Note 127 — Chapter XV · FRENCH AND DUTCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

14. No greater service was rendered in that age to the spread of rational views than that embodied in the great Dictionnaire Historique et Critique127 of Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), who, born in France, but driven out by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, spent the best part of his life and did his main work at Rotterdam. Persecuted there for his freethinking, to the extent of having to give up his professorship, he yet produced a virtual encyclopedia for freethinkers in his incomparable Dictionary, baffling hostility by the Pyrrhonian impartiality with which he handled all religious questions. In his youth, when sent by his Protestant father to study at Toulouse, he had been temporarily converted, as was the young Gibbon later, to Catholicism;128 and the retrospect of that experience seems in Bayle’s case, as in Gibbon’s, to have been a permanent motive to practical skepticism.129 But, again, in the one case as in the other, skepticism was fortified by abundant knowledge. Bayle had read everything and mastered every controversy, and was thereby the better able to seem to have no convictions of his own. But even apart from the notable defence of the character of atheists dropped by him in the famous Pensées diverses sur la Comète (1682), and in the Éclaircissements in which he defended it, it is abundantly evident that he was an unbeliever. The only alternative view is that he was strictly or philosophically a skeptic, reaching no conclusions for himself; but this is excluded by the whole management of his expositions.130 It is recorded that it was his vehement description of himself as a Protestant “in the full force of the term,” accompanied with a quotation from Lucretius, that set the clerical diplomatist Polignac upon re-reading the Roman atheist and writing his poem Anti-Lucretius.131 Bayle’s ostensible Pyrrhonism was simply the tactic forced on him by his conditions; and it was the positive unbelievers who specially delighted in his volumes. He laid down no cosmic doctrines, but he illuminated all; and his air of repudiating such views as Spinoza’s had the effect rather of forcing Spinozists to leave neutral ground than of rehabilitating orthodoxy.