theorem independently reached later (with the substitution of Nature for God) by Mary Wollstonecraft and Tennyson in turn. Browne cites yet another: “that he looks not below the moon, but hath resigned the regiment of sublunary affairs unto inferior deputations”—a thesis adopted in effect by Cudworth. [↑]
[139] By an error of the press, Browne is made in Mr. Sayle’s excellent reprint (i, 108) to begin a sentence in the middle of a clause, with an odd result:—“I do confess I am an Atheist. I cannot persuade myself to honour that the world adores.” The passage should obviously read: “to that subterraneous Idol (avarice) and God of the Earth I do confess I am an Atheist,” etc. [↑]
[140] Hutchinson, Histor. Essay Conc. Witchcraft, 1718, p. 118; 2nd ed. 1720, p. 151. [↑]
[141] Cp. Whewell, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. 1862, p. 33. [↑]
[142] Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, 1889, pref. p. vi; Rev. Dr. Duff, Hist. of Old Test. Criticism, R. P. A. 1910, p. 113. [↑]
[143] This appears again, much curtailed and “so altered as to be in a manner new,” in its author’s collected Essays on Several Important Subjects in Religion and Philosophy (1676), under the title Against Confidence in Philosophy. [↑]
[144] See the Humane Nature (1640), ch. iv, §§ 7–9. [↑]
[145] Scepsis Scientifica, ch. 23, § 1. [↑]
[146] See the passages compared by Lewes, History of Philosophy, 4th ed. ii, 338. [↑]
[147] In his Blow at Modern Sadducism (4th ed. 1668), Sadducismus Triumphatus (1681; 3rd ed. 1689), and A Whip to the Droll, Fidler to the Atheist (1688—a letter to Henry More, who was zealous on the same lines). These works seem to have been much more widely circulated than the Scepsis Scientifica. [↑]
[148] Scepsis, ch. 20, § 3. [↑]
[149] See Glanvill’s reply in a letter to a friend (1665), re-written as Essay II, Of Scepticism and Certainty: in A short Reply to the learned Mr. Thomas White in his collected Essays on Several Important Subjects, 1676. [↑]
[150] See the reply in Plus Ultra: or, the Progress and Advancement of Knowledge since the days of Aristotle, 1668, Epist. Ded. Pref. ch. xviii, and Conclusion. [The re-written treatise, in the collected Essays, eliminates the controversial matter.] [↑]
[151] First printed with Glanvill’s Philosophia Pia in 1671. Rep. as an essay in the collected Essays. [↑]
[152] Owen, pref. to Scepsis, pp. xx–xxii. [↑]
[153] Owen, pref. to ed. of Scepsis Scientifica, p. ix. [↑]
[154] Of whom, however, a high medical authority declares that, “as a physiologist, he was sunk in realism” (that is, metaphysical apriorism). Prof. T. Clifford Allbutt, Harveian Oration on Science and Medieval Thought, 1901, p. 44. [↑]
[155] Cp. Whewell, as last cited, pp. 75–83; Hallam, Literature of Europe, iv, 159–71. [↑]
[156] Reid, Intellectual Powers, Essay I, ch. i; Hamilton’s ed. of Works, p. 226. Glanvill calls Gassendi “that noble wit.” (Scepsis Scientifica, Owen’s ed. p. 151.) [↑]
[157] Poet. Works of Milton, 1874, Introd. i, 92 sq. [↑]
[158] Scepsis Scientifica, Owen’s ed. p. 66. In the condensed version of the treatise in Glanvill’s collected Essays (1676, p. 20), the language is to the same effect. [↑]
[159] J. J. Tayler, Retrospect of the Religious Life of England, Martineau’s ed. p. 204; Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography, iii, 152–53. [↑]
[160] Cp. Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 347–51; 1-vol. ed. pp. 196–99. [↑]
[161] Tayler, Retrospect, pp. 204–205; Wallace, iii, 154–56. [↑]
[162] Gangræna, pt. i, p. 38. [↑]
[163] Tayler, p. 221. As to Biddle, the chief propagandist of the sect, see pp. 221–24, and Wallace, Art. 285. [↑]
[164] Macaulay, Essay on Milton. Cp. Brown’s ed. (Clarendon Press) of the poems of Milton, ii, 30. [↑]
[165] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, ch. v. [↑]
[166] Of Education, § 136. [↑]
[167] Essay, bk. iv, ch. xix. § 4. [↑]
[168] Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, c. 15. [↑]
[169] Third Letter to the Bishop of Worcester. [↑]
[170] Some Familiar Letters between Mr. Locke and Several of his Friends, 1708, pp. 302–304. [↑]
[171] Fox Bourne, Life of Locke, 1876, ii, 34. [↑]
[172] The first Letter, written while he was hiding in Holland in 1685, was in Latin, but was translated into French, Dutch, and English. [↑]
[173] Mr. Fox Bourne, in his biography (ii, 41), apologizes for the lapse, so alien to his own ideals, by the remark that “the atheism then in vogue was of a very violent and rampant sort.” It is to be feared that this palliation will not hold good—at least, the present writer has been unable to trace the atheism in question. For “atheism” we had better read “religion.” [↑]
[174] Second Vindication of “The Reasonableness of Christianity,” 1697, pref. [↑]
[175] Fox Bourne, Life of Locke, ii, 181. [↑]
[176] Son of the Presbyterian author of the famous Gangræna. [↑]
[177] Said by Carrol, Dissertation on Mr. Lock’s Essay, 1706, cited by Anthony Collins, Essay Concerning the Use of Reason, 1709, p. 30. [↑]
[178] Cited by Fox Bourne, Life of Locke, ii, 438. [↑]
[179] Whose calibre may be gathered from his egregious doctoral thesis, Concio ad clerum de dæmonum malorum existentia et natura (1700). After a list of the deniers of evil spirits, from the Sadducees and Sallustius to Bekker and Van Dale, he addresses to his “dilectissimi in Christo fratres” the exordium: “En, Academici, veteres ac hodiernos Sadducæos! quibuscum tota Atheorum cohors amicissimè congruit; nam qui divinum numen, iidem ipsi infernales spiritus acriter negant.” [↑]
[180] Confutation of Warburton (1757) in Extracts from Law’s Works, 1768, i, 208–209. [↑]
[181] Cp. the Essay, bk. i, ch. iii, § 6, with Law’s Case of Reason, in Extracts, as cited, p. 36. [↑]
[182] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, p. 122. [↑]
[183] Fox Bourne, ii, 404–405. [↑]
[184] An ostensibly orthodox Professor of our own day has written that Locke’s doctrine as to religion and ethics “shows at once the sincerity of his religious convictions and the inadequate conception he had formed to himself of the grounds and nature of moral philosophy” (Fowler, Locke, 1880, p. 76). [↑]
[185] Burnet, History of his Own Time, ed. 1838, p. 251. Burnet adds that Temple “was a corrupter of all that came near him.” The 1838 editor protests against the whole attack as the “most unfair and exaggerated” of Burnet’s portraits; and a writer in The Present State of the Republick of Letters, Jan., 1736, p. 26, carries the defence to claiming orthodoxy for Temple. But the whole cast of his thought is deistic. Cp. the Essay upon the Origin and Nature of Government, and ch. v of the Observations upon the United Provinces (Works, ed. 1770, i, 29, 36, 170–74). [↑]
[186] Cp. Macaulay, History, ch. ii. Student’s ed. i, 120. [↑]
[187] Compare his Advice to a Daughter, § 1 (in Miscellanies, 1700), and his Political Thoughts and Reflections: Religion. [↑]
[188] See Macaulay, ch. xx. Student’s ed. ii, 459. [↑]
[189] De Morgan, as cited, p. 107. [↑]
[190] See Brewster, ii, 318, 321–22, 323, 331 sq., 342 sq. [↑]
[193] Cp. De Morgan, pp. 133–45. [↑]
[194] Four Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to Dr. Bentley, ed. 1756, p. 25. Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 97–102. [↑]
[198] Brewster, p. 349. See the remaining articles, and App. XXX, p. 532. [↑]
[200] Discourse on Tillotson and Burnet, pp. 38, 40, 74, cited by Collins, Discourse of Freethinking, 1713, pp. 171–72. [↑]
[201] The Brief Notes on the Creed of St. Athanasius (author unknown), printed by Thomas Firmin. Late in 1693 appeared another antitrinitarian tract, by William Freke, who was prosecuted, fined £500, and ordered to make a recantation in the Four Courts of Westminster Hall. The book was burnt by the hangman. Wallace, Art. 354. There had also been “two quarto volumes of tracts in support of Unitarianism,” published in 1691 (Dr. W. H. Drummond, An Explanation and Defence of the Principles of Protestant Dissent, 1842, p. 17). [↑]
[202] “Locke’s ribald schoolfellow of nearly fifty years ago” (Fox Bourne, ii, 405). [↑]
[204] Tayler, Retrospect, p. 226; Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography, i, 160–69. [↑]
[205] Fox Bourne, ii, 405; Wallace, art. 353. [↑]
[207] Nelson’s Life of Bishop Bull, 2nd ed. 1714, p. 398. [↑]
[208] “Perhaps at no period was the Unitarian controversy so actively carried on in England as between 1690 and 1720.” History, Opinions, etc., of the English Presbyterians, 1834, p. 22. [↑]
[209] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 113–15—Tayler, Retrospect, p. 227. [↑]
[210] As to whom see Tayler, Retrospect, ch. v. § 4. They are spoken of as “the new sect of Latitude-Men” in 1662; and in 1708 are said to be “at this day Low Churchmen.” See A Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude-Men, by “S. P.” of Cambridge, 1662, reprinted in The Phenix, vol. ii, 1708. and pref. to that vol. From “S. P.’s” account it is clear that they connected with the new scientific movement, and leant to Cartesianism. As above noted, they included such prelates as Wilkins and Tillotson. The work of E. A. George, Seventeenth Century Men of Latitude (1908), deals with Hales, Chillingworth, Whichcote, H. More, Taylor, Browne, and Baxter. [↑]
[211] Toulmin, Histor. View of the Prot. Dissenters, 1814, p. 270. A main ground of the offence taken was a somewhat trivial dialogue in Burnet’s book between Eve and the serpent, indicating the “popular” character of the tale. This was omitted from a Dutch edition at the author’s request, and from the 3rd ed. 1733 (Toulmin, as cited). It is given in the partial translation in Blount’s Oracles of Reason. [↑]
[212] See Brewster’s Memoirs of Newton, 1855, ii, 315–16, for a letter indicating Craig’s religious attitude. He contributed to Dr. George Cheyne’s Philosophical Principles of Religion, Natural and Revealed, 1705. (Pref. to pt. i, ed. 1725.) [↑]
[213] See the note of Pope and Warburton on the Dunciad, iv, 462. [↑]
[214] See arts. in Dict. of Nat. Biog. [↑]
[215] Reprinted at Amsterdam, 1712. [↑]
[216] Essays as cited, p. 84. [↑]
[218] See Christianity not Founded on Argument (by Henry Dodwell, jr.), 1741, pp. 11, 34. Waterland, as cited by Bishop Hurst, treats the terms Reasonist and Rationalist as labels or nicknames of those who untruly profess to reason more scrupulously than other people. The former term may, however, have been set up as a result of Le Clerc’s rendering of “the Logos,” in John i, 1, by “Reason”—an argument to which Waterland repeatedly refers. [↑]
Chapter XV
FRENCH AND DUTCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
1. We have seen France, in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, pervaded in its upper classes by a freethought partly born of the knowledge that religion counted for little but harm in public affairs, partly the result of such argumentation as had been thrown out by Montaigne and codified by Charron. That it was not the freethinking of mere idle men of the world is clear when we note the names and writings of La Mothe le Vayer (1588–1672), Gui Patin (1601–1671), and Gabriel Naudé (1600–1653), all scholars, all heretics of the skeptical and rationalistic order. The last two indeed, sided with the Catholics in politics, Patin approving of the Fronde, and Naudé of the Massacre, on which ground they are sometimes claimed as believers.[1] But though in the nature of the case their inclusion on the side of freethought is not to be zealously contended for, they must be classed in terms of the balance of testimony. Patin was the admiring friend of Gassendi; and though he was never explicitly heretical, and indeed wrote of Socinianism as a pestilent doctrine,[2] his habit of irony and the risk of written avowals to correspondents must be kept in view in deciding on his cast of mind. He is constantly anti-clerical;[3] and the germinal skepticism of Montaigne and Charron clearly persists in him.
