Aristee ou de la Divinite.

x, 208 pp. Plain wrappers with handwritten spine label, sewn binding. A dialogue by the Dutch philosopher who influenced Immanuel Kant and the Romantic movement. Hemsterhuis, in discussing the existence of God and God's relationship to man, attempts to reconcile Newton's mechanical system of philosophy with Socratic ideas on more metaphysical topics. "His most valuable contributions are in the department of aesthetics or the general analysis of feeling. His philosophy has been characterized as Socratic in content and Platonic in form. Its foundation was the desire for self-knowledge and truth, untrammeled by the rigid bonds of any particular system. His most important works, all of which were written in French, are: Lettre sur la sculpture (1769), in which occurs the well-known definition of the Beautiful as 'that which gives us the greatest number of ideas in the shortest space of time'; its continuation, Lettre sur les desirs (1770); Lettre sur l'homme et ses rapports (1772), in which the 'moral organ' and the theory of knowledge are discussed; Sopyle (1778), a dialogue on the relation between the soul and the body, and also an attack on materialism; Aristee (1779), the 'theodicy' of Hemsterhuis, discussing the existence of God and his relation to man; Simon (1787), on the four faculties of the soul, which are the will, the imagination, the moral principle (which is both passive and active); Alexis (1787), an attempt to prove that there are three golden ages, the last being the life beyond the grave; Lettre sur l'atheisme (1787)." - 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica