Page:The Golden verses of Pythagoras (IA cu31924026681076).pdf/224

 with the Roman Empire, withering the principles of the life it had received, necessitated the institution of a new cult and thus was exposed to the incursion of foreign errors and the arms of the barbarians. This colossus, victim of its own fury, after having torn and devoured itself was buried beneath the shams that it had heaped up; Ignorance seated upon its débris governed Europe, until Bacon and Descartes came and resuscitating, as much as was possible for them the Socratic skepticism, endeavoured by its means to turn minds toward the research of truth. But they might not have done so well, had they not also awakened certain remnants of Pyrrhonic skepticism, which, being sustained with their passions and their prejudices, soon resulted in bewildering their disciples. This new skepticism, naïve in Montaigne, dogmatic in Hobbes, disguised in Locke, masterly in Bayle, paradoxical but seductive in the greater number of the eighteenth-century writers, hidden now beneath the surface of what is called Experimental philosophy, lures the mind on toward a sort of empirical routine, and unceasingly denying the past, discouraging the future, aims by all kinds of means to retard the progress of the human mind. It is no more even the character of truth; and the proof of this character that the modern skeptics demand ad infinitum, is the demonstration of the very possibility of understanding this character and of proving it: a new subtlety that they have deduced from the unfruitful efforts that certain thinkers have made recently in Germany, to give to the possibility of the knowledge of self, a basis which they have not given.

I will relate in my next Examination, what has hindered these savants from finding this basis. I must, before terminating this one, show to my readers how I believe one can distinguish the two kinds of skepticism of which I have