Chapter XXXV: Conclusion (2)

[328] On this see Lange, Hist. of Materialism, sec. iii, ch. ii.

[329] 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.

[330] E.g., Leviathan, pt. iv, ch. xlvii.

[331] Kuno Fischer, Descartes and his School, pp. 232-35. Cp. Bentley, Sermons on Atheism (i.e., his Boyle Lectures), ed. 1724, p. 8.

[332] 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.)

[333] 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.

[334] Croom Robertson, Hobbes, p. 196; Pepys's Diary, Sept. 3, 1668.

[335] Leviathan, ch. ii; Morley's ed. p. 19; chs. xiv, xv, pp. 66, 71, 72, 78; ch. xxix, pp. 148, 149.

[336] Leviathan, chs. xv, xvii, xviii. Morley's ed. pp. 72, 82, 83, 85.

[337] "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).

[338] 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).

[339] See the headings, Council, Religion, etc.

[340] G. W. Johnson, Memoirs of John Selden, 1835, pp. 348, 362.

[341] G. W. Johnson, p. 264.

[342] Above, p. 20.

[343] G. W. Johnson, pp. 258, 302.

[344] Id. p. 302. Cp. in the Table Talk, art. Trinity, his view of the Roundheads.

[345] Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. 1810, i, 181. Cp. i, 292; ii, 44.

[346] 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).

[347] Lords Journals, January 16, 1645-1646; Gangræna, as cited, p. 150; cp. Gardiner, Hist. of the Civil War, ed. 1893, iii, 11.

[348] Green, Short Hist. ch. viii, § 8, pp. 551-52; Gardiner, Hist. of the Civil War, iv, 22.

[349] Gangræna, p. 18.

[350] 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.

[351] Rev. James Cranford, Hæreseo-Machia, a Sermon, 1646, p. 10.

[352] No. 100 in Gangræna.

[353] Cranford, as cited, p. 11 sq.

[354] See G. P. Gooch's Hist. of Democ. Ideas in England in the 17th Century, 1898, ch. vi.

[355] Above, pp. 4 and 8.

[356] 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.

[357] The fourth English edition appeared in 1754.

[358] 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.

[359] Gangræna, pp. 152-53.

[360] Pp. 18-36.

[361] Id. p. 15. As to other sects mentioned by him cp. Tayler, p. 194.

[362] 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.

[363] See the citations in Buckle, 3-vol. ed. i, 347; 1-vol. ed. p. 196.

[364] Alex. Ross, Pansebeia, 4th ed. 1672, p. 379.

[365] Cp. the present writer's Buckle and his Critics, 1895, ch. viii, § 2.

[366] See above, vol. i, p. 5.

[367] Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson, 3rd ed. i, 200.

[368] Heresiography: The Heretics and Sectaries of these Times, 1614. Epist. Ded.

[369] Discourse, ed. 1857, p. 226.

[370] Dr. J. Brown's pref. to ed. of 1857, p. xxii.

[371] More, Collection of Philosophical Writings, 4th ed. 1692, p. 95.

[372] Fabricius, Delectus Argumentorum et Syllabus Scriptorum, 1725, p. 341.

[373] No copy in British Museum.

[374] 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.

[375] 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.

[376] Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography, Art. 285.

[377] 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."

[378] See bk. ii, ch. x. Page 338, 3rd ed. 1666.

[379] 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.

[380] Cp. Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, i. 109.

[381] The Reformed Pastor, abr. ed. 1826, pp. 236, 239.

[382] Work cited, ed. 1667, p. 136. The proposition is reiterated.

[383] Id. p. 388.

[384] Reasons of the Christian Religion, pp. 388-89.

[385] Religio Stoici, Edinburgh, 1663. p. 19. The essay was reprinted in 1665, and in London in 1693 under the title of The Religious Stoic.

[386] Id. p. 18.

[387] Id. p. 124.

[388] Id. p. 76.

[389] Id. p. 69.

[390] Religio Stoici, p. 116.

[391] Id. p. 122.

