Naturally, the less sacrosanct dogmatism was the more freely assailed; and in the sixteenth century the attacks became numerous and vehement. Luther was a furious anti-Aristotelian,[279] as were also some Calvinists; but in 1570 we find Beza declaring to Ramus[280] that “the Genevese have decreed, once and for ever, that they will never, neither in logic nor in any other branch of learning, turn away from the teaching of Aristotle.” At Oxford the same code held.[281] In Italy, Telesio, who notably anticipates the tone of Bacon as to natural science, and is largely followed by him, influenced Bruno in the anti-Aristotelian direction,[282] though it was in a long line from Aristotle that he got his principle of the eternity of the universe. The Spaniard Ludovicus Vives, too (1492–1540), pronounced by Lange one of the clearest heads of his age, had insisted on progress beyond Aristotle in the spirit of naturalist science.[283] But the typical anti-Aristotelian of the century was Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée, 1515–1572), whose long and strenuous battle against the ruling school at Paris brought him to his death in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.[284] Ramus hardily laid it down that “there is no authority over reason, but reason ought to be queen and ruler over authority.”[285] Such a message was of more value than his imperfect attempt to supersede the Aristotelian logic. Bacon, who carried on in England the warfare against the Aristotelian tradition, never ventured so to express himself as against the theological tyranny in particular, though, as we have seen, the general energy and vividness of his argumentation gave him an influence which undermined the orthodoxies to which he professed to conform. On the other hand, he did no such service to exact science as was rendered in his day by Kepler and Galileo and their English emulators; and his full didactic influence came much later into play.
Like fallacies to Bacon’s may be found in Descartes, whose seventeenth-century reputation as a champion of theism proved mainly the eagerness of theists for a plausible defence. Already in his own day his arguments were logically confuted by both Gassendi and Hobbes; and his partial success with theists was a success of partisanism. It was primarily in respect of his habitual appeal to reason and argument, in disregard of the assumptions of faith, and secondarily in respect of his real scientific work, that he counts for freethought. Ultimately his method undermined his creed; and it is not too much to say of him that, next to Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo,[286] he laid a good part of the foundation of modern philosophy and science,[287] Gassendi largely aiding. Though he never does justice to Galileo, from his fear of provoking the Church, it can hardly be doubted that he owes to him in large part the early determination of his mind to scientific methods; for it is difficult to believe that the account he gives of his mental development in the Discours de la Méthode (1637) is biographically true. It is rather the schemed statement, by a ripened mind, of how it might best have been developed. Nor did Descartes, any more than Bacon, live up to the intellectual idea he had framed. All through his life he anxiously sought to propitiate the Church;[288] and his scientific as well as his philosophic work was hampered in consequence. In England Henry More, who latterly recoiled from his philosophy, still thought his physics had been spoiled by fear of the Church, declaring that the imprisonment of Galileo “frighted Des Cartes into such a distorted description of motion that no man’s reason could make good sense of it, nor modesty permit him to fancy anything nonsense in so excellent an author.”[289]
But nonetheless the unusual rationalism of Descartes’s method, avowedly aiming at the uprooting of all his own prejudices[290] as a first step to truth, displeased the Jesuits, and could not escape the hostile attention of the Protestant theologians of Holland, where Descartes passed so many years of his life. Despite his constant theism, accordingly, he had at length to withdraw.[291] A Jesuit, Père Bourdin, sought to have the Discours de la Méthode at once condemned by the French clergy, but the attempt failed for the time being. France was just then, in fact, the most freethinking part of Europe;[292] and Descartes, though not so unsparing with his prejudices as he set out to be, was the greatest innovator in philosophy that had arisen in the Christian era. He made real scientific discoveries, too, where Bacon only inspired an approach and schemed a wandering road to them. He first effectively applied algebra to geometry; he first scientifically explained the rainbow; he at once accepted and founded on Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, which most physiologists of the day derided; and he welcomed Aselli’s discovery of the lacteals, which was rejected by Harvey.[293] And though as regards religion his timorous conformities deprive him of any heroic status, it is perhaps not too much to pronounce him “the great reformer and liberator of the European intellect.”[294] One not given to warm sympathy with freethought has avowed that “the common root of modern philosophy is the doubt which is alike Baconian and Cartesian.”[295]
