A German translation appeared in 1772. The Essay was reprinted over 20 times in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Beattie attacked Hume by putting him in the same company as Hobbes and Spinoza. Joshua Reynolds celebrated Beattie’s essay with an allegorical painting, entitled “The Triumph of Truth”, depicting Beattie standing with his book under his arm and watching an avenging angel sending three demons - one of whom is Hume, and another Voltaire - into hell.

Beattie’s defence of orthodoxy against Hume’s rationalism, based on sociological rather metaphysical arguments, became widely popular.

“Beattie was no intellectual giant, though his writings are said to have had some influence of Kant, mainly (it is to be feared) in transmitting a faulty view of the achievement of British philosophy. But his ambitious assault on the philosophical basis of deism was widely welcomed. Oxford University presented him with an honorary degree, George III awarded him a pension, and Sir Joshua Reynolds painted a controversial scene of Beattie vanquishing Hume, in the ‘Triumph of Truth’. Beattie’s celebrity was symptomatic of the times, though not every defender of the faith met with such universal approbation.” (Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, p. 469-70).

First performed 13 January 1770 without success.

Published between 1779 and 1783.

A pamphlet concerned with the main constitutional controversy of the 18^th century, namely, the respective control of king and parliament over the executive. Defending the active intervention of the electorate and a reduction in the crown’s powers, the pamphlet includes Burke’s famous, and new, justification of party, defined as a body of men united on public principle, which could act as a constitutional link between king and parliament, providing continuity in administration, or principled criticism in opposition. (Encyclopaedia Britinnica)

Famous English musicologist, whom his friend Joshua Reynolds described as “both a philosopher & a Musician.” Burney met Diderot in Paris where Diderot asked his daughter, Angelique, to play for Burney. In his book he mentions her as “one of the finest harpsichord-players in Paris”.

Written in part as a rejoinder to a story by Saint-Lambert, Les Deux Amis, conte iroquois, is set in ‘distant lands’, among the North American Indians. Diderot wished to show that “greatness of soul and noble qualities are found in all situations and in all countries...and you do not have to go as far as the Iroquois to find two friends”.

This was a review Grimm asked Diderot to write of a pamphlet about Garrick and acting for the Correspondance littéraire. Over the following years he expanded and revised the piece, casting it dialogue form and entitling it Paradoxe sur le comédien. In a letter to Grimm, dated 14 November 1769, Diderot wrote, “I claim that sensibility makes mediocre actors; extreme sensibility, limited actors; cold sense and head, sublime actors.” (The editor of Diderot’s correspondence, Georges Roth, suggests that Paradoxe sur le comédien emerged from this comment.)

“Great poets, the great actors, and perhaps all the great imitators of nature in general, whoever they are, endowed as they are with a fine imagination, excellent judgment, fine tact, absolutely sure taste, have less sensibility than anyone. They are equally well equipped for too many things; they are too busy looking, recognizing, and imitating, to be vividly affected within themselves. I see them ceaselessly with their portfolios on their knees and their pencil in their hand.” (Paradoxe sur le comédien.)

Memories of his father and family, sparked off by a visit to Langres in 1770, led to this dialogue in which Diderot, his father, brother and sister discuss whether or not there are cases when it is right to disobey the law.

This work was a reply to Morellet’s attack on Galiani’s Dialogue sur le commerce des bles, published the previous year, and marked a decisive place in Diderot’s developing interest in politics. Diderot was lead to agree with Galiani’s argument that the cause of free trade in grain was mistaken after he saw the condition endured by the peasants during a visit to Langres and Bourbonne. The restrictions on the grain trade had been lifted six years earlier and in 1770 the price of corn had reach its highest level before 1787.

Andre Morellet (1729-1819) was an admirer of Diderot, a freethinking Jesuit, tutor to the grandson of the King of Poland, a prolific author and was often employed as a writer in government service. He contributed articles to the Encyclopédie and was a major contributor of the Dictionnaire of the Academie and helped secure the revival of the Academie after the revolution.

A tranlation appeared in 1840.

An attack on Holbach’s Essai sur les prejuges, which advocated measures to make society less hierarchical, close and stultified; if princes did not adopt such measures, then philosophers should suggest them to the people and encourage public opinion.

A critique of William Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (1737, 1741) that contended that Book 6 of the Aeneid is an allegory of Aeneas's initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries.

A poem which has been described as marking the transition from neoclassicism to romanticism.

Published in 2 volumes, with an English translation appearing in 1795. Several editions of the work appeared in 1770, a few of which included Discours preliminaire de l'Auteur which Naigeon printed separately in London. The Abrege du Code de la Nature which is the final chapter of the book was also published separately and has been attributed to Diderot. Samuel Wilkinson published an English translation in 1820. According to Wilkinson, "no work, ancient or modern, has surpassed it in the eloquence and sublimity of its language or in the facility with which it treats the most abstruse and difficult subjects. It is without exception the boldest effort the human mind has yet produced in the investigation of Morals and Theology. The republic of letters has never produced another author whose pen was so well calculated to emancipate mankind from all those trammels with which the nurse, the school master, and the priest have successively locked up their noblest faculties, before they were capable of reasoning and judging for themselves."

Holbach, a rich German baron, settled in Paris, where he wrote a number of books attacking religion; because of their subversive content, many of his works were channelled to Holland and for publication and smuggled back to France where they were mostly published anonymously or pseudo-anonymously. Système de la Nature, published under the name of J.B. Mirabaud (the late secretary of the Académie Française), caused an uproar. It was condemned by the parlement of Paris on August 18, 1770; the parlement accused the book, amongst other matters, of ‘reviving’ and ‘expanding’ the ‘system of Lucretius’. The book was condemned to be burned alongside Voltaire's Dieu et les Hommes, Holbach's Discours sur les Miracles, La Contagion sacree, and Le Christianisme devoile.

After reading it Goethe declared that he could not understand how anyone could accept such a grey, Cimmerian, corpse-like affair, devoid of colour,life, art, humanity.

Système de la Nature, which appeared in an abridged version in 1774 under the title Le vrai sens du Système de la Nature, bears the mark of innumerable conversations between Holbach and Diderot. D’Holbach who knew himself to be no stylist would ask Diderot to supply him with a purple passage; the concluding paen to Nature (“O Nature! Sovereign of all beings! Any you her adorable daughters Virtue, Reason and Truth, be for ever our sole divinities”, etc.) is believed to be Diderot’s work.

“Man is unhappy only because he does not know nature” - this is the opening sentence to the work. Man’s mind, continues Holbach, is infected with prejudices; he seeks to “rush beyond the visible world”, and “he despises realities to meditate on chimeras; neglects experience to indulge in systems and conjectures; dares not cultivate his reason”. “In a word, man disdains the study of nature to run after phantoms.”

Throughout there are clear warnings regarding the limits of knowledge: “it is not given man to know everything, it is not given him to know his origins; it is not given him to penetrate to the essence of things or to go back to first principles”.

“Man’s life is a line that nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, without his ever being able to swerve from it, even for an instant. He is born without his own consent; his organization does in nowise depend upon himself; his ideas come to him involuntarily; his habits are in the power of those who cause him to contract them; he is unceasingly modified by causes, whether visible or concealed, over which he has no control, which necessarily regulate his mode of existence, give the hue to his way of thinking, and determine his manner of acting.”

Like La Mettrie and others Holbach viewed religion as the enemy of man’s passionate nature: “If we examine matters without prejudice, we will find that most of the precepts which religion, or its fanatical and supernatural ethics, prescribe to man, are as ridiculous as they impossible to practice. To prohibit men their passions is to forbid them to be men; to advise a man carried away by his imagination to moderate his desires is to advise him to change his physical constitution, to order his blood to run more slowly. To tell a lover of impetuous temperament that he must stifle his passion for the object that enchants him is to make him understand that he should renounce his happiness.”

