In this critical situation, the scientists, the philosophers, and the theologians would either have to fight for survival or abandon the quest for certainty. Gradually, first in the area of religion and then in science and philosophy, the menace of Pyrrhonism was recognized, and a counterattack was begun. Out of this struggle, the modern philosophers emerged as so many Saint Georges, prepared to slay the sceptical dragon; only in this case the dragon was never really slain and, in fact, managed within a century to consume the various knights who tried to rescue human knowledge.
Involved in this battle was the paradox that no matter how much the sceptics sneered and argued, and pushed one into doubt, not all matters happened to be dubious. In spite of the sceptic’s criticisms, the sciences, new or old, seemed to contain some real knowledge about the world. As a result, the struggle, in part, was an attempt to reconcile the force of the doubts of the Pyrrhonists with the rapidly expanding knowledge that human beings possessed. For some thinkers, the battle was not so much a quest for certainty as a quest for intellectual stability in which doubt and knowledge could both be accepted. For others, it was a holy war to overcome doubt so that man could be secure in his religious and scientific knowledge.
As is all too often the case, the first dragon-killers were the worst. The first opponents of the nouveau pyrrhonisme were both naive and vituperative and hence failed to come to grips with the issues in question. These first antagonists either dwelt on invective instead of argument or begged the question by assuming that Aristotle’s views were not in doubt and thus could be recited to the sceptic to make him disappear. The earliest to be aware of the menace of the revival of Pyrrhonism were astrologers like Sir Christopher Heydon and spiritologists such as Pierre Le Loyer.1 The latter, as indicated earlier, devoted a brief portion of his book in defense of spectres to answering the sceptical critique of sense knowledge with an appeal to Aristotelian epistemology, a line of defense that I shall show to be fairly common in this survey of the antisceptics of the first half of the seventeenth century.
But the answer to scepticism that really launched the counterattack was less philosophical and far more bombastic, that of Father François Garasse of the Society of Jesus. Apparently shocked by the libertinage of Théophile de Viau, and by the scandalous things he heard in confession, corruptions that people told him they were led to by reading Charron’s La Sagesse, Garasse started a crusade against the atheistical and libertine tendencies of the time.2 In 1623, he published his La Doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps, ou pretendus tels, in which he made a series of sensational charges: He claimed to see through the mask of piety in Charron’s Catholic Pyrrhonism and to see behind it a most dangerous and pernicious irreligion. The “pretended piety” of Charron is revealed as a real disservice to his country and his faith. The book of over one thousand pages attacks Charron for his impertinence and ignorance in religious matters, using invective as its main weapon.3
A disciple of Charron’s, Father François Ogier, immediately replied in kind in his Jugement et Censure du Livre de la Doctrine curieuse de François Garasse, criticizing Garasse’s style, temper, ignorance, and so on. Perhaps the most cutting remark in this answer is: “Garasse, my friend, that which is above us is nothing to us. The works of Charron are a little too high tone for low and vulgar minds like yours.”4
Ogier’s harsh criticism led Garasse on to stronger attacks. First, in 1624, he charged forth with his Apologie du Père François Garassus, de la Compagnie de Jesus, pour son livre contre les Atheistes & Libertins de nostre siecle. Besides abusing his critic Ogier, Garasse tried to strengthen his attack on Charron, who “chokes and strangles sweetly the feelings of religion as if with a silken cord of philosophy.”5 Two chapters list the “impious and atheistical propositions” and the “impious and brutal propositions” drawn from Charron’s Sagesse.6 Finally, Garasse, in 1625, brought forth his magnum opus on the problem, La Somme Théologique des veritez capitales de la Religion Chrestienne. In the dedication to Cardinal Richelieu, the author explained why a new Summa was necessary. “This title which I place at the head of my works, having been used for four of five centuries, deserves to be revived, and since the libertine types have beclouded our times with new darkness, we must seek for new lights to illuminate the Truth.”7 “The terror of the secret atheists” and of the “incorrigibles and desperate types,” of whom Charron is the worst, required this new theological undertaking.8 In order to perform this tremendous task properly, Garasse attacked the views of any and all kinds of atheists, all kinds of “real Troglodytes or village rats.”9 Almost any type of view other than Garasse’s constitutes atheism, from the views of Calvin to those of the Pyrrhonists. Five classes of atheism are listed: (1) “furious and enraged atheism,” (2) “atheism of libertinage and corruption of manners,” (3) “atheism of profanation,” (4) “wavering or unbelieving atheism,” and (5) “brutal, lazy, melancholy atheism.”10 The Pyrrhonists, like Charron, are in the fourth group. Wavering or unbelieving atheism is that vagabond spirit of the Pyrrhonians, which claims all matters are indifferent and does not become impassioned either for or against God, and thus “adopts a cold policy of leaving matters undecided.”11 The people of this type, monsters who have arisen in the seventeenth century,12 are indifferent about religion; they are for neither God nor the devil. To them, religion is a matter of convention, not a serious question. Garasse was not concerned to answer their arguments for suspending judgment on all matters but only to denounce them and to show the horrors of religious indifference.13 In fact, Garasse himself was somewhat sceptical of rational theology, denying that there were any a priori proofs of God’s existence and insisting that the best way to know God was by faith.14 But he refused to believe that this was the sort of view that Charron and the Catholic Pyrrhonists subscribed to. Instead, he saw their theory as a suspense of judgment on all matters, including religious ones.
