Note 158 — Chapter XVII · FRENCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

23. But science, like theology, had its schisms, and the rationalizing camp had its own strifes. Maupertuis, for instance, is remembered mainly as one of the victims of the mockery of Voltaire (which he well earned by his own antagonism at the court of Frederick); yet he was really an energetic man of science, and had preceded Voltaire in setting up in France the Newtonian against the Cartesian physics. In his System of Nature158 (not to be confused with the later work of d’Holbach under the same title) he in 1751 propounded a new version of the hylozoisms of ancient Greece; developed the idea of an underlying unity in the forms of natural life, already propounded by La Mettrie in his L’Homme Plante; connected it with Leibnitz’s formula of the economy of nature (“minimum of action”—the germ of the modern “line of least resistance”), and at the same time anticipated some of the special philosophic positions of Kant.159 Diderot, impressed by but professedly dissenting from Maupertuis’s Système in his Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature (1754), promptly pointed out that the conception of a primordially vitalized atom excluded that of a Creator, and for his own part thereafter took that standpoint.160