Birth
Born in France
Born a Protestant pastor's son in the south of France, he was driven into exile by religious persecution.
Words
“An opinion is none the truer for passing from age to age; errors are not improved by being old.”
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A Huguenot driven from France by religious persecution, Bayle settled in Rotterdam and wrote the Historical and Critical Dictionary, a sprawling work whose real arguments hide in the footnotes. There he set reason against faith, exposed contradictions in every system, and argued that morality does not depend on belief — that a society of atheists could be more virtuous than one of fanatics. His relentless doubt and his case for toleration made him, in Voltaire's phrase, the arsenal of the Enlightenment; the philosophes raided his pages for a generation. He doubted not to destroy but to clear the ground.
