ABSTRACT

ASPECTS OF ENGLISH THOUGHT IN BAYLE'S
NOUVELLES DE LA REPUBLIQUE
DES LETTRES

 

 

BY

Jean Gedeon Nicholas

This study analyzes the contents of the reviews of
English works in the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres
from March 1684 through February 1687 when Pierre Bayle was

its editor. The Nouvelles, the first published of the

 

French-language gazettes printed in Holland at the end of
the seventeenth century, was an important agent in the
transmission of English ideas to the Continent and helped
effect the shift in interest from Latin countries to north-
ern ones. Since very few educated Continentals knew English,
they were largely dependent on publications like the

Nouvelles for their knowledge of English trends. Bayle,

 

a Huguenot and relaps exiled in Holland, not only influenced
Continental opinion, but was in turn influenced by his edit-
ing of English material, which helped mold his thought in
the years when he was gathering the information that would

later be used in his great work, the Dictionnaire.

 

 

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Jean Gedeon Nicholas

The articles from and about England, which occupied
a steadily increasing number of pages, presented certain
part of the English challenge to authority in questions of
theology and natural philosophy. The English, with a long
tradition of clashes with orthodox Roman Catholic thought,
were publishing works that investigated the record of the
early days of Christianity, the beliefs of the Church
Fathers, the origins of the sacraments, and the Bible.
Though the stated purpose of these books was to return to
what their authors liked to call the pure core of belief of
the primitive Church, it was clear that their real goal was
more to discredit Rome and its claims. Though it is impos-
sible to know Bayle's exact thoughts on the questions, he
did devote many columns to reviews dealing with Christianity,
its doctrines, and its record since one of his main inter-
ests was to establish the study of history on a factual
basis.

In natural philosophy England had the Royal Society
the members of which were in correspondence with their
counterparts in all Europe. Scientists, realizing the power
given them by mathematics and by experiment, observation,
and measurement, were enthusiastically comparing results
and planning to attack new problems as well as old ones.
Though Bayle's lack of knowledge made his science reporting

inadequate, he was an enthusiastic popularizer, eager to

Jean Gedeon Nicholas

publicize the names of scientific scholars and to give a
general idea of what they were doing.

The review articles in the Nouvelles, and in other

 

publications printed in Holland, represented for Europeans
who knew no English the only readily available source of
information about the island that was playing a growing role
in the Republic of Letters. The next step should be to com-
pare the original work with the review of it to see just how
distorted a View was presented to Continental readers and to
determine, if possible, the impact and consequences of that

distortion.

ASPECTS OF ENGLISH THOUGHT IN BAYLE'S

NOUVELLES DE LA REPUBLIQUE

 

DES LETTRES

 

BY

Jean Gedeon Nicholas

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Comparative Literature Program

1973

(web/2’

04;

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . .
II. CHANGING PERSPECTIVES ON CHURCH HISTORY
AND DOGMA . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
III. A POTPOURRI OF NOTIONS ON SCIENCE . . .
IV. CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
APPENDIX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

ii

Page

23
76
109
113

131

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Voltaire, Prévost, and the eighteenth century used
.to get credit for introducing English ideas into France

and the Continent, but current thinking suggests that the
intellectual discovery of England by Continental Europeans
really took place in the last decades of the seventeenth
century. One of the most notable and best documented trends
of that period is the shift in interest from Latin countries

1 especially to England, which

to northern European nations,
enjoyed the reputation of being a country where serious
scholars were adding to the general store of knowledge.
Bayle noted admiringly as he printed a list of new titles
he had recently received in a letter from London that
England alone could provide each month material for a

2

journal even bulkier than his own, and a year later he

 

1Paul Hazard, The European Mind (1680-1715)
(Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian Books, 1963), pp. 53-79; and
René Pintard, Le Libertinage érudit, Vol. I (Paris: Boivin,
1943): P. 570.

 

 

2Pierre Bayle, ed., Nouvelles de la République des
Lettres, Vol. I (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1966), juin,
1685, p. 666. Citations from this periodical in my text are
to this edition, hereafter cited as NEE, The spelling and

 

reported that the English, not content merely to write
books on philosophy, also reprinted works composed elsewhere
(60, p. 1179). And in France, Father Rapin's judgment was
reported by M. Baillet, librarian for M. 1'Avocat Général de
Lamoignon:

. . . par cette profondeur de génie qui est

ordinaire a leur nation, ils aiment les méthodes

profondes, abstruses, recherchées. Il est cer-

tain qu'il n'y a point de Philosophes qui

s'élevent autant que les Anglois vers la Région

de la verité la plus abstraite, & qui aprofon-

dissent comme eux les matiéres peu batues qu'ils

entreprennent de prouver.3

English thought was freer and more advanced than it

was on the Continent in the three main areas of interest to
seventeenth century readers: religion, science, and poli-
tics; English literature was also better and more abundant
than in any other European country, as the Term Catalogs
show.“ The English, especially after 1660, acquired the
reputation of being bold thinkers as well as profound ones,

especially on theological questions, so that the label

"published in England" often served to mark a work as daring

 

punctuation of the text have been retained as they appear
in that edition. Further references to articles in the
Nouvelles give the number of the reference as found in the
Appendix, where the articles from and about England are
listed chronologically, and the page.

 

3NRL, Vol. 1, décembre, 1685, p. 1377.

“Hendrika Reesink, L'Angleterre et la littérature
anglaise dansgles trois plus anciens périodiques francais
de Hollande de 1684 a 1709 (Zutphen and Paris: Thieme and
Champion, 1931), pp. 34-35.

 

and to attract attention to it, just as the labels
"translated from the English" and "printed in Holland"
tended to increase interest in any work to which they were

attached. For example, when Bayle's Commentaire philos-

 

ophique was mentioned under the rubric Catalogue des Livres
in the Nouvelles, it was described as "Traduit de 1'Anglois
du Sieur John Fox de Bruggs," and was said to have been pub-
lished in Canterbury.5 The English had, after all, proved
their right to be regarded as leaders: Henry VIII had
defied the authority of the Pope and had established the
Anglican Church, without, however, becoming Protestant; the
English had executed an anointed king, Charles I; they had
experimented with a parliamentary government; scientific
experimentation flourished there under the encouragement of
the Royal Society, founded in 1660 and chartered in 1662.
Though there had been in France since the sixteenth
century a great deal of curiosity about and interest in
‘England and its culture,6 the obstacles preventing any real
knowledge of that country and its people were many. The
French did not, for the most part, know the language, which

was not considered proper for discussing cultural matters.7

 

sNRL, Vol. II, aofit, 1686, pp. 960-963; and Reesink,
L'Angleterre, p. 71.

6Pintard, op. cit., pp. 102-103.

 

7Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, Vol. I: Du pays
de Foix a la cite d'Erasme (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963),
p. 169.

When French interest in England was at its height (1712-
1747), the language barrier remained; at that late date
Frenchmen were still dependent on the French journals
published in Holland for their knowledge of English trends,8
and in spite of the proximity of the two countries, there
was little travel between them except for the Huguenot
refugees and for exiles such as Voltaire and Prévost.
Unfortunately, then, the English language was one
very real barrier preventing the free dissemination of
English ideas abroad; the second one was the strict censor-
ship of books by Catholic countries. The solution to both
problems was found in Holland, where, near the end of the
seventeenth century, appeared three notable international

newspapers: the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres,

 

the Bibliotheque universelle et historique, and the Histoire
des ouvrages des savans, edited by Pierre Bayle, Jean
LeClerc, and Henri Basnage de Beauval respectively.

The main reason for the influence of these news-
papers was that they were published in Holland, the
seventeenth century haven for all kinds of refugees--
religious, intellectual, and political. The relative

freedom of the Dutch press permitted open discussion of

 

°Reesink, op. cit., pp. 38-39; and Gabriel Bonno,
"La culture et la civilisation britanniques devant l'opinion
francaise," in TransagEions of the American Philosophical
Society, N, S. (XXXVIII, Pt. 1) (1948), P. 16.

 

almost all topics. No one was persecuted for his religious
beliefs--usually the object of the censor's scrutiny--
as long as he did not meddle in Dutch political affairs.
Admittedly, some censorship did exist, but it consisted in
issuing and publishing decrees, more to set an example than
to prosecute. The Dutch magistrates, knowing full well that
the freedom of both conscience and press was one of the main
sources of their prosperity, were not about to destroy that
freedom.9

The second reason for the extraordinary role of
these publications was that they were written in French,
the language common to all educated men of the day (27,
p. 1235).10 In fact, during the late seventeenth century
even more important than publications coming from France
itself were those from the French press in Holland.11 The
latter enjoyed wide circulation among learned circles in
Europe, especially in France, where free movement of books
was not possible. In that country, for example, the

Nouvelles, though it could not be sold in bookshops or

 

displayed openly, passed freely from hand to hand as well

as through the mails and served as a vehicle to introduce

 

9Reesink, op. cit, p. 75.

1°Ferdinand Brunot and Charles Bruneau, Précis de
grammaire historique de la langue frangaise (Paris, 1949),
p. xxii. '

 

 

11Georges Mongrédien, La Vie littéraire au XVIIe
siecle (Paris, 1947), pp. 410-411.

 

to Louis XIV's subjects summaries of the contents of banned
books. As might be expected, these restrictions did little
to spoil the reputation of the paper or to hinder its
circulation; they only increased its desirability.12

This study proposes to look at the Nouvelles de la

 

Republique des Lettres during the years 1684-1687 when it
was edited by Pierre Bayle to determine the main ideas from
England that found their way into his newspaper and were,
therefore, available to the educated Continental reader who
knew French.13 Because of the general ignorance of England
by Continentals and because of the tremendous desire on
their part to know what the English were thinking, the

Nouvelles, along with the other French-language journals

 

published in Holland, helped mold the thinking of the

Republic of Letters. Thus, the Nouvelles served as one of

 

the main lines of transmission of English thought to the
Continent at a time when Continentals were most receptive
Ito ideas from across the Channel. But even more important
was the influence of English ideas on Bayle himself at a

period when he was maturing intellectually. His thorough,

 

12Mme. Labrousse points out that the NRL was very
well received in France, but that after January, 1685,
because the publication had become suspect, it could enter
the country only by mail. Pierre Bayle, Vol. I, p. 190; and
Instrument, pp. 31-32.

 

13Mongrédien, Vie littéraire, p. 410; Brunot and
Bruneau, Précis, p. xviii; and Reesink, L'Angleterre,
pp. 158-159.

 

 

first-hand knowledge of the Protestant-Catholic debates of
the 1680's helped prepare him to compile his most enduring
contribution to Western intellectual history, the Diction-
pgigg, and to conclude that no man can judge another's
conscience. In other words, since God alone can know
whether a man is following his own conscience, men here
on earth should respect each other and stop quarreling
about questions of faith and belief. Above all, no one
should impose his beliefs on another.

Bayle established the journal and edited it from
its first appearance in March 1684 through February 1687
when failing health forced him to give up directing it.
He was well aware that space devoted to publicizing news
from England was one of the main reasons for the success of
his publication. Though he knew no English (or Dutch either,
for that matter) and although his knowledge of England and
English ideas was not really extensive until after 1687, he
was nonetheless tremendously influential in his role as
liaison agent between England and the Continent. In turn,
he was molded, at a period when he was particularly recep-
tive to new ideas, by what the English were thinking and
writing. In particular, the problem of freedom of con-
science in religious matters was of concern to him. As a
young man, he, the son of a Protestant pastor in southern
France, had gone to Toulouse for further studies in theology.

There, in March 1669 he was converted by the Jesuits, with

whom he was studying, to Roman Catholicism, a faith he
abjured in August 1670. Immediately, he had to flee to
Geneva, since as a relaps he could no longer live safely
in France because of the religious policies of Louis XIV.
This fact, coupled with his intense life-long interest in
theology, made him sensitive to the many arguments advanced
by both sides, each purporting to prove the authenticity and
veracity of its beliefs.

The English acceptance of change in official reli-
gious policy and of a multiplicity of sects gave Bayle a
new perspective on the question of religious toleration in
France; it strengthened his belief in the possibility of
peaceful settlement of theological differences and convinced
him of the essential rightness of freedom of conscience in
religious matters. Most scholars of the time, both Protes-
tant and Roman Catholic were busy clarifying questions of
dogma and refining definitions; but Bayle's concern was
quite different. He wanted to ground acceptance or rejec-
tion of religious belief in the individual conscience, a

View best expressed in his Nouvelles lettres de l'auteur

 

de la Critique générale de l'histoire du Calvinisme de M.

Maimbourg (Oeuvres diverses, II, 334):

 

 

En matiére de Religion i1 ne faut point
suspendre son consentement, jusques a ce que l'on
ait acquis toute l'évidence que l'on attend dans
la Philosophie de Monsieur Des-Cartes, avant que
de prendre parti. Pour établir ce principe, il
en faut poser un second, a pen pres tel que celui-
ci; qu'en matiére de Religion, la regle de juger

n'est point dans l'entendement, mais dans la

conscience, c'est a dire, qu'il faut embrasser

les objets non pas selon des idées claires et

distinctes, acquises par un examen severe, mais

selon que la conscience nous dicte qu'en les

embrassant nous ferons ce qui est agréable a

Dieu.
With such a guiding principle, Bayle cannot possibly condone
the sectarian mind eager to impose its views on dissenters.
He never tires of championing the rights of the individual
conscience which indicates that one's actions are pleasing

to God.

Bayle's editorship of the Nouvelles is generally

 

agreed to be important as a preparation for his later work,
especially for his masterpiece, the Dictionnaire (1697).
After an erratic career as an itinerant teacher, Bayle had
settled in Rotterdam in 1681, had had time to establish him-
self in another of the Protestant, French-speaking milieux
in which he always lived and worked, even in exile.‘“ There
he had published his Lettres sur la comete (1682), the
second edition of that work with a new title, Pensées
diverses sur la cométe (1683), and the Critique générale
(1682). For the first time in his life, established in the
freest country in Europe, he found available a wide variety
of reading material and, as editor of the Nouvelles, was
deluged with books, articles, and reviews sent him by authors

eager to have their ideas published and circulated.

 

1"Labrousse, Instrument, p. 28.

 

10

Bayle's wide circle of correspondents included his
friends and collaborators in England, Justel, Desmaizeaux,

5 who wrote letters to keep him informed about

and Larroque,1
ideas in vogue across the Channel, and, in addition, sent

him résfimes and articles for publication in the Nouvelles.

 

Fortunately, too, many of the serious works of the day,
especially those dealing with the two main topics of inter-
est to the Republic of Letters, science and theology, were
published in Latin as well as in the vernacular, so that
Bayle, who knew Latin well, could read and evaluate them
himself.

Because of Bayle's language handicap and because of
his resulting dependence on others, it is possible to raise
objections about his importance as an intermediary between
England and the Continent. In spite of his knowing neither
English nor Dutch, he had compensating strengths: his
knowledge of French and Latin and his general linguistic
ability, coupled with his encyclopedic memory, made him a
good critic, often able to decipher and comment an English
text.16 Madame Labrousse, after carefully weighing the

charges and the evidence, considers the Nouvelles mainly

 

 

lsLabrousse, Pierre Bayle, Vol. I, pp. 218-219; and
"Les Coulisses du journal de Bayle," in Pierre Bayle, 1e
philosophe de Rotterdam, ed. by Paul Dibon (Amsterdam and
Paris: Elsevier and Vrin, 1959), pp. 101-102.

 

16Georges Ascoli, L2_Grande Bretagne devant l'opinion
francaise au XVIIe siécle (Paris: Gamber, 1930), p. 4.

11

the work of Bayle, whose personal stamp they bear.17 His
conception of the journal, his strong appeals for articles
expressing all points of view, his insistence on keeping the
paper free of the personal animosity that had marked other
such publications, his catholic tastes--all these gave the

Nouvelles his own special cachet.

 

Bayle's wide-ranging interests are reflected by the
variety of articles and reviews on questions of dogma, such
as transubstantiation; on the teachings of the early Church,
such as the real nature of the Son; on Roman Catholic-
Protestant differences;on natural philosophy, with special
attention to mechanistic explanations of natural phenomena;
on historical events, especially those like Henry VIII's
break with Rome since that fitted with his general interest
in theological questions. The one notable lack, at least
for those who equate the Republic of Letters with literature,
is the paucity of articles on and reviews of purely literary
works. The great, in both volume and quality, literary pro-
duction in France and England at the end of the seventeenth

century receives scant attention. The Nouvelles is largely

 

devoted to publicizing titles and authors; to raising ques-
tions, especially those involving historical accuracy; to
reviewing in detail works that caught the editor's eye or,

were likely to provoke debate among the reading public.

 

17Labrousse, "Les Coulisses," pp. 97-108.

12

Actually the journal is more like a technical or scientific
journal than a literary one. All things considered, the
publication is a remarkable reflection of a whole intellec-
tual and social milieu consisting of both Roman Catholics
and Protestants who were not disconcerted by an inquiring
secular mind fascinated by ideas and interested in further-
ing knowledge of them.18

Although it is tempting to see in Bayle a philosophe

 

avant la lettre, it is even more important to remember

 

that, until after 1687, the main trends in his work are

all Calvinist.19 One of the commonest notions in literary
history is that of Bayle (and here he is usually linked
with Fontenelle) as a precursor of the Enlightenment who
transmitted to the eighteenth century notions from the free
thought of the Renaissance and from the libertin thinkers of
the seventeenth century.2° This View, expecially congenial
to eighteenth century writers and thinkers, emphasizes his
critical examination of historical evidence, his care in
documentation, his tolerance for dissent, his stress on the

1

disparity between Christian dogma and reason2 and gives his

 

18Ibid., p. 97.

19Walter Rex, Essays on Pierre Bayle (The Hague,
1965)! P. Xii.

 

20Ibid., p. xi.

21Karl Sandberg, At the Crossroads of Faith and
Reason, An Essay on Pierre Bayle (University of Arizona,
1966), pp. 108-109.

13

thought a coherence, direction, and conviction that it does
not really have. The aspects of his thought that are most

prominent in the Nouvelles are his fair-mindedness; his

 

interest in natural phenomena and in oddities, such as the
horned girl said to have been born in Ireland; and, above
all, his great concern with the theological questions of
the times. Bayle, living in a century when theological
matters occupied a large part of the attention and energies
of the Republic of Letters, shared that concern and was much
involved in the controversies of the day. Though much crit-
ical effort has been devoted to the attempt to determine
whether Bayle was a sceptic or a believer, the answer to
that question--an answer which, in any case, cannot be
known--is not so important as the recognition of his pas-
sionate interest in theological questions. It is essential
to stress Bayle's main interest here; otherwise he is read
out of context so that he appears more modern than he ought
to.

Bayle's decision to publish a newspaper was not a
trail-blazing one22 since there were earlier examples, the
most famous of which was de Sallo's Journal des Sgavans,

founded in Paris in January 1665. But the Nouvelles mark

 

 

22Jean Delvolvé, Essai sur Pierre Bayle, religion
critique et philosophie positive (Paris: Alcan, 1906),
p. 67.

 

14

a new direction, indicated by the motto on the masthead:

Non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dare lucem, etc. In the

 

Préface to the first issue, Bayle explains what he proposes
to do. After duly praising the liberty of the Dutch press,
he goes on to hope for communications from "les personnes

de ce PaIs-ci, qui auront une connaissance exacte des
nouvelles machines qu'on pourra inventer & des raretez qu'on

n 23

y apportera des Indes. At the same time he warns his

readers that the Nouvelles will not malign people in the

 

manner of the Mercure Sgavant. Works are to be judged "sans

 

prevention, & sans aucune malignité & de telle sorte que
l'on espére que ceux qui seront intéressez a ce jugement
ne s'en irriteront point."2“

To avoid any condemnation of his work, Bayle, who
was as a relaps suspect, declares his intention to examine
and report impartially on all topics without trying to seek
or to avoid religious controversy. Then, having stated his
policy, he does fairly much whatever he wants, with the
result that many of his examinations, defenses, and apol-
ogies are really not very subtle undermining operations.

