he seventeenth century and all metaphysics generally was Pierre
Bayle. His weapon was scepticism, forged out of the magic formulas of
metaphysics itself. He took Cartesian metaphysics as his immediate
starting-point. Just as Feuerbach in combating speculative theology
was driven to combat speculative philosophy, because he perceived in
speculation the last support of theology, because he had to force the
theologians to retreat from fictitious science to crude, repugnant
faith, so religious doubt drove Bayle into doubts of the metaphysics
which supported this faith. Consequently he subjected metaphysics in
its entire historical evolution to criticism. He became its historian
in order to write the history of its death. Above all he refuted
Spinoza and Leibnitz.

Pierre Bayle not only prepared the way for the acceptance in France of
the materialism and philosophy of healthy common science through the
sceptical disintegration of metaphysics. He announced the atheistic
society which was soon to come into existence, inasmuch as a society
of avowed atheists could exist, as an atheist could be an honest man,
as man was not degraded by atheism, but by superstition and idolatry.

In the words of a French writer, Pierre Bayle was "the last
metaphysician in the sense of the seventeenth and the first
philosopher in the sense of the eighteenth century."

In addition to the negative refutation of the theology and metaphysics
of the seventeenth century, a positive, anti-metaphysical system was
required. A book was wanted which would systematize the practical
activities of that time and provide them with a theoretical
foundation. Locke's essay on the "Origin of the Human Understanding"
came as if summoned from beyond the Channel. It was greeted
enthusiastically as an anxiously awaited guest.

It may be asked: Is Locke perchance a pupil of Spinoza? We would
answer. Materialism is the native son of Great Britain. Already her
schoolman Duns Scotus asked "whether matter could not think?"

In order to work this miracle, he took refuge in God's omnipotence,
that is, he made theology itself preach materialism. Moreover, he was
a nominalist. Nominalism is found to be a chief ingredient among
English materialists, just as it is the first expression of
materialism generally.

The real progenitor of English materialism and of all modern
experimental science is Bacon. Natural science was regarded by him as
the true science, and physics as th