Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (February 11, 1657 – January 9, 1757) also

called Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle, was a French author noted especially for
his accessible treatment of scientific topics during the unfolding of the Age of
Enlightenment.

Contents
Quotes
The History of Oracles, and the Cheats of the Pagan Priests(1688)
Quotes about de Fontenelle Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
Portrait by Louis Galloche
External links

Quotes
Behold a universe so immense that I am lost in it. I no longer know where I am. I am just nothing at all. Our world is
terrifying in its insignificance.

Conversations with a Lady on the Plurality of Worldsor Etretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes(1686) as quoted
by Mark Brake, Alien Life Imagined: Communicating the Science and Culture of Astrobiology (2012)

The calculus is to mathematics no more than what experiment is to physics, and all the truths produced solely by the
calculus can be treated as truths of experiment. The sciences must proceed to first causes, above all mathematics
where one cannot assume, as in physics, principles that are unknown to us. For there is in mathematics, so to
speak, only what we have placed there... If, however , mathematics always has some essential obscurity that one
cannot dissipate, it will lie, uniquely, I think, in the direction of the infinite; it is in that direction that mathematics
touches on physics, on the innermost nature of bodies about which we know little.

Elements de la géométrie de l'infini(1727) as quoted by Amir R. Alexander, Geometrical Landscapes: The

Voyages of Discovery and the Transformation of Mathematical Practice(2002) citing Michael S. Mahoney,
"Infinitesimals and Transcendent Relations: The Mathematics of Motion in the Late Seventeenth Century" in
Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg, Robert S. Westman (1990)

The geometrical spirit is not so tied to geometry that it cannot be detached from it and transported to other branches
of knowledge. A work of morals or politics or criticism, perhaps even of eloquence, would be better (other things
being equal) if it were done in the style of a geometer. The order, clarity, precision and exactitude which have been
apparent in good books for some time might well have their source in this geometric spirit. ...Sometimes one great
man gives the tone to a whole century; Descartes],
[ to whom one might legitimately be accorded the glory of having
established a new art of reasoning, was an excellent geometer .

"The Utility of Mathematics," i.e. "Préface sur l'utitlité des mathématiques et de la physique et sur les travaux de
le Académie des Sciences,"Œuvres de Monsieur de Fontenelle(1753) Vol. 6, pp.37-50, as quoted byHerbert
Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science 1300-1800(1949).

At the time the book of Marquis de l'Hôpital had appeared, and almost all mathematicians began to turn to the new
geometry of the infinite [that is, the new infinitesimal calculus], until then little known. The surprising universality of
the methods, the elegant brevity of the proofs, the neatness and speed of the most dif ficult solutions, a singular and
unexpected novelty, all attracted the mind and there was in the mathematical world a well marked revolution [une
révolution bien marquée.

(1792) as quoted by I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (1985)

The History of Oracles, and the Cheats of the Pagan Priests(1688)

 Men are not willing to suffer the decision of things to be too easie, and therefore they mingle their own prejudices
with truths, and so create greater perplexities than are Naturally found therein; and those scruples, which our selves
frame, give us the most pain to untangle.

It is more reasonable to remove error from truth, than to venerate error because it is mix'd with truth.

We can never add more truth to what is truealready, nor make that true which is false.

But why then did the Ancient Priestesses always answer in e Vrse? ...To this Plutarch replies... That even the Ancient
Priestesses did now and then speak in Prose. And besides this,in Old times all People were born Poets. ...[T]hey
had no sooner drank a little freely, but they made Verses; they had no sooner cast their eyes on a Handsom
Woman, but they were all Poesy, and their very common discourse fell naturally into Feet and Rhime: So that their
Feasts and their Courtships were the most delectable things in the W orld. But now this Poetick Genius has deserted
Mankind: and tho' our passions be as ardent... yet Love at present creeps in humble prose. ...Plutarch gives us
another reason ...that the Ancients wrote always in Verse, whether they treated of Religion, Morality, Natural
Philosophy or Astrology. Orpheus and Hesiod, whom every body acknowledges for Poets, were Philosophers
also: and Parmenides, Xenophanes, Empedocles, Eudoxus, and Thales... [the] Philosophers, were Poets too.It is
very strange indeed that Poetry should be elder Brother to Prose... but it is very probable... precepts... were
shap'd into measured lines, that they might be the more easily remembred : and therefore all their Laws and
their rules of Morality were in Verse. By this we may see that Poetry had a much more serious beginning than is
usually imagin'd, andthat the Muses have of late days mightily deviated from their original Gravity .