In his role of detached, disinterested commentator, he sows
the seeds of doubt by asking questions, the subversive

conclusions of which cannot be avoided. Here lies the

 

23NRL, Vol. I, mars, 1684, Préface.

”Ibid.

15

essence of the famous Bayle procedure: juxtapose "truth"
and fact and let corrosion proceed.25 But always Bayle
insists on his impartiality, particularly in matters of
religion. All illustrious dead, he writes, will receive

in the Nouvelles consideration according to the following

 

formula:

11 ne s'agit point de Religion: i1 s'agit

de Science: on doit donc mettre bas tous les
termes qui divisent les hommes en differentes
factions, considerer seulement 1e point dans
lequel ils se reunissent, qui est la qualité
d'Homme illustre dans la République des
Lettres.26

Bayle was also aware of his two reader groups and
of their quite different needs:

On avertit seulement en particulier, que pour
complaire a deux sortes de lecteurs de different
gofit, dont les uns se plaignent que le Journal
leur donne trop en abregé l'idée d'un livre,

les autres au contraire, qu'il ne leur parle pas
d'un assez grand nombre d'Ouvrages a chaque fois,
l'on a résolu de diviser chacune de ces Relations
en deux parties. La premiere sera pour ceux qui
veulent qu'on leur rende raison d'un Livre un peu
amplement, & 1a seconde pour ceux qui ne demandent
qu'une idée superficielle de beaucoup de Livres.27

Though the announced program is not strictly followed, Bayle
does manage to mention an astonishing number of books and‘

even to talk of them at some length.

 

25Delvolvé, Essai, p. 98; and Rex, Essays, pp. x-xi.
asNRL, Vol. 1, mars, 1684, Préface.

”Ibid.

16

The intellectual news from England printed in the

Nouvelles presents part of the English reaction to the

 

question of authority in religion and science, a matter

of great concern to seventeenth century thinkers. In
religion, the Protestant-Roman Catholic quarrel divided the
Christian world while the question of God and his power in
the universe exercised scholars in both camps. The uneasy
feeling of the times was that the new laws of mechanics,
especially those of Descartes, had eliminated the Creator
from his creation. In the medieval world, reason and logic
had been used to account for human and natural phenomena;
to relate them to theological concepts such as the Creation,
the Fall, and the Incarnation; and to arrive at a coherent
view of the universe as well as of man's place in it.
Revelation had provided a supernatural explanation of the
universe in which religion, buttressed by reason, furnished
the means by which man might guide his steps and, possibly,
partake of supernatural grace.28 Nature, a unified whole
of which man was an integral part, showed further evidence
of divine purpose in the world; it was a second revealed
truth that supported the first. In essence, the former
conflict of reason versus faith took, in the seventeenth

century, a new form, that of science versus religion.

 

”Samuel Bethell, The Cultural Revolution of the
Seventeenth Century (London, 1951), p. 54.

 

 

17

Where earlier centuries had seen the created universe both
as a manifestation of the Creator and also as one source of
revelation to man (the other being, of course, the Scrip-
tures), the new trend was to see the universe as something
to be measured and explained rationally. Reason was now
asked to provide a different basis for living founded not
on faith but on observation and experiment. It is a com-
monplace that the seventeenth century is the great dividing
line that marks the beginning of what we call the modern

world,29

but it is nonetheless still very much a theolog-
ically oriented century. That meant that Christianity had
once again to reformulate its doctrines in the language of
the new philosophical principles.3°
In the evolving dialogue between science and reli-
gion one of the most absorbing questions was that of the
governing of the universe: How does God (on his existence
there was agreement, often tacit, but still agreement)
manifest his power in the world? This question arose

naturally after the publications of Descartes, whose world

seemed to function quite nicely after the initial flick

 

29Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier
Seventeenth Century (New York: Oxford UniverSity Press,
1945), Ch. 1; Sir George Clark, The Seventeepth Centppy,
2nd ed., Galaxy Books (New York: Oxford University Press,
1961), Ch. 1; and Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the
Modern World, Mentor Books (New York: The New American
Library): Ch. 1.

 

 

 

 

3°Richard Samuel Westfall, Science and Religion in
Seventeenth Century England (New Haven, 1958), p. 10.

 

 

18

from the Creator that set it all in motion. If, after the
creation, the world worked according to purely mechanical
laws, how did one account for miracles, not only those in
the Bible, but those that were still occurring or were to
occur in the future? If all natural effects could be
explained by the laws of motion, what happened to religion?
The problem was particularly difficult since the observation
and reasoning that constituted the most common intellectual
activities of the day gave an adequate account of the phe-
nomena observed; there was no need to invoke intervention
on the part of God. Protestants especially tended to dis-
count any miracles not related in the Bible, but still the
possibility of their occurring had to be taken into consid-
eration. And even though miracles, commonly thought to be
signs of God's presence and power in the world, were more
and more discredited, some sort of explanation was in order.
The old belief that providence governed the world was becom-
ing harder to accept in the face of new evidence that indi-
cated a clear set of laws governing matter and motion.

In the new scheme, the world was made up of move-
ments that could be seen and quantified,31 an attitude
fostered by Cartesianism, which, as it was usually under-

stood, implied three things: that reason was to be prized

 

”R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature, Galaxy Books
(New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 102-103.

 

19

above authority; that the laws of nature were assumed to
be stable; and that rigorous proofs were to be searched for.
The interest in science and its concomitant insistence on
measurement led inexorably to the notion that what is real
is what can be measured; what is true can be expressed
mathematically. Quantitative distinctions became more
absorbing than qualitative ones; how do things happen?
became a more important question than why do things happen?
The activities in the realm of natural philosophy were
presumably designed to provide rational proofs for the
existence of God and to give religion a firm intellectual
support; actually this religion based on human reason and
experience tended to replace, rather than supplement,
Christianity. More and more, as the scientific spirit grew,
scholars said less and less about Christian beliefs, which
retreated steadily into the background.32 The traditional
notions of Christianity were, however, never denied; they
were simply not mentioned as scholars emphasized what was
reasonable and susceptible of proof. The result was a
religion that was really a moral code based more on rational
ways of thinking and behaving than on any sort of spiritual
foundation.

In England, between 1640 and 1660, a wave of reli-

gious enthusiasm had resulted in a multiplicity of sects.

 

32Westfall, Science and Religion, p. 161.

 

20

While the Anglican Church was the established one, at

the same time there existed a tradition of non-conformity
that prevented any one creed from monopolizing the spiritual
life of the nation. The real roots of the English tradition
go back even farther. In both England and Scotland, the
Reformation saw a lay rebellion against the medieval clergy,
but the revolt took quite different forms in the two coun-
tries. In England, where the 1aity could exercise control
of the Church through the instruments of Parliament and

the Crown, they preferred state control of the Church. In
Scotland, where there was no Parliament and where the Crown
(Mary Stuart) could not be trusted to safeguard the inter-
ests of her Protestant subjects, a group of laymen and
ministers active in Church organization took over. Naturally
enough, under such circumstances the Scottish Presbyterians
opted for Church control of the State since it was the only
way they could wield power. As Trevelyan and Trevor-Roper

33

both point out, The victory of the Independents over the

Presbyterians meant the victory of the laity over the clergy
and the final defeat of clerical ideas. English leaders

holding Erastian views refused to set up in England a

'presbytery' according to the word of God"3“and England

 

33G. M. Trevelyan, History of England, 3 vols.
Doubleday Anchor Books (Garden City: Doubleday and Co.,
Inc., 1954), pp. 173-174; and H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Crisis
of the_Seventeenth Centupy (New York: Harper and Row, 1968),
pp. 207-208.

 

 

 

3“Trevor-Roper, Crisis, ibid.

21

accordingly escaped the fate of France, where Louis XIV
had managed to impose and maintain Roman Catholicism as
the official religion and to imprison or drive into exile
dissenters, notably the Huguenots.

Not only was English life enriched--or cursed,
depending on one's point of view--by a variety of paths to
salvation but there was at the same time a pronounced trend
toward rational theology that produced a view of religion
more as moral attitude and conviction than as sacrament and
dogma. Along with those ideas was the notion that believing
Christians were obliged to espouse only a certain number of
fundamental tenets. Since, according to such a view, the
many differences in dogma did not constitute genuine reli-
gious quarrels, there was in England a general liberty of
conscience along with a tradition of non-conformity.

To sum up: the English contributions to the

Nouvelles have a basic theme, the challenge to authority

 

in religion and science. In matters of faith, authority had
been the voice of the Pope speaking as the head of the Roman
Catholic Church until seriously questioned by the Reformers
of the sixteenth century. In science, the natural philosophy
of the Scholastics had been the official one until Copernicus,
Galileo, and Tycho Brahe, among others, had begun to look at
the world around them, make measurements and observations,

and conclude that the old explanations would no longer do.

Bayle does not deal with politics, the third main topic of

22

interest to seventeenth century readers, for doing so would

have subjected the Nouvelles to censorship even by the

 

tolerant Dutch. It was dangerous but possible to deal with
aspects of religious politics such as the various ways of
church government or the questions of papal authority but
writing about civil government, about a reigning monarch,
was not advisable if one wanted to keep on publishing. Too,
Bayle himself was no revolutionary. Unlike his compatriot
Jurieu, he did not advocate violence on the part of the
Huguenots nor did he work to see Louis XIV overthrown.
Occasionally Bayle mentions English politics, usually only
to commend a sovereign for his tolerance of religious dis-

sent, but he, and consequently the Nouvelles, carefully

 

avoid meddling in current political affairs.

CHAPTER II
CHANGING PERSPECTIVES ON CHURCH

HISTORY AND DOGMA

In their method of challenging authority the

articles in the Nouvelles that deal with religious questions

 

reflect accurately the main intellectual trend of the age:
the application of the new scientific principles of reason
and observation to the matter at hand, here Church history
and dogma. Observation in the world of nature was revealing
more design, order, and law than had been suspected, with
the result that scholars began to look for the same~qual-
ities in religion. Instead of God's numerous interventions,
by means of miracles, in the physical universe, perhaps
there could be found rational explanations for otherwise
mysterious happenings recounted in the Bible.

For years the Roman Catholic Church had proclaimed
itself the purveyor of truth to the Christian world; the
Church alone represented orthodoxy and had the means to
show the believer the way to salvation. There had been,
of course, attacks on the Roman Catholic Church, but it had
managed to weather the storms by declaring the attackers

heretics. But that was soon to change. Martin Luther's

23

24

protest against abuses in the Roman Catholic Church was the
beginning of an important movement, not to be easily stemmed,
that finally became a protest against the authority of the
Church itself.1 The new protest was, however, of necessity

formed by the old orthodoxy; and the new certainty, at least

 

as it is usually expressed in the Nouvelles, concerned it-
self with proofs, as had the Scholastics, and appealed to
the human mind in attempting to explain the reasonableness
of ideas such as the existence of God, the believability of
miracles, and the Incarnation.2
The constant recourse to reason in the intellectual
battles of the day caused scholars to speak less and less of
essentially Christian beliefs as they framed their arguments.

3

As Pelikan points out for Lutheranism, and his remarks

explain a notable trend in the Nouvelles, the special mes-

 

sage of Christianity, the communication between God and man,
the revelation through Christ of God's love for man, got
lost in scholarly quarrels. In their efforts to make the
Christian faith intellectually convincing, the disputants
necessarily used arguments aimed at man's rationality; for,

according to both Lutherans and Calvinists“ the Holy Spirit,

 

1Rex, Essays, p. xiii.

2Jaroslav Pelikan, From Luther to Kierkpgaard
(St. Louis, Missouri, 1950), P. 59.

 

31bid.

I'Ibid., pp. 59-60; and Rex, Essays, p. 29.

25

working through the mind, convinced man of the truth of the
Scriptures and enabled him to attain certainty.

Since the problem, then, was to win over the
intellect, the means lay ready to hand. Because all those
involved had had university training, they were familiar
with philosophy no matter what their religious creed. The
learned mind, formed by philosophy (and that meant medieval
Scholastic philosophy), was best reached by arguments based
on its developed taste for “symmetry, harmony, and compre-

"5 Therefore, the arguments on both sides were

hensiveness.
couched in terms that both sides understood, and the emo-
tional component of the Christian faith was increasingly
obscured as Roman Catholics and anti-Romans battled each
other, largely over the formulations stated by the Council
of Trent. The result was that the Bible and the message of
the Scriptures, especially, receded into the background as
philosophical-theological debates took the center of the
stage and dogmatics became more important than exegesis.
Both sides appealed to the reasoning faculties; only the
mind would provide a sure basis for belief firmly built on
an intellectually coherent system, based in turn on the
Scriptures read and interpreted by men whose minds were

illuminated by the Holy Spirit. However, the Scriptures

were not the primary concern in the debates; they were

 

5Pelikan, From Luther, p. 59.

26

overshadowed by the efforts to construct a satisfying
philosophical-theological explanation of Christian dogma

and this is the battle reflected in the Nouvelles.

 

The new protest took the form of questioning
accepted notions such as transubstantiation and of carefully
studying and analyzing accounts of the early days of the
Christian Church and the text of the Bible. Later on, when
scholars like Simon proved the Bible not to be the uniform
divinely inspired work it was once thought to be, the anti-
Roman Catholic attack lost some of its vigor, but in the
early years of the debate Protestants usually championed
Bible study as a tremendous weapon against the authority
and the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. Though
the anti-Roman Catholics whose views are recorded in the

Nouvelles belong to various sects, their differences are

 

not so important as is their feeling of unity against Rome.
The groups dissenting from the Roman Catholic Church felt
themselves united by their stated aim: to return to what
they called the true Church, that of the first centuries

of Christianity. In the Nouvelles there is no emphasis on

 

the doctrinal differences among the protesting sects; only
their common stand against Roman Catholic orthodoxy is

stressed. Accordingly, in this study the word Protestant

 

means anti-Roman Catholic.
Mainly the Protestant efforts aimed to restore the

early purity of the Church before it had got contaminated,

27

as they thought, with all sorts of extraneous attachments,
many from pagan tradition; they wanted a Church free of
the overburden of Roman Catholicism. Such an undertaking
depended on going back to the early Church to discover just
what was held to be essential by the early Christians. For
Calvinists, of whom Bayle was one, and for anti-Romans as a
group, this core of true belief was to be found in the study
of the early Church "to the time when the Fourth Oecumenical
Council issued the last of the series of definitions and
decrees to which all the historic churches refer as the
expression of the consent of the Church universal in
antiquity."6
In Bayle's publication the attack on the Roman
Catholic version of Christianity can mostly be found in
articles dealing with Church history and with dogma. The
usual techniques of assault are the dispassionate question-
ing of what had previously been taken for granted and the
use of scientific evidence or of new historical methods to
prove either that old ideas were false or at the very least
to cast serious doubt on them--all this often in the guise
of removing pagan error or false patristic traditions.7 In

the world view emerging at this time, the fantastic, the

 

6Henry Bettenson, Documents of the Christian Church
(2nd ed.; New York: Oxford Paperbacks, 1963), p. vi.

7Frank Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the
Gods (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), p. 22.

28

miraculous have no place; the new world is a matter—of-fact
one that prefers to see and concentrate on the ordinary
rather than on the extraordinary.

As historical studies uncovered contradictions
within the Roman Catholic Church itself, Protestants were
quick to call attention to them. The English, whose rela-
tions with the papacy had grown steadily worse ever since
the time of Wycliffe, were leaders in questioning the Roman
Catholic claims. Once Henry VIII had openly defied papal
authority, the way was clear to re-examine all aspects of
belief. Bayle's journal was careful to point out differ-
ences in thinking and to suggest that the Roman Catholic way
was not necessarily the only one nor the one in force since
the earliest days of the faith.

One of the great differences between the two.
churches was the number of sacraments recognized. Since
the Protestants refused to acknowledge the seven sacraments
of the Roman Catholic Church, a fruitful line of inquiry was
the one leading to an examination of the origins of these
sacraments. In their effort to find rational, historically
based proofs for their views, Protestants scrutinized Roman
Catholic claims, which were found, needless to say, to rest
on a shaky foundation. The Protestant goal was to show that
the Roman Catholic Church was not a monolithic body insti-
tuted by Christ and maintained in its initial purity by its

Catholic guardians. They wanted to portray it as they saw

29

it: a body that was the blending of several traditions and
the result of more than a few compromises.
As the two main divisions of Christianity argued

about the number and nature of the sacraments, the Nouvelles,

 

true to its intention of clarifying the questions of the day,
provided its readers with a running account of the quarrel.
Because of its central importance in the Christian Church,
the Eucharist was the sacrament that got the most attention
from scholars. Though both sides agreed that the Eucharist
was a sacrament, they could not agree on the nature of it.
The Roman Catholic position was that the bread and wine,
after proper consecration, actually became the body and
blood of Christ, under the accidents of the bread and the
wine. Though the anti-Roman Catholic rejected that view,
they came to no general agreement on the question. Impana—

tion, consubstantiation, real presence, spiritual presence--

 

all these explanations were mentioned but without definition
or elaboration. One of the several Protestant arguments was
based on the discovery that the Roman Catholic view of the
Eucharist was a fairly recent one: Archbishop John Tillot-
son's work (44) showed by presenting convincing passages,

said the review in the Nouvelles, that the Fathers of the

 

first six centuries had not believed in transubstantiation,
and there had not been unanimous consent to that view until
quite late. After a clouded early history, transubstantia-

tion had become an article of faith only after the Council

30

of Trent. In spite of the Roman Catholic assertion that

the words Hoc est corpus meum meant exactly what they said;

 

that is, that the bread became the body of Christ, Tillotson
disagreed. Having studied the question and the reasons for
belief in transubstantiation, he pointed out that there was
absolutely no reason why the words had to mean what the
Roman Catholics said they meant, and that there was ground
to understand them in quite another sense. He found the
whole idea of transubstantiation to be a late idea that had
come into the West from the Greeks after the Second Nicene
Council in 787, which had convened to discuss the question
of the veneration of images, and to answer an earlier state-
ment by the Council of Constantinople to the effect that the
only image of himself that the Lord had left was the sacra-
ment in which the substance of the bread is the image of his
body. To the preceding statement, the Second Nicene Council
replied that after the consecration the Host is not the
image of Christ's body and blood but is properly his body
and blood. The foregoing evidence presented by Tillotson
strenghtened the arguments of those eager to cast doubt on
Roman Catholic teachings in order to urge a return to the
early doctrine of the Christian Church.

Tillotson's summary of the question prompted Bayle-
to add to the review article a long digression on the ortho-
doxy of Ratramnus, one of the heretical authors mentioned by

Tillotson and also, Bayle reminded his readers, the subject

31

of a recent treatise by one Boileau (40, p. 682). Ratramnus
had held that the elements of the Eucharist are spiritually
efficacious without, however, undergoing any real or objec-
tive change. For his views he had been declared orthodox

by a doctor of the Sorbonne; on the other hand, he had

also been condemned by two popes (Pius IV and Clement VIII)
and by other Roman Catholic theologians, unnamed in the
review. Bayle's conclusion, after reviewing Tillotson's

and Boileau's statements of the controversy, was that Church
Fathers who believed in transubstantiation would have lost
any judgment handed down in earlier days. He also reminded
his readers that Roman Catholic apologists found a way out
of their difficulty by saying that the Church Fathers had
two languages, one for initiates and another, enigmatic, for
everyone else. The same apologists, disregarding passages
cited by Protestant theologians, continued to insist that
the Fathers prove the Roman Catholic views correct.

Not content to rely only on historical argument,
Tillotson adduced other reasons for not following Roman
Catholic teachings and here Bayle stressed the attack that
Tillotson emphasized most. Suppose, went Tillotson's argu-
ment, that the doctrine of transubstantiation were revealed
in the Bible just as clearly as it had been stated by the
Council of Trent. We could then see the doctrine clearly,
but no more clearly than we see that the consecrated bread

is bread; hence, Tillotson reasoned, there is no more reason

32

to believe one thing than the other. Once one is allowed
to doubt that bread is bread, then all sorts of questions
can creep into one's mind. If, his argument continued, the
doctrine of transubstantiation is true, then God has really
deprived Christianity of the strongest proof of that truth:
transubstantiation is a miracle, but we do not see it.
Unfortunately then, miracles, which are the most powerful
proof of the gospel, no longer serve any purpose; they
cannot convince those who do not witness them.