Holbach on deliberation: “When the soul is assailed by two motives that act alternately upon it, or modify it successively, it deliberates; the brain is in a sort of equilibrium, accompanied with perpetual oscillations, sometimes towards one object, sometimes towards the other, until the most forcible carries the point, and thereby extricates it from this state of suspense, in which consists the indecision of his will.”

Man is not a free agent: “That man should have free agency, it were needful that he should be able to will or choose without motive, or that he could prevent motives coercing his will. Action always being the effect of his will once determined, and as his will cannot be determined but by a motive which is not in his own power, it follows that he is never the master of the determination of his own peculiar will; that consequently he never acts as a free agent.”

What explains our belief in our own freedom? “It is the great complication of motion in man, it is the variety of his action, it is the multiplicity of causes that move him, whether simultaneously or in continual succession, that persuades him that he is a free agent.”

On the difficulty of predicting an individual’s particular actions: “Nevertheless it must be acknowledged that the multiplicity and diversity of the causes which continually act upon man, frequently without even his knowledge, render it impossible, or at least extremely difficult for him to recur to the true principles of his own peculiar actions, much less the actions of others.”

Diderot writes to Le Reve de d’Alembert: “this dialogue is at one and the same time the wildest extravagance and the profoundest philosophy. It was a clever idea to put my ideas into the mouth of a man who is dreaming. Wisdom must often be given the appearance of madness in order to gain admittance. I prefer it that people say: ‘But that is not as crazy as you might think’, rather than say: ‘Listen to me, here are some very wise things’.” Letter to Sophie Volland, August, 1769.

Published anonymously with Voltaire's Epître à Uranie. A critique of the Gospels based on a literal reading of the Bible.

A comprehensive critique of historical and contemporary defenders of Christianity.

The book appeared under the name of Dumarsais and was presented as a version of Dumarsais's essay on the Philosophe, first published in the Nouvelles libertés de penser in 1750. Frederick the Great published a refutation of the Essaiunder the title Examen de l'Essai sur les préjugés (1770); Frederick disagreed in particular with Holbach's remarks on government. He forward a copy of the work to Voltaire.

Published in Amsterdam and translated from Anthony Collins, a strong attack on Judaism and Christianity.

Holbach's loose translation of Peter Annet's History and character of St. Paul examined, written in answer to Lyttelton.

Kant’s inaugural dissertation composed on becoming professor of philosophy at Königsberg University and first step towards a critical philosophy.

David Hume made arrangements to have the Memoirs by Cristof Hermann Manstein (1711–1757) work published in 1770; he wrote a preface to the work which was published in the same year. A German translation from the English version and a French version based on the original manuscript appeared in 1771.

This moralising fantasy, in which absolute monarchy and the established church are imagined away in favour of patriot kingship and natural religion, became the most best-selling work in pre-revolutionary France. (It was not, as most scholars have thought, Rousseau’s SocialContract.)

Antimilitarist drama that was not performed until 1782.

Published first in 1770 in six volumes, the Historie was revised in 1774, and again, with extensive and audacious revisions, in 1780. Diderot made a large number of contributions, all of which were anonymous. His main involvement was with the third edition, for which he wrote nearly a fifth of the text. It has only been during the last thirty years, with the discovery of the collection of Diderot’s manuscripts known as the Fonds Vandeul, that it has become possible to identify these contributions. The work was a history of European colonization from its beginnings in the East Indies and West Indies. It combined historical and anthropological information, and attacks on slavery, with a firm belief in the benefits of commerce, “this new soul of the moral world”. In the Salon de 1769 Diderot wrote that everyone was becoming “preoccupied with administration, commerce, agriculture, imports, exports and finance...The Abbé Raynal can boast of having been the hero of this change”. Raynal’s work was one of the most frequently reprinted books in the years immediately preceding the French revolution, and Raynal himself was invited to be a member of the Constituent Assembly in 1789. According to Furbank, the History of the Two Indies had almost the same importance for the philosophique movement as the Encyclopédie itself. Its original purpose had been to recommend a more rational colonial policy for France. However, the overall effect of Diderot’s contributions to the third edition transformed the work from one which advanced colonialism to one which suggested that colonialism was a crime. In one passage he urged the inhabitants of the Cape to resist the colonialists: “Flee, unhappy Hottentots! Flee! Hide yourselves deep in your forests. The wild beasts who inhabit there are less to be feared than the monsters whose rule you will fall... Or if you feel the courage for it, take up your hatchets, bend your bows and rain down poisoned arrows on these intruders. May none remain to bring the news back to their fellow-country men”.

Raynal’s History, and especially the third edition, was one of the most discussed and important books of the late eighteenth century; it influenced, for example, the young Napoleon, who was entertained by Raynal in Marseilles. The Holy See objected to the book in 1774, when it was placed on the Index. Smuggled copies of the work found their way into France - it was originally published in Holland - and eventually in May 1781, Parlement condemned it to be burned and Raynal was threatened with arrest and had to seek refuge abroad. The work appeared in thirty-five editions in five or six languages in thirty years. In England it ran through eighteen editions.

“Raynal is a historian of a sort we no longer see; so much the better for him and so much the worse for history. If from the beginning history had seized, and dragged by the hair, both political and religious tyrants, I don’t suppose they would have been better men, but they would have been more thoroughtly detested, and their unhappy subjects would have perhaps become less patient with them.” Then after doubting whether such bellicose history was still history Diderot writes, “All right efface the word ‘history’ from his book, and be silent. The kind of book I like is the one that kings and their courtiers detest, it is the kind of book that give birth to Brutuses - give it whatever name you please.” (Quoted in Hans Wolpe, Raynal et sa machine de guerre: ‘L’Histoire des deux Indes’ et ses perfectionnements, 1957, 43-4)

On slavery Raynal wrote, “even imaginary misfortunes wring tears from us in the silence of our study and, even more, in the threatre. Only the fatal destiny of miserable Negroes fails to interest us. They are oppressed, they are mutilated, they are burned, they are stabbed - and we hear it coldly, without emotion. The tormets of a people to which we owe our pleasures never reach our hearts.” (Quoted in Wolpe, ibid., 155)

A critique of Holbach's most famous work.

Rousseau finished Les Confessions, begun in 1766, in 1770 and started private readings of the work, which in 1771 and at the request of Mme d’Épinay are banned by the police. Rousseau prohibited the publication of his Confessions before the year 1800. Nevertheless, printers managed to get hold of copies, perhaps through Theresa, Rousseau’s wife, who was always short of money; the first part appeared in 1781 and the second part in 1788.

“When I wrote my Confessions I was already old and disillusioned with the vain pleasures of life, all of which I had tasted and felt their emptiness in my heart”. Reveries of the Solitary Walker, 76.

De Sales corresponded regularly with Voltaire and Rousseau.

Voltaire began this series of philosophical essays in 1770. They eventually extended to nine volumes.

“More than half the habitable world is still populated by two-footed animals who live in a horrible condition approximating the state of nature, with hardly enough to live on and cloth themselves, barely enjoying the gift of speech, barely aware that they are miserable, living and dying practically without knowing it.” ‘Homme’

Published between 1771-74 The Minstrel became a popular poem on the progress of genius, in Spenserian stanzas, which inspired many early Romantics.

Published in 2 volumes, a critique of Holbach's Système de la Nature. Bergier frequented the same salons as Holbach and Diderot and remained a staunch defender of Catholicism.

Includes praise of James Beattie but criticism of David Hume.

