Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 93 based on the Scottish moralistic conception of natural reason, and on the Scottish psychology of morals and religion. 9. Franco Restaino describes Thomas Brown as "the heretic of the Scottish School." He and Sir William Hamilton, writing in the early nineteenth century, outlived the enthusiasm of the enlightenment and represent two of the most erudite Scottish scholars looking back at their predecessors critically at a time when Kant, too, was writing critiques of his Scottish ancestors. 10. Giancarlo Carabelli presents another highly influential Scottish religious reformer, Thomas Chalmers, whose reflections on the Enlightenment are an important part of the famous Bridgewater Treatises. One comment on the Bologna Conference seems appropriate. Why was Adam Smith, Hume's closest friend and Hutcheson's successor at Glasgow, ignored? This question is relevant especially to Lecaldano's essay, since it was Adam Smith, not Hume, who developed the theory that sympathy is the essential element in the "moral sense." HERBERTW. SCHNEIDER Ctaremont, California Ira O. Wade. The Structure and Form of the French Enlightenment. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Pp xxiii + 690; x + 456. $40.00, vol. 1; $25.00, vol. 2; $60.00, the set. Professor Wade, building on his major studies in the last decade, The Intellectual Development of Voltaire (1969) and The Intellectual Origins of The French Enlightenment (1972), as well as on a lifetime of scholarship dealing with eighteenth-century French topics, has undertaken a genuinely monumental project, that of assessing the character of French Enlightenment thinking and the social and political consequences of that thinking. A great many major and minor figures are treated in Wade's first volume, which tries to trace historically how the French Enlightenment developed (and how it was influenced by the past and by other cultures, especially England). However, Wade concentrates on three thinkers as central to three perspectives, or schools, of the Enlightenment: Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot. Then in the second volume Wade attempts to show how Enlightenment thought passed into the ideas of the prerevolutionaires and the actual revolutionaries after 1789, and how the intellectual ideas of the Enlightenment became the basis of the revolutionary ideas of the end of the century. According to Wade, Voltaire's basic view was that the development of l'esprit was the goal of the world. With this view, Voltaire concluded that the construction of civilization, the full nature of civilization, was due to the human mind. Wade contends that "this conclusion [is] the most significant of all those proposed during the Enlightenment" (2:415). Nonetheless, Wade states that Voltaire's view had to be supplemented by Rousseau's basic thesis that civilization does not arise from the mind, but rather from man's heart. And added to this was Diderot's insistence on recognition of the profound power of change. In this are encompassed all human possibilities. In summary fashion, Wade sees Voltaire basing his outlook on the human mind and its ability to examine the world; Rousseau, on the human heart (sentiment) and its ability to find order in the world; and Diderot, on human creativity and its ability to organize its findings. The other major and minor figures take off from these themes, combining them, altering them, and so forth. The second vohime of this vast study is devoted mainly to how Enlightenment thought became revolutionary thought. In dealing with Morelly, Helvetius, Holbach, Raynal, Mably, Condorcet, and the American Revolution, Wade seeks to connect the French Enlightenment with the American Revolution. He also declares: "The one result of the movement of Enlightenment which I find incontrovertible, is the French Revolution" (2:388). As Wade is well aware, there is a growing movement among historians of the French Revolution to dissolve any connection between the 94 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY great intellectual change that dominated the eighteenth century and the political upheaval at the end of the century. Condorcet was the only majorphilosophe still alive in 1789, and in spite of his radical views, he was a victim of the Reign of Terror. Other minor figures such as the abb6 Raynalturned against the Revolution and became counter-Revolutionaries. The evidence from studies in economic, political, social, and intellectual history now...