Tillotson's final argument was to point out that,
even if the doctrine of transubstantiation should be true,
there was an even graver risk than doubting it and that was
the risk of idolatry. Because it is never sure that the
many conditions necessary for consecration have been prop-
erly carried out, believers may venerate ordinary bread
rather than the Host.

After presenting Tillotson's arguments against
belief in transubstantiation, along with some of his own
personal comment, Bayle made a final observation designed
to put the quarrel in a more rational perspective: for
enemies of Christianity the really amazing aspect of the
controversy was not the dogma itself, but the fact that so
many people who did not believe in it had been sacrificed.

Although Tillotson's book provided the most compre-
hensive English attack reported in the Nouvelles during the

period under consideration, the discussion continued in

33

other articles of non-English origin. The emphasis was
almost always on the recent inclusion of transubstantiation
among the articles of faith and on the untrustworthiness
of a church claiming an unbroken tradition that did not
actually exist, as the evidence clearly showed. Historical
research had made it very plain that the Church was at
one time a fluid organization that had become more rigidly
doctrinal with the passing years, especially after the
Council of Trent. The publication of the results of such
studies, along with the questioning of commonly accepted
practices and ideas, aimed to destroy the credibility of
the Church in the minds of the faithful, or at least to
prod them into a more critical examination of its claims.

The critical examination of Roman Catholic sac-
raments continued in the review of John Goodman's work
entitled A Discourse Concerning Auricular Confession (28).
In his study, Goodman, after investigating the origins of
the practice, rejected it as a sacrament and presented
three theses: that auricular confession was not instituted
by Christ; that it had not had either constant or universal
use in the Roman Catholic Church; and that, as currently
:practiced, it was more harmful than conducive to piety and
ecclesiastical discipline.

As Goodman, in his role as critic, looked into the
liistorical background to see when and why the Roman Catho-

lics had decreed auricular confession one of the sacraments,

34

he found that it had not been instituted by Christ.
Moreover, even Roman Catholic experts did not agree on its
origin. Some of those knowledgeable in canon law thought
it was simply based on an old custom, while others cited

a passage in St. John (not indicated in the review) which
seemed to support both confession and penitence, a passage

judged weak by the author of the Discourse.

 

Further exploration of the question uncovered the
fact that there was no mention at all of auricular confes-
sion during the first two centuries of the Church. Tertul-
lian did mention the practice, but it was clearly quite
different from the current one. Saints Augustine and
Chrysostom also talked of confession between men (d'homme
a homme) but they were obviously far from considering it a
sacrament. Goodman's conclusion was that the Fourth Lateran
Council established the custom as law at the beginning of
the thirteenth century and that the Council of Trent later
prescribed it, but that it was certainly not a practice of
the primitive Church. In fact, auricular confession had
gained ground only slowly and not without opposition.

The third objection, that the practice as currently
understood was more harmful than conducive to piety, was one
that Protestants had made repeatedly. The reasons for that‘
charge were not given in the article but were presumably
that auricular confession gave priests so much power that

they became arrogant and that such confession too often led

35

to debauchery and loose conduct on the part of priests and
their women parishioners.

The review concluded that, to convince dissenters,
Roman Catholics would have to make three points: that the
primitive Church considered auricular confession a sacrament
or part of one; that auricular confession was universally
necessary; and that without such confession there was no
salvation.

The controversies about the sacraments did not
occupy all the energies of scholars; they also began to look
at the Bible, where they found more challenges. Interest in
the Bible implied, of course, study of the Old Testament, a
pursuit that raised troubling questions. The Old Testament,
as everyone knew, prefigured the New, but such a statement
did not clear up the many confusing aspects of the Old Law.
The chronology of the books was a problem, as was the corre—
lation of events mentioned in both the Old and the New
Testaments. Then, too, how could scholars explain away
certain acts that did not appear to be in harmony with the
accepted ideas of the nature of God. These acts had to have
a meaning, for it was taken on faith that God behaved ration-
ally rather than capriciously. The only difficulty lay in
determining his meaning. One way out, though it seemed too'
easy, was to resort to the notion of his use of a language
incomprehensible to man or comprehensible only to an ini-

tiated few. Two English scholars, Lightfoot and Spencer,

36

had worked on questions of interpretation and had found
notably reasonable ways to account for puzzling events.

The plague of lice (Exodus 8) had provoked John
Lightfoot (38) to find an intellectually satisfying expla-
nation of it. The Egyptian magicians, explaining to Pharaoh
the appearance of the lice, had said, "This is the finger of
God," a statement that needed amplification. Why would a
benevolent Creator so afflict his children? The common idea,
according to the review article, was that these words showed
the recognition by the Egyptian magicians of the superiority
of the Jewish divinity Jehovah, whose deputy Moses claimed
to be. However, such an act was hardly becoming to a pro-
tector of the Jews. According to Lightfoot, a careful
reading of the text produced evidence leading to a new view
of the event. In the case of the lice, Moses did not
threaten in advance as he had with the other plagues, and
the lice afflicted both the Israelites and their enemies
alike. Therefore, Moses, a deputy with limited powers but
in charge of the Jewish nation, could perform certain mir-
acles, but nothing so impressive as the production of lice.
Lightfoot's conclusions were that the insects must have come
from the supreme divinity recognized by the Egyptians and
that Jehovah was one of several subordinate divinities with‘
circumscribed powers. The result of all his reasoning was

to absolve the God of Moses of any base action and at the

37

same time to account for elements that might otherwise
seem supernatural.
John Spencer, another English scholar, set out in

his De legibus Hebraeorum to demonstrate the wisdom of the

 

Creator. Spencer's work, of which the second edition.cor-
rected and revised is under review (39), had, according to

the Nouvelles, as its main goal, the same one that Male-

 

branche had in several works; that is, to show the libertins

 

"que l'on peut résoudre leurs difficultez autrement que par
cette raison générale, que tel a été 1e droit ou le bon
plaisir de Dieu" (39, p. 431). Hence, Spencer's task was
clear: he had to find a good reason for each ceremony of
the Old Law, even, for example, wrote Bayle, going so far
as to tell why a ram was preferred to a goat as a sacrifi-
cial animal. To whet the reader's appetite, the review
listed briefly some of the topics treated by Spencer but
gave extended treatment to only a few.

The common libertin notion that God did things just
because he wanted to had to be dealt with since it did not
fit the rational pattern scholars were trying to establish.
Clearly God interfered in his universe much less often than
he had previously, but still the Old Testament did present
instances of God's direct intervention and these had,
equally clearly, to be explained satisfactorily. Male-

branche had claimed, according to the Nouvelles (39, p. 431),

 

that God's wisdom and the exercise of his power must never be

38

separated; then it can be said that God does things because
of his infinite sovereignty, which puts him above having to
render any account of his actions. The same principle
guided Spencer, said the review, in his study of the Mosaic
laws, which presented some knotty problems. Although it was
a commonplace that the Old Testament laws were a prefigura-
tion of the New Testament, that explanation was not felt to
be sufficient, since it was constantly bolstered with more
readily understandable and more convincing arguments.

In his treatment of Jewish ceremonial law, Spencer
began by stating that the Jews, after their stay in Egypt,
had a tendency to idolatry. For that ill the establishment
of a theocratic government, with all its accompanying laws,
was the principal solution. But, said Bayle's review, some
people-~Origen, for example--had not been able to accept
that explanation for the laws of the Jews; for Origen had
found the laws of Greece and Rome to be more reasonable.
Obviously, his understanding had been faulty. Spencer pro-
ceeded on the assumption that the literal sense of these
Mosaic laws was necessarily reasonable; there was no need,
he said, to invoke figurative language and to conclude that
the laws did not really mean what they said. Spencer's
elucidation of the sense of the laws always kept in mind
that God's wisdom was to be demonstrated, not questioned.
His examination of the laws showed that God had, as a matter

of fact, been extraordinarily forethoughtful. The Chaldeans

39

and related tribes had two sorts of practices: criminal
ones such as the sacrifice of children to Moloch and the
prostitution of women to Venus and others such as various
laws regulating ways of eating and dressing. In Spencer's
view, God, of course, forbade the criminal practices but
also the ones concerning relatively unimportant matters,
too, for fear that dangerous habits would somehow be adopted
and become custom under the protective cover of innocuous
ways. In that way he provided an understandable reason for
a host of otherwise unexplainable and confusing laws: God
was protecting his chosen people from the wickedness sur-
rounding them.

The second line of explanation used by Spencer (as
well as by Malebranche) concerned God's occasional interven—
tion in his universe to remedy the irregularity of second
causes. Having done so when necessary, God then retired,
allowing the universe to function according to the general
laws of motion. Using that principle, then, Spencer had a
basis for stating that God had intervened to give to the
Jews laws which were adapted, by a sagacious combination
of the moral (the laws about religious practices) and the
physical (the laws concerning eating and dressing), to keep
the Jewish nation from idolatry.

As for the Old Testament as a prefiguration of the
New, Spencer held (and proved, said Bayle, by citing author-

ities and reasons which were not, however, mentioned in the

40

review article) that God modified certain ways that the
Jews had inherited from their ancestors because he realized
that those practices, once purified by his modifications,
would lead the Jews away from idolatry and prepare them to
receive the Gospel. As proof that the Jews inherited cer-
tain ways, Spencer showed similarities between Jewish and
Egyptian rites (though the article gave no details), then
pointed out that was easier to show that the Jews imitated
the Egyptians than vice versa. It is clear, and a general
principle as well, commented Bayle, that in passing from
the old to the new (as from paganism to Judaism and as, in
England, from Roman Catholicism to Anglicanism) many old
customs are retained, a great precedent established when
Judaic rites incorporated old, familiar elements rather
than breaking completely with the past.

The conclusion of Spencer's investigation was that
though many of the Jewish practices had a pagan background
(the Feast of the New Moon, the Cherubim, the scapegoat),
these could be justified because they were familiar bridges
between the old and the new that tended to keep the Jews
protected from the worship of false gods. Thus Spencer had
managed to give a plausible, rational explanation for what
could otherwise have seemed a whimsical and capricious set
of laws.

In short, his aim was not to say that God estab-

lished laws and ceremonies simply because the idolators had

41

contrary ones, or because such was his pleasure but to show
that in his wisdom he set them up because the Jews already
had the spirit of his laws and because the latter were an
intermediate step between the Old Law and the New. The
beauty of the account was that it proved God's sagacity:
he presumably did not draw up a perfect plan but rather
adapted his ideas to man's state of ignorance and corruption.
We can see then, as contemporary readers were doubtless
supposed to, that the allegorical interpretation of the Old
Testament was clearly unnecessary, a useless complication
once the light of reason had illuminated the matter.

As is obvious from the preceding descriptions,
systematic, rigorous development of themes was not a feature

of the Nouvelles; the very nature of the material used and

 

the purpose of the journal made that impossible. The long,
rambling discussions of Church-related topics prompted by
the books under review served several purposes: to tell
what the English were thinking and writing about; to inves-
tigate claims that Bayle found extravagant; to present for
consideration problems (such as weighing evidence or eval-
uating the probable veracity of an author's account) that
occurred as a conscientious historian pursued his studies;
and to juxtapose fact and accepted ideas to see what would
result.

No one sect was consistently quoted or represented;

rather Bayle printed a selection of materials linked by one

42

common theme, anti-Roman Catholicism. However, if it was
a question of making a case against a common enemy, Bayle
and the anti-Romans might well adopt Roman Catholic argu-
ments. Dodwell, interested in making clear the essential
and real distinction between priests and laymen (not, how-
ever, spelled out in the review), joined forces with Father
Petau, a Jesuit, to attack their common foe, Grotius, a
Dutch Arminian (43). An Anglican priest, George Bull,
defended the Church Fathers against the remarks of a Jesuit
who was supporting the Arian (hence heretical) position.
The case was surprising because Roman Catholics had cus-
tomarily prided themselves on their respect for the Fathers
while accusing Protestants (as the Anglicans were considered
here) of paying scant attention to them (24). But religious
politics made strange allies and the polemicists took their
weapons and their supporters where they found them. As
Bayle remarked of Dodwell,
Il nous apprend une infinité de belles

choses sur les antiquitez Ecclesiastiques:

c'est avec raison qu'on cajolle les Anglois

sur cette science, car dans les points 00 ils

ont les memes Adversaires que Rome ils lui

fournisent de grands secours; mais ils s'en

dédommagent bien dans les autres circonstances

(43).

The two consistent anti-Roman Caholic themes were

the questions of the number of the sacraments and the gen-

eral untrustworthiness of a church that had changed its

teachings, while constantly proclaiming the continuity of

43

its tradition. Any arguments that could be used to destroy
trust in the Roman Catholic teachings about the sacraments
or about the authenticity of Roman tradition were brought
out. Bayle's dislike was not, however, confined to Roman
Catholicism; he also publicized Protestant excesses and
shortcomings since his main target was the narrow mind,
closed to all beliefs but its own. The multiplicity of
sects, he wrote was regrettable, but there was no more
chance of uniting them than there was of having a "Monarchie
Universelle" (4, p. 309). Long-standing decisions honored
by all, as well as personal ways of thinking, prevented
unity in the Christian world. Thomas Pierce, however,
according to an anonymous report from England, was trying
to reduce the subjects of dispute by separating real issues
from mere misunderstandings (4).

Instead of relying on facts and reason, some schol-
ars were moved by sectarian feelings. Alexander Pitcairn, a
Scottish minister, was forced to leave his country because
of the dominant sect (Presbyterians), but in a fratricidal
war, he himself accused LeBlanc, a pillar of the RPR in
France, of being too Roman Catholic. Actually, LeBlanc,
who was, said Bayle, far from resembling a Roman Catholic,
had simply said that the two churches were not so far apart-
as was commonly supposed, at least not on the question of

justification. Pitcairn's zeal was excused on the grounds

44

that he was really just solicitous to preserve the purity
of the dogma of the first reformers (25).

Another example could be found in a work trying to
prove by means of the Fathers and the Bible that Quakerism
was the true religion. The author, Barclay, built his case
as did other scholars, "sans oublier non plus qu'eux a dire
du mal de toutes les autres sectes" (3, p. 221). He in-
cluded in his attack "Catholiques, Réformés, Sociniens,
Remontrans et ceux de la Confession d'Ausbourg" (3, p. 221).
Bayle here presents the reader with a picture of warring
groups, each out to condemn the others, the result being
to make a mockery of the concept of Christian charity.

Differences of Opinion often had surprising conse-
quences. The Rainoldus brothers, Englishmen reared outside
of England, in different faiths, met one day, argued so
strongly with each other that they changed sides. John,
who had been Roman Catholic, became a famous Presbyterian
controvertist; William, who had been Protestant, developed
such hatred for the Réformés that he wrote a book entitled

Calvino-turcismus to prove that the Reformed religion was

 

Turkish. So, concluded Bayle, disputes did not necessarily
develop stubborness (18, pp. 757-758).

In England, during the period of the struggles
between the Anglicans and the Roman Catholics when the
latter were under severe restrictions, negotiations were

arranged to give Catholics the right to practice their

45

religion. Here, Father Walsh showed that unfortunately, the
Jesuits botched everything by recommending an intransigeant
Roman Catholic as delegate to the discussions (5, p. 327).

The picture was not, however, all black; for in
Tudor England, in spite of the animosity between the warring
sects, Bayle reported that Cardinal Pole urged moeration on
his fellow Roman Catholics and advocated kind treatment of
heretics. The Protestant side showed equal consideration
when the Marquis of Winchester, a Roman Catholic, kept his
post as treasurer under Elizabeth (27, pp. 1251-1253).

Bayle's greatest praise was reserved for the English
solution, discussed by Gilbert Burnet (27), to religious
differences. The English break with Rome was really a
series of revolutions, but, in this case, the changes were
effected without the civil war that usually accompanied such
upheavals: "La plus grande regueur exercée sur les Catho—
liques fut que l'on emprisonna, et que l'on déposa quelque
peu d'Evéques . . ." (27, p. 1243).

The important lesson to be gleaned from the preced-
ing examples, which showed exemplary behavior in religious
matters as well as instances of extreme intolerance, was the
variety of ways to handle the problem of sectarian views.

In particular, the Nouvelles, in covering the English scene,'

 

carefully related details that showed the pacific solutions

found across the Channel for religious problems similar to

46

those that had set Frenchman against Frenchman and torn the
country apart. Bayle never tired of saying that solutions
to such problems were possible; that a plurality of sects
could exist together in a single country; that the people
of one nation did not have to have one religion. Bayle's
attack on human credulity and blind obedience to authority,
his most enduring contribution to the intellectual world,
was the result of his fair-mindedness, his willingness to
look carefully at all claims before making any judgment, his
readiness to revise his thinking in the face of new evidence.
While studies of the Bible provided rational expla-
nations for certain otherwise mysterious happenings, the
study of Church history shed light on the development of
the Christian faith and revealed changes in the Church over
the years. All in all, history was the most powerful weapon
available in the struggles to clear away misconceptions
about the Church, its past, and its teachings. Bayle's
marshalling of historical evidence to show his readers the
difference between tradition and truth represented a tremen-

dous change in historical studies. As Cassirer showed,

Bayle's view was no longer that of a scholar like Bossuet,

 

aErnst Cassirer, The Philosophyppf the Enlightenment,
trans. by Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove, Beacon"
Paperbacks (Boston, Beacon Press, 1955), Ch. 5, "The Con-
quest of the Historical World."

47

whose Discours sur l'histoire universelle presented a view

 

of history based firmly on the authority of the Bible, which,
in turn, derived its authority from tradition. According to
such an interpretation, historical certainty rested on tra—
dition but tradition could be evaluated only in the light of
evidence from history--circular reasoning pointed out and
criticized by Bayle, whose great service was to see history,
not as the unveiling of a divine plan for the world, but as
a discipline by which one could accumulate known facts and

9

use them in order to root out error. In fact, Bayle's

original aim in writing his Dictionnaire was to correct the

 

many errors in Moréri's dictionary rather than to compile
his own independent work; he was quite content to amass
facts and corrections without worrying about fitting them
into a larger scheme or without trying to impose his per-
sonal vision on his findings.

Quite in keeping with Bayle's notions of history,
the anti-Roman Catholic attitudes abstracted from English

publications to appear consequently in the Nouvelles con-

 

stantly emphasized the differences between history and

theology. Accordingly, many of the reviews in the Nouvelles,

 

like the one on Dodwell's Dissertationes Cyprianicae (41),

 

took great care to point out traditional views and commonly

accepted notions, then to present historical evidence that

 

91bid., p. 207.

48

refuted those views or at least nuanced them. The whole
effort was one of clearing out the accumulated false ideas
of centuries to make room for a new perspective of history
in which its truth was no longer guaranteed by the Bible
and tradition.

A common idea was that pagan emperors had killed
tremendous numbers of Christians, hence the high numbers of
martyrs in the early days of the Church. Henry Dodwell's
work (41, pp. 538-539) reported that popes and Roman Cath-
olic sovereigns had, for religious reasons, caused the death
of more people than had the pagan emperors. In fact, in the
light of historical evidence, the pagans seemed amazingly
mild; neither thy nor their provincial governors had been
devils incarnate. A detailed review of the persecutions of
the early Church by the Roman emperors revealed far fewer
martyrs than had been commonly supposed; for even during the
worst of the persecutions, orders went out not to torture
Christians so badly that they died (41, p. 545). Of course,
the action was not, as the review was careful to specify,
completely altruistic; though it did prove clemency, it also
prevented many of the persecuted Christians from attaining
the condition to which they aspired, martyrdom. Still,
whatever their reasons, pagan rulers had refrained from
wholesale slaughter.

