Montaigne and Bayle: Variations on the Theme of Skepticism (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 103 detailed investigations of this sort we shall be able to begin understanding something about Renaissance AristoteIiani~m. CHARLES B. ScHMn3" University of Leeds Montaigne and Bayle: Variations on the Theme of Skepticism. By Craig B. Brush. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966. Pp. 361. $13.00) Professor Brush has undertaken the demanding task of describing the mind and thought of two especially elusive thinkers, Montaigne and Pierre Bayle, whose works have long been encrusted with heavy layers of interpretations by disciples or detractors. In my opinion, he has succeeded marvelously well and has produced a book that one may recommend with confidence to any student working seriously within this period of intellectual history. Professor Brush first situates both Montaigne and Bayle within the stream of skepticism extending from antiquity through the seventeenth century. Within this historical setting he then undertakes to trace the development of Montaigne's thought from the early essays to the Apologie de Raimond Sebond, and then through the essays of 1578-1580 to his finalessays. In doing so, Professor Brush shows what I consider to be very subtle and penetrating insights into a mind grappling with the questions of human belief.The resultis not the usual sterilecodificationof a historicalfigurebut rather an engaging and even fascinating portrait of the mind of Montaigne. The section on Montaigne is followed by a chapter tracing the development of seventeenth-century skepticism through various disciplesof Montaigne up to the time when Pierre Bayle, maturing in his Huguenot milieu, himself started to engage in the "great contest of faith and reason" In the section on Bayle, good use is made of the latestdevelopments in the feld of Bayle scholarship, taking the work of such scholars as Walter Rex, Elizabeth Labrousse, and Richard Popkin as a point of departure. A very good picture of the e.xpressionof skepticism in the Dictionnaire historique et critique emerges from the examination. The conclusion of the study establishesthe similaritiesand dissimilaritiesbetween Bayle and Montaigne, who have often been carelessly lumped together under the catch-all word of "skeptics." Noting that both of them endorsed a form of religious fideism and argued that skepticism prepared the mind to receive Grace, Professor Brush touches upon the very thorny problem of defining Bayle's religious belief,which he charactcrises as a semi-fideism. He notes by way of contrast that Montaigne, by not sharing the Calvinist austerity of Bayle's character, came at the end of his life to a peculiar brand of gay wisdom that Bayle never knew. Where Montaigne attained to the prize of self-knowledge at the end of his life of inquiry, Bayle found only an unmitigated pessimism, producing in his Dictionnaire a "documented indictment of the human race." Bayle also differed from his predecessor in that he did not believe that reason could actually affect moral conduct to an appreciable extent. The study is well documented and is marked by considerable precision in the use of vocabulary. It contains a wealth of information treated with a deft style. In his conclusions, Professor Brus1~ makes the statement that "true skepticism as a philosophy is largely a thing of the past today." But it may not be amiss to point out that one of the more eminent of the "radical theologians," Gabriel Vahanian, has been much influenced in his thought by Bayle's writings and their delineation of the boundaries between faith and reason. Perhaps more books like that of Professor Brush 104 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY would do much to define emerging or re-emerging questions of belief by showing them in the perspective of their historical development. KARL C. SANDemtO Macalexter College John Locke: Problems and Perspectives. A Collection o/New Essays. Edited by John W. Yolton. (New York: Cambridge University Press. Pp. vii+278. $9.50) Contemporary philosophical fashion has made much of Descartes, Berkeley and Hume at Locke's expense. In consequence one thinks of Locke as the author of a straw man distinction between primary and secondary qualities knocked down by Berkeley, and of occult doctrines of substance and power destroyed by Hume, or as a polemicist for a new way of ideas already announced by Descartes. One sees little contemporary recognition...