The Institutions reveal Châtelet’s conversion, under the tutelage of Samuel König, to Wolff's interpretation of Leibnizian philosophy. "Everybody understands the monads", said La Mettrie, "since the Leibnitzians made the brilliant acquisition of Mme du Châtelet." Châtelet’s was revealed as the author when she was accused of plagiarism by König. A revised edition appeared in 1742.

Published by Voltaire at The Hague, the work circulated widely in France where it was regarded as the political programme of the young ruler who succeeded to the Prussian throne on 31 May, 1740. Frederick expounded upon the principles of the enlightened ruler in opposition to the maxims of Machiavelli. The work contains the often misquoted sentence: “The ruler is in no way the absolute lord of the people under him, but merely the first servant.”

Hume completed the Abstract after a hostile review of A Treatise of Human Nature appeared in the Works of the Learned. He published the Abstract anonymously in London under the title An abstract of a book lately published; entitled, A treatise of human nature, &c. Wherein the chief argument of that book is farther illustrated and explained. “I have got it printed in London; but not in the Works of the Learned; there having been an Article with regard to my Book, somewhat abusive, printed in that Work, before I sent up the Abstract” (Hume to Francis Hutcheson, March 4, 1740).

Lowman was a dissenting clergyman, who wrote in response to Tory slanders of the Jewish people: “The very foundation of the Hebrew Constitution was an equal Division of the Land, the Continuance of which was secured by a fundamental Law, which made that Division perpetual, as no Estate could be alienated or pass from One Tribe or Family to another. The laws had further provided that no Interest could be made of Money, so that had a Man never so much Money, he could make no profit of it, either by Purchase or Interest.... The Constitution had expressly made a perpetual Mortmain, so that they could not have any increase of Property in Land, by any Title whatsoever.... As the Constitution put a bar to great Riches, and made such Provision for the natural Conveniences of Life, that very few could be in great Want or Poverty; this served to diminish greatly the temptations of Luxury, Pride and Envy, nor were there any so necessitous as to seek Relief for their private Wants and Misery, in the publick Confusion and Disorders of their Country....The particular Powers of each Part of this Government were so balanced by the Powers of other Parts, that without the concurrence of all it was hardly practicable for any one Part to draw to themselves any share of Property, Wealth, or Power, from the other Parts; and it was as hard and impracticable to obtain their Concurrence, to the ruin of their own Property and Liberty.”

Mably's first major which painted a positive view of the French state in comparison to the Roman Republic.

Marchand was a French Huguenot refugee who became a bookseller, bibliographer, and journalist in the Netherlands. His History of the Origins and Early Progress of Printing was a the title suggests a history of printing.

Includes a satirical attack on the highest courts – the King’s Bench, Common Pleas, Exchequer and Chancery – where “four ancient Rook’ries, invested with Pow’r, All the Gold in the Nation and Silver devour”.

Novel based on the famous contemporary love story of the Chevalier d’Aydie and Mlle Aïssé. Aïssé’s letters to Mme Calandrini, an aunt of Bolingbroke’s wife, were first published in 1787.

Published anonymously in November and translated into French by Abbé Prévost in 1742. (Prévost also translated Hume’s History of the House of Stuart, the first work by Hume that Rousseau read.) Pamelaprobably became the most widely read novel of the century, it went through five editions in less than a year, and nine editions between 1740 and 1762; it was translated into French, Dutch, German, Italian and Danish by 1750. Richardson was deeply disturbed with the criticisms of the novel’s morality. In Europe opinion became divided, some regarding Pamela “as an example for Ladies to follow . . . Others . . . (discovering) in it the behaviour of an hypocritical, crafty girl . . . who understands the Art of bringing a man to her lure.” Notable among the attacks were Fielding’s Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741) and Joseph Andrews (1742).

An account of Rousseau’s project for the education of the eldest son of M. de Mably. From May 1740 until May the following year Rousseau served as tutor to the two sons of M. de Mably. Mably, the brother of the Abbé de Mably and Condillac, was the Prévôt-Général of the province of Lyonnais.

This posthumous work included a memoir which Diderot used in his Letter on the Blind to construct an invented scene in which the dying Saunderson, who was blind, is visited on his death-bed by a clergyman, who attempts a religious conversion.

Châtelet defense of Institutions de physique against charges of plagiarism by Köning and the academician Dortous de Mairan.

A parody of Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela (1740)

Published in 2 volumes. Hume began work in his Essays around 1739. They were published in late 1741 or early 1742. A second volume and a second edition of volume 1 appeared in 1742 and the two volumes were published together in 1748. This later edition was republished with other essays as Political Discourses (1752), a Essays Moral, Political and Literary (1758).

A work that was widely read at the time, and which enhanced Middleton’s reputation, in spite of the fact he had borrowed heavily upon an earlier work on Cicero by William Bellenden. In a letter to a friend, Henry Seymour Conway, Horace Walpole wrote: “I wait with some patience to see Dr. Middleton’s Tully, as I read the greatest part of it in manuscript; though indeed that is rather a reason for my being impatient to read the rest. If Tully can receive any additional honour, Dr. Middleton is most capable of conferring it”, (25 March, 1741). Gibbon’s view was more circumspect; in his autobiography he wrote that upon first reading it, he had appreciated it “above its true value”.

