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270 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY And yet, no matter how rewarding in the end, he is also one of the most difficult authors of this period, in fact he is next to impossible: his vast erudition is of a size and quality extremely difficult to duplicate today. He was often deliberately obscure, so that his daring ideas flicker in and out so ambiguously, we wonder whether they actually existed; in his endlessly long sentences, the ironies of this partisan style li~cut in so many directions we cannot be sure he truly knew where his own bottom line was. Indeed it was a fortunate moment for the Republic of Letters when Mme. Labrousse decided to devote her scholarly life to this baffling enigmatic figure. We may note, too, that only a scholar who had mastered all the issues could have written a book that, like hers, is short. It may be surprising to some that .Mme. Labrousse sees Bayle, first of all, as a Calvinist, or at least someone who was constantly grappling with the theological and moral issues raised by Calvinism, as his own thought evolved. Bayle also dealt with Calvinism in more immediate ways: for Mme. Labrousse the year x685 and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, with the persecutions of Calvinists that preceded and followed it--Bayle's own exile in Holland and the death of his brother, the Pastor Jacob Bayle, were both immediate consequences of these---formed the crux, the pivot of his life. His early works in French waged battles against religious intolerence by attacking the Catholic arguments supporting it, and, after the Revocation, too, his controversies with both liberal and conservative Protestants, as well as with Catholics, were constantly in the shadow of this overwhelming event. Those familiar with the reputation Bayle gained in later centuries as a mini-Voltaire, an advocate of Italian free-thinkers, a sceptic, a deist, or even an incipient positivist, will be astonished at Mme. Labrousse's analysis of Bayle's religious thought, for the categories in which his ideas take form cannot be reconciled with any of these later or earlier systems. Bayle belongs to a very special milieu, which Mme. Labrousse understands better than anyone. Certainly she treats Bayle as a philosopher--indeed there are brilliant passages on his relationship to Cartesianism, Locke, and the Epicureans. There is considerable discussion of Bayle as a historian also. But her point is that matters such as philosophy and history seldom exist in the pure state in Bayle, who was essentially, to the depths of his being, a controversialist, or, as we would say today, aperson who was engaged (engagk) in what were to him the great issues of his time. This is an enthralling little book. WALTER E. REX University of California, Berkeley James R. Jacob. Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, x983. Pp. viii + ~a. $37.5o. J. R. Jacob's book gives a very intriguing picture of what may have happened in the inner intellectual life of a minor figure in English thought from the late Puritan period to the end of the century. It is intriguing to consider how some very radical theological and political views may have survived during the Restoration and resur- BOOK REVIEWS 271 faced in the writings of the early deists; it is also intriguing to consider how a radical thinker could put forth his views in the face of a Church of England and a Crown again in the ascendent. Leo Strauss taught us a very important lesson in his Persecution and the Art of Writing, namely, that people very often have to hide their true opinions, or assert them in some oblique or clandestine manner. The change in England from the freedom to express radical anti-royalist ideas to the oppression of such views in the Restoration should make us careful about accepting the apparent changes of viewpoint that occur in many of the authors, including Hobbes, Wilkins, Boyle, and many lesser lights. They may have been prudent, careful, and practical in their presentations , but had they really changed their Millenarian and political views? They may have been opportunists, as...

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