25. And in any case, Bodin was not himself a fanatic. Indeed, his thought anticipated the business-like outlook of Cardinal Richelieu, who was to put Bodin’s ideas into practice on an ambitious scale.
26. Bowle, Op. cit., page 291.
27. Schulze, Op. cit., page 53.
28. Ibid., pages 56–57.
29. Poland and the Netherlands were exceptions. Schulze, Op. cit., page 57.
30. Bowle, Op. cit., page 293.
31. Ibid., page 317.
32. Bronowski and Mazlish, Op. cit., page 198.
33. Bowle, Op. cit., page 318. See also: Moynahan, Op. cit., page 492.
34. One of its distinguishing features is the most vivid title page of any book ever printed. The upper half shows a landscape which depicts a neatly planned town against a background of open country. Towering above this scene, however, there stands the crowned figure of a giant, a titan, shown from the waist up, his arms outstretched in a protective embrace, a great sword in one hand, a crozier in the other. Most poignant of all, the body of the figure is formed from a swarm of little people, their backs to the reader and their gaze fixed on the giant’s face. It is one of the most eerie, and most powerful images in all history.
35. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1951, page 254.
36. Roger Smith, The Fontana History of the Human Sciences, London: Fontana Press, 1997, pages 105ff.
37. Bronowski and Mazlish, Op. cit., page 205.
38. Bowle, Op. cit., page 321.
39. Ibid., page 329.
40. Ibid., page 328.
41. Bronowski and Mazlish, Op. cit., page 206.
42. Ibid., page 207.
43. Bowle, Op. cit., page 331.
44. Ibid., page 361.
45. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 180.
46. Bowle, Op. cit., page 363.
47. Ibid., page 364.
48. Schulze, Op. cit., pages 70–71.
49. Bowle, Op. cit., page 365.
50. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 186, who says the works are ‘labored’ and that it is surprising they have been so inspiring.
51. Bronowski and Mazlish, Op. cit., page 210.
52. Bowle, Op. cit., page 378.
53. Ibid., pages 379–381.
54. The Tractatus was originally published anonymously and, briefly, banned. The Jewish community of Amsterdam expelled him.
55. Bowle, Op. cit., page 381. See: Richard H. Popkin, ‘Spinoza and Bible scholarship’, in: Don Garrett (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pages 383ff, which has many of Spinoza’s more pithy remarks on the scriptures.
56. R. H. Delahunty, Spinoza, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984, pages 211–212.
57. Bowle, Op. cit., page 383.
58. Delahunty, Op. cit., page 7.
59. Bowle, Op. cit., page 386.
60. Ibid., page 387.
61. Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, page 591.
62. Giuseppe Mazzitta, The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999, pages 100–101.
63. Bowle, Op. cit., page 389.
64. Joseph Mali, The Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico’s ‘New Science’, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992, page 48.
65. Ibid., pages 99ff, for the role of providence and curiosity.
66. Bowle, Op. cit., page 393.
67. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 233, for the way some of these ideas are echoed by Oswald Spengler.
68. Bowle, Op. cit., page 395.
69. T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, page 2.
70. Ibid., page 137.
71. Ibid., page 208.
72. Ibid., page 151.
73. Ibid., pages 156–159.
74. Israel, Op. cit., page 150.
75. Ibid., page 151.
76. Blanning, Op. cit., page 169.
CHAPTER 25: THE ‘ATHEIST SCARE’ AND THE ADVENT OF DOUBT
1. It was, as Thomas Kuhn puts it, in his monograph on the Copernican revolution, ‘the first European astronomical text that could rival the Almagest in depth and completeness’. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, Op. cit., page 185.
2. Ibid., page 186.
3. Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 330.
4. Popkin, The Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought, Op. cit., pages 102–103. See also: Moynahan, The Faith, Op. cit., page 354.
5. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 357.
6. Ibid., page 359.
7. Ibid., page 360.
8. Simon Fish, A Supplicacyion for the Beggars Rosa, quoted in Menno Simons, The Complete Writings, Scotsdale: University of Arizona Press, 1956, pages 140–141.
9. Armstrong, Op. cit., page 330.
10. Interestingly, Anaxagoras, an Ionian, and a pupil of Anaximenes of Miletus, held a number of views that anticipated Copernicus. He taught that the sun was not ‘animated’ in the way that the Athenians believed, and neither was it a god, but ‘a red-hot mass many times larger than the Peloponnese’. He also insisted that the moon was a solid body with geographical features – plains and mountains and valleys – just like the earth. Anaxagoras also believed that the world was round. J. M. Robertson, A History of Freethought, volume 1, London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969, page 166.
11. In fact there appears to have been something of a fashion for freethinking in Periclean Athens, where the aristocrats foreshadowed the thought in Voltaire’s France, in believing that ‘the common people’ needed religion ‘to restrain them’, but that they themselves needed no such restriction.
12. Thrower, The Alternative Tradition, Op. cit., pages 173 and 225–226.
13. Robertson, Op. cit., page 181.
14. Thrower, Op. cit., pages 204ff and 223.
15. Ibid., pages 63–65.
16. Ibid., page 84.
17. Ibid., page 122.
18. Robertson, Op. cit., pages 395–396.
19. Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, Op. cit., page 25.
20. Ibid., page 32.
21. Ibid., page 70.
22. Ibid., page 161.
23. Robertson, Op. cit., pages 319–323.
24. Lucien Febvre, The Problems of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982, page 457.