Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot by Jean Le Rond d' Alembert, Richard N. Schwab

Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot

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tary accomplishments: "Many men have won battles and con-
quered provinces," he wrote, "but few have written a work as
perfect as the preface to the Encyclopedia." ^intro.3 Toward the end
of the century Condorcet eloquently summed up the judgment
of the work shared by a substantial proportion of his fellow
philosophes: "The union of a vast extent of knowledge, that
manner of viewing the sciences which belongs only to a man
of genius, a clear, noble, and energetic style, having all the
severity which the subject demands and all the pungency that
it permits, have placed the Preliminary Discourse of the En-
cyclopedia in the number of invaluable works which two or
three at the most in each century are in a position to ex-
ecute." ^intro.4 Ever since the eighteenth century the Discourse has

____________________

^intro.3

Frederick the Great, Œuvres ( Berlin, 1854), XXV, 166. Letter of 1780
to d'Alembert.

^intro.4

M. J. A. Condorcet, "Éloge de d'Alembert," in Œuvres complètes de
d'Alembert ( Paris, 1821), I, ix, read at the Académie des Sciences and pub-
lished in 1784. Condorcet ( 1743-1794), a fellow mathematician and per-
sonal friend of d'Alembert, modeled his Esquisse d'un tableau historique
des progrès de l'esprit humain in part after the Preliminary Discourse.
The Esquisse, written in 1793 while Condorcet was in hiding from the
Terror, was the most impassioned statement of faith in progress of the
Enlightenment. Voltaire, although he apparently did not immediately
recognize the merit of the Discourse, later excessively rated it superior to
what he called the "method" of Descartes ( Lettres sur Rabelais [ 1767], in
Œuvres, ed. L. Moland [ Paris, 1879 ], XXVI, 513), and in this he was sec-
onded by the nineteenth-century scholar, F. Picavet, who placed the Pre-
liminary Discourse on an equal plane with the Discourse on Method ( 1637)
in the introduction to the last French edition of d'Alembert Discourse
( Paris, 1894), p. 1viii. Among the i-philosophes of the eighteenth cen-
tury who nonetheless praised certain features of the work was even the
bitterly hostile Father Jesuit Berthier, editor of the Journal de Trévoux,
October, 1751, pp. 2270 ff., and October, 1759, p. 2565. The abbé Sabatier
de Castres, who consistently attacked the encyclopedists in his Trois siècles
de la littérature françoise ( Paris, 1774), I, 40, regrets that the magnificent
promise of the Discourse was not fulfilled in the Encyclopedia itself. In
his Philosophie du dix-huitéme siécles ( Paris, 1818), I, 109-10, J. F. La
Harpe, similarly an enemy of the philosophes, although he claimed to be
a friend of d'Alembert, put him on a level with Pascal as a scientist and
writer, because of the excellence of the Preliminary Discourse.

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Publication Information: Book Title: Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot. Contributors: Jean Le Rond d' Alembert - author, Richard N. Schwab - transltr. Publisher: Bobbs-Merrill. Place of Publication: Indianapolis. Publication Year: 1963. Page Number: x.

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