The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715

by Paul Hazard

  A dictionary, the compilation of a dictionary! A queer sort of undertaking truly for a man of his tastes and talents! Well; this is what he himself has to say on the matter: “Somewhere about the month of December, 1690, I conceived the idea of compiling a critical dictionary, i.e., a dictionary which should comprise a complete inventory, as it were, of the various errors perpetrated, not only by lexicogaphers, but by writers in general; the details of each such error to be set out under the name of the individual, town or city associated with it.”[10] Such was his plan, but he did not fulfil it to the letter. The names are set down in alphabetical order, and under each name he has furnished a certain amount of factual information. But his most daring ideas, his most provocative utterances are to be found passim, or tucked away in the notes. The result is that the things he was really anxious to convey are, except in a few instances, to be met with anywhere, rather than in the places one would naturally expect to find them. He rather liked this game of hide and seek, it appealed to him, and he excelled at it. But, despite all the modifications he had to introduce into his original plan in order to avoid scaring publishers, booksellers and public alike, this Historical and Critical Dictionary stands out as the most damning indictment that was ever drawn up by man to the shame and confusion of his fellows. Well-nigh every name calls up the recollection of some delusion, error, misdemeanour or crime. All those Kings whose misrule brought misery to their people; all those Popes who debased the Catholic religion to the level of their own ambitions, their own passions, philosophers with their futile, foolish systems, all those cities, towns and countries whose names call back the memory of wars and plunder and massacres. Next came offences against decency, against all that is good and seemly, moral perversions. If Bayle tells of these with obvious zest, the reason may be, as he says, that the book-trade had asked for them as a bait to attract readers, or it may have been that he himself wanted a little diversion, reminding us, as he does, that it is one thing to give an account of man’s delinquencies, another deliberately to brighten up a narrative with a sprinkling of broad and spicy anecdotes. But is not the real reason to be sought in the fact that, in addition to our errors, we must also take stock of our wilful transgressions, and that in addition to our errors in the realm of the intellect, we must not lose sight of offences committed by us in the moral sphere. Thirdly, and finally, we have to consider the fables and stories invented by those who have related the deeds of others, fables and stories so many of which are born of the levity, stupidity, greed or corruption of the narrators. What an edifying spectacle!

  All that had to cleared away, and that is precisely the task to which, with a sort of melancholy satisfaction, Bayle first addresses himself. Away with the myth-mongers! Mankind, one and all, have gone astray: the Ancients, who lied as glibly and freely as we speak; the Moderns, because they were dazzled and carried away by the prestige of the Ancients. The most competent, the most respectable of authors have made mistakes; La Mothe Le Vayer, and Gassendi included. There are professional liars like Moreri, who compiled a dictionary which was everything a dictionary ought not to be, a dictionary bulging with falsehoods. He was a public poisoner. He must be refuted point by point; we must make a list of his lies: a dozen here, fifteen there; we must take him by the throat; no quarter for him! Toil on, make sure of every step, and Truth will be established on her throne once more. Stern yet seemly are the laws that govern the Republic of Ideas. “This republic is a state in which wide latitude is allowed. The only powers whose writ is acknowledged there are Truth and Reason, and under their auspices men take the field impartially, wherever they are called upon to fight. Friends may be called to account by friends; sires by their own children.”[11]

  Courage such as this, such an ardour for battle, such determination to free men’s minds from error, presupposes the conviction that truth prevails, and may be attained, no matter what obstacles stand in the way: objective, factual truth, which criticism and positive knowledge combine to set free from all encumbrances. But that positive knowledge, that objective truth, how hard it is to grasp it! How potent is error and how deep-rooted, so deep that, do what you will to destroy it, it will always contrive to spring up again somewhere or other. “There is no perversion of the truth, however absurd it be, that is not passed on from book to book, from generation to generation. Lie with a bold face, we may say to the sorriest mountebank in Europe, print what outrageous extravagance you will, you will find plenty of people to copy your tales, and, if you are extinguished now, the day will come, circumstances will arise, when it will be in someone’s interest to bring you back to life again.”[12] We shall never convert any but the converted, so impervious is the mind to truth, even when it is as plain as daylight.

  Are what we call facts really what we take them to be? The new school of philosophy would have us believe, would it not, that they are merely modifications of our own consciousness?[13]

  The name of Sextus Empiricus was hardly known in our schools. The allurements of the epoch which he described so subtly were as unknown there as was the southern continent, when Gassendi gave us a brief account of it and opened our eyes. Cartesianism put the finishing touches on the work, and now no sound philosopher has any doubt that the sceptics were in the right when they said that the qualities of the objects which we apprehend with our senses are merely appearances. Anyone may say “I feel the heat when I am close to the fire”, but not “I know that heat is in itself, what I think it is”. That is the way these early Pyrrhonists looked at the matter. To-day, the new school adopts a more positive tone. They say that heat, smell, colour and so on are not objects of our senses but modifications of our mind. We know that external objects are not what they appear to us to be. There was an idea that extent and motion might be excluded from this rule, but that was found to be impossible; for if the objects of our senses appear to us to be coloured, hot, cold, odorous, when, as a matter of fact, they are not so, what is to prevent their appearing to be of such and such an extent, of such and such a shape and design, at rest or in motion, when in reality they are none of these things? Those are the kind of ideas with which the new school of philosophy would strengthen the Pyrrhonist position, and which I decline to admit.

