The Remarks with Dissertation upon Parties (1733) grew out of essays which Bolingbroke wrote for the newspaper The Craftsman in which he attacked the prime minister Walpole, the corrupt ‘Robinocracy’, and demanded frequent elections and limits on placemen and standing armies. Together with The Idea of a Patriot King (1738), these three works argued for an end to party divisions as a prelude to the re-establishment of English liberties.

Comprises 35 treatises, including The Supremacy of the Father, An Enquiry concerning Infinite Justice and Infinite Satisfaction, A Vindication of God’s Moral Character, An Examination of Mr. Barclay's Principles, Human Nature Vindicated, Reflections on Natural Liberty, etc.

Tindal sets a natural religion of reason against clericalism and demonstrates a scepticism towards the Bible. According to Tindal, Priests have perverted natural religion: “Priests, on the pretence of the good of the Church” work the people up “to Tumults, Mutiny, Sedition and Rebellion”; and a close look at “Ecclesiastical History” will show that the clergy have allied themselves with secular power: “The worst of princes have been most sure of their Assistance even in carrying on the vilest Designs”. (254)

A German version of Christianity as Old as the Creation appeared in 1741and other deist writings soon followed to enjoy success in the German states much to the alarm of the authorites and orthodox opinion.

A French fictitious or pseudo-translation which was translated into English by Lockman in 1731.

Work in which Gottsched argued that German literature should emulate that of the French. “What the Greeks were to the Romans the French now are to us. They have given us in all of the major genres of poetry the most beautiful models and have written very many discourses, reviews, critiques and other guides from which we can take a number of rules.”

Celebrated text on natural science.

A ballad-opera, the first play by an American to appear on the London stage. Ralph was probably born in New Jersey. He accompanied Benjamin Franklin to London in 1724. In imitation of James Thomson he published the blank-verse poems The Tempest and Night in 1727. He was employed as political writer and liaison officer by Bubb Dodington and Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales and was given a pension by the Pelham ministry to purchase his silence. Author of The History of England (1744, 1746) and The Case of Authors by Profession (1758).

According to Stackhouse, civil justice serves as a warning that, if Woolston did not abandon his infidelity, God would punish him much more severely.

"A work that became known as the ""Deists' Bible"", Toland was reviled by his own college chaplain as ""Spinoza revived""."

A poem Voltaire wrote on the death of his former mistress and actress Adrienne Lecouvreur at the age of thirty-eight. He was at her bedside at the time of her death and subsequently tried unsuccessfully to arrange for her funeral, since France was the only Catholic country in Europe which refused to allow actors a Christian burial. The poem was circulated privately.

Mock-heroic verse epic based on the life of Joan of Arc; the subject was suggested to Voltaire by the duc de Richelieu.

After meeting Fabrice, a former companion of Charles XII, in London, Voltaire wrote this biography. All 2,600 copies of the first edition were sold immediately and it appeared in sixty editions during Voltaire's lifetime.

Memoirs of Whiston's close friend and fellow Arian Samuel Clarke.

The work, though unfinished, was circulated in manuscript before being published in England in 1731. It presented a sympathetic account of the prophet's life.

Journal (1731-54) founded and edited by Cave under the pseudonym "Sylvanus Urban, Gent". It published reports of debates in the House of Commons. Johnson gained his first job writing some of these reports. Cave was employed by the post office in London and supplied country newspapers with London newsletters.

This work appeared more than forty years after the author’s death.

Unfinished novel written between 1731-6. With its emphasis on feminine sensibility it anticipates Richardson’s Pamela (1740).

Novel published when the author was thirty-one. Manon Lescaut appeared as the final installment of a seven-volume novel called Mémoires et aventures d’un homme de qualité qui s’est retiré de monde (1728-31). It was publicly burned by the authorities as an immoral work when it was first published. In The Confessions Rousseau remarks that his works “deserve immortality”, p.348.

Prévost, copying Addison’s Spectator, published Le Pour et le Conte

Published in Utrecht in eight volumes between 1731 and 1739 and drawing on Prévost’s extensive knowledge of England, they are based on a fictitious account of the adventures of the natural son of Oliver Cromwell.

