System of Nature

…de la nature (1770; “The System of Nature”), published under the name of J.B. Mirabaud, caustically derided religion and espoused an atheistic, deterministic materialism: causality became simply relationships of motion, humans became machines devoid of free will, and religion was excoriated as harmful and untrue. In Le Christianisme dévoilé (1761;

…Bonnot de Condillac (1715–80), and The System of Nature (1770) by Paul-Henri Dietrich, baron d’Holbach (1723–89). This position even found its way into many of the articles of the great French Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot (1713–84) and Jean d’Alembert (1717–83), which was almost a