of Avranches, whose Demonstratio Evangelica (1678) is remarkable (with
Boyle's Discourse of Things above Reason) as anticipating Berkeley in
the argument from the arbitrariness of mathematical assumptions. He
too, by that and by his later works, made for sheer philosophical
skepticism, [583] always a dangerous basis for orthodoxy. [584]
Such an evolution, on the part of a man of uncommon intellectual
energy, challenges attention, the more so seeing that it typifies
a good deal of thinking within the Catholic pale, on lines already
noted as following on the debate with Protestantism. Honestly pious
by bent of mind, but always occupied with processes of reasoning
and research, Huet leant more and more, as he grew in years, to
the skeptical defence against the pressures of Protestantism and
rationalism, at once following and furthering the tendency of his
age. That the skeptical method is a last weapon of defence can be
seen from the temper in which the demonstrator assails Spinoza,
whom he abuses, without naming him, in the fashion of his day, and
to whose arguments concerning the authorship of the Pentateuch he
makes singularly feeble answers. [585] They are too worthless to
have satisfied himself; and it is easy to see how he was driven to
seek a more plausible rebuttal. [586] A distinguished English critic,
noting the general movement, pronounces, justly enough, that Huet took
up philosophy "not as an end, but as a means--not for its own sake,
but for the support of religion"; and then adds that his attitude is
thus quite different from Pascal's. [587] But the two cases are really
on a level. Pascal too was driven to philosophy in reaction against
incredulity; and though Pascal's work is of a more bitter and morbid
intensity, Huet also had in him that psychic craving for a supernatural
support which is the essence of latter-day religion. And if we credit
this spirit to Pascal and to Huet, as we do to Newman, we must suppose
that it partly touched the whole movement of pro-Catholic skepticism
which has been above noted as following on the Reformation. It is
ascribing to it as a whole too much of calculation and strategy to
say of its combatants that "they conceived the desperate design of
first ruining the territory they were prepared to evacuate; before
philosophy was handed over to the philosophers the old Aristotelean
citadel was to be blown into the air." [588] In reality they caught,
as religious men will, with passion rather than with policy, at any
plea that might seem fitted to beat down the presumption of "the wild,
living intellect of man"; [589] and their skepticism had a certain
sincerity inasmuch as, trained to uncritical belief, they had never
found for themselves the grounds of rational certitude.
Inasmuch too as Protestantism had no such ground, and rationalism
was still far from having cleared its bases, Huet, as things went,
was within his moral rights when he set forth his transcendentalist
skepticism in his Quæstiones Alnetanæ in 1690. Though written in very
limpid Latin, [590] that work attracted practically no attention;
and though, having a repute for provincialism in his French style,
Huet was loth to resort to the vernacular, he did devote his spare
hours through a number of his latter years to preparing his Traité
Philosophique de la faiblesse de l'esprit humain, which, dying in 1722,
he left to be published posthumously (1723). The outcry against his
criticism of Descartes and his Demonstratio had indisposed him for
further personal strife; but he was determined to leave a completed
message. Thus it came about that a sincere and devoted Catholic
bishop "left, as his last legacy to his fellow-men, a work of the
most outrageous skepticism." [591]