Bougainville was a French soldier, sailor, writer and mathematician who made a journey around the world between 1766 and 1769. He had returned to France with a Tahitian, Aotourou, who spent a year in Paris. He was presented to Louis XV, and acquired a liking for the opera, which he would attend on his own and dressed in European clothes. He died of smallpox on his homeward journey.

Diderot wrote a review of Bougainville’s book which he expanded to form Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville. “Ah Monsieur de Bougainville, sail away from the shores of these innocent people and fortunate Tahitians; they are happy and you can only harm their happiness...This man whom you are grabbing like an animal or a plant is a child like you. What right have you over him? Leave him his way of life, it is more upright and wise than yours. His ignorance is worth more than all your enlightenment.”

Castillon was a member of the Berlin Academy. He condemned Holbach's Système de la Nature as a "long and wicked error".

A draft version is known to have existed by September as Diderot gave a two-hour reading from it to a friend.

This short play - “the one really effective piece that he ever wrote for the stage” - seems to have been first sketched, as ‘The Play and the Prologue’, in 1770 or 1771. He revised it several times and completed it around 1783, when he was seventy. It concerns Hardouin, who embarks on a public examination of his motives and who enjoys doing things for others but in his own way, for which reason he is not always thanked.

“I, a good man, as people say? I’m nothing of the kind. I was born essentially hard, bad, perverse. I’m practically moved to tears by the tenderness of that mother for her child, her sensibility, her gratitude; I might even develop a taste for her; and despite myself I persist in the project that may make her miserable . . . Hardouin, you amuse yourself with everything; nothing is sacred to you; you’re a regular monster . . . That’s bad, very bad . . . You must absolutely get rid of this bad inclination . . . and renounce the prank I’ve planned? . . . Oh, no . . . But after this one, no more, no more. It will be the last one of my life.”

“I was born, I think, to do nothing that pleases me, to do everything that others demand, and to satisfy nobody - no, nobody - not even myself.”

“Is he good? Is he bad?”/ “One after the other.”/ “Like you, like me, like everybody.”

A dithyrambic poem denouncing injustice.

Published at a time when there was considerable public debate about the effectiveness and advance of capital punishment. Eden argued that it should be deployed only for the most serious offences.

Eden was an MP (1774-89), an ambassador to Spain and Holland, President of the Board of Trade under Grenville (1806-07), and raised to the peerage of Ireland (1789), Britain (1793).

Historical drama which appeared between 1771 and 1773.

Published in 4 volumes and includes criticism of the work of David Hume

One of three political novels published by Haller.

Published between 1771 and 1793.

Volume of lyric poetry.

An attack on the physiocrats and liberal economic policies that failed to alleviate the conditions of the poverty stricken.

Begun in 1767, a best-selling novel, in imitation of Laurence Sterne’s “novel of sensibility”. “Unlike Rousseau and Sterne, Mackenzie offered nothing that would upset the pious or the prudish. His was the melancholy tale of a man whose life was a succession of sentimental encounters with the harsh realities of the world and who devoted it to mitigating them.” (Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, p. 481.)

Member of the Scottish school, friend and colleague of Adam Smith, Millar’s book appeared in a second edition in 1773 and a third in 1779. In an analysis of the different relations of power between men and women, fathers and children, states and subjects, Millar devotes the last chapter to “The Authority of a Master over Servants”. He argues that slavery is “inconsistent with humanity” and that “when a people become civilized, and when they have made considerable progress in commerce and manufactures, one would imagine they should entertain more liberal views, and be influenced by more extensive considerations of utility.” Slavery is unprofitable and “contrary to the true interest of the master . . . No conclusion seems more certain than this, that men will commonly exert more activity when they work for their own benefit, than when they are compelled to labour for the benefit merely of another. The introduction of personal liberty has therefore an infallible tendency to render the inhabitants of a country more industrious.”

Published in 2 volumes, a translation of Millot's Élémens de l’histoire d’Angleterre (1769). Contains praise of Hume's History - a “treasure of philosophical and political knowledge.”

Published in Amsterdam by Marc-Michel Rey and Charles Guillaume Frédéric Dumas. Against the Physiocrats who claimed that wealth is generated by agriculture De Pinto claimed that economic prosperity could be increased by speculation and public borrowing.

A work which laid the foundation for a scientific system for life insurance and old-age pensions.

First German novel by a woman.

Written after Count Wielhorski asked Rousseau to advise the Poles on how to reform their institutions. It was first published in 1782.

Published between 1771 and 1775.

“Lucretius is admirable in his exordiums, in his descriptions, in his ethics, in everything he says against superstition. That beautiful line, Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum (Such are the heights of evil that religion can urge, I, 101), will last as long as the world lasts. If he had not been as ridiculous as all the others as a physical scientist, he would have been a divine man”.

A ten-page pamphlet in which Voltaire demonstrated the injustice undermining the trail against Mme Monbailli who with her husband was accused of murdering her mother. Mme Monbailli was acquited in May 1772.

The essay was published in volume 1 of Melanges.

“LIBERTY, TRUTH and POVERTY are the three words that men of letters should always keep before their eyes, as a monarch should keep POSTERITY.”

An anthology which includes David Hume’s “On Impudence and Modesty,” “On Love and Marriage,” and “On Avarice”.

This edition contains a commentary on Judge Mansfield decision, made on 14 May, that there is no legal basis for slavery in England.

Burgh was a pupil of Richard Price. In the Disquisitions, published between 1772 and 1772 and which enjoyed immense popularity, Burgh demanded universal male suffrage.

A comedy.

Catherince the Great wrote over two dozens plays and operettes. Oh, These Times is a satirical attack on the many vices Catherine wished to root out from Russia: religious hypocrisy, superstition and slander. The main character, Mrs Sanctimonious, is a superficially religious old woman who resembles Moliere's Tartuffe.

Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville wasincluded in Correspondance littéraire, September-October, 1773 and March-April, 1774.

“Examine the history of all nations and all centuries and you will always find men subject to three codes: the code of nature, the code of society, and the code of religion; and constrained to infinge upon all three codes in succession, for these codes never were in harmony. The result of this has been that there never was in any country...a real man, a real citzen, or a real believer”.

A short essay published in an edition of Correspondance littéraire, 1812. “They have preserved all the energy of their natural egoism and self-interest...more civilized than us on the outside, they have remained true savages within, all of them more or less machiavellian. The symbol of women in general is that of the Apocalypse, on whose forehead was written: MYSTERY.”

A favourite work of Diderot’s which he kept on revising. It consists of a dialogue about the art of acting in which the first of two speakers argues that what characterises a great actor is not some superior power of feeling but an exceptional and total lack of feeling: “it is extreme sensibility which makes a mediocre actor; mediocre sensibility which makes the multitude of bad actors; and a total lack of sensibility which produces sublime actors”. The Paradox has been debated by a whole succession of great actors, among them Talma, Coquelin, Henry Irving and Jouvet, but the work extends beyond acting to ‘genius’ in general.

Fabricy was a fierce critic of the philosophes. “The false lights of a haughty and highly presumptuous philosophy have so dazzled the so-called fine minds of our century, they have seduced them to such an extent, that Incredulity and Libertinage are doing frightful damage within the very heart of Christianity”

Graves’ best known work which recounts the comic journeys of a Methodist preacher. The figure of Wildgoose satirizes George Whitefield whom Graves had met during their student days at Oxford.

A huge literary success, the Essay was translated into all major languages (including Persian). Its theories of warfare were put into practice by Napoleon’s revolutionary armies. Guibert was received by both Frederick II of Prussia and Joseph II of Austria.

The popularity of the Essay was due in part to its Introduction, in which Guibert argued for the cessation of abuses in all departments of State. In Paris the book was kept on the Index Expurgatorius of the Government for over two years and could only be read in contraband copies imported from Holland.