It is true that, as one critic puts it, such rationalists were not “quite clear whither they were bound. At first sight,” he adds, “no one looks more negative than Gui Patin.... He was always congratulating himself on being ‘delivered from the nightmare’; and he rivals the eighteenth century in the scorn he pours on priests, monks, and especially ‘that black Loyolitic scum from Spain’ which called itself the Society of Jesus. Yet Patin was no freethinker. Skeptics who made game of the kernel of religion came quite as much under the lash of his tongue as bigots who dared defend its husks. His letters end with the characteristic confession: ‘Credo in Deum, Christum crucifixum, etc.; ... De minimis non curat prætor’” (Viscount St. Cyres in Cambridge Modern History, v, 73). But the last statement is an error, and Patin did not attack Gassendi, though he did Descartes. He says of Rabelais: “C’étoit un homme qui se moquoit de tout; en verité il y a bien des choses dont on doit raisonnablement se moquer ... elles sont presque tous remplies de vanité, d’imposture et d’ignorance: ceux qui sont un peu philosophes ne doivent-ils pas s’en moquer?” (Lett. 485, éd. cited, iii, 148). Again he writes that “la vie humaine n’est qu’un bureau de rencontre et un théâtre sur lesquels domine la fortune” (Lett. 726, iii, 620). This is pure Montaigne. The formula cited by Viscount St. Cyres is neither a general nor a final conclusion to the letters of Patin. It occurs, I think, only once (18 juillet, 1642, à M. Belin) in the 836 letters, and not at the end of that one (Lett. 55, éd. cited, i, 90).
Concerning his friend Naudé, Patin writes: “Je suis fort de l’avis de feu M. Naudé, qui disoit qu’il y avait quatre choses dont il se fallait garder, afin de n’être point trompé, savoir, de prophéties, de miracles, de révélations, et d’apparitions” (Lett. 353, éd. cited, ii, 490). Again, he writes of a symposium of Naudé, Gassendi, and himself: “Peut-être, tous trois, guéris de loup-garou et delivrés du mal des scrupules, qui est le tyran des consciences, nous irons peut-être jusque fort près du sanctuaire. Je fis l’an passé ce voyage de Gentilly avec M. Naudé, moi seul avec lui tête-à-tête; il n’y avait point de témoins, aussi n’y en falloit-il point: nous y parlâmes fort librement de tout, sans que personne en ait été scandalisé” (Lett. 362, ii, 508). This seems tolerably freethinking.
All that the Christian editor cares to claim upon the latter passage is that assuredly “l’unité de Dieu, l’immortalité de l’âme, l’égalité des hommes devant la loi, ces verités fondamentales de la raison et consacrées par le Christianisme, y étaient placées au premier rang” in the discussion. As to the skepticism of Naudé the editor remarks: “Ce qu’il y a de remarquable, c’est que Gui Patin soutenait que son ami ... avait puisé son opinion, en général très peu orthodoxe, en Italie, pendant le long séjour qu’il fit dans ce pays avec le cardinal Bagni” (ii, 490; cp. Lett. 816; iii, 758, where Naudé is again cited as making small account of religion).
Certainly Patin and Naudé are of less importance for freethought than La Mothe le Vayer. That scholar, a “Conseiller d’Estat ordinaire,” tutor of the brother of Louis XIV, and one of the early members of the new Academy founded by Richelieu, is an interesting figure[4] in the history of culture, being a skeptic of the school of Sextus Empiricus, and practically a great friend of tolerance. Standing in favour with Richelieu, he wrote at that statesman’s suggestion a treatise On the Virtue of the Heathen,[5] justifying toleration by pagan example—a course which raises the question whether Richelieu himself was not strongly touched by the rationalism of his age. If it be true that the great Cardinal “believed as all the world did in his time,”[6] there is little more to be said; for unbelief, as we have seen, was already abundant, and even somewhat fashionable. Certainly no ecclesiastic in high power ever followed a less ecclesiastical policy;[7] and from the date of his appointment as Minister to Louis XIII (1624), for forty years, there was no burning of heretics or unbelievers in France. If he was orthodox, it was very passively.[8]
And Le Vayer’s way of handling the dicta of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas as to the virtues of unbelievers being merely vices is for its time so hardy that the Cardinal’s protection alone can explain its immunity from censure. St. Augustine and St. Thomas, says the critic calmly, had regard merely to eternal happiness, which virtue alone can obtain for no one. They are, therefore, to be always interpreted in this special sense. And so at the very outset the ground is summarily cleared of orthodox obstacles.[9] The Petit discours chrétien sur l’immortalité de l’âme, also addressed to Richelieu, tells of a good deal of current unbelief on that subject; and the epistle dedicatory professes pain over the “philosopher of our day [Vanini] who has had the impiety to write that, unless one is very old, very rich, and a German, one should never expatiate on this subject.” But on the very threshold of the discourse, again, the skeptic tranquilly suggests that there would be “perhaps something unreasonable” in following Augustine’s precept, so popular in later times, that the problem of immortality should be solved by the dictates of religion and feeling, not of “uncertain” reason. “Why,” he asks, “should the soul be her own judge?”[10] And he shows a distinct appreciation of the avowal of Augustine in his Retractationes that his own book on the Immortality of the Soul was so obscure to him that in many places he himself could not understand it.[11] The “Little Christian Discourse” is, in fact, not Christian at all; and its arguments are but dialectic exercises, on a par with those of the Discours sceptique sur la musique which follows. He was, in short, a skeptic by temperament; and his Preface d’une histoire[12] shows his mind to have played on the “Mississippi of falsehood called history” very much as did that of Bayle in a later generation.
Le Vayer’s Dialogues of Oratius Tubero (1633) is philosophically his most important work;[13] but its tranquil Pyrrhonism was not calculated to affect greatly the current thought of his day; and he ranked rather as a man of all-round learning[14] than as a polemist, being reputed “a little contradictory, but in no way bigoted or obstinate, all opinions being to him nearly indifferent, excepting those of which faith does not permit us to doubt.”[15] The last phrase tells of the fact that it affects to negate: Le Vayer’s general skepticism was well known.[16] He was not indeed an original thinker, most of his ideas being echoes from the skeptics of antiquity;[17] and it has been not unjustly said of him that he is rather of the sixteenth century than of the seventeenth.[18]
2. On the other hand, the resort on the part of the Catholics to a skeptical method, as against both Protestants and freethinkers, which we have seen originating soon after the issue of Montaigne’s Essais, seems to have become more and more common; and this process must rank as in some degree a product of skeptical thought of a more sincere sort. In any case it was turned vigorously, even recklessly, against the Protestants. Thus we find Daillé, at the outset of his work On the True Use of the Fathers,[19] complaining that when Protestants quote the Scriptures some Romanists at once ask “whence and in what way those books may be known to be really written by the prophets and apostles whose names and titles they bear.” This challenge, rashly incurred by Luther and Calvin in their pronouncements on the Canon, later Protestants did not as a rule attempt to meet, save in the fashion of La Placette, who in his work De insanibili Ecclesiæ Romanæ Scepticismo (1688)[20] undertakes to show that Romanists themselves are without any grounds of certitude for the authority of the Church. It was indeed certain that the Catholic method would make more skeptics than it won.
3. Between the negative development of the doctrine of Montaigne and the vogue of upper-class deism, the philosophy of Descartes, with its careful profession of submission to the Church, had at first an easy reception; and on the appearance of the Discours de la Méthode (1637) it speedily affected the whole thought of France; the women of the leisured class, now much given to literature, being among its students.[21] From the first the Jansenists, who were the most serious religious thinkers of the time, accepted the Cartesian system as in the main soundly Christian; and its founder’s authority had some such influence in keeping up the prestige of orthodoxy as had that of Locke later in England. Boileau, who wrote a satire in defence of the system when it was persecuted after Descartes’s death, is named among those whom he so influenced.[22] But a merely external influence of this kind could not counteract the fundamental rationalism of Descartes’s thought, and the whole social and intellectual tendency towards a secular view of life. Soon, indeed, Descartes became suspect, partly by reason of the hostile activities of the Jesuits, who opposed him because the Jansenists generally held by him, though he had been a Jesuit pupil, and had always some adherents in that order;[23] partly by reason of the inherent naturalism of his system. That his doctrine was incompatible with the eucharist was the standing charge against it,[24] and his defence was not found satisfactory,[25] though his orthodox followers obtained from Queen Christina a declaration that he had been largely instrumental in converting her to Catholicism.[26] Pascal reproached him with having done his best to do without God in his system;[27] and this seems to have been the common clerical impression. Thirteen years after his death, in 1663, his work was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, under a modified censure,[28] and in 1671 a royal order was obtained under which his philosophy was proscribed in all the universities of France.[29] Cartesian professors and curés were persecuted and exiled, or compelled to recant; among the victims being Père Lami of the Congregation of the Oratory and Père André the Jesuit;[30] and the Oratorians were in 1678 forced to undergo the humiliation of not only renouncing Descartes and all his works, but of abjuring their former Cartesian declarations, in order to preserve their corporate existence.[31] Precisely in this period of official reaction, however, there was going on not merely an academic but a social development of a rationalistic kind, in which the persecuted philosophy played its part, even though some freethinkers disparaged it.
4. The general tendency is revealed on the one hand by the series of treatises from eminent Churchmen, defending the faith against unpublished attacks, and on the other hand by the prevailing tone in belles lettres. Malherbe, the literary dictator of the first quarter of the century, had died in 1628 with the character of a scoffer;[32] and the fashion now lasted till the latter half of the reign of Louis XIV. In 1621, two years after the burning of Vanini, a young man named Jean Fontanier had been burned alive on the Place de Grève at Paris, apparently for the doctrines laid down by him in a manuscript entitled Le Trésor Inestimable, written on deistic and anti-Catholic lines.[33] He was said to have been successively Protestant, Catholic, Turk, Jew, and atheist; and had conducted himself like one of shaken mind.[34] But the cases of the poet Théophile de Viau, who about 1623 suffered prosecution on a charge of impiety,[35] and of his companions Berthelot and Colletet—who like him were condemned but set free by royal favour—appear to be the only others of the kind for over a generation. Frivolity of tone sufficed to ward off legal pursuit. It was in 1665, some years after the death of Mazarin, who had maintained Richelieu’s policy of tolerance, that Claude Petit was burnt at Paris for “impious pieces”;[36] and even then there was no general reversion to orthodoxy, the upper-class tone remaining, as in the age of Richelieu and Mazarin, more or less unbelieving. When Corneille had introduced a touch of Christian zeal into his Polyeucte (1643) he had given general offence to the dilettants of both sexes.[37] Molière, again, the disciple of Gassendi[38] and “the very genius of reason,”[39] was unquestionably an unbeliever;[40] and only the personal protection of Louis XIV, which after all could not avail to support such a play as Tartufe against the fury of the bigots, enabled him to sustain himself at all against them.
