D'Alembert, the mathematician, for some years his special colleague
on the Encyclopédie, and Baron d'Holbach. The former, one of
the staunchest friends of Voltaire, though a less invincible
fighter than Diderot, counted for practical freethought by his
miscellaneous articles, his little book on the Jesuits (1765), his
Pensées philosophiques, his physics, and the general rationalism of
his Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie. It is noteworthy that
in his intimate correspondence with Voltaire he never avows theism,
and that his and Diderot's friend, the atheist Damilaville, died
in his arms. [1122] On Dumarsais, too, he penned an éloge of which
Voltaire wrote: "Dumarsais only begins to live since his death;
you have given him existence and immortality." [1123] And perpetual
secretary as he was of the Academy, the fanatical daughter of Madame
Geoffrin could write to him in 1776: "For many years you have set
all respectable people against you by your indecent and imprudent
manner of speaking against religion." [1124] Baron d'Holbach, a
naturalized German of large fortune, was on the other hand one of the
most strenuous propagandists of freethought in his age. Personally no
less beloved than Helvétius, [1125] he gave his life and his fortune
to the work of enlightening men on all the lines on which he felt
they needed light. Much of the progress of the physical sciences in
pre-revolutionary France was due to the long series--at least eleven
in all--of his translations of solid treatises from the German;
and his still longer series of original works and translations from
the English in all branches of freethought--a really astonishing
movement of intellectual energy despite the emotion attaching
to the subject-matter--was for the most part prepared in the same
essentially scientific temper. Of all the freethinkers of the period
he had perhaps the largest range of practical erudition; [1126] and
he drew upon it with unhasting and unresting industry. Imitating the
tactic of Voltaire, he produced, with some assistance from Diderot,
Naigeon, and others, a small library of anti-Christian treatises under
a variety of pseudonyms; [1127] and his principal work, the famous
System of Nature (1770), was put out under the name of Mirabaud,
an actual person, then dead. Summing up as it does with stringent
force the whole anti-theological propaganda of the age, it has been
described as a "thundering engine of revolt and destruction." [1128]
It was the first published atheistic [1129] treatise of a systematic
kind, if we except that of Robinet, issued some years before; and it
significantly marks the era of modern freethought, as does the powerful
Essai sur les préjugés, published in the same year, [1130] by its stern
impeachment of the sins of monarchy--here carrying on the note struck
by Jean Meslier in his manuscript of half-a-century earlier. Rather
a practical argument than a dispassionate philosophic research,
its polemic against human folly laid it open to the regulation
retort that on its own necessarian principles no such polemic was
admissible. That retort is, of course, ultimately invalid when the
denunciation is resolved into demonstration. If, however, it be termed
"shallow" on the score of its censorious treatment of the past, [1131]
the term will have to be applied to the Hebrew books, to the Gospel
Jesus, to the Christian Fathers, to Pascal, Milton, Carlyle, Ruskin,
and a good many other prophets, ancient and modern. The synthesis of
the book is really emotional rather than philosophic, and hortatory
rather than scientific; and it was all the more influential on that
account. To the sensation it produced is to be ascribed the edict
of 1770 condemning a whole shelf of previous works to be burnt along
with it by the common hangman.