Abstract
Jacques Proust has suggested that such post-Encyclopédie ventures as the Supplément should be studied for further information about the literary life of the period.1 As demonstrated above, the history of the publication of the Supplément provides information of this sort in great detail. A study of the text of the work likewise furnishes insights into many intellectual tendencies of pre-Revolutionary France. These currents can be described in general as the rationalist and empirical, the non-mechanist and sentimental, and the reformist. Since they did not develop separately and simultaneously, but rather grew from each other, the Supplément of the mid-1770’s is a more complete source of evidence of these trends than the earlier Encyclopédie . The following chapters summarize, and illustrate with textual references, the expression of these different approaches in the Supplément.
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References
Adanson’s exclamation is quoted in Theodore Monod, “L’oeuvre zoologique d’Adanson,” in Adanson: The Bicentennial of Michel Adanson’s “Famille des Plantes .” II (Pittsburgh: The Hunt Botanical Library, Carnegie Institue of Technology, 1963), 502.
See Margarete Hochdoerfer, The Conflict between the Religious and the Scientific Views of Albrecht von Haller (1708-17 7 7) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1932), pp. 13–14 and passim .Haller maintained this view of a purposeful nature throughout his work.
“Rationalism in Modern Science: d’Alembert and the Esprit Simpliste,” Bucknell Review , VIII (1958–1959), 127–139. Butts concludes that d’Alembert professed empiricism in order to fight metaphysics and because he agreed with other points connected with empiricism, such as religious scepticism. D’Alembert’s method, however, was Cartesian: he wanted to reduce knowledge to principles, and he assigned a high place to mathematics.
Abraham Wolf, A History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1939), p. 501, observes that progress in agriculture in the eighteenth century was mainly of an empirical nature. It was not until the nineteenth century that scientists began to understand their information.
Daniel Mornet mentions the emphasis on instruments among a group including the Supplément writers Condorcet and Guyton de Morveau in Les Origines intellectuelles de la Révolution française (1715-1787) ,5th ed. (Paris: Colin, 1954), p. 181. Cf .also the fact that d’Alembert was unable to base hydromechanics on sound first principles in 1752 because instruments were too crude (Wolf, p. 82).
Another example of the respect with which thinkers regarded experience: Robinet, in his metaphysico-scientific explanations in De la nature , pretends to hold to experience. See Jean Mayer, Diderot: Homme de Science (Rennes: Imprimerie bretonne, 1959), p. 114.
See, for example, Karl Vietor, Goethe the Thinker , trans. Bayard Q. Morgan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), pp. 26 - 27.
Jacques Roger, Les Sciences de la vie… l’Encyclopédie (Paris: Armand Colin, 1963), pp. 206-219, discusses the theory of the fixity of species during the first third of the century, when cartesianism dominated thinking. The permanence of the theory is mentioned passim in the same work.
His quarrels with the Jussieu, whom he accused of plagiarism, are especially well-known. See for the most detailed discussion of Adanson’s taxonomical work Peter H.A. Sneath, “Mathematics and Classification from Adanson to the Present,” in Adanson: The Bicentennial ..., II (1964), 471–498. There are also useful accounts in Michaud’s Biographie universelle ; Nicolas, “Le Cas Michel Adanson”; Sabathier de Castres, Les Trois Siècles de la littérature... alphabétique , 5th ed. (The Hague, 1781); and Nicolas, “Adanson,Adanson, the Man,” in Adanson: The Bicentennial ..., I, 1 — 121.
The same discrediting of hypotheses occurs in an anti-Masonic tract written by Cadet Gassicourt, son of a Supplément contributor and representative of secondary Revolutionary thought. The work is a diatribe against the Masons in particular and the philosophic influence in general, but is most interesting in the unconscious submission to that influence that it reveals. Le Tombeau de Jacques Molai... Loges ,2nd ed. (Paris: Desenne, 1797), pp. 86 ff.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment , trans. Fritz C.A. Koelln and Jas. P. Pettegrove (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 60-64, discusses the question.
Correspondance inédite de Albert de Haller... avec le Dr Rast, publ. Dr. Vernay (Lyon: Aimé Vingtrinier, 1856), p. 19 .
André Hahn, “De Descartes à Claude Bernard: L’évolution du concept de méthode en science,” Humanisme actif II (Paris: Herman, 1968), 340’341, discusses Haller’s contributions in this area.
Diderot in the article “Encyclopédie”; Adanson in the notations on his copy of the Encyclopédie , as reported in J.P. Nicolas, Adanson et les Encyclopédistes (Paris: Université de Paris, 1965), p. 11.
Wladyslaw Folkierski, Entre le classicisme et le romantisme... XVIII’ siècle (Paris: Champion, 1969), p. 332, considers Marmontel’s restrictions on completely free interpretation of the unities an example of French conservatism in late Enlightenment theater.
History in the Encyclopédie (New York: C.U.P., 1947), R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History ,ed. T.M. Knox (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 72 an à passim ,discusses the two chief features of eighteenth-century thought, historicism and the Lockean philosophy.
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© 1977 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Hardesty, K. (1977). The Rationalist and Empirical Spirit. In: The Supplément to the Encyclopédie. Archives Internationales D’Histoire des Idées International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 89. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9660-1_2
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