Pierre Poiret[1] (1646-1719; for some years a preacher in Hamburg; lived later in Rhynsburg near Leyden) was rendered hostile to Cartesianism through the influence of mystical writings (among others those of Antoinette Bourignon, which he published), and through the perception of the results to which it had led in Spinoza.  All cognition 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 for knowledge, with a sincere spirit of belief (which has been wrongly disputed by Lange, Zeller, and Puenjer) a demoniacal pleasure in bringing