none but trembling flaves, and bafe flatterers. To be loved and esteemed by men of free and generous minds, thou must be virtuous, affectionate, difinterested, beneficent; and know how to live in a fort of equality with those who share and deferve. thy friendship. FENELON, Archbishop of Cambray. SECTION III. LOCKE AND BAYLE.. Christianity defended against the Cavils of Scepticism. BAYLE. YES, we both were philofophers; but my philofophy was the deepeft. You dogmatized: I doubted. LOCKE Do you make doubting a proof of depth in philofophy? 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 fee objections and difficulties in every system, which are overlooked or undiscoverable by ordinary understandings. LOCKE. It would be better then to be no philofopher, and to continue in the vulgar herd of mankind, that one may have the convenience of thinking that one knows fomething. I find that the eyes which nature has given me, fee many things very clearly, though fome are out of their reach, or difcerned but dimly. What opinion ought I to have of a phyfician, who fhould offer me an eye-water, the ufe of which would at firft fo fharpen my fight; as to carry it farther than ordinary vifion; but would in the end put them out? Your philofophy is to the eyes of the mind, what I have supposed the doctor's noftrum to be to thofe of the body. It: actually brought your own excellent understanding, which was by nature quick-fighted, and rendered: more fo by art and a fubtilty of logick peculiar to yourself-it brought, I fay, your very acute underftanding to fee nothing clearly; and enveloped all the great truths of reafon and religion in mifts of doubt. BAYLE. I own it did; but your comparison is not just. I did not fee well, before I ufed my philofophic eye-water I only fuppofed I faw well; but I was in an error, with all the reft 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 fervice you did them, they ought to erect you a ftatue ? BAYLE. Yes; it is good for human nature to know its own weakness. When we arrogantly prefume on a ftrength we have not, we are always in great danger of hurting ourfelves, or at least of deferving ridicule and contempt, by vain and idle efforts. LOCKE. I agree with you, that human nature fhould know its own weaknefs; but it should also feel its ftrength, and try to improve it. This was my employment as a philofopher. I endeavoured to difcover the real powers of the mind, to fee what it could do, and what it could not; to reftrain 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 vaft ocean of philofophy, I had the line and the plummet always in my hands. Many of its depths I found myfelf unable to fathom; but, by caution in founding, and the careful obfervations I made in the course of my voyage, I found out fome truths of fo much ufe to mankind, that they acknowledge me to have been their benefactor. BAYLE. Some Their ignorance makes them think fo. other philofopher will come hereafter, and fhow thofe truths to be falfehoods. He will pretend to difcover other truths of equal importance. A later fage will arife, perhaps among men now barbarous and unlearned, whofe fagacious difcoveries will difcredit the opinions of his admired predeceffor. In philofophy, as in nature, all changes its form, and one thing exifts by the deftruction of another. Opinions taken up without a patient investigation, depending on terms not accurately defined, and principles begged without proof, like theories to explain the phænomena of nature, built on fuppofitions inftead of experiments, muft perpetually change and deftroy one another. But fome opi nions there are, even in matters not obvious to the common sense of mankind, which the mind has received on fuch rational grounds of affent, that they are as immoveable as the pillars of heaven; or (to speak philofophically) as the great laws of Nature, by which, under God, the univerfe is fuftained. Can you feriously think, that because the hypothefis of your countryman Defcartes, which was nothing but an ingenious, wellimagined romance, has been lately exploded, the system of Newton, which is built on experiments and geometry, the two moft certain methods of discovering truth, will ever fail; or that, because the whims of fanatics and the divinity of the fchoolmen, cannot now be fupported, the doctrines of that religion, which I, the declared enemy all enthusiasm and falfe reafoning, firmly believed and maintained, will ever be fhaken? BAYLE. If you had afked Defcartes, while he was in the height of his vogue, whether his fyftem would ever be confuted by any other philofophers, as that of Ariftotle had been by his, what anfwer do you fuppofe he would have returned? LOCKE. Come, come, you yourself know the difference between the foundations on which the credit of thofe fyftems, and that of Newton is placed. Your fcepticism is more affected than real. You found it a fhorter way to a great reputation, (the only with of your heart,) to object, than to defend; to pull down, than to fet up. And your talents were admirable for that kind of work. Then your hud dling together in a Critical Dictionary, a pleasant tale, or obscene jest, and a grave argument against the Christian religion, a witty confutation of fome abfurd author, and an artful fophifm to impeach fome refpectable truth, was particularly commodious to all our young smarts and fmatterers in freethinking. But what mifchief have you not done to human fociety? You have endeavoured, and with fome degree of fuccefs, to shake thofe foundations, on which the whole moral world, and the great fabric of social happiness, entirely reft. How could you, as a philofopher, in the fober hours of reflection, answer for this to your confcience, even fuppofing you had doubts of the truth of a fyftem, which gives to virtue its sweetest hopes, to impenitent vice its greatest fears, and to true penitence its beft confolations; which restrains even the least approaches to guilt, and yet makes thofe allowances for the infirmites of our nature, which the Stoic pride denied to it, but which its real imperfection, and the goodness of its infinitely benevolent Creator, fo 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 governour within itfelf, which may and ought to limit the exercife of its freedom. That governour is Reason. BAYLE. Yes-but Reafon, like other governours, has a policy more dependent upon uncertain caprice, than |