First published in the 1741 edition of Pope’s works, but largely written as early as 1713-14 by the members of the Scriblerus club whose most important members were Arbuthnot, Swift, Pope and Gray, and which aimed to ridicule bad literature and false learning. According to Pope, the Memoirs were designed “to have ridiculed all the false tastes in learning, under the character of a man of capacity enough, that had dipped into every art and science, but injudiciously in each.”

A work that upset the Knights of Malta.

Sequel to Pamela, published in 2 volumes in September.

Historian who wrote biographies of Boyle, Tillotson, John Ward, amongst others. He also edited volumes of correspondence and state papers. Birch worked for Edward Cave on the Gentleman's Magazine

Brucker was a Lutheran pastor. His Historia was published in five-volumes, first in German then in Latin, in Leipzig between 1742 and 1744. It was an important work in the writing of the history of philosophy since it excluded religion as a philosophical subject. It retained its authority until late into the nineteenth century. Diderot used it extensively for his articles on philosophy for the Encyclopédie

A second edition appeared in 1757 under the title Oriental Eclogues

Dodwell rejected natural religion and the attempt to justify Christianity by reason; “the Foundation of Philosophy is all Doubt and Suspicion, as the Foundation of Religion is all Acquiesence and Belief.”

The first comic novel in English.

Hildrop (d.1756) was the author of various fugitive essays of a satirico-polemical kind, chiefly directed against the deists. This work has been described as “an attempt to prove that the lower animals have souls in a state of degradation consequent upon the fall of man.” It includes criticism of Locke’s treatment of the subject in his Essay.

On 2 February 1742 Sir Robert Walpole resigned as Great Britain's Prime Minister. On 13 February 1742 an anonymous article appeared in the Newcastle Journal, later reprinted in the Gentleman's Magazine in February 1742, consisting of ten critical questions regarding Hume's essay "A Character of Sir Rober Walpole" which appeared in his Essays Moral and Political (1742). Hume's replies to each of the questions were then published in the Scots Magazine in March 1742.

Includes an essay on tides, a statement of the conception of level surfaces, and Maclaurin's theory of maxima and minima.

History of William the Conqueror.

Young’s most important work, consisting of 10,000 lines of blank verse, was considered by Johnson to display “the magnificence of vast extent and endless diversity” and became extremely popular in Britain and on the continent.

Important treatise on dynamics, published when d’Alembert was 26, and containing the famous ‘d’Alembert’s principle’, which states that Newton’s third law of motion (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction) is true of bodies that are free to move as well as for bodies rigidly fixed.

Authorship uncertain, a slim volume containing five treatises, hitherto circulated only privately. Two of the essays have been attributed to Fontenelle and one of them, Le Philosophe, to César Chesneau.

Le Philosophe was composed around 1720, and is generally considered a manifesto of French Enlightenment; it describes the philosopher as a human machine which by means of its mechanical constitution reflects on its movements; he is moved by reason as a Christian is moved by grace. Le philosophe has also been attributed to Diderot, who later abridged it for the Encyclopédie. Voltaire later published two versions of it and claimed it had been in circulation since 1730. One of Fontenelle’s essays, Traité de la liberté, became one of his most famous clandestine works, and was reprinted in many posthumous editions of Fontenells’s works.

A study of flexible and elastic lines and membranes.

Hales ventilators came to be installed on ships and in public buildings. He published A Treatise on Ventilators in 1758.

An advocacy of a proto-communist utopia.

Unpublished manuscript on the construction of a flying machine; “what privilege can birds have to exclude us from their medium, when fishes admit us to theirs?”

Dedicated to the Provost and Fellows of Trinity College, Dublin, this appears to be the only published work by William Thompson. “If, then, upon the Sum of the Argument, I have given competent Evidence from Reason and Experience, that Religion is so far from being insignificant and useless to the true Ends of Government, that Government cannot subsist without it: That whatever Motives may force Men into Societies, it is only the Belief of a Superintending Deity, and Religion, which is the Natural Consequence of that Belief, which makes a Cement, able to unite Societies in any manner of Stability, I think I need not say any Thing in Answer to the Nominal Deists, who pretend, that Religion is not only useless, but hurtful: ....” (page 343).

“I exist, therefore, something exists throughout eternity, is an evident proposition”.

A tragedy about the mythical Greek queen which met with instant acclaim on its first night.

A philosophical poem patterned on Virgil and Horace. Akenside was a physician who practiced in London and in 1761 became physician to the queen. He also published Odes on Several Subjects (1745) and Hymn to the Naiads (1746) and other verse. Akenside worked for Edward Cave on the Gentleman's Magazine. Holbach translated and published a French edition in 1759.

A work in which d’Alembert’s principle is applied to the theory of equilibrium and motion of fluids.

Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries concerning the Virtues of Tar Water, and divers other Subjects connected together and arising one from another.

Essay on the nature of fire written in 1737, originally submitted to the Paris Académie Royale des Sciences for a competition in which the entrants were anonymous. The essay took issue with Voltaire's treatment of the subject and the Académie published both essays.

(12 vols., 1744; ed. by Issac Reed, 1780, 12 vols.; 4^th ed. by W. C. Hazlitt, 1874-76, 15 vols.)

Ostensibly published by a club of four women, it continues in monthly issues until May 1746.

