gnition is taking up the
form of the object. The perfection of man is based more on his passive
capacities than on his active reason, which is concerned with mere ideas,
unreal shadows; the mathematical spirit leads to fatalism, to the denial of
freedom. The passive faculties, on the contrary, are in direct intercourse
with reality, the senses with external material objects, and the arcanum of
the mind, the basis of the soul, the intellect, with spiritual truths
and with God, whose existence is more certain than our own. Man is not
unconcerned in the development of the highest power of the mind, he must
offer himself to God in sincere humility. In subordination to the passive
intellect, the external faculty, the active reason, is also to be
cultivated; it deserves care, like the skin. Evil consists in the absurdity
that the creature, who apart from God is nothing, ascribes to himself an
independent existence.

[Footnote 1: Poiret: _Cogitationes Rationates de Deo, Anima, et Malo_,
1677, the later editions including a vehement attack on the atheism of
Spinoza: _L'Economie Divine_, 1682; _De Eruditione Solida, Superficiaria,
et Falsa_, 1692; _Fides et Ratio Collatae_, against Locke, 1707.]

Le Vayer and Huet, who have been already mentioned (pp. 50-51),
mediate between the founders of skepticism and Bayle, its most gifted
representative. The latter of these two wrote a _Criticism of the Cartesian
Philosophy_, 1689, besides a _Treatise on the Impotence of the Human Mind_,
which did not appear until after his death. He opposes, among other things,
the criterion of truth based on evidence, since there is an evidence of
the false not to be distinguished from that of the true, as well as the
position that God becomes a deceiver in the bestowal of a weak and blind
reason--for he gives us, at the same time, the power to know its deceptive
character.

As the last among those influenced by Descartes but who advanced beyond
him, may be mentioned the acute Pierre Bayle (1647-1706; professor in Sedan
and Rotterdam; _Works_, 1725-31[1]), who greatly excited the world of
letters by his occasional and polemic treatises, and still more by the
journal, _Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres_ from 1684, and his
_Historical and Critical Dictionary_, in two volumes, 1695 and 1697.
Nowhere do the most opposite antitheses dwell in such close proximity as
in the mind of Bayle. Along with an ever watchful doubt he harbors a most
active zeal fo