The charge by Garasse that Catholic Pyrrhonism, especially that of Charron, was really an atheistical plot raised a storm of controversy and put the problem of Pyrrhonism and its refutation at the center of the intellectual stage. Garasse hardly touched on the philosophical issues involved, merely smearing the Pyrrhonists with the label “atheist.” In 1625, his Somme Théologique had received an official approbation, in which it was declared that the work conformed to the doctrines of the Catholic Church and was worthy of being published “to serve as an antidote against the impieties of the present Atheists and Libertines.”15 But it became apparent immediately that Garasse had challenged the entente cordiale of the Church and the nouveaux pyrrhoniens, and had accused the latter of constituting a “fifth column.” As a result, one of the most dynamic theologians of the time rushed to do battle with Garasse and forced the condemnation of his Somme Théologique.
Jean Duvergier du Hauranne (better known as Saint-Cyran), the French leader of the Jansenist movement, the spiritual head of Port-Royal, and the disciple of Cardinal Bérulle, denounced Garasse in a huge tract, fought against Garasse’s views until he forced the Sorbonne to condemn his work, and, finally, brought about the silencing of the bombastic Jesuit. The attack on Garasse, Orcibal has shown, played a vital role in the development of Jansenism in France and was, perhaps, the opening blow in the Jansenist crusade.16 Theologically, as I shall show, Saint-Cyran was committed to a type of antirationalism not far removed from Charron’s,17 and hence was willing to make common cause with the Catholic Pyrrhonists.
A tremendous fuss was made about the appearance of Saint-Cyran’s monumental four-volume opus of 1626, La Somme des fautes et faussetez capitales contenues en la Somme Theologique du Pere François Garasse de la Compagnie de Jesus. Signs were put up all over Paris announcing the work. The book itself begins, as Garasse’s did, with a dedication to Cardinal Richelieu. Here, and throughout the work, violent charges and accusations are made against the Jesuit who dared to attack “the secret atheists.” We are told that Garasse “dishonors the Majesty of God”;18 that “the author of this Summa Theologica has destroyed the Faith and the Religion in all its principal points”;19 that Garasse’s charges against Charron are such that “I do not know if the ages past or those which are to come will ever see, notably in a priest, such a kind of effrontery, or malice and ignorance dominant to a similar degree”;20 that Garasse’s work is “a most appalling monster of a book”;21 and its author is “the most hideous author one has ever seen in view of the innumerable falsehoods with which his books are filled.”22 Saint-Cyran found it incredible that a religious order could have permitted the publication of such a work.23 Garasse had (he said) advocated heresies, misquoted, slandered, been impious and impertinent, and uttered buffooneries. In the course of his attack, Saint-Cyran further accused his Jesuit opponent of Pelagianism, Arianism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and paganism.24
What troubled Saint-Cyran, besides the vast number of errors in citations and interpretations of Scripture, the Church Fathers, and diverse theologians, was Garasse’s attack on fideistic Pyrrhonism as a form of atheism. Late in the second volume, when Saint-Cyran discussed Charron’s views, he said that he had never known or read Charron’s books before he saw them attacked and vilified by Garasse as the most impious and atheistical works ever produced. But the indications of Charron’s thought that Garasse presented hardly lived up to the description. So, Saint-Cyran tells us, he bought a copy of the denounced work and found that, contrary to Garasse’s claims, the views of the Catholic Pyrrhonist were intelligent and sound, worthy of the praise and esteem that they had received from the best Catholic thinkers in France, including the eminent Cardinal du Perron.25
The antiphilosophical views of the Jansenists, their opposition to rational theology, and their appeal to an almost purely fideistic reading of St. Augustine led Saint-Cyran to discover a good many of the basic Jansenist claims in Charron.26 The sceptic’s insistence on the incomprehensibility of God, the feebleness of human reason, and the danger of trying to measure God by human standards Saint-Cyran endorsed as sound Augustinian Christianity. Without attempting to, or desiring to, defend all of Charron’s views, Saint-Cyran tried to show that the message of Catholic Pyrrhonism was really the same as what the Jansenists set forth as orthodox Christianity—the misery and weakness of man without God. Augustine is constantly cited to justify Charron’s picture of the hopeless limitations on the quest for human knowledge, and the need for revelation in order to know. The very views that Garasse had taken for atheism, Saint-Cyran insisted were sound, traditional Christian views.27