5. Equally freethinking was his brilliant predecessor and early comrade, Cyrano de Bergerac (1620–1655), who did not fear to indicate his frame of mind in one of his dramas. In La Mort d’Agrippine he puts in the mouth of Sejanus, as was said by a contemporary, “horrible things against the Gods,” notably the phrase, “whom men made, and who did not make men,”[41] which, however, generally passed as an attack on polytheism; and though there was certainly no blasphemous intention in the phrase, Frappons, voilà l’hostie [= hostia, victim], some pretended to regard it as an insult to the Catholic host.[42] At times Cyrano writes like a deist;[43] but in so many other passages does he hold the language of a convinced materialist, and of a scoffer at that,[44] that he can hardly be taken seriously on the former head.[45] In short, he was one of the first of the hardy freethinkers who, under the tolerant rule of Richelieu and Mazarin, gave clear voice to the newer spirit. Under any other government, he would have been in danger of his life: as it was, he was menaced with prosecutions; his Agrippine was forbidden; the first edition of his Pédant joué was confiscated; during his last illness there was an attempt to seize his manuscripts; and down till the time of the Revolution the editions of his works were eagerly bought up and destroyed by zealots.[46] His recent literary rehabilitation thus hardly serves to realize his importance in the history of freethought. Between Cyrano and Molière it would appear that there was little less of rationalistic ferment in the France of their day than in England. Bossuet avows in a letter to Huet in 1678 that impiety and unbelief abound more than ever before.[47]
6. Even in the apologetic reasoning of the greatest French prose writer of that age, Pascal, we have the most pregnant testimony to the prevalence of unbelief; for not only were the fragments preserved as Pensées (1670), however originated,[48] developed as part of a planned defence of religion against contemporary rationalism,[49] but they themselves show their author profoundly unable to believe save by a desperate abnegation of reason, though he perpetually commits the gross fallacy of trusting to reason to prove that reason is untrustworthy. His work is thus one continuous paralogism, in which reason is disparaged merely to make way for a parade of bad reasoning. The case of Pascal is that of Berkeley with a difference: the latter suffered from hypochondria, but reacted with nervous energy; Pascal, a physical degenerate, prematurely profound, was prematurely old; and his pietism in its final form is the expression of the physical collapse.
This is disputed by M. Lanson, an always weighty authority. He writes (p. 464) that Pascal was “neither mad nor ill” when he gave himself up wholly to religion. But ill he certainly was. He had chronically suffered from intense pains in the head from his eighteenth year; and M. Lanson admits (p. 451) that the Pensées were written in intervals of acute suffering. This indeed understates the case. Pascal several times told his family that since the age of eighteen he had never passed a day without pain. His sister, Madame Perier, in her biographical sketch, speaks of him as suffering “continual and ever-increasing maladies,” and avows that the four last years of his life, in which he penned the fragments called Pensées, “were but a continual languishment.” The Port Royal preface of 1670 says the same thing, speaking of the “four years of languor and malady in which he wrote all we have of the book he planned,” and calling the Pensées “the feeble essays of a sick man.” Cp. Pascal’s Prière pour demander à Dieu le bon usage des maladies: and Owen French Skeptics, pp. 746, 784.
Doubtless the levity and licence of the libertins in high places[50] confirmed him in his revolt against unbelief; but his own credence was an act rather of despairing emotion than of rational conviction. The man who advised doubters to make a habit of causing masses to be said and following religious rites, on the score that cela vous fera croire et vous abêtira—“that will make you believe and will stupefy you”[51]—was a pathological case; and though the whole Jansenist movement latterly stood for a reaction against freethinking, it can hardly be doubted that the Pensées generally acted as a solvent rather than as a sustainer of religious beliefs.[52] This charge was made against them immediately on their publication by the Abbé de Villars, who pointed out that they did the reverse of what they claimed to do in the matter of appealing to the heart and to good sense, since they set forth all the ordinary arguments of Pyrrhonism, denied that the existence of God could be established by reason or philosophy, and staked the case on a “wager” which shocked good sense and feeling alike. “Have you resolved,” asks this critic in dialogue, “to make atheists on pretext of combatting them?”[53]
The same question arises concerning the famous Lettres Provinciales (1656), written by Pascal in defence of Arnauld against the persecution of the Jesuits, who carried on in Arnauld’s case their campaign against Jansen, whom they charged with mis-stating the doctrine of Augustine in his great work expounding that Father. Once more the Catholic Church was swerving from its own established doctrine of predestination, the Spanish Jesuit Molina having set up a new movement in the Pelagian or Arminian direction. The cause of the Jansenists has been represented as that of freedom of thought and speech;[54] and this it relatively was insofar as Jansen and Arnauld sought for a hearing, while the Jesuit-ridden Sorbonne strove to silence and punish them. Pascal had to go from printer to printer as his Letters succeeded each other, the first three being successively prosecuted by the clerical authorities; and in their collected form they found publicity only by being printed at Rouen and published at Amsterdam, with the rubric of Cologne. All the while Jansenism claimed to be strict orthodoxy; and it was in virtue only of the irreducible element of rationalism in Pascal that the school of Port Royal made for freethought in any higher or more general sense. Indeed, between his own reputation for piety and that of the Jansenists for orthodoxy, the Provincial Letters have a conventional standing as orthodox compositions. It is strange, however, that those who charge upon the satire of the later philosophers the downfall of Catholicism in France should not realize the plain tendency of these brilliant satires to discredit the entire authority of the Church, and, further, by their own dogmatic weaknesses, to put all dogma alike under suspicion.[55] Few thoughtful men can now read the Provinciales without being impressed by the utter absurdity of the problem over which the entire religious intelligence of a great nation was engrossed.
It was, in fact, the endless wrangles of the religious factions over unintelligible issues that more than any other single cause fostered the unbelief previously set up by religious wars;[56] and Pascal’s writings only deepened the trouble. Even Bossuet, in his History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches (1688), did but throw a new light on the hollowness of the grounds of religion; and for thoughtful readers gave a lead rather to atheism than to Catholicism. The converts it would make to the Catholic Church would be precisely those whose adherence was of least value, since they had not even the temperamental basis which, rather than argument, kept Bossuet a believer, and were Catholics only for lack of courage to put all religion aside. When “variation” was put as a sign of error by a Churchman the bulk of whose life was spent in bitter strifes with sections of his own Church, critical people were hardly likely to be confirmed in the faith. Within ten years of writing his book against the Protestants, Bossuet was engaged in an acrid controversy with Fénelon, his fellow prelate and fellow demonstrator of the existence and attributes of God, accusing him of holding unchristian positions; and both prelates were always fighting their fellow-churchmen the Jansenists. If the variations of Protestants helped Catholicism, those of Catholics must have helped unbelief.
7. A similar fatality attended the labours of the learned Huet, Bishop of Avranches, whose Demonstratio Evangelica (1678) is remarkable (with Boyle’s Discourse of Things above Reason) as anticipating Berkeley in the argument from the arbitrariness of mathematical assumptions. He too, by that and by his later works, made for sheer philosophical skepticism,[57] always a dangerous basis for orthodoxy.[58] Such an evolution, on the part of a man of uncommon intellectual energy, challenges attention, the more so seeing that it typifies a good deal of thinking within the Catholic pale, on lines already noted as following on the debate with Protestantism. Honestly pious by bent of mind, but always occupied with processes of reasoning and research, Huet leant more and more, as he grew in years, to the skeptical defence against the pressures of Protestantism and rationalism, at once following and furthering the tendency of his age. That the skeptical method is a last weapon of defence can be seen from the temper in which the demonstrator assails Spinoza, whom he abuses, without naming him, in the fashion of his day, and to whose arguments concerning the authorship of the Pentateuch he makes singularly feeble answers.[59] They are too worthless to have satisfied himself; and it is easy to see how he was driven to seek a more plausible rebuttal.[60] A distinguished English critic, noting the general movement, pronounces, justly enough, that Huet took up philosophy “not as an end, but as a means—not for its own sake, but for the support of religion”; and then adds that his attitude is thus quite different from Pascal’s.[61] But the two cases are really on a level. Pascal too was driven to philosophy in reaction against incredulity; and though Pascal’s work is of a more bitter and morbid intensity, Huet also had in him that psychic craving for a supernatural support which is the essence of latter-day religion. And if we credit this spirit to Pascal and to Huet, as we do to Newman, we must suppose that it partly touched the whole movement of pro-Catholic skepticism which has been above noted as following on the Reformation. It is ascribing to it as a whole too much of calculation and strategy to say of its combatants that “they conceived the desperate design of first ruining the territory they were prepared to evacuate; before philosophy was handed over to the philosophers the old Aristotelean citadel was to be blown into the air.”[62] In reality they caught, as religious men will, with passion rather than with policy, at any plea that might seem fitted to beat down the presumption of “the wild, living intellect of man”;[63] and their skepticism had a certain sincerity inasmuch as, trained to uncritical belief, they had never found for themselves the grounds of rational certitude.
Inasmuch too as Protestantism had no such ground, and rationalism was still far from having cleared its bases, Huet, as things went, was within his moral rights when he set forth his transcendentalist skepticism in his Quæstiones Alnetanæ in 1690. Though written in very limpid Latin,[64] that work attracted practically no attention; and though, having a repute for provincialism in his French style, Huet was loth to resort to the vernacular, he did devote his spare hours through a number of his latter years to preparing his Traité Philosophique de la faiblesse de l’esprit humain, which, dying in 1722, he left to be published posthumously (1723). The outcry against his criticism of Descartes and his Demonstratio had indisposed him for further personal strife; but he was determined to leave a completed message. Thus it came about that a sincere and devoted Catholic bishop “left, as his last legacy to his fellow-men, a work of the most outrageous skepticism.”[65]
8. Meanwhile the philosophy of Descartes, if less strictly propitious to science at some points than that of Gassendi, was both directly and indirectly making for the activity of reason. In virtue of its formal “spiritualism,” it found access where any clearly materialistic doctrine would have been tabooed; so that we find the Cartesian ecclesiastic Régis not only eagerly listened to and acclaimed at Toulouse in 1665, but offered a civic pension by the magistrates[66]—this within two years of the placing of Descartes’s works on the Index. After arousing a similar enthusiasm at Montpellier and at Paris, Régis was silenced by the Archbishop, whereupon he set himself to develop the Cartesian philosophy in his study. The result was that he ultimately went beyond his master, openly rejecting the idea of creation out of nothing,[67] and finally following Locke in rejecting the innate ideas which Descartes had affirmed.[68] Another young Churchman, Desgabets, developing from Descartes and his pupil Malebranche, combined with their “spiritist” doctrine much of the virtual materialism of Gassendi, arriving at a kind of pantheism, and at a courageous pantheistic ethic, wherein God is recognized as the author alike of good and evil[69]—a doctrine which we find even getting a hearing in general society, and noticed in the correspondence of Madame de Sévigné in 1677.[70]
Malebranche’s treatise De la Recherche de la Vérité (1674) was in fact a development of Descartes which on the one hand sought to connect his doctrine of innate ideas with his God-idea, and on the other hand headed the whole system towards pantheism. The tendency had arisen before him in the congregation of the Oratory, to which he belonged, and in which the Cartesian philosophy had so spread that when, in 1678, the alarmed superiors proposed to eradicate it, they were told by the members that, “If Cartesianism is a plague, there are two hundred of us who are infected.”[71] But if Cartesianism alarmed the official orthodox, Malebranche wrought a deeper disintegration of the faith. In his old age his young disciple De Mairan, who had deeply studied Spinoza, pressed him fatally hard on the virtual coincidence of his philosophy with that of the more thoroughgoing pantheist; and Malebranche indignantly repudiated all agreement with “the miserable Spinoza,”[72] “the atheist,”[73] whose system he pronounced “a frightful and ridiculous chimera.”[74] “Nevertheless, it was towards this chimera that Malebranche tended.”[75] On all hands the new development set up new strife; and Malebranche, who disliked controversy, found himself embroiled alike with Jansenists and Jesuits, with orthodox and with innovating Cartesians, and with his own Spinozistic disciples. The Jansenist Arnauld attacked his book in a long and stringent treatise, Des vrayes at des fausses idées (1683),[76] accumulating denials and contradictions with a cold tenacity of ratiocination which never lapsed into passion, and was all the more destructive. For the Jansenists Malebranche was a danger to the faith in the ratio of his exaltation of it, inasmuch as reference of the most ordinary beliefs back to “faith” left them no ground upon which to argue up to faith.[77] This seems to have been a common feeling among his readers. For the same reason he made no appeal to men of science. He would have no recognition of secondary causes, the acceptance of which he declared to be a dangerous relapse into paganism.[78] There was thus no scientific principle in the new doctrine which could enable it to solve the problems or absorb the systems of other schools. Locke was as little moved by it as were the Jansenists. Malebranche won readers everywhere by his charm of style;[79] but he was as much of a disturber as of a reconciler. The very controversies which he set up made for disintegration; and Fénelon found it necessary to “refute” Malebranche as well as Spinoza, and did his censure with as great severity as Arnauld’s.[80] The mere fact that Malebranche put aside miracles in the name of divine law was fatal from the point of view of orthodoxy.
