PENSÉES ET CONSIDÉRATIONS

12mo, pp. [ii], xviii, 357, [3] table des matières, [4] approbation and privilege du roi; paper flaw to half-title, single wormhole in margin of prelims, occasional spotting, and paper lightly yellowed throughout; dampstaining to the last few leaves; otherwise clean and crisp; in contemporary marbled wrappers, spine with old paper reinforcement, handwritten paper label on upper wrapper and title in rather smudged ink on spine; somewhat worn but still an attractive copy in its way. First edition of this uncommon examination of one of the more pernicious examples of the 'philosophisme' polluting the intellectual culture of the late eighteenth century, the La Philosophie de la Nature by Delisle de Sales, which had first appeared in 1778. The philosopher and mathematician Nicolas Desponts (born 1749) taught at the École centrale of the Aube département and at the college in Brienne, where the young Napoleon Bonaparte was among his pupils. In this work, he leaves the reader in no doubt of his view of the philosophical currents of the time: 'In reading this immense collection of incoherent chapters, which have been decorated with the glitzy title The Philosophy of Nature, I saw that it was a resumé of the most dangerous paradoxes which are found spread widely around the writings of our philosophists, and which our author [Delisle] has himself endeavoured to increase'. Following the structure of Delisle's work, and quoting extensively from it, Desponts attacks his target's approach to physics (motion, creation, and the origins of the universe), human biology (ranging from generation to hermaphroditism), psychology and the soul, ethics (from the principles of morality to suicide) and finally theology (the relation of God to humans, the divine attributes, the possibility of miracles, and the nature of heaven, hell, angels, and devils). OCLC records three copies, at Chicago, Cambridge, and the BnF.