This was the third and corrected edition of the work.

A poem published posthumously by J.C.A. Saint-Lambert with an account of Helvétius’s life and works.

Hemsterhuis was a Platonist and admired the work of Locke and Newton.

In his celebrated thesis, Herder claimed that even though language is of human origin, “it reveals God in the light of a higher day: his work is a human soul which itself creates and continues to create its own language because it is his work, because it is a human soul.” The Treatise was awarded a prize by the Prussian Academy of Sciences and was translated into English 1827.

An abridged and more accessible version of Système de la Nature. In 1791 the work was published under the name of the curé Jean Meslier d'Etrépigny, a name that became well known after Voltaire's published his alleged last will and testament in which he rejected and condemned Christianity. Some of the later editions contain Letters by Voltaire and his sketch of Jean Meslier.

Translated by Holbach and reprinted in a French Edition of Hobbes' works by Holbach and Sorbière that was published in 1787. Holbach considered the essay, which first appeared in English in 1640, as one of Hobbes best works.

One of Lessing’s most popular plays and Germany’s first major bourgeois tragedy, based on a Roman legend.

Lettsom was a Quaker who also wrote pamphlets against drunkness.

One of two historical dramas Mercier wrote about the French religious wars, the other was La Destruction de la ligue (1782, The Destruction of the League). They were both so anticlerical and antimonarchical that they were not performed until after the Revolution.

Written before Mirabeau was 25.

Niebuhr took part in a Danish scientific expedition to the Ottoman Near East.

An attack on Voltaire's Dictionnaire philosophique.

Published in 3 volumes by Sabatier des Castres, Palissot and others; a sort of history of French literature, it was violently biased and hostile to Voltaire and the Enlightenment.

The Appeal lead William Pitt to establish the sinking fund.

Published in 3 volumes and includes criticism of Hume, Reid, Oswald and Beattie.

A work which led to the medicalisation of female sexuality.

Spalding became provost and member of the Prussian church board in Berlin in 1764.

An English translation which was attributed to Jeremy Bentham.

A short work that shows that Voltaire believed in God, though not in immortality.

Under the guise of Oriental stories Weland discusses political theory and preaches a benevolent and enlightened monarchy. Between 1769 and 1772 Wieland was professor of philosophy at the elector of Mainz’s university at Erfurt.

Anonymous pamphlet published in Philadelphia, includes an attack on Hume's views about blacks in his essay “Of National Characters.”

Pamphlet attacking Beattie' Essay and Hume's scepticism. It has been claimed that the piece was written by Thomas Cogan (1736–1818).

Beaumarchais defence of his case in the Goëzman affair.

Consists of the journal Burney kept during a second visit to the continent, a visit he begun in July 1772.

On publication of the Letters Chapone was asked to assist in the education of children.

Initially met with a mixed reception; admired by some for its attack on contemporary mores and condemned by others for its vulgarity.

Day was an admirer Rousseau who launched philanthropic schemes of moral and social reform.

Famous poem dedicated to Rousseau. Day, an admirer of Rousseau’s doctrines attempted a number of philanthropic schemes of moral and social reform. He was a stout defender of the anti-slavery cause.

Hemsterhuis was a Dutch philosopher, known as the “Dutch Plato”, and met Diderot in Holland and asked him to comment on his Lettre sur l’homme et ses rapports. First published in 1773, the Lettre is a short treatise setting out Christian principles in idealistic, quasi-Platonic terms, with the aim to “combat by Reason the fashionable philosophy of the day: scepticism, materialism and atheism”. Diderot’s commentary was only discovered in the early 1960’s.

Refutation of Helvétius, written between 1773-4, first appeared in Grimm’s manuscript journal La Correspondance littéraire, January 1783-1786. The Correspondance littéraire was a cultural newsletter which regularly informed a small number of princes and monarchs in Germany, Sweden and Russia about intellectual life in Paris. It never had more than fifteen subscribers. Diderot began to contribute articles in 1757.

Helvetuis’s posthumous On Man, which had just appeared in Holland because no publisher dare touch it in France, was an example of what Hemsterhuis’s called “the fashionable philosophy of the day.” Diderot, reading it for the first time, was shocked by the inadequacy of Helvétius’s “self-interest” theory of Man and he began a critique of the book.

“It is really true that physical pain and pleasure, which are perhaps the sole principle of animal behaviour, are also the sole principle of human conduct. No doubt we need to be organised as we are, and to have the faculty of sensation, to be capable of action; but it seems to me that these are essential and primordial conditions, a mere sine qua non, and that the direct and immediate motives of our aversions and desires are something quite other.”

“It is very hard to think cogently about metaphysics or ethics without being an anatomist, a naturalist, a physiologist, and a physician.”

Diderot did, however, think the book was full of good ideas and that its errors could be easily remedied. “The difference between you and Rousseau is that Rousseau principles are false, and the consequences true, while your principles are true and the consequences false. In exaggerating his principles, Rousseau’s disciples will be nothing but madmen; yours, moderating your consequences, will be wise men.” This work of moderation results in a series of objections to Helvétius bold pronouncements, designed not to refute but “restrain” him: “He says: Education does everything. Say: Education does a great deal. He says: Constitution does nothing. Say: Constitution does less than you think.” Again: “He says: Character depends entirely on circumstances. Say: I think that they modify it. He says: One gives a man the temperament one wants to give him . . . Say: Temperament is not always an invincible obstacle to the progress of the human spirit.”

Diderot’s corrections disappear as soon Helvétius moves from implicit to explicit politics; quoting Helvétius’s praise of Frederick - “There is nothing better than the arbitrary government of princes who are just, humane, and virtuous “ - Diderot cannot disguise his disappointment: “And you Helvétius, quote this tyrant’s maxim in high praise! His virtues are the most dangerous and the most certain of his seductions; They insensibly habituate the public to love, respect, serve his successor, evil and stupid as he may be . . . One of the greatest misfortunes that can happen to a nation would be two or three reigns of a power that is just, mild, enlightened, but arbitrary: the people will be led by happiness to the complete forgetfulness of their privileges, and into perfect slavery.”

Published in La Correspondance littéraire in April.

Reflections and memoranda on the situation in France and Russia, based on conversations Diderot held with the Empress during the autumn of 1773.

First version of Faust

The second of three political novels published by Haller.

This posthumous work, in which Helvétius attacks Rousseau’s Émile by upholding the value of education, is supposed to have influenced Jeremy Bentham. Diderot mocked one of its claims, namely, that in a rationally organised society every member has the potential to become a genius.

Helvétius maintained that all man’s faulties can be reduced to sensation, men are only motivated by self-interest, which is founded on the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, and that all men’s intellects are equal, their inequalities due to man’s unequal desire for education (“one becomes stupid as soon as one ceases to be passionate”).

The work was translated into English in 1777.

Published in 3 vols. An exposition of the naturalistic principles that should support any system of good government. Abbé Richard who criticized the work from point of view of the divine right of kings in La Défense de la religion, de la morale, de la vertu, de la politique et de la société, dans la réfutation des ouvrages qui ont pour titre, l'un Système Social etc. Vautre La Politique Naturelle par le R. P. Ch. L. Richard, Professeur de Théologie, etc. (1775).

An outline of utilitarian principles of morality and politics.

A critique of the Christian belief in miracles.

The Sorbonne initially endorsed Holland's attack on Holbach but his work was officially condemned on January 17, 1773 when it was discovered that he was a Protestant.

The Contributions to History and Literature were published between 1773 and 1781.

A successful tragedy, written for the Edinburgh stage.

A translation appeared in 1774.

Marat’s first published work, it subsequently appeared in a three-volume translation entitled De l’Homme, published in Amsterdam in 1775.

