r luminous exposition which were
characteristic of the Cartesian school common in French writers. Of the
two authors just mentioned, Arnauld was the greater thinker, Nicole by
far the better writer. He was, in fact, a sort of minor Pascal, his
_Lettres sur les Visionnaires_ corresponding to the _Provinciales_ of
his greater contemporary, while he was the author of _Pensees_, which,
unlike Pascal's, were regularly finished, and which, though much
inferior to them, have something of the same character. The
intellectual activity of Port Royal was very considerable, but most of
it was directed into channels which were not purely literary, owing
partly to incessant controversies brought on by the differences between
the community and the Jesuits, partly to the cultivation of
philosophical subjects. The age was perhaps the most controversial that
Europe has ever seen, and the comparative absence of periodicals (which
were only in their infancy) threw the controversies necessarily into
book form, as letters, pamphlets, or even volumes of considerable size.
But no very large portion of this controversial matter deserves the name
of literature, and much of it was written in Latin. Thus Gassendi, the
upholder of Neo-Epicurean opinions in opposition to Descartes, and
beyond all question the greatest French philosopher of the century after
Descartes and Malebranche, hardly belongs to French literature, though
his Latin works are of great bulk and no small literary merit. The
Gassendian school soon gave birth to a small but influential school of
materialist freethinkers. What may be called the school of orthodox
doubt, which had been represented by Montaigne and Charron, had, as has
been said, a representative in La Mothe le Vayer. But this special kind
of scepticism was already antiquated, if not obsolete, and it was
succeeded, on the one side, by the above-mentioned freethinkers, who
were also to a great extent free livers[277], and whose most remarkable
literary figure was Saint Evremond; on the other, by a school of learned
Pyrrhonists, whose most remarkable representative in every respect was
Pierre Bayle.

[Sidenote: Bayle.]

Bayle was born in the south of France in 1647, and, like almost all the
men of letters of his time, was educated by the Jesuits. He was of a
Protestant family, and was converted by his teachers, his conversion
being however so little of a solid one that he reverted to
Protestantism in less than two year