The question of martyrs to the faith brought another

matter to the fore, the explanation of their courage. Of

49

course, the review admitted that the spirit of God working
within the individual was the main reason for their bravery
but there might well be others. Again, the reader could
see the concern to advance a rational explanation for such
extraordinary resolve. Dodwell, addressing himself to

the question, discovered other reasons for the exemplary
behavior of the early Christian martyrs. The austere life
they led hardened them to bodily suffering just as the
Lacedaemonians' difficult life made death seem preferable
to existence; the thirst for glory might well be a factor,
though not a major one; the prevalent notion that martyrs
went straight to heaven and did not have to pass through
the fire that was presumed to consume the world also helped
strengthen their determination; martyrdom also conferred

on those who attained it one of the privileges granted to
saints, that of being able to shorten, by their prayers,
the time during which the Church would have to suffer; and,
finally, martyrdom was thought to be a second baptism (41,
p. 549).

Such an account stressed the readily understandable
reasons that might have led Christians to want martyrdom
rather than emphasize explanations depending on notions
such as revelation or supernatural grace. As a result
of Dodwell's work, the Church appeared to the seventeenth
century reader more as an organization of practical, rea-

sonable, ordinary people whose conduct was not so mystical

50

or far removed from contemporary experience as one might
think.

History was also used as a weapon by the Protestant
camp, which never tired of announcing its intention to go
back to the early days of Christianity, to the Church
Fathers, for an untainted view of that faith. Actually
Protestants were far more interested in unearthing items
that might prove useful in demolishing Roman Catholic claims
than in doing anything else. Since both sides shared a
common history, at least up to the Reformation, their
similarities, which got little publicity, were greater than
their differences, which were usually stressed more than
might be called for by a less biased judge.

The publication of a new edition of Origen's trea-

tise on prayer gave the Nouvelles an occasion (45) to point

 

out some of the difficulties in the Church when that work
was written. Dealing with the treatise was a delicate
problem, for Origen, in spite of his important role in

the early Church, had been condemned for his heretical
views. Now, the Protestants liked to appeal to the Fathers,
of whom Origen was one, because the latter represented an
early, pure strain of Christianity. For that reason they
had to defend Origen, to put his work in the most favorable.
light possible, without appearing to foster heresy. Accord-

ing to the review, a survey of the early Church showed a

51

wide range of beliefs: the Gnostics had made prayers into
magical incantations; Marcion had said that Christians must
not pray to the Old Testament God; others recognized some
kinds of providence, but yet condemned the use of prayer.
To refute the latter group, Origen wrote his work, which
was primarily a study of the Lord's Prayer with special
attention to the words "who art in Heaven," a phrase which
does not mean that God is in only that spot. He attacked
those who, by analogy with the human body, saw the Deity in
material form. All in all, the review concluded, Origen's
work was a mixture of false thought and reasoning (some
explanation had to be given for his condemnation) along
with certain good and correct ideas. Deserving of blame
was his notion that the stars are creations endowed with
liberty, which they use to praise the Creator. Proof, for
Origen, was the command given to the sun and the moon to
praise God; from that he concluded that it was all right to
pray for sunrise. That idea was bad, said the editor of the

Nouvelles, but it was not so serious as his statement that

 

one must not invoke God the Father, an opinion even worse
than the Socinian heresy. The reader, then, forewarned and
guided by selected examples of good and bad thinking, could
read the treatise as he would. The essential point of the
article was to show the adaptations and choices made in

earlier days before the Church had assumed its modern form.

52

Going back to the first three centuries of the
Christian faith meant reviving old questions that had been
the subject of early Councils; for example, the Arian heresy.
The purpose of such articles was to remind readers once
again that the Church had not had a fixed form since its
beginnings, but had evolved through the years as quarrels
were settled by means of compromise. And, naturally, if
going back to the early years revealed what the Protestants
considered Roman Catholic error, so much the better.

One of the early important controversies aired in

the Nouvelles was the condemnation of the views of Arius

 

at Nicaea in 325 when the Council discussed the sense in

which the words Son of God were to be understood. If the

 

Son was begotten of the Father, said the Arians, who rea-
soned by analogy with human biology, the necessary impli-
cation was that the Father existed before the Son. The
orthodox view, the one that prevailed finally, was that the

word son was to be taken as meaning of the same nature, the

 

essence of sonship being, for those of this persuasion, that
the son be of the same nature as the father.

An article, reviewing a book by George Bull, an
Anglican priest, had as its main purpose not so much re-
thinking what had already been decided as reaffirming the
trend to return to the primitive Church and casting doubt

on Roman Catholic claims (36). The discussion was fairly

53

confusing and had many digressions, but its aim was to give
firm support to the Fathers, in particular to Origen, who
had taught that Christ's human nature, as well as his divine,
existed before the Incarnation. Upholding the orthodox view
would prevent the Socinians from doing what had been done
on other occasions: taking one passage supporting a favored
view and holding that it should outweigh any number of pas-
sages expressing a contrary opinion. In the particular case
under consideration, the Socinians, along with the Arian
heretics, could take a passage where Christ was spoken of
as a mere creature and count it more important than a
hundred passages where the Son was spoken of as God. Actu-
ally the answer to that problem, as the review was careful
to point out, was easy: since Christ has two natures, he
can be spoken of as human or divine. One can deny in one
passage what one affirms in another without any fear of
contradiction. Thus the Fathers and orthodoxy triumph.

The second goal was to show Roman Catholic error.
First, the Jesuit Father Petau had encouraged the current
enemy, the Socinians, by saying that the early Fathers
agreed with Arius (hence they would be considered heretical
by current Roman Catholic thinking) and that Arius's oppo-
nents spoke figuratively or oratorically when they made
their claims. Father Petau had also made it very difficult

to reconcile his position with the tradition of his Church.

54

How was it possible--this was a favorite charge--to hold

to the idea of the perpetuity of the faith when Father Petau
admitted that in the fourth century Christians adopted a new
article of faith unknown to those holy men who had led the
Church in its finest days? If Father Petau was representa-
tive of his faith, then being a good Roman Catholic meant
being concerned only with the decisions of a council while
neglecting the teachings of the Fathers. Father Petau's
thinking could be stated as follows, according to the

Nouvelles: although people did not believe in the Trinity

 

before Nicaea, they had to believe it after that Council;
therefore, people had to believe everything the Council of
Trent decided, no matter what their previous beliefs (if
any) on a given subject. Readers sympathetic to the Prot-
estant position were to understand that it is better to
stick with the teaching of the first centuries rather than
follow later Council decisions that depart from the pure
early traditions.

The final irony was that an Anglican priest had come
forth to defend the orthodox point of view, a reversal of
roles since Roman Catholics liked to boast of their profound
respect for the Fathers and to accuse Protestants, as Angli-
cans were considered here, of disrespect.

As the anti-Roman Catholic side constantly pro-

claimed its fidelity to the teachings of the early Church

55

and its intention to return to that primitive faith, its

efforts brought attack from another quarter. According to

 

the Nouvelles (34, pp. 105-106), the freethinkers (esprits
fpgpg), eager to belittle orthodox religion, noted, in their
own study of early books against Christianity, the paucity
of such works. From that fact, they hinted first, that many
books containing unanswerable arguments against the Chris-
tian faith must have been destroyed by the early Fathers
and second, that the only objections those Fathers raised
and then answered were those for which they already had
replies. Cave's work (38) gave the real explanation for
the shortage of books: the temporal powers, the early
Christian emperors, in their zeal to protect the new faith,
had so many anti-Christian tracts burned that there is no
record of them or even of the names of the authors. Once
again, the reader was to understand that the Fathers were
not at fault, a predictable conclusion that was part of the
constant effort to present them and the early Church in the
best possible light and to contrast their purity with the
contemporary Roman Catholic Church, which did not hesitate
to suppress evidence (44, pp. 685-686; 68).

Continued research into the early days of the Church
afforded Bayle a chance to show his fascination with odd and
little-known facts; in this case, it was his interest, often

severely criticized by commentators, in sexual matters. The

56

only instance in the articles under review here came in

his long review of Dodwell (41) whose Dissertationes

 

Cyprianicae discussed in some detail the case of certain

 

nuns who slept with young boys, while insisting on the
innocence of the arrangement, which Bayle dubbed "1a
plaisante cofitume." Although St. Cyprian won his campaign
against their sleeping together, he did not prevent their
living together in a commune-like group. The proof of his
lack of success was that the Church found it necessary to
have rules against such behavior, which had been introduced
into the Church by Paul of Samosatos, who was always accom-
panied by two beautiful girls. The Council of Nicaea banned

such conduct only for the clergy, said the Nouvelles,

 

because only the clergy behaved that way. But still chas-
tity was not always the rule of those communities, the proof
being St. Athanasius's comment that Leontius, forbidden to
see his friend Eustolia, had himself castrated in order to
be able to continue the relationship without being accused
of impropriety: "I1 se fit mettre en état par de bonnes
mutilations de coucher avec cette amie sans qu'on 1e
soupconnat d'impudicité" (41, p. 535).

As the preceding accounts show, Bayle's Nouvelles

 

reflected the effort of the times to clarify accounts of
earlier centuries and to make a clear distinction between
history and theology, which were no longer used to authen-

ticate each other. All through the reviews, Bayle's

57

comments revealed a constant and rigorous attempt to
establish historical accuracy. To do that, he had first
to find historical facts that could be proved absolutely,
then set such facts next to falsehoods and half-truths,
after which the obvious truth would dissolve prejudice.
The most difficult part of the task, the most essential
as well, was to find the historical facts that could be
proved absolutely. Statements, even though universally
accepted, were not sufficient, since universal acceptance
was no guarantee against error. Facts, in order to be
convincing, had to be uncontested in the sense that they
offered no possible ground for objection. Once such an
item was found, it was a bit of knowledge even more real
than the abstract truths of mathematics.10 Unfortunately,
much of what passed for fact was simply not so; much
"knowledge" had never been questioned or investigated.
Bayle was more than quite willing to look into commonly
accepted ideas; he welcomed the challenge, being at the
same time aware of the problems confronting any determined
seeker of facts.

Bayle's contribution to the attack on idées regues

 

was not a sustained, closely reasoned one. The method he

 

1°Delvolvé, Essai, Conclusion; Paul Dibon, "Re-
découverte de Bayle," in Pierre Bayle, 1e philosophe de
Rotterdam, ed. by Paul Dibon (Amsterdam and Paris: Elsevier

and Vrin, 1959), pp. ix-x; and Emile Bréhier, The History of

 

 

 

Philosophy, Vol. IV: The Seventeenth Century, trans. by
Wade Baskin, Phoenix Books (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press), pp. 291-294. '

 

 

58

adopted with outstanding success was to drop, almost as if
inadvertently, a series of comments designed to catch the
attention of his readers and to shock them into examining
cherished beliefs. For example, recoutning in his review
of O'Flaherty's book on Ireland the legend that the stone
on which pagan Irish kings sat to learn whether or not they
were to rule (A noise from the stone was a favorable sign.),
Bayle noted the report that the stone was silent in the time
of our Lord: "Au temps de notre Seigneur elle eut 1e sort
des Oracles, c'est a dire, quelle [gig] fut condamné a se
taire" (55, p. 901). His constant reading and his encyclo-
pedic memory enabled him to undermine the narrow-minded
thinking he deplored by presenting other points of view on
the important questions of the day.

One other important by-product of his life work was
a series of comments on the difficulties of writing history
and on the personal blind spots of historians. Although-
most of his remarks were made in connection with the work
of older scholars, they were pertinent in the seventeenth
century and remain so today.

First the historian needed good sources of infor-
mation; without those, he had no hope of being able to
present an accurate account of the past. As scholars
realized the lack of certain indispensable aids, other

investigators began to fill the need so that on publishers'

59

lists began to appear the essential works: accurate
dictionaries, grammars, texts, and handbooks of various
sorts. Since the English were active in the production

and publication of such helps, the Nouvelles carefully

 

listed, and briefly described these works, indicated their
good points and their shortcomings.

Continental readers learned that a good edition of
Origen had been published at a price that made it available
even to impecunious scholars. It was a model of scholarship,
with the text put into Latin to make it more easily readable;
moreover, the Scriptural passages referred to were printed
along with Origen's text. Conjectural words and passages
were indicated by brackets so that readers could distinguish
the editor's contributions from Origen's words. The

Nouvelles further noted that such a book, now inexpensive,

 

would formerly have been difficult to get even if one had
the money (45).

Although St. Cyprian's work had been very well
edited in 1682 by Fell, Bishop of Oxford and Pearson, Bishop
of Chester, Bayle announced that Dodwell's thirteen disserta-
tions on the saint's writings proved that further comments
were still possible (41, pp. 532-533). Commentaries on
Lactantius and on his treatise De Mortibus persecutorum
were plentiful. Baluze and Sparck had already written on
the subject; another commentary from Sweden was expected

and so was a second (to follow his Variorum Lactantius)

60

from M. Galet, a minister of the Walloon Church at Haerlem
(17). A brief sentence mentioned that Mr. Gale, one of
the greatest Greek scholars in Europe, had produced "un
si beau Jamblique" and had helped with the edition of
Origen so highly praised (45, p. 690).

The Protestant emphasis on Bible study and on
individual interpretation of it encouraged the study of
ancient languages, especially Hebrew, so that the faithful

could read the sacred text in the original. The Nouvelles

 

called attention to a Thesaurus Linguae Sanctae, a Hebrew-

 

Latin dictionary that was really a combination lexicon-
concordance-Hebrew grammar and a necessary help for those
who wanted to perfect their knowledge of Hebrew (48). A
book by Robertson provided a table of irregular words in
the Bible and a summary of rules for Hebrew accents in both
prose and verse as well as a grammatical explanation of
Hebrew verbs (49). Also mentioned but not described were

Robertson's Trésor de la langue grecque (50) and Lloyd's

 

enlarged version of Etienne's Dictionnaire historique, &
géographigue, et poetique (51).

As the number of books in print increased, it
became more and more necessary to have bibliographic aids.
Though Bayle himself seems to have had an excellent memory,-

he realized that others were less fortunate:

61

Tout 1e monde doit convenir que si la mémoire
n'est pas 1a principale piéce d'un habile Docteur,
elle est du moins ce qui contribué le plus a le
rendre fort scavant. Mais comme c'est un talent
de fort difficile garde, i1 importe beaucoup
qu'il y ait de bons gros livres qui soient
destinez a la soulager, & a nous épargner la
perte incroiable de temps que nous ferions a
chercher dans une Bibliotheque les choses que
nous voudrions éclaircir. Et parce que les livres
& les Auteurs qui ne dévroient étre originairement
qu'un moyen d'acquerir les sciences sont devenus
enfin eux-memes l'objet d'une science pour la
quelle il faut une prodigieuse mémoire, i1 importe
de venir au secours des gens d'étude dans ce genre
15. par plusieurs sortes de Lexicons (36) . '

Hyde's Oxford Catalog was a dictionary of authors and their
published works (36). Smith, publisher of Boyle's pg

Specificorum remediorpg, also published a catalog of all

 

Boyle's other writings, along with their dates of publi-
cation. In case the reader did not grasp the importance
of the date of publication, Bayle explained that because
the Geneva edition of Boyle did not give such information,
many readers would not realize that Boyle had been the first
to mention "cent choses" and would not give him credit for
his originality (60, pp. 1178-1179).

Cave, even more ambitious, had undertaken a mon-
umental task, the writing of Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum

Historia Literaria, which the Nouvelles described as

 

 

follows:

. . . un Ouvrage . . . ou l'on voit d'abord
l'état de la République des lettres en chaque
siécle, 1'érection des Bibliotheques, la fonda-
tion des Académies des Ordres Religieux, l'origine
& 1e progrés des Schismes & des Hérésies. L'on

62

voit en suite la vie de chaque Ecrivain par

rapport a ses Ouvrages, & ce qui concerne ses

Ecrits vrais ou supposez, perdus on non perdus,

leur sujet, leur fin, 1e stile, 1e génie, la

Secte, & les defauts de leur Auteur, 1e juge-

ment que les grands hommes en ont fait, &

enfin leurs meilleurs éditions (34, pp. 104-

105).
The reader was warned that the history stopped with Luther;
all information after that would have to be supplied. Such
a work was a formidable challenge and Cave, fearing that he
might possibly not have time to finish his great work, had
begun another compilation. Actually he was revising his
Tables Ecclesiastiques (first published in England in 1674),
in which he undertook to characterize each century by some
notable religious event. That work, considerably revised,
corrected, and augmented, had been published with the title
Chartophylax Ecclesiasticus, and was the ostensible subject
of the preceding review (34, p. 105).

The compilation of scholarly works and the prolifer-
ation of books brought certain difficulties. One plea for
brevity has a most contemporary sound: commentators with
one point to make should do so without writing a whole book.
Many people, complained Bayle, reluctant to publish their
single idea in ephemeral form, padded out the message and
published it in book form (72, pp. 120-121).

Printing the text was only part of the task; next

came interpretation. Reading old text is often difficult

because, as Bayle realized, men often change their ideas

63

much faster than they change their language. Both
Aristotelians and Cartesians, he pointed out, used terms

such as vie, ame, gualité, chaleur, but in quite different

 

senses. On the surface, if one simply read the words un-
critically, it would seem easy to prove that Descartes
really agreed with the Peripaticians since they used a
common vocabulary. However, while old authors might

seem to be talking about the same subjects as the moderns,
we must realize that only our faulty understanding of
semantic change made the ancients seem up-to-date (28,

p. 1270).

History was a controversial subject in which
accusations flew back and forth; people made baseless
statements; hearsay was repeated and passed off as truth.
To combat such ills, documentation was indispensable. In

his review of Burnet's Histoire de la Reformation de l'Eglise

 

d'Angleterre, Bayle carefully noted two characteristics of

 

the good historian: he knows that all his readers will
demand proof, and that his duty is to tell things as they
are without trying to present a pleasant picture. In
writing his book, Burnet used public registers, parlia-
mentary records, the records of two ecclesiastical courts
(London and Canterbury). Much was available because, as
Bayle dryly remarked, Mary Tudor's commissioners forgot

to destroy all the pertinent documents, some of them

64

damaging to her cause. Documents are especially valuable,
he was concerned to add, because the written word is more
reliable than the memory of witnesses, who are subject to
bias (27, pp. 1237-1238).

Another possible source of error is the distance
of the historian from his subject matter. Often those
living long after the event are those who spoil everything
with their careless reporting while those living at the
moment, even though they are affected by events, are the
most faithful chroniclers. To back up such a claim, Bayle
mentioned that Dodwell, for example, did not value very
highly the life of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus because it was
written on the basis of hearsay more than a hundred years
after the saint lived (41, p. 544). The same principle
applied to one of the commonplaces of Church history, the
great numbers of martyrs. The figures were exaggerated,
however, not by men living at the time of the persecutions,
but by later writers. In reviewing Dodwell's work on St.

Cyprian, the Nouvelles asked a pertinent question: If there

 

were really so many who died for the faith in the early
years of Christianity, why did not a writer such as
Lactantius know about them? Bayle, discussing Dodwell's
account of the early years of the Church, made the amusing.
comment that what is true of the stars (as astronomers

discovered when they began to count the heavenly bodies)

65

is also true of the early martyrs: they seem innumerable,
but exact counting greatly reduces their numbers (41,

p. 538). Rather than read later (less reliable is to be

 

understood) accounts, students should read those writers
like Origen who were closer to the events described. Origen
stated flatly, in refuting a pagan, that few died for the
Christian faith and Eusebius, in his accounts, listed few.
If so few martyrs were mentioned (and since martyrdom was

a glorious death, there was every reason to mention it),
these authors must be telling the truth. Not only that,

but early Christians were very careful to find out and to
list those who died for the faith (41, pp. 539-540).

The review continued the attack by pointing out that
all the factual proof offered would not impress people who
were used to their comfortable notions about the huge num-
bers of martyrs. Dodwell, too, knew that, so he did a
review of the Roman persecutions, beginning with Nero.

