Note 179 — Chapter XVII · FRENCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

In its brilliant pages may be found a conspectus of the intellectual life of the day, on the side of the religious problem. Every type of thinker is there tersely characterized—the orthodox, the deist, the atheist, the sheer skeptic, the scoffer, the pantheist, the solipsist, and the freethinking libertine, the last figuring as no small nuisance to the serious unbeliever. So drastic is the criticism of orthodoxy that the book was unprintable in its day;179 and it was little known even in manuscript. But ere long there appeared the Letter on the Blind, for the use of those who see (1749), in which a logical rebuttal alike of the ethical and the cosmological assumptions of theism, developed from hints in the Pensées, is put in the mouth of the blind English mathematician, Sanderson. It is not surprising that whereas the Pensées had been, with some other books, ordered by the Paris Parlement to be burnt by the common hangman, the Lettre sur les Aveugles led to his arrest and an imprisonment of six months180 in the Château de Vincennes. Both books had of course been published without licence;181 but the second book was more than a defiance of the censorship: it was a challenge alike to the philosophy and the faith of Christendom; and as such could not have missed denunciation.182