The Atheist's Bible

Front matter

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Caroline War

PART ONE: The Éléments de physiologie Generally, Philosophically, and Physiologically

1. Introduction: The Curious Materialist 3 2. ‘Toutes les imperfections de l’inachèvement’: The 17 Mystification about the Manuscript Fragments

3. Material World and Embodied Mind 61 4. Diderot the Physiologist 137

PART TWO: The Eléments de physiologie, 1790-1823

5. 1790: Naigeon and the Adresse à l'Assemblée nationale 179 6. 1792: Naigeon’s Article on ‘Diderot’ in the Encyclopédie 207 méthodique: Philosophie ancienne et moderne

7. 1794: ‘Le citoyen Garron’, the Comité d'instruction 213 publique, and the Lost Manuscript of the Eléments de

physiologie

8. 1794-95: Garat and the École normale 231 9. 1796-97: Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy at the Institut 271 national

10. 1798, 1802: Naigeon, the Œuvres de Diderot, and the 319

Censored Preface to Montaigne’s Essais

11. 1820: Garat’s Mémoires historiques sur la vie de M. Suard, 335 sur ses écrits, et sur le XVIIIe siècle

12. 1823: Naigeon’s Mémoires historiques et philosophiques 355 sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot vi

13. Conclusion

Acknowledgements Bibliography Index

399 403 421

For Leo and Viola

Preface

This book is about Denis Diderot’s late work, the Éléments de physiologie. It argues, against the prevailing view, that this treatise made a substantial contribution to materialist thought, offering ways of explaining a human being without recourse to the divine and also without reducing human complexity or doing away with awe and wonder. These ways were physiological. The prevailing view accepts that Diderot planned to do something like this, but considers that unfortunately he did not complete his project. I argue that he did, and I explain not only why I think this, but also what led to the prevailing view that he did not, and why that particular story is illuminating in itself. Another aspect of the prevailing view is that it is accepted that even in its unfinished form, this work would have been of importance and interest to readers of the time, if only it had circulated and been read instead of being hidden away in two copies in the inaccessible private archives of Diderot’s daughter and Catherine II of Russia, his patron. I argue that it did circulate, was read, and did have a decisive influence as early as the 1790s, and also that it was published, in an admittedly slightly odd form, in 1823. To help this rather argumentative study make its case, I offer a connected digital edition of this first publication, Jacques-André Naigeon’s Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot, which can be accessed here: https://naigeons-diderot.mml.ox.ac.uk/index. htm.

A quick word on the translations: every quoted text is followed by an English translation, with both languages equal on the page. This is to make it as accessible as possible to any interested reader, whether francophone or anglophone or somewhere in between. The translations x The Atheist's Bible are drawn from published works where possible, but in the many cases where there is none, I keep the translated text as close to the original as possible (while hopefully still making sense), specifically to facilitate access to the French for those who wish to toggle between the two.

PARTONE

THE ÉLÉMENTS DE PHYSIOLOGIE GENERALLY, PHILOSOPHICALLY, AND PHYSIOLOGICALLY

1. Introduction The Curious Materialist

Lamour est plus difficile à expliquer que la faim: car le fruit n’éprouve pas le désir d’être mangé.!

Love is harder to explain than hunger, for a piece of fruit does not feel the desire to be eaten.

Love is more difficult to explain than hunger, or so says the eighteenth-century philosophe and explainer of difficult things, Denis Diderot. How could we disagree? Hunger is probably a more fundamental physiological need than the complex set of feelings called love. Even if the comparison nudges us to see love in terms of another physiological need, lust and the drive to procreate, we would probably still agree that it is harder to explain than hunger. And that is where we suppose

