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Notes
1 J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume 1 The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 138.
2 C. de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Lettres persanes (Cologne [i.e. Amsterdam], 1721).
3 On the composition of the letters see R. Pomeau, D’Arouet à Voltaire (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1985), ch. 19 and R. Vaillot, Avec Mme Du Châtelet (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1988), ch. 1.
4 T. Burnet, Telluris theoria sacra: orbis nostri originem et mutationes generales, quas aut jam subiit aut olim subiturus est, complectens […] (London, 1680).
5 The idea that nature manifested the wisdom, benevolence and glory of God was a commonplace in sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century thought, but this was not connected with an interest in studying natural history, and it is noteworthy that writers who attacked atheism did not invoke physico‐theology before the 1690s, although they regularly invoked it from then on. See N. C. Gillespie, ‘Natural History, Natural Theology, and Social Order: John Ray and the “Newtonian ideology”’, Journal of the History of Biology, 20 (1987), 1–50.
6 See Clarke’s Boyle Lectures: ‘A Discourse concerning the Being and Attributes of God, the Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and the Certainty of the Christian Revelation’ and ‘A Discourse concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation’, The Works of Samuel Clarke, 4 vols (London, 1738), vol. 2, 513–733.
7 J. Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious (London, 1696), v.
8 A. Collins, A Discourse of Free‐Thinking, occasion’d by the Rise and Growth of a Sect call’d Free‐Thinkers (London, 1713), 107–8.
9 See, for example, J. Tulloch, Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century (2 vols, Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1874).
10 See G. Dumas, Histoire du Journal de Trévoux depuis 1701 jusqu’en 1762 (Paris: Bouvin, 1936); and particularly G. R. Healy, ‘Mechanistic Science and the French Jesuits: A Study of the Responses of the Journal de Trevoux (1701–1762) to Descartes and Newton’ (University of Minnesota, PhD Dissertation, 1956).
11 On these general themes I am particularly indebted to R. Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666–1803 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), and J. B. Shank, ‘Before Voltaire: Newtonianism and the Origins of the Enlightenment in France, 1687–1734’ (Stanford University, PhD Dissertation, 2000). An updated version of parts of Shanks’s invaluable dissertation is due to appear in 2008 as The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
12 On these societies see H. Brown, Scientific Organizations in Seventeenth Century France, 1620–1680 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1967).
13 On the Académie see Hahn, Anatomy; F.‐J.‐M. Olivier‐Martin, L’Organisation Corporative de la France d’Ancien Régime (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1938); and R. Taton, Les Origines de l’Académie Royale des Sciences (Paris: Université de Paris, Palais de la découverte, 1966). Specifically on Colbert, see J. E. King, Science and Rationalism in the Government of Louis XIV, 1661–1683 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1949).
15 Oeuvres de Monsieur de Fontenelle […] nouvelle édition, 10 vols (Paris, 1762), vol. 5, 183–4.
14 Hahn, Anatomy of a Scientific Institution, 13–14. More generally, see J. M. Hirschfeld, ‘The Académie Royale des Sciences (1666–1683): Inauguration and Initial Problems of Method’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 1957); E. S. Saunders, ‘The Decline and Reform of the Académie des Sciences à Paris, 1676–1699’ (Ph.D. thesis, The Ohio State University, 1980); Shank, ‘Before Voltaire’; H. T. Parker, ‘French Administrators and French Scientists during the Old Regime and the Early Years of the Revolution’, in Ideas in History, edited by R. Herr and H. T. Parker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965), 85–109. Resistance from the University of Paris Faculty of Medicine successfully prevented the formation of a Parisian academy devoted to medicine, proposals for which were made from 1718 onwards: see P. Delaunay, Le monde médical parisien au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: J. Rousset, 1906), 309–10.
