_Bayle_.--Yes, we both were philosophers; but my philosophy was the
deepest. You dogmatised; I doubted.
_Locke_.--Do you make doubting a proof of depth in philosophy? It may be
a good beginning of it, but it is a bad end.
_Bayle_.--No; the more profound our searches are into the nature of
things, the more uncertainty we shall find; and the most subtle minds see
objections and difficulties in every system which are overlooked or
undiscoverable by ordinary understandings.
_Locke_.--It would be better, then, to be no philosopher, and to continue
in the vulgar herd of mankind, that one may have the convenience of
thinking that one knows something. I find that the eyes which Nature has
given me see many things very clearly, though some are out of their
reach, or discerned but dimly. What opinion ought I to have of a
physician who should offer me an eye-water, the use of which would at
first so sharpen my sight as to carry it farther than ordinary vision,
but would in the end put them out? Your philosophy, Monsieur Bayle, is
to the eyes of the mind what I have supposed the doctor's nostrum to be
to those of the body. It actually brought your own excellent
understanding, which was by nature quick-sighted, and rendered more so by
art and a subtlety of logic peculiar to yourself--it brought, I say, your
very acute understanding to see nothing clearly, and enveloped all the
great truths of reason and religion in mists of doubt.
_Bayle_.--I own it did; but your comparison is not just. I did not see
well before I used my philosophic eye-water. I only supposed I saw well;
but I was in an error, with all the rest of mankind. The blindness was
real; the perceptions were imaginary. I cured myself first of those
false imaginations, and then I laudably endeavoured to cure other men.
_Locke_.--A great cure, indeed! and don't you think that, in return for
the service you did them, they ought to erect you a statue?
_Bayle_.--Yes; it is good for human nature to know its own weakness. When
we arrogantly presume on a strength we have not, we are always in great
danger of hurting ourselves--or, at least, of deserving ridicule and
contempt by vain and idle efforts.
_Locke_.--I agree with you that human nature should know its own
weakness; but it should also feel its strength, and try to improve it.
This was my employment as a philosopher. I endeavoured to discover the
real powers of the mind; to see what it could do, and what it could not;
to restrain it from efforts beyond its ability, but to teach it how to
advance as far as the faculties given to it by Nature, with the utmost
exertion and most proper culture of them, would allow it to go. In the
vast ocean of philosophy I had the line and the plummet always in my
hands. Many of its depths I found myself unable to fathom; but by
caution in sounding, and the careful observations I made in the course of
my voyage, I found out some truths of so much use to mankind that they
acknowledge me to have been their benefactor.
_Bayle_.--Their ignorance makes them think so. Some other philosopher
will come hereafter, and show those truths to be falsehoods. He will
pretend to discover other truths of equal importance. A later sage will
arise, perhaps among men now barbarous and unlearned, whose sagacious
discoveries will discredit the opinions of his admired predecessor. In
philosophy, as in Nature, all changes its form, and one thing exists by
the destruction of another.
_Locke_.--Opinions taken up without a patient investigation, depending on
terms not accurately defined, and principles begged without proof, like
theories to explain the phenomena of Nature built on suppositions instead
of experiments, must perpetually change and destroy one another. But
some opinions there are, even in matters not obvious to the common sense
of mankind, which the mind has received on such rational grounds of
assent that they are as immovable as the pillars of heaven, or (to speak
philosophically) as the great laws of Nature, by which, under God, the
universe is sustained. Can you seriously think that because the
hypothesis of your countryman Descartes, which was nothing but an
ingenious, well-imagined romance, has been lately exploded, the system of
Newton, which is built on experiments and geometry--the two most certain
methods of discovering truth--will ever fail? Or that, because the whims
of fanatics and the divinity of the schoolmen cannot now be supported,
the doctrines of that religion which I, the declared enemy of all
enthusiasm and false reasoning, firmly believed and maintained, will ever
be shaken?
_Bayle_.--If you had asked Descartes, while he was in the height of his
vogue, whether his system would be ever confuted by any other
philosopher's, as that of Aristotle had been by his, what answer do you
suppose he would have returned?
_Locke_.--Come, come, Monsieur Bayle, you yourself know the difference
between the foundations on which the credit of those systems and that of
Newton is placed. Your scepticism is more affected than real. You found
it a shorter way to a great reputation (the only wish of your heart) to
object than to defend, to pull down than to set up. And your talents
were admirable for that kind of work. Then your huddling together in a
critical dictionary a pleasant tale, or obscene jest, and a grave
argument against the Christian religion, a witty confutation of some
absurd author, and an artful sophism to impeach some respectable truth,
was particularly commodious to all our young smarts and smatterers in
freethinking. But what mischief have you not done to human society! You
have endeavoured, and with some degree of success, to shake those
foundations on which the whole moral world and the great fabric of social
happiness entirely rest. How could you, as a philosopher, in the sober
hours of reflection, answer for this to your conscience, even supposing
you had doubts of the truth of a system which gives to virtue its
sweetest hopes, to impenitent vice its greatest fears, and to true
penitence its best consolations; which restrains even the least
approaches to guilt, and yet makes those allowances for the infirmities
of our nature which the stoic pride denied to it, but which its real
imperfection and the goodness of its infinitely benevolent Creator so
evidently require?