1 Throughout this book, I will give page references to the three current critical editions, in order of publication, in part to facilitate ease of reference for readers with access to only one of them, and in part because the most recent edition massively expands our understanding of the sources Diderot used when composing this work, and is therefore immediately a crucial referent. First, Jean Mayer’s 1987 edition: Denis Diderot, Eléments de physiologie, ed. by Jean Mayer, vol. 17 (Paris: Hermann, 1987). This constitutes volume 17 of the ongoing Œuvres complètes of Diderot, known as DPV, after three of its founding editors, Herbert Dieckmann, Jacques Proust, and Jean Varloot. Second, Paolo Quintili’s stand-alone edition: Denis Diderot, Eléments de physiologie, ed. by Paolo Quintili (Paris: Champion, 2004). Third, Motoichi Terada’s edition: Denis Diderot, Eléments de physiologie, ed. by Motoichi Terada (Paris: Editions Matériologiques, 2019). This makes available Terada’s immense work on Diderot’s sources, which very helpfully appeared as I was revising this manuscript. I will always signal when his indication of a source should be taken into account in our understanding of any given passage. Thus: DPV 494/PQ 328/ MT 307.

Diderot is taking us, towards an analysis of hunger and love as appetites of different but recognisable sorts. But that is not where the sentence goes! The reason he gives for love being harder to explain than hunger is that a piece of fruit does not feel the desire to be eaten. What? We suddenly halt.

The perspective has switched, from the person who feels appetites to the object of their appetite, be that a piece of fruit or, implicitly, the desired person. Does a piece of fruit feel anything at all? By stating that the fruit has no desire to be eaten, Diderot raises the possibility that it might indeed have feelings of some sort, even desires, even if this particular one, not to be eaten, is negative. Furthermore, in saying that the piece of fruit does not want to be eaten, the proposed self-protective position of the piece of fruit sounds perfectly reasonable. So here we are, in agreement with the imaginary point of view of a piece of fruit. Look what he has reduced us to! We are obliged to pause and take stock; and although we do not really think that a piece of fruit has sensation or feeling, we are wondering about the relationship between an eater and an eaten thing, and seeing that it raises questions about reciprocity that might need further thought. These same questions about reciprocity return us to the other factor in this equation: love, or rather, those feeling the love, the lovers. Does a lover pulsate with the desire to be eaten? We appear to be bordering on the sexually explicit. Certainly, Diderot is presenting us with a complex knot that brings together and literally equates not only bodily urges, emotions, and feelings, but also fruitly feelings. And this all feels rather challenging, to put it no more strongly than that.

The Éléments de physiologie quite frequently exerts a sort of Alice in Wonderland pressure on the reader, inverting proportions, shaking assumptions, making bizarre comparisons, asserting relationships between phenomena we would never have thought of associating. For instance, we read that blood flows round the body faster than the fastest river? That is not just an analogy to make us understand the point more quickly, not just an image that evokes coursing water only to project an internal picture of our rivery arteries, it’s also an exact statement about the relative speeds of fluids in nature which requires us to think about them comparatively. Or, as we find on another page, ‘un œil se fait comme une anémone’ [an eye grows like an anemone] and ‘un homme se fait comme un ceil’ [a man grows like an eye].° Here, rather than moving progressively from simple to complex and thus from an anemone to an eye and thence to a human being, Diderot criss-crosses the different organisms so that we never settle into some complacent supremacist hierarchy. In fact, he is more likely to do the exact opposite, as here:

Les animaux carnassiers sont plus sujets au vomissement que les frugivores.

Les ruminants ne vomissent point.

Lhuitre n’a point de bouche."

Carnivorous animals are more subject to vomiting than herbivores. Ruminants don’t vomit at all.

The oyster has no mouth.

There is a visible sequence to the order in which Diderot presents digestion here: he moves from the top of the food chain to the bottom; from complex meat-eater to simple oyster (oysters are the typical example of a crude life form in writing of the period).° And yet the bodily function he chooses, the ability to vomit, might not be the normal way of establishing a top-down hierarchy. Furthermore, the mouthless oyster somehow seems seriously incapacitated in this series: it is not that the oyster does not vomit because it never needs to, but that it has no mouth so it cannot.

