Abstract
“No history is more interesting than the history of philosophers”, observed the Journal encyclopédique when presenting Savérien’s Histoire des philosophes modernes. It went on: “Men who, with their constant dedication and the power of their genius, lift the veil of prejudice from nature; men who enlighten our souls, raising them up and placing them above the whims of fate where that may find happiness: we can never be reminded too often of such men. But to write their history is much more difficult than writing the history of a conqueror. Battles, sieges, ambitious projects, or some act of mercy that shines out in the course of a barbarous life: all this can be easily depicted. But to succeed in grasping those elements that characterize the simple, uniform, and even obscure life of a sage; to take those delicate nuances that reveal the innermost part of the soul, to follow the wanderings of the mind, to find the fixed point among the feelings and, showing as much courage as skill, reject those opinions that were imposed by fanaticism, envy, or ignorance: this is the task of those who write the history of a philosopher” (JE, 1760, ii/3, p. 3). “How important is the use of the history of philosophy!”, observed the Calvinist refugee Paul-Jérémie Bitaubé, a translator of Homer and a member of the Berlin Academy as well as a ‘foreign affiliate’ to the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. “If it is certain that, before arriving at the truth, men stray in various ways, it is extremely important to know the mistakes made by those who preceded them; we see the mistakes made by others, but we might have made them ourselves: mistakes thus help to establish truth. Even more than that: the edifice of the sciences, like those of Egyptian pyramids built by the work of several generations, is the work of the whole of mankind”. Hence we the need to use the opinions of the ancients as “terms of reference” and to rescue some truths “from oblivion” (P.-J. Bitaubé, ‘De l’influence des belles-lettres sur la philosophie’, in Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres, Année mdcclxvii, Berlin, 1769, p. 490).
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Notes
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*Revised and updated by Gregorio Piaia.
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Revised and updated by Gregorio Piaia.
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“Connoître la nature des Causes, est de tous les objets de curiosité, le premier qui se présente à l’homme, lorsqu’il commence à réflechir. Son propre intérêt le conduit à rechercher ce qu’il est lui-même, quelle est son origine, et quelle sera sa fin. Or ces trois questions supposent celle qui a pour objet la première Cause” (Histoire, p. 1).
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In his call to “common sense”, Batteux seems to echo the positions of the Jesuit Claude Buffier (1661–1737), which were highly regarded during the eighteenth century and inspired the philosophers of the Scottish School in particular (Th. Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense appeared in 1764, a few years before the Histoire des causes premières). Cf. L. Marcil-Lacoste, Buffier and Thomas Reid. Two Common Sense Philosophers (Buffalo, 1982). In founding his enquiry into the ultimate truths on common sense, Buffier had distanced himself from both the ancients and the Scholastics (who “sometimes refuse to acknowledge the most important truths, when the latter are not enveloped in formalities and expressions authorised in their tribunals”) and from the nouveaux philosophes. Cf. C. Buffier, Traité des premières véritez et de la source de nos jugements (Paris: Vve Mauge, 1724), pp. 4–5.
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Quite a different from of periodization had been outlined at the beginning of the Mémoires historiques sur le principe actif de l’Univers, in which ancient philosophy is subdivided into three epochs: from the early philosophers to Thales; from Thales to Socrates; from Socrates to Chrysippus or Posidonius, who is considered to be “the last of ancient philosophers, because those who came later, up to Descartes, did nothing other than copying, translating, or commenting on those who had preceded them. We might add”, observes the author, “a fourth epoch, beginning with Descartes and ending with Newton; however, since the thoughts of these philosophers are in the hands and before the eyes of everybody, anyone who is interested will be able to connect the last link in the chain we are forming to the first link of modern philosophy” (HA Mém., XXVII, p. 168).