[392] 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."

[393] Reason: an Essay, ed. 1690, p. 21. Cp. p. 152.

[394] 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.

[395] Work cited, 2nd ed. pt. ii, pp. 106-15.

[396] 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.

[397] Replying to Herbert's De Veritate, which he seems not to have read before.

[398] Pref. to Obs. upon the United Prov. of the Netherlands, in Works, ed. 1814, i, 36.

[399] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 87, 94-98, 111, 112.

[400] As to the religious immoralism see Mosheim, 17 Cent. sec. ii, pt. ii, ch. ii, § 23, and Murdock's notes.

[401] Compare the picture of average Protestant deportment given by Benjamin Bennet in his Discourses against Popery, 1714, p. 377.

[402] More, Coll. of Philos. Writings, 4th ed. 1712, gen. pref. p. 7.

[403] 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.

[404] Cited by Bonnet, A Defence of the Discourse of Schism, etc., as cited, p. 41.

[405] 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."

[406] The Reasonableness of Scripture Belief, 1672, Epist. Ded.

[407] Rep. 1675; 2nd ed. 1691; rep. in the Phoenix, vol. ii, 1708; 3rd ed. 1736.

[408] 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.

[409] Tract. Theol. Polit. c. 15.

[410] Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, ii, 381-82; Granger, Biog. Hist. of England, 5th ed. v, 293.

[411] Johnson's Life of Dr. Watts, 1785, App. i.

[412] Toulmin, Hist. of the Prot. Dissenters, 1814, citing Johnson's Life of Dr. Watts.

[413] 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.

[414] Work cited, pp. 10, 14, 30, 55.

[415] Dr. Urwick, Life of Howe, as cited, p. xxxii.

[416] 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).

[417] Work cited, 2nd ed. 1682, pp. 32, 38-40, 45-48.

[418] Id. pp. 54-55.

[419] Id. p. 52.

[420] Twelve Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions, 1692, pp. 438-39.

[421] This has been ascribed, without any good ground, to Charles Blount. It does not seem to me to be in his style.

[422] Premonition to the Candid Reader.

[423] Hist. Nat. vii, 1.

[424] Pamphlet cited, pp. 20, 21.

[425] Id. p. 23.

[426] 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).

[427] 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.

[428] 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.

[429] 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.

[430] Boyle Lectures on Atheism, ed. 1724, p. 4.

[431] 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.

[432] As cited by Leslie, Truth of Christianity Demonstrated, 1711, pp. 17-21.

[433] 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.

[434] 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.

[435] See the text in Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner's Penalties upon Opinion, pp. 19-21. Macaulay does not mention this measure.

[436] The Act had been preceded by a proclamation of the king, dated Feb. 24. 1697.

[437] 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.

[438] 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.

[439] 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."

[440] 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).

[441] Religio Medici, i, 6.

[442] Id. i, 9.

[443] Id. i, 18.

[444] Religio Medici, i, 20.

[445] Bk. I, ch. x.

[446] 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.

[447] 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.

[448] Hutchinson, Histor. Essay Conc. Witchcraft, 1718, p. 118; 2nd ed. 1720, p. 151.

[449] Cp. Whewell, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. 1862, p. 33.

[450] 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.

[451] 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.

[452] See the Humane Nature (1640), ch. iv, §§ 7-9.

[453] Scepsis Scientifica, ch. 23, § 1.

[454] See the passages compared by Lewes, History of Philosophy, 4th ed. ii, 338.

[455] 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.

[456] Scepsis, ch. 20, § 3.

[457] 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.

[458] 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.]

[459] First printed with Glanvill's Philosophia Pia in 1671. Rep. as an essay in the collected Essays.

[460] Owen, pref. to Scepsis, pp. xx-xxii.

[461] Owen, pref. to ed. of Scepsis Scientifica, p. ix.

[462] 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.

[463] Cp. Whewell, as last cited, pp. 75-83; Hallam, Literature of Europe, iv, 159-71.

[464] 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.)