Diderot’s human being is not a supreme life form, but a composite of life forms in all their stages: ‘l'homme a toutes les sortes d'existence: l'inertie, la sensibilité, la vie végétale, la vie polypeuse, la vie humaine’ [man has every kind of existence: inertia, feeling, vegetable life, polypous life, human life].° Thus, analogies whereby the nervous system is like ‘une écrevisse’ [a crayfish] or the blood vessels around the heart

5 See Caroline Jacot-Grapa, ‘Des huîtres aux grands animaux’, Dix-huitième siècle, 42.1 (2010), 99-117 (pp. 107-08), https: //doi.org/10.3917/dhs.042.0099.

are like its ‘pattes’ [paws],f are not just imaginative comparisons that draw the reader in by giving them a rapid and vivid visualisation, but also genuine investigations into the cohabitation of different life systems within one complex organism. The Eléments de physiologie is as much about the elements as it is about the physiology: it looks at the shifting forms and patterns of matter and it considers humans in their material embodiment, as an expression thereof. It asks how the being and behaviour of any given person express that material identity, in sickness and in health. Bodily sensation, emotion, and perception are thus directly connected, as Diderot shows, using himself as an example:

Je suis heureux, tout ce qui m’entoure s’embellit. Je souffre, tout ce qui m'entoure s’obscurcit.’

Iam happy, and everything around me grows beautiful. I am in pain, and everything around me is plunged in gloom.

And he asks what, in a context whereby physiological embodiment is all-determining, selfhood might be? The answer is that self is memory:

La mémoire constitue le soi. La conscience du soi et la conscience de son existence sont différentes. Des sensations continues sans mémoire donneraient la conscience ininterrompue de son existence: elles ne produiraient nulle conscience de soi.”

Memory constitutes the self. The consciousness of self and the consciousness of one’s existence are different. What continuous sensation without any memory would impart would be the uninterrupted sense of existence, not any consciousness of self.

Selfhood is not a given, and its lack or loss have to be envisaged. It may exist for only part of life, between childhood and old age. The processes of growth and decline cannot be controlled, but are impelled forward naturally, passively. Change and flux are constant:

Nul état fixe dans le corps animal: il décroît quand il ne croît plus.”

There is no fixed state in the animal body: it starts shrinking once it stops growing.

There is always movement and variation: this is a premise of materialist thought. In the context of human physiology, that means growth, age, illness, and also, inevitably, malformation. The curious materialist will be fascinated by all these variations in bodily condition, and will want to know what effect they have on perception, experience, and happiness. Diderot is this curious materialist, and while one could no doubt argue that all of his works explore aspects of human embodiment and experience in some way, it is in the Éléments de physiologie that he focuses on it most directly, thoroughly and systematically. Furthermore, written at the end of his life, it contains and distills aspects of everything he has hitherto engaged with; it has great range and depth of allusion, and great writerly control, such that images, phrases, stories, and subjects work their way into the reading mind and stick there. As Diderot comments with a witty and virtuoso command of rhythm and onomatopeia, ‘un plat ouvrage nous endort comme le murmure monotone d’un ruisseau’ [a flat piece of work sends us to sleep like the monotonous murmur of a stream ].’* This work is one long series of jolts. The chapter opened with one such, and indeed it is woven through with bizarre one-liners that specialise in startling juxtapositions.

Diderot probably started working on the Eléments soon after he completed the first draft of his experimental poetico-materialist dialogue Le Rêve de d'Alembert [D’Alembert’s Dream] in 1769, with its quartet of truly existing but fictionalised speakers, philosophe Diderot, mathematician Jean le Rond d’Alembert, doctor Théophile de Bordeu, female Julie de Lespinasse. D’Alembert’s Dream in fact serves as an imaginative introduction to the substantial materialist treatise that is the Eléments de physiologie, which Diderot probably continued to work on until relatively close to his death in 1784.” In terms of genre it is quite unlike his earlier writings in this area, be they the allusive Lettres (on

