Abstract
What is the quality of human nature? What kind of life is man destined to live? What is his place in the “creation”? The writers of the Enlightenment often addressed themselves to questions such as these, and this section offers some of the typical answers.
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Notes
Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private vices, publick benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1924).
Translated by Gertrude C. Bussey in Man a Machine (La Salle, Ind.: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1912). Reprinted by permission of the publishers.
C. E. Vaughan (ed.), The Political Writings of Rousseau (2 vols.; Cambridge: The University Press, 1915), vol. 1. Translated by the editor.
Helvétius, De L’Homme (London, 1776), an anonymous eighteenth-century translation.
Voltaire, Candide and Zadig, ed. L. G. Crocker (New York: Washington Square Press, 1962), pp. 74–79. The text is taken from the eighteenth-century translation by Tobias Smollett.
Tobias Smollett (ed.), The Works of Voltaire; a contemporary version with notes, revised and modernized with new translations by William F. Fleming, introduction Oliver H. G. Leigh (New York: E. R. DuMont, 1901).
Translated by Derek Coltman in Diderot’s Selected Writings, ed. L. G. Crocker (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966), pp. 130–37. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Denis Diderot, Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Paul Vernière (Paris: Gamier Frères, 1956), pp. 563–67. Translation by the editor.
D’Holbach, La Morale universelle (Paris, 1820). Translated by the editor.
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© 1969 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Crocker, L.G. (1969). The Human Situation. In: Crocker, L.G. (eds) The Age of Enlightenment. The Documentary History of Western Civilization. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00369-3_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00369-3_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
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