Note 57 — Chapter XV · FRENCH AND DUTCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

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.