13 We know this because there are references to it in his Réfutation d'Helvétius and Observations sur Hemsterhuis, from 1773-74, and within the Eléments itself he remarks that he was more than 66 years old when he working on a particular section, which would date that part to after October 1779 [DPV 313/PQ 129/MT 136], and finally, the most developed manuscript version we have, from his daughter’s archive the Fonds Vandeul, has additions that could not have been made before 1782. So, this the blind or on the deaf and dumb), the aphoristic Pensées or indeed the audacious dialogues that form Le Rêve de d'Alembert. It advertises its claim to seriousness overtly. This is obvious from the title itself, whether that title is indeed the Eléments de physiologie or simply Physiologie (there is some dispute about this).® And despite the many startling one-liners, cunningly designed to jolt the sleepy and passive reader into wakefulness, its attentive approach to the thorough but succinct description of the human body aligns it more with the knowledgedisseminating Encyclopédie he edited for more than twenty years than with the rest of his generally elliptical writings, with the crucial difference that here he presents his highly contentious theories about matter, life, thought, and the human mind unmasked, and step by censorable step. As Diderot puts it, while nonetheless admitting that this method is not infallible, ‘il n’y a qu’un moyen de connaître la vérité, c'est de ne procéder que par partie et de ne conclure qu’aprés une énumération exacte et entiére’ [there’s only one way of getting to the truth, to proceed from one part to the next and to conclude only after an exact and total enumeration |." His earlier text, the Rêve de d'Alembert, for all its playful gives us periodic reference points that suggest that he was working on it across the final fifteen years of his life.

14 Pensées philosophiques, published in 1746, Lettre sur les aveugles, published in 1749 and the Lettre sur les sourds et muets, published in 1751, the Principes sur l'interprétation de la nature published in 1753, and the Principes philosophiques sur la matière et le mouvement, written but not published, in 1770.

15 The (early draft) St Petersburg manuscript is entitled Elémen[t]s de physiologie; the (mature draft) Fonds Vandeul manuscript also has Élémens de physiologie on the title page; Hippolyte Walferdin, describing a lost manuscript copy in 1837, gives its title as Physiologie (see DPV 270-71, discussed below, in the chapter entitled ‘1823: Naigeon’s Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot’); Gerhardt Stenger considers that l'ouvrage fini devait s’intituler “Physiologie” tout court’ [the finished work was supposed simply to be called Physiology] (Diderot, le combattant de la liberté (Paris: Perrin, 2013), p. 740, n. 144); Naigeon confuses matters by alluding to it as Diderot’s ‘systéme particulier de physiologie’ [his particular system of physiology] and also as ‘une nouvelle théorie, ou plutôt une histoire naturelle et expérimentale de l’homme’ [a new theory, or rather, a natural and experimental history of man] (Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot (Paris: J. L. L. Brière, ‘1821’ [1823]; repr. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970), p. 291); Terada, presumably on the basis of Naigeon’s description, also calls it by the name Histoire naturelle et expérimentale de l'homme (MT 54, 57). It seems most probable, given that both manuscript versions carry the full title of Eléments de physiologie and that the ‘Avertissement’ of the Vandeul version explicitly names the title ‘Éléments de physiologie’, that this was indeed the proposed title.

profundity and exploratory discussion, was not ‘an exact and total enumeration’, and nor does it proceed systematically, but the Eléments de physiologie is and does. In the Réve, Diderot has the fictionalised Bordeu offer the thought that ‘la fibre est un animal simple; l’homme est un animal composé. Mais gardons ce texte pour une autre fois’ [the fibre is a simple animal; man is a composite animal. But let's keep that thought for another time], and in so doing, he plants an allusion to a more systematic treatment of this idea. That more systematic treatment is to be found in the Éléments de physiologie.” We have already quoted the passage proposing that ‘l’homme a toutes les sortes d'existence’; this is a recurrent theme which is repeatedly revisited, and later we read that ‘Thomme est un assemblage d'animaux où chacun garde sa fonction’ [man is an assemblage of animals, each one with its own function]. The Éléments de physiologie is organised into three parts, each of which is subdivided into numerous chapters. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, in the most traditional way possible, and let it be said, in a more traditional way than we normally find in Diderot’s works. The first part, simply entitled ‘Des Etres’ [On Beings], opens with a tableau of nature in general, looking at the links in a chain of being organised according to complexity of organism. It is divided into three chapters on, in order of increasing complexity, the ‘végéto-animal’, the ‘animal’ and ‘homme’. In these, he rapidly sketches the classification of living beings according to their differences and similarities, repeatedly enquiring about the ability to feel sensation across nature. What is original about this part is perhaps more than anything the way in which it fuses philosophy