Only less important, in some regards, was the influence of Pierre Gassend or Gassendi (1592–1655), who, living his life as a canon of the Church, reverted in his doctrine to the philosophy of Epicurus, alike in physics and ethics.[296] It seems clear that he never had any religious leanings, but simply entered the Church on the advice of friends who pointed out to him how much better a provision it gave, in income and leisure, than the professorship he held in his youth at the university of Aix.[297] Professing like Descartes a strict submission to the Church, he yet set forth a theory of things which had in all ages been recognized as fundamentally irreconcilable with the Christian creed; and his substantial exemption from penalties is to be set down to his position, his prudence, and his careful conformities. The correspondent of Galileo and Kepler, he was the friend of La Mothe le Vayer and Naudé; and Gui Patin was his physician and intimate.[298] Strong as a physicist and astronomer where Descartes was weak, he divides with him and Galileo the credit of practically renewing natural philosophy; Newton being Gassendist rather than Cartesian.[299] Indeed, Gassendi’s youthful attack on the Aristotelian physics (1624) makes him the predecessor of Descartes; and he expressly opposed his contemporary on points of physics and metaphysics on which he thought him chimerical, and so promoted unbelief where Descartes made for orthodoxy.[300] Of the criticisms on his Méditations to which Descartes published replies, those of Gassendi are, with the partial exception of those of Hobbes, distinctly the most searching and sustained. The later position of Hume, indeed, is explicitly taken up in the first objection of Cratérus;[301] but the persistent pressure of Gassendi on the theistic and spiritistic assumptions of Descartes reads like the reasoning of a modern atheist.[302] Yet the works of Descartes were in time placed on the Index, condemned by the king’s council, and even vetoed in the universities, while those of Gassendi were not, though his early work on Aristotelianism had to be stopped after the first volume because of the anger it aroused.[303] Himself one of the most abstemious of men,[304] like his master Epicurus (of whom he wrote a Life, 1647), he attracted disciples of another temperamental cast as well as many of his own; and as usual his system is associated with the former, who are duly vilified by orthodoxy, although certainly no worse than the average orthodox.
Among his other practical services to rationalism was a curious experiment, made in a village of the Lower Alps, by way of investigating the doctrine of witchcraft. A drug prepared by one sorcerer was administered to others of the craft in presence of witnesses. It threw them into a deep sleep, on awakening from which they declared that they had been at a witches’ Sabbath. As they had never left their beds, the experiment went far to discredit the superstition.[305] One significant result of the experiment was seen in the course later taken by Colbert in overriding a decision of the Parlement of Rouen as to witchcraft (1670). That Parlement proposed to burn fourteen sorcerers. Colbert, who had doubtless read Montaigne as well as Gassendi, gave Montaigne’s prescription that the culprits should be dosed with hellebore—a medicine for brain disturbance.[306] In 1672, finally, the king issued a declaration forbidding the tribunals to admit charges of mere sorcery;[307] and any future condemnations were on the score of blasphemy and poisoning. Yet further, in the section of his posthumous Syntagma Philosophicum (1658) entitled De Effectibus Siderum,[308] Gassendi dealt the first great blow on the rationalist side to the venerable creed of astrology, assailed often, but to little purpose, from the side of faith; bringing to his task, indeed, more asperity than he is commonly credited with, but also a stringent scientific and logical method, lacking in the polemic of the churchmen, who had attacked astrology mainly because it ignored revelation. It is sobering to remember, however, that he was one of those who could not assimilate Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, which Descartes at once adopted and propounded.
Such anomalies meet us many times in the history of scientific as of other lines of thought; and the residual lesson is the recognition that progress is infinitely multiplex in its causation. Nothing is more vital in this regard than scientific truth, which is as a light-house in seas of speculation; and those who, like Galileo and Descartes, add to the world’s exact knowledge, perform a specific service not matched by that of the Bacons, who urge right method without applying it. Yet in that kind also an incalculable influence has been wielded. Many minds can accept scientific truths without being thereby led to scientific ways of thought; and thus the reasoners and speculators, the Brunos and the Vaninis, play their fruitful part, as do the mentors who turn men’s eyes on their own vices of intellectual habit. And in respect of creeds and philosophies, finally, it is not so much sheer soundness of result as educativeness of method, effectual appeal to the thinking faculty and to the spirit of reason, that determines a thinker’s influence. This kind of impact we shall find historically to be the service done by Descartes to European thought for a hundred years.
From Descartes, then, as regards philosophy, more than from any professed thinker of his day, but also from the other thinkers we have noted, from the reactions of scientific discovery, from the terrible experience of the potency of religion as a breeder of strife and its impotence as a curber of evil, and from the practical freethinking of the more open-minded of that age in general, derives the great rationalistic movement, which, taking clear literary form first in the seventeenth century, has with some fluctuations broadened and deepened down to our own day.
[1] Stow’s Annals, ed. 1615, pp. 570, 575. [↑]
[2] Burnet, Hist. of the Reformation, ed. Nares, ii, 179; iii, 289; Strype, Memorials of Cranmer, ed. 1848–54, ii, 100. [↑]