9. Yet another philosophic figure of the reign of Louis XIV, the Jesuit Père Buffier (1661–1737), deserves a passing notice here—out of his chronological order—though the historians of philosophy have mostly ignored him.[81] He is indeed of no permanent philosophic importance, being a precursor of the Scottish school of Reid, nourished on Locke, and somewhat on Descartes; but he is significant for the element of practical rationalism which pervades his reasoning, and which recommended him to Voltaire, Reid, and Destutt de Tracy. On the question of “primary truths in theology” he declares so boldly for the authority of revelation in all dogmas which pass comprehension, and for the non-concern of theology with any process of rational proof,[82] that it is hardly possible to suppose him a believer. On those principles, Islam has exactly the same authority as Christianity. In his metaphysic “he rejects all the ontological proofs of the existence of God, and, among others, the proof of Descartes from infinitude: he maintains that the idea of God is not innate, and that it can be reached only from consideration of the order of nature.”[83] He is thus as much of a force for deism as was his master, Locke; and he outgoes him in point of rationalism when he puts the primary ethic of reciprocity as a universally recognized truth,[84] where Locke had helplessly fallen back on “the will of God.” On the other hand he censures Descartes for not admitting the equal validity of other tests with that of primary consciousness, thus in effect putting himself in line with Gassendi. For the rest, his Examen des préjugés vulgaires, the most popular of his works, is so full of practical rationalism, and declares among other things so strongly in favour of free discussion, that its influence must have been wholly in the direction of freethought. “Give me,” he makes one of his disputants say, “a nation where they do not dispute, do not contest: it will be, I assure you, a very stupid and a very ignorant nation.”[85] Such reasoning could hardly please the Jesuits,[86] and must have pleased freethinkers. And yet Buffier, like Gassendi, in virtue of his clerical status and his purely professional orthodoxy, escaped all persecution.
While an evolving Cartesianism, modified by the thought of Locke and the critical evolution of that, was thus reacting on thought in all directions, the primary and proper impulse of Descartes and Locke was doing on the Continent what that of Bacon had already done in England—setting men on actual scientific observation and experiment, and turning them from traditionalism of every kind. The more religious minds, as Malebranche, set their faces almost fanatically against erudition, thus making an enemy of the all-learned Huet,[87] but on the other hand preparing the way for the scientific age. For the rest we find the influence of Descartes at work in heresies at which he had not hinted. Finally we shall see it taking deep root in Holland, furthering a rationalistic view of the Bible and of popular superstitions.
10. Yet another new departure was made in the France of Louis XIV by the scholarly performance of Richard Simon (1638–1712), who was as regards the Scriptural texts what Spencer of Cambridge was as regards the culture-history of the Hebrews, one of the founders of modern methodical criticism. It was as a devout Catholic refuting Protestants, and a champion of the Bible against Spinoza, that Simon began his work; but, more sincerely critical than Huet, he reached views more akin to those of Spinoza than to those of the Church.[88] The congregation of the Oratory, where Simon laid the foundations of his learning, was so little inclined to his critical views that he decided to leave it; and though persuaded to stay, and to become for a time a professor of philosophy at Julli, he at length broke with the Order. Then, from his native town of Dieppe, came his strenuous series of critical works—L’histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678), which among other things decisively impugned the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch; the Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament (Rotterdam, 1689); numerous other volumes of critical studies on texts, versions, and commentators; and finally a French translation of the New Testament with notes. His Bibliothèque Critique (4 vols. under the name of Saint-Jore) was suppressed by an order in council; the translation was condemned by Bossuet and the Archbishop of Paris; and the two first-named works were suppressed by the Parlement of Paris and attacked by a host of orthodox scholars; but they were translated promptly into Latin and English; and they gave a new breadth of footing to the deistic argument, though Simon always wrote as an avowed believer.
Before Simon, the Protestant Isaac la Peyrère, the friend of La Mothe le Vayer and Gassendi, and the librarian of Condé, had fired a somewhat startling shot at the Pentateuch in his Præadamitæ[89] and Systema Theologica ex Præ-adamitarum Hypothesi (both 1655: printed in Holland[90]), for which he was imprisoned at Brussels, with the result that he recanted and joined the Church of Rome, going to the Pope in person to receive absolution, and publishing an Epistola ad Philotimum (Frankfort, 1658), in which he professed to explain his reasons for abjuring at once his Calvinism and his treatise. It is clear that all this was done to save his skin, for there is explicit testimony that he held firmly by his Preadamite doctrine to the end of his life, despite the seven or eight confutations of his work published in 1656.[91] Were it not for his constructive theses—especially his idea that Adam was a real person, but simply the father of the Hebrews and not of the human race—he would deserve to rank high among the scientific pioneers of modern rationalism, for his negative work is shrewd and sound. Like so many other early rationalists, collectively accused of “destroying without replacing,” he erred precisely in his eagerness to build up, for his negations have all become accepted truths.[92] As it is, he may be ranked, after Toland, as a main founder of the older rationalism, developed chiefly in Germany, which sought to reduce as many miracles as possible to natural events misunderstood. But he was too far before his time to win a fair hearing. Where Simon laid a cautious scholarly foundation, Peyrère suddenly challenged immemorial beliefs, and failed accordingly.
11. Such an evolution could not occur in France without affecting the neighbouring civilization of Holland. We have seen Dutch life at the beginning of the seventeenth century full of Protestant fanaticism and sectarian strife; and in the time of Descartes these elements, especially on the Calvinist side, were strong enough virtually to drive him out of Holland (1647) after nineteen years’ residence.[93] He had, however, made disciples; and his doctrine bore fruit, finding doubtless some old soil ready. Thus in 1666 one of his disciples, the Amsterdam physician Louis Meyer, published a work entitled Philosophia Sacrae Scripturae Interpres,[94] in which, after formally affirming that the Scripture is the infallible Word of God, he proceeds to argue that the interpretation of the Word must be made by the human reason, and accordingly sets aside all meanings which are irreconcilable therewith, reducing them to allegories or tropes. Apart from this, there is somewhat strong evidence that in Holland in the second half of the century Cartesianism was in large part identified with a widespread movement of rationalism, of a sufficiently pronounced kind. Peter von Mastricht, Professor of Theology at Utrecht, published in 1677 a Latin treatise, Novitatum Cartesianarum Gangræna, in which he made out a list of fifty-six anti-Christian propositions maintained by Cartesians. Among them are these: That the divine essence, also that of angels, and that of the soul, consists only in Cogitation; That philosophy is not subservient to divinity, and is no less certain and no less revealed; That in things natural, moral, and practical, and also in matters of faith, the Scripture speaks according to the erroneous notions of the vulgar; That the mystery of the Trinity may be demonstrated by natural reason; That the first chaos was able of itself to produce all things material; That the world has a soul; and that it may be infinite in extent.[95] The theologian was thus visibly justified in maintaining that the “novelties” of Cartesianism outwent by a long way those of Arminianism.[96] It had in fact established a new point of view; seeing that Arminius had claimed for theology all the supremacy ever accorded to it in the Church.[97]
12. As Meyer was one of the most intimate friends of Spinoza, being with him at death, and became the editor of his posthumous works, it can hardly be doubted that his treatise, which preceded Spinoza’s Tractatus by four years, influenced the great Jew, who speedily eclipsed him.[98] Spinoza, however (1632–1677), was first led to rationalize by his Amsterdam friend and teacher, Van den Ende, a scientific materialist, hostile to all religion;[99] and it was while under his influence that he was excommunicated by his father’s synagogue. From the first, apparently, Spinoza’s thought was shaped partly by the medieval Hebrew philosophy[100] (which, as we have seen, combined Aristotelean and Saracen influences), partly by the teaching of Bruno, though he modified and corrected that at various points.[101] Later he was deeply influenced by Descartes, whom he specially expounded for a pupil in a tractate.[102] Here he endorses Descartes’s doctrine of freewill, which he was later to repudiate and overthrow. But he drew from Descartes his retained principle that evil is not a real existence. In a much less degree he was influenced by Bacon, whose psychology he ultimately condemned; but from Hobbes he took not only his rationalistic attitude towards “revelation,” but his doctrine of ecclesiastical subordination.[103] Finally evolving his own conceptions, he produced a philosophic system which was destined to affect all European thought, remaining the while quietly occupied with the handicraft of lens-grinding by which he earned his livelihood. The Grand Pensionary of the Netherlands, John de Witt, seems to have been in full sympathy with the young heretic, on whom he conferred a small pension before he had published anything save his Cartesian Principia (1663).
The much more daring and powerful Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670[104]) was promptly condemned by a Dutch clerical synod, along with Hobbes’s Leviathan, which it greatly surpassed in the matter of criticism of the scriptural text. It was the most stringent censure of supernaturalism that had thus far appeared in any modern language; and its preface is an even more mordant attack on popular religion and clericalism than the main body of the work. What seems to-day an odd compromise—the reservation of supra-rational authority for revelation, alongside of unqualified claims for the freedom of reason[105]—was but an adaptation of the old scholastic formula of “twofold truth,” and was perhaps at the time the possible maximum of open rationalism in regard to the current creed, since both Bacon and Locke, as we have seen, were fain to resort to it. As revealed in his letters, Spinoza in almost all things stood at the point of view of the cultivated rationalism of two centuries later. He believed in a historical Jesus, rejecting the Resurrection;[106] disbelieved in ghosts and spirits;[107] rejected miracles;[108] and refused to think of God as ever angry;[109] avowing that he could not understand the Scriptures, and had been able to learn nothing from them as to God’s attributes.[110] The Tractatus could not go so far; but it went far enough to horrify many who counted themselves latitudinarian. It was only in Holland that so aggressive a criticism of Christian faith and practice could then appear; and even there neither publisher nor author dared avow himself. Spinoza even vetoed a translation into Dutch, foreseeing that such a book would be placed under an interdict.[111] It was as much an appeal for freedom of thought (libertas philosophandi) as a demonstration of rational truth; and Spinoza dexterously pointed (c. 20) to the social effects of the religious liberty already enjoyed in Amsterdam as a reason for carrying liberty further. There can be no question that it powerfully furthered alike the deistic and the Unitarian movements in England from the year of its appearance; and, though the States-General felt bound formally to prohibit it on the issue of the second edition in 1674, its effect in Holland was probably as great as elsewhere: at least there seems to have gone on there from this time a rapid modification of the old orthodoxy.
