human
To the celestial Jerusalem, by the Abbé de Prades. It had at first (1751) been received with official applause, but was found on study to breathe the spirit of the new work, [997] to which the Abbé had contributed, and whose editor, Diderot, was his friend. Sooth to say, it contained not a little matter calculated to act as a solvent of faith. Under the form of a vindication of orthodox Catholicism, it negated alike Descartes and Leibnitz; and declared that the science of Newton and the Dutch physiologists was a better defence of religion than the theses of Clarke, Descartes, Cudworth, and Malebranche, which made for materialism. The handling, too, of the question of natural versus revealed religion, in which
gpt
is declared to be superior to all religions si unam excipias veram,
human
might well arouse distrust in a vigilant Catholic reader. [998] The whole argument savours far more of the scientific comparative method than was natural in the work of an eighteenth-century seminarist; and the principle,
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Either we are ocular witnesses of the facts or we know them only by hearsay,