Thomas M. Lennon

If Liebniz was the broadest and most consistent, indeed, most brilliant
thinker of his time, Bayle was perhaps that period's deepest thinker. Alas,
the attention Bayle nowadays draws is hardly commensurate with such
alleged profundity. He is known, if at all, as a source exploited by later
thinkers for some few arguments concerning the primary-secondary quality
distinction and the infinite divisibility of space and time. Beyond that we
have a vague notion of Bayle's use of skeptical arguments in an entertaining
send-up of and Scholasticism and as a basis for views on religious and
political toleration that appealed to the Enlightenment. But none of this is
sufficient for explaining the success of Bayle Dictionary as the most popular
book of the eighteenth century or his heroic status among the fashioners of
the Enlightenment. Nor does it even begin to provide an interpretive key to

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