The whole tendency of his study was to show the reductions
necessary in the ranks of the martyrs and to explain the
probable reasons for the inflated statistics. Certainly,
he wrote, Tacitus counted many dead but his figures applied
only to Rome, the center of persecutions, so that the total
number could not be as great as one might like to think.
There were other explanations given to suggest that not all

the names of the martyrs' names were on the lists--just to

66

balance the presentation. Dodwell said that the custom of

anniversaires had not yet been established; and some thought

 

that the ranks of the martyrs should not be swelled by the
names of those who were formally accused, not of having died
for the faith, but of having set fire to Rome (41, p. 542).

Trying to illustrate the importance he attached to
factual accounts, Bayle gave a little example: There was
the prediction, widely attributed to a scientist of Leyden
and to an astronomer, of an extremely cold February 2--a
prediction that came true. But people neglected to note
that the following day was even colder. Later, both men
involved--or said to have been involved--denied having made
any such statement and were offended to think that anyone
would consider them so deficient in judgment as to have done
so. The point of the story, said Bayle, was to get people
used to not judging by hearsay, which is "1a chose du monde
la plus sujette a caution & la plus fertile en fables & en
Hyperboles" (1, pp. 64-66).

Historians themselves, being human, have failings
that color their written accounts. Before praising Burnet

for his objectivity, the Nouvelles did a rapid survey of

 

faults to avoid and gave personal examples where possible.
Some writers might be like Sanderus, making outrageous
statements based on no proof at all and without realizing
that they might be contradicted by authentic evidence.

Others followed the pattern of Fra Paolo, who condemned

67

people by calmly putting down detrimental information about
them. Others might write for reader groups who mistake
strength of feelings for truth and who are willing to
believe statements that harmonize with their prejudices
(27, pp. 1238-1240).

The bad examples just given made readers aware of
the pitfalls awaiting the unwary student of history. But

the Nouvelles reported two cases even worse since they

 

involved an attempt to suppress evidence. The distingished
French churchman Bossuet had published a book falsely
labeled a first edition. Unfortunately for him, he was
caught out when an Englishman, having discovered the real
first edition (which Bossuet had suppressed because of
censorship in France), went on to publish his findings.

In spite of French protests claiming that the changes were
made only for reasons of style and word order, the English
author's reply was eloquent: he put in parallel columns
Bossuet's version of the Roman Catholic Church and that of
past centuries so that readers could see the deceit prac-
ticed by Bossuet as he tried to reconcile two very different
views (68, p. 1428). A similar case involved a controver-
sial letter on the subject of transubstantiation written by
St. Chrysostom to the monk Cesarius. The problem, one of
interpreting the language of a passage, had caused the Roman
Catholic Church to forbid publication of the letter. How-

ever, since the text had already been public for over a

68

century, some Roman Catholics felt that it would be better
to publish the passage along with an explanation of the
problems involved than to try to censor it (44, pp. 685-686).

Still other historians, following the earlier tradi-
tion of their profession, presumed to read divine intentions
into history. Thus some Roman Catholics read in the English
loss of Calais a sign of God's disapproval of Mary Tudor for
not having banished all heresy from England. On the other
hand, some Reformers were equally guilty since they saw the
same loss as God's way of showing disapproval of the Roman
Catholic persecution of Protestants. "C'est ainsi que les
hommes s'ingerent de juger des desseins de Dieu," was
Bayle's comment (27, p. 1249).

The worst historical account reviewed in the

Nouvelles was O'Flaherty's Ogygia (55), a work purporting

 

to give the history of Ireland from before the Flood to the
year 435! The whole fantastic history, presented with only
a few historical comments, made such extraordinary claims
that no editorial nudge was needed to make the reader see
how ridiculous its claims were. First of all, Bayle set
the tone by noting that it was indeed remarkable that so
clever a people as the Greeks could not leave a chronology

but that a race barbare, the Irish, did. After the mild

 

statement that the Irish claim was hard to believe but not
impossible, he turned to a straightforward examination of

the work itself.

69

O'Flaherty's history was so complete that he knew
the names of the three Spanish fisherman driven to Ireland
before the Flood, as well as the names of the three women
and the three men who, with fifty other women, landed on the
island exactly forty days before the Flood. The proportion
of men to women was especially suitable for populating the
island, but, because of the Flood, nothing came of that
fortunate arrangement. But 312 years after the deluge, on
a Tuesday the 14th of the month, Partholan and several
others landed in Ireland.

Ogygia also provided the information that the house
of the current King of England (probably James II) had been
on the throne for 2700 years. But the Spanish had reached a
new high: the Archbishop of Pampeluna, after studying the
House of Austria, came up with 118 successions from Adam to
Philip II; Contreras found 121 successions from Adam to the
Duke of Lerma, but neither of these had a series of 76 royal
generations such as O'Flaherty had found in the genealogy of
the English king (55, p. 904).

To add to the wonders, there was a parallel chronol-
ogy for the history of Ireland and of other nations from the
Flood to 428 A.D. O'Flaherty disputed knowledgeably Father
Bollandus, who had claimed that the Irish were illiterate
before their conversion. The review also added that Ogygia

contained good observations on the inventors of letters and

70

on the instability of languages. Scotia and Hibernia had
once been synonymous. Since the eleventh century Scotia
had been applied to Scotland but some continued to call
Ireland by that name even up to the fifteenth century. The
question was not without importance: a long series of kings
and a certain glory would be given to or taken away from
Scotland, depending on whether it could be proved that
Scotia and Scoti, Hibernia and Hiberni were not synonyms.
The review added a bit of gratuitous information: the three
nations under the English king, being jealous of each other,
watch each other closely and refute claims vigorously, just
as do (the review added slyly) the German and Northern
writers.

The Nouvelles announced that the second volume of
the work was going to talk about the 48 Christian Irish
kings; the 136 monarchs treated in the first volume were
not Christian (55, p. 908).

From the remarks scattered throughout the Nouvelles,

 

it was clear that the study of history was difficult but
important. Truth was hard to find, partly because the tools
of the scholar were not what they ought to be, and partly
because the scholars themselves were often too prejudiced.
However, by dint of work and willingness to study other
points of view, men could, if they would only try, discover
the pertinent facts and make judgments on them. Though the

portrait of Bayle's ideal historian can be inferred from his

71

observations in the Nouvelles, he was more precise in the

 

Dictionnaire. In Remarque F under the entry Usson, Bayle

 

gives the qualities of the ideal historian who is interested
only in truth, and remains unmoved by partisan feelings be
they for country, church, friends, or family. If he is to
fulfill his duty as a chronicler of events, he must subor-
dinate his personal feelings to serve the greater end that
is the study of history.
Because of the times in which he lived, Bayle was

much occupied with questions that originated in the Refor-
mation, which was really an intellectual, theological, and

political rebellion. The Nouvelles did not much hesitate

 

to cope with the intellectual and theological aspects of
the revolt, but the political question was more difficult
to treat and more dangerous since most European governments
did not welcome dissident political views. However, in the
review of Burnet's history of the English Reformation, the
reader could get some idea of Bayle's stand on political
questions, even though his views were expressed indirectly.
Bayle gave Burnet full praise for his balanced,
documented report of a difficult period in English history
(the changes in religion and government in that country from
Henry VIII to Elizabeth I). Burnet's work told of the
abolition of papal authority during the reign of Henry VIII,
the continuation of the same policy under Edward VI, then of

the restitution of Roman Catholicism under Mary and finally

72

of Elizabeth's return to Anglicanism (27, p. 1236). The
points emphasized were the challenge to Roman Catholicism
and the resulting changes, which were mostly peaceful ones.
During the period in question, the review pointed out,
three great revolutions actually took place, with less
turmoil than such upsets usually entail. Though the review
made no clear statement about the differences between
England and France, the comparison was obvious.

In conformity with the prevailing tone of the

Nouvelles, Henry's break with Rome was described as a

 

reformation of the Church to make it resemble the early
tradition: having dared to examine the question of papal
authority, the English then looked at the decisions of the
Councils, keeping only those they judged in agreement with
the Scriptures and with the traditions of the first two or
three centuries of the Christian Church.

As the Nouvelles carefully emphasized, the English

 

religious revolutions were notable because of the compara-
tively short time involved (twelve years) and because of
the lack of stress. Each side had treated the other with
consideration and all actions were legally taken (27).

In discussing Burnet's account, Bayle and the

Nouvelles skirted one of the important political issues of.

 

the day, one not explicitly treated in the journal, and

that was the right of the monarch to rule. Involved was

73

the notion of the divine right of kings and the closely
allied question of the loyalty of subjects to the ruler.
When in his will Edward VI banned his sister Mary from
succeeding to the throne, he was on dangerous ground. His

action could be explained, said the Nouvelles, by zeal; he

 

wanted to protect the new religion. But his action could
hardly be considered right unless one were to judge the
utility of the measure by its usefulness in Church policy
and by what it brought to the Church. Since Protestants
often accused their enemies of using precisely that standard,
they would do well, opined Bayle, to abandon it (27, p. 1244).
On the subject of loyalty, opinion was divided. One
camp held that a subject, no matter what his religious
beliefs, owed allegiance to his sovereign first of all;
another side felt that a subject should hold his religious
faith paramount. On this subject Bayle's views were clear;
he was no revolutionary. No matter what his sufferings
under Louis XIV, he did not advocate violent overthrow of
the French government. At the same time, he respected the
rights of the individual conscience and could not accept
the idea of forced conversions as practiced in France. The

Nouvelles did not labor the subject of loyalty but did give

 

two examples of political behavior.
One of the common charges levelled against Roman

Catholics was that their allegiance was first to Rome rather

74

than to any temporal power. But there was proof that the
Roman Catholic Church was not a monolithic body controlled
by Rome, not at least in the British Isles. When Father
Walsh, an Irish monk, presented, on behalf of the Irish
clergy, a document condemning the claims of Rome to be more
powerful than the king, he was excommunicated. The Walsh
case proved that good loyal Catholics could be persecuted

by their own Church simply because they upheld the idea that
a sovereign should be independent and that he should command
the loyalty of his subjects (5, pp. 323-324).

Contrasted with the honesty of Father Walsh's
behavior was the description of Mary Tudorjs deceit. Having
promised her people that she wanted nothing more than the
right to practice her religion in private, she rallied many
fair-minded Protestants to her side, after which she insti-
tuted rapid changes to try to undo everything that her
father had done. Although Burnet advanced reasons for
Mary's actions (27, pp. 1250-1252) he clearly indicated
that he thought she had broken faith with her subjects.

Still another solution was possible; although Bayle
did not stress the point, he told of St. Cyprian's behavior
when he realized that the Carthaginians were asking for him
so that they could throw him to the lions. He retired,
hoping that his absence might make for a calmer attitude.

From that account, Bayle drew a conclusion with contemporary

A—

75

overtones: Let the saint's behavior be a lesson to peevish

souls ("esprits chagrins") who thought that the orders of a

 

sovereign should be defied as soon as he attacked the pre-
rogatiVes of religion and who thought that a pastor should
never be allowed to yield (41, pp. 543-544)--probably an
allusion to Bayle's difficulties with his co-religionist
Jurieu, whose inflexible views on allegiance Bayle did not

share.

CHAPTER III

A POTPOURRI OF NOTIONS ON SCIENCE

What could be called the scientific scene in the
seventeenth century was a model of confusion. John Donne's
lines are frequently quoted to illustrate the prevailing
attitude:

And the new Philosophy calls all in doubt,
The Element of fire is quite put out;
The Sun is lost, and th'earth, and no mans wit
Can well direct him where to looke for it.
And freely men confesse that this world's spent,
When in the Planets, and the Firmament
They seeke so many new; then see that this
Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies.
'Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone;
All just supply, and all Relation:
--The First Anniversary (1611) (11, 205-214).

 

That statement, extreme for its day, was certainly appli-
cable later in the century as old concepts were being re-
examined and new explanations were being sought for old
phenomena. In the field of science, which was known as
natural philosophy in the seventeenth century, England,
where men were somewhat freer than Continentals to exper-
iment and test new hypotheses, was the leading nation. Led

by a group of extraordinarily talented amateurs, the virtuosi,1

 

1Westfall, Science and Religion, p. 14.

 

76

77

later organized into the Royal Society (chartered in 1662),
that country was busily engaged in studying, observing,
classifying, and reporting natural phenomena. Men, eager
to read about the work of other investigators, began to
report their results and to correspond with one another.
Many of these accounts were reported in the pages of the

Nouvelles, a contribution accurately summarized by Sarton:

 

There are a good many scientific articles
in the Nouvelles; yet, the journal concerned
the world of learning rather than the world of
science. The scientific articles are seldom
perspicacious, enlightening, or authoritative;
Bayle's curiosity was largely restricted to
scientific "curiosities," e.g., anatomical,
anthropological, or medical curiosities in
which men of learning took some interest,
because everything concerning men interested
them. Bayle could see the difference between
a good historical work and a mediocre one, but
he had no standard to determine the relative
importance of various scientific ones, no
touchstone to distinguish the genuine from the
false or to separate pregnant items from
futilities.2

 

As Sarton stated, in spite of the many references to
science and scientific experiment, Bayle was no scientist.
Like Bacon, he lacked sufficient knowledge of mathematical
analysis to be able to deal with many of the most interest-
ing questions of the day. He could, of course, follow and
appreciate qualitatively the work being done and the excite-

ment caused by the new ideas. So it is that the reports in

 

2George Sarton, "Boyle and Bayle; the Sceptical
Chemist and the Sceptical Historian," Chymia, Annual Studies
in the History of Chemistry, III (1950), 186.

78

the Nouvelles do not present a coherent picture of the

 

progress of science, but give rather a series of interesting
notes from here and there, echoes of the important scien-
tific ideas of the day, but no extended or profound
treatment or development.

During this period several scientific systems were
very much talked about, each had its own followers, but no

one view predominated, certainly not in the Nouvelles. Most

 

of the articles show that scholars were trying their wings,
were exploring new ideas to see whether they explained what
had been observed, and were delighted by their sense of
power and freedom.
11 faudra dire desormais que rien n'est
impossible a l'esprit de l'homme puis qu'il
se rend maitre de l'infini, qu'il peut déterminer

ce qui est sans bornes. Nihil mortalibus arduum
est coelum ipsum petimus industriS (30, p. 1350).

 

 

The reviews in Bayle's journal all emphasize that
what distinguished the new science from the old was the
stress on experimental results, on determining what took
place under given conditions, and how that happened. There
was very little speculation on the ultimate cause of things;
the focus was firmly fixed on experimentation and on collec-
tion and classification of phenomena. It was generally
agreed, of course, that God was the final cause, but he was
not often invoked except as a way of warding off hostile
criticism. De Stair, for example, stated that the first

principle of all was ". . . qu'il ne faut rien admettre

 

79

dans la nature qui ne s'accorde avec la veracité, la

liberté, la science & 1a puissance infinie de Dieu" (30,

 

p. 1337). Having pacified any possible critics with that
avowal, he was then free to speculate on the workings of

the universe. In a review of Willoughby's De piscibus,

 

Bayle, musing on variations in size among animals and men
living on the plains as contrasted with those inhabiting
mountainous regions, wrote, "11 y a des raisons trés-
méchaniques de toutes ces bizarres diversitez, mais comment
les connoitre ces raisons? Dés qu'on quitte 1a générale
qui est l'infinie fecondité des voies simples dont Dieu se
sert on ne trouve rien de distinct qui nous satisfasse" (46,
pp. 701-702). Obviously, God was still very much present
in the universe, but he was no longer so much the center
of attention. Similarly, though European civilization was
still very much a Christian culture, that faith was growing
less important as science assumed a larger role in the
intellectual life of the Continent.3

In general, those engaged in studying the new
philosophy looked to natural science as an aid to belief.

They hoped to bolster their faith“ by demonstrating its

 

3Westfall, Science and Religion, pp. 2-3; and Basil
Willey, "The Touch of Cold Philosophy,” in The Seventeenth
Century, ed. by Richard Foster Jones g£_§l. (Stanford:
Stan ord Press, 1969), pp. 373-374.

"Westfall, Science and Religion, pp. ll7-118; and
Manuel, The Eighteenth Century, p. 26.

 

80

reasonableness. Just as the study of history had suggested
readily understandable reasons for the courage of Christian
martyrs, so natural history provided explanations for
Biblical miracles:

Cette grande activité de l'estomach d'une
Lamie ne doit pas empécher de croire que Jonas
y ait vécu 3. jours, car dutre que Dieu 1e
conserva par miracle, il est certain qu'il
aurait p0 demeurer a l'entrée de l'oesophage
sans étre exposé a la concoction, car on trouve
souvent dans un brochet que s'il avale un
poisson qui s'arréte en partie dans 1e gosier,
tout ce qui en demeure la s'y conserve sans
alteration, pendant que 1e reste qui touche
1e ventricule est dissout jusques aux os (46,
p. 705).

Though the end result of such studies was to relegate the
spiritual element of Christianity, its most distinctive
part, to a minor role, that was not the intention of the
first scholars, whose goal was more accurately summarized

by the title of a treatise published in Paris: Essais de

 

Physique prouvez par l'experience & confirmez par l'Ecriture
Sainte (30, p. 1346).

The ample evidence scattered through the pages
of the Nouvelles indicated that the Republic of Letters
realized the importance of experiment as the way to learn
more about the physical world. Without experiment there
could be no progress, on that there was general agreement.
Scholars all over EurOpe were forming study groups to talk.

about what they had done and to correspond with their fellow

'81

researchers in other countries.5

Bayle mentioned having
got news from London: he learned that Dublin and Oxfort
[sic] had academies where work to advance knowledge was
going on. Results would go to the Royal Society (2). Even
earlier in Italy a group had been at work and he gave this
optimistic report:
Le temps est enfin venu ou la physique peut

faire de grand progrés, puis qu'on s'attache par

tout aux expériences raisonnées. C'est le

meilleur chemin qu'on puisse tenir pour arracher

a la nature son secret, c'est pour cela, dis-je,

qu'on est si faché qu'une telle Académie ne sub-

siste plus (23, p. 978).
The same article went on to remark, without giving any
details, that the Academy of Cimento had done work and that
Waller of the Royal Society had published a collection of
the Italian experiments done under the patronage of Prince
Leopold de Medicis. Though that academy was no longer in
existence, Bayle expressed the hope that groups in Paris
would adopt the new principles (23).

The publication of the collected experiments men-

tioned above illustrated a trend, the compiling of existing

knowledge on a given subject so it would be more readily

available. For example, the Nouvelles reported a collection

 

of chemical operations, recently published, that would be

useful in both medicine and chemistry since it was codified

 

5Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science
(1300-1800) (London: Bell and Sons, 1950), p. 11.

 

82

for easy reference. In addition to lists of operations,

it also contained chapters of technical terms and on
apparatus (10). Another short note told readers that
Robert Boyle had written up his experiments on human

blood and its properties: odor, taste, ease of congealing
and of reconstitution, and the proportions of serum to
solids. He dried blood, burned it, and noted the results
"d'ofi on peut retirer divers usages pour la Medicine" (7).
However, no details were given to explain just how medicine
was to profit from Boyle's work.

Science was not Bayle's strong point but still he
wanted his readers to know what work was being done and
what titles were being published. His usual solution was
to list titles, with the authors if he knew them, and then
to give a short description of the contents. For example,
he published a letter from London that gave his readers

the following information: Boyle had put out a Traité des

 

eaux Minerales d'Angleterre. Traité de menstruis mulierum

 

and De motu circulari sanguinis had appeared (the letter

 

indicated no author for either treatise). Wallis, in a
thick in folio work, had proved that in algebra Descartes
took everything from Harniottus, as Roberval had recognized.
A book, with a big map included, on the draining of marshes

in England, was available, as was Officina Chymica

 

83

Londinensis opera Nicol. Staphorst. The posthumous works

 

of Barrow contained only mathematics. Morison's Historia

plantérum rariorum, Ray's De plantis, and Willesgbejus

 

 

(Willoughby's) De piscibus were well thought of (16).

