Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle Quotes (1657-1757)

“Poetry had a much more serious beginning than is usually imagin'd, and... the Muses have of late days mightily deviated from their original Gravity.”

“The geometrical spirit is not so tied to geometry that it cannot be detached from it and transported to other branches of knowledge. A work of morals or politics or criticism, perhaps even of eloquence, would be better (other things being equal) if it were done in the style of a geometer. The order, clarity, precision and exactitude which have been apparent in good books for some time might well have their source in this geometric spirit. ...Sometimes one great man gives the tone to a whole century; [Descartes], to whom one might legitimately be accorded the glory of having established a new art of reasoning, was an excellent geometer.”

“The calculus is to mathematics no more than what experiment is to physics, and all the truths produced solely by the calculus can be treated as truths of experiment. The sciences must proceed to first causes, above all mathematics where one cannot assume, as in physics, principles that are unknown to us. For there is in mathematics, so to speak, only what we have placed there... If, however, mathematics always has some essential obscurity that one cannot dissipate, it will lie, uniquely, I think, in the direction of the infinite; it is in that direction that mathematics touches on physics, on the innermost nature of bodies about which we know little.”

“[T]he intellectual changes of Louis XIV's reign touch the history of science—especially as they represent the extension of the scientific method into other realms of thought. ...we meet the beginnings of the criticism of the French monarchy... acute criticism from... the French intelligentsia who could claim to understand the... state better than the king himself. ...The funeral orations of Fontenelle call attention to an aspect of this movement... [i.e.,] the initial effect of the new scientific movement on political thought. ...The first result ...as Fontenelle makes clear, was the insistence that politics requires the inductive method, the collection of information, the accumulation of concrete data and statistics. ...He describes ...how Vauban... travelled over France, accumulating data, seeing the condition[s]... for himself, studying commerce and the possibilities of commerce... gaining a knowledge of local conditions. Vauban, says Fontenelle, did more than anybody else to call mathematics out of the skies... [he] put statistics to the service of modern political economy and first applied the rational and experimental method in matters of finance. ...Fontenelle tells us that ...Sir William Petty, the author of Political Arithmetic, showed how much of the knowledge requisite for government reduces itself to mathematical calculation.”

“His wit, his Learning, his Knowledge of Mankind, his exquisite Taste in all that is Polite, the Fire of his Imagination, the uncommon Felicity of his Eloquence, and the ready Turn of his Expression, are Reasons which the Publick will think very natural to direct me in this Address to Your Lordship.”