Peter Bayle is severe on certain historical inaccuracies of Davila, and it is true that Davila must be read with due remembrance of the fact that he was not only a Catholic but the especial protege of Catherine de' Medici, but it is not to be forgotten that Bayle was as strongly Protestant.
Against this work and the Ethics of Spinoza the orthodox Cartesians (who were in the majority), no less than sceptical hangers-on like Bayle, raised an all but universal howl of reprobation, scarcely broken for about a century.
Malebranche gave all causation to God; and the acosmist - as Hegel called him, in repudiation of Bayle's nickname " atheist " - Spinoza, from the premises of Carte.
Scepticism, with which P. Bayle had played as a historian - he amused himself, too, with praising the Manichaean solution of the riddle of the universe - became a serious power in the history of philosophy with the advent of David Hume.
Leibnitz devotes an introductory chapter in his Theodicee, 1710 (as against Pierre Bayle), to faith and reason.