16 In this respect, it was in fact not unlike the more localized patronage networks of the sixteenth‐ and early seventeenth‐century Italian states: see M. Biagioli, Galileo Courtier, The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
17 The attempts to attract natural philosophers of first rank to the Académie continued after this initial recruitment, and it seems reasonably certain, for example, that Jacques Cassini travelled to England to offer Newton such a position in 1698: see R. S. Westfall, Never At Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 587.
18 See Hahn, Anatomy, 21–33.
19 See Hahn, 66–70.
22 Quoted in L. M. Marsak, ‘Bernard de Fontenelle: The Idea of Science in the French Enlightenment’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 49: 7 (1959), 1–64: 43. See also S. Delorme, ‘La vie scientifique à l’époque de Fontenelle d’àpres les “Eloges des Savants”’, Archeion, 19 (1937), 217–35.
20 Hahn, ch. 2.
21 The Essai was first published in Paris under a false Berlin imprint. It can be found in d’Alembert, Oeuvres, 5 vols (Paris, 1721–2), vol. 4, 335–72. The theme of lack of democracy was, needless to say, a constant refrain in those whose work the Académie refused to sanction. See, for example, B. de la Coste, Le reveil matin fait par Monsieur Bertrand pour reveller les pretendus sçavans matematiciens de l’Academie Royale de Paris (Hamburg, 1674); G. R. de Vausenville, Essai Physico‐géométrique (Paris, 1778); J.‐P. Brissot de Warville, De la verité, ou méditations sur les moyens de parvenir à la verité dans toutes les conaissances humaines (Neufchâtel, 1782). There is a good discussion in Hahn, Anatomy, 140–58; see also R. Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Régime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
23 Fontenelle, Oeuvres, vol. 3, 381–2. It is worth nothing in this context that in 1694, the Dictionnaire of the Académie Française had called for the expunging of all scientific terms from the language: see Marsak, ‘Bernard de Fontenelle’, 44.
24 Fontenelle, Oeuvres, vol. 5, 131.
25 It is worth remembering in this context that Sprat, Royal Society apologist par excellence, was not a natural philosopher either but a poet and preacher.
26 See L. Mathieu‐Kerns and M. A. Nusimovici, ‘1686–1687. L’Odyssée de l’espace, Fontenelle ou le génie de la vulgarisation scientifique’, in Fontenelle: Actes du colloque tenu à Rouen du 6 au 10 Octobre 1987, edited by A. Niderst (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989), 87–103.
27 There are two main discussions of the idea before Fontenelle: H. More, Democritus Platonissans, or an Essay upon the Infinity of Worlds out of Platonick Principles (Cambridge, 1646); and P. Borel, Discours nouveau prouvant la pluralité des mondes, que les astres sont des terres habitées, & la terre un estoile, qu’elle est hors du centre du monde dans le troisième ciel, & se torné devant le soleil qui est fixe, & autres choses tres‐curieuses (Geneva, 1657). There was a notable attack on the idea of a plurality of worlds in the anti‐Cartesian writer G. de Vries, Dissertio academica de lunicolis, appendix to Daniel Voet, Physiologia, sive, de natura rerum libri sex (Utrecht, 1694). See the discussion in S. J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), ch. 5.
28 As E. Harth notes in her Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 139–40, there was a tradition of such works that targeted women, from L. de Lesclache, Avantages que les femmes peuvent recevoir de la philosophie, et principalment de la morale (Paris, 1667) to J. de Lalande, Astronomie des dames (Paris, 1786), which was frequently bound with Fontenelle in the nineteenth century. Cf. J. B. Shank, ‘Neither Natural Philosophy, nor Science, nor Literature: Gender and Natural Knowledge in Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes’, in Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science, edited by J. Zinsser (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), 86–110.
29 On the role of women in salon culture, see Harth, Cartesian Women; J. DeJean, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and D. Goodman, ‘Enlightenment Salons: The Convergence of Female and Philosophic Ambitions’, Eighteenth‐Century Studies, 22 (1989), 329–50. See also M. Feingold, The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture (New York and Oxford: New York Public Library, 2004), ch. 5.
