connected and harmonious, all following from reasons and nothing being left incomplete or exposed to the rash discretion of perfect indifference, it seems that it was not pleasing to M. Bayle:  for he was here somewhat biassed in favour of such indifference, which, notwithstanding, he contested so strongly on other occasions.  He was much given to passing from one extreme to the other, not with an ill intention or against his own conviction, but because there was as yet nothing settled in his mind on the question concerned.  He contented himself with whatever suited him for frustrating the opponent he had in mind, his aim being only to perplex philosophers, and show the weakness of our reason; and never, in my opinion, did either Arcesilaus or Carneades argue for and against with more eloquence and more wit.  But, after all, one must not doubt for the sake of doubting:  doubts must serve us as a gangway to the truth.  That is what I often said to the late Abbe Foucher, a few specimens of whose work prove that he designed to do with regard to the Academicians what Lipsius and Scioppius had done for the Stoics, and M. Gassendi for Epicurus, and what M. Dacier has so well begun for Plato.  It must not be possible for us to offer true philosophers such a reproach as that implied in the celebrated Casaubon’s answer to those who, in showing him the hall of the Sorbonne, told him that debate had been carried on there for some centuries.  What conclusions have been reached? he said to them.

354.  M. Bayle goes on (p. 166):  ’It is true that since the laws of motion were instituted in such forms as we see now in the world, it is an inevitable necessity that a hammer striking a nut should break it, and[338] that a stone falling on a man’s foot should cause some bruise or some derangement of its parts.  But that is all that can follow the action of this stone upon the human body.  If you want it in addition to cause a feeling of pain, then one must assume the institution of a code other than that one which regulates the action and reaction of bodies one upon another; one must, I say, have recourse to the particular system of the laws of union between the soul and certain bodies.  Now as this system is not of necessity connected with the other, the indifference of God does not cease in relation to the one immediately upon his choice of the other.  He therefore combined these two systems with a complete freedom, like two things which did not follow naturally the one from the other.  Thus it is by an arbitrary institution he has ordained that wounds in the body should cause pain in the soul which is united to this body.  It therefore only rested with him to have chosen another system of union between soul and body:  he was therefore able to choose one in accordance wherewith wounds only evoke the idea of the remedy and an intense but agreeable desire to apply it.  He was able to arrange that all bodies which were on the point of breaking a man’s head or piercing his heart