As a result of this defense of Catholic Pyrrhonism by one of the most important theologians of the period, Garasse’s counteroffensive against scepticism was brought to a complete and drastic end. Saint-Cyran pressed his opposition until the faculty of theology of the Sorbonne finally condemned Garasse and his tirades. The report from the Sorbonne indicates that, because of the complaints, they studied and examined the Somme Théologique for several months, until finally, in September 1626, they concluded that this work of François Garasse “ought to be entirely condemned, because it contains many heretical, erroneous, scandalous, rash propositions, and many passages from Holy Scripture and the Holy Fathers badly cited, corrupted and turned from their true sense, and innumerable buffooneries which are unworthy to be written or read by Christians and by theologians.”28 Though Father Garasse’s answer by abuse to Pyrrhonism may have met its appropriate end, his type of counterattack is reflected in several works of the period, in which no charge is too strong to hurl at the sceptics. Mersenne, without naming any names, called them monsters, unworthy to be called men. And Mersenne’s early polemics, dating from 1623 to 1625, are full of all sorts of denunciations and insults, such as the following:
They call themselves Sceptics, and are libertine people, and unworthy of the name of man that they bear since like baleful birds of the night, not having an eyeball strong enough to bear the bright light of truth, they sacrifice themselves shamefully to errors, and limiting all of man’s knowledge to the range of the senses alone, and to the external appearance of things, reduce us unworthily to the most vile state, and to the lowest condition of the stupidest animals and deprive us of all genuine discourse and reason.29
Father Jean Boucher, a leading Franciscan, charged the Pyrrhonists with carrying on dangerous, subversive activities. Boucher’s lengthy tome Les Triomphes de la Religon Chrestienne, of 1628, presents an odd combination of a modified form of Catholic Pyrrhonism, along with a most strenuous denunciation of the views of Montaigne and Charron. The latter are accused of impieties, of writing dangerous, venomous books whose literary merits hide the serpent lurking inside. The effect of the writing of the two great nouveaux pyrrhoniens is likened to that of the medical “Empyriques,” who, Boucher tells us, killed five to six hundred persons for every five or six that they cured.30 But, in spite of the dangerous and insidious effects of the writings of Montaigne and Charron, the type of theological view offered by Boucher is not too different. If religious truths had to be based on natural reason, “we would not possess anything either assured or solid, since we see natural judgments not only so diverse amongst themselves, but also the same judging faculty variable and contrary to itself.”31 We possess no perfect science because all our knowledge is based on reason and the senses, and the latter often deceive us, and the former is inconstant and vacillating.32 In order to obtain any infallible knowledge, we must gain it by faith, through revelation. Truth is to be discovered in the Bible, and not by using our weak faculties.33
A study of Boucher’s views by Father Julien-Eymard d’Angers has tried to show that this apparent copy of some of the features of Montaigne’s fideism was really the orthodox view of the Catholic Church. In order to support this view, stress is laid on the fact that although Boucher denied there could be any “evident arguments” in matters of religion, he did assert that there were “probable and persuasive arguments.” Thus, no completely certain evidence could be set forth to establish any religious truth, but, at the same time, short of faith, some kind of persuasive or morally certain evidence could be offered that was adequate either to convince one of, or to support but not to establish, a religious truth.34 This modified form of fideism is not really different from that of Charron, for whom the certitude of religious truths depended solely on faith but who also presented a great deal of allegedly persuasive “reasons” to convince one of these truths. Fideism as a religious epistemology would seem to involve the claim that the guarantee of the truth of religious knowledge comes solely by faith. Such an assertion in no way denies that there may be all sorts of evidences that render this knowledge plausible or probable or might lead one to believe it. But the evidences can never be adequate to establish the truth of the religious propositions.
