Note 15 — DISQUISITIONS ON THE BOOK ENTITLED THE THREE IMPOSTORS.

With more apparent reason they attack both Pompanacius and Cardan. The former, in his treatise on the immortality of the soul, where he reasons as a philosopher and speaks abstractly of the Catholic faith—in which (at the end of his work) he solemnly professes himself a believer—is bold enough to add that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul had been propounded by the originators of every religious creed in order to keep their followers in thrall, and that therefore the majority of the human race had been duped. “If the Jewish, Christian, and Mahometan religions,” he continues, “are all three of them impostures, it follows that the half of mankind are mistaken.” This absurd reasoning, in spite of the precautions of Pompanacius, reached Jacques Carpentier, and induced him to exclaim, “Can any thing be conceived of more truly pernicious than this scepticism, coming as it does from a Christian school of theology.15”