Note 145 — XX. POPE. 1688–1744.

Bayle, the author of the great Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1690), to whom belongs the lasting honour of having inaugurated the critical method in history and philosophy, which has since led to such extensive and important results, seems also to have been the first explicitly to state the difficulties of that greatest crux of Theology—the problem of the existence, or rather dominance, of Evil. His rival Le Clerc, in his Bibliothéque, took up the orthodox cudgels. Lord Shaftesbury, the celebrated theologian and moralist, wrote his dialogue—The Moralists (1709)—in direct answer to Bayle, followed the next year by the Theodike or Vindication of the Deity of Leibnitz. Two of the most able and distinguished of the Anti-Optimists are Voltaire and Schopenhauer, the former of whom never wearies of using his unrivalled powers of irony and sarcasm on the Tout est Bien theory. As for the latter philosopher, he has carried his Anti-Optimism to the extremes of Pessimism.