Pierre Bayle, the most important and most influential skeptic of the late seventeenth century, was born in Carla (now Carla-Bayle), a French village near the Spanish frontier, where his father was the Protestant pastor. He grew up during the religious persecutions under Louis XIV that culminated in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) and the outlawing of Protestantism in France. Bayle was sent first to a Calvinist school and then to a Jesuit college at Toulouse, where after studying the controversial literature and hearing the dialectical arguments of some of the professors, he converted to Catholicism. The intellectual considerations that led him to Catholicism, after further examination, soon led him back to Calvinism. He became technically a relaps, a person who has returned to heresy after having abjured it, and under French law he was therefore subject to severe penalties.

He left France...