- Principes shows fundamental principles of Diderot's materialism: heterogeneous and autodynamic matter.
- It is a sketch of the concerns of Rêve and Éléments.
Other rare Diderot works which help us trace the roots of Principes:
- Objections diverses contre les récits de divers théologiens
- Addition aux Pensées philosophiques
Naigeon seemingly has relegated access to Principes to Recueil philosophiques or Encyclopédie méthodique for hardcore Dideroteans interested in his work notes.
Shows Diderot's tendency to realize his pieces as "conversations".
Naigeon places emphasis through italics for idealists and plain (roman) for materialists.
Diderot's text has an unfinished feeling, but according to Naigeon, functions as a response to questions at the end of Pensées sur l'interpretation de la nature.
According to Delon, Principes is in fact a major interrogation of Diderotean materialism.
Helpful definitions from Pensées:
- "elements": different heterogeneous matters
- "nature": general successive results of their combinations
Principes and Éléments on side of "analysis".
Other defintions of matter in rare Diderot texts:
- Dissertation sur la formation du monde: movement in matter is an accident which must necessarily happen in its substance.
- Essais sur la recherche de la vérité: movement essential to matter, part of its being.
- Partie de la vie et de la mort: essential mode or property of matter, always inherent.
- Dialogues sur l'ame: we must not conclude parts of matter at rest are inert, but that they are not currently in a place to exercise their power.
Important possible source of difficult to translate construction about "essential" matter:
Toland trans. by Holbach, Lettres à Serena , 1704. «Il n'y a aucune partie de la matiere qui n'ait une énergie interne qui lui est propre.» i.e. susceptible to no alteration or division.
1770 Dulaurens takes up the project of Principes in le Portefeuille d'un philosophe, «Lettre sur l'activité de la matière» (se réfère à Toland et à ses polémiques avec Boyle et Leibniz).
The same year, Holbach cobbles together, System de la Nature, with examples of "internal" types of movement of matter:
- Fermentation of flour.
- vegetable and animal development.
- intellectual and psychological activity of the human being.
IMPORTANT: Nisus: continual efforts made between bodies which otherwise appear to be at rest. (nisus in this sense is Diderot's exact definition of internal movement of matter).
Holbach paints picture of: equally strong forces shocked by contrary forces, they are arrested, (and at this point) in nisu...
Nisus is:
- in Medieval texts: impetus, impulsus.
- In Sir Francis Bacon: movement and tendency to movement as respectively: motus, nixus.
- Gassendi: distinguishes between freely moving, in motu, and those with impeded movement, both in conatu ad motum or in nisu.
- Bernier: nisus as effort or pushing (le poussement) of atoms.
Nisus as in these thinkers prior to Diderot could not however resist the spread of the theory of universal gravitation.
The Encyclopédie article, «HOBBISME», by Diderot, has a precise definition:
- Effort or nisus: movement in terms of space or time less than any (experimental) givens.
- quantity of effort or impetus: the same speed considered at the moment of transport.
- resistence: opposition of two efforts or nisus at the moment of contact.
- force: impetus multiplied either by itself or by the greatness of the moving/movable.
Delon sees not only Pensées sur l'interpretation marking a passage from a mathematical epistemological model to a physical model, but Principes as marking passage from physics to chemistry.
Note the prescience of this passage in Diderot's «moi qui suis physicien et chimiste».
Principes as a diverse synthesis of matter suggesting that gravitation should be replaced with the notion of fermentation.
Macquer's Dictionnaire de Chimie, 1766 defines fermentation as a «mouvement intestin, excited by itself».
ONE MUST NOT read Principes Philosophiques as constructing a system, and in turn Delon does not let his introduction do so, it «se contente de mettre en place les notions décisives qui permettent au Rêve et aux Éléments de physiologie d'ébaucher une science et une philosophie matérialist de la vie universelle».