Customer Reviews

The System of Nature, Vol. 1

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The first of the philosophers during the Englightenment to be openly atheist. This elucidates his theories about Materialism, which are very similar to Democritus, although Thierry does deny the existence of a soul. Overall, very interesting, although if you aren't into dry philosophy books, this won't be for you.

This book is a series of 2, the book is smart and thought provoking. It questions the nature of all things in a well thought out composition. It is not an easy read but it is well worth reading and should be kept in your library.

This is absolutely one of the most arrogant books I have ever come across. Of course, the author was an extremely wealthy aristocrat who was accustomed to getting his own way, and as the head of a celebrated radical salon he probably felt like a very smart guy.

So when he sat down to write "The System of Nature" his main (or only) concern was to tell the reader the way things were, that is, his opinion of the way things were. Virtually nothing in the book is argued or logically demonstrated, and questions d'Holbach cannot answer are simply tossed aside as irrelevant.

And this is the way things were for the Baron: only material things exist (presumably including light and energy), God does not exist, the soul does not exist, there is no free will and there is no afterlife.

It is not at all hard to see the baleful influence of this book (1770) on later history, especially the radical anti-clericalism of the French Revolution, but also seeping into Russia and helping to produce an entire "educated" Russian class which believed in this world-view...ultimately producing Chernyshevsky's disastrous What Is to Be Done? and Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, not to mention the Bolshevik coup d'etat and the production of 60 million corpses in the names of radical atheism and socialism.

Mind you, I'm not sure that any of this (atheism vs theism, etc.) can be logically proved or disproved; mankind has been arguing these questions forever. The question I am putting is this: d'Holbach claimed that he wrote his book to increase human happiness, and to lead to a better society. And that means comparing the atheist regimes of the 19th and especially the 20th centuries with the preceding Christian civilization. As David Stove has pointed out, the comparison is so devastating, "it's not a game, it's a shame."

By the way, another opinion of this book comes from Goethe.

Goethe and his friends took a look at this book. "We could not conceive how such a book could be dangerous. It appeared to us so grey, so Cimmerian, so corpse-like that we had difficulty in enduring its presence and shuddered before it as a spectre." For Goethe, the book stole everything precious and interesting from life.

And the book does raise (indirectly) a rather interesting question: is it possible for a philosophical materialist to believe in free will?

"In his 'The System of Nature,' not even the case which is made for atheism depends at all on modern science. In fact, nothing in the book does: it could just as easily have been written in the 1st century B.C. In all essential respects, indeed, it WAS written then. For "The System of Nature" is just Lucretius' "De Rerum Natura" all over again, only many times longer, many times less well written, and many times coarser, both intellectually and morally." -- David Stove, "A Promise Kept by Accident."