Four volumes, comprising thirty-four sermons and tracts, separately published and in various editions, with some printed as late as 1755; thirty-one are printed for Thomas Trye, and three for Richard Williamson.Edward Synge (1659-1741), established a reputation as one of the most industrious clergymen and popular preachers in the city of Dublin. “It has been said of Synge that his life was as exemplary as his writings were instructive; that what he wrote he believed, and what he believed he practised. As the son of one bishop, the nephew of another, himself an archbishop, and the father of two other bishops, his position in ecclesiastical biography is probably unique.”

“Perhaps soom what has already happened in physics will happen in the writing of history. New discoveries have led us to proscribe ancient systems. We will want to know mankind in the interesting detail which today forms the basis of natural philosophy.”

In The Enthusiast and later in the Warton took a stand against the critical rules of Pope and the "correct" school of poetry, and displayed an unfashionable love of nature and natural scenery; he edited Virgil and translated Eclogues and Georgics in 1753.

A third edition, first published in 1733, containing the first edition of An Appendix to the First Part of the Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul, wherein the Principles laid down there, are cleared from some Objections; and the Government of the Deity in the material World is vindicated, or shewn not to be carried on by Mechanism and second Causes. By the Author of The Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul.

"What is properly stiled the People, is what most distinguishes the English from their neighbours; the share they have in the government by their right to choose their representatives inspires them with a certain courage, which is not to be found in other countries in those of the same rank."

Written in imitation of Swift’s Drapier’s Letters during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 Brooke warned of the threat of a rebellion by the Catholic majority in Ireland and argued for a more enlightened policy to forstall the danger. As a result he was appointed to the post of barrack master at Mullingar, Country Westmeath, which he held until his death, in Dublin, on 10 Oct, 1783.

A work inspired by Conti's readings of Descartes, Leibniz, and Locke. Conti was accused and acquitted of atheism before the Inquisition in Venice in 1735.

Diderot's translation and publication of Shaftesbury's Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit. Due to the fact that the Essai advocated a natural philosophy independent of Revelation it was viewed as being potentially subversive. Thus when it appeared in April it did so without either Shaftesbury’s or Diderot’s name and under a bogus ‘Amsterdam’ imprint. The Essai received respectful reviews, even from the Jesuit-run Memoires de Trevoux.

“In the universe everything is united. This truth was one of the first steps taken by philosophy...and all the discoveries of modern philosophers agree in stating the same proposition...The further we look into nature the more unity we see.”

“Atheism leaves honesty unsupported; it does worse, indirectly it leads to depravity. Nevertheless, Hobbes was a good citizen, parent and friend, and he did not believe in God. Men are not consistent...If there is any surprise it should not be an atheist who lives an upright life but a Christian who lives a bad life.” (From Diderot’s notes to Shaftesbury’s text).

Published in 2 vols. between 1745-7, a collection of dramatic works and poems which had previously been published separately

Letter in which Hume defended his nomination for the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University Edinburgh after William Wishart, Principal of the university, drew up a list of allegedly dangerous propositions contained in Hume's Treatise of Human Nature.

A defence of an immanent God, and an application of mechanistic ideas to counter pre-formation theory. During the 1740’s the argument from design seem to acquire confirmation from discoveries in biology and zoology. For example, the Swiss scientist Trembley showed how the freshwater polyp seemed to have the properties of both an animal and a plant in being able to generate itself. This discovery, in conjunction with other developments, led to a view of nature as self-generating, having its own internal dynamism.

‘The Aristippus of modern materialism’, La Mettrie made observations upon himself during an attack of fever; seeing a connection between the rapid circulation of blood and the operation of the mind, La Mettrie concluded that psychical phenomena were to be explained as the effects of organic changes in the brain and nervous system. The book caused an outcry and was seized by the police; La Mettrie was forced to return to Holland from Paris. In 1746 The Natural History of the Soul, together with Diderot's Philosophical Thoughts, was condemned by the Paris Parlement.

English Catholic Priest and scientist, Needham advanced the theory of spontaneous generation, alleging that tiny eel-like creatures develop in fermenting organic matter, such as flour. Voltaire rejected the theory, but it appealed to Diderot as logically eliminating the necessity for outside (divine?) agency; “Voltaire can joke as much as he likes, but the Eelmonger is right”. (D’Alembert’s Dream, p.173.)

Rousseau finished his ballat Les Muses galantes in 1745 and it was first performed at the Opéra in Paris with no great success.

Published in the year that Swift died.

Untitled piece.

After this poem, celebrating the victory at Fontenoy (1745), Voltaire was appointed historiographer, gentleman of the king’s chamber and academician. Although the poem was heavily criticised Marechal de Saxe in a letter to Mme du Chatelet wrote, "the King is very much pleased with it and even says that the work is beyond criticism".

Contains the first conception of the calculus of partial differential equations.

A well-known work on aesthetics which Diderot attacked in his Lettre sur les sourds et muets, (1751). In 1750 the prestigious post of Professor of Greek and Latin Philosophy at the College de France fell vacant and was given to Batteux, and this was resented by the philosophes, who thought it should have gone to a philosopher (like Condillac, or Diderot himself), instead of a mere scholar and rhetorician.

Blacklock, who was educated at Edinburgh Univeristy, was a Scot who became blind through smallpox when he was six months old. Hume introduced the poems to Joseph Spence, former Oxford Professor of Poetry, who in 1754 published his Account of the Life, Character and Poems of Mr. Blacklock which became the Preface to the 2^nd edition of the Poems in 1756. Burke refers to Blacklock in A Philosophical Inquiry and Johnson scepticism about Spence is included in Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

Published by Mortier in Amsterdam and translated as An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge in 1756.