Still more profound, probably, was the effect of the posthumous Ethica (1677), which he had been prevented from publishing in his lifetime,[112] and which not only propounded in parts an absolute pantheism (= atheism[113]), but definitely grounded ethics in human nature. If more were needed to arouse theological rage, it was to be found in the repeated and insistent criticism of the moral and mental perversity of the defenders of the faith[114]—a position not indeed quite consistent with the primary teaching of the treatise on the subject of Will, of which it denies the entity in the ordinary sense. Spinoza was here reverting to the practical attitude of Bacon, which, under a partial misconception, he had repudiated; and he did not formally solve the contradiction. His purpose was to confute the ordinary orthodox dogma that unbelief is wilful sin; and to retort the charge without reconciling it with the thesis was to impair the philosophic argument.[115] It was not on that score, however, that it was resented, but as an unpardonable attack on orthodoxy, not to be atoned for by any words about the spirit of Christ.[116] The discussion went deep and far. A reply to the Tractatus which appeared in 1674, by an Utrecht professor (then dead), is spoken of by Spinoza with contempt;[117] but abler discussion followed, though the assailants mostly fell foul of each other. Franz Cuper or Kuyper of Amsterdam, who in 1676 published an Arcana Atheismi Revelata, professedly refuting Spinoza’s Tractatus, was charged with writing in bad faith and with being on Spinoza’s side—an accusation which he promptly retorted on other critics, apparently with justice.[118]
The able treatise of Prof. E. E. Powell on Spinoza and Religion is open to demur at one point—its reiterated dictum that Spinoza’s character was marred by “lack of moral courage” (p. 44). This expression is later in a measure retreated from: after “his habitual attitude of timid caution,” we have: “Spinoza’s timidity, or, if you will, his peaceable disposition.” If the last-cited concession is to stand, the other phrases should be withdrawn. Moral courage, like every other human attribute, is to be estimated comparatively; and the test-question here is: Did any other writer in Spinoza’s day venture further than he? Moral courage is not identical with the fanaticism which invites destruction; fanaticism supplies a motive which dispenses with courage, though it operates as courage might. But refusal to challenge destruction gratuitously does not imply lack of courage, though of course it may be thereby motived. A quite brave man, it has been noted, will quietly shun a gratuitous risk where one who is “afraid of being afraid” may face it. When all is said, Spinoza was one of the most daring writers of his day; and his ethic made it no more a dereliction of duty for him to avoid provoking arrest and capital punishment than it is for either a Protestant or a rationalist to refrain from courting death by openly defying Catholic beliefs before a Catholic mob in Spain. It is easy for any of us to-day to be far more explicit than Spinoza was. It is doubtful whether any of us, if we had lived in his day and were capable of going as far in heresy, would have run such risks as he did in publishing the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. For those who have lived much in his society, it should be difficult to doubt that, if allowed, he would have dared death on the night of the mob-murder of the De Witts. The formerly suppressed proof of his very plain speaking on the subject of prayer, and his indications of aversion to the practice of grace before meals (Powell, pp. 323–25) show lack even of prudence on his part. Prof. Powell is certainly entitled to censure those recent writers who have wilfully kept up a mystification as to Spinoza’s religiosity; but their lack of courage or candour does not justify an imputation of the same kind upon him. That Spinoza was “no saint” (Powell, p. 43) is true in the remote sense that he was not incapable of anger. But it would be hard to find a Christian who would compare with him in general nobility of character. The proposition that he was not “in any sense religious” (id. ib.) seems open to verbal challenge.
13. The appearance in 1678 of a Dutch treatise “against all sorts of atheists,”[119] and in 1681, at Amsterdam, of an attack in French on Spinoza’s Scriptural criticism,[120] points to a movement outside of the clerical and scholarly class. All along, indeed, the atmosphere of the Arminian or “Remonstrant” School in Holland must have been fairly liberal.[121] Already in 1685 Locke’s friend Le Clerc had taken up the position of Hobbes and Spinoza and Simon on the Pentateuch in his Sentimens de quelques théologiens de Hollande (translated into English and published in 1690 as “Five Letters Concerning the Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures”).[122] And although Le Clerc always remained something of a Scripturalist, and refused to go the way of Spinoza, he had courage enough to revive an ancient heresy by urging, in his commentary on the fourth Gospel (1701), that “the Logos” should be rendered “Reason”—an idea which he probably derived from the Unitarian Zwicker without realizing how far it could take him. His ultimate recantation, on the subject of the authorship of the Pentateuch, served only to weaken his credit with freethinkers, and came too late to arrest the intellectual movement which he had forwarded.
A rationalizing spirit had now begun to spread widely in Holland; and within twenty years of Spinoza’s death there had arisen a Dutch sect, led by Pontiaan van Hattem, a pastor at Philipsland, which blended Spinozism with evangelicalism in such a way as to incur the anathema of the Church.[123] In the time of the English Civil War the fear of the opponents of the new multitude of sects was that England should become “another Amsterdam.”[124] This very multiplicity tended to promote doubt; and in 1713 we find Anthony Collins[125] pointing to Holland as a country where freedom to think has undermined superstition to a remarkable degree. During his stay, in the previous generation, Locke had found a measure of liberal theology, in harmony with his own; but in those days downright heresy was still dangerous. Deurhoff (d. 1717), who translated Descartes and was accused of Spinozism, though he strongly attacked it,[126] had at one time to fly Holland, though by his writings he founded a pantheistic sect known as Deurhovians; and Balthasar Bekker, a Cartesian, persecuted first for Socinianism, incurred so much odium by publishing in 1691 a treatise denying the reality of witchcraft that he had to give up his office as a preacher.
Cp. art. in Biographie Universelle, and Mosheim, 17 Cent. pt. ii, ch. ii, § 35, and notes in Reid’s ed. Bekker was not the first to combat demonology on scriptural grounds; Arnold Geulincx, of Leyden, and the French Protestant refugee Daillon having less confidently put the view before him, the latter in his Daimonologia, 1687 (trans. in English, 1723), and the former in his system of ethics. Gassendi, as we saw, had notably discredited witchcraft a generation earlier; Reginald Scot had impugned its actuality in 1584; and Wier, still earlier, in 1563. And even before the Reformation the learned King Christian II of Denmark (deposed 1523) had vetoed witch-burning in his dominions. (Allen, Hist. de Danemark, French tr. 1878, i, 281.) As Scot’s Discoverie had been translated into Dutch in 1609, Bekker probably had a lead from him. Glanvill’s Blow at Modern Sadducism (1688), reproduced in Sadducismus Triumphatus, undertakes to answer some objections of the kind later urged by Bekker; and the discussion was practically international. Bekker’s treatise, entitled De Betooverte Wereld, was translated into English—first in 1695, from the French, under the title The World Bewitched (only 1 vol. published), and again in 1700 as The World turned upside down. In the French translation, Le Monde Enchanté (4 tom. 1694), it had a great vogue. A refutation was published in English in An Historical Treatise of Spirits, by J. Beaumont, in 1705. It is noteworthy that Bekker was included as one of “four modern sages (vier neuer Welt-Weisen)” with Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza, in a German folio tractate (hostile) of 1702.
14. No greater service was rendered in that age to the spread of rational views than that embodied in the great Dictionnaire Historique et Critique[127] of Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), who, born in France, but driven out by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, spent the best part of his life and did his main work at Rotterdam. Persecuted there for his freethinking, to the extent of having to give up his professorship, he yet produced a virtual encyclopedia for freethinkers in his incomparable Dictionary, baffling hostility by the Pyrrhonian impartiality with which he handled all religious questions. In his youth, when sent by his Protestant father to study at Toulouse, he had been temporarily converted, as was the young Gibbon later, to Catholicism;[128] and the retrospect of that experience seems in Bayle’s case, as in Gibbon’s, to have been a permanent motive to practical skepticism.[129] But, again, in the one case as in the other, skepticism was fortified by abundant knowledge. Bayle had read everything and mastered every controversy, and was thereby the better able to seem to have no convictions of his own. But even apart from the notable defence of the character of atheists dropped by him in the famous Pensées diverses sur la Comète (1682), and in the Éclaircissements in which he defended it, it is abundantly evident that he was an unbeliever. The only alternative view is that he was strictly or philosophically a skeptic, reaching no conclusions for himself; but this is excluded by the whole management of his expositions.[130] It is recorded that it was his vehement description of himself as a Protestant “in the full force of the term,” accompanied with a quotation from Lucretius, that set the clerical diplomatist Polignac upon re-reading the Roman atheist and writing his poem Anti-Lucretius.[131] Bayle’s ostensible Pyrrhonism was simply the tactic forced on him by his conditions; and it was the positive unbelievers who specially delighted in his volumes. He laid down no cosmic doctrines, but he illuminated all; and his air of repudiating such views as Spinoza’s had the effect rather of forcing Spinozists to leave neutral ground than of rehabilitating orthodoxy.
On one theme he spoke without any semblance of doubt. Above all men who had yet written he is the champion of toleration.[132] At a time when in England the school of Locke still held that atheism must not be tolerated, he would accept no such position, insisting that error as such is not culpable, and that, save in the case of a sect positively inciting to violence and disorder, all punishment of opinion is irrational and unjust.[133] On this theme, moved by the memory of his own life of exile and the atrocious persecution of the Protestants of France, he lost his normal imperturbability, as in his Letter to an Abbé (if it be really his), entitled Ce que c’est que la France toute catholique sous le règne de Louis le Grand, in which a controlled passion of accusation makes every sentence bite like an acid, leaving a mark that no dialectic can efface. But it was not only from Catholicism that he suffered, and not only to Catholics that his message was addressed. One of his most malignant enemies was the Protestant Jurieu, who it was that succeeded in having him deprived of his chair of philosophy and history at Rotterdam (1693) on the score of the freethinking of his Pensées sur la Comète. This wrong cast a shadow over his life, reducing him to financial straits in which he had to curtail greatly the plan of his Dictionary. Further, it moved him to some inconsistent censure of the political writings of French Protestant refugees[134]—Jurieu being the reputed author of a violent attack on the rule of Louis XIV, under the title Les Soupirs de la France esclave qui aspire après la liberté (1689).[135] Yet again, the malicious Jurieu induced the Consistory of Rotterdam to censure the Dictionary on the score of the tone and tendency of the article “David” and the renewed vindications of atheists.
But nothing could turn Bayle from his loyalty to reason and toleration; and the malice of the bigots could not deprive him of his literary vogue, which was in the ratio of his unparalleled industry. As a mere writer he is admirable: save in point of sheer wit, of which, however, he has not a little, he is to this day as readable as Voltaire. By force of unfailing lucidity, wisdom, and knowledge, he made the conquest of literary Europe; and fifty years after his death we find the Jesuit Delamare in his (anonymous) apologetic treatise, La Foi justifiée de tout reproche de contradiction avec la raison (1761), speaking of him to the deists as “their theologian, their doctor, their oracle.”[136] He was indeed no less; and his serene exposure of the historic failure of Christianity was all the more deadly as coming from a master of theological history.
