HUME TO HEGEL Bayle’s scepticism was controverted by many, most notably by Leibniz in his Theodicy But his negative attitude to religious authority set the tone for Enlightenment thinkers in Germany as well as in France The positive element in the Enlightenment—the attempt to achieve a scientiWc understanding of the human social and political condition—owed more to another, more systematic thinker, Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) Montesquieu’s great work was The Spirit of the Laws (1748), which built up a theory of the nature of the state upon a mass of historical and sociological erudition This work, which took many years to write, had been preceded by two shorter works—the Persian Letters of 1721, a satire on French society, and a more ponderous treatise on the causes of the greatness and decadence of the ancient Romans (1734).3 Montesquieu spent a period in England and acquired a great admiration for the English Constitution His Anglophile passion was shared by later Enlightenment philosophers, who saw themselves as heirs of Bacon, Locke, and Newton rather than of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz The Wrst philosophical publication of Voltaire (born in 1694 as Franc¸ois Marie Arouet), the Philosophical Letters of 1734, is full of enthusiasm for the comparative freedom and moderation of English political and ecclesiastical institutions His admiration for British tolerance was all the more sincere, since before being exiled to England in 1726 he had already been imprisoned twice in the Bastille in punishment for libellous pamphlets about senior noblemen Locke, Voltaire says in his thirteenth letter, is the Wrst philosopher to have given a sober account of the human soul in place of the romantic fantasies woven by earlier philosophers ‘He has displayed to mankind the human reason just like a good anatomist explaining the machinery of the human body.’ In the years before the appearance of the Encyclope´die Voltaire made himself a lively publicist for English science and philosophy, publishing in 1738 his Philosophy of Newton The very idea of an encyclopedia came from England, where in 1728 one Ephraim Chambers had produced, in two volumes Cyclopaedia; or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences The two editors of the Encyclope´die were men of diVerent talents and temperaments D’Alembert was a gifted mathematician with original work in Xuid dynamics to his credit He aimed to bring to all the sciences the Montesquieu’s political philosophy is treated in detail in Ch 91