10. 1776, Buzonnière, Nouel de, Observations sur un ouvrage intitulé le Système de la Nature. Paris, Debure, père, 1776, 8vo, pp. 126. (Prix 1 livre, 16 sols broché.)
11. 1780, Fangouse, Abbé, La religion prouvée aux incrédules, avec une lettre à l'auteur du Système de la Nature par un homme du monde. Paris, Debure l'aîné, 12mo, p. 150. Same under title Réflexions importantes sur la religion, etc., 1785.
12. 1788, Paulian, A. J., Le véritable système de la nature, etc., Avignon, Niel, 2 vols., 12mo.
13. 1803, Mangold, F. X. von, Unumstossliche Widerlegung des Materialismus gegen den Verfasser des Systems der Natur. Augsburg, 1803.
Of these and other refutations of materialism such as Saint-Martin's Des erreurs et de la vérité, Dupont de Nemours' Philosophie de l'univers, Delisles de Sales' Philosophie de la nature, etc., which are not directed explicitly against the Système de la Nature, the works of Voltaire and Frederick the Great are the most interesting but by no means the most serious or convincing. Morley finds Voltaire very weak and much beside the point, especially in his discussion of order and disorder in nature which Holbach had denied. Voltaire's argument is that there must be an intelligent motor or cause behind nature (p. 7). This is God (p. 8). He admits at the outset that all systems are mere dreams but he continues to insist with a dogmatism equal to Holbach's on the validity of his dream. He repeatedly asserts without foundation that Holbach's system is based on the false experiment of Needham (pp. 5, 6), and even goes so far as to ridicule the evolutionary hypothesis altogether (p. 6). He speaks of the necessity of a belief in God, by a kind of natural logic. God and matter exist in the nature of things, "Tout nous announce un Être suprême, rien ne nous dit ce qu'il est." God himself seems to be a kind of fatalistic necessity. "C'est ce que vous appellerez Nature et c'est ce que j'appelle Dieu." At the end he shifts the argument from the base of necessity to that of utility. Which is the more consoling doctrine? If the idea of God has prevented ten crimes I hold that the entire world should embrace it (p. 27). As Morley has said, such arguments could scarcely have convinced Voltaire himself.
Frederick was surprised that Voltaire and D'Alembert had found anything good in the book. His refutation was more methodical than that of Voltaire, who called it a "homage to the Divinity" but wrote to D'Alembert that it was written in the style of a notary. Two other refutations emanating from the Academy of Berlin were those of Castillon and Holland. The first of these is a very heavy and learned work, formidable and forbidding in its logic. Castillon reduces Holbach's propositions to three. The self-existence of matter, the essential relation of movement to it, and the possibility of deriving everything from it or some mode of it. Castillon concludes after five hundred pages of reasoning that matter is contingent, movement not inherent in it, and that purely spiritual beings exist in independence of it. Hence the Système de la Nature is a "long and wicked error." Holland's is a still more serious work, which the Sorbonne recommended strongly as an antidote against Holbach's Système which it qualified as "une malheureuse production que notre siècle doit rougir d'avoir enfantée." But when it was discovered that Holland was a Protestant his work was condemned forthwith, Jan. 17, 1773.
Bergier's refutation is interesting as an attack from a churchman of extraordinary keenness and insight into the progress of the new philosophy. In the Système de la Nature he recognized the hand of the author of La Contagion sacrée and the Essai sur les préjugés and dealt with it as he did the Christianisme dévoilé. Buzonniere, Rochfort and Fangouse are milder and more naive in their demonstrations and their works are of no weight or interest. L'Impie démasqué is a brutal work which qualifies Holbach as a "vile apostle of vice and crime," and the Système de la Nature as the most impudent treatise on atheism that has yet dishonored the globe—one which covers the century with shame and will be the scandal of future generations.
The work of Paulian is of a different sort. Coming comparatively late, it attempted to review the hostile opinions of many years and then mass them in an overwhelming final attack on the Système de la Nature. To this end Paulian rewrites the entire book chapter by chapter, giving the "true version." He then reviews Holland's outline and Bergier's comments, together with seven articles directed explicitly against the Système de la Nature in such works as the Lettres Helviennes, of Abbé Barruel, Dict. des Philosophes, Dict. anti-philosophe, his own Dict. théologique, etc., besides many other writings against the new philosophy in general. He then reviews articles by members of the philosophic school against materialism and then goes back to Holbach's sources, Diderot, Bayle, Spinoza, Lucretius, Epicurus, etc. The work is not scholarly but comprehensive and evidently discouraged further formal refutations.
The Système de la Nature had many critics in the stormy days that followed 1789. Delisle de Sales found it a monstrosity—a fratras; La Harpe called it an infamous book, "un amas de bêtises qu'on ose appeler philosophie, inconcevables inepties, un immense échafaudage de mensonge et d'invective"; M. Villemain is much more calm and fair; Lord Brougham, like Damiron, Buzonnière, and many others, found it seductive but full of false reasoning; Lerminier was so severe that St.-Beuve was moved to defend Holbach against him. Samuel Wilkinson, the English translator of 1820, is one of the few whose criticism is at all favorable. Holbach has always appealed to a certain type of radical mind and his translators and editors have generally been men who were often over-enthusiastic. For example, Mr. Wilkinson says of the Système de la Nature, [64:15] "No work, ancient or modern, has surpassed it in the eloquence and sublimity of its language or in the facility with which it treats the most abstruse and difficult subjects. It is without exception the boldest effort the human mind has yet produced in the investigation of Morals and Theology. The republic of letters has never produced another author whose pen was so well calculated to emancipate mankind from all those trammels with which the nurse, the school master, and the priest have successively locked up their noblest faculties, before they were capable of reasoning and judging for themselves."
It seems unnecessary to analyze the Système de la Nature. This has been done by Damiron, Soury, Fabre, Lange, Morley, the historians of philosophy, and encyclopaedists; and the book itself is easily available in the larger libraries. The substance of Holbach's philosophy is susceptible of clearer treatment apart from it or any one of his books, although it permeates all of them.