15. Meantime, Spinoza had reinforced the critical movement in France,[137] where decline of belief can be seen proceeding after as before the definite adoption of pietistic courses by the king, under the influence of Madame de Maintenon. Abbadie, writing his Traité de la verité de la religion chrétienne at Berlin in 1684, speaks of an “infinity” of prejudiced deists as against the “infinity” of prejudiced believers[138]—evidently thinking of northern Europeans in general; and he strives hard to refute both Hobbes and Spinoza on points of Biblical criticism. In France he could not turn the tide. That radical distrust of religious motives and illumination which can be seen growing up in every country in modern Europe where religion led to war, was bound to be strengthened by the spectacle of the reformed sensualist harrying heresy in his own kingdom in the intervals of his wars with his neighbours. The crowning folly of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes[139] (1685), forcing the flight from France of some three hundred thousand industrious[140] and educated inhabitants for the offence of Protestantism, was as mad a blow to religion as to the State. Less paralysing to economic life than the similar policy of the Church against the Moriscoes in Spain, it is no less striking a proof of the paralysis of practical judgment to which unreasoning faith and systematic ecclesiasticism can lead. Orthodoxy in France was as ecstatic in its praise of the act as had been that of Spain in the case of the expulsion of the Moriscoes. The deed is not to be laid at the single door of the king or of any of his advisers, male or female: the act which deprived France of a vast host of her soundest citizens was applauded by nearly all cultured Catholicism.[141] Not merely the bishops, Bossuet and Fénelon[142] and Masillon, but the Jansenist Arnauld; not merely the female devotees, Mademoiselle de Scudéry and Madame Deshoulières, but Racine, La Bruyère, and the senile la Fontaine—all extolled the senseless deed. The not over-pious Madame de Sévigné was delighted with the “dragonnades,” declaring that “nothing could be finer: no king has done or will do anything more memorable”; the still less mystical Bussy, author of the Histoire amoureuse des Gaules, was moved to pious exultation; and the dying Chancelier le Tellier, on signing the edict of revocation, repeated the legendary cry of Simeon, Nunc dimitte servum tuum, Domine! To this pass had the Catholic creed and discipline brought the mind of France. Only the men of affairs, nourished upon realities—the Vaubans, Saint Simons, and Catinats—realized the insanity of the action, which Colbert (d. 1683) would never have allowed to come to birth.
The triumphers, doubtless, did not contemplate the expatriation of the myriads of Protestants who escaped over the frontiers in the closing years of the century in spite of all the efforts of the royal police, “carrying with them,” as a later French historian writes, “our arts, the secrets of our manufactures, and their hatred of the king.” The Catholics, as deep in civics as in science, thought only of the humiliation and subjection of the heretics—doubtless feeling that they were getting a revenge against Protestantism for the Test Act and the atrocities of the Popish Plot mania in England. The blow recoiled on their country. Within a generation, their children were enduring the agonies of utter defeat at the hands of a coalition of Protestant nations every one of which had been strengthened by the piously exiled sons of France; and in the midst of their mortal struggle the revolted Protestants of the Cévennes so furiously assailed from the rear that the drain upon the king’s forces precipitated the loss of their hold on Germany.
For every Protestant who crossed the frontiers between 1685 and 1700, perhaps, a Catholic neared or crossed the line between indifferentism and active doubt. The steady advance of science all the while infallibly undermined faith; and hardly was the bolt launched against the Protestants when new sapping and mining was going on. Fontenelle (1657–1757), whose Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) popularized for the elegant world the new cosmology, cannot but have undermined dogmatic faith in some directions; above all by his graceful and skilful Histoire des Oracles (also 1686), where “the argumentation passes beyond the thesis advanced. All that he says of oracles could be said of miracles.”[143] The Jesuits found the book essentially “impious”; and a French culture-historian sees in it “the first attack which directs the scientific spirit against the foundations of Christianity. All the purely philosophic arguments with which religion has been assailed are in principle in the work of Fontenelle.”[144] In his abstract thinking he was no less radical, and his Traité de la Liberté[145] established so well the determinist position that it was decisively held by the majority of the French freethinkers who followed. Living to his hundredth year, he could join hands with the freethought of Gassendi and Voltaire,[146] Descartes and Diderot. Yet we shall find him later, in his official capacity of censor of literature, refusing to pass heretical books, on principles that would have vetoed his own. He is in fact a type of the freethought of the age of Louis XIV—Epicurean in the common sense, unheroic, resolute only to evade penalties, guiltless of over-zeal. Not in that age could men generate an enthusiasm for truth.
16. Of the new Epicureans, the most famous in his day was Saint-Evremond,[147] who, exiled from France for his politics, maintained both in London and in Paris, by his writings, a leadership in polite letters. In England he greatly influenced young men like Bolingbroke; and a translation (attributed to Dryden) of one of his writings seems to have given Bishop Butler the provocation to the first and weakest chapter of his Analogy.[148] As to his skepticism there was no doubt in his own day; and his compliments to Christianity are much on a par with those paid later by the equally conforming and unbelieving Shaftesbury, whom he also anticipated in his persuasive advocacy of toleration.[149] Regnard, the dramatist, had a similar private repute as an “Epicurean.” And even among the nominally orthodox writers of the time in France a subtle skepticism touches nearly all opinion. La Bruyère is almost the only lay classic of the period who is pronouncedly religious; and his essay on the freethinkers,[150] against whom his reasoning is so forcibly feeble, testifies to their numbers and to the stress of debate set up by them. Even he, too, writes as a deist against atheists, hardly as a believing Christian. If he were a believer he certainly found no comfort in his faith: whatever were his capacity for good feeling, no great writer of his age betrays such bitterness of spirit, such suffering from the brutalities of life, such utter disillusionment, such unfaith in men. And a certain doubt is cast upon all his professions of opinion by the sombre avowal: “A man born a Christian and a Frenchman finds himself constrained[151] in satire: the great subjects are forbidden him: he takes them up at times, and then turns aside to little things, which he elevates by his ... genius and his style.”[152]
M. Lanson remarks that “we must not let ourselves be abused by the last chapter [Des esprits forts], a collection of philosophic reflections and reasonings, where La Bruyère mingles Plato, Descartes, and Pascal in a vague Christian spiritualism. This chapter, evidently sincere, but without individuality, and containing only the reflex of the thoughts of others, is not a conclusion to which the whole work conducts. It marks, on the contrary, the lack of conclusion and of general views. What is more, with the chapter On the Sovereign, placed in the middle of the volume, it is destined to disarm the temporal and spiritual powers, to serve as passport for the independent freedom of observation in the rest of the Caractères” (p. 599).
On this it may be remarked that the essay in question is not so much Christian as theistic; but the suggestion as to the object is plausible. Taine (Essais de critique et d’histoire, ed. 1901) first remarks (p. 11) on the “christianisme” of the essay, and then decides (p. 12) that “he merely exposes in brief and imperious style the reasonings of the school of Descartes.” It should be noted, however, that in this essay La Bruyère does not scruple to write: “If all religion is a respectful fear of God, what is to be thought of those who dare to wound him in his most living image, which is the sovereign?” (§ 27 in ed. Walckenaer, p. 578. Pascal holds the same tone. Vie, par Madame Perier.) This appears first in the fourth edition; and many other passages were inserted in that and later issues: the whole is an inharmonious mosaic.
Concerning La Bruyère, the truth would seem to be that the inconsequences in the structure of his essays were symptomatic of variability in his moods and opinions. Taine and Lanson are struck by the premonitions of the revolution in his famous picture of the peasants, and other passages; and the latter remarks (p. 603) that “the points touched by La Bruyère are precisely those where the writers of the next age undermined the old order: La Bruyère is already philosophe in the sense which Voltaire and Diderot gave to that term.” But we cannot be sure that the plunges into convention were not real swervings of a vacillating spirit. It is difficult otherwise to explain his recorded approbation of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
The Dialogues sur le Quiétisme, published posthumously under his name (1699), appear to be spurious. This was emphatically asserted by contemporaries (Sentiments critiques sur les Caractères de M. de la Bruyère, 1701, p. 447; Apologie de M. de la Bruyère, 1701, p. 357, both cited by Walckenaer) who on other points were in opposition. Baron Walckenaer (Étude, ed. cited, p. 76 sq.) pronounces that they were the work of Elliès du Pin, a doctor of the Sorbonne, and gives good reasons for the attribution. The Abbé d’Olivet in his Histoire de l’Académie française declares that La Bruyère only drafted them, and that du Pin edited them; but the internal evidence is against their containing anything of La Bruyère’s draught. They are indeed so feeble that no admirer cares to accept them as his. (Cp. note to Suard’s Notice sur la personne et les écrits de la Bruyère, in Didot ed. 1865, p. 20.) Written against Madame Guyon, they were not worth his while.
If the apologetics of Huet and Pascal, Bossuet and Fénelon, had any influence on the rationalistic spirit, it was but in the direction of making it more circumspect, never of driving it out. It is significant that whereas in the year of the issue of the Demonstratio the Duchesse d’Orléans could write that “every young man either is or affects to be an atheist,” Le Vassor wrote in 1688: “People talk only of reason, of good taste, of force of mind, of the advantage of those who can raise themselves above the prejudices of education and of the society in which one is born. Pyrrhonism is the fashion in many things: men say that rectitude of mind consists in ‘not believing lightly’ and in being ‘ready to doubt.’”[153] Pascal and Huet between them had only multiplied doubters. On both lines, obviously, freethought was the gainer; and in a Jesuit treatise, Le Monde condamné par luymesme, published in 1695, the Préface contre l’incrédulité des libertins sets out with the avowal that “to draw the condemnation of the world out of its own mouth, it is necessary to attack first the incredulity of the unbelievers (libertins), who compose the main part of it, and who under some appearance of Christianity conceal a mind either Judaic [read deistic] or pagan.” Such was France to a religious eye at the height of the Catholic triumph over Protestantism. The statement that the libertins formed the majority of “the world” is of course a furious extravagance. But there must have been a good deal of unbelief to have moved a priest to such an explosion. And the unbelief must have been as much a product of revulsion from religious savagery as a result of direct critical impulse, for there was as yet no circulation of positively freethinking literature. For a time, indeed, there was a general falling away in French intellectual prestige,[154] the result, not of the mere “protective spirit” in literature, as is sometimes argued, but of the immense diversion of national energy under Louis XIV to militarism;[155] and the freethinkers lost some of the confidence as well as some of the competence they had exhibited in the days of Molière.[156] There had been too little solid thinking done to preclude a reaction when the king, led by Madame de Maintenon, went about to atone for his debaucheries by an old age of piety. “The king had been put in such fear of hell that he believed that all who had not been instructed by the Jesuits were damned. To ruin anyone it was necessary only to say, ‘He is a Huguenot, or a Jansenist,’ and the thing was done.”[157] In this state of things there spread in France the revived doctrine or temper of Quietism, set up by the Spanish priest, Miguel de Molinos (1640–1697), whose Spiritual Guide, published in Spanish in 1675, appeared in 1681 in Italian at Rome, where he was a highly influential confessor. It was soon translated into Latin, French, and Dutch. In 1685 he was cited before the Inquisition; in 1687 the book was condemned to be burned, and he was compelled to retract sixty-eight propositions declared to be heretical; whereafter, nonetheless, he was imprisoned till his death in 1696. In France, whence the attack on him had begun, his teaching made many converts, notably Madame Guyon, and may be said to have created a measure of religious revival. But when Fénelon took it up (1697), modifying the terminology of Molinos to evade the official condemnation, he was bitterly attacked by Bossuet as putting forth doctrine incompatible with Christianity; the prelates fought for two years; and finally the Pope condemned Fénelon’s book, whereupon he submitted, limiting his polemic to attacks on the Jansenists. Thus the gloomy orthodoxy of the court and the mysticism of the new school alike failed to affect the general intelligence; there was no real building up of belief; and the forward movement at length recommenced.