Swift’s most admired poem, a partly satirical piece in which he imagines public reaction to his death, and where he then gives a deceptive description of his life and achievements.

Another example of Voltaire’s verse tragedies which met with little success; it was performed only in a college.

Published in London in two volumes; volume 2 includes An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision. The dialogues constitute a defence of Christianity from the point of view of an Anglican divine, though based on the philosophical beliefs defined in Berkeley's earlier works.

Thomas Chubb, deist, “was a disciple of Samuel Clarke, but gradually diverged further from Arianism into a modified deism.” (D.N.B.) This Enquiry was directed against a sermon by Dr. Croxall.

A collection of short poems published by subscription.

Influential work which aimed to rejuvenate the Roman Catholic Church.

Published annually until 1757.

Eight volume work that appeared between 1732 and 1744.

Visiting London in 1728 Maupertuis abandoned Cartesian for Newtonian science. The Discours was the first of several defences of Newton, in fact, the first book by a Frenchmen to accept and expound Newton’s theory of gravitation, and it helped to spread his ideas in France.

Moser was Professor at Tübingen (1720-24, 1729-34) and was first the legal scholar to bring out a complete presentation of German constitutional law.

Aubry de La Mottraye made three visits to London

Passerano took refuge in London in 1730. His Dissertation caused such an outcry due to its defence of materialism and athesim that he and his translator Joseph Morgan were arrested.

Published between 1732 and 1750 a Christian apologia of the argument from the design. Translated into almost all the European languages,Le spectacle de la nature became hugely popular during the eighteenth century.

A bold defence of self-determination which proposed that individuals should have the legal right to commit suicide.

A tragedy, which like Hamlet, included an apparition of a ghost. It was booed by the audience at its first performance on the 7th March 1732. Voltaire revised the play fifteen years later with the more successful Sémiramis.

Zaïre, was written in twenty-two days; with its exotic subject matter, bringing Christian crusaders in conflict with acts of Muslim chivalry, was greeted with great acclaim on its first performance on 13 August 1732. Garrick appeared in the staging of the play at a latter date.

A 68-volume encyclopaedia published by Johann Heinrich Zedler in Leipzig between 1732 and 1754. It was published under its full-name: "Great Complete Encyclopaedia of all Sciences and Arts which so far have been invented and improved by human mind and wit: Including the geographical and political description of the whole world according to all monarchies, empires, kingdoms, principalities, republics, free sovereignties, countries, towns, sea harbours, fortresses, castles, areas, authorities, monasteries, mountains, passes, woods, seas, lakes ... and also a detailed historical and genealogical description of the world's brightest and most famous family lines, the life and deeds of the emperors, kings, electors and princes, great heroes, ministers of state, war leaders... ; equally about all policies of state, war and law and budgetary business of the nobility and the bourgeois, merchants, traders, arts".

The Theory of Vision was Berkeley’s answer to an attack in the London Daily Post-boy, with the anonymous letter appended. “This book was thought to be of such small importance that it was overlooked by the editor of the Works, 1784, and, as Luce says, ‘was lost to sight for over a century’, that is until it was reprinted with annotations by H.V.H. Cowell in 1860 and restored to the Works by Fraser in 1871. It was Berkeley’s final word on his Theory of Vision, and he wrote of it in a letter to the Revd. Samuel Johnson, 4 April, 1734, that he composed it simply to explain his doctrine. Luce suggests that his real object was ‘to broaden the basis of his theory of vision, and so to bring its metaphysics into conformity with the Principles’. He argues that with the passage of time the Theory of Vision had become much better known than the Principles, so that the ‘semi-materialism’ of the earlier book had overshadowed the immaterialism of the later one. The Vindication was designed to set this right and is therefore of major importance. The fact of its having been overlooked for so long was not due to any particular rarity; more probably its small size and modest appearance without the author’s name suggested that it was only a trivial addition to the argument.” (Jessop 134. Keynes 4.)

A defence of deism in which Cooke asked his readers to turn away from the prejudices of a Christian education and to adopt “no other Guide but Nature”, a guide he called “the Rule of Right”.

An investigation of the arterial systems of animals.