_Bayle_.--The mind is free, and it loves to exert its freedom. Any
restraint upon it is a violence done to its nature, and a tyranny against
which it has a right to rebel.
_Locke_.--The mind, though free, has a governor within itself, which may
and ought to limit the exercise of its freedom. That governor is reason.
_Bayle_.--Yes; but reason, like other governors, has a policy more
dependent upon uncertain caprice than upon any fixed laws. And if that
reason which rules my mind or yours has happened to set up a favourite
notion, it not only submits implicitly to it, but desires that the same
respect should be paid to it by all the rest of mankind. Now I hold that
any man may lawfully oppose this desire in another; and that if he is
wise, he will do his utmost endeavours to check it in himself.
_Locke_.--Is there not also a weakness of a contrary nature to this you
are now ridiculing? Do we not often take a pleasure to show our own
power and gratify our own pride by degrading notions set up by other men
and generally respected?
_Bayle_.--I believe we do; and by this means it often happens that if one
man builds and consecrates a temple to folly, another pulls it down.
_Locke_.--Do you think it beneficial to human society to have all temples
pulled down?
_Bayle_.--I cannot say that I do.
_Locke_.--Yet I find not in your writings any mark of distinction to show
us which you mean to save.
_Bayle_.--A true philosopher, like an impartial historian, must be of no
sect.
_Locke_.--Is there no medium between the blind zeal of a sectary and a
total indifference to all religion?
_Bayle_.--With regard to morality I was not indifferent.
_Locke_.--How could you, then, be indifferent with regard to the
sanctions religion gives to morality? How could you publish what tends
so directly and apparently to weaken in mankind the belief of those
sanctions? Was not this sacrificing the great interests of virtue to the
little motives of vanity?
_Bayle_.--A man may act indiscreetly, but he cannot do wrong, by
declaring that which, on a full discussion of the question, he sincerely
thinks to be true.
_Locke_.--An enthusiast who advances doctrines prejudicial to society, or
opposes any that are useful to it, has the strength of opinion and the
heat of a disturbed imagination to plead in alleviation of his fault; but
your cool head and sound judgment can have no such excuse. I know very
well there are passages in all your works, and those not a few, where you
talk like a rigid moralist. I have also heard that your character was
irreproachably good; but when, in the most laboured parts of your
writings, you sap the surest foundations of all moral duties, what avails
it that in others, or in the conduct of your life, you have appeared to
respect them? How many who have stronger passions than you had, and are
desirous to get rid of the curb that restrains them, will lay hold of
your scepticism to set themselves loose from all obligations of virtue!
What a misfortune is it to have made such a use of such talents! It
would have been better for you and for mankind if you had been one of the
dullest of Dutch theologians, or the most credulous monk in a Portuguese
convent. The riches of the mind, like those of Fortune, may be employed
so perversely as to become a nuisance and pest instead of an ornament and
support to society.
_Bayle_.--You are very severe upon me. But do you count it no merit, no
service to mankind, to deliver them from the frauds and fetters of
priestcraft, from the deliriums of fanaticism, and from the terrors and
follies of superstition? Consider how much mischief these have done to
the world! Even in the last age what massacres, what civil wars, what
convulsions of government, what confusion in society, did they produce!
Nay, in that we both lived in, though much more enlightened than the
former, did I not see them occasion a violent persecution in my own
country? And can you blame me for striking at the root of these evils.
_Locke_.--The root of these evils, you well know, was false religion; but
you struck at the true. Heaven and hell are not more different than the
system of faith I defended and that which produced the horrors of which
you speak. Why would you so fallaciously confound them together in some
of your writings, that it requires much more judgment, and a more
diligent attention than ordinary readers have, to separate them again,
and to make the proper distinctions? This, indeed, is the great art of
the most celebrated freethinkers. They recommend themselves to warm and
ingenuous minds by lively strokes of wit, and by arguments really strong,
against superstition, enthusiasm, and priestcraft; but at the same time
they insidiously throw the colours of these upon the fair face of true
religion, and dress her out in their garb, with a malignant intention to
render her odious or despicable to those who have not penetration enough
to discern the impious fraud. Some of them may have thus deceived
themselves as well as others. Yet it is certain no book that ever was
written by the most acute of these gentlemen is so repugnant to
priestcraft, to spiritual tyranny, to all absurd superstitions, to all
that can tend to disturb or injure society, as that Gospel they so much
affect to despise.
_Bayle_.--Mankind is so made that, when they have been over-heated, they
cannot be brought to a proper temper again till they have been
over-cooled. My scepticism might be necessary to abate the fever and
frenzy of false religion.
_Locke_.--A wise prescription, indeed, to bring on a paralytical state of
the mind (for such a scepticism as yours is a palsy which deprives the
mind of all vigour, and deadens its natural and vital powers) in order to
take off a fever which temperance and the milk of the Evangelical
doctrines would probably cure.
_Bayle_.--I acknowledge that those medicines have a great power. But few
doctors apply them untainted with the mixture of some harsher drugs or
some unsafe and ridiculous nostrums of their own.
_Locke_.--What you now say is too true. God has given us a most
excellent physic for the soul in all its diseases, but bad and interested
physicians, or ignorant and conceited quacks, administer it so ill to the
rest of mankind that much of the benefit of it is unhappily lost.