ABSTRACT
The Philosophes’ relationships with Descartes’ philosophy constitutes one of the most interesting chapters in the history of metaphysics. Their rejection of Cartesian metaphysics is in fact radical; according to the Philosophes, the Cartesian theory of the soul is a roman de l’âme based on chimeric innate ideas to which Locke had happily replaced the true histoire de l’âme; the Cartesian demonstrations of the existence of God drawn from innate ideas are too abstract and less convincing than the metaphysical proofs by Samuel Clarke and “the proofs of the general laws of nature.” But the Philosophes’ critique of the Cartesian metaphysical system from the point of view of the new logic of experience, founded on the English philosophy of Newton and Locke, is not a refusal of all metaphysics: it is rather a reform of metaphysics and a foundation of a new metaphysics. For the Philosophes, metaphysics is not indeed “the science of first truths, or the first principles of things” but is “the experimental physics of the soul,” which now is limited to the theory of knowledge: the search for the first principles now goes hand in hand with the mind’s reflection on its own history.