“Élargissez l’art - set art free!” Mercier emphasized the didactic nature of the theatre and criticized the artificiality of traditional French tragedy. He wrote about 60 plays and was nicknamed “Le Singe (Ape) de Jean-Jacques” because he was strongly influenced by Rousseau’s views. A moderate member of the Convention he opposed the death penalty for Louis XVI and was imprisoned during the Terror but released after Robespierre’s death.

6 vols. (1773-92).

The famous treatise on the origin of language appeared in 6 volumes between 1777 and 1792. It contains a great deal of curious and anthropological learning, advocates a return to Greek philosophy and condemns most modern poets and philosophers, including Newton. The work is chiefly remembered for its reference to the customs of primitive communities and its anticipation of the principles of evolution by comparing man to the orangutan, though this idea bears little resemblance to the theories of Darwin.

A pastoral drama, written when More was 18.

A plagiarized version of Holbach's Système de la Nature

Drama containing the much quoted line, Le monde avec lenteur marche vers la sagesse, in Act III, Scene 5.`

Published in three instalments in the Correspondance littéraire, in November and December 1773 and January 1774.

The first black poet in English. Her Poems were published in London and consist of conventional verses on didactic themes: “Remember, Christians, Negroes black as Cain,/ May be refin’d, and join the angelic train.” Her best-known poems are “To the University of Cambridge in New England”(1767) and “To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty”(1768). Wheatley also translated Joseph La Vallée’s French novel Le Nègre comme il y a peu des Blancs.

Wheatley was captured by slave traders, probably in Senegal, when she was eight years old and taken to the American colonies and sold to the Wheatley family of Boston. She served as maid-servant to the wife of John Wheatley and married John Peters, a free Negro in 1778. She began writing poetry when she was 13, using as models particularly Pope and Gray. In 1773 she accompanied a member of the Wheatley family to England, where she gained widespread attention in literary circles. She subsequently return to Boston.

Highly influential journal, founded by Wieland, which ran for almost forty years promoting the ideals of classical humanism.

Published anonymously. Authorship has been contested although Lorraine McMullen’s 1983 biography supports the attribution.

Published in 3 volumes between 1774 and 1775. Burgh was a Dissenting schoolmaster who spent most of his adult life in Stoke Newington. He lead a group who wished to replace Parliament with a U.S.-style assembly.

English translation of De la félicité publique, ou, Considérations sur le sort des hommes dans les différentes epoques de l’histoire, (1772). Chastellux's work was admired by Thomas Jefferson.

Famous letters to Chesterfield’s illegitmate son, Philip Stanhope, born in in 1732 when Chesterfield was ambassador to The Hague and had an affair with a governess, Elizabeth de Bouchet. They were published by his son’s widow. Johnson, after Chesterfield had claimed but failed to support his Dictionary, described the Letters as teaching “the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master”.

A commentary on Catherine’s proposed constitutional reforms.

Aimed against Frederick II, these were a series of reflections “written by the hand of a sovereign in the margin of Tacitus”.

In 1765 Catherine had drawn up a Preparatory Instruction, the Nakaz, to be considered by the Estates General in 1767. It set out advanced ideas, drawn largely from Montesquieu and Beccaria. However, the assembly was dissolved before the document was considered, as war broke out between Russia and Turkey, but the document remained the offical version of Catherine’s political intentions. The document was translated into French in 1769 and it provided Diderot with the occasion for his most developed piece of political writing. The Observations were only sent to Catherine after Diderot’s death. They were not well received.

Published anonymously, with a revised and extended edition appearing in 1781. A series of dialogues between the author and her grand-daughter concerning education. Mme d’Épinay was a prolific contributor to the Correspondance littéraire, providing essays, theatre reviews, book review articles on politics, philosophy and economics and light verse. The educational dialogues made their first appearance there and she used it to circulate the letters she received from Voltaire and Galiani.

“Goethe’s Werther was translated into English in 1779. It had an immense effect. Authors in England cashed in with meretricious imitations, mainly ‘letters of Charlotte’. One of these writers had the temerity to dedicate his contribution to Queen Charlotte. He also remarked, ‘I am confident that a collection of nonsense, under the same title would at least sell an edition.’ There were prints and engravings, porcelain figurines and momentoes. Charlotte was endlessly portrayed at Vauxhall and on the stage. In the most appealing scene (though it did not actually appear in Goethe’s work), Charlotte at Werther’s grave, she was exhibited at Mrs Salmon’s Historical Waxworks. Even Richard Graves, a sharp satirist of contemporary morals and manners, was trapped into a half-admiring admission that Charlotte’s love for Werther, though illicit on earth, would surely permit them to enjoy a permanent union in heaven. As a clergyman he came to regret this judgement and published a denunciation of suicide by way of retraction. (Lucubrations, 1786, pp. 199-205.) Others were more critical from the beginning. Goethe seemed positively to justify suicide by depicting it as the natural, logical end for a man of powerful feelings foiled by conventional morality.” (Langford, A Polite and Commercial Society, pp. 479-80).

The third of three political novels published by Haller.

One of many of Hanway’s publications, which he described as ‘my voyage round the moral world’.

Herder's attempt to reconcile modern methods of inquiry with biblical exegesis.

An outline for a universal history.

Essay by a friend of Kant’s in praise of marriage. It became a popular work and Hippel revised it in 1776, 1792, and 1793, by strengthing the arguments favouring the equality for women.

An abridged version of Holbach's Système de la Nature which was attributed to Helvetius.

Jamin was a Benedictine monk, these guidelines on collecting old and more recent books was republished in 1782 and 1827.

An attack on physiocratic economic theory.

Long served in the West Indies. He argued blacks looked and smelled differently, carried black lice, were “void of genius” and possessed “no moral sense, no taste but for women … no wish but to be idle".

A work on rhetoric. Ogilvie published poetry and a number of miscellaneous works. According to his biographer, "Ogilvie, with powers far above the common order, did not know how to use them with effect. He was an able man lost. His intellectual wealth and industry were wasted in huge and unhappy speculations. Of all his books, there is not one which, as a whole, can be expected to please the general reader. Noble sentiments, brilliant conceptions, and poetic graces, may be culled in profusion from the mass; but there is no one production in which they so predominate, (if we except some of his minor pieces,) as to induce it to be selected for a happier fate than the rest. Had the same talent which Ogilvie threw away on a number of objects, been concentrated on one, and that one chosen with judgment and taste, he might have rivalled in popularity the most renowned of his contemporaries." (Lives of Eminent Scotsmen)

De Pinto was a leading figure in the Sephardic community in Amsterdam. Analysing the poverty amongst the Sephardim De Pinto called for reduced taxation, minimal trade restrictions and Jewish emigration from Europe to Surinam. The Précis des arguments contre les matérialistes consists of two lectures Pinto gave to a mainly Jewish society. In the lectures Pinto rejected both materialism and scepticism.

Includes criticism of Reid, Beattie and Oswald with a discussion of their views on Hume.

Reimarus’s major work, a series of anonymous critical essays on the gospel history, which he withheld from publication during his lifetime. He died in Hamburg on 1 March, 1768. Lessing aroused considerable controversy by printing fragments of the work, under the title ‘Wolfenbüttel fragments’, in his Zur Geschichte und Litteratur, parts iii and iv (1774 and 1777); Andreas Riem, under the pseudonym C.A.E. Schmidt, published other passages in 1787; D.W. Klose, more passages in 1850-52; and D.F. Strauss described the contents of the manuscript in his H.S. Reimarus und seine Schutzschrift . . . (1862; second edition 1877; Eng. Trans., Fragments from Reimarus, 1879).

