he stimulated Voltaire to new audacities by his example. 17. An interlude in the critical campaign, little noticed at the time, developed importance a generation later. In 1753 Jean Astruc, doctor of medicine, published after long hesitation his Conjectures on the original documents which Moses seems to have used in composing the book of Genesis. Only in respect of his flash of insight into the composite structure of the Pentateuch was Astruc a freethinker. His hesitation to publish was due to his fear that les pretendus esprits forts might make a bad use of his work; and he was quite satisfied that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch as it stands. The denial of that authorship, implied in the criticisms of Hobbes and Spinoza, he described as "the disease of the last century." This attitude may explain the lack of interest in Astruc's work shown by the freethinkers of the time. [1047] Nonetheless, by his perception of the clue given by the narrative use of the two names Yahweh and Elohim in Genesis, he laid a new foundation of the Higher Criticism of the Bible in modern times, advancing alike on Spinoza and on Simon. For freethought he had "builded better than he knew." 18. In the select Parisian arena of the Académie, the intellectual movement of the age is as it were dramatized; and there more clearly than in the literary record we can trace the struggle of opinions, from the admission of Voltaire (1746) onwards. In the old days the Académie had been rather the home of convention, royalism, and orthodoxy than of ideas, though before Voltaire there were some freethinking members of the lesser Académies, notably Boindin. [1048] The admission of Montesquieu (1728), after much opposition from the court, preludes a new era; and from the entrance of Voltaire, fourteen years after his first attempt, [1049] the atmosphere begins perceptibly to change. When, in 1727, the academician Bonamy had read a memoir On the character and the paganism of the emperor Julian, partly vindicating him against the aspersions of the Christian Fathers, the Academy feared to print the paper, though its author was a devout Catholic. [1050] When the Abbé La Bletterie, also orthodox, read to the Academy portions of his Vie de Julien, the members were not now scandalized, though the Abbé's Jansenism moved the King to veto his nomination. So, when Blanchard in 1735 read a memoir on Les exorcismes magiques there was much trepidation among the members, and again the Secretary inserted merely an analysis, concluding with the words of Philetas, "Believe and fear God; beware of questioning." [1051] Even such a play of criticism as the challenging of the early history of Rome by Lévesque de Pouilly (brother of Lévesque de Burigny) in a dissertation before the Académie in 1722, roused the fears and the resentment of the orthodox; the Abbé Sallier, in undertaking to refute him, insinuated that he had shown a spirit which might be