[465] Poet. Works of Milton, 1874, Introd. i, 92 sq.

[466] 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.

[467] J. J. Tayler, Retrospect of the Religious Life of England, Martineau's ed. p. 204; Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography, iii, 152-53.

[468] Cp. Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 347-51; 1-vol. ed. pp. 196-99.

[469] Tayler, Retrospect, pp. 204-205; Wallace, iii, 154-56.

[470] Gangræna, pt. i, p. 38.

[471] Tayler, p. 221. As to Biddle, the chief propagandist of the sect, see pp. 221-24, and Wallace, Art. 285.

[472] Macaulay, Essay on Milton. Cp. Brown's ed. (Clarendon Press) of the poems of Milton, ii, 30.

[473] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, ch. v.

[474] Of Education, § 136.

[475] Essay, bk. iv, ch. xix. § 4.

[476] Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, c. 15.

[477] Third Letter to the Bishop of Worcester.

[478] Some Familiar Letters between Mr. Locke and Several of his Friends, 1708, pp. 302-304.

[479] Fox Bourne, Life of Locke, 1876, ii, 34.

[480] The first Letter, written while he was hiding in Holland in 1685, was in Latin, but was translated into French, Dutch, and English.

[481] 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."

[482] Second Vindication of "The Reasonableness of Christianity," 1697, pref.

[483] Fox Bourne, Life of Locke, ii, 181.

[484] Son of the Presbyterian author of the famous Gangræna.

[485] Said by Carrol, Dissertation on Mr. Lock's Essay, 1706, cited by Anthony Collins, Essay Concerning the Use of Reason, 1709, p. 30.

[486] Cited by Fox Bourne, Life of Locke, ii, 438.

[487] 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."

[488] Confutation of Warburton (1757) in Extracts from Law's Works, 1768, i, 208-209.

[489] Cp. the Essay, bk. i, ch. iii, § 6, with Law's Case of Reason, in Extracts, as cited, p. 36.

[490] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, p. 122.

[491] Fox Bourne, ii, 404-405.

[492] 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).

[493] 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).

[494] Cp. Macaulay, History, ch. ii. Student's ed. i, 120.

[495] Compare his Advice to a Daughter, § 1 (in Miscellanies, 1700), and his Political Thoughts and Reflections: Religion.

[496] See Macaulay, ch. xx. Student's ed. ii, 459.

[497] De Morgan, as cited, p. 107.

[498] See Brewster, ii, 318, 321-22, 323, 331 sq., 342 sq.

[499] Id. p. 327 sq.

[500] Id. p. 115.

[501] Cp. De Morgan, pp. 133-45.

[502] Four Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to Dr. Bentley, ed. 1756, p. 25. Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 97-102.

[503] Brewster, ii, 314.

[504] Id. pp. 315-16.

[505] Id. pp. 342-46.

[506] Brewster, p. 349. See the remaining articles, and App. XXX, p. 532.

[507] Id. p. 388.

[508] Discourse on Tillotson and Burnet, pp. 38, 40, 74, cited by Collins, Discourse of Freethinking, 1713, pp. 171-72.

[509] 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).

[510] "Locke's ribald schoolfellow of nearly fifty years ago" (Fox Bourne, ii, 405).

[511] Id. ib.

[512] Tayler, Retrospect, p. 226; Wallace, Antitrinitarian Biography, i, 160-69.

[513] Fox Bourne, ii, 405; Wallace, art. 353.

[514] Above, pp. 35-36.

[515] Nelson's Life of Bishop Bull, 2nd ed. 1714, p. 398.

[516] "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.

[517] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 113-15--Tayler, Retrospect, p. 227.

[518] 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.

[519] 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.

[520] 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.)

[521] See the note of Pope and Warburton on the Dunciad, iv, 462.

[522] See arts. in Dict. of Nat. Biog.

[523] Reprinted at Amsterdam, 1712.

[524] Essays as cited, p. 84.

[525] Id. p. 30.

[526] 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.

[527] 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.