This kind of violent antiscepticism, coupled with an acceptance of fideism like that of the nouveaux pyrrhoniens, also appears in the views of Guez de Balzac, a well-known apologist for the Jesuits. Balzac, in his correspondence, inveighs continually against La Mothe Le Vayer, whom he regarded as an atheist, and against Marie de Gournay, who is treated as a vain, presumptuous person.35 But this personal dislike for the living disciples of Montaigne did not prevent Balzac, in his Socrate Chrestien, from maintaining a type of Christian Pyrrhonism.
This Truth [what Socrates was seeking] is none other than JESUS CHRIST: and it is this JESUS CHRIST who has made the doubts and irresolution of the Academy; who has even guaranteed Pyrrhonism. He came to stop the vague thoughts of the human mind, and to fasten its reasonings in air. After many centuries of agitation and trouble, he came to bring Philosophy down to earth, and to provide anchors and harbors to a Sea which had neither bottom nor shore.36
Thus, without Jesus, all is in doubt, and by natural means one can only arrive at complete scepticism. Truth depends solely on faith.
Another who joined in denouncing the sceptical menace was the future member of the Academie Française, Charles Cotin. But in this case the concern is solely in making clear the horrible, even harrowing effects of the Pyrrhonism of Montaigne and Charron, and not in developing some sort of fideism as well. In his Discours a Theopompe sur les Forts Esprits du temps of 1629, Cotin described the terrible state of affairs in Paris, where there are monsters, “forts-esprits,” who look like men but who deny that anything is true, and accept only appearances. These villainous creatures, created through reading Montaigne and Charron, want to reduce us to being mere animals and to subject our souls to our bodies. The result of the views of these “forts-esprits” is rage and despair. And what is most frightful is that there are an almost infinite number of these monsters now in existence.37
Besides the refutations by abuse of Pyrrhonism, the call-to-arms of Garasse, Mersenne, Boucher, Cotin, and others, philosophical answers to the nouveau pyrrhonisme began to appear in large number, starting about 1624, the year of Gassendi’s first publication. These replies can be roughly classified in three categories, although some of the works to be considered fall in more than one of these: (1) refutations based on principles of Aristotelian philosophy; (2) refutations that admit the full force and validity of the Pyrrhonian arguments and then attempt to mitigate the effects of total scepticism; and (3) refutations that attempt to construct a new system of philosophy in order to meet the sceptical challenge.
The Aristotelian type of answer to some of the sceptical arguments had been offered, as has been indicated earlier, by Pierre Le Loyer in his defense of spiritology. It was also used by such of the Protestant opponents of François Veron, as Jean Daillé and Paul Ferry. In trying to show the reliability of some sense information, or the justification of rational procedures, these thinkers had appealed to Aristotle’s theory of the natural functioning of the senses and reason and the need for proper conditions for the employment of our faculties. In the battles against the nouveaux pyrrhoniens in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, more elaborate and complete statements of this Aristotelian type of rejection of scepticism appeared. One of the clearest examples of this kind of approach is Pierre Chanet’s answer to Charron.