30 Shank, ‘Before Voltaire’, 128.
31 Both quoted in A. Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 54–5.
33 Quoted in A. Goldgar, 113.
32 Quoted in A. Goldgar, 62.
34 See, in particular, J. Desmarets de Saint‐Sorlin, La Comparaison de la langue et de poésie française avec la grec et la latine, et des poètes grecs, latins, et françaises (Paris, 1670).
35 On these questions, see the discussion in N. Hepp, Homère en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1968).
36 See Shank, ‘Before Voltaire’, ch. 5.
37 In fact, both Newton and Leibniz agreed that infinitesimal calculus required justification in terms of limit procedures, which were geometrical and open to inspection at every stage. The difference was that Newton believed that this meant that any procedure using infinitesimal calculus had to be translated into geometrical limit procedures, whereas Leibniz believed that it was only the general technique that had to be justified in terms of limit procedures, and that once this was done, it was not required that one justify each and every operation employing infinitesimals in this way. See N. Guicciardini, Reading the Principia: The Debate on Newton’s Mathematical Methods for Natural Philosophy from 1687–1736 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
38 See P. Costabel, ‘Introduction’, and André Robinet, ‘Les académiciens des sciences malebranchists’, in Malebranche, Oeuvres complètes, edited by André Robinet, 20 vols (Paris: Vrin, 1958–78), vol. 17–2, 309–16 and vol. 20, 162–74, respectively; A. Robinet, ‘Le groupe malebranchiste introducteur du calcul infinitésimal en France’, Revue d’histoire des sciences, 13 (1960), 287–308; and idem, Malebranche de l’Académie des sciences. L’oeuvre scientifique, 1674–1715 (Paris: Vrin, 1970); J. O. Fleckenstein, ‘Pierre Varignon und die mathematischen Wissenschaften im Zeitalter der Cartesianismus’, Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences, 5 (1948), 76–138.
39 N. Malebranche, De la recherche de la vérité, edited by G. Rodis‐Lewis (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), Book VI, Part 1, ch 5.
40 Fontenelle, Oeuvres, vol. 10, 29–43, at 31.
41 The point is well made in Shank, ‘Before Voltaire’, 237.
42 See M. Hellyer, Catholic Physics: Jesuit Natural Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 194.
43 Hellyer, 178.
44 By mid‐century the anti‐medieval tendency in Jesuit natural philosophy will become transformed into nothing short of a rewriting of history. The Jesuit Professor at the University of Vienna, Josef Redlhamer, in his 1755 textbook Philosophiae Naturalis, provides a genealogy for Jesuit physics, in which he does not even mention the Latin medieval philosophers, confining his attention to Averroes, who he complains substituted contentious abstract metaphysical questions for physical ones, and completely ignored experiments: J. Redlhamer, Philosophiae Naturalis. Pars prima, seu Physica generalis ad praefixam in scholis nostris normam concinnata (Vienna, 1755), 7. As Hellyer points out: ‘Aside from the erroneous detour provided by the Arabs, the course of the history of science followed the straight path of the development of experimental science. The Jesuits, in Redlhamer’s telling, were integral to this process. His readers could be forgiven for supposing that the Jesuits had never done any other kind of natural philosophy’: Catholic Physics, 194–5.
48 Shank, ‘Before Voltaire’, 260.
45 Fontenelle, ‘Préface de l’histoire de l’Académie des Sciences’, Oeuvres, vol. 10, 3.
46 Oeuvres, vol. 5, 12.
47 Oeuvres, 13.
49 See A. R. Hall, Philosophers at War: The Quarrel between Newton and Leibniz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
50 A year before the appearance of his Analyse, for example, l’Hôpital was writing to Johann Bernoulli asking him to explain what centrifugal force – the key notion in vortex theory – was! See D. Bertoloni‐Meli, Equivalence and Priority: Newton Versus Leibniz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 201.
