Note 143 — Chapter XV · FRENCH AND DUTCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

For every Protestant who crossed the frontiers between 1685 and 1700, perhaps, a Catholic neared or crossed the line between indifferentism and active doubt. The steady advance of science all the while infallibly undermined faith; and hardly was the bolt launched against the Protestants when new sapping and mining was going on. Fontenelle (1657–1757), whose Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) popularized for the elegant world the new cosmology, cannot but have undermined dogmatic faith in some directions; above all by his graceful and skilful Histoire des Oracles (also 1686), where “the argumentation passes beyond the thesis advanced. All that he says of oracles could be said of miracles.”143 The Jesuits found the book essentially “impious”; and a French culture-historian sees in it “the first attack which directs the scientific spirit against the foundations of Christianity. All the purely philosophic arguments with which religion has been assailed are in principle in the work of Fontenelle.”144 In his abstract thinking he was no less radical, and his Traité de la Liberté145 established so well the determinist position that it was decisively held by the majority of the French freethinkers who followed. Living to his hundredth year, he could join hands with the freethought of Gassendi and Voltaire,146 Descartes and Diderot. Yet we shall find him later, in his official capacity of censor of literature, refusing to pass heretical books, on principles that would have vetoed his own. He is in fact a type of the freethought of the age of Louis XIV—Epicurean in the common sense, unheroic, resolute only to evade penalties, guiltless of over-zeal. Not in that age could men generate an enthusiasm for truth.