“The standpoint is that of pure naturalistic deism. Miracles and mysteries, with the exception of the Creation, are denied, and natural religion is advanced as the absolute contradiction of revealed religion: discoverable by reason, the essential truths of natural religion, namely the existence of a wise and good Creator and the immortality of the soul, can be the basis of a universal religion, whereas no revealed religion can ever be intelligible or credible to all. The fragment “Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger” (On the Aim of Jesus and his Pupils) influenced some 19^th century critics.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Includes a discussion of Hume's views on economics.

A French translation by Holbach. Wallerius was a professor of chemistry in the University of Upsala.

A tract which helped Methodism to support the anti-slavery cause.

A satire on German provinciality. An English translation - The Republic of Fools - appeared in 1861.

Begun in Woolman’s 36^th year and continued until his death, recognized as one of the classics of inner life.

Published in London. Adair was an American trader who was born in Ireland. He lived for almost 40 years among the Indians, primarily in the Chickasaw region in what is now the southeastern part of the US. Adair’s History is one of the best firsthand accounts of Indian tribes of the region. It also includes an incomplete but valuable vocabulary of various Indian dialects. Adair offered twenty-three arguments for regarding the Indians as the descendants of one of the tribes of Israel. There racial characteristics did not strike Adair as being of paramount importance; their colour, he suggested, was merely the result of a sunny climate and the excessive use of oil.

Barry was an Irish artist who blamed the religious turmoil of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for killing off the natural creativity of the English. In his own day he supposed the rational temper of his own age would cause no such obstruction.

Both the The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro endorsed Diderot’s theories about acting. First performed on 23 February 1775, it was an instant success. It was first made into an opera by Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816), the leading creator of comic opera of his era after Mozart, in 1782 and then by Rossini in 1816.

Bienville proposed that blood-letting, purging and in extreme cases, a strait-jacket should be used to prevent masturbation, the necessary prelude to masturbation.

Blumenbach endeavoured to define a concept of race based on physical characteristics such as skin color, type of hair, and cranial forms. In the third edition (1795) he proposed that races could be classified as Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay

Bretonne wrote numerous novels, stories (more than 1,000) plays, tracts and philosophical treatises. His contemporaries called him "Rousseau du ruisseau" and the "Voltaire des femmes de chamber". Although his writings have been dismissed and criticised, Paul Valéry rated him higher than Rousseau. Married in 1760, Bretonne worked as a typesetter in Paris. Among other works, he published Tableaux de Paris, an invaluable account of the pre-revolutionary period and Monsieur Nicolas, an autobiography which aimed to show "the human heart laid bare".

A defence of the American rebels.

A work in which Combe condemns Bristol businessmen: “love of gain entirely envelopes all traits of feeling and delicacy of sentiment, . . . I bless heaven that I am not a man of merchandize”. In the resulting controversy Combe was forced to publish a modified version of his views. Commerce, he claimed, tarnished only those unwilling to cultivate the finer feelings: many of its practitioners were in fact men of refinement and sensitivity.

Combe, born to a substantial fortune, was educated at Eton and Oxford. Nicknamed ‘Count Combe’ for his extravagance, he descended to a life of literary penury and debt. From 1780 he spent much of his life in debtors’ prison and found occassional employment as a private soldier, cook and waiter. His most famous work was Travels of Dr. Syntax.

In 1758, Condillac was appointed tutor to Prince Ferdinand of Parma (grandson of Louis XV), a post which he held for nine years, and which resulted in the eventual publication in 1775 of his Course of Studies for the Instruction of the Prince of Parma in 16 volumes covering a variety of subjects. The work, appearing under the Imprimerie Royale in Parma, consisted of the following volumes:

1 Grammaire

2 Art d’écrire

3 Art de raisonner

4 Art de penser

5-10 Introduction à l’étude de l’histoire ancienne

11-16 Introduction à l’étude de l’histoire moderne

A defence of Turgot’s reforms, published soon after the corn riots which first broke out in Dijon during April, 1777.

At Catherine’s request, Diderot wrote this full-length work on educational reforms; “to instruct a nation is to civilize it; to broaden its knowledge is to lead it away from the primitive state of barbarism”.

A record of Gray’s impressions taken during his extensive journeys throughout Britain in search of picturesque scenery and ancient monuments.

Social comedy.

A theoretical treatise defending social equality and the common ownership of property.

Written in 1764 in response to the law of silence of 28 March of the same year which barred anyone from publishing criticism of the government's economic policies. Morellet was only able to publish the work under the more relaxed regime of Turgot.

In the Essay on Legislation and the Grain Trade Necker attacked the free-trade polices instituted by the comptroller-general of finance, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot.

Coleridge used this edition.

In December, Rousseau tried to place the Dialogues under God’s protection on the high alter of Notre Dame, but was prevented from doing so by the iron grille surrounding the choir, which he had never before noticed on his many previous visits to the church. He gave a copy of the work to Condillac, who reacted unfavourably, and started to hand out to passers-by a hand written circular beginning:

To all Frenchmen who still love justice and truth.

People of France! Nation that was once kind and affectionate, what has become of you? Why have you changed towards an unfortunate foreigner who is alone, at your mercy, without any support or defender ...

Rousseau entrusted the manuscript to Sir Brooke Boothby, his neighbour at Wootton Hall, to be published after his death, which he duly did at Lichfield in 1781.

“Human nature cannot turn back. Once man has left the time of innocence and equality, he can never return to it.”

“Whence could the painter and apologist of human nature have taken his model, if not from his own heart? He has described this nature just as he felt it within himself. The prejudices which had not subjugated him, the artificial passions which had not made him their victim - they did not hide from his eyes, as from those of all others, the basic traits of humanity, so generally forgotten and misunderstood . . . In a word, it was necessary that one man should paint his own portrait to show us, in this manner, the natural man.” (“Dialogue Troisième”)

In all his writings, Rousseau said he saw “the development of his great principle that nature has made man happy and good but that society depraves him and makes him miserable. Émile in particular, that book that has been so much read, so little understood, and so poorly appreciated, is nothing but a treatise on the original goodness of man.” In his earliest writings, he had “concentrated most of all on destroying that illusion that gives us a foolish admiration for the instruments of our unhappiness, and to correct that misleading evaluation that makes us honor pernicious talents and despise useful virtues. Everywhere he shows us mankind better, wiser, and happier in its primitive condition, blind, miserable, and wicked to the degree that it has departed from that condition.” But, he emphatically adds, “human nature does not turn back. Once man has left it, he never returns to the time of innocence and equality” - this was another principle on which Rousseau “insisted most strongly.” Rousseau repudiates the widespread and “obstinate” accusation that he had wanted “to destroy the arts and sciences, the theatre, and the academies, and to plunge the world into its original barbarism.” Quite the contrary: “He always insisted on the preservation of existing institutions, arguing that their destruction would only remove the remedies but leave the vices intact, and to substitute plunder for corruption.” (“Dialogue Troisième”)

A celebration of Masonic science which was attacked by Voltaire. According to J. G. Findel, Saint-Martin gave "the key to all the allegories and mystical fables of the ancients, the source of all religions and political institutions, and a model of the laws which should regulate the universe as well as single persons, and without which no real science could exist."

The first, a drama, the second, an opera, were produced with great success at Covent Garden.

A work on phonetic principles.

A hero of republicianism in the 1790’s, Spence argued here for the proposed public ownership of land rented out to individuals at moderate rates.