[528] Lettres de Gui Patin, No. 188, édit. Reveillé-Parise, 1846, i, 364.

[529] Cp. Reveillé-Parise, as cited, Notice sur Gui Patin, pp. xxiii-xxvii, and Bayle, art. Patin.

[530] See the notices of him in Owen's Skeptics of the French Renaissance; and in Sainte-Beuve. Port Royal, iii, 180, etc.

[531] De la Vertu des Payens, in t. v. of the 12mo ed. of OEuvres, 1669.

[532] Hanotaux, Hist. du Cardinal de Richelieu, 1893, i, pref. p. 7.

[533] Cp. Buckle, ch. viii, 1-vol. ed. pp. 305-10, 325-28.

[534] See the good criticism of M. Hanotaux in Perrens, Les Libertins en France au xvii. siècle, p. 95 sq.

[535] OEuvres, 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.

[536] Ed. cited, iv, 125.

[537] Id. pp. 123-24.

[538] Tom. iii, 251.

[539] 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.

[540] "On le régarde comme le Plutarque de notre siècle" (Perrault, Les Hommes Illustres du XVIIe Siècle, éd. 1701, ii. 131).

[541] Perrault, ii, 132.

[542] 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.

[543] 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.

[544] Perrens, p. 132.

[545] In French, 1631; in Latin, 1656, amended.

[546] Translated into English in 1688, and into French, under the title Traité du Pyrrhonisme de l'église romaine, by N. Chalaire, Amsterdam, 1721.

[547] 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.

[548] Bouillier, i, 456; Lanson, p. 397.

[549] Bouillier, i, 411 sq.

[550] Id. p. 431 sq.

[551] Id. p. 437 sq.

[552] Id. pp. 449-50.

[553] "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.

[554] Bouillier, p. 453.

[555] Id. p. 455 sq.

[556] See Bouillier, i, 460 sq.; ii, 373 sq.; and introd. to OEuvres philos. du Père Buffier, 1846, p. 4; and cp. Rambaud, Hist. de la civilisation française, 6e édit. ii, 336.

[557] Bouillier, i, 465.

[558] Perrens, pp. 84-85.

[559] Cp. Perrens, pp. 68-69, and refs.

[560] Cp. Strowski, De Montaigne à Pascal, p. 141.

[561] See Duvernet, Vie de Voltaire, ch. i, and note 1; and Perrens, pp. 74-80.

[562] 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.

[563] 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.

[564] 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.

[565] Constant Coquelin, art. "Don Juan" in the International Review, September, 1903, p. 61--an acute and scholarly study.

[566] "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).

[567] Act II, sc. iv. in OEuvres Comiques, etc., ed. Jacob, rep. by Garnier, pp. 426-27.

[568] See Jacob's note in loc., ed. cited, p. 455.

[569] 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.

[570] 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.).

[571] See the careful criticism of Perrens, pp. 248-50.

[572] Bibliophile Jacob, pref. to ed. cited, pp. i-ii.

[573] 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.

[574] 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.

[575] 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.

[576] 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.

[577] Pensées, ed. Faugère, ii, 168-69. The "abêtira" comes from Montaigne.

[578] 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.

[579] De la Delicatesse, 1671, dial. v, p. 329, etc.

[580] Vinet, Études sur Blaise Pascal, 3e édit. p. 267 sq.

[581] 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.

[582] Cp. Voltaire's letter of 1768, cited by Morley, Voltaire, 4th ed. p. 159.

[583] Cp. Owen, French Skeptics, pp. 762-63, 767.

[584] 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 OEuvres Compl. iii, 396, 404, 424) denouncing Huet's Pyrrhonism as "impious" and perfectly adapted to the purposes of the freethinkers.

[585] Cp. Alexandre Westphal, Les Sources du Pentateuque, i (1888), pp. 64-68.

[586] Huet himself incurred a charge of temerity in his handling of textual questions. Id. p. 66.

[587] Pattison, Essays, 1889, i. 303-304.

[588] Pattison, as cited.