A work which Condillac’s friend, Diderot, helped to get published. It addressed Molyneux’s problem, namely, if someborn born blind were to have his sight restored, would he be able to recognize objects previously known to him only through the sense of touch? In giving an account of the development of the mind, Condillac went further than Locke, who he greatly admired, by arguing that not only ideas, but the mind’s very faculties originate in sensation.

The essay also inaugurated the celebrated controversy about the origins of language, dividing those such as Harris (1751), Maupertuis (1756), De Brosses (1765), Herder (1772) and Monboddo (1773), who believed that it was of human invention, from those such as Sussmilch (1756), who supposed it had been given to mankind by God.

When the essay was translated into English ten years later, it was announced in its subtitle as “A Supplement to Mr. Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding”. The aim of the book is clearly announced in its Introduction: “Our first object, which we should never lose sight of, is the study of the human mind - l’esprit humain - not in order to discover its nature, but to understand its operations, to observe in what manner they are combined and how we should employ them that we might acquire all the intelligence of which we are capable. It is necessary to go back to the origin of our ideas, to work out their generation, follow them up to the limits nature has prescribed to them, and thus establish the extent and the limits of our knowledge, and renew all of human understanding.”

From basic building blocks of knowledge and from these alone, provided that we allow them to differ in vivacity and agreeableness, we can show how attention, memory, pleasure and pain, reminiscence, comparison are produced. “All mental operations are nothing but sensation transformed in different ways.” For instance, attention is nothing other than an impression standing out by virtue of its vivacity. Memory just is an impression which persists. Condillac, unlike Locke, does not distinguish between ideas of inner sense, which arise from awareness of what goes on within us, and ideas of outer sense which have their origin in the outside world. Furthermore, unlike Locke, he claims that language plays a constitutive role in the formation of ideas from impressions.

Diderot’s first independent work, consisting of sixty-two short reflections on Christianity, deism, sceptism and atheism, appeared anonymously. It made a considerable impact and was condemned to be burnt by the Paris Parlement, as “presenting to restless and reckless spirits the venom of the most criminal opinions.” Of all of Diderot’s works it was the one that went through most editions in the eighteenth century

In the opening paragraph Diderot writes: “People ceaselessly proclaim against the passions . . . people inpute to the passsions all of men’s pains, and forget that they are also the source of all his pleasures. It is an element of man’s constitution of which we can say neither too many favorable, nor too many unfavorable things. But what makes me angry is that the passions are never regarded from any but the critical angle. People think they do reason an injury if they say a word in favor of its rivals. Yet it is only the passions, and the great passions, that can raise the soul to great things.”

Frederick began writing Histoire de mon temps in 1746 and was originally devised for the political education of the heir to the throne and not for publication. The work contains the inner thoughts of the king as well as his concept of history, combining the political philosophy of the Enlightenment with a high estimate of the part played by a will to self-assertion that Frederick saw embodied in the great personalities in world history.

An attack on the medical profession

Monumental work published between 1746 and 1759.

Deist and friend of Voltaire’s, Vauvenargues Introduction was moderately successful and consists, apart from the title essay, of some 700 maxims, aphorisms and reflections. Voltaire claimed that it was possibly one of the best books in the French language. Vauvenargues aphorisms on the instincts were much quoted and admired in his time: “The great thoughts come from the heart” - “Reason does not know the interests of the hear” - “Reason misleads us more often than nature.”

Widely applauded address upon election to the Académie française.

A work on the development of partial differential equations which won d’Alembert a prize at the Berlin Academy, and to which he was elected in the same year 1747.

An application of d’Alembert’s new calculus to the problem of vibrating strings.

Published between 1747 and 1750 the Cours appeared in a German translation between 1756 and 1758. It remained influential throughout much of the eighteenth century and is referred to in The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Swiss political philosopher jurist and statesman, translator of Grotius and Puffendorf, his writings, in furthering the natural law tradition, became important in the second half of the century. Many of the Encyclopédie articles on jurisprudence, not least those by Diderot, owe much to his work. Rousseau cited him only once, in his Discourse on Inequality.

Published between 1747 and 1755, the General History of England was was attacked by anti-Jacobites because of its account of a cure of the king’s evil by the Old Pretender.

Colle was a successful songwriter and comic author. Diderot refers to this play in Jacques the Fatalist.

Collection consisted of 12 Odes, including "To Evening," "To Simplicity", etc. Poorly received.

Prize essay published anonymously in the proceedings of the Academy of Berlin, of which he was made an associate member in 1749. The essay was identified and attributed to Condillac only in 1980. Did Condillac have his own reasons for keeping his authorship secret? Did he fear that it would undermine his empiricism and his attack on traditional metaphysics? For although, in the first part Condillac, criticizes the Leibnizians and asserts that we must start with ideas of sensations, in the second part, he gives a finitist argument for the existence of simple indivisible entities, i.e. monads. It is interesting that Derrida in his introduction to the Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (an introduction that was originally published before Les Monades was identified), speculates whether “Condillac plagiarized Leibniz without knowing it”.

Completed but not published, an allegory which takes the form of a discussion between a small group of philosophers as they walk through an avenue of thorns, which represents Christianity, an avenue of chestnut trees, where the philosophers feel at ease, and an avenue of flowers, which represents unthinking hedonism.

“(Only) two matters deserve my attention and they are precisely the ones you forbid me to discuss.