[1] Prof. Strowski, who is concerned to prove that the freethinkers of the period were mostly men-about-town, claims Patin as a Frondeur (De Montaigne à Pascal, p. 215). But Patin’s attitude in this matter was determined by his detestation of Mazarin, whom he regarded as an arch-scoundrel. Naudé’s defence of the Massacre is forensic. [↑]
[2] Lettres de Gui Patin, No. 188, édit. Reveillé-Parise, 1846, i, 364. [↑]
[3] Cp. Reveillé-Parise, as cited, Notice sur Gui Patin, pp. xxiii-xxvii, and Bayle, art. Patin. [↑]
[4] See the notices of him in Owen’s Skeptics of the French Renaissance; and in Sainte-Beuve. Port Royal, iii, 180, etc. [↑]
[5] De la Vertu des Payens, in t. v. of the 12mo ed. of Œuvres, 1669. [↑]
[6] Hanotaux, Hist. du Cardinal de Richelieu, 1893, i, pref. p. 7. [↑]
[7] Cp. Buckle, ch. viii, 1-vol. ed. pp. 305–10, 325–28. [↑]
[8] See the good criticism of M. Hanotaux in Perrens, Les Libertins en France au xvii. siècle, p. 95 sq. [↑]
[9] Œuvres, ed. 1669, v, 4 sq. Bellarmin, as Le Vayer shows, had similarly explained away Augustine. But the doctrine that heathen virtue was not true virtue had remained orthodox. [↑]
[13] He wrote very many, the final collection filling three volumes folio, and fifteen in duodecimo. The Cincq Dialogues faits à l’imitation des Anciens were pseudonymous, and are not included in the collected works. [↑]
[14] “On le régarde comme le Plutarque de notre siècle” (Perrault, Les Hommes Illustres du XVIIe Siècle, éd. 1701, ii. 131). [↑]
[16] Bayle, Dict. art. La Mothe le Vayer. Cp. introd. to L’Esprit de la Mothe le Vayer, par M. de M. C. D. S. P. D. L. (i.e. De Montlinot, chanoine de Saint Pierre de Lille), 1763, pp. xviii, xxi, xxvi. [↑]
[17] M. Perrens, who endorses this criticism, does not note that some passages he quotes from the Dialogues, as to atheism being less disturbing to States than superstition, are borrowed from Bacon’s essay Of Atheism, of which Le Vayer would read the Latin version. [↑]
[19] In French, 1631; in Latin, 1656, amended. [↑]
[20] Translated into English in 1688, and into French, under the title Traité du Pyrrhonisme de l’église romaine, by N. Chalaire, Amsterdam, 1721. [↑]
[21] Bouillier, Hist. de la Philos. cartésienne, 1854, i, 410 sq., 420 sq.; Lanson, Hist. de la litt. française, 5e édit. p. 396; Brunetière, Études Critiques, 3e série, p. 2; Buckle, 1-vol. ed. p. 338. Bouillier notes (i, 426) that the femmes savantes ridiculed by Molière are Cartesians. [↑]
[22] Bouillier, i, 456; Lanson, p. 397. [↑]
[23] Bouillier, i, 411 sq. [↑]
[27] “Il disait très souvent,” said Pascal’s niece:—”Je ne puis pardonner à Descartes: il aurait bien voulu, dans toute sa philosophie, pouvoir se passer de Dieu; mais il n’a pu s’empêcher de lui accorder une chiquenade, pour mettre le monde en mouvement; après cela il n’a plus que faire de Dieu.” Récit de Marguerite Perier (”De ce que j’ai ouï dire par M. Pascal, mon oncle”), rep. with Pensées, ed. 1853. pp. 38–39. [↑]
[30] See Bouillier, i, 460 sq.; ii, 373 sq.; and introd. to Œuvres philos. du Père Buffier, 1846, p. 4; and cp. Rambaud, Hist. de la civilisation française, 6e édit. ii, 336. [↑]
[33] Cp. Perrens, pp. 68–69, and refs. [↑]
[34] Cp. Strowski, De Montaigne à Pascal, p. 141. [↑]
[35] See Duvernet, Vie de Voltaire, ch. i, and note 1; and Perrens, pp. 74–80. [↑]
[36] For all that is known of Petit see the Avertissement to Bibliophile Jacob’s edition of Paris ridicule et burlesque au 17ième siècle, and refs. in Perrens, p. 153. After Petit’s death, his friend Du Pelletier defended him as being a deist; but he seems in his youthful writings to have blasphemed at large, and he had been guilty of assassinating a young monk. He was burned, however, for blaspheming the Virgin. [↑]
[37] Guizot, Corneille et son temps, ed. 1880, p. 200. The circle of the Hôtel Rambouillet were especially hostile. Cp. Palissot’s note to Polyeucte, end. On the other hand, Corneille found it prudent to cancel four skeptical lines which he had originally put in the mouth of the pagan Severus, the sage of the piece. Perrens, Les Libertins, p. 140. [↑]
[38] Under whom he studied in his youth with a number of other notably independent spirits, among them Cyrano de Bergerac. See Sainte-Beuve’s essay on Molière, prefixed to the Hachette edition. Molière held by Gassendi as against Descartes. Bouillier, i, 542 sq. [↑]
[39] Constant Coquelin, art. “Don Juan” in the International Review, September, 1903, p. 61—an acute and scholarly study. [↑]
[40] “Molière is a freethinker to the marrow of his bones” (Perrens, p. 280). Cp. Lanson, p. 520; Fournier, Études sur Molière, 1885, pp. 122–23; Soury, Brêv. de l’hist. du matér. p. 384. “Ginguené,” writes Sainte-Beuve, “a publié une brochure pour montrer Rabelais précurseur de la révolution française: c’étoit inutile à prouver sur Molière” (essay cited). [↑]
[41] Act II, sc. iv. in Œuvres Comiques, etc., ed. Jacob, rep. by Garnier, pp. 426–27. [↑]
[42] See Jacob’s note in loc., ed. cited, p. 455. [↑]
[43] E.g. his Lettre contre un Pédant (No. 13 of the Lettres Satiriques in ed. cited, p. 181), which, however, appears to have been mutilated in some editions; as one of the deistic sentences cited by M. Perrens, p. 247, does not appear in the reprint of Bibliophile Jacob. [↑]
[44] E.g. the Histoire des Oiseaux in the Histoire Comique des états et empires du Soleil, ed. Jacob (Garnier), p. 278; and the Fragment de Physique (same vol.). [↑]
[45] See the careful criticism of Perrens, pp. 248–50. [↑]
[46] Bibliophile Jacob, pref. to ed. cited, pp. i-ii. [↑]
[47] Perrens, p. 302. Compare Bossuet’s earlier sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent, 1665, cited by Perrens, pp. 253–54, where he speaks with something like fury of the free discussion around him. [↑]
[48] Cousin plausibly argues that Pascal began writing Pensées under the influence of a practice set up in her circle by Madame de Sablé. Mme. de Sablé, 5e édit. p. 124 sq. [↑]
[49] It is to be remembered that the work as published contained matter not Pascal’s. Cp. Brunetière, Études, iii, 46–47; and the editions of the Pensées by Faugère and Havet. [↑]
[50] As to some of these see Perrens, pp. 158–69. They included the great Condé and some of the women in his circle; all of them unserious in their skepticism, and all “converted” when the physique gave the required cue. [↑]
[51] Pensées, ed. Faugère, ii, 168–69. The “abêtira” comes from Montaigne. [↑]
[52] Thus Mr. Owen treats Pascal as a skeptic, which philosophically he was, insofar as he really philosophized and did not merely catch at pleas for his emotional beliefs. “Les Pensées de Pascal,” writes Prof. Le Dantec, “sont à mon avis le livre le plus capable de renforcer l’athéisme chez un athée” (L’Athéisme, 1906, pp. 24–25). They have in fact always had that effect. [↑]
[53] De la Delicatesse, 1671, dial. v, p. 329, etc. [↑]
[54] Vinet, Études sur Blaise Pascal, 3e édit. p. 267 sq. [↑]
[55] Cp. the Éloge de Pascal by Bordas Demoulin in Didot ed. of the Lettres, 1854, pp. xxii–xxiii, and cit. from Saint-Beuve. Mark Pattison, it seems, held that the Jesuits had the best of the argument. See the Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone, 1904, p. 207. As regards the effect of Jansenism on belief, we find De Tocqueville pronouncing that “Le Jansenisme ouvrit ... la brêche par laquelle la philosophie du 18e siècle devait faire irruption” (Hist. philos. du règne de Louis XV, 1849, i, 2). This could truly be said of Pascal. [↑]
[56] Cp. Voltaire’s letter of 1768, cited by Morley, Voltaire, 4th ed. p. 159. [↑]
[57] Cp. Owen, French Skeptics, pp. 762–63, 767. [↑]
[58] This was expressly urged against Huet by Arnauld. See the Notice in Jourdain’s ed. of the Logique de Port Royal, 1854, p. xi; Perrens, Les Libertins, p. 301; and Bouillier Hist. de la philos. cartésienne, 1854, i, 595–96, where are cited the letters of Arnauld (Nos. 830, 834, and 837 in Œuvres Compl. iii, 396, 404, 424) denouncing Huet’s Pyrrhonism as “impious” and perfectly adapted to the purposes of the freethinkers. [↑]
[59] Cp. Alexandre Westphal, Les Sources du Pentateuque, i (1888), pp. 64–68. [↑]
[60] Huet himself incurred a charge of temerity in his handling of textual questions. Id. p. 66. [↑]
[61] Pattison, Essays, 1889, i. 303–304. [↑]
[63] “After all, a book [the Bible] cannot make a stand against the wild, living intellect of man.” Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, 1st ed. p. 382; ed. 1875, p. 245. The same is said by Newman of religion in general (p. 243). [↑]
[64] Pattison disparages it as colourless, a fault he charges on Jesuit Latin in general. But by most moderns the Latin style of Huet will be found pure and pleasant. [↑]
[65] Pattison, Essays, i, 299. Cp. Bouillier, i, 595. [↑]
[66] Fontenelle, Éloge sur Régis; Bouillier, Philos. cartés., i, 507. [↑]
[67] Réponse to Huet’s Censura philosophiæ cartes., 1691; Bouillier, i, 515. [↑]
[68] Usage de la raison et de la foi, 1704, liv. i, ptie. i, ch. vii; Bouillier, p. 511. [↑]
[69] Bouillier, i, 521–25. [↑]
[70] Lettre de 10 août, 1677, No. 591, éd. Nodier. [↑]
[72] Méditations chrétiennes, ix, § 13. [↑]
[73] Entretiens métaphysiques, viii. [↑]
[75] Bouillier, ii, 33. So Kuno Fischer: “In brief, Malebranche’s doctrine, rightly understood, is Spinoza’s” (Descartes and his School, Eng. tr. 1890, p. 589. Cp. p. 542). [↑]
[76] The work of Arnauld was reprinted in 1724 with a remarkable Approbation by Clavel, in which he eulogizes the style and the dialectic of Arnauld, and expresses the hope that the book may “guérir, s’il se peut, d’une étrange préoccupation et d’une excessive confiance, ceux qui enseignent ou soutiennent comme evident ce qu’il y a de plus dangereux dans la nouvelle philosophie non-obstant les défenses faites par le feu Roi Louis XIV à l’Université d’Angers en l’année 1675 et à l’Université de Paris aux années 1691 et 1704 de le laisser enseigner ou soutenir.” [↑]
[77] Des vrayes et des fausses idées, ch. xxviii. [↑]
[78] Recherche de la Vérité, liv. vi, ptie. ii, ch. iii. [↑]
[79] This was the main theme of the finished Éloge of Fontenelle, and was acknowledged by Bayle, Daguesseau, Arnauld, Bossuet, Voltaire, and Diderot, none of whom agreed with him. Bouillier, ii, 19. Fontenelle opposed Malebranche’s philosophy in his Doutes sur le système physique des causes occasionelles. Id. p. 575. [↑]
[80] Cp. Bouillier, ii, 260–61. [↑]
[81] He is not mentioned by Ueberweg, Lange, or Lewes. His importance in æsthetics, however, is recognized by some moderns, though he is not named in Mr. Bosanquet’s History of Æsthetic. [↑]
[82] Traité des premières vérités, 1724, §§ 521–31. [↑]
