c ideas by a council at Sens in 1225; and
the pantheistic views of Bruno had much to do with his martyrdom in the
year 1600.

Montaigne, the pioneer of modern scepticism, gave voice to his
repugnance for dogmas in his brilliant Essays, in which he stated that
all religious opinions are the result of custom; and that he doubted if,
out of the immense number of religious opinions, there were any means of
ascertaining which were accurate. Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Descartes
were the inaugurators of a school of thought which is characterized by
its practical spirit; and while these men professed theistic beliefs,
their systems of thought had done much, when applied and amplified by
their followers, to undermine that belief. These men furnished the
source of a later agnosticism.

Thomas Hobbes agreed with Bacon and Galileo that all knowledge starts
from experience, and, carrying out the inductive method of Bacon, he
produced his "Leviathan" in 1651. It was promptly attacked by the clergy
of every country in Europe. Hobbes says of the immortality of the soul,
"It is a belief grounded upon other men's sayings that they knew it
supernaturally; or that they knew those who knew them, that knew others
that knew it supernaturally."

Locke concerned himself with a philosophic inquiry into the nature of
the mind itself, and was looked upon as a destroyer of the faith.
Descartes based his philosophy on the rejection of authority in favor of
human reason for which his works were honored by being placed on the
Index in 1663. Hume, with the publication of the highly heretical
"Treatise on Human Nature," threw consternation into the ranks of the
theists. His theory of knowledge played havoc with the old arguments for
belief in God and immortality of the soul. His works were widely read
and were instrumental in leading to the philosophical agnosticism of the
nineteenth century.

Spinoza's religious views seemed in his time little short of atheism and
brought him the hostility of both Jews and Christians, to which was
added the excommunication from the synagogue. In his philosophy God and
nature are equivalent terms and it is pantheistic only in the sense that
if man is to have a god at all, nature must be that god, and whatever
man considers godlike must be found in nature. Spinoza recognizes no
supernatural realm and denies the survival of personal memory. Professor
G. Boas, in his "Adventures of Human Thought," discusses the attitude