Holbach was one of William Godwin's major sources for his ideas about political justice, and Shelley, who discussed Holbach with Godwin, quotes extensively from The System of Nature in Queen Mab. Furthermore, Volney's Ruins, another important book for Shelley, is directly descended from The System of Nature. On the other side, Holbach was a standing challenge to such writers as Coleridge and Goethe and was reprinted and retranslated extensively in America, where his work was well known to the rationalist circle around Jefferson and Barlow.
Issued in 1770 as though by Jean Baptiste de Mirabaud (a former perpetual secretary to the Académie française who had died ten years before), La Système de la nature was translated and reprinted frequently. The Samuel Wilkinson translation we have chosen to reprint was the most often reprinted or pirated version in English. A useful starting point for Holbach's work is Jerome Vercruysse, Bibliographie descriptive des écrits du baron d'Holbach (Paris, 1971). The difficult subject of the essentially clandestine evolution of biblical criticism as an anti-Christian and antimyth critique in the early part of the eighteenth century, before the well-documented era of the biblical critic Eichhorn in Germany, is illuminated in Ira Wade, The Clandestine Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from 1700-1750 (Princeton Univ. Press, 1938).
Robert D. Richardson, Jr.
University of Denver
{Illustration: Parke sculp't M. DE MIRABAUD}