Augustus Montague Toplady (1740-1778), divine, converted to Wesleyism after hearing a sermon in 1755 or 1756, but in 1758 changed to extreme Calvinism, of which he became the fiercest defender. “Of the contemporary Calvinist writers Toplady was the keenest, raciest, and best equipped philosophically. .... The unpardonable blot in all his writings is his controversial venom against Wesley and his followers. The wrangle began after Toplady had published a translation of a Latin treatise by Jerom Zanchius on Calvinism, 1769. Wesley published an abridgement of this piece for the use of the methodist societies, summarising it in conclusion with contemptuous coarseness .... Toplady replied in ‘A Letter to Mr. Wesley’ (1770), charging him with clandestine printing, coarseness, evasiveness, unfairness, and raking together stories against Wesley's general conduct.” (D.N.B.) A heated exchange of views followed, and Toplady continued to hound Wesley in the ‘Gospel Magazine’, of which he was editor until June 1776, and did not cease his cause until his death of consumption in 1778. Toplady was author of the well-known hymn “Rock of Ages cleft for me.”

Anthology printed in 109 volumes between 1776 and 1779. Each volume cost 1s. 6d or 6d on cheap paper.

“Under a government of Laws, what is the motto of a good citzen? To obey punctually; to censure freely.” Drawing on Hume, Helvétius and Beccaria, Bentham postulated that “It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong,” constitutes the fundamental axiom of public life.

Published in four volumes between 1776 and 1789. Burney collected the material for his history during tours to the continent, the first to Paris in 1764, and from June 1770 to Paris again, Geneva, Turin, Milan, Padua, Venice, Bologna, Florence, Rome and Naples. Burney was a strong admirer of Italian vocal music and an advocate of the music of Haydn, who he knew during the composer’s visits to England.

Includes a discussion of David Hume's essay “Of Tragedy”. The work became a standard text in teaching rhetoric in America.

Cartwright became known as the Father of Reform: he defended the colonies, universal male suffrage, the secret ballot, annual parliaments, the improvement of national defenses, the freedom of Spain and Greece from foreign rule, and other causes.

A tragic drama performed before Louis XVI in 1776. A resounding failure, Chamfort decided never to publish again.

The Remarks were addresses to Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, and contained Ferguson’s proposals for a peace settlement for the Americans.

Published between 1776 and 1788 the first quarto volume was published in 16 February 1776. It was immediately successful and Gibbon was acclaimed by David Hume and William Robertson as their equal if not their superior as an historian.

It has been claimed that Goldsmith began work on his survey as early as 1762.

Publication, in five volumes, coincided with the appearance of the first volume of Charles Burney’s history, and the relative merits of the two works was contested by contemporary critics. Burney favoured modern against Hawkins’s love for older music. Hawkins also wrote a life of Samuel Johnson (like Burney, a member of Johnson’s circle) and published editions of Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler.

Published in 3 vols. (Amsterdam)

Published in Amsterdam.

This autobiography, the title of which Hume devised himself, was published in 1777. It is dated 18 April 1776. Hume died 25 August. It was published by Adam Smith who subsequently claimed that by doing so he had incurred “ten times more abuse than the very violent attack I had made upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain”. (E. C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume, p. 605).

Hunter (better known for his work on Bolingbroke) was very critical of Stanhope's opinions.

A work which arosed much interest: “at the fashionable clubs it is gold to silver, since the appearance of Mr Jenyns’s book, that the Christian religion is true.” (Letters from Mrs Elizabeth Carter, to Mrs Montagu, iii. 6.) Jenyns argued that God, not the abuse of men’s free will, is the cause of evil, a view denounced by groups as diverse as the Methodists and Rational Dissenters.

A defence of theories of social equality and the common ownership of property.

Published 10 January this pamphlet was the first public statement in support of American independence. It was credited by Washington with having “worked a powerful change in the minds of many happy men”.

After the start of the American war of Independence, Paine maintained the morale of the rebels with a series of pamphlets called The American Crisis (1776-83). Its opening sentence - “These are the times that try men’s souls” - became a battle cry.

De Pinto argued in two Letters that the struggle for American Independence would ultimately fail. The Letters were written in French and published in the Hague with English translations appearing in the same year. He wrote, "it is astonishing to see people condemn a great monarch, his ministers, the parliament, that great and illustrious senate", given "the exorbitant sums granted to that ungrateful people".

Includes criticism of David Hume's essay “Of Miracles”.

With Additional Observations... (1777), Price’s two writings on American independence met with large sales in both England and America, it sold 60,000 copies immediately and double the number in a cheap edition. In advocating independence Price became a friend of Benjamin Franklin. He was given the freedom of the city of London in 1776, invited by the U.S Congress in 1778 to offer advice on finance, and his economic ideas influence Turgot and Necker in France.

“In this hour of danger it would become us to turn our thoughts to Heaven. This is what our brethren in the Colonies are doing. From one end of North America to the other they are fasting and praying. But what are we doing? - shocking thought. - We are running wild after pleasure and forgetting everything serious and decent in Masquerades. - We are gambling in gaming houses: trafficking in boroughs: perjuring ourselves at elections: and selling ourselves for places - which side is Providence likely to favour?”

The chronology of the work is uncertain. The first two Walks seemed to have been written in the autumn and winter of 1776 and then continued intermittently until 1778, when the Tenth Walk, itself unfinished, is dated Palm Sunday 1778.

Published in 2 volumes, the appendix includes an attack on Hume's criticism of the priesthood

Published in March, a second edition appeared within two years and the fifth edition, the last during Smith’s lifetime, appeared in 1789.

“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.” (Introduction)

An attack on the theory of spontaneous generation.

Untitled piece.

A Lettre provoked by Pierre le Touneur’s translations of Shakespeare which appeared in 1776. It was here that Voltaire spoke of Shakespeare as “a drunken savage”. D'Alembert read the work to members of the Académie who were generally amused, the King though was unhappy since he originally commissioned the translations.

Fictitious dialogues on the American Revolution

“The English Antique has become a general and fashionable Study.”

First part of a trilogy that included L'andrographe (1782) and Le thesmographe (1789).

A novel about a heroine in London in search of literary fame. Brooke has a dig at Garrick for not supporting new work. Earlier in her career Brooke had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Garrick to produce her blank verse tragedy Virginia; it was finally published in 1756, with other poems and translations.

In 4 volumes and including about half of Colman’s plays.

Three works concerned with sexuality, apparently a result of a short-lived affair with Madame de Maux.

Published posthumously in London but in the same year as Dodd’s execution. “The chaplain to the Thatched House Society (and earlier to the Magdalen House) was William Dodd, an adroit and ambitious divine who founded his career on the fashion for sentimental sermonizing. His performances in the pulpit were highly regarded, not least by philanthropic ladies disposed to pity the plight of fallen women and distressed debtors. He was also a swindler. A damaging attempt in 1774 to bribe the Lord Chancellor into appointing him to the lucrative living of St George’s, Hanover Square resulted in his dismissal as one of the King’s chaplains. A further miscalculation was more serious. He forged the signature of his former pupil the Earl of Chesterfield on a bond for £2,400. The trial which followed detection was reported in detail in the press. Chesterfield was condemned for his remorselessness in prosecuting his old tutor. A public campaign, supported by Dr Johnson and by the societies which Dodd had served, was mounted for his reprieve. Dodd seems confidently to have expected mercy. In prison he composed powerful invocations of the sentimental muse. His Prison Thoughts, published posthumously, dwelt heavily on the melancholy plight of the man of feeling as prison. ‘My friends are gone! Harsh on its sullen hinge Grates the dread door.’ It also included explicit appeals for reform. ‘Hail, generous Hanway.’ When the pleas failed Dodd was executed the spectacle of a philanthropic parson at the gallows sent a distinct shudder through the propertied community.” (Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, p. 491.)

An account of Forster's father's role as a naturalist on Captain James Cook's second voyage (1772–1775) round the globe.

“Would not one have to be demented to suppose that men said to one of their number: we are raising you above us because we like being slaves, and so we are giving you the power to direct our thoughts as you like? On the contrary, what they said was: we need you to maintain the laws which we wish to obey, to govern us wisely, to defend us; for the rest, we require that you respect our liberty.”