Depicts a utopia based on a collection of imaginary state papers. Although the book was printed it was never published because of its subversive implications; copies are therefore extremely rare.

An introduction to general science for the layman which went through forty editions in as many years.

Dedicated to the Right Honourable Peter Lord King, Baron of Ockham. “It seems remarkable that a scientist could have written this theological study of abstruse prophecy, but Brewster says that Newton ‘had been a searcher of the Scriptures from his youth, and he found it no abrupt transition to pass from the study of the material universe to an investigation of the profoundest truths, and the most obscure predictions, of Holy Writ ... Sir Isaac regards the prophecies of the Old and New Testaments, not as given to gratify men’s curiosities, by enabling them to foreknow things, but that, after they were fulfilled, they might be interpreted by the event, and afford convincing arguments that the world is governed by Providence ... This ingenious work is characterized by great learning, and marked with the sagacity of its distinguished author.’ ” A Descriptive Catalogue of the Grace K. Babson Collection of the Works of Sir Isaac Newton, p.110.

Published between 1733 and 1738, an encyclopedic description of religious practices.

A historical tragedy.

Published in 1733-34, the Essay was translated and enjoyed great success in France. It was printed in French more than sixty times before 1789. Pope’s deism found an echo in the French deists, while the themes of order, harmony and optimism were readily assimulated by a public who had been prepared for them by Leibniz’s philosophy. Voltaire’s seven Discours en vers sur l’homme (1734-70) were inspired by the Essay, while Zadig (1748) registers clearly Pope’s influence.

Fictitious letter to a State censor that Voltaire did not publish for another thirteen years. Using England as an example Voltaire argues that the state has no right to decide what can and cannot be read by the public.

Libretto for an opera commission by Rameau, it was never staged.

Vast history written between 1740-51. Voltaire spent twenty years preparing the material for this work by interviewing survivors of le grand siècle.  He was concerning with establishing the truth by collecting evidence from as many witnesses as possible.

The famous opening paragraph reads: “It is not merely the life of Louis XIV that we claim to write; we have set ourselves a larger objective. We want to attempt to paint for posterity, not the actions of a single man, but the spirit of men in the most enlightened century that ever was.” Concluding the work with chapters on religious disputes and the Jesuits’ penetration of China Voltaire finishes with the comment, “But if God had wanted China to be Christian, would he have been content with putting crosses in the air? Would he not have put them into the hearts of the Chinese?” “The time will not come again when a duke de La Rochefoucauld, author of the Maximes, upon leaving the conversation of a Pascal and an Arnauld, goes to the theatre of Corneille.”

Voltaire's first attempt to write an opera.

Published first in English in August in a print run of 2,000 copies; the French version appeared in 1734 augumented by a long 24th letter on the Pensees of Pascal. Also known as Les Lettres philosophiques, the Letters introduced the ideas of Locke to a French reading public and thus help to establish sensationalism within French philosophy. The work became an 18th century best-seller and appeared in a further eighteenth editions before 1800.

The French government seized the French edition in June 1734 and had it publicly burned as “scandalous, contrary to religion, good morals, and the respect due to authority”. In spite of Voltaire’s attack on Pascal the Jesuits found Les Lettres philosophiques disturbing; a reviewer in the Journal de Trévoux said Voltaire had acted the “deist with the Quakers”.

Gustave Lanson, the first modern editor of the French text, famously described the work as "the first bomb thrown against the ancien régime".

Inspired by Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, this was Voltaire’s attempt to satirize French cultural dullness. It provoked many denunciations.

First English edition, published in 10 vols between 1734 and 1741.

The ‘Infidel Mathematician’ was probably Edmund Halley, astronomer and mathematician. This work started a controversy among mathematicians beginning with Jurin's attack on Berkeley, answered in his ‘Defence of Free-thinking in Mathematics’; other pamphlets followed, some of which Berkeley did not trouble to answer. According to Keynes “This book was the origin of the Berkeley-Newton controversy. In it, Bishop Berkeley attacks the logical basis of the Fluxion and higher mathematics in general, as leading to free thinking.”

Printed anonymously this plea against excessive drinking was widely distributed.