Chanet, a Protestant doctor, published his Considerations sur la Sagesse de Charon in 1643. In the preface, the author indicated his concern about the reception his book would have since so many people admired the writings of Charron. But, Chanet realized, he ought not to be afraid since he was only expounding the opinions everybody accepted, the views of the Schools. The only people who will disagree, he tells us, are those who take Charron for Socrates and the “Apologie de Raimond Sebond” for Scripture.38
The first part of Chanet’s work is devoted to refuting certain peculiar sceptical assertions of Montaigne and Charron dealing with the similarities of men and animals. They had argued that man was vain in thinking that he had any special or privileged place in the scheme of things, or that man had any faculties or abilities not also shared with beasts. Also they had contended that there was no reason for supposing that the five human senses constituted the totality of means that natural creatures possessed for gaining knowledge about the world. Chanet attempted to show that the evidence offered to support these claims (mainly anecdotal materials drawn from Plutarch, Sextus, and others), could be accounted for without making any of the drastic claims of Montaigne and Charron.39
In the second part of his book, Chanet came to grips with the philosophical core of the nouveau pyrrhonisme, the arguments offered to bring about a scepticism with regard to the senses, and a scepticism with regard to reason. In spite of the sceptical tropes about the variations, and so on, in our sense experience, there is a basis, Chanet insisted, for asserting “the Certitude of the Senses.” Sometimes our senses do deceive us, but there are conditions, namely those stated in Aristotle’s De Anima, that, if fulfilled, render the senses incapable of error or deception.
If the sense organ is functioning properly, if the object is at a proper distance, and if the medium through which perception takes place is as it ought to be, then no sense errors can occur. Contrary to Charron, who claimed that even under the best of conditions, the senses can be deceptive, Chanet insisted that errors, illusions, or deceptions could only take place if something was abnormal in the organ, the medium, or the location or nature of the object. With his Aristotelian standards, he then proceeded to analyze all the standard examples of sense illusions offered by the sceptics. The problem of the oar that appears bent in water is explained as due to the fact that the milieu is not “as it ought to be.” The square tower that appears round from a distance is accounted for by claiming that the sense organ, the eye, does not receive rectangular forms well. The double images that one perceives when one’s eyeball is pressed are due to the sense organ being in an unhealthy or unnatural state. Perspective problems are explained as the result of perceiving objects from improper distances; and so on.40 In all this, Chanet never saw that these examples were introduced by Charron as challenges to his criterion of sense knowledge and not as illustrations of its operation. The issue that the sceptics had raised was: Is there any way of distinguishing veridical from nonveridical sense experience? Chanet answered yes, by employing the Aristotelian criterion of sense knowledge. But the sceptics were challenging the criterion, and asking how we could be sure that even perceptions that occurred with healthy, normal sense organs, with specified media, distances, and objects, were veridical? Merely stating a criterion that, if true, would allow one to classify veridical and deceptive perceptions begs the question, unless one can also show that the Aristotelian standard of sense knowledge is justified.
Next Chanet turned to sceptical difficulties raised with regard to reasoning. Here, as in his claims about sense knowledge, he maintained that although we are sometimes deceived, there are some judgments that are so evident “that one would have to be mad to doubt this certainty.”41 A standard of right reasoning exists, namely the rules of Aristotelian logic, and this standard enables us to distinguish what is evident from what is only probable. By means of this standard, we are able to recognize true premises and employ them to discover other truths. True premises are those that have either been demonstrated from evident truths or are so evident that they are indubitable. Hence, with the canons of logic and the self-evident character of truths like “The whole is greater than the part,” we are able to build up rational scientific knowledge.42 Once again, Chanet bypassed the sceptical problems raised by Montaigne and Charron by assuming that Aristotle’s theories are not in doubt, and then applying them to the difficulties set forth.