Impose on me silence concerning religion and government, and I’ll have nothing more to say.”

Edelmann was a freethinker who defended Spinoza.

"Included recipes for servants in order to save ""the Ladies a great deal of Trouble""."

Modelled on Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes, Letters from a Peruvian Woman is a love story combined with social commentary centred on a captive Inca princess brought to France. A second edition appeared in 1752 and the novel remained popular throughout the eighteenth century.

First published in 1747 by Thomas Amory in two volumes the eight concluding chapters were in fact written by Thomas Amory, Grove’s pupil, assistant and successor. Henry Grove (1683/4-1738), Presbyterian divine, was the youngest of fourteen children of a Taunton upholsterer. From 1706 until his death he was a tutor at the Taunton academy. He was a friend of Isaac Watts, and Grove himself wrote some hymns and verse, but his chief literary contributions are his sermons, some of them ordination addresses and funeral orations. While granting that human opinions are not to be valued above Scripture, Grove strongly affirms the place of reason in religion. Against Ball he argues that Christ himself did not deduce his moral injunctions from an elaborate theological system, and frequently offered reasons for them; and that reason is a necessary component of religious conversion. In all of this, the influence of Richard Baxter, in whose line Grove claims to stand, and of Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity is apparent. Grove is described as “a dissenter at the parting of the ways.” He looks back, not uncritically, to Locke, forward to Price. Schooled in Cartesianism, he stands with Newton. Upholding the priority of Scripture, his assertion of the rights of reason eased the passage of those who would elevate reason above the Bible. While staunchly rooting his ethical system in the divine order, Grove, by introducing a curriculum innovation at Taunton whereby ethics was separated from dogmatics, unwittingly facilitated that divorce of religion from ethics which some, both friends and foes of Christianity, have subsequently welcomed. (With thanks to Alan P.F. Sell).

First English edition of the Philosophiae moralis institutio compendiaria (Foulis, 1742), “apparently the author's own version” (Jessop), published the year following his death. After the Inquiry (1725) and Essay (1728), this was the third major work to appear in which Hutcheson advanced the ‘moral-sense’ position against the rationalist one, in that key debate of eighteenth-century ethics.

Published in Leiden for which the publisher Luzac was condemned by the religious authorities and translated in 1749 as Man a Machine. The work bears similarities in tone and content to Maupertius Venus physique, (1745). In the satirical dedication to Albrecht von Haller, La Mettrie assimiliated the pleasures of philosophy to sexual pleasure: speaking of the “sublime voluptuousness of study” he hints that he found it necessary to lead a life of sensual dissipation for the sake of finding philosophical truth.

Voltaire described Polignac as the “avenger of heaven and vanquisher of Lucretius,” but called Anti-Lucretius a “poem without poetry and philosophy without reason”. The cardinal de Polignac was a friend of Montesquieu.

Popular work on public health.

Four volumes published between 1748 and 1762.

“The Hull Tragedy told the tale of a Yorkshire knight Sir Peter Symonds who found himself involved in a ghastly cycle of domestic strife and murder thanks to the satanic nature of black servants. It was typical of a genre which reinforced commonplace prejudices against almost everything and everyone alien and unfamiliar.” (Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783, p. 320)

Published in 2 volumes, “Anson’s voyage around the world, celebrated by posterity as evidence of a power poised to assert global supremacy, was in origin an old-fashioned buccaneering expedition, intended to singe beards and supper treasure fleets in the approved Elizabethan manner, at little cost in terms of men and material. Those who sailed on it were thoroughly imbued with this mentality, as Anson’s chaplain recorded in his published memoirs of the voyage. Rounding Cape Horn before the full horrors of storms and scurvy struck them, he recalled the ‘romantic schemes’ and expectations of ‘opulence’ with which they had entertained themselves. The 7 March 1742, was, it transpired, ‘the last cheerful day that the greatest part of us would ever live to enjoy’ ”. (Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783, p.173)

Infamous novel, and best-known story attributed to Argens.

Published in two volumes in 1748 and 1749 and immediately suppressed. Cleland was arrested probably on account of the fact that the book contained a description of a homosexual encounter, this at a time when homesexuality could lead to execution. The scene, which Cleland veiled by calling it “a project of preposterous pleasure” (preposterous, meaning back to front, was often used to mean unnatural) was dropped after the first edition.

Cleland was a consular and commercial agent in the Middle East and India and wrote Fanny Hill in extreme poverty whilst living in Bombay. Cleland sent copies back to England to circulate among friends and at one time stated that he no intention of publishing the manuscript until financial necessity compelled him to do so in 1748. Cleland also wrote Memoirs of a Coxcomb (1751), Surprises of Love (1765), and the plays Titus Vespasian (1755) and Timbo-Chiqui (1758).

Diderot’s first novel, published anonymously, has been seen as being pre-Freudian. It was composed for his lover Madeleine de Puisieux after he informed her that writing a novel was easy.

The plot centres on a magic ring which can make women’s vaginas (the jewels of the title) speak: while a woman may say one thing, her sex may say another, and what her sex has experienced may be not at all what the woman wants (or can allow herself) to admit. Is the world such that “isn’t it true that we are only puppets?”

In his Preface to the Collection, which was published in three volumes, Dodsley claimed that his purpose was “to preserve to the Public those poetical performances, which seemed to merit a longer remembrance than what would be secured to them by the Manner wherein they were originally published”.