[589] "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).

[590] 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.

[591] Pattison, Essays, i, 299. Cp. Bouillier, i, 595.

[592] Fontenelle, Éloge sur Régis; Bouillier, Philos. cartés., i, 507.

[593] Réponse to Huet's Censura philosophiæ cartes., 1691; Bouillier, i, 515.

[594] Usage de la raison et de la foi, 1704, liv. i, ptie. i, ch. vii; Bouillier, p. 511.

[595] Bouillier, i, 521-25.

[596] Lettre de 10 août, 1677, No. 591, éd. Nodier.

[597] Bouillier, ii, 10.

[598] Méditations chrétiennes, ix, § 13.

[599] Entretiens métaphysiques, viii.

[600] Id. viii, ix.

[601] 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).

[602] 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."

[603] Des vrayes et des fausses idées, ch. xxviii.

[604] Recherche de la Vérité, liv. vi, ptie. ii, ch. iii.

[605] 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.

[606] Cp. Bouillier, ii, 260-61.

[607] 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.

[608] Traité des premières vérités, 1724, §§ 521-31.

[609] Bouillier, introd. to Buffier's OEuvres philosophiques, 1846, p. xiii.

[610] Remarques sur les principes de la metaphysique de Locke, passages cited by Bouillier.

[611] OEuvres, éd. Bouillier, p. 329.

[612] Cp. Bouillier, Hist. de la philos. cartés., ii, 391.

[613] Malebranche, Traité de Morale, liv. ii, ch. 10. Cp. Bouillier, i, 582, 588-90; ii, 23.

[614] Cp. Westphal, Les Sources du Pentateuque, 1888, i, 67 sq.

[615] 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.)

[616] 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.

[617] 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.

[618] 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.

[619] Kuno Fischer, Descartes and his School, pp. 254-68.

[620] Colerus (i.e., Köhler), Vie de Spinoza, in Gfrörer's ed. of the Opera, pp. xlv-xlvii.

[621] 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.

[622] "Novitates Cartesianæ multis parasangas superunt Arminianas."

[623] Nichols, Works of Arminius, 1824, i, 257 b (paging partly duplicated).

[624] Cp. Bouillier, i, 293-94.

[625] 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.

[626] 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.

[627] 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.

[628] Renati Des Cartes Princip. Philos. more geometrico demonstratæ, 1663.

[629] Cp. Martineau, pp. 46, 57.

[630] Reprinted in 1674, without place-name, and with the imprint of an imaginary Hamburg publisher.

[631] Tractatus, c. 15.

[632] Ep. xxiv, to Oldenburg.

[633] Epp. lviii, lx, to Boxel.

[634] Ep. xxiii, to Oldenburg.

[635] Ep. xxiv.

[636] Ep. xxxiv, to W. van Bleyenberg.

[637] Ep. xlvii, to Jellis, Feb. 1671.

[638] Ep. xix, 1675, to Oldenburg.

[639] "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).

[640] Ethica, pt. i, App.; pt. ii, end; pt. v, prop. 41, schol. Cp. the Letters, passim.

[641] 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.

[642] Pt. iv, prop. 68, schol.

[643] Ep. 1; 2 June, 1674.

[644] 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.

[645] Theologisch, Philosophisch, en Historisch process voor God, tegen allerley Atheisten. By Francis Ridder, Rotterdam, 1678.

[646] 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.

[647] See Fox Bourne's Life of Locke, ii, 282-83, as to Locke's friendly relations with the Remonstrants in 1683-89.

[648] See the summary of his argument by Alexandre Westphal, Les Sources du Pentateuque, 1888, i, 78 sq.

[649] 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.

[650] Edwards, Gangræna, as before cited.

[651] Discourse of Freethinking, p. 28.

[652] Colerus, as cited, p. lviii.

[653] First ed. Rotterdam, 2 vols. folio, 1696.

[654] Albert Cazes, Pierre Bayle, sa vie, ses idées, son influence, son oeuvre, 1905, pp. 6, 7.

