Note 28 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

With his hostility to credulous hopes and fears in the sphere of Nature, Sanchez is naturally regarded as a forerunner and helper of freethought. But there is nothing to show that his work had any effect in undermining the most formidable of all the false beliefs of Christendom.28 Like so many others of his age, he flouted Aristotelean scholasticism, but was perforce silent as to the verbalisms and sophistries of simple theology. It may fairly be inferred that his poem on the comet of 1577 helped to create that current of reasoned disbelief29 which we find throwing up almost identical expressions in Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Molière,30 concerning the folly of connecting the stars with human affairs. But a skepticism which left untouched the main matter of the creeds could not affect conduct in general; and while Sanchez passed unchecked the watchdogs of the Inquisition, the fiery Bruno and Vanini were in his day to meet their fiery death at its hands—the latter in Toulouse, perhaps under the eyes of Sanchez. Having resigned his professorship of medicine, he seems to have lived to a ripe age, dying in 1623.