“In the same year (1748), Dodsley published a much revised and more refined edition of the set; in 1755 he added a fourth; he completed the collection in 1758 with a fifth and sixth volume. Pitched at wealthy purchasers and educated readers of poetry in the Augustan mode, the Collection far outsold all contenders and quickly gained a reputation as the epitome of polite taste in poetry. Before the next edition (1763) – the last before Dodsley’s death – Michael Suarez estimates that the bookseller had sold close to 24,000 volumes. Under the care of his brother-successor at Tully’s Head, the Collection continued to enhance its stature as the fashionable miscellany of choice, passing through six more editions until the last in 1782. Although displaced by a new mode of poetry at the end of the century, the Collection’s reputation continued long after. In 1814, when another miscellany of poetry was projected by the bookseller John Murray, Lord Byron would remember Dodsley’s Collection as the “last decent thing of its kind”. ” (James E. Tierney, review of Robert Dodsley, A Collection of Poems by Several Hands, edited by Michael Suarez, in TLR, 9 Oct. 1998.)

The first analytical treatment of algebra, the theory of equations, trigonometry, and analytical geometry.

Hume's friend Henry Home advised Hume against publication of the Enquiry due to its religious views. In a letter to Home Hume spoke of his "indifference about all the consequences that may follow". The work was published in April 1748 with the title Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding. Hume retitled the work in 1758 to the more familiar Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. A second addition was published in 1750. Reviews of the work appeared in Göttingische Zeitungen von gelehrten Sachen in 1749 and 1753 (3rd edition). He circulated the manuscript among friends, including Henry Home who felt that it should not be published because of its religious views.

One of the footnotes in Of Natural Character states "I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites". It concludes with the observation that the achievements of a Jamaican "negroe" known as "a man of parts and learning" were "slender", like those of "a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly".

Hume's defence of his friend Archibald Stewart, Edinburgh's provost, who was jailed by the Jacobite rebels for allege resisting the Jacobite Rebellion in July 1745. Steward was subsequently jailed for surrending Edinburgh after the rebellion failed. Henry Mackenzie wrote the following account of Hume's defence: "When Provost Stewart, who was a distinguished wine-merchant at that time (1746) and Provost of Edinburgh, was called to account for an alleged breach of duty in delivering the City to the rebels, D. Hume wrote a volunteer pamphlet in his defence shewing most convincingly that the City could not have been defended, and that standing a siege would have been attended with most disastrous consequences; the Provost on finding out his anonymous advocate, made him a present of a batch of uncommonly good Burgundy. ‘The gift,’ said David, in his good-humoured way, ‘ruined me; I was obliged to give so many dinners in honour of the wine.’" [Anecdotes and Egotisms (1927)]

Klopstock published the first three cantos of The Messiah in 1748 but continued working on the poem until 1773.

The novel was translated into English by Tobias Smollet.

Lessing’s first play, written whilst a student at Leipzig university.

Popular work that meet with international approval.

Posthumously published by Patrick Murdoch. Aged 19 Maclaurin was elected professor of mathematics in Marischal College in Aberdeen. In 1725 he was made professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh on the recommendation of Newton. When the Jacobites marched on Edinburgh in 1745, Maclaurin helped to prepared trenches and barricades for its defence. As soon as the rebel army occupied Edinburgh Maclaurin fled to England until it was safe to return. He died in Edinburgh on 14 June 1746.

Marmontel went on to contribute articles to the Encyclopédie, edit Mercure de France (1758-60) and serve as royal historiographer (1771).

Meier was a pupil of Baumgarten and used the Rudiments of All Beautiful Sciences to disseminate Baumgarten views; it was published between 1748 and 1750.

Publication of first two volumes of La Mattrie's medical satire.

Another friend of Diderot’s, de Monbron was exiled from Paris for this satirical and pornographic novel.

“The corruption of every government begins almost always with the corruption of its principles”.

By 1743, when the text of L’Esprit des lois was virtually complete, Montesquieu begin the first of two detailed revisions, which lasted until December 1746. A Geneven publisher, J. Barrillot, was selected, further corrections were made, several new chapters written and in November 1748 the work was printed in November in two quarto volumes, comprising 31 books in 1,086 pages. In 1750 it was published in English, in 2 volumes, as The Spirit of Laws, Translated (by Thomas Nugent) . . . with Corrections and Additions Communicated by the Author. It appeared in twenty-two French editions by 1751, ten English editions by 1773 and appeared in Dutch, Polish and Italian in the 1770’s, in German in 1789 and Russian in 1801. Soon after publication a number of articles and pamphlets appeared denouncing Montesquieu; he was attacked in the Sorbonne and in the general assembly of the French clergy, and in Rome, despite the interventions of the French ambassador, Montesquieu’s enemies were successful, and the work was placed on the Index in 1751.

Horace Walpole, who read De l’esprit des lois as soon as it became generally available in January 1750, called it “the best book that ever was written - at least I never learned half so much from all I ever read”. (Letter to Horace Mann, 10 January 1750) “In what book in the world is there half so much wit, sentiment, delicacy, humanity?” (Letter to the same, 25 February 1750)

In “A,B,C,” in his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire writes that the De l’esprit des lois was “full of admirable things” because Montesquieu “reminds men that they are free; he shows manking the rights it has lost in most of the world; he combats superstition, he inspires good morals.”

Montesquieu’s main legacy was his theory of constitutional monarchy, with a separation of powers according to the English model, and the theory concerning the effect of climate on the character of peoples.