Now, the Priests who belonged to the Temples, scorn'd to use the same Customs in comm on with these Gypsies; for
they thought themselves to be a nobler and graver sort of Fortune-tellers; which makes a mighty ference,
dif I'll
assure you, in this great affair.

[A]bout the time of Alexander the Great, a little before Pyrrhus's days, there appear'd in Greece certain great Sects
of Philosophers, such as thePeripateticks and Epicureans, who made a mock ofOracles. The Epicureans
especially made sport with the paltry Poetry that came fromDelphos. For the Priests hammered out their
Verses as well as they could, and they oftentimes committed faults against the common Rules of Prosodia. Now
those Fleering Philosophers were mightily concerned thatApollo, the very God of Poetry, should come so
far behind Homer, who was but a meer mortal, and was beholding to the same Apollo for his inspirations.

It was to little purpose to excuse the matter , by saying, that the badness of the Verses was a kind of
Testimony that they were made by a God,who nobly scorn'd to be tyed up to rules and to be confined to the
Beauty of a Style. For this made no impression upon the Philosophers; who, to turn this answer into ridicule,
compared it to the Story of a Painter, who being hired to draw the Picture of a Horse tumbling on his Back upon the
ground, drew one running full speed: and when he was told, that this was not such a Picture as was bespoke, he
turned it upside down, and then ask'd if the Horse did not tumble upon his back now . Thus these Philosophers jeered
such Persons, who by a way of arguing that would serve both ways, could equally prove that theersesV were made
by a God, whether they were good or bad.

So that at length the Priests ofDelphos being quite baffled with the railleries of thoselearned Wits, renounced all
Verses, at least as to the speaking them fromthe Tripos; for there were still some Poets maintain'd in the emple,
T
who at leisure turned into Verse, what the Divine fury had inspired the Pythian Priestess withal in Prose. It was very
pretty, that Men could not be contented to take theOracle just as it came piping hot from the Mouth of their
God. But perhaps, when they had come a great way for it, they thought it would look silly to carry home an
Oracle in Prose.

Quotes about de Fontenelle

[T]he intellectual changes ofLouis XIV's reign touch the history of science—especially as they represent the
extension of the scientific method into other realms of thought. ...we meet the beginnings of the criticism of the
French monarchy... acute criticism from... theFrench intelligentsia who could claim to understand the... state better
than the king himself. ...The funeral orations of Fontenelle call attention to an aspect of this movement... [i.e.,] the
initial effect of the new scientific movement on political thought. ...The first result ...as Fontenelle makes clear
, was
the insistence that politics requires the inductive method, the collection of information, the accumulation of concrete
data and statistics. ...He describes ...howVauban... travelled over France, accumulating data, seeing the
condition[s]... for himself, studying commerce and the possibilities of commerce... gaining a knowledge of local
conditions. Vauban, says Fontenelle, did more than anybody else to call mathematics out of the skies... [he] put
statistics to the service of modern political economy and first applied the rational and experimental method in matters
of finance. ...Fontenelle tells us that ...SirWilliam Petty, the author of Political Arithmetic, showed how much of the
knowledge requisite for government reduces itself to mathematical calculation.

Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science 1300-1800(1949)

Fontenelle provides an example of the transfer of the scientific spirit, and the application of methodical doubt, in...
the History of Oracles. In a sense he is one of the predursors of thecomparative method in the history of religion—
 the collection of myths of all lands to throw light on the development of human reason. ...he recommends the study
of primitive tribes in our own day ...He treats myths as... a natural product, subject to scientific analysis—not the
fruits of conscious imposture but the characteristic of a certain stage in human development. The human mind he
regards as... the same in all times and ages, but subject to local influences... Here is a self-conscious attempt to
show how the scientific method could receive extended application and could be transferred from the examination of
purely material phenomena even into... human studies.

Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science 1300-1800(1949)

His wit, his Learning, his Knowledge of Mankind, his exquisite aste
T in all that is Polite, the Fire of his Imagination,
the uncommon Felicity of his Eloquence, and the ready u Trn of his Expression, are Reasons which the Publick will
think very natural to direct me in this Address to Y
our Lordship.

John Hughes, Dedication inFontenelle's Dialogues of the Dead(1730)

A mere nothing, a tiny fibre, something that could never be found by the most delicate anatomy
, would have made of
Erasmus and Fontenelle two idiots, and Fontenelle himself speaks of this very fact in one of his best dialogues.

Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine (1747)

External links

A Conversation on the Plurality of Worlds(1753)

Fontenelle's Dialogues of the DeadTr. John Hughes (1730)

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