 

In addition to publishing bulletins like the pre-

ceding example, the Nouvelles put out many brief notices,

 

which sometimes served to announce works to be dealt with
in detail later on, sometimes only to indicate publication.
Short notices were given to Abercrombie, a doctor already

known, the Nouvelles reminded readers, because of his

 

method of curing venereal disease without the use of mercury
and the resulting mercurial salivation; the doctor had

written De variatione pulsus (57). Another note informed

 

readers that Thomas Wharton's Adénographia sive glandularum

 

totius corporis descriptio reported that saliva has its
special ducts; Wharton was the first to find one (26).

Still another bulletin said that Burnet--and the Nouvelles

 

warned readers that he was not the Burnet who wrote Sacra

theoria telluris--had extracted, for those lacking time and

 

patience, some useful parts from Hippocrates. An additional
note mentioned that publication of Burnet's work was urged
by Sibbaldus, well known for his natural history of Scotland
(33), later treated in some detail. Other short notes in-

formed readers that the Journal d'Apgleterre for June 1685

 

84

had published observations about an experiment carried out
by the Royal Society using a piece of asbestos (62). Thomas

Gage had, according to the Nouvelles, made remarks about

 

chocolate (13) but readers were not told what he said.

The works on natural history, which got longer and
clearer reviews than those on physical science, marked the
beginning of interest in the systematic study and classifi-
cation of plants and animals. The trend was sketched in

Scotia illustrata, a work in two parts published by Robert

 

Sibbald, M.D. The first section dealt with the air, the
water, the places and inhabitants of Scotland, while the
second talked of plants, cultivated and wild; animals,
domestic and wild; minerals, metals, products of the sea.
The whole was preceded by a geographical description of
Scotland (11). Though that account sounded fairly compre-
hensive, readers were promised even more: ". . . ce n'est
qu'un essay & comme un avertissement d'un grand Ouvrage
intitulé Atlas Scoticus . . ." a work commissioned by His
Britannic Majesty (11).

Many volumes were merely mentioned since Bayle's
role was primarily to popularize new ideas and to famil-
iarize his readers with the latest developments in the

Republic of Letters. Occasionally he paused longer to

present a more explicit account of a work. De piscibus

 

(46), sent him by the Royal Society, did not, said the

85

Nouvelles, lend itself to detailed treatment, but it did

 

get, nevertheless, a more extended review than most. The

Nouvelles informed its readers that the work dealt with

 

creatures that lived in water ("aquatiles"), having blood
and fins but no feet and hardly able to live anywhere but
in the water. Four volumes made up the study: the first

talked of fish in general; the second, of Belluas marinas,

 

of whales and the like; the third, of those fish called

Cartilagineux tar Pliny; and the last, of several other

 

sorts of fish with bones.

The summary also mentioned fish biology. The work
discussed the question, Can fish hear? The answer was
affirmative but the organ involved was not known; it might,
so the speculation went, be connected with the olfactory
system. The respiration of fish was not easy to explain
but the fact that fish died under ice proved that they need

air; De piScibus upheld the idea that fish breathe, and

 

recognized the existence and the purpose of the swim
bladder. Also discussed were the longevity and the eating
and reproductive habits of fish.

Mostly the review concentrated on odd facts, the
sort of curiosities that especially enchanted Bayle. It
was odd, he thought, that the largest fish (the whale was
considered a fish in the work) lived in the coldest water
of the north; the reverse was true of animals, for the

elephant is a tropical beast. The second volume on

86

dolphins, porpoises, and whales ("Ces énormes masses de
matiére animée") (46, p. 702) and their ability to hear
and breathe would please the curious, opined the review,
adding that there was nothing to the old tale that a fish
guided whales as they swam about.

Then, continued the review, came a long treatment
of the Monoceros (swordfish) with a curious example: a fish
with two horns instead of just one, caught by the crew of a
ship of Sr. Peterson of the Greenland whaling fleet. Next
was a discussion of the Lamia (shark); readers learned that
it was probably a fish of this group rather than a whale
that swallowed Jonah. This fish, the most voracious of all,
said Francis Willoughby, dissolves its victims in the short-
est time possible. As for the electric ray, the old tale of
its numbing force was not completely false, according to the
review, a fact in which the Moderns ("quand ils sont hon-
nétes gens") (46, p. 706) take pleasure. There are, however,
others ("qui ont l'esprit mal tourné") (46, p. 706) who
delight in contradicting old authorities. According to

the Nouvelles, Willoughby was a model; he gave credit when

 

and where it was due, corrected errors for the edification
of his century and of posterity.

The last volume of De piscibus, obviously a miscel-

 

lany, gave odd bits of information about herring fishing and

Guillaume Buckeldius (whose tomb Charles V had visited when

87

he was in the Low Countries), who had found out how to salt
and preserve herring in kegs. The final praise for the
author indicated his special merit and showed that he
belonged to the new breed of scientists, those who checked
their information before presenting it to the public:
Ce qu'il y a de bon dans cet Ouvrage c'est

que l'Auteur a vérifié tout ce qu'il rapporte,

s'étant promené pour cet effet dans plusieurs

Ports & dans plusieurs Poissonneries de l'Europe.

Sa diligence lui a fait découvrir plusieurs sortes

de poissons qui n'avoient pas été encore décrites

dans les livres (46, p. 707).

John Ray's Historia plantarum also got a long and

 

quite detailed treatment in the journal (63). Ray's work
was especially important, for he had abandoned the old ways
of looking at plants for their medicinal virtues and had
looked at them logically; that is, according to "leurs
accidens, leurs parties, & leurs differences" (63, p. 1318),
after which he had arranged them into species and subgroups.
This work marked the beginning of the systematic classifica-
tion of plants, the collection and consolidation of the work
of other botanists, and the clarification of the botanical
nomenclature. The guiding principle was "de ne pas multi-
plier les especes sans necessité" (63, p. 1319), a principle
not always observed by earlier students.

The review explained the function of leaves ("Elles
servent a digerer l'aliment & a 1e renvoier bien preparé aux

autres parties" (63, p. 1321); explained studies of fecundity

88

by giving an astonishing illustration: A seed of tobacco
produces a plant that gives 360,000 seeds (63, p. 1321).
Efforts were made to give rational explanations for the
actions of plants like the sensitive plant, which reacts
when touched: that happened, said the article, because
touching it compressed and shut off the little tubes that
carried the sap to the affected part; then the deprivation
of the vital fluid caused the touched part to droop or
shrink (63, p. 1320).

Ray, according to the review, gave examples of out-
size trees (with examples from Germany, the Congo, Malabar,
Cochin-China, Barbados) along with their ages (63, p. 1323).
The medieval notion of signatures was rejected in the work
(63, p. 1324), and Ray scoffed at those who used the stars
and the moon to determine the best harvest dates (63,

p. 1325). And, added Bayle, ". . . il a bien d'autres
conseils a nous donner, tout autrement fondez en raison"
(63, p. 1325).

In Ray's work, plants were studied in ascending
order of perfection, perfect being those that reproduce
sexually and produce seeds. The lowest group, the mush-
rooms, had no seeds; then came the ferns, explained the
Nouvelles, with seeds visible only under a microscope
(63, p. 1325).

Though there were plants like the acacia called

pudigues or vergogneuses, the poppy was not one since the

 

'89

Turks used opium--and this is the sort of detail dear to
Bayle--as an aphrodisiac, as did the Chinese, in whom it
produced truly remarkable results: even courtisans fled,
unable to stand the "fureur" (63, pp. 1328-1329).

At the end of the review, a note gave additional
data about Ray and his work: he had also worked on a
history of birds and fish compiled by Willoughby; he had
published, too, in 1670 and 1677 the catalog of plants found
in England and the neighboring islands and in 1673 he pub-
lished the catalog of plants he had noticed in the Low
Countries, in Germany, in Italy, in Sicily, on the island

of Malta, and in France. His Methodus plantarum was printed

 

twice, in 1665 and in 1682 (63, p. 1330).
In the course of the review other works are men-
tioned but no details are given: two works by Grew, L2_

fécondité du pavot blanc and De Saporum causis et differ-

 

entiia; Harley on La grosseur et l'age des arbres; Plot,

Histoire naturelle de la Province d'Oxford, and Slare,

 

Observations sur 1e tartre.

 

As Sarton's criticism suggested, Bayle was not a
reliable reporter of scientific works. His written reports
were not particularly lucid, although the accounts of biolog-
ical science were somewhat clearer than those on physical
science. Trying to follow his explanations is difficult
because the reports begin fairly well with a statement of

the problem, but soon jump from point to point, usually

90

without transition, as he singles out odd bits of
information which he finds especially fascinating and
which then often serve as points of departure for long
digressions having little to do with the subject at hand.
When the going becomes too difficult, Bayle gets
out of trouble by sending the reader to the original for
more details. Points that do not capture his interest,
even though they may be important, are barely mentioned,
while others, quite minor, get full attention because they
appeal to him. Some of the scientific explanations, espe-
cially those of the siphons and the perpetual motion machine,
are accompanied by diagrams more confusing than explanatory.
However, certain topics get more play than others.
Fluid flow, a fascinating notion, provides material for
several columns (14) describing its effects and reporting
the results of observations, mostly on the behavior of water
in siphons. Although Torricelli's work was known, scien-
tists were still toying with the notion of raising water
to any wanted height. De Stair speculated that water
issuing from natural fountains might have originated from
the sea rather than from rain and melted snow. The sea
water, he said, could rise to a height of 30 feet in certain
pores of the earth, from which fact he deduced that water ,
might be able to flow into subterranean reservoirs. Then

it could, by a sort of switchback system, not specified,

91

rise another 30 feet and so on to any desired elevation
(30, pp. 1347-1348).

Two articles discuss the problem of particles
suspended in a liquid medium. Especially interesting is
the case of particles of mercury suspended in spirit of
niter, where the liquid remains clear in spite of the
floating metal. The result is difficult to explain, for,
as the review pointed out, each particle of mercury had to
be heavier than each equal part of acid. Parallels were
drawn to the case of dust particles suspended in air and
to sand particles floating in water. The conclusion was
that little particles of liquid were constantly in motion,
even though the observer could not see that motion, and that
the movement kept the mercury particles from recombining and
falling to the bottom of the vessel (9; 12).

Another experiment with an accompanying diagram
proved that liquids press on the bottom of a container in
proportion to the height of the liquid, not according to
its mass or specific gravity (70).

When it was a question of explaining the universe,

the pages of the Nouvelles presented a generous mixture of

 

ideas old and new. There was general agreement--more tacit
than explicit--on the existence of God, but Very little on
the composition and functioning of his creation. The long-

est and most important philosophical exploration of the

92

physical universe was the review of Boyle's De ipsa natura

 

(66), in which he wrote as a believing Christian who did not
want to attribute to any abstract term such as nature what
properly belonged to God. The real danger of the concept

of nature was that it distanced man from God and was basi-
cally harmful to religion, a structure Boyle wanted to
preserve.

Nature, after all, was, explained the review, a
creation of the human brain, hence naturally inferior to
God's wisdom, which reigns supreme in the universe. To
investigate the question Boyle first did some analysis:
what is the meaning of nature? He called it a complex term
suggesting a lack of perfection on the part of God, almost
as if nature were a necessary intermediary between the Cre-
ator and his universe. The word nature, an elusive one, may
mean no more than that "les corps agissent les uns sur les
autres d'une maniere qui repond aux lois generales du
mouvement que 1e Createur a etablies" (66, p. 1388). Boyle,
after eight sections of analysis, concluded in favor of
rejecting the idea of nature because it did not explain what
happens to matter. His feeling favored religion because the
Bible attributes everything to God without mentioning nature
at all (66, pp. 1401-1402). The notion of nature espoused
by the Peripaticians gave, he thought, support to the
impious, to those who believe in a world soul, to which

they attribute divine qualities. Even if we cannot explain

93

phenomena by mechanical principles (which Boyle was trying
to do), we must reject the idea of nature since it inter-
poses a concept between man and God. It further posits a
force which is not God but which acts constantly in the
universe. Such a notion tends to incline men to idolatry
and to undermine faith since they attribute understanding
and feeling to natural bodies.

In discussing the phenomena of the physical world,
most of the articles resorted to explanations involving what

were variously called small particles of matter, or atoms,

 

or corpuscles. The actions of these units, never very

 

exactly defined or described, were the basis for accounting
for physical effects observed. No one system got official
sanction; Gassendi could be mentioned, but not with complete
approval since his thinking might lead to materialism.
Aristotle was clearly discredited; when his arguments were
mentioned, it was to make fun of them and of those who held
them. Neither did the Cartesians get complete sympathy,
though Descartes' reliance on God to set his system in
motion got approval. The strongest impression resulting
from reading is that of a great number of possible theoret-
ical explanations of natural phenomena. For example, the

review of De Stair's Physiologia nova experimentalis (30)

 

showed a man who ranged widely, assimilated what suited him,

combined and recombined ideas. Not content with the work of

94

Ptolemy, Copernicus or Tycho Brahe, he proposed a system
of his own, made up of parts from theirs. His explanation
was not given in detail, probably because it was too com-
plicated for Bayle, and did not basically interest him, for
he referred his readers to De Stair's original text rather
than trying to give them a summary of it (30, pp. 1342-1343).
By reporting in detail some of the works, by sending
his readers to the original works for fuller explanations,
by listing briefly the numerous topics in English publica-
tions, Bayle managed to convey to his readers a sense of
some of the exciting work going on abroad and to make it
especially evident that the new science held greater promise
of explaining the world than did the old scheme. Because
there was almost no extended development of any one topic,
it is impossible to present more than a sampling of the

ideas that Bayle, in his role of vulgarisateur, tossed out

 

to his readers.
The material in the following paragraphs, abstracted
from various articles, indicates the sort of hodgepodge

presented to the readers of the Nouvelles. Two theories

 

of light were mentioned: some, like the Stoics, think the
sun a flame, which, needing fuel, is fed by ocean vapors.
The same idea is held by people like Gassendi; he thought
that light consists of a perpetual flow of corpuscles (30,

pp. 1345-1346). On the other hand, the Cartesians said that

95

the sun presses all around on the globules of the second
element surrounding it. De Stair did not embrace the
corpuscular theory nor did he completely agree with
Descartes; he thought, rather, that light was transmitted
by lumious bodies that dart out and hit the matter surround-
ing them (30, pp. 1345-1346).

The ebb and flow of the tides was a fascinating

subject, much talked about but not satisfactorily explained.
Galileo's accounting for the tides by the diurnal and annual
movements of the earth did not explain why the tides do not
recur exactly every twelve hours. John Wallis, an English
mathematician, put out a sketch of his theory, hoping, he
added, that someone with more leisure than he had would
develop it further (6). Wallis, working within the Coper-
nican system, held that the moon revolves around the earth
every month in such a way that the orbit described by the
earth in its revolution around the sun is not described by
the center of the earth but by the center of gravity common
to the earth and the moon considered as a single system.
But he recognized that the biggest problem was the lack of
accurate observations of the tides, which vary considerably,
probably, he added, because the days are not exactly 24
hours-long (6, pp. 411-412).

Astronomy figured briefly in a series of theses from

Oxford. Though the theses were termed Pythagorean by their

96

author, and though, conceded the Nouvelles, he might have

 

gone back to that source, he could have got all his ideas
from Gassendi. The purpose was to argue against the
Aristotelians and to refute their notions. The points

made were that the skies are fluid; that the earth moves

on its own axis; that the rays of the sun are a body. These
statements got no further clarification in the journal; the
other three, which obviously suited Bayle better, got ampli-
fication: that the earth is not the center of the universe;
that the moon is a habitable country; that the sun is a

flame. The arguments summarized in the Nouvelles to support

 

these ideas were not especially convincing. For example,
the earth, said the review, is not the center of the uni-
verse and those who think so just because the sky seems to
be a vault above them fail to realize that travelers always
think, no matter where they are, that they are in the middle
of the celestial vault. The similarity of the physical
features of the earth and the moon seems to indicate to
the author that both bodies are inhabited, though he is
careful not to specify the sort of life to be found on the
moon. The sun, since it is a flame, needs fuel and is fed
by the ocean vapors. If the latter are lacking, nature
makes up the deficiency elsewhere in a manner not explained
(6, p. 404).

There was no general discussion of matter in the

sense of a comprehensive theory to explain the physical

97

world. De Stair's view (also that of a Spanish Jesuit,
Arriaga, said the review) was that matter is a series of
indivisible points which God then combines to form little
bodies. The difference between the latter and Gassendi's
atoms, it was explained, was that De Stair's could be
divided by God's omnipotence. De Stair also attacked the
Cartesian denial that matter can have active faculties and
he held--again along with Arriaga--that the prime quality

of matter is not extension but impenetrability (30, pp. 1336-
1339).

As for the constituent parts of matter, there are
echoes of the old notion of the four basic elements: earth,
water, fire, and air. The salt-sulphur-mercury idea is
mentioned but not elaborated. Those old Scholastic notions
are being replaced as experiments reveal their inability to
explain observed phenomena, but the new system is not dis-

cernible in the pages of the Nouvelles. The one clear trend

 

is the use of mechanistic explanations: whenever natural
processes have to be explained, the favorite solution is to
resort to the notion of particles of matter behaving in a
certain way. Particles feed the sun; the sun transmits
light by pressing on surrounding particles; particles,
agitated by heat, keep other particles in suspension.

Two men, however, spoke about the workings of the
universe in somewhat more metaphysical terms. George Rust,

Bishop of Dromore in Ireland, wrote a Discours sur la vérité

 

98

to explain that objective truth resided in the eternal and
unchanging connections among things. God does not make
these connections, however; he finds them already estab-
lished (although there was no explanation of how or what
established them or how they were established) and he then
observes them. The bishop then answered objections, though
none'were given in the review, so as to show the absurdities
and impieties that resulted from holding contrary views (32).
Henry More, an English metaphysician, had written an

Enchiridion Metaphysicum, combating Cartesian notions,

 

because he felt that explaining all natural effects accord-
ing to law of motion did great wrong to religion (21). But,
Bayle reminded his readers, according to Descartes, only God
could execute natural laws so that the Cartesian statement
was really a clearer and stronger one against impiety than
More's idea of some sort of incorporeal and insensitive
cause, a soul or spirit of nature that moves bodies. That
latter principle, one espoused by the Cambridge Platonists,
is a hylarchic one and, though this was not spelled out in
the text, would presumably lead to some sort of materialist
explanation of the universe.

Nowhere, in the articles from England, is the idea
of particles better illustrated than in the reviews of

Boyle's work, De Specificorum remediorum, which was the

 

object of a long review (60). 'In that work the corpuscular

99

philosophy advocated by Boyle seems to clash with the idea
of specific remedies; the problem is to show that the two
notions are compatible. The old idea that has to be refuted
is that all phenomena have a cause, something like heat,
dryness, wetness or the like; hence there must be, accord-
ing to such a view, a reason why a specific remedy acts as
it does. However, examination of a specific remedy like
quinine gives no clue to its manner of working; the relation
between the illness, malaria, and the remedy, quinine,

is simply not clear. Boyle's account, summarized in the

Nouvelles, emphasizes the new idea of corpuscles that have

 

shape, weight, motion and that act according to mechanical
principles, that is, that there is actual mixing of the
corpuscles of an ointment, say, with the corpuscles of the
body. Thus, the corpuscles (small particles of matter) of
a specific remedy actually come to grips with those causing
illness.

Boyle, according to the review, after defining the

term specific remedy and giving his reasons for being per-

 

suaded that such medicines exist, proposes a difficulty:
any medicine undergoes change after being swallowed since
it gets mixed up with the contents of the stomach and since
part of it surely is excreted. That is not a serious
objection, according to Boyle's reasoning, because Galen's
followers have the same problem and the same accounting to

do when they talk of their sudorifics and their cardiacs.

100

As the Nouvelles summarized them, the mechanical

 

actions that can be accounted for by the corpuscular theory
are dissolution, deadening, precipitation, strengthening,
dilution, union. As the review describes the deadening
action, there is a corpuscle-to-corpuscle struggle; the
specific remedy can dull or remove the points of acids or
it can surround the points much as a sheath encases a sword.
The result is the same; since the acid can no longer cut or
slice with its projecting points, it is rendered innocuous.

