Baron d'Holbach Quotes on Knowledge
Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789), the presiding host of the most radical Parisian salon of the high Enlightenment, gave eighteenth-century materialism its most uncompromising statement in the anonymously published The System of Nature (1770) and the parallel Common Sense (1772). The framework presents the natural world as a single deterministic system of matter in motion and the human being as a wholly natural part of it, with the consequent epistemological case that genuine knowledge must confine itself to the discoverable causal regularities of nature and that the categories of theology, of free will, and of immaterial soul are projections of ignorance and fear rather than legitimate cognitive achievements.
Quotes
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Attributed to Baron d'Holbach:
“Theology is but the ignorance of natural causes reduced to a system.”
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Attributed to Baron d'Holbach:
“If we go back to the beginning, we shall always find that ignorance and fear created the gods.”
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Attributed to Baron d'Holbach:
“Man is born neither good nor wicked; education makes him so.”
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“It is thus superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism.”
Samuel Wilkinson, trans., The System of Nature ( Project Gutenberg e-text ), vol. 1, chap. IX | Date and place of publication unknown. Original publication in French, 1770, as La Système de la nature , under the name of Jean Baptiste de Mirabaud . -
“If the ignorance of nature gave birth to such a variety of gods, the knowledge of this nature is calculated to destroy them.”
Samuel Wilkinson, trans., The System of Nature ( Project Gutenberg e-text ), vol. 2, chap. I | Date and place of publication unknown. Original publication in French, 1770, as La Système de la nature , under the name of Jean Baptiste de Mirabaud . -
“When we examine the opinions of men, we find that nothing is more uncommon, than common sense; or, in other words, they lack judgment to discover plain truths, or to reject absurdities, and palpable contradictions.”
Good Sense without God, or, Freethoughts Opposed to Supernatural Ideas (London: W. Stewart & Co., ca. 1900) ( Project Gutenberg e-text ), preface | Translator unknown. Original publication in French at Amsterdam, 1772, as Le bon sens ("Common Sense"), and often attributed to John Meslier . -
“Translator unknown. Original publication in French at Amsterdam, 1772, as Le bon sens ("Common Sense"), and often attributed to John Meslier .”
When we examine the opinions of men, we find that nothing is more uncommon, than common sense; or, in other words, they lack judgment to discover plain truths, or to reject absurdities, and palpable contradictions.