De Jaucourt eventually became, after Diderot, the chief mainstay of the Encyclopédie. It has been calculated that of the 60,660 articles in its seventeen volumes 17,050, or 28 per cent, were written by de Jaucourt.

Journal that appeared in 1734.

A short treatise which was immediately withdrawn so that only Montesquieu’s own copy is still extant.

Although scholars at the time frowned on Montesquieu’s disregard for archaeology the Considérations is noteworthy for its comments on the history of Rome and the question of historical causation. Drawing on Malebranche and Italian writers, Montesquieu drew a distinction between cause and occasion in order to reconcile free will and historical determinism.

Radicati first attempted to publish his Discours in London in 1730. Only the first part appeared under the title Christianity Set in a True Light; the first complete edition was published in English in 1734.

Published between 1734 and 1742.

A monumental work, consisting of a mixture of metallurgy and metaphysical speculation on the creation of the world.

“To wish and to act, this is precisely the same thing as to be free”.

“It is with this motivating force (i.e. the passions) that God, whom Plato called the eternal geometer, and whom I call the eternal machinist, has animated and embellished nature: the passions are the wheels which make all these machines go”.

“In general, we have a natural right to use both our pen and our tougue at our own risk. I know many tedious books, but I do not know a single one that has done any real harm”.

Voltaire’s radical comments on philosophy and religion caused him to attract further scandal. A warrent was issued for his arrest in May and he took refuge in the château of Mme du Châtelet at Cirey, in Champagne. The Lettres have been described as the first bomb thrown at the ancien régime.

The work was condemned by the Paris parlement on 10 June 1734 and was meant to be burnt at 11 that morning on the steps of the Palais de Justice. The clerk in charge of the burning substituted the Lettres Philosophiques with a book about the Spanish Inquistion.

A drama set during the early years of the Hundred Years war; it was first performed at the Comédie-Française on 18th January 1734.

This was Baumgarten's dissertation.

Published between 1735 and 1737, epigrams on the economic plight in Ireland. A second edition appeared in 1750.

A work which coined the phrase “history is philosophy teaching by examples”.

Carte was a stauch Jacobite who in 1715 resigned as reader at Bath Abbey rather than take oaths to George I. He served as secretary to Bishop Atterbury, after whose fall in 1722 he lived in exile in France for six years.

A satirical farce

A work that proved a great success. It attacked feudalism and legitimized Louis XIV’s attack on the power of the parlements and offered a defence of his monopoly of legislative and executive power. Montesquieu presented a “refutation” of Dubos in De l’esprit des lois.

First published at the recommendation of Linnaeus's Dutch scientific patrons, Systema naturae was enlarged and republished many times throughout Linnaeus's lifetime.

A story of a young and handsome youth who seduces elder women in order to advance in the world.

Published between 1735 and 1742.

Autobiographical novel. Tencin was the mother of D’Alembert. She was imprisoned in the Bastille in 1726 on a false though plausible charge of murder, and released after the intervention of her brother Pierre, then an archbiship, later a cardinal. She became a hostess and attracted the likes of Fontenelle, Montesquieu (who she twice assisted with the publication of his works), Marivaux and Marmontel to her salon.

Published between 1736 and 1738, the Lettres, like Argens other Lettres, was inspired by Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes.

The Analogy did much to influence the history of Christian apologetics during the 19^th century. It defends the doctrine of immortality and the need for revelation against deistic rationalism; Butler argues that a sound use of reason does not contradict but at the least supports faith in divine revelation and in human immortality. In other words, Butler attempted to establish the complementarity of natural and revealed religion. He proposed that “probability is the very guide of life”. Butler’s writings were much admired by the leaders of the Oxford movement.

Euler's first book, an extension of Newtonian mechanics.

Popular satire where “the Sun” is the deity worshiped by Queen Common Sense, who is murdered by the hypocritical priest Firebrand.

Includes a description of the first flowering of a banana plant in Europe.

A collection which consisted of Histoire abrégée de la profession sacerdotale ancienne et modern dédiée à la très illustre et très célèbre secte des Esprit-forts, par un Free-thinker chrétien (Short History of the Ancient and Modern Priestly Profession, Dedicated to the Most Illustrious and Famous Freethinkers by a Christian Freethinker) and Nazarenus et Lycurgos mis en parallèle (The Nazarene and Lycurgus Compared).