The second part of Boyle's dissertation, the one
demonstrating the usefulness of simple remedies, is only
mentioned in passing.

Just as Boyle looks to the corpuscular philosophy
to provide an explanation of specific remedies, so Sylvius
hunts for a mechanical cause for fevers (71). His idea, as

summarized by the Nouvelles, is that the blood, when it

 

circulates slowly, heats up and produces a fever. In his
mind, fevers result from a disproportion in the mass of the
blood, followed by a corresponding difference in heating and
cooling and a consequent impaired circulation. The discom-
forts accompanying fevers can also be explained by irregular
corpuscles that produce unbalanced mixtures of blood parti-
cles and interfere with proper bodily function. There can
be other possible causes--mechanical, too--besides irregular
mixtures of blood particles; for example, because of pres-

sure on particles of matter, passages can be blocked so that

101

particles do not travel freely and then they become
increasingly acid. The natural ferment of the blood
particles can be changed by glandular obstructions so
that the natural symmetry of the blood is upset.

According to Sylvius's theory, the cure for a
fever is to give medicines that have a heating effect on
the blood. Increased circulation, not blood-letting, is
the answer to the difficulty, since the mechanical cause
of the fever demands a mechanical cure. Sylvius recommends
camphor but there is no explanation of the way it works.

As his thinking is summarized, Sylvius takes as
his basic notion the idea that good health depends on the
union and balance of parts of the blood and the chyle. The
mechanical principle is again used to explain that the
corpuscles of these two substances mesh with each other.
This they do by using their points well and by not wearing
them out by constant friction against other particles. The
goal is to attain the balance mentioned previously so that
the particles can pass freely through the pores without
clogging or distending them to produce illness.

To his work on fevers, Sylvius adds a treatise on
what he terms imperceptible transpiration, a phenomenon
also based on mechanical principles. Foods are distin-
guished from each other by the distance between the par-

ticles composing them and the arrangement of those particles.

102

Sylvius, along with the Cartesians, supposes a subtle matter
circulating among particles and moving them. If this subtle
matter cannot escape through the proper pores, said the

Nouvelles, it produces an agitation called natural effer-

 

vescence, which in turn carries off certain aqueous and
volatile particles-—an absolutely necessary action that
takes place in every part of the human body. The mechanism,
as he sees it, is that little corpuscles come from the
blood, compress the air, and cause subtle matter to occupy
their former places. Without this process, the blood would
not have enough motion to resist the weight of the air, he
thinks. If, in fact, this imperceptible transpiration were
visible, we would appear surrounded by a cloud, since we
lose more material this way from our bodies than we do
through passing urine and feces.

The same Sylvius is responsible for a report on a
girl, born in Waterford, Ireland, who sprouted horns like
ram's horns at the joints of her arms, feet, and hands,
including her fingers and in fleshy parts of her body like

her buttocks and breasts (53). The Nouvelles provides a

 

full description, with accompanying sketch, of the child's
body, of the horns, and told of the efforts made to pull
out the horns or to wear them away. The case is quite
different, Sylvius stresses in his letter, from that of
the Italian noble who had an abnormal growth of nails on

his hands and feet; these are real ram‘s horns.

103

Again, Sylvius relies on mechanical principles to
provide an explanation of the case. When the sperm ferti-
lizes the egg, the great variety of resulting particles
makes possible a proportionately great diversity of results.
His account is based on the passage through pores of viscous
and aqueous material and the consequent development of a
whole network of vessels and tubes. The horns resulted from
a combination of viscous matter and volatile particles.
Viscous matter, propelled through body passages by volatile
particles, finds its way to the extremities where it passes
through the skin. Then the volatile matter is dissipated
and the viscous particles, hardened by the air, take the
form of nails, or, in this case, of horns.

The girl's body had, at conception, Sylvius feels,
more viscous particles and less diluting matter than usual,
a disproportion that brought about a corresponding change in
the tubes and vessels of her body. The viscous part of the
chyle then became even thicker as a result of her peculiar
constitution. The excess viscous matter joined with what
inas already present at the extremities to form horns instead
(of nails and the excess found other channels, already formed,
'through which it passed and resulted in the horns, as
described .

The articles on science in the Nouvelles, though

'they were neither plentiful nor very accurate, did serve

104

to praise the Royal Society and the English and to give
Continental readers an idea of the interests and activity
across the Channel. What did emerge was a small chapter

in the long controversy between vitalism and mechanism.

As Dampier points out, those two concepts have alternated
for the last three hundred years.6 The Cartesian physics
sharply differentiated mind and matter and found that the
latter could be described in terms of certain laws of motion.
So biology-—for it occupied by far the most prominent place
among the scientific articles from England--was to be
explained by mechanistic notions. Boyle's corpuscles,
moving about, colliding with each other, meshing with each
other by means of projecting points, wearing each other down
by friction--all the accounting for biological phenomena

by laws of motion put the reporting in the main stream of
seventeenth century scientific thought, which was primarily‘
mechanistic.7 As a matter of fact, the science described

in the Nouvelles is really a revival of the old Greek atomic

 

theories, which had been recently given new life by Gassendi.
Though the ideas of the latter were widely known and used--
as Boyle used them in his explanations of the motions of

corpuscles--Gassendi's name was not generally mentioned,

 

6Sir William Dampier, A History of Science (3rd ed.
revised and enlarged; Cambridge: At the University Press;
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1944), p. 370.

 

7Westfall, Science and Religion, pp. 17 and 92; and
Baker, Wars of Truth, p. 30.

 

 

105

or, if it was, it was hedged about by cautionary statements
since he was a dangerous man: he looked to matter, not God,
for the source of reality. But the corpuscular theories

discussed in the Nouvelles differ in one important respect

 

from the old atomic theories: in the seventeenth century
"there was assumed to be rationality in the mechanism
itself--indeed, the corpuscular theories were the result

of the search for rationality, and even part of the urge

to justify God."° The broad difference, then, between the
old theories and the new was the substitution of a rational
mechanism for the chance that had governed the world accord-
ing to the older view.

Along with Bayle's real interest in scientific work
and his sketchy understanding of it went a very unmodern
curiosity about the soul, its generation and its qualities,
and in witches. These topics, which got more than cursory

attention in the Nouvelles, were dangerous, as is evident

 

from the gingerly treatment accorded them, with carefully
worded discussions so that a reader could interpret them

as he chose. Even when Bayle appeared to condemn what he
termed "sentiments un peu bien creux" (21, p. 976), the fact
that he mentioned them in some detail was significant since
it was a way to get them into circulation. If Bayle were~
called to account by censors, he could always claim to be

doing nothing more than reporting on a serious work for

 

aButterfield, Origins, p. 100.

106

his readers, who, after all, were eager to learn what the
English were saying. No matter what his intentions--and
since no one can be sure what they were, speculation is
idle--he conveyed a number of notions not sanctioned by
orthodoxy.

The discussion of the soul was ambiguous; while
More's and Glanvil's ideas (the two men were not always
clearly distinguished) were mentioned in what seemed to be
a disparaging way, they merited several columns. More, in
particular, got credit for great "esprit" while at the same
time he was termed a "Platonicien outré" (21, p. 976) whose
ideas were rather superficial, wording designed to protect
the journal from the wrath of both sides. Several of More's
ideas were set forth: souls, which pre-exist before they
are joined to the body, are attracted to come down to be
united with the body when the unformed embryos give off a
subtle odor. In other words, much as birds of prey, went
the summary, are attracted by game, the soul was said to be
attracted to the body. But More was not a complete Plato-
nist: he held, for example, that souls, attracted by the
odor of embryos, confine themselves voluntarily in bodies,
whereas Proclus, a Neoplatonist, held that they were so
reluctant to lodge in souls that demons had to chase after
them (21, p. 974). The burden of the work was to prove, of
course, the existence of the soul against the arguments of

those who doubted both its existence and its immortality.

107

The study of the soul was also pursued by Glanvil,
who claimed to be proposing the old idea of the pre-

existence of souls only to prove, said the Nouvelles,

 

divine attributes and to make the Divinity more worthy of
adoration. Whatever the reasons, opined Bayle, espousing
that notion was dangerous since it meant that he sided with
the condemned Origen, who had held that all souls were cre-
ated at once. To support his thinking, Glanvil added com-
ments against the creation of souls by parents (traducianism,
a sensitive subject since it seemed to involve God in illicit
sexual activities); he upheld the idea of pre-existence of
souls by references to Scripture, by metaphysical principles,
and by answering objections, although no examples were given
in the review. The review went on to point out that all
this material needed examination, as did Glanvil's comments
on the states of the soul (aerial, etheral, terrestrial), on
the final conflagration and the subsequent restitution of
everything. The editor concluded that all the preceding
notions meant wanting to restore Origen (32), whether such

a result was good or bad was left to the reader.

Glanvil also turned his attention to witchcraft and
wrote Saducismus Triumphatus to refute Webster's investiga-
tion of the story of the Tedworth ghost and to prove the
existence of witches and diabolical apparitions. From that

work seven statements were printed in the Nouvelles. Two

 

108

had to do with Biblical subjects: first the angel that
accompanied Tobias was the soul of Asarias, incorporated,
after leaving his body, in the heart of St. Raphael; and
second, the soul of Jesus Christ actually appeared to the
Patriarchs. Four dealt with the supposed mechanism by which
souls act: first, souls exist before entering the body and
are always accompanied by an ethereal matter that serves
them as a vehicle; second, during life a man's soul, sus-
tained by its accompanying ethereal matter, can leave his
body for a time--that is how witches go to revels; third, by
force of imagination the soul can imprint on the ethereal
matter the form of an animal and can wander around for a
while in that form; fourth, should ethereal matter in an
assumed form receive a blow, it can, by the same force of
imagination, imprint a similar wound on its real body when
it is reintegrated into that body (just as a mother can
imprint her foetus); and last, on the subject of witches,

it is not absurd to say that devils suckle at the breast of
witches, that they are nourished by witches' milk and that
at the same time they strike the witches with a subtle
poison to derange them mentally (21). Belief in witches

was fading rapidly as the new philosophy changed men's ideas
of the workings of nature, but the review shows that such
speculation had not died out completely and could even

captivate the mind of a Bayle.

CHAPTER IV

CONCLUSION

The Nouvelles de la République des Lettres under

 

the editorship of Pierre Bayle was an important agent in
attracting attention to the new ideas coming out of northern
European countries, especially England, as those nations
replaced Latin countries as the leading centers of intel-
lectual activity in the western world. Because Bayle
realized very early, long before the eighteenth-century
travelers who usually get credit for the discovery, that
England was a fertile source of new ideas, he looked to the
island for inspiration and leadership. England, with a
freer intellectual climate than that of most Continental
nations, was open to the developments that grew out of the
revolt against the Aristotelianism of the medieval world.
By praising English accomplishments, Bayle managed to sug-
gest improvements and changes that might be made on his
side of the Channel.

Bayle, settled in exile in Rotterdam, was at the
crossroads of Europe where the lively Dutch publishing 1
industry provided a constant stream of books to read and

where the liberal Dutch government allowed him to print

109

110

fairly much what he wanted. From 1684 to 1687 he put out

his Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, a splendid

 

vehicle for doing what he did superbly well, vulgarisation.

 

In a steady production of articles, brief notices, and
reviews, he told his readers what was happening in the
Republic of Letters. He publicized new ideas, which he
then examined critically; he questioned traditional beliefs;
he pointed out inconsistencies, especially in questions of
theology and history.

Most of his great store of intellectual energy was
devoted to the Protestant-Roman Catholic debates. Having
first-hand knowledge of both sects, Bayle became disen-
chanted with their narrow-mindedness in matters of dogma
and with their partisan interpretations of the past. From
his participation in the controversy came his strong belief
in the right of the individual conscience to believe what
it deemed pleasing to God and his emphasis on the importance
of accurate historical studies.

Though no scientist, Bayle had a commendable inter—
est in and appreciation for the new spirit that had spurred
the formation of the Royal Society. He did his best to keep
his public informed about current scientific experiments,
and, if his information is often utterly inadequate, he at
least got into circulation the names of authors and works

and conveyed some idea of what they were doing.

111

By dwelling on points that fascinated him rather
than trying to cover all aspects of a work, Bayle often
falsified somewhat the contents of the works he was eval-
uating, but his good intentions were evident: he wanted
to share his catholic interests with French-speaking Europe.
For seventeenth-century readers who knew no English at all,

the Nouvelles presented, in a readily available format,

 

samples of what the English were discussing and reading.
An even more instructive study would compare the English

works reviewed in the Nouvelles with the evaluation in

 

that publication to discover just what distortions occurred
in the transmission of ideas to the Continent. Such a
study would permit greater understanding of the perennial
difficulties the English and the French have always had

in appreciating each other's culture and would illuminate
the special strengths and the blind spots of each

civilization.

APPENDIX

LIST OF ARTICLES FROM AND ABOUT ENGLAND APPEARING

IN THE NOUVELLES DE LA REPUBLIQUE DES LETTRES

 

 

(MARS 1684-FEVRIER 1687)

APPENDIX

LIST OF ARTICLES FROM AND ABOUT ENGLAND APPEARING

IN THE NOUVELLES _D_E_: _Lz_x REPUBLIQUE DES LETTRES

 

 

(MARS 1684-FEVRIER 1687)

During the period of Bayle's editorship, the
Nouvelles de la République des Lettres published roughly
3734 pages of text, most of which came from Continental
sources. Of this total, however, approximately 352 pages,
or roughly 10 out of every 100 pages, dealt with material
from and about England. These 352 pages giving a fairly
extended treatment of a specific work do not include the
brief mentions, usually less than a half page, in which
Bayle announced by author, title, and brief description,
books soon to appear. Nor does the total include the many
one-line references that appear scattered through other
longer articles from England or the Continent. The increas-
ing interest in English matters is reflected in the number
of entries for each year: the following appendix shows that
there were only 11 entries for the year 1684 but that the
last full year of Bayle's direction, 1686, produced 37
entries. In addition, the later reviews tend to be longer

and more detailed because readers wrote to reproach him, as

113

114

Bayle remarked, for not saying enough about what they

wanted to hear.

1. mars 1684 Extrait d'une lettre écrite de Londres
(pp. 62-66).

News of work going on in the scientific
community of London.

2. avril 1684 Report taken from the Journal des
Sgavans 1684 (Pp. 210-211).

 

News of academies of Dublin and
Oxfort [sic].

3. avril 1684 ANTIBARCLAIUS, id est examen Apologiae
quam non ita pridem Robertus Barclaius,
Scoto-Britannicus pro theologia vere
Christiana edidit, institutem in
gratiam Evangelicorum (pp. 220-222).

Mostly devoted to Barclay's work, the
goal of which was to prove that
Quakerism is the true religion.

4. mai 1684 Pacificatorium Orthodoxae Theologiae
Corpusculum. Sive brevis Juniorum, &
ad Doctrinam vere Christianam manuductio,
cui omnes qui seposito partium studio,
Christum sapiunt & profitentur, una-
nimiter queant suffragari. Opus ad
connubium unitatis cum veritate
sanciendum a Thoma Pierce S. T. P.
Regiae Majestati a Sacris, Decano
Sarisburiensi amicabiliter concinnatum
(pp. 308-310).

The author is to be congratulated on
wanting to reduce the number of disputes
among Christians.

5. juin 1684 Causa Valesiana Epistolis ternis
praelibata, in antecessum fusioris.
Apologiae. Quibus accesserunt appen-
dices duae, una instrumentorum, altera
de Gregorio VII. & in fine additamentum.
Autore F. Petro Valesio 0rd. S. FranciSci
Strict. Observan. S. Theologiae Profes-
sore (pp. 323-332).

6.

7.

8.

9.

juin 1684

juin 1684

juin 1684

aofit 1684

115

A discussion of Roman Catholics and the
oath of supremacy.

HyGAFOPAZ METEMVnyZ

Theses quadragesimales in Scholis
Oxonii publicis pro forma habitae.
Adjecta est Dissertatio Epistolica
D. Wallisii ad D. Boyle de fluxu et
refluxu Maris (PP. 400-414).

Discussion of Pythagorean theories
about certain questions in physics,
along with Wallis's theories about
the tides.

Apparatus ad Historiam Naturalem
sanguinis humani, ac spiritus praeciprié
ejusdem liquoris, Authore Roberto

Boyleo Nobili Anglo, regiae Societatis
socio. Pars I. ex Anglico Sermone in
Latinum traducebat D. A. M. D.

(pp. 416-417).

Reports of Boyle's experiments with
human blood.

Francisci Baconi Baronis de Verulamio,
Vice-Comitis S. Albani, & summi Angliae
Cancellarii opera quae extant omnia, in
unum corpus collecta sex volumnibus
comprehensa in 12 (pp. 423-424).

Notice of Bacon's collected works, to
appear in several months.

Extrait d'une Lettre écrite de Leyde a
l'auteur de ces Nouvelles par M.
Molineux, touchant la Dissolution des
corps dans les Menstrues (PP. 37-41).

Discussion of hydrostatics: how can
heavy bodies be dissolved in lighter
liquids? The specific example is that
of particles of mercury floating in
spirit of niter.

10. octobre 1684

11. octobre 1684

12. janvier 1685

13. mai 1685

116

Collectanea Chymica Leidensia, id est
Maétsiana, Margraviana, 1e Mortiana
scilicet trium in Academia Lugduno-
Batava Facultatis Chymicae, qua publicé
qua privatim professorum nunc viventium,
atque docentium, qui esthaec discipulis
suis, ex omni Europa illo confluentibus
per hos annos non solum ostenderunt,
verum etiam suis verbis dictarunt.

Opus quingentis & amplius processibus
adornatum collegit digessit, edidit
Christophorus Love Morley M. D. Anglus
(pp. 293-295).

Collection of experiments useful in
both medicine and chemistry.

Scotia illustrata, sive prodromus
Historiae naturalis, in quo Regionis
natura, incolarumingenia & mores, morbi
iisque medendi methodus, & Medicina
indigena accurate explicantur, &c.cum
figuris aeneis.‘ Opus viginti annorum
jussu magnae Britanniae Regis editum.
Auctore Roberto Sibbaldo, M. D. Equite
aurato, Medico & Geographo Regio, &
Regii Medicorum Colegii apud Edinburgum
socio (p. 311).

List of the subjects treated in this
work, a natural history of Scotland.

Réflexion de Monsieur Molineaux sur un
endroit des Nouvelles du mois d'Aoflt
page 36. oh l'on suppose que la
suspension des corps dissouts dans des
Menstrués procéde de ce que les parties
du Menstrué servent de Vehicule a
celles du corps dissout plus pesant,

&c (pp. 301-302).

Continues the discussion begun in No. 9.

Mention made of Thomas Gage "Voyageur
Anglois" and his book and remarks on
chocolate (p. 507). See also aofit
1686 (p. 976).

14. mai 1685

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

juin 1685

juin 1685

juin 1685

juillet 1685

aofit 1685

117

The description of a Siphon performing
the same things With the Sipho
Wirtembergicus, invented by Doctor
Papin Fellow of the Roial Society.

. . . Extrait du Journal d'Angleterre
n. 167, page 847 (pp. 537-540).

Papin's explanation of his siphon, the
largest of which is not more than 20
feet tall.

Idea Eloquentiae forensis hodiernae,
una cum actione forensi ex unaquaque
Juris parte. Authore Georgio Mackenzeo
a Valle Rosarum, Regio apud Scotos
Advocato (pp. 649-653).

Defense of the idea that the eloquence
of lawyers is greater than that of
preachers.

Lettre de Londres (pp. 665-666).

A list of books recently published in
England with some short descriptions of
contents.

Lucii Coelii Lactantii Firmiani opera
quae extant ad fidem MSS recognita &
commentarii illustrata, a Tho. Spark
A. M. ex aede Christi (pp. 681-682).

Mention of recent works on Lactantius.

Inserted (pp. 757-758) in a longer
article (VI) is the story of the
Rainoldus brothers.