51 See M. Blay, La naissance de la mécanique analytique: La science du mouvement au tournant des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992).
52 See the account of Villemot in E. J. Aiton, The Vortex Theory of the Planetary Motions (London: Macdonald, 1972), 152–72.
53 See Aiton, Vortex Theory, 170–80. Cf. J. M. Briggs, ‘Aurora and Enlightenment’, Isis, 58 (1967), 498–515.
54 Compare, for example, Aiton, Vortex Theory, and Blay, La naissance de la mécanique. Both deal with mechanics in France in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, yet there is hardly any overlap in the kinds of question that they look at.
55 See Aiton, Vortex Theory, 152.
56 See Shank, ‘Before Voltaire’, 367–76.
57 See Shank, ‘Before Voltaire’, 345–55; and, for more detail, A. R. Kleinbaum, ‘Jean Jacques Dortous de Mairan (1678–1771): A Study of an Enlightenment Scientist’ (PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1970). Shank also draws attention to the rise in prominence of the Observatoire, where observational work was close to constitutive of the activity of the astronomers.
58 See H. Guerlac, Newton on the Continent (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), ch. 3.
59 See the detailed account of these questions in Greenberg, The Problem of the Earth’s Shape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chs 1–5; and M. Terrall, The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), ch. 3.
60 See Shank, ‘Before Voltaire’, ch. 10. The pieces are largely discussions and reviews of a French translation of the Leibniz/Clarke letters with an extensive collection of related pieces, collected and introduced by P. Des Maizeaux: Recueil de diverses pieces, sur la philosophie, la religion naturelle, l’histoire, les mathematiques, &c par Mrs Leibniz, Clarke, Newton et autres auteurs celébres, 2 vols (Amsterdam, 1720).
61 J.‐J. Dortous de Mairan, ‘Recherches géometriques sur la diminution des degrés terrestres en allant de l’équateur vers les pôles’, Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences (1720), 231–77. See the account in Greenberg, The Problem of the Earth’s Shape, ch. 2.
62 I am indebted in what follows to Terrall, The Man Who Flattened the Earth, ch. 2.
63 Maupertuis had spent three months in England in 1728, consulting with Newtonian natural philosophers and mathematicians, but there is no evidence of Newtonian sympathies as a result of the trip. The first signs of an acceptance of the Newtonian account are in 1731. See Terrall, 41–3.
69 Terrall, The Man Who Flattened the Earth, 123.
64 See Terrall, 72–83.
65 See J. L. Greenberg, ‘Geodesy in Paris in the 1730s and the Paduan Connection’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 13 (1983), 239–60; and idem, ‘Degrees of Longitude and the Earth’s Shape: The Diffusion of a Scientific Idea in Paris in the 1730s’, Annals of Science, 41 (1984), 151–8.
66 Terrall, The Man Who Flattened the Earth, 91–2.
67 Given that the observations had to be made at the equator, and given that Africa was largely unexplored and the islands of south‐east Asia too far, a double chain of mountains in the viceroy of Peru (actually present‐day Ecuador) was identified as the ideal observation point.
68 P.‐L. Moreau de Maupertuis, La figure de la terre determinée par les observations de MM. de Maupertuis, Clairaut, Camus, Le Monnier, Outhier, Celsuis au cercle polaire (Paris, 1738).
71 Lettres philosophiques, 37.
70 I quote from the first full English version of the Lettres philosophiques: Letters Concerning the English Nation […] The second edition, with large additions (London, 1741), 28.
72 Parallel claims about natural philosophy being the sole arbiter of cognitive claims had been made by Spinoza, but Spinoza had explicitly associated this tool of arbitration with an unreconstructed form of Cartesian natural philosophy, which was discredited by the time he proposed it. To make matters worse, he defended this discredited system on a priori grounds, making the whole project unacceptable to anyone seriously engaged in – or was even up to date in – natural philosophy. See S. Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 471–92.