An outline of the novel was completed by June 1744. The first two volumes appeared in November 1747, volumes three and four in April 1748 and volumes five, six and seven in December 1748. It was translated into French in 1751.

Unpublished Lectures delivered from 1748-63.

"This basic book on the philosophy of religion of the German Enlightenment was expanded several times and by 1793 had been published in at least thirteen editions. There were translations into several languages, including a French translation by no less a personage than the queen of Prussia. The work documents not only the end of confessional orthodoxy, but also a turning away from Christian Wolff's system on the one hand and from rigid pietism on the other. In their place appears an analysis of the self-experience of man and his emotions (Empfindungen) through the stages of sensuality, of mind, of virtue, of religion, and of immortality. Spalding thus contradicted French materialism, especially Julien Offroy de La Mettrie (L'homme-machine, 1748), and adopted, with a Leibnizian background, the anthropology of the English Enlightenment, for example, the doctrine on virtue of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson." Walter Sparn "Spalding, Johann Joachim" Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. Ed. Alan Charles Kors. Oxford University Press 2003.

Toussaint was a friend of Diderot. The Treatise, which defended a non-religious system of ethics, was greatly admired although it generated much scandal, was publicly burned, and caused Toussaint to flee the country.
“To love men and to treat them with goodness, considering them only in their simple condition of men, and not for the love of God, that is true humanity.”

Staged by Voltaire as a court spectacle, with an elaborate decor, as well as the apparition of a ghost, Sémiramis failed to entertain the public.

Written between 1746 and 1747 Zadig, Voltaire’s first important short story and originally published under the title Memnon, became the basis of Voltaire deist faith; it was later to be the subject of bitter disagreements between him and the next generation of philosophes, in particular Holbach.

“In Memnon, one of his most biting stories, Voltaire created a self-satisfied rationalist who conceives the foolish notions of being wholly wise and of establishing the supremacy of reason over passion. In his ludicrous quest, he loses an eye, his money, his property, and at last his presumptuousness. Memnon is the ideal representative of an age of reason, but he is an anti-Voltaire; he is the very type that the Enlightenment repudiated and that its critics later took as its embodiement.” (Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: the Rise of Modern Paganism, 143.)

An explanation of the precession of the equinoxes (a gradual change in the position of the Earth’s orbit) and including an explantion of the phenomenon of the nutation (nodding) of the Earth’s axis.

Published between 1749 and 1766, and with supplements added to the 1789 edition. The Histoire, consisting of 44 volumes, considered the history of the earth, anthropology and the natural history of quadrupeds; it was the first work to put the apparently disconnected facts of natural history into some kind of intelligible form. In one of the volumes, The Epochs of Nature, he questioned biblical chronology for the first time, and raised the Earth’s age from the traditional figure of 6,000 years to the seemingly colossal estimate of 75,000 years. A literal reading of the Bible seemed also to be contradicted wen Buffon observed that some animals retain parts that are vestigial and no longer useful, suggesting that they have evolved rather than having been spontaneously generated. Buffon was forced to recant by the authorities.

“It is...the way we are constituted, our life, our soul which in effect makes our existence. From this point of view matter is (only) an extraneous envelope.”

In 1749 Buffon wrote. “Natural History taken in its full extent, is an immense History, embracing all the objects that the Universe presents to us. This prodigious multitude of Quadrupeds, Birds, Fish, Insects, Plants, Minerals, etc., offers a vast spectacle to the curiosity of the human spirit; its totality is so great that it seems, and actually is, inexhaustible in all its details. . . the hand of the Creator seems not to have opened to give being to a certain fixed number of species; rather, it seems that is has thrown out, all at once, a world of beings related and unrelated, an infinity of harmonious and unharmonious combinations, and a perpetual destruction and renewal. . . . (Nature is) a work perpetually alive, a worker ceaselessly active, who knows how to employ everything. . . . Time, space, and matter are its means, the Universe its object, movement and life its goal”.

Published by Neaulme in The Hague the Treatise is a critique of abstract and speculative systems, with Locke and Newton as its twin heroes.

“Today a few physical scientists, above all the chemists, are concentrating on collecting phenomena, for they have recognized that one must possess the effects of nature, and discover their mutual dependence, before one poses principles that explain them. The example of their predecessors has been a good lesson to them; they at least wish to avoid the errors that the mania for systems has brought in its train. If only all the other philosophers would imitate them!”

“Ideas in no way allow us to know things as they are; they merely depict them in terms of their relationship with us...the good and the beautiful are by no means absolutes; they are relative to the character of the man who judges and to the way in which he is organised.”

“The art of reasoning reduces itself to a well constructed language.” (italics, Condillac)

Although published anonymously in June and distributed clandestinely word quickly spread as to its author. It made a considerable impact and prompted Voltaire to write to Diderot asking the honour of his acquaintance. He told Diderot he desired “passionately” to talk to him, “whether you think yourself one of his (God’s) works or whether you regard yourself as necessarily-organised portion of an eternal and necessary matter. Whichever it be, you are a truly estimable part of that great Whole which is beyond my understanding”. The publication of the Lettre led to Diderot’s arrest and imprisonment at Vincennes between August and November.

The Lettre is an elaboration of sensualist epistomology, postulating that all thought is the product of the senses and concludes that if a blind man’s knowledge of the world is limited by his sightlessness, so ours is bounded by the handicap of having only five senses: if we had a hundred, what else might we know? Diderot rejects Condillac’s view that the mind is passive: “it is not enough that objects strike us, we must in addition pay attention to the impression they made on us”. “How does a man born blind form ideas of shapes?”

