Note 5 — Chapter XIX · FREETHOUGHT IN THE REMAINING EUROPEAN STATES

The German traveller Alberti,5 citing the London Magazine, 1732, states that Passerano visited England and published works in English through a translator, Joseph Morgan, and that both were sentenced to imprisonment. This presumably refers to his anonymous Philosophical Dissertation upon Death, “by a friend to truth,” published in English in 1732.6 It is a remarkable treatise, being a hardy justification of suicide, “composed for the consolation of the unhappy,” from a practically atheistic standpoint. Two years earlier he had published in English, also anonymously, a tract entitled Christianity set in a True Light, by a Pagan Philosopher newly converted; and it may be that the startling nature of the second pamphlet elicited a prosecution which included both. The pamphlet of 1730, however, is a eulogy of the ethic of Jesus, who is deistically treated as a simple man, but with all the amenity which the deists usually brought to bear on that theme. Passerano’s Recueil des pièces curieuses sur les matières les plus interessants, published with his name at Rotterdam in 1736,7 includes a translation of Swift’s ironical Project concerning babies, and an Histoire abregée de la profession sacerdotale, which was published in a separate English translation.8 Passerano is noticeable chiefly for the relative thoroughness of his rationalism.9 In the Recueil he speaks of deists and atheists as being the same, those called atheists having always admitted a first cause under the names God, Nature, Eternal Germs, movement, or universal soul.10