In Father Yves de Paris’ Théologie Naturelle, one finds this type of use of an Aristotelian answer to Pyrrhonism briefly introduced among other criticisms of the libertines, whom he portrayed as having suspended judgment on all matters, religious as well as natural. First, the self-referential problem is raised. When the sceptics say nothing is true, all must be doubted, they are forced into a contradiction since they think these very assertions are true. But, then, Yves de Paris asserted, there is a better way to make the sceptics see the error of their ways, namely by showing them the natural knowledge that they cannot reject, our sense information. When our senses are operating in a normal state, under normal conditions, and our rational faculty is properly employed, we have no reason to doubt, and we can know the truth. So, instead of remaining with “the torments and hopeless anxieties of these miserable souls,” the libertin sceptics should recognize that knowledge is possible through proper use of our faculties and that there is no need for doubt with regard to either natural or revealed information. We have the means to discover scientific truths, and God has informed us of the true religion. So, in these circumstances, scepticism is either stupidity or perversion.43
A more elaborate rejection of Pyrrhonism, somewhat in the same vein, appears in the Apologeticus fidei by Jean Bagot of the Society of Jesus, in 1644. The opening portions of this work deal directly with the Pyrrhonian and Academic theories in their classical form as presented in Sextus, Cicero, Diogenes Laertius, and St. Augustine. Only later are the views of the modern sceptics, especially Charron, treated. Bagot saw the sceptical claims as menancing the faith, and he observed in a marginal note, “Today there are many Pyrrhonists.”44 After outlining the arguments of the Greek sceptics, Bagot offered his answer, asserting that there are some truths that are based on the infallible authority who declares them and others whose truth is evident and manifest, providing our rational and sense faculties are properly used under proper conditions. In these terms, the basic arguments of the sceptics are answered, and a detailed theory of truth is worked out.45
A modified form of the use of Aristotelian theories to answer scepticism appears in some other thinkers of the period. As I shall show in later discussions, some of the elements of the Aristotelian theory of knowledge were used to reject certain Pyrrhonian claims even by thinkers whose general views were not in the Aristotelian tradition, as in the instances of Father Mersenne and Herbert of Cherbury. In the vast eclectic project of Charles Sorel, La Science universelle, many ingredients of the Aristotelian theory are introduced as part of his rebuttal to scepticism, along with several other kinds of answers, some drawn, apparently, from contemporary sources, like the writings of Mersenne.
Sorel was a well-known writer and historian of the period and a friend of the libertin érudit Guy Patin. The first part of Sorel’s grandiose philosophical work La Science des choses corporelles, of 1634, begins in the style of many of the writings of the new thinkers of the seventeenth century, bemoaning the low state of human learning, the uselessness and stupidity of what is taught in the Schools, and offering a new panacea, the universal science, “in which the Truth about all things in the World is known by the force of Reason, And the refutation of the Errors of ordinary Philosophy is found.”46 This new science, we are told, will be completely reasonable and certain and will improve mankind. After this fanfare, Sorel discussed two types of criticisms of the possibility of a true science of nature: one, which appears to be a kind of Platonism, denying that there can be any real knowledge of matters in this world, and insisting that truth is only to be found in the Heavenly World; the other a scepticism, contending that we cannot really know anything. In view of the initial claims set forth for the universal science, some rather extreme modifications are given in relation to the criticisms. Man, Sorel tells us, can know as much about all things as is necessary for his happiness. His natural capacities of sense and reason are able to receive information and judge it. But, in so doing, there may well be secrets of Nature that have not, or cannot be, explained. It may be difficult to know the essences of incorporeal things; it may be impossible to know God. However, this does not destroy the possibility of knowledge but, rather, enables us to see the falsity of certain theories that have been offered, as well as allowing us to know the limits of human knowledge. We can at least know what we cannot know and hence have a science of our ignorance.47 Sorel was willing to settle for a little less than complete knowledge of everything, in order to justify our assurance in what we are able to know.
In later portions of his epic presentation of the universal science, Sorel came to grips with the sceptical challenge, which he felt had to be met in order for us to be able to make proper use of our faculties and capacities.48 The Schools and the logic texts did not have any satisfactory answer, but Sorel felt that he and Mersenne had found one.49 From studying the Pyrrhonian classics, like Sextus, and observing that “there are sometimes libertines who revive them to the great prejudice of Religion and Human Society,”50 Sorel set to work to vitiate the force of scepticism, ancient and modern.