  But Bayle did not decline for ever. That he was uneasy in his mind is quite evident. Despite himself, perhaps, or, it may be, because he had a natural inclination that way, he slips insensibly into Pyrrhonism as he goes on confronting truth and error. Can you ever be quite sure where a principle is going to lead you? “The same theory which serves as a weapon against error, may sometimes do a disservice to the cause of truth. One thing you will always find if you look long enough, and that is antinomy, contradiction.”[14] In a word, man is in an unhappy posture, because the light which enables him to avoid one evil leads him into another. Banish ignorance and barbarism and childish credulity, so profitable to the powers that be, and the only use the people make of the advantage they have gained is to wallow in sloth and debauchery; but then, when you point out to them the evils of such a mode of life, and inspire them with the desire to find out all they can about things, they become so hair-splitting, so logic-chopping that nothing is good enough to satisfy the demands of their miserable reason.

  There is a method, and, with a little trouble, you can see what it is, and even reduce it to a formula: In every system, if it is to be made to work, two things are essential; the first is that its terms should be plain and unequivocal; the second, that it should square with practical experience.[15] By this method you get at abstract truth, and at the concrete proof of it. But when it comes to putting this method into practice, how is it to be done? As for getting at the concrete truth, people are for ever distorting and misrepresenting facts. In the Dictionnaire historique et critique, the critical part demolishes the historical. As for abstract truth, men can never get an adequate grasp of ideas, and if they did, if they saw those ideas as they really were, they would find that they were all equally cogent, all equally probable an
d all mutually destructive.

  But Bayle does not stop there. If we would take stock of his philosophy as a whole, and see how constantly, as though by a sort of logical obsession, it kept harking back to questions which he could never persuade himself he had satisfactorily settled, we must go further and study his Réponse aux questions d’un Provincial, the publication of which, begun in 1704, was cut short by his death. In it, he discarded neither his style, with its characteristic outbursts and coruscations, nor his habit of turning from the actual chapter and verse of what he was dealing with—historical narrative, philosophical treatise, dissertation, or whatever it might be—to launch out into a flood of criticism and counter-argument; nor was his pitiless irony any the less in evidence. His propensity to go off at a tangent was, if possible, more marked than ever, his reactions more vehement, his analysis more relentlessly logical. The man of the provinces is supposed to be making enquiries about the contents of a book, or about the exact determination of the date at which something happened, about some event in history, or about some matter of ordinary, everyday interest. In a few sentences Bayle defines the bearings of the question with a clarity that is always admirable; no shirking the point at issue, no equivocation, no hidden corners where any vestiges of error could linger on unnoticed, no leniency, no indulgence, no pardon. Around him the same problems are for ever recurring. Does God mean that universal consent should be taken as proof of His existence? Has God endowed man with free-will, or is he the bondslave of ineluctable destiny? If there be a God, why does He permit injustice and every imaginable evil to exist in the world? With unflagging persistence, Bayle advances his ultimate solution, a solution which leads to the conclusion that certainty can be affirmed of nothing, that nothing can be known beyond all doubt.

  And back again goes the labourer to resume his task, but more boldly now, and with an added consciousness of his responsibility. And that task is to show convincingly, beyond all doubt, that there is no common ground between religion and philosophy. So long as you continue to mix up the one with the other you will be but a voice crying in the wilderness. Bayle protests that he is not attacking religious belief as such; he even goes the length of averring that he respects it; he does, he declares, but follow and restate the arguments of its apologists. Do they not admit that in every form of religion there is at the outset an element of mystery? That is the crucial point of the whole matter, for mystery is incompatible with reason, and implies an attitude of mind irreconcilable with the mental processes, nay, with the very nature, of a reasoning being. It is now truer than ever to say he is inside the fort in order to betray it, that he mingles with its defenders in order to sow alarm and despondency among them. He tells them that if Revelation is true, religion is true, and that its dogmas follow logically, one upon another. But then, he goes on, Revelation cannot be proved to be true. To believe is one thing, to employ one’s reason is another. There can be no middle course, no picking and choosing. To reject a dogma here, to retain a dogma there, is a flagrant anomaly, a manifest absurdity. “I fancy I gathered from some of you that, as regards the Trinity and some other articles of the Christian faith, reason must bow to the word of God, but that, as regards the Fall of Adam and its consequences, the Scriptures must defer to the judgment of the philosophers. I should be sorry for you if you really took this view and believed you could differentiate to that extent.”[16] You say you believe in the element of mystery. Believe in it then, whether philosophy tells you to do so, or not. Believe in it, even if the arguments against it are irrefragable. But if you do take that line, don’t go and pretend that you are acting according to reason. It is not the Catholics or the Calvinists only that Bayle would tax with stupidity or folly, but the Jews and Mohammedans into the bargain; nor these alone, but the deists as well, the deists who maintain that the existence of God may be demonstrated by human reason. All these he lumped together as “religionnaires”,[17] as he called them. In the opposing camp are the Rationalists.