An optimistic Epicurean poem celebrating worldiness.

A play staged with great success. The action takes place in Lima, Peru, during the Spanish conquest and displays the moral superiority of civilized behaviour over acts of brute force. Despite its conventional portrayal of ‘noble savages’, the tragedy remained part of the repertoire of the Comédie Française for almost a century.

An example of Voltaire’s attempt at the comédie larmoyante (sentimental comedy), which met with little success.

A defence of the existing establishment. “It offered a realistic defence of the position of the Church, one which abandoned all pretensions to an independent authority, and yet laid on the State a clear duty of protection. . . . In time it came to be seen as the classic statement of complacent Georgian Erastianism and a mark of the stable relationship between religion and politics in mid-eighteenth-century England.” (Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783, p.43-4.)

Published in 2 volumes in 1736–1737.

Written in 1773, Algarotti’s popularization of Newtonian optics was translated into English in 1739 and was highly praised by Voltaire.

Born in Venice on 11 December 1712, Algarotti was educated in Rome, Bologna and Florence. Aged 20 he went to Paris and soon made himself known in intellectual circles. After a visit to England in 1739, Algarotti went to Russia and then returned to England via Saxony. In 1740 he accepted an invitation from Frederick the Great and stayed in Germany for more than nine years. Ill health forced him to return to Italy, where in Pisa he died of consumption on 3 May 1764. Frederick commissioned a monument to be set up on his tomb with the famous epitaph “Algarottus non omnis” (“[Here lies] Algarotti [but] not all”).

Algarotti’s numerous writings include studies on classical themes, architecture, opera and painting.

Lord Chesterfield, Lord Hervey, Thomas Grey, Metastasio, Voltaire, Maupertuis and Heinrich von Brühl were among his correspondents.

Owing much to Bayle and Fontenelle, the Philosophie was a popular work which did much to arouse French interest in Locke. Argens, who from 1744 was chamberlain in service of Frederick the Great, helped to disseminate the ideas of the philosophes and was a friend of Voltaire and D’Alembert. During the 25 years he spent at Frederick’s Court he produced 18 volumes of letters, the Correspondance philosophique

Published between 1737 and 1739

Translated by Wm. Gardiner, third edition, London.

An answer to Thomas Morgan’s deistical work published in the same year. Leland also published a reply.

Fifty volumes appeared between 1737 and 1754.

Published in 2 vols. in 1737-1741, Warburton’s best known work, demonstrating, on deist principles, the divine authority of Mosaic writings, which deist’s denied.

An argument to the effect that the role of a King should be as a national leader, above the corrupt world of politics. Bolingbroke was a friend of Pope’s to whom Pope addressed his Essay on Man.

Carter contributed verse to the Gentleman' s Magazine. She was an expert linguist and translated works from French and Italian. In 1758 she translated Epictetus. Johnson who praised her Greek scholarship.

Crousaz was a Swiss theologian and philosopher whose letters to correspondants reveal much about the intellectual climate of his age. His refutation of Pope’s Essay was translated into English in 1742 by Samuel Johnson. Crousaz also published refutations of Leibniz and Pierre Bayle.

Frederick’s first political essay, revealing his disappointment with the weak position of Prussia, which had recently been forced to abandon the Hohenzollern claims to the duchies of Jülich and Berg on the lower Rhine in the face of the united opposition of the great powers.

Translated into English and published in London in the same year 1738.

Pope was so impressed by Johnson's first poem, which was published in May, that he induced Lord Gower to write to a friend to ask Swift to obtain a degree for Johnson from the University of Dublin. The object of the degree was to obtain for Johnson £60 a year. According to Gower, Johnson would rather die on the road to Dublin if an examination were necessary, "than to be starved to death translating for booksellers, which has been his only substance for some time past". The application for the degree failed, however.