In answer to the doubts introduced by the Pyrrhonists about the reliability of our sense knowledge, Sorel offered an Aristotelian reply. The information received by our external senses has to be weighed and judged by our “common sense” in order to avoid deception. We have a variation in experiences due to the disposition of the sense organs, the temperament of the observer, the location of the object, and the medium through which perception takes place. But our senses are capable of perceiving the qualities of objects as they actually are, and our interior sense, the “common sense,” has the ability or capacity for judging when the senses give accurate reports, and for correcting them when they do not. In all his detailed examination of the examples offered by the sceptics about the differences between human and animal perception (which he seemed to be willing to accept at face value) and the variations in human perception, Sorel never saw that the point the Pyrrhonists were questioning was whether we have any way of telling when or if our senses are ever accurate. Instead, he assumed that we can and do recognize some veridical perceptions and can then judge others accordingly. Thus, perspective and distance problems cause no trouble, since we have these reliable perceptions, and in using them we learn to judge and correct special perceptions by experience. There may be some unusual circumstances when it is better not to judge at all, but, by and large, we can use these perceptions to evaluate almost every circumstance and, by employing our “common sense,” determine what things are actually like from how they appear to us. Then we can disregard all the sceptical cavils about the experiences and views of maniacs, or delirious people, since we know that such people have corrupted sense organs and, thus, see things as other than they are.51
The only rationale offered by Sorel for his constant assumption that normal people with normal sense organs under normal conditions have accurate, reliable sensations, or a normal, natural ability to weigh and judge the reliability of their experience, is that it would be odd and strange if those in perfect condition did not know the truth and only abnormal people did. But the sceptics were arguing that we have no way of telling whether those conditions that we regard as optimum for observing the world happen to be the right ones for perceiving the real state of affairs. It might be odd if only a couple of idiosyncratic people saw things as they really are, but it is also odd that only people with normal vision do. Sorel, in offering as a resolution of the sceptical difficulties a description of our normal procedures for judging sense information, has not met the problem of how we tell that our normal, natural way of distinguishing reliable perceptions from unreliable ones is in accord with the actual features of real objects.
The same sort of answer, merely embellished or elaborated, was put forth by Sorel to all the other sceptical arguments. Can we tell whether all our experience is just a dream? This problem, that Sorel’s famous contemporary Descartes was to make so much of, is easily dismissed. The normal person, when awake, can tell the difference between dreaming and waking. If somebody dreamt that he ate a large meal and then awoke and was hungry, he could tell that he had been dreaming. Are we ever acquainted with anything other than the appearances of things? Even if we only perceive surfaces, or appearances of objects, we can judge the inner nature of the object, just as we do in ordinary cases when we judge what is inside from seeing the outside, or when we judge what a whole object is like from seeing its parts. Effects provide an adequate basis for determining causes.52
The sceptics who have tried to generate an infinite regress of difficulties about going from effects to causes, to causes of causes, and so on, have created a bogus problem. They have maintained we can only know an object if we know completely why it is what it is, what the causes of all its properties are. Sorel dismissed this problem by first admitting that some things may be unknowable, and others only partially knowable, but then declaring that we can still have assured knowledge about some matters. Our assured knowledge is all that we require, and can be gained from the pertinent information available to us, and the use of our natural faculties.53
We have sufficient information and adequate faculties for developing sciences. The Pyrrhonists deny that we know any certain first principles to use as the premises of our scientific knowledge. They suspend judgment on the most obvious truths, that the whole is greater than the part, that anything including themselves exists, that the sun shines, and so on, because they think these are all uncertain. “One sees finally here how pernicious are their indifferences, and that they tend to subvert all Science, Politics and Religion.”54 But we possess first principles that are indisputable, known either by the common experience of all mankind, or “known by the light of Reason.” By employing our natural reason, we can discover reliable scientific knowledge from these certain principles. The sceptics, in order to challenge our scientific knowledge, have to dispute the reliability of our normal, natural sense organs, our normal “common sense,” and our natural reason or understanding. But we can see that our faculties have the perfections requisite for their function, and hence we have no reason to be concerned with the objections of the sceptics to the possibility of our obtaining scientific knowledge. There may be difficulties, there may be things we can never know, but if we take great precautions, we can know what is necessary for us well enough, and with complete assurance, so that we can establish the arts and sciences on a firm basis. Our “common sense” and the manifest and indubitable first principles are the gateway to knowledge of the truth about objects.55
After this appeal to the normal, natural conditions and faculties that enable us to gain true knowledge, Sorel presented one other answer to the Pyrrhonist, the standard problem of the self-contradictory nature of the sceptic’s position.56 The sceptics, Sorel contended, cannot be as ignorant as they pretend, since they look for reasons for their views and seem to prefer the ones they offer to those of the dogmatists. They are certain that nothing is certain (a claim that Sextus, Montaigne, La Mothe Le Vayer, and others were careful to avoid making); thus, they have found a certain truth, and so cannot be completely in doubt. “We should boast here of having overthrown their foundation, did not their doctrine consist in proving that there is no view which has any foundation, but therefore theirs is then without any basis; and if in order to defend it, they claim that it has some foundation, it is again overthrown by this, since it should not have one according to their maxims.”57 So, by taking the sceptic’s position as a definite assertion, Sorel pointed out the self-referential character of the view, and the dilemma involved. The problem of stating the Pyrrhonian view without self-contradiction is one of the persistent problems recognized by the sceptics, and one of the continual answers offered by the opponents.
