De l'Esprit.

£800 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Second Quarto Edition of Helvétius’ De l’Esprit , his first major work and a truly great succès de scandale : “no book during the eighteenth century, except perhaps Rousseau’s Émile, evoked such an outcry from the religious and civil authorities or such universal public interest” (Smith, The Publication of Helvétius’s De l’Esprit , p. 332). Though accused by Voltaire of lacking originality, Bentham read Helvétius in 1769 and immediately determined to devote his life to his principles, saying: ‘What Bacon was to the physical world, Helvétius was to the moral. The moral world had therefore had its Bacon, but its Newton is still to come.’ Moreover, James Mill took Helvétius as his guide in the education of his son John Stuart (Russell, History of Western Philosophy , p. 749). Following Locke’s conception of mind as tablula rasa , Helvétius ‘considered the differences between individuals entirely due to differences of education: in every individual, his talents and his virtues are the effect of his instruction … Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education’ (Russell, op cit. , p. 749). It therefore followed for Helvétius that moral constructs such as good or evil cannot be held to be inherent characteristics of individuals, a position that unsurprisingly provoked the condemnation of his work by both the Sorbonne and the Church. The publication of De l’Esprit was an unusually complicated affair, largely due to Helvétius’s decision to publish through the off

• Year: 1758

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