[655] 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.

[656] 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.

[657] 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."

[658] 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.

[659] 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.

[660] See pref. to Eng. tr. of Hotman's Franco-Gallia, 1711.

[661] Rep. at Amsterdam, 1788, under the title, Voeux 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.

[662] Ed. 1766, p. 7.

[663] 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.

[664] Tom. I. § ii, ch. ix (ed. 1864, i, 134. 177).

[665] 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.

[666] As to the loss to French industry see Bonet-Maury, as cited, p. 59, and refs.

[667] See Duruy, Hist. de la France, ii, 253; Bonet-Maury, as cited, pp. 53-66.

[668] As to whose attitude at this crisis see O. Douen, L'Intolérance de Fénelon, 1880.

[669] Lanson, Hist. de la litt. française, p. 627.

[670] Id ib. Cp. Demogeot, p. 468.

[671] 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."

[672] But Voltaire and he were not at one. He is the "nain de Saturne" in Micromégas.

[673] B. 1613; d. 1703. A man who lived to ninety can have been no great debauchee.

[674] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, p. 172.

[675] Cp. Gidel, Étude prefixed to OEuvres Choisies de Saint-Evremond, ed. Garnier, pp. 64-69.

[676] Caractères (1687), ch. xvi: Les Esprits Forts.

[677] "Is embarrassed" in the first edition.

[678] Des ouvrages de l'esprit, near end. § 65 in ed. Walckenaer, p. 176.

[679] 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.

[680] Cp. Huet, Huetiana, § 1.

[681] 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.

[682] Cp. Perrens, pp. 310-14.

[683] Letter of the Duchesse d'Orléans, cited by Rocquain, L'Esprit révolutionnaire avant la révolution, 1878, p. 3, note.

[684] As Voltaire noted, Toland was persecuted in Ireland for his circumspect and cautious first book, and left unmolested in England when he grew much more aggressive.

[685] First ed. anonymous. Second ed., of same year, gives author's name. Another ed. in 1702.

[686] See Dynamics of Religion, p. 129.

[687] Pref. to 2nd ed. pp. vi, viii, xxiv, xxvi.

[688] As late as 1701 a vote for its prosecution was passed in the Lower House of Convocation. Farrar, Crit. Hist. of Freethought, p. 180.

[689] Molyneux, in Familiar Letters of Locke, etc. p. 228.

[690] No credit for this is given in Sir Leslie Stephen's notice of Toland in English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, i, 101-12. Compare the estimate of Lange, Gesch. des Materialismus, i, 272-76 (Eng. tr. i, 324-30). Lange perhaps idealizes his subject somewhat.

[691] In two letters published along with the Letters to Serena, 1704.

[692] Letters to Serena, etc. 1704, pref.

[693] De Principiis atque Originibus (Routledge's 1-vol. ed. pp. 651, 667).

[694] Letters to Serena, pp. 19, 67.

[695] Sir Henry Craik (cited by Temple Scott, Bohn ed. of Swift's Works, iii, 9) speaks of Toland as "a man of utterly worthless character." This is mere malignant abuse. Toland is described by Pope in a note to the Dunciad (ii, 399) as a spy to Lord Oxford. There could hardly be a worse authority for such a charge.

[696] Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, 1882, p. 26.

[697] Cp. Stephen, as cited, p. 115.

[698] "The Christianity of many writers consisted simply in expressing deist opinions in the old-fashioned phraseology" (Stephen, i, 91).

[699] Cp. Pünjer, Christ. Philos. of Religion, i, 289-90; and Dynamics of Religion, pp. 94-98. Lord Morley's reference to "the godless deism of the English school" (Voltaire, 4th ed. p. 69) is puzzling. Cp. Rosenkranz (Diderot's Leben und Werke, 1866, ii, 421) on "den ungöttlichen Gott der Jesuiten and Jansenisten, dies monströse Zerrbild des alten Jehovah, diesen apotheosirten Tyrannen, diesen Moloch." The latter application of the term seems the more plausible.

