wo very
different things, 'to account for a thing', and 'to uphold it against
objections'; as he does when he presently adds: 'They are obliged to follow
him [their adversary] everywhere whither he shall wish to lead them, and it
would be to retire ignominiously and ask for quarter, if they were to admit
that our intelligence is too weak to remove completely all the objections
advanced by a philosopher.'

58. It seems here that, according to M. Bayle, 'accounting for' comes short
of 'answering objections', since he threatens one who should undertake the
first with the resulting obligation to pass on to the second. But it is
quite the opposite: he who maintains a thesis (the _respondens_) is not
bound to account for it, but he is bound to meet the objections of an
opponent. A defendant in law is not bound (as a general rule) to prove his
right or to produce his title to possession; but he is obliged to reply to
the arguments of the plaintiff. I have marvelled many times that a writer
so precise and so shrewd as M. Bayle so often here confuses things where so
much difference exists as between these three acts of reason: to
comprehend, to prove, and to answer objections; as if when it is a question
of the use of reason in theology one term were as good as another. Thus he
says in his posthumous Conversations, p. 73: 'There is no principle which
M. Bayle has more often inculcated than this, that the incomprehensibility
of a dogma and the insolubility of the objections that oppose it provide no
legitimate reason for rejecting it.' This is true as regards the
incomprehensibility, but it is not the same with the insolubility. And it
is indeed just as if one said that an invincible reason against a [106]
thesis was not a legitimate reason for rejecting it. For what other
legitimate reason for rejecting an opinion can one find, if an invincible
opposing argument is not such an one? And what means shall one have
thereafter of demonstrating the falsity, and even the absurdity, of any
opinion?

59. It is well to observe also that he who proves a thing _a priori_
accounts for it through the efficient cause; and whosoever can thus account
for it in a precise and adequate manner is also in a position to comprehend
the thing. Therefore it was that the Scholastic theologians had already
censured Raymond Lully for having undertaken to demonstrate the Trinity by
philosophy. This so-called demonstration is to be found in his _Works_; a