  But the two forces once well in sunder, it behoves the Rationalists, if there is any logic in them, to see about setting their own house in order, to examine their own basic principles, and this is where the trouble begins.

  Unhappily, philosophy does not make good the breaches it creates, in spite of all its efforts so to do. The philosophers are very good at knocking down received beliefs, but having done so, all they can supply to fill up the gaps are notes of interrogation. Is man the captain, or the captive, of his fate? Argument about this question of freedom is never-ending. The resources of either side are inexhaustible.

  “So intricate is this question of free-will, so rich in ambiguities, that the deeper into it you go, the more you get involved in contradictions. As often as not, you find yourself echoing the words of your antagonist and forging weapons for your own discomfiture.”[18] Is the soul immortal? It is; unless, of course, the contrary is the case. If that is so, it is merely a property of matter. Is there an all-wise and all-beneficent deity? There may be, but, if there is, how are you going to explain, by what possible argument can you explain, that this wise and beneficent deity permits his creatures to suffer as they do in body and soul, and freely allows them to compass their own perdition? When he contemplates, even for a moment, such a picture of things, a picture which appals the feelings as much as it outrages the reason, Bayle is filled with horror. He is also filled with indignation. “Those who permit an evil which they are perfectly able to prevent are to be condemned; those who permit someone to go to his doom when they could readily save him are guilty of his death. Put this question to any simple peasant woman: A mother, though her breast is full of milk, lets her little one die of hunger. Is she not as much its murderess as if she had flung it into the water to drown? A father who, seeing his son about to put something poisonous into his mouth, lets him do so, when a word or a glance would have stopped him, is he not as great a criminal as if he had given him the poison himself?”[19]

  Can we imagine that God could be as cruel as that inhuman mother, as criminal as that father? Some worthy souls there were who did their utmost to find a way out of the dilemma. One William King, an Anglican theologian, was guileless enough to think that he had disposed of the problem of evil once and for all. He published a voluminous treatise in Latin in which he fondly believed he had solved the insoluble. He had solved nothing. He might as well have tried to square the circle.

  What a tangle of contradictions is man! Man is the toughest morsel to digest that any system could have to tackle. He is the reef on which, like waves, the false and the true are shattered. He is a trial to orthodox and unorthodox alike. He is a harder knot to untie than any the poets ever dreamt of. Men try to do battle with error, but when the fight is over they have the uncomfortable feeling that the human soul is more at home with illusion than with truth[20] and that they ought to admit it. A man stakes his all on reason, only to find that he has been leaning on a broken reed. Reason cannot hold out against the feelings. Time after time she has to follow the chariot wheels of the passions, sometimes like a docile captive, sometimes like a fawning sycophant. For a time she strives against the passions, then she holds her peace and chafes in secret, finally she gives in and lets them work their will.[21] It is clear that she is never quite certain of what she lays down and that propositions which seem on the face of them self-evident, have, nevertheless, a shade of the problematic about them. Once again scepticism renews the attack, and the truth that seemed so crystal clear begins to grow thought-sick and cloudy.

  Did he reach the point of absolute scepticism? He would have done so had he suffered his mind to follow its natural bent. Nothing ever pleased him better than that interplay of pro and con. He would have floated away into that far-off void, where actions lose their significance and life its purpose, had he followed logic to its final term, and taken cognizance only of his human experiences, which day by day impressed him more and more. He might, nay, he must, have arrived at last at what Le Clerc calls metaphysical a
nd historical scepticism, at universal doubt.

  But this he resisted. His intrepid spirit, the feeling that he had a mission to fulfil, an abhorrence of error, more potent than any doubts he might have entertained about truth, a reasoning mind that would not willingly accept defeat, and above all his strength of will enabled him to stop short of the final step. He never would, and he never did, divest himself of the belief that he had a definite moral task to accomplish, a definite line of progress to recommend. In this connexion, the Dictionnaire furnishes a moving passage; it occurs under Mâcon, note D: Why I touch on these appalling disorders. These appalling disorders are the wars of religion, which have served as a pretext for the most shocking barbarities. Were it not better to pluck them from the memory, to raze them from the tablets of the mind? If we recount them afresh, shall we not be feeding the fires of irreconcilable hatred among men? “Shall I not be told that I seem to have a special desire to revive old passions, to rekindle the fires of hatred, when I go out of my way, in various parts of my work, to describe the most atrocious deeds in the history of the bygone century?” The answer is, No! “As everything has two faces, we may, for sound reasons, be permitted to hope that the memory of all those frightful disorders will be kept studiously alive.” Rulers, churchmen, theologians must be constantly reminded of former evils, so that in the future they may be avoided. Thus, of the two faces which everything presents, Bayle chooses the one in which he is able to discern a modicum of hope. He may have doubted whether absolute truth would ever be attainable, but he was at all events convinced that the liability to err was a contagious disease and that it behoved him to limit its ravages. A physician to the blind, it was at least his duty to give sight to the sightless whereever he could.