17 Denis Diderot, Le Rêve de d'Alembert, ed. by Colas Duflo (Paris: GF Flammarion, 2002), p. 138; or DPV 17, p. 166. Duflo supplies a footnote reference to a slightly different passage of the Éléments, ‘Il y a certainement dans un même animal trois vies distinctes [etc]’ [there are certainly three distinct life forms in a single animal], although his reference is in fact to a very early draft of the Eléments de physiologie, called the Fragments dont on n'a pu trouver la véritable place, DPV 17, p. 226. In the Eléments de physiologie proper, this passage is DPV 310/PQ 126/MT 134. I discuss the relationship of these drafts to each other below, see the section in Chapter 2 titled ‘From Elements to Fragments’.

19 DPV 501/PQ 338/MT 314. Terada points out that Diderot’s source here is Bordeu’s Recherches sur les maladies chroniques (1775), in which he variously writes that ‘le corps vivant’ [the living body] is an ‘assemblage de divers organes’ [assemblage of different organs] and an ‘assemblage de plusieurs organes’ [assemblage of many organs |. Eléments, ed. by Terada, p. 496, Source XI.

and natural history so totally, that it does it so briefly, and that it is so explicit in its views. Others such as the famous and successful author of the Histoire naturelle générale et particulière (1749-89) in 36 volumes, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, or the Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet might be diffusely, ever so cautiously, hovering on the point of suggesting similar sorts of points, but apart from needing to penetrate their actual meaning, first of all you’d have to find the passage, buried somewhere in volume 12. This is not even a joke: that is where Buffon first gets round to defining Nature, in volume 12 of 36.2 In the Éléments de physiologie, it’s line 1.

The second part, entitled the ‘Eléments et parties du corps humain’ [Elements and parts of the human body], focuses on human physiology. It displays a remarkable synthesis of disciplinary erudition, this time very specifically from the field of physiology and much bolstered by the work of the pre-eminent Swiss physiologist Albrecht von Haller, and made comprehensible and meaningful thanks to Diderot’s extraordinary style, consisting at once in concise lucidity of description and in the ability to know when to puncture the description, pause, and start asking questions or drawing strange and destabilising analogies which breathe new meaning into the text. This second part does not attempt a complete synthesis of existing accounts of the workings of the human body and of its elements. There is nothing about the skeleton, for example. Instead, it focuses its attention on the basic material of the human body (fibres, cellular tissues) and on how it functions (blood, muscles, reproduction, the separate organs). Diderot repeatedly returns to two groups of questions: firstly, what is the difference between organised beings and an animal or what we’d now call an organism (can an organ be considered an animal in itself, for example?), and secondly, how is sensation communicated from one part of the body to another, what happens when that communication is interrupted, and what is the significance of that interruption?

The third and final part contains a detailed discussion of the senses and the mind, memory, imagination, thought, what it terms ‘les phénomènes du cerveau’ [the phenomena of the brain]. It proposes

20 Buffon, ‘De la nature. Première vue’ [On Nature. First view], in Œuvres, ed. by Stéphane Schmitt and Cédric Crémiére (Paris: Gallimard Pléiade, 2007), p. 985, https://doi.org/10.5962/bh1.title.53421.

that human experience of self and other is first and last the product of relational material organisation in time and space, entirely determined by it, yet no less conscious and lived for all that it is determined. Thus there is no soul, no supernatural element, and also no place for the faculty supposedly exclusive to man, ‘reason’. Reason is replaced with ‘instinct’ on the one hand, and ‘understanding’ on the other. Diderot rounds off the Éléments de physiologie with an extraordinary meditation on death in the Stoic tradition—in Montaigne’s version, ‘que philosopher c'est apprendre à mourir’ [to philosophise is to learn to die] and in Diderot’s chiastic mirroring: ‘un autre apprentissage de la mort est la philosophie’ [another apprenticeship of death is what philosophy is].21

In sum, the Eléments de physiologie is overtly atheist and materialist. Materialism refers to the view that the universe and everything in it is made entirely from matter in different shapes and forms; in this eighteenth-century context, it is also automatically understood to be an atheist position, and therefore dangerous, both for the person who holds it and might be imprisoned because of it (as Diderot was in 1749, for the suspect views about the existence of God expressed in his Letter on the Blind), and for the general population, who, the (ecclesiastical) authorities considered, would be at risk of contamination.