[700] Macaulay's description of Blount as an atheist is therefore doubly unwarranted.

[701] Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 94-98.

[702] Continuation des Pensées Diverses ... à l'occasion de la Comète ... de 1680, Amsterdam, 1705, i, 91.

[703] Warburton, Divine Legation, vol. ii, preface.

[704] Stephen, English Thought, i, 114-18.

[705] This, according to John Craig, was Newton's opinion. "The reason of his [Newton's] showing the errors of Cartes's philosophy was because he thought it made on purpose to be the foundation of infidelity." Letter to Conduitt, April 7, 1727, in Brewster's Memoirs of Newton, ii, 315. Clarke, in his Answer to Butler's Fifth Letter, expresses a similar view.

[706] "Three Discourses of Happiness, Virtue, and Liberty, Collected from the Works of the Learn'd Gassendi by Monsieur Bernier. Translated out of the French, 1699."

[707] Cp. W. Sichel, Bolingbroke and His Times, 1901, i, 175.

[708] Sir Leslie Stephen (i, 33) makes the surprising statement that a "dogmatic assertion of free-will became a mark of the whole deist and semi-deist school." On the contrary, Hobbes and Anthony Collins, not to speak of Locke, wrote with uncommon power against the conception of free-will, and had many disciples on that head.

[709] Letter to the Princess of Wales, November, 1715, in Brewster, ii, 284-85.

[710] Second Letter to Clarke, par. 1.

[711] Abstract from the Works of John Hutchinson, 1755, pp. 149-63.

[712] Clarke's Answer to Leibnitz's First Letter, end.

[713] Berkeley, Defence of Freethinking in Mathematics, par. vii; and Stock's Memoir of Berkeley. Cp. Brewster, Memoirs of Newton, ii, 408.

[714] In the Philosophical Transactions, 1718, No. 355, i, v, vi.

[715] Brewster, More Worlds than One, 1854, p. 110.

[716] Lecky, Hist. of England in the Eighteenth Cent. ed. 1892, iii, 22-24.

[717] The tradition of Saunderson's unbelief is constant. In the memoir prefixed to his Elements of Algebra (1740) no word is said of his creed, though at death he received the sacrament.

[718] See The State of the Process depending against Mr. John Simson, Edinburgh, 1728. Simson always expressed himself piously, but had thrown out such expressions as Ratio est principium et fundamentum theologiæ, which "contravened the Act of Assembly, 1717" (vol. cited, p. 316). The "process" against him began in 1714, and dragged on for nearly twenty years, with the result of his resigning his professorship of theology at Glasgow in 1729, and seceding from the Associate Presbytery in 1733. Burton, History of Scotland, viii, 399-400.

[719] Cp. the pamphlet by "A Presbyter of the Church of England," attributed to Bishop Hare, cited in Dynamics of Religion, pp. 177-78, and by Lecky, iii, 25.

[720] Tatler, Nos. 12, 111, 135; Spectator, Nos. 231, 381, 389, 599; Guardian, Nos. 3, 9, 27, 35, 39, 55, 62, 70, 77, 83, 88, 120, 130, 169. Most of the Guardian papers cited are by Berkeley. They are extremely virulent; but Steele's run them hard.

[721] Analyst, Queries 60 and 62: Defence of Freethinking in Mathematics, §§ 5, 6, 50. Cp. Dynamics of Religion, pp. 141-42.

[722] Letter in De Morgan's Newton: his Friend: and his Niece, 1885, p. 69.

[723] The essays in the Characteristics (excepting the Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit, which was published by Toland, without permission, in 1699) appeared between 1708 and 1711, being collected in the latter year. Shaftesbury died in 1713, in which year appeared his paper on The Judgment of Hercules.

[724] A Project for the Advancement of Religion. Bohn ed. of Works, iii, 44. In this paper Swift reveals his moral standards by the avowal (p. 40) that "hypocrisy is much more eligible than open infidelity and vice: it wears the livery of religion ... and is cautious of giving scandal."