By employing elements of Aristotle’s theory of knowledge, by insisting on the adequacy of the knowledge that we can gain thereby for our purposes, by conceding some possible limitations on our full and complete understanding of things, and by showing the self-contradictoriness of an assertion of complete scepticism, Sorel thought he had destroyed the Pyrrhonian menace.
An interesting variant of the use of Aristotle’s theories to reject scepticism appears in some comments of Sir Francis Bacon (who was himself called an imitator of the Pyrrhonists by Mersenne for his harping on some of the sceptical difficulties in finding true knowledge).58 In Of the Advancement and Proficiencie of Learning, Bacon criticized the sceptics for misrepresenting the problems involved in gaining knowledge through the senses. They had seized (he said) on the errors and deceptions of the senses in order to “pluck up Sciences by the roots.” What they failed to see was that the real causes of the errors were the Idols, and that the proper solution to the difficulties was the use of instruments; “yet assisted by industry the senses may be sufficient for the sciences.”59 In other words, a set of conditions can be given, in terms of corrections of the unaided senses, that, when coupled with certain internal reforms, will specify when our adjusted perceptions are veridical. But our natural, normal senses are not sufficient to give us reliable knowledge, unless certain aids and instruments are employed. Thus, one ought to adopt a partial or temporary scepticism until all the aids and procedures of the Novum Organum can be successfully employed.
Nor need any one be alarmed at such suspension of judgment, in one who maintains not simply that nothing can be known, but only that nothing can be known except in a certain course and way; and yet establishes provisionally certain degrees of assurance for use and relief until the mind shall arrive at a knowledge of causes in which it can rest. For even those schools of philosophy which held the absolute impossibility of knowing anything were not inferior to those which took upon them to pronounce. But then they did not provide helps for the sense and understanding, as I have done, but simply took away all their authority: which is quite a different thing—almost the reverse.60
The different types of Aristotelian answers to the sceptical crisis share in common, regardless of variations, a view that there are proper conditions either for perceptions or reasoning, and that we have faculties that, when operating properly under these conditions, are able to give us true knowledge. Hence neither a scepticism with regard to the senses nor with regard to reason is called for. The sort of evidence introduced by the sceptics is either false or deals with abnormal conditions and corrupted faculties.
Those who employed this kind of answer to the Pyrrhonists refused to recognize that the sceptics were challenging the reliability of even our natural faculties, under the best of conditions, and were denying the criteria Aristotle had laid down for deciding when our faculties were functioning properly. It may well be that the Aristotelian system is ingeniously constructed for avoiding the standard sceptical arguments, by either specifying a way of answering the problems on the basis of a standard which is not questioned, or by ruling the arguments out as foolish. Hence, according to the Aristotelians, if one is really in doubt about first principles or the criterion, one is not prepared to philosophize. But the nouveau pyrrhonisme was questioning the very system of the Aristotelians, which could not be justified or defended merely by employing the system.
The abusive critics of scepticism failed to meet the problems being raised, and the Aristotelians met them by begging the crucial questions. The former tried to destroy the force of Pyrrhonism by denouncing it. The latter tried to answer the problems by treating them as items to be dealt with within their system, difficulties to be resolved by the criteria they accepted. They did not see that to dispel the sceptical crisis they would first have to establish the basis for their philosophical system before they could show that what was true according to Aristotle’s theory was actually true. In the next chapters, I shall examine some attempts to deal with the sceptical challenge by a more serious appraisal of the basic problems raised.