It is a substantial materialist treatise and there is nothing else of its time like it (and nor would there be for at least another century), nothing else that places a detailed physiological account of humans and human consciousness within an overtly materialist presentation of nature. It draws on the work of physiologists like Haller and others, and on the work of naturalists like Buffon or Bonnet. It dialogues with philosophers like the polemical Julien Offray de La Mettrie and the more mainstream Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, and re-visits many of the same examples and topoi that we find across all these writers, and which Diderot had also treated in earlier works, examples such as the man plunged in thought and perfectly unaware of his surroundings who nonetheless unhesitatingly navigates obstacles as he paces along, or the abilities of the imbecile or the mad, or the surprising strength ill men discover in themselves when rescuing possessions from fire, and so on. It extends all this into an open investigation of conscious and unconscious states in all their bizarre variety. In 1759, Théophile de Bordeu (the real one, and Diderot’s friend, not the loquacious fictionalised version we meet in the Rêve de d'Alembert) had implored some great philosopher to come forward and help make sense of what he called the ‘animal economy’, that is to say, the human being in both physical and moral aspects.”

Il faudroit enfin un Descartes ou un Leibniz, pour débrouiller ce qui concerne les causes, l’ordre, le rapport, les variations, l'harmonie, et les lois des fonctions de l’économie animale.

Ultimately what is needed is a Descartes or a Leibniz to disentangle everything concerning the causes, the order, the relationship, the variations, the harmony, and the laws governing the functions of the animal economy.

It seems that the Éléments de physiologie is Diderot’s answer to that challenge.

And yet, for all its manifest stature, both within Diderot’s own œuvre and beyond it, as a bravely explicit exploration of what it is to be human in the absence of the soul, and also as a response to the need expressed by vitalist doctors like Bordeu for some new ways of understanding how the body, in its physical and emotional aspects, connects up, the Éléments de physiologie is little known and little studied. It is really only the third part, with its discussions of thought and memory, its bravura set pieces about sensation and recall which prefigure the writings of Henri Bergson or Marcel Proust, that have interested Diderot scholars. Indeed two mainstream editions of Diderot’s philosophical works do not consider it worth including the first two parts, and only print the last one; they abridge no other work by so much as a paragraph, let alone

22 For a discussion of the term ‘animal economy’, see Philippe Huneman, ‘Les théories de l’économie animale et l'émergence de la psychiatrie de l’Éncyclopédie à l’aliénisme’, Psychiatrie Sciences Humaines Neurosciences, 2.2 (2004), 47-60 (p. 47), https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03006001.

23 Théophile de Bordeu, ‘Recherches sur les glandes’ (1759), in Œuvres complètes de Bordeu: précédées d'une notice sur sa vie et sur ses ouvrages, ed. by Anthelme Richerand (Paris: Caille et Ravier, 1818), vol. 1, p. 208. We discuss this claim and its implications below, in the section titled ‘Major Debates in Physiology: Mechanism and Vitalism’, in Chapter 4.

two thirds of the whole text.” The current book is, for all its faults, the only monograph devoted to it thus far.” How could this be?