Extrait des Transactions Philosophiques
ou du Journal d'Angleterre du mois de
juin dernier; contenant un Ecrit
présenté dans une Assemblée de la
Société Roiale de Londres par M. Papin,
touchant une nouvelle maniére d'élever
les eaux. C'est M. Papin qui parle.
(pp. 894-899).

Description of a new hydraulic machine.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

septembre

septembre

septembre

septembre

septembre

1685

1685

1685

1685

1685

octobre 1685

118

Two items from England are mentioned in
Article IV (pp. 969-970): first, a
lamp "inventée a l'imitation de celle
de M. Boyle" and "Trompettes a parler
de loin qui ont acquis a M. 1e
Chevalier Morland beaucoup de
reputation."

In Article III (pp. 973-974) Henry
More's Enchiridion Metaphysicum, a work
attacking Descartes' mechanical prin-
ciples, was given brief treatment.

 

Mentioned in one section of Article III
are More's explanation of the Apocalypse,
Glanvil's Saducismus trium:hatus, and
Webster's work attacking the story of
the Tedworth ghost.

 

 

Waller of the Royal Society published,
during the previous year, a collection
of experiments done by the Academy of

Cimento (p. 978).

Defensio fidei Nicaenae ex scriptis
quae extant Catholicorum Doctorum qui
intra tria prima Ecclesiae Christianae
saecula floruerunt. In qua obiter
quoque Constantinopolitana confessio
de Spiritu Sancto antiquiorum testi-
moniis adstruitur. Authore Georgio
Bullo Presbytero Anglicano. C'est a
dire, Defense de la foi du Concile de
Nicée par les écrits qui nous restent
des trois premiers siécles. On établit
en passant par les temoignages des
anciens la doctrine qui concerne le

S. Esprit (pp. 1037-1041).

An attack against the Jesuit Father
Petau and the Socinians whose heretical
views he encouraged.

Harmonia Evangelica Apostolorum Pauli &
Jacobi in doctrina de justificatione,

cum enodatione praecipuarum difficultatum
super hoc fundamentali articulo, vindica-
tione doctrinae orthodoxae & confutatione
errorum ab antiquis & modernis propriae
justitiae praeconibus assertorum.
Adversus Socinianos, Pontificios,

26.

27.

28.

novembre 1685

novembre 1685

novembre 1685

119

Arminianos, Curcellaeum, Morum, Bullum,
Schorlockum & alios novaturientes
instituta, une cum inquisitione in
constitutionem controversiae inter nos
& Romanenses a D. 1e Blanc exhibitam;
insecundam justificationem cum
Pontificiam cum Baxterianam a modernis
Conditionalistis propugnatam, & in alia
iustius commatis Neotericorum placita.
Studio & opera Alexandri Pitcarnii,
Scoto-Britanni V. D. M. C'est a dire
Accord de S. Paul & de S. Jacques sur
la matiére de la juStification &c

(pp. 1158-1160).

The author, forced to leave his country
because of the dominant sect, is a
studious man, eager to establish the
clear differences between the views of
the Reformers and those of the Roman
Catholics. The title explains the
contents of the work.

Warthon's [Wharton's] adenographie
proved that saliva has its special
ducts (p. 1224).

Histoire de la Reformation de l'Eglise
d'Angleterre seconde partie, contenant
1e progrés de la Reformation sous 1e
Régne d'Edouard VI. son renversement
sous l'autorité de Marie, & son
rétablissement par la piété d‘Elisabeth.
Traduite de l'Anglois de M. Burnet, par
M. de Rosemond (pp. 1234-1254).

The main headings of the first volume
are listed, along with the second
volume topics listed above. The third
volume contains documentary proof for
the statements of the first two.

A Discourse concerning auricular
Confession, as it is prescribed by the
Council of Trent, and practised in te
[gig] Church of Rome. C'est a dire,
Discours sur la Confession auriculaire
telle que 1e Concile de Trente la
prescrit, & que l'Eglise Romaine 1a
pratique (pp. 1267-1271).

29.

30.

31.

32.

novembre 1685

décembre 1685

décembre 1685

décembre 1685

120

An attack in which the author maintains
that auricular confession was not
instituted by Christ, that it has not
had universal acceptance, and that it
is, as currently practiced, harmful to
piety.

The Summa Theologiae Christianae by
Bishop Roger Boy1e of Dublin is a
confused work. Brief‘mention only
(pp. 1270-1271).

 

Physiologia nova experimentalis in

qua notiones Aristotelis, Epicuri &
Cartesii supplentur [gig] errores
deteguntur & emendantur, atque clarae
distinctae & speciales causae' ’
praecipuorum experimentorum aliorumque
phaenomenum naturialium aperiuntur, ex
evidentibus principiis quae nemo
antehac perspexit et prosecutus est.
Authore D. de Stair Carolo 2.
Britanniarum Regi a Consiliis Juris &
Status, nuper Latinitate donata. C'est
a dire Physique nouvelle experimentale
ou l'on rectifie les Principes
d'Aristote, d'Epicure, et de Descartes
&c (PP. 1336-1350).

An eclectic discussion of the nature of
matter, of movement and rest, of weight,
of the heavens, or the four elements.

Mention made, but no details given,
of "la nouvelle science de l'infini
inventee & demontree par M. Cluver

de la Societe Roiale d'Angleterre"

(pp. 1349-1350).

Two English works mentioned in Article
IX: "1e vrai systéme intellectuel de
1'Univers par le Docteur Cudworth" and
Glanvil's work on the pre-existence of
souls (p. 1378). An outline of the
Discoursksur la verité by the Bishop
of Dromore in IreIand [George Rust]
leads the author to believe that the
work should be translated into Latin
(pp. 1377-1378).

 

33. janvier 1686

34. janvier 1686

35. janvier 1686

36. fevrier 1686

37. mars 1686

121

Hippocratus contractus in quo magni
Hippocratis Medicorum Principis opera
omnia in brevem epitomen summa
diligentia redacta habentur. Studio &
opera Thomae Burnet M.D. Medici Regii
et Colegii Regii Medicorum
Edinburgensium Socii (pp. 102-103).

Burnet has abstracted parts of the
works of HippOcrates for those who have
neither the time nor patience to read
the original.

Chartophylax Ecclesiasticus quo prope
M.D. Scriptores Ecclesiastici tam
minores quam majores, tum Catholici,

tum Haeretici, eorumque patria, Ordo,
Secta, munera, aetas, & obitus,
editiones operum praestantiores,
opuscula, quin et ipsa Fragmenta
breviter indicantur. Scriptores dubii

a certis, suppositii a genuinis, non
existantes a superstitibus distinguuntur.
A Chr. Nato ad annum usque 1517.
Accedunt Scriptores Gentiles Christianae
Religionis oppugnatores, & brevis
cujusque saeculi conspectus. Studio &
labore Guilielmi Cave S. S. Th. Pr.
Canonici Windesoriensis (pp. 103-108).

This work is really the completely
revised TablesyEcclesiastiques, which
Cave had done earlier and which had
been printed in England in 1674.

 

Praise is given to the Tables
Higtoriques_et Chronologiques by
M. Tallents of Magdalen College,
Cambridge (p. 107).

Brief mention only of Hyde's Oxford
Catalog (p. 217).

Brigg's book on vision is mentioned
and refuted by a doctor from Amsterdam
(pp. 319-326).

38. avril 1686

39. avril 1686

40. avril 1686

41. mai 1686

122

Joannis Lightfooti SS. Th. P. Aulae
Catharinae apud Cantabrigienses
Praefecti, Canonici Eliensis, opera
omnia. C'est a dire, Toutes les
Oeuvres de M. Lightfoot (pp. 408-415).

A two-volume work containing the
results of Lightfoot's hours spent
studying the Old Testament, the Four
Gospels, and the relations between
them.

De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus &

earum rationibus libri tres. Authore
Jo. Spencero, S. T. D. Ecclesiae
Eliensis Decano & Collegii Corp. Christi
apud Cantabrig, Praefecto. C'est a
dire, Traité des Loix Cérémonielles,

des Juifs & de leurs raisons (PP. 430-
444). *

The author has worked to demonstrate
God's wisdom and power in establishing
the ceremonial laws of the Jews.

Extrait du Journal d'Angleterre du mois
de Décembre 1685. contenant des
remarques sur un imprimé Francois qui
propose un movement perpétuel, faites
par D. Papin Membre de la Société
Royale. C'est M. Papin qui parle

(pp. 444-447).

A sketch of a perpetual motion machine
(also published in the NRL, novembre
1685, p. 1254) and an accompanying
explanation appear. The conclusion

is that such a machine will not work.

Dissertationes Cyprianicae, ab Henrico
Dodwello A. M. Dubliniensi. C'est a
dire, Dissertations sur S. Cyprien
(pp. 532-552).

Thirteen dissertations on points chosen
from the saint's writings pay special
attention to the question of early
martyrs.

42.

mai 1686

43. mai 1686

44.

45.

46.

juin 1686

juin 1686

juin 1686

123

Dodwell's book on schism mentioned,
but the exact title is not given nor
is the work discussed (p. 533).

De jure Laicorum sacerdotali ex
sententia Tertulliani aliorumque
Veterum Dissertatio, adversus anonymum
Dissertatorum de coenae administratione
ubi Pastores non sunt: ab Henrico
Dodwello A. M. Dubliniensi (p. 551).

Another book discussing a passage where
Tertullian seems to say that all
Christians are, in emergencies, real
priests. Dodwell, Father Petau, and
Grotius are involved in the debate.

Discours contre la Transsubstanciation
compose en Anglois par le R. D. T. &
traduit par L. L. (pp. 680-689).

A discussion of Protestant objections
to the Roman Catholic doctrine of
transubstantiation with emphasis on
the early history of the Church.

Traité de 1'Oraison par Origene
(pp. 689-696).

A discussion of the early days of the
Church, and the problems faced by
Origen. There is also a review of the
various editions of Origen's works.

Francisci Willughbeii Armig. de Historia
Piscium Libri IV jussu & sumptibus
SOCIETATIS REGIAE Londinensis editi:

in quibus non tantum de piscibus in
genere agitur, sed & species omnes tum
ab aliis traditae, tum novae & nondum
editae bene multae, naturae ductum
servante methodo dispositae, accurate
describuntur, earumque effigies quotquot
habere potuere, vel ad vivum delineatae,
vel ad optima exemplaria impressae,
artifici manu elegantissime in aes
incisae ad descriptiones illustrandas
exhibentur. Cum appendice Historias &
observationes in supplementum operis
collatas complectente. Totum opus

47.

48.

49-

50.

51.

juin 1686

juin 1686

juin 1686

juin 1686

juin 1686

124

recognovit, cooptavit, supplevit,
librum etiam 1. & 2. integros adjecit
Johannes Rajus é Societate Regia.
C'est 5 dire, l'Histoire des Poissons
(pp. 697-708).

A study of aquatic creatures having
blood and fins but not feet.

Mention of John Goad who observed
weather changes and noted the method
he used (p. 707).

Thesaurus Linguae Sanctae compendiosé
scil. contractus plane tamen referatus
pleneque explicatus, sive Concordantiale
Lexicon Hebraeo-Latino-Biblicum, in quo
Lexica omnia Hebraica huc usque edita
methodicé, succincté & quasi synopticos
exhibentur una cum Cordantiis Hebraicis,
&c a Gulielmo Robertson A.M. (PP. 729-
732).

A useful aid for those wanting to
perfect their knowledge of Hebrew.

Another volume by Robertson has three
parts: (1) une Table générale des mots
les plus irréguliers de la Bible réduits
a leurs racines, conjugaisons, &c &
plusieurs régles pour apprendre a
connoitre les racines & a lire sans
points; (2) Abregé de la doctrine des
accens Hebreux tant pour la Prose que
pour les Vers; (3) une explication
Grammaticale de la formation des verbes
Hebreux &c (p. 731).

Mention is limited to the above.

Robertson also published a Trésor de
la Langue Grécque (p. 731).

No details given.

Dictionnaire Historique, Géographique,
Poétique de Charles Etienne augmenté par
feu Monsieur Lloyd, qui étoit Membre du
Collége de Wadham 5 Oxford (p. 732).

52.

53.

54.

55.

56.

57.

juin 1686

juillet 1686

juillet 1686

aoflt 1686

aofit 1686

septembre 1686

125

A greatly revised and improved version
of Lloyd's first revision of Etienne.

Miscellanea, &c. Authore Thoma Smith
Ecclesiae Anglicanae Presbytero
(pp. 732-734).

The book contains a solid reply to
Simon's attack along with four other
dissertations on various subjects,
including the causes that divide
Christians.

Extrait d'une Lettre de M. Sylvius,
Medecin Membre de l'Academie de Dublin,
ecrite a l'Auteur de ces Nouvelles,
Touchant une fille qui a plusieurs
cornes en divers endroits du corps

(pp. 790-796).

Article includes a sketch of the girl,
showing the locations of the horns and
an explication of their formation.

Angliae notitia sive praesens status
Angliae succincté enucleatus. C'est a
dire, L'état présent de l'Angleterre
(pp. 836-838).

A survey of the state of affairs in
England but without any details.

Ogygia: seu rerum Hibernicarum
Chronologia, &c. C'est a dire,
Chronologie d'Irlande, Authore Roderico
O Flaherty Armigero (pp. 897-908).

A history of Ireland from before the
Flood to the year 435 in amazing detail.

A brief mention of Dr. G. Cave's Traité
de la patience des l. Chrétiens pendant
la Persecution, traduit de l'Anglois
(pp. 978-979). '

De Variatipne Pulsus by David Abercromby
is mentioned briefly and readers are,
reminded that he previously published
Méthode de guerir souvent les maladies
veneriennes sans l'aide du Mercure &
toujours sans aucune salivation
mercuriale (PP. 1015-1016).

58. septembre 1686

59. octobre 1686

60. octobre 1686

61. octobre 1686

126

La Morale de l'Evangile ou l'on traitte
de la nature de la vertu Chretienne,
des motifs qui nous y doivent porter,

& des remedes contre les tentations.
Traduit de l'Anglois de Mr. Lucas,
Ministre de l'Eglise S. Etienne a
Londres (pp. 1098-1100).

Added to the review, which gives no
details beyond what the title indicates,
are notices of M. Rai's ouvrage sur les
plantes; of M. Boyle's de Specificorum
remediorum and of "un nouveau livre

. . . [by Boyle] une recherche touchant
la signification qu'on donne ordinaire-
ment au mot de Nature”; and of the
letters of Usserius.

 

 

Deux essais d'Arithmetique politique
touchant les Villes et hospitaux de
Londres et de Paris. Par 1e Chevalier
Petty de la Societé Roiale (pp. 1144-
1151).

A comparison of statistics for the two
cities.

De Specificorum remediorum cum
corpusculari Philosophia concordia cui
accedit dissertatio de varia simplicum
Medicamentorum utilitate usuque. Ex
anglico in latinum sermonem traducebat
D. A. M. D. Autore Roberto Boyleo
Nobili Anglo Societatis Regiae Socio.
C'est a dire, de l'accord des remedes
specifiques avec le Systeme qui donne
raison des effects par les corpuscules
(pp. 1165-1182).

Boyle's effort to show that the concept
of specific remedies does not clash
with that of the corpuscular philosophy.

Reflections on M. Varillas's History of
the revolutions that have happened in
Europe in matters of Religion. And
more particularly on his Ninth Book
that relates to England. By G. Burnet,
D. D. C'est a dire, Reflexions sur
l'Histoire que M. Varillas a publiée

62.

63.

64.

65.

novembre 1686

novembre 1686

novembre 1686

novembre 1686

127

de l'Hérésie, principalement sur 1e
9 livre 00 i1 parle de l"Angleterre
(pp. 1206-1216).

Burnet's criticism is mainly that
Varillas lacks documentary proof for
his statements (see No. 27).

Notice of a report appearing in the
Journal d'Angleterre for June 1685 and
mentioning an experiment performed with
a piece of asbestos (p. 1247).

Historia plantarum species hactenus
editas aliasque insuper moltas noviter
inventas & descriptas complectens, &c.
Auctore Joanne Rajo a societate Regia
SS. Individuae Trinitatis Collegii apud
Cantabrigionses quondam Socio. Tomus
primus. C'est a dire, Histoire
universelle des plantes (pP. 1317-1330).

A new study of plants based on logical
principles.

No. 62 also carries brief mention of '
several related works: two by Grew

(De saporum causis et differentiis and
CalcuIsurIa fécondité du pavotfblanc);
Robert HarIey ongflla grosseur.et l'ége
des arbres"; and four additional works
by Ray himself (Catalogue des plgntes
qui se trouvent en Angleterre &pgans

les Iles Episines, Catalogue_des lantes
qu'ilpavait remarquées dans les Pais-Bas,
en Allemagne, en Italie, en Sicile, dans
1'Ile de Malthe &.en France, 1'son
travail sur l'Histoire des oiseaux et
des poissons que M. Willugby avait
compilee," and Methodus plantarum);
Slare's Observations sur le tartre;
Plot's Histoire naturelle de la

Province EJOxford.

 

 

 

 

 

Critique de Varillas (pp. 1350-1352).

See No. 61. Both the translator who ‘
put Burnet's comments into French and ‘
Burnet himself have made additional
unfavorable criticisms of Varillas.

66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

décembre 1686

décembre 1686

décembre 1686

décembre 1686

janvier 1687

128

De ipsa Natura, sive libera in receptam
Naturae notionem disquisitio ad Amicum.
Authore R. B. nobili Anglo Societatis
Regiae Socio. C'est a dire, Recherche
libre sur l'idée qu'on se forme
ordinairement de la Nature (pp. 1384-
1402).

A work in 8 sections that studies the
history of the word nature; its dangers
(it seems to interpose a concept between
us and God); its bases. Boyle rejects
the idea of nature in favor of mechan-
ical principles.

Mention made of a "Traitté du Sr.
Preston Catholique Anglois qui sous

la nom de Widdrington a discuté
savamment l'autorité de ce Concile
Latran contre le P. Lessus" (p. 1424).

A defence of the Exposition of the
doctrine of the Church of England,
&c (pp. 1427-1429).

An attack on the doctrine of trans-
substantiation and on the veracity
of Bossuet.

Commentarium de rebellione Anglicana
ab anno 1640. usque ad annum 1685.
Pars I. Autore R. M. Eq. Aur. C'est
a dire Histoire de la rebellion
d'Angleterre (pp. 1456-1457).

A Royalist is speaking against the
Independents who committed the
parricide against the wishes of the
Presbyterian ministers who urged a
more moderate course.

Extrait d'un lettre ecrite de Londres
a M. Silvestre Docteur en Medicine par
M. Pujolas touchant l'experience
curieuse d'hydrostatique communiquée
par M. Lufneu & inserée dans les
Nouvelles d'avril 1685. art. 5

(pp. 20-28).

71.

72.

73.

janvier 1687

février 1687

février 1687

129

The article deals with a proposition
believed true by Stevin, with an
experiment questioned by Boyle and
Wallis, and with Lufneu's explanation
of Stevin's proposition.

Novissima idea de febribus, & earundem
dogmatica ac rationalis cura mechanicis
rationibus suffulta. Accessit
dissertatio de insensibili transpira-
tione mechanicé probata. Auctore Jac.
Sylvio Med. Doct. Batavo Collegii
Medicineo non scoietatis Dubliniensis
ad promovendam naturalem scientiam
socio. C'est 5 dire, Nouveau Traitté
des fievres selon les principes
mechaniques (PP. 46-62).

Fevers result from impaired circulation
of the blood so that the cure is to get
the blood moving again.

Extrait d'une lettre ecrite de Londres
a l'Auteur de ces Nouvelles 1e 10
janvier 1687. contenant l'explication
d'un passage de Lucrece, & d'un passage
de Terence (pp. 117-121).

The letter writer is commended on
saying concisely what he has to give
without padding out his message.

Extrait des Transactions Philosophiques
du mois d'octobfe 1686. sur une maniere
de calculer la vitesse de l'air
presentée a la societé Roiale par M.
Papin. C'est lui qui parle (pp. 164-
168).

 

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