ABSTRACT
Among the Cartesian doctrines to which Bayle was sympathetic, perhaps none fi gures more prominently in his works than the strict distinction of mind and body. As we saw in the previous chapter, Bayle repeatedly affi rms that only an immaterial substance is capable of thought. Indeed, Elizabeth Labrousse has argued that “the distinction between thought and extension is for [Bayle] an indubitable and luminous truth that compels our recognition as soon as we have learned from Descartes to use only the understanding, without allowing the imagination and the senses to obscure its luminous self-evidence.”1 In addition to its excellent epistemic credentials, the doctrine of substance dualism holds out the sole possibility of establishing a secure metaphysical foundation for a number of dogmas of orthodox Christianity, notably the immortality of the soul and the tenability-indeed, conceivability-of a transcendent creator of the universe. Recently, however, this reading of Bayle as an unqualifi ed adherent of Cartesian mind-body dualism has been called into question.2 Drawing on crucial passages from the Objections to Poiret and other texts, Gianluca Mori argues that Bayle discretely articulates a materialist ontology, rendering suspect his frequent appeals to standard Cartesian arguments for the distinctness of mind and body. On Mori’s reading Bayle refuses to rule out the possibility that matter might be endowed with the faculty of thought, while at the same time emphasizing the conceptual diffi culties that attend the Cartesian account of mind as res cogitans. As a result the possibility of a rational proof of both the immateriality and immortality of the soul is undermined.