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In his first mémoire, Batteux had associated Anaxagoras’ thought (which included the doctrine of homoeomeries and the distinction between an intelligent and spiritual God and matter) with that of Newton: the latter “in his Optics, explicitly affirms that there are immutable and indestructible physical principles, possessing size and shape, endowed with those properties and qualities that the supreme Being wished to give them, in relation to the plan of the universe he had developed. He [Newton] explains why: because, without this, today the world would no longer be the same as it was a long time ago; water, earth, would no longer be the same as they were at the time of their primeval origin; and he adds that the intelligent Cause, by a special decree of its will, necessarily formed the first complete individual of each species, in order to give form, through him, to all the others. The transition from these principles to those of Anaxagoras is not long. These two men, though separated by over 20 centuries, go hand in hand; and perhaps it would not be difficult to show that this philosophy comes from even further and its source lies in the traditions of the remotest and most respectable Antiquity” (Conjectures sur le système des homéoméries, HA Mém., XXV, p. 67).
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Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, transl. H. Aarsleff, pp. 3–4: “One has the ambition of solving all mysteries; nature, the essence of all beings, the most hidden causes, those are the things that embellish it and that it promises to open up. The other is more modest and adjusts its inquiries to the weakness of the human mind, and being as unconcerned about what must lie beyond its grasp as it is avid to seize what lies within it, this sort of metaphysics is content to stay within the bounds that are marked out for it. The first turns all nature into a kind of enchantment that anyone who wishes to make progress in the search for truth, it is essential to know the mistakes of those who first sought to open the way”.
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A Treatise on Systems, Ch. i, in Philosophical Writings, I, p. 1: “A system is nothing other than the arrangement of different parts of an art or science in an order in which they all lend each other support and in which the last ones are explained by the first ones. Parts that explain other parts are called principles, and the fewer principles a system has the more perfect it is. It is even desirable to reduce all principles to a single one”. For a comparison with an analogous systematic approach in Batteux, see above, p. 121; cf. also J.-L. Vieillard-Baron, ‘Le concept de système de Leibniz à Condillac’, Studia Leibnitiana, Suppl., XV (1975), pp. 97–103.
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Cours d’études, Discours préliminaire, in Oeuvres philos., I, p. 404b: “Hence this study embraces all that which can contribute to the happiness or unhappiness of peoples: i.e. governments, customs, opinions, abuses, the arts and the sciences, the ‘revolutions’ and their causes, the advances in greatness, and the decline of empires, which is viewed in its beginning, acceleration, and final end. In a word, it embraces all those things that helped to form civil societies, improve them, defend them, corrupt them, and destroy them”.
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On Millot, who was appointed to teach history in Parma after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1768, see Guerci, Condillac storico, pp. 96–108; O. Penke, ‘L’abbé Millot et l’historiographie des Lumières françaises’, Acta Romanica, VII (1982), pp. 339–387. Note that abbé Millot is also considered to be the author of the Histoire philosophique de l’homme (London: Nourse, 1766, pp. 290), which is an individual history, − like Condillac’s – of the “véritable marche de l’esprit humain”, that is to say a psychological ‘history’ of the development of the human faculties.
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In addition to that presented in the Esquisse, let us mention another form of periodization – contained in a fragment later published by Alengry – pertaining to the ancient philosophers, which is of considerable interest from the point of view of the history of philosophy. In this fragment, Condorcet distinguishes between four epochs by referring to the “fashion in which men have understood the general economy of nature”. “In the first epoch, since they considered beings to be active and somehow urged by a power similar to their own, men gave a soul to all great objects and all great phenomena of matter, that is, they attributed ideas, wishes, and intentions to them. This was the cosmology of all savage nations […]. In the second epoch, philosophers considered nature to be somehow composed of brute matter and by an active principle modifying this matter”. Condorcet hints at the advancement represented by Democritus’ materialistic mechanism, then moves on to the “happier conception” elaborated by Pythagoras, who, having studied irrational numbers and having observed the regularity of natural phenomena, notably of the motion of stars, “inferred that there certainly existed a calculable law regulating those motions. This idea was so sublime and superior in the century of Pythagoras, that its intelligibility was lost after his death” (Alengry, Condorcet, pp. 782–783).
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Piaia, G., Bergamaschi, G., Scarduelli, L. (2015). The Impact of the esprit des Lumières on the History of Philosophy. In: Piaia, G., Santinello, G. (eds) Models of the History of Philosophy. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 216. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9966-9_2
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