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Updated: June 15, 2025
The scornful Pyrrhonism in which the Esope clothed itself could only be acceptable to a few minds "aeme sdegnose," who knew the solid worth beneath it. It was force absolutely lost upon action and life. There was no help for it. The more democratic France became, the more aristocratic did her ideas, her art, her science seem to grow.
If the atheist, as they please to call those who differ in opinion with themselves, objects to the correctness, of their systems, he cannot deny his own existence, nor that of beings similar to himself, by whom he is surrounded; he cannot doubt the reciprocity of the relations that subsist between them; he cannot question the duties which spring out of these relations; Pyrrhonism, then, cannot enter his mind upon the, actual principles of morality; which is nothing more than the science of the relations of beings living together in society.
Our comrade Dufaure had not, when this book was published, made his appearance in public life as a lawyer. The translator of Fichte, the expositor and friend of Ballanche, was already interested, as I myself was, in metaphysical questions; we often talked nonsense together about God, ourselves, and nature. He at that time affected pyrrhonism.
It may be said that critical scepticism carried to the length suggested is historical pyrrhonism; that if we are altogether to discredit an ancient or a modern historian, because he has assumed fabulous matter to be true, it will be as well to give up paying any attention to history.
It opens the door to the most exaggerated Pyrrhonism: for it leads to the assertion that this proposition, three and three make six, is only true where and during the time when it pleases God; that it is perhaps false in some parts of the universe; and that perhaps it will be so among men in the coming year.
Hence arose what has been called POPISH PYRRHONISM, a system which attempts to combine Doubt with Dogmatism, and to establish the certitude of religious knowledge on the sole basis of authority, which is somehow supposed to be more secure and stable when it rests on the ruins of human reason. Not a few significant symptoms of a tendency in this direction have appeared from age to age.
The latter are charitable because they regard evil as a part of the universal order of things, one which it is idle to blame, yet permissible to rectify. From whatever source such a tenet springs, whether from materialism, stoicism, pyrrhonism, epicureanism, atheism even, is of small matter; it is a tenet which is honorable to the holder.
When the reflective intellect gets at work, however, it discovers incomprehensibilities in the flowing process. Distinguishing its elements and parts, it gives them separate names, and what it thus disjoins it cannot easily put together. Pyrrhonism accepts the irrationality and revels in its dialectic elaboration.
This historical Pyrrhonism, then, proves nothing against the study and knowledge of history; which, of all other studies, is the most necessary for a man who is to live in the world.
Nay, I cannot help carrying my Pyrrhonism still further, and extending it often to historical facts themselves, at least to most of the circumstances with which they are related; and every day's experience confirms me in this historical incredulity. Do we ever hear the most recent fact related exactly in the same way, by the several people who were at the same time eyewitnesses of it? No.
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