Systeme de la Nature: ou, Des Loix du Monde Physique & du Monde Moral. Par M. Mirabaud [2 Volumes]

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Format: hardcover

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Condition: Collectible, Very Good

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Author/Artists: Mirabaud, J-P. [Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiri]

Publisher & year: Marc-Michel Rey, 1770

Edition: First Edition

Seller Item ID: SP201

Price: 2900.00

Notes: Londres [i.e. Amsterdam], 1770. First edition, first issue, with comma after Londres on title page. Half title on first volume only. Contemporary mottled calf, spines gilt, floral decorated spines, gilt spine labels. A beautiful complete set of Holbach's major work in an original binding. Joints dried, some very small cracks to heel of binding on tome 1, small chips to leather at corners, some light scattered foxing to contents. Remains in excellent, near fine condition overall. Holbach published the work under the name of Jean-Baptiste de Mirabaud, the secretary of the Academie Francaise who had died ten years previously. Denying the existence of a deity, and refusing to admit as evidence all a priori arguments, d'Holbach saw in the universe as nothing more than matter in motion, bound by inexorable natural laws of cause and effect. There is, he wrote "no necessity to have recourse to supernatural powers to account for the formation of things." "He was far too dogmatically atheistic for most of the "philosophes" who were 'skeptical' and vacillated between atheism and deism." - PMM 215; Kress 6737, Tchemerzine VI, page 243.