Pope sent a copy of the poem to a friend with a note describing Johnson as "a man afflicted with an infirmity of the convulsive kind, that attacks him sometimes so as to make him a sad spectacle". The poem appeared in a second edition in a week and attracted various patrons, including General Oglethorpe, who was celebrated by Pope, and who became a lifelong friend to Johnson.

One of the great comedies of the eighteenth century.

Written in collaboration with Châtelet-Lomont, Voltaire’s long-term lover, and containing the famous story of Newton and the falling apple, which ‘demonstrated’ the universal law of gravity.

In his dedication to Madame du Châtelet, Voltaire wrote, “this philosopher gathered in during his lifetime all the glory he deserved; he aroused no envy because he could have no rival. The learned world were his disciples, the rest admired him without daring to claim that they understood him”.

The book consists of three sections: beginning with Newton’s religion, continuing with his optics and concluding with his physics. Without using mathematics Voltaire seeks to explain the nature of perception, the character of colours, the orbits of the planets, and the laws of gravitation. A year after the book appeared Voltaire wrote in his Réponse, “the author of the Eléménts tried to make these new truths available to minds with little practice in these matters.” An English translation appeared in the same year 1738.

The first of twenty-six contes philosophiques Voltaire wrote between 1738 and 1773, the last being The White Bull

Alembert's first published work, written when he was 22.

The Metaphysica was repeatedly reissued and was used for a time by Kant as a text-book for his lectures. Baumgarten was a pupil and disciple of Christian Wolff (1679-1754), the founder of the “the Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy”.

Celebrated drama the performance of which was banned under the new Licensing act because of the supposition that Sir Robert Walpole was portrayed in the part of the villian Trollio. The play was printed and later performed in Dublin as The Patriot. Following the ban Brooke return to Ireland.

A selection of Conti's work; a second edition was published in 1756.

Begun in 1712 and intended for use by the duke of Savoy for the education of his eldest son. A political treatise in which Duguet outline measures for social and economic improvement.

Hume wrote the three-volume Treatise of Human Nature in La Flèche, France. The first two volumes appeared together in late January 1739, and the third in the summer of 1740. All three volumes were published anonymously. Hume did not republish the work during his lifetime.

The standard English translation to appear in the eighteenth century. It was made by the Revd William Smith and reached a fifth edition in 1800. It has always been believed that Longinus was the author of this work. Although evidence suggest that it was written in the first century AD its actual date and authorship are unkown. The oldest surviving MS (10^th century Paris) attributes it to ‘Dionysius or Longinus’. Boileau made his famous translation of the treatise in 1674.

Collection of coarse jests, only three of which are attributable to Joe Miller (1684-1738). Miller was an English comedian and member of the Drury Lane company from 1709. His roles included Trinculo in The Tempest, First Gravedigger in Hamlet, and Marplot in The Busybody. There is a reference to Miller in Beckett’s Murphy

A work heavily indebted to William Warburton's writings on Greek mythology. Voltaire called it a “bad novel”.

Sophia was the name attached to two out of three essays on the relative merits of the sexes, the second, published in 1740 entitled Women’s Superior Excellence Over Man, or a Reply to the Author of a Late Treatise entitled ‘Men Superior to Woman’. This latter essay was a response to the anonymously published essay which appeared in 1739, entitled Man Superior to Woman, or, a Vindication of Man's Natural Right of Sovereign Authority over the Woman. Containing a plain confutation of the fallacious arguments of Sophia. All three appeared together in print in 1751 under the heading Beauty’s Triumph, or the Superiority of the Fair Sex Invincibly Prove and with authorship ascribed to Sophia and ‘a gentleman’.

Sophia’s two essays were adaptations of publications by the French ex-Catholic cleric, François Poulain de la Barre, first translated into English in 1677. Sophia wrote, “surely the Women were created by Heaven for some better end than to labour in vain their whole life long.” The whole exchange took the same shape as the French when a reply to the first appeared, purporting to be by a man. Sophia refers to her attacker in Man Superior to Woman as “one of those amphibious things between both, which I think they call a Wit”.

Performances of the play, in which the founder of Islam is portrayed as an imposter, were forbidden afters its first successful production in 1742.

Published by Dodsley, who served a short time in prison after Manners was voted scandalous by the House of Lords.