[83] Bouillier, introd. to Buffier’s Œuvres philosophiques, 1846, p. xiii. [↑]
[84] Remarques sur les principes de la metaphysique de Locke, passages cited by Bouillier. [↑]
[85] Œuvres, éd. Bouillier, p. 329. [↑]
[86] Cp. Bouillier, Hist. de la philos. cartés., ii, 391. [↑]
[87] Malebranche, Traité de Morale, liv. ii, ch. 10. Cp. Bouillier, i, 582, 588–90; ii, 23. [↑]
[88] Cp. Westphal, Les Sources du Pentateuque, 1888, i, 67 sq. [↑]
[89] Præadamitæ, sive Exercitatio super versibus 12, 13, 14 cap. 5, Epist. D. Pauli ad Romanos, Quibus inducuntur Primi Homines ante Adamum conditi. The notion of a pre-Adamite human race, as we saw, had been held by Bruno. (Above, p. 46.) [↑]
[90] My copies of the Præadamitæ and Systema bear no place-imprint, but simply “Anno Salutis MDCLV.” Both books seem to have been at once reprinted in 12mo. [↑]
[91] Bayle, Dictionnaire, art. Peyrere. A correspondent of Bayle’s concludes his account of “le Préadamite” thus: “Le Pereire étoit le meilleur homme du monde, le plus doux, et qui tranquillement croyoit fort peu de chose.” There is a satirical account of him in the Lettres de Gui Patin, April 5,1658 (No. 454, ed. Reveillé-Parise, 1846, iii, 83), cited by Bayle. [↑]
[92] See the account of his book by Mr. Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, i, 295–97. Rejecting as he did the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, he ranks with Hobbes and Spinoza among the pioneers of true criticism. Indeed, as his book seems to have been in MS. in 1645, he may precede Hobbes. Patin had heard of Peyrère’s Præadamitæ as ready for printing in 1643. Let. 169, ed. cited, i, 297. [↑]
[93] Kuno Fischer, Descartes and his School, pp. 254–68. [↑]
[94] Colerus (i.e., Köhler), Vie de Spinoza, in Gfrörer’s ed. of the Opera, pp. xlv–xlvii. [↑]
[95] Cited by George Sinclar in pref. to Satan’s Invisible World Discovered, 1685,rep. 1871. I have been unable to meet with a copy of Mastricht’s book. [↑]
[96] “Novitates Cartesianæ multis parasangas superunt Arminianas.” [↑]
[97] Nichols, Works of Arminius, 1824, i, 257 b (paging partly duplicated). [↑]
[98] Cp. Bouillier, i, 293–94. [↑]
[99] Colerus, Vie de Spinoza, in Gfrörer’s ed. of Opera, p. xxv; Martineau, Study of Spinoza, 1882, pp. 20–22; Pollock, Spinoza, 2nd ed. 1899, pp. 10–14. [↑]
[100] As set forth by Joel, Beiträge zur Gesch. der Philos., Breslau, 1876. See citations in Land’s note to his lecture in Spinoza: Four Essays, 1882, pp. 51–53. [↑]
[101] Land, “In Memory of Spinoza,” in Spinoza: Four Essays, pp. 57–58; Sigwart, as there cited; Pollock, Spinoza, p. 12. Cp. however, Martineau, p. 101, note. [↑]
[102] Renati Des Cartes Princip. Philos. more geometrico demonstratæ, 1663. [↑]
[103] Cp. Martineau, pp. 46, 57. [↑]
[104] Reprinted in 1674, without place-name, and with the imprint of an imaginary Hamburg publisher. [↑]
[106] Ep. xxiv, to Oldenburg. [↑]
[107] Epp. lviii, lx, to Boxel. [↑]
[108] Ep. xxiii, to Oldenburg. [↑]
[110] Ep. xxxiv, to W. van Bleyenberg. [↑]
[111] Ep. xlvii, to Jellis, Feb. 1671. [↑]
[112] Ep. xix, 1675, to Oldenburg. [↑]
[113] “Spinozism is atheistic, and has no valid ground for retaining the word ‘God’” (Martineau, p. 349). This estimate is systematically made good by Prof. E. E. Powell of Miami University in his Spinoza and Religion (1906). See in particular ch. v. The summing-up is that “the right name for Spinoza’s philosophy is Atheistic Monism” (pp. 339–40). [↑]
[114] Ethica, pt. i, App.; pt. ii, end; pt. v, prop. 41, schol. Cp. the Letters, passim. [↑]
[115] The solution is, of course, that the attitude of the will in the forming of opinion may or may not be passionally perverse, in the sense of being inconsistent. To show that it is inconsistent may be a means of enlightening it; and an aspersion to that effect may be medicinal. Spinoza might truly have said that passional perversity was at least as common on the orthodox side as on the other. In any case, he quashes his own criticism of Bacon. Cp. the author’s essay on Spinoza in Pioneer Humanists. [↑]
[116] Pt. iv, prop. 68, schol. [↑]
[117] Ep. 1; 2 June, 1674. [↑]
[118] Colerus, as cited, p. liv. Cuper appears to have been genuinely anti-Spinozist, while his opponent, Breitburg, or Bredenburg, of Rotterdam, was a Spinozist. Both were members of the society of “Collegiants,” a body of non-dogmatic Christians, which for a time was broken up through their dissensions. Mosheim, 17 Cent. sec. ii, pt. ii, ch. vii, § 2, and note. [↑]
[119] Theologisch, Philosophisch, en Historisch process voor God, tegen allerley Atheisten. By Francis Ridder, Rotterdam, 1678. [↑]
[120] L’Impiétié Convaincu, “par Pierre Yvon,” Amsterdam, 1681. Really by the Sieur Noël Aubert de Versé. This appears to have been reprinted in 1685 under the title L’Impie convaincu, ou Dissertation contre Spinosa, ou l’on réfute les fondemens de son athéisme. [↑]
[121] See Fox Bourne’s Life of Locke, ii, 282–83, as to Locke’s friendly relations with the Remonstrants in 1683–89. [↑]
[122] See the summary of his argument by Alexandre Westphal, Les Sources du Pentateuque, 1888, i, 78 sq. [↑]
[123] Mosheim, Reid’s ed. p. 836; Martineau, pp. 327–28. The first MS. of the treatise of Spinoza, De Deo et Homine, found and published in the nineteenth century, bore a note which showed it to have been used by a sect of Christian Spinozists. See Janet’s ed. 1878, p. 3. They altered the text, putting “faith” for “opinion.” Id. p. 53, notes. [↑]
[124] Edwards, Gangræna, as before cited. [↑]
[125] Discourse of Freethinking, p. 28. [↑]
[126] Colerus, as cited, p. lviii. [↑]
[127] First ed. Rotterdam, 2 vols. folio, 1696. [↑]
[128] Albert Cazes, Pierre Bayle, sa vie, ses idées, son influence, son œuvre, 1905, pp. 6, 7. [↑]
[129] A movement of skepticism had probably been first set up in the young Bayle by Montaigne, who was one of his favourite authors before his conversion (Cazes, p. 5). Montaigne, it will be remembered, had been a fanatic in his youth. Thus three typical skeptics of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries had known what it was to be Catholic believers. [↑]
[130] Cp. the essay on The Skepticism of Bayle in Sir J. F. Stephen’s Horæ Sabbaticæ, vol. iii, and the remarks of Perrens, Les Libertins, pp. 331–37. [↑]
[131] Éloge de M. le Cardinal Polignac prefixed to Bougainville’s translation, L’Anti-Lucrèce, 1767, i, 141. Bayle’s quoted words are: “Oui, monsieur, je suis bon Protestant, et dans toute la force du mot; car au fond de mon âme je proteste contre tout ce qui se dit et tout ce qui se fait.” [↑]
[132] Cp. the testimony of Bonet-Maury, Histoire de la liberté de conscience en France, 1900, p. 55. Besides the writings above cited, note, in the Dictionnaire, art. Mahomet, § ix; art. Conecte; art. Simonide, notes H and G; art. Sponde, note C. [↑]
[133] Commentaire philosophique sur la parabole: Contrains-les d’entrer, 2e ptie, vi. Cp. the Critique générale de l’histoire du Calvinisme du Père Maimbourg, passim. [↑]
[134] See pref. to Eng. tr. of Hotman’s Franco-Gallia, 1711. [↑]
[135] Rep. at Amsterdam, 1788, under the title, Vœux d’un Patriote. Jurieu’s authorship is not certain. Cp. Ch. Nodier, Mélanges tirés d’une petite bibliothèque, 1829, p. 357. But it is more likely than the alternative ascription to Le Vassor. The book made such a sensation that the police of Louis XIV destroyed every copy they could find; and in 1772 the Chancelier Maupeou was said to have paid 500 livres for a copy at auction over the Duc d’Orléans. [↑]
[137] The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus had been translated into French in 1678 by Saint-Glain, a Protestant, who gave it no fewer than three other titles in succession to evade prosecution. (Note to Colerus in Gfrörer’s ed. of Spinoza, p. xlix.) In addition to the work of Aubert de Versé, above mentioned, replies were published by Simon, De la Motte (minister of the Savoy Chapel, London), Lami, a Benedictine, and others. Their spirit may be divined from Lami’s title, Nouvel athéisme renversé, 1706. [↑]
[138] Tom. I. § ii, ch. ix (ed. 1864, i, 134. 177). [↑]
[139] The destruction of Protestant liberties was not the work of the single Act of Revocation. It had begun in detail as early as 1663. From the withholding of court favour it proceeded to subsidies for conversions, and thence to a graduated series of invasions of Protestant rights, so that the formal Revocation was only the violent consummation of a process. See the recital in Bonet-Maury, Histoire de la liberté de conscience en France, 1900, pp. 46–52. [↑]
[140] As to the loss to French industry see Bonet-Maury, as cited, p. 59, and refs. [↑]
[141] See Duruy, Hist. de la France, ii, 253; Bonet-Maury, as cited, pp. 53–66. [↑]
[142] As to whose attitude at this crisis see O. Douen, L’Intolérance de Fénelon, 1880. [↑]
[143] Lanson, Hist. de la litt. française, p. 627. [↑]
[144] Id ib. Cp. Demogeot, p. 468. [↑]
[145] Not printed till 1743, in the Nouvelles libertés de penser; and still read in MS. by Grimm in 1754. Fontenelle was also credited with a heretical letter on the resurrection, and an essay on the Infinite, pointing to disbelief. It should be noted, however, that he stands for deism in his essay, De l’existence de Dieu, which is a guarded application of the design argument against what was then assumed to be the only alternative—the “fortuitous concourse of atoms.” [↑]
[146] But Voltaire and he were not at one. He is the “nain de Saturne” in Micromégas. [↑]
[147] B. 1613; d. 1703. A man who lived to ninety can have been no great debauchee. [↑]
[148] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, p. 172. [↑]
[149] Cp. Gidel, Étude prefixed to Œuvres Choisies de Saint-Evremond, ed. Garnier, pp. 64–69. [↑]
[150] Caractères (1687), ch. xvi: Les Esprits Forts. [↑]
[151] “Is embarrassed” in the first edition. [↑]
[152] Des ouvrages de l’esprit, near end. § 65 in ed. Walckenaer, p. 176. [↑]
[153] M. Le Vassor, De la véritable religion, 1688, préf. Le Vassor speaks in the same preface of “this multitude of libertins and of unbelievers which now terrifies us.” His book seeks to vindicate the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, inspiration, prophecies, and miracles, against Spinoza, Le Clerc, and others. [↑]
[154] Cp. Huet, Huetiana, § 1. [↑]
[155] The question is discussed in the author’s Buckle and his Critics, pp. 324–42, and ed. of Buckle’s Introduction. Buckle’s view, however, was held by Huet, Huetiana, § 73. [↑]
[156] Cp. Perrens, pp. 310–14. [↑]
[157] Letter of the Duchesse d’Orléans, cited by Rocquain, L’Esprit révolutionnaire avant la révolution, 1878, p. 3, note. [↑]