"It is pure illusion to think that an opinion that passes down from century to century, from generation to generation, may not be entirely false"
About this Quote
Tradition, Bayle reminds you, is not evidence; it is just time doing PR. The line lands with a cool, surgical audacity: the very fact that an opinion has survived centuries is precisely what makes it dangerous. It has had the benefit of repetition, authority, and social convenience - the three additives that can make even a bad idea taste like common sense.
Bayle is writing as an early Enlightenment skeptic in a Europe still bruised by religious wars and the policing of belief. In that context, inherited opinions are not quaint customs; they are often the intellectual scaffolding of persecution. His target is the argument from antiquity: the reflex that treats longevity as a proxy for truth, as if history were a jury rather than a record of power. The subtext is political as much as epistemological: institutions that need obedience love beliefs that feel older than any individual, because age disguises authorship. If no one can locate the inventor, no one can easily indict the invention.
The sentence is also a warning about how error reproduces. An opinion can be "entirely false" and still travel intact because what gets transmitted is not accuracy but social function: belonging, hierarchy, moral reassurance. Bayle’s elegance is in refusing consolation. He doesn’t offer a replacement doctrine, only a demand: treat inheritance as a hypothesis, not a halo.
Bayle is writing as an early Enlightenment skeptic in a Europe still bruised by religious wars and the policing of belief. In that context, inherited opinions are not quaint customs; they are often the intellectual scaffolding of persecution. His target is the argument from antiquity: the reflex that treats longevity as a proxy for truth, as if history were a jury rather than a record of power. The subtext is political as much as epistemological: institutions that need obedience love beliefs that feel older than any individual, because age disguises authorship. If no one can locate the inventor, no one can easily indict the invention.
The sentence is also a warning about how error reproduces. An opinion can be "entirely false" and still travel intact because what gets transmitted is not accuracy but social function: belonging, hierarchy, moral reassurance. Bayle’s elegance is in refusing consolation. He doesn’t offer a replacement doctrine, only a demand: treat inheritance as a hypothesis, not a halo.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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