There seem to be a number of rather fascinating reasons for this bizarre neglect, as we will see. This book falls into two parts: the first looks at how Diderot’s Éléments de physiologie makes an intervention in the philosophy and physiology of his time (part of the intervention in the former, having been misunderstood, is part of the reason for the neglect), deepening our understanding of what is at stake beyond what has been sketched out thus far. The second part looks at what would normally be called its dissemination and reception, but cannot yet be, seeing as scholarship as it currently stands does not think that it was disseminated in the first place. Perhaps we can say instead that the second part presents its reasons for supposing that the Eléments de physiologie was being read at least to some extent in the 1790s, those turbulent and unstable years of frequent régime change, and furthermore, its reasons for thinking that it exerted influence almost immediately. The book ends with a study of what I will argue is the first publication of the Eléments de physiologie in 1823, in a form which is almost but not quite unrecognisable, thanks to a substantial reorganisation operation carried out on it by Diderot’s intellectual disciple and literary executor, the industrious Jacques-André Naigeon.”®

24 Laurent Versini’s five-volume edition of Diderot’s work only contains this last part: Denis Diderot, Œuvres, ed. by Laurent Versini, 5 vols (Paris: R. Laffont, 1994-97). More recently, Michel Delon and Barbara de Negroni’s edition of Diderot’s Œuvres philosophiques reproduces very short extracts from parts 1 and 2, and slightly longer extracts (although also cut) from part 3, and downgrades it to an Appendix to the Rêve. Denis Diderot, Œuvres philosophiques, ed. by Michel Delon and Barbara de Negroni (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), pp. 411-44. We discuss this further below, see Chapter 2.

25 Monographs on Diderot which do substantially engage with or quote from the Eléments de physiologie are: Kurt Ballstadt, Diderot: Natural Philosopher, SVEC 2008:09 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008); Andrew Clark, Diderot’s Part (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2008), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315257853; Colas Duflo, Diderot Philosophe (Paris: Champion, 2003); Caroline Jacot-Grapa, Dans le vif du sujet: Diderot, corps et ame (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2009); Jean Mayer, Diderot, homme de science (Rennes: Imprimerie Bretonne, 1959).

26 Naigeon’s Mémoires came out as the twenty-second volume of the Brière edition of Diderot’s Œuvres; all are date-stamped as having been published in 1821, but in fact they came out gradually between 1821-23. See David Adams, Bibliographie des œuvres de Diderot, 1739-1900, 2 vols (Ferney-Voltaire: Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle, 2000), vol. 2, p. 141. Naigeon’s Mémoires therefore came out in 1823, and I will consistently refer to them in that way, despite the prevailing dating

Perhaps this is the moment therefore to mention that the Éléments de physiologie was not published during Diderot’s lifetime. Those who already frequent the works of Diderot know that this puts it in good company, and indeed in the same camp as most of his work. In order to secure his release from prison in 1749, he had had to promise never to publish anything that might disturb or undermine the authorities ever again, and nor did he. The Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, on which he was already in 1749 hard at work (and which his imprisonment interrupted), which he co-edited with Jean le Rond d’Alembert until its publication was banned in 1759 and d'Alembert gave up on it, and which Diderot carried on preparing in secret, bringing out the remaining volumes of text in 1765 (there were 17 in all), and 11 volumes of plates in 1772, bringing the grand total to 28 volumes, was too massive an enterprise to endanger, and in itself exposed him to a good deal of risk anyway. Instead, from then on, he only published a couple of philosophical works (Lettre sur les sourds et muets, 1751; Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature, 1753), a few plays (Le Fils naturel, 1757; Le Pére de famille, 1758), and various other short texts, including the Additions aux pensées philosophiques (1770) and the Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre (1772).” And of this, only the Lettre de M. Diderot à MM. Briasson et Le Breton, Diderot’s intervention in the case brought by Luneau de Boisjermain against the publishers of the Encyclopédie, actually carried his name in black and white.” Indeed, the plays caused a scandal anyway, as he was accused of plagiarism, while he himself was mercilessly satirised in Palissot’s play Les philosophes of 1760 as part of a large-scale anti-Encyclopédie campaign; in sum, he was already a target, and already at risk. Thus, many of the works for which he is now most famous—his novels Jacques le fataliste or La Religieuse, or his dialogues, the scientifically exploratory Rêve de d'Alembert and the morally outrageous Neveu de Rameau, went to 1821. See below for further information about the precise circumstances of their publication.