With a democratic sense that is partly due to the democratic origin of the French monarchy, which to be absolute, had to rest on the support of the people, the thinkers of France did not dream of keeping their conclusions to themselves. What they considered true should be public. Perhaps, in their feeling that it is the duty of the man of science to communicate to the people the result of his studies, they hid the most beautiful motive of the whole century—one that is not brought out by the historians of philosophy—the imperative exigency of Truth that impels divulgation. It is frequently remarked that they were the real champions of Illuminism inasmuch as they claimed the right of the people to be enlightened; the idea of Truth which prompted such a claim is the loftiest part of their contribution to philosophy. The French mathematical mentality, after having exported Descartes, had imported Newton, and as Hobbes and, before him, Bacon, had come to France to find the yeast they needed to develop their own theories, so now men like Voltaire and Rousseau made their leaven out of Locke’s and Hume’s doctrines and studied the political institutions of England. In France, from Montaigne, from Pascal, men had learned the cautious prudence, and the self-dedication to the object of faith that are nearly antithetic and usually never appear together Montaigne’s influence is due to the fact that he reflects the state of mind of all the western world, tired of religious struggles and the emphatic expressions of dogmatism on all sides; it was due also to his charming style and the purity of his French mind. So French is he, so much a man of the West, that his charm is felt alike by French and Anglo-Saxon minds. One cannot resist him. In his analytic scepticism he is so logically methodic, that his style is like the colour of a piece of antique bronze, inviting the onlooker to touch it whilst its lines, its lights and shadows reveal the powerful mind of the sculptor. Montaigne through his very respect for the Church helped to ruin the religious spirit of his countrymen, and the genius of Pascal could not have made up for it, even if its mysticism and its repugnance for the _Moi haissable_ had not been tinged as they were by the self-assertive spirit of his time. Both mysticism and scepticism take their practical form in Pierre Bayle. Few men ever enjoyed the gift of sympathy with which he was endowed because few men are so superlatively sincere. He does not renounce religion, he is indeed quite a religious man, but his religion is negative on account of his mysticism as a believer and of his scepticism as a scientist. To him the Thomist and Lockian point of view of the super-rationality of the Revelation is an illusion. In perfect sincerity he could say _credo quia absurdum_, and like Tertullian proclaim definitely the divorce of science from religion, of rationality from irrationality.