Note 31 — Chapter XVII · FRENCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

7. Apart from this direct influence, too, others of the cloth bore some part in the general process of enlightenment. A good type of the agnostic priest of the period was the Abbé Terrasson, the author of the philosophic romance Sethos (1732), who died in 1750. Not very judicious in his theory of human evolution (which he represented as a continuous growth from a stage of literary infancy, seen in Homer), he adopted the Newtonian theory at a time when the entire Academy stood by Cartesianism. Among his friends he tranquilly avowed his atheism.31 He died “without the sacraments,” and when asked whether he believed all the doctrine of the Church, he replied that for him that was not possible.32 Another anti-clerical Abbé was Gaidi, whose poem, La Religion à l’Assemblé du Clergé de France (1762), was condemned to be burned.33