“If you want me to believe in God you must make me touch him”.

A work which satisfied the public appetite for information about the North American colonies; it enjoyed great popularity.

Hartley constructed his system with constant prayer to “show”, he wrote to a friend, “that the Christian revelation has the most incontestable marks of truth and certainty.” (Letter to Rev. John Lister, 2 December, 1736.) The Observations aimed to overcome “the great difficulty of supposing that the Soul, an immaterial Substance, exerts and receives a physical influence upon and the from the Body.” In the Preface Hartley states that he had been “informed that the Rev. Mr. Gay had asserted the possibility of deducing our intellectual pleasures and pains from Association.” (Gay was a devout Anglican whose Utilitarian ideas became influential). In Part I Hartley explains how he derived from “the hints concerning the performance of sensation and motion, which Sir Isaac Newton has given at the end of his Principia, and in the Questions annexed to his Optics” the idea that sensory stimuli might operate by producing “vibrations,” propagated through the nerves, like “the trembling of particles in sounding bodies”: in short, that in the brain the occurance of a set of vibrations prepares it for a similar set of vibrations taking place in the same order. Part II explains how complex processes - imagining, remembering, reasoning - may be analyzed into sequences of basic sense impressions, so that all psychological acts can be explicated by a single law of association. In this section Hartley begins “from what Mr. Locke, and other ingenious persons since his time, have delivered concerning the influence of association over our opinions and affections.” Part II investigates the development of concepts of God. Hartley lays down his methodology as follows: “the proper method of philosophizing is to discover and establish the general laws of action, affecting the subject under consideration, from certain select, well-defined, and well-attested phaenomena, and then to explain and predict the other phaenomena by these laws.” This “is the method of analysis and synthesis recommended and followed by Sir Issac Newton.”

Hartley sought to explain the “infinite variety of man’s experience from his dimmest awareness of shapes and colors to his most exalted perception of God, from his most animal-like sensuality to his most abstruse cogitations”. (Gay, 185) Dugald Stewart rejected Hartley’s work as unscientific, as a “metaphysical romance”, though Joseph Priestley, Hartley’s most effective popularizer, thought he had done more for psychology than Locke, and “thrown more useful light upon the theory of the mind that Newton did upon the theory of the natural world.”

Produced by Garrick at Drury Lane Theatre. It has a run of nine performances.

Published by subscription in London. Jones, supposedly an uneducated poet, published complimentary poems dedicated to the Earl of Chesterfield when he became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1745. Chesterfield liked the poems, encouraged Jones to continue writing, and asked him to go to London, which he did in 1747 or 1748. In 1751, Jones’s tragedy The Earl of Essex had a successful run (according to most accounts, Chesterfield and Cibber helped Jones with the play). In 1753, Cibber - who thought he was on his deathbed - wrote a letter to Chesterfield recommending that Jones succeed him. Cibber recovered and Jones faded into obscurity. His modern biographer recounts that Jones died drunk under the wheels of a market cart.

Two of several plays Lessing wrote during the time he spent in Berlin, where between 1748 to 1755 he was a drama and literary critic.

“A famous author, reckoning up the good and evil of human life, and comparing the aggregates, finds that our pains greatly exceed our pleasures: so that, all things considered, human life is not at all a valuable gift. This conclusion does not surprise me; for the writer drew all his arguments from man in civilization.” (Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality).

A work which satisfied the public appetite for information about the North American colonies; it enjoyed great popularity.The long controversy concerning the historicity of miracles culminated in the outcry caused by Middleton’s Free Enquiry and Hume’s essay on the subject. Middleton was heavily criticized for writing a latitudinarian treatise on miracles.

de Puisieux was Diderot’s lover and wife of one of his collaboraters on the Encyclopédie. This, her first book, is a kind of manifesto for the emancipated woman, born to a higher destiny than just to “drink, eat, sleep, produce children, play cards, deceive one’s lover, husband and confessor and slander one’s fellow-woman.”

Rousseau’s essay won the Dijon academy prize in July 1750. He was ill when the news arrived and Diderot saw to its publication by the end of 1750. (Trans. as the Discourses on the Sciences and the Arts, 1751, and known as the First Discourse). The Discourse, a diatribe against advanced civilization and a hymn to “ignorance, innocence and poverty”, made an extraordinary impression. “You are raised to the skies”, reported Diderot. “There never was a success like it!”

However, in the Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron Diderot described Rouseau’s essay as “an old warmed-over quarrel,” and “apologia for ignorance,” which exalted the “savage over the civilized state”.

Published anonymously in 2 volumes. The work consists of dialogues on theology and includes criticism of David Hume’s “Of Miracles”.

One of the central motives for writing this play was to remind the public of a great figure from antiquity, to “make young people who go to the theatre acquainted with Cicero”. At some private performances in 1750, the author took the part of Cicero and played it with such fire that his audience claimed to be in the presence of the great orator himself. In his preface to the play, Voltaire called Cicero the “greatest as well as the most eloquent of Roman philosophers”and praised him as an individual who was able to write so much philosophy “in the midst of the tumults and storms of his life, steadily engaged in affairs of state”

A play based on an incident in Richardson’s novel Pamela.

Memoirs of Whiston's own life published in 1749-50.