be mixed.  “I desire men to be upright without paradise and hell.”  Religion seeks to crown morality, not to generate it; virtue is earlier and more natural than piety.  In his definition of the relation between religion and ethics, his delimitation of morality from legality, and his insistence on the purity of motives (do right, because the inner rational law commands it), an anticipation of Kantian principles may be recognized.

Under Francis Sanchez (died 1632; his chief work is entitled Quod Nihil Scitur), a Portuguese by birth, and professor of medicine in Montpellier and Toulouse, skepticism was transformed from melancholy contemplation into a fresh, vigorous search after new problems.  In the place of book-learning, which disgusts him by its smell of the closet, its continued prating of Aristotle, and its self-exhaustion in useless verbalism, Sanchez desires to substitute a knowledge of things.  Perfect knowledge, it is true, can be hoped for only when subject and object correspond to each other.  But how is finite man to grasp the infinite universe?  Experience, the basis of all knowledge, gropes about the outer surface of things and illumines particulars only, without the ability either to penetrate to their inner nature or to comprehend the whole.  We know only what we produce.  Thus God knows the world which he has made, but to us is vouchsafed merely an insight into mediate or second causes, causae secundae.  Here, however, a rich field still lies open before philosophy—­only let her attack her problem with observation and experiment rather than with words.

The French nation, predisposed to skepticism by its prevailing acuteness, has never lacked representatives of skeptical philosophy.  The transition from the philosophers of doubt whom we have described to the great Bayle was formed by La Mothe le Vayer (died 1672; Five Dialogues, 1671), the tutor of Louis XIV., and P.D.  Huet(ius), Bishop of Avranches (died 1721), who agreed in holding that a recognition of the weakness of the reason is the best preparation for faith.

6. %German Mysticism%.

In a period which has given birth to a skeptical philosophy, one never looks in vain for the complementary phenomenon of mysticism.  The stone offered by doubt in place of bread is incapable of satisfying the impulse after knowledge, and when the intellect grows weary and despairing, the heart starts out in the quest after truth.  Then its path leads inward, the mind turns in upon itself, seeks to learn the truth by inner experience and life, by inward feeling and possession, and waits in quietude for divine illumination.  The German mysticism of Eckhart[1] (about 1300), which had been continued in Suso and Tauler and had received a practical direction in the Netherlands,—­Ruysbroek (about 1350) to Thomas a Kempis (about 1450),—­now puts forth new branches and blossoms at the turning point of the centuries.