Hume wrote My Own Life in April 1776, intending it to be included in the next published edition of his Essays and Treatises. In March 1777 My Own Life and Adam Smith’s “Letter... to William Strahan” were appeared in a pamphlet titled The Life of David Hume, Esq. Written by Himself. Although not part of the 1777 edition of Essays and Treatises, it was included in subsequent editions of that work and his History.

Knox was a cleric who became master of Tunbridge School in Kent. His works include: Liberal Education; or a Practical Treatise on the Methods of Acquiring Useful and Polite Learning (1781) and Elegant Extracts in Prose and Verse (1789).

Linguet founded the Annales in 1777 in London. It was banned in France but nevertheless circulated widely there. Linguet, a disbarred lawyer, was a virulant opponent of the philosophes, the Academie and the idea of constitutional monarchy, holding that “freemen in modern societies are more perfectly enslaved than subjugated men were in slave societies.” He was at this time in the Bastille, and he was executed during the Terror.

Marmontel wrote Les Incas between 1767 and 1771 as a response to the Sorbonne's condemnation of Bélisaire (1767) for espousing religious intolorence.

An ambiguous and still scandalous erotic novel. Mirabeau spent time in Vincennes between 1777 and 1780. Sade was won of his fellow prisoners.

A defence of Hume’s moral character and critique of Horne’s Letter. Selections from the work were also published in Curious Particulars (1788)

Renamed The Old English Baron, avowedly in imitation of Sir Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto.

Published in 2 volumes.

Tetens’ main work. Tetens (1736-1807) studied at the University of Kiel under Eschenbach, who was the first German translator of Berkeley and introduced Tetens to British philosophy. “In spite of the confusions and inconsistencies in Tetens’ various treatments, the Versuche is filled with ideas that may well have influenced Kant at many specific points. .... So it is correct to say of Tetens that, like Kant, he believed a necessity of thought was the basis of an ascription of an objective necessity to objects and their connections. He agreed with Kant that what is objectified is a necessity of thought, not a belief based upon instinct or custom. But he failed to remember how utterly different the synthetic and logical ‘necessities of thought’ are. He made the egregious mistake of trying to correct Hume, when it was the historic destiny of Hume to correct the Germans.” L.W. Beck, Early German Philosophy, pp.412-425.

Sixty page treatise on penal reform Voltaire completed towards the end of 1777. In February 1777 the Gazette de Berne offered a prize of 50 louis for the best essay on the reform of criminal law. When Voltaire found out about the competition he doubled the prize money and composed his treatise.

After a break of 28 years it was the theatre that took Voltaire back to Paris. Wishing to direct rehearsals of Irène he returned on 28 February and saw a performance of the play at the Académie on 30 March. Voltaire died on 30 May.

“If anyone has ever battled to restore liberty, the right of nature, to slaves of all kinds, surely is was Montesquieu. He pitted reason and humanity against all kinds of slavery,” against the enslavement of Negroes bought on the Gold Coast to harvest sugar in the Carribbean Islands, and against serfdom in Europe.

Burney's first novel which was well received by Reynolds, Gibbon, Burke and Dr Johnson.

Burney wrote the comedy A Busy Day, or An Arrival from India in 1800 while living in Surrey with her husband, General d'Arblay, an exile from the French Revolution. The play begins when the young heiress, Eliza, arrives back in London from the British trading post of Calcutta to be confronted by her long-lost family, who have made a fortune in the City. Misunderstandings and farcical meetings between Eliza and her family, who are ill at ease in the circles in which they now move, are at the centre of the play. Burney never saw the play performed and it only re-emerged in the 50s when the Burney scholar Joyce Hemlow discovered the manuscript in the New York Public Library.

Before Burney had the chance to finish the play D'Arblay, taking advantage of the peace between Britain and France, returned to Paris to recover his lost wealth. Burney, with her son Alex, soon followed but remained stranded in France when war broke out again. She remained in France until after the defeat of Napolean in 1815. Thackeray used material from her diaries, especially her account of being in Brussells as the troops marched off to Waterloo.

D'Arblay died on his return to Britain and Burney never attempted to have her play performed.

A longer version of this work entitled Essai sur les regnes de Claude et de Neron was published in 1782. It was Diderot’s first work to be published in France with his own name on the title page since 1758. When it was published in December it received an extremely hostile press and Diderot was threatened with arrest. He made an apology in person and there the matter ended. The essay on the life and work of Seneca was written at Holbach’s request, to accompany a translation of Seneca’s works begun by La Grange, the tutor of Holbach’s children, and completed by Naigeon.

“After reading Seneca, am I the same man I was before I read him? That’s not so - it can’t be so.”

Unpublished note, first printed by Herbert Dieckmann in his Inventaire du fonds Vandeul (1951), 257.

Published in installments from 1778 in Correspondance littéraire.

An unsuccessful tragedy.

Son of the philosopher David Hartley, MP for Hull, friend of Benjamin Franklin; he spent a great part of his political career opposing the American Revolutionary War. Hartley was appointed by the Fox-North ministry as plenipotentiary to negotiate with the Americans in 1783 and signed the treaty of Paris.

A work on the aesthetics of sculpture.

Published between 1778 and 1781, a novel in the style of Sterne. Hippel was a friend of Kant, studied law and theology and in 1780 was appointed chief burgomaster of Konigsberg, becoming in 1786 mayor of the town.

Written between 1778-80, consisting of dialogues on freemason lines, pleading for men to behave humanely, and which had to be published posthumously.

Co-authored with Richard Price, a discussion of doctrines Priestley held and Price rejected.

First English translation.

A critique of Hume’s Tory view of royal prerogative.

In 1773–1774 Bahrdt published a translation of part of the Bible, which was condemned by Imperial decree in 1779.

Collected papers published posthumously.

Includes an appeal for toleration of Catholics.

Novel in which a young Priest is sent to a village which the villagers have been reduced to a state of poverty. Charrière, a Jesuit, was the author of the now lost Écrits satiriques sur l'Encyclopédie (Satiric Writings on the Encyclopédie).

Collection of Genlis's plays.

A devastating reply to critics who accused Gibbon of falsifying his critics.

A masterly state paper in reply to continental criticism of the British government’s policy in America.

Published posthumously. Hume wrote the Dialogues before 1751 and, in his will, appointed Adam Smith as his literary executor and bequeathed two hundred pounds to Smith for correcting and publishing the work, but he eventually came to an understanding with Smith, suspecting that he might suppress the work, leaving the manuscripts to Strahan the publisher, saying that if the work was not published within two and a half years of his death, the property would return to his nephew David. Neither Strahan nor Smith were willing to publish the work, and the author’s nephew published the Dialogues in 1779. Holbach translated and published a version in French in the same year under the title Dialogues sur la religion naturelle. Ouvrage posthume de David Hume, ecuyer.

“What cannot be got wrong...has not much value in it; and what cannot be abused has little practical value”.

Published between 1779 and 1781.

A defence of Judaism and tolerance based on a portrait of Lessing’s friend Moses Mendelssohn. An iambic dramatic poem where among the representatives of the three religions - Islamic (Saladin), Chriatian (the Templar) and Jewish (Nathan) - only the Jew can embody ideal humanity. Its first performance took place in Berlin in 1783.

Published in 1779-80.

Published in 6 volumes between 1779 and 1799, a eulogy to Greek philosophy in which Monboddo conceives man as elevating himself from an animal condition to a state where the mind acts independently of the body.

The first two dialogues consist of fictional exchanges between David Hume and Lord Herbert.

Novel Rabaut Saint-Étienne published in London.