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]