Preliminary Discourse

Summary

Note on the text

Discours preliminaire was written as an introduction to La Mettrie's Philosophical Works, and hence exists only in the version in which it appeared there. It incorporates some material originally included in the conclusion of the Natural History of the Soul and removed from the Treatise on the Soul, as well as some elements of self-defence developed in his Réponse à un libelle (Reply to a Pamphlet), published in the third volume of L'Ouvrage de Pénélope (Penelope's Work) in 1750. Later editions of the Works present minor variations in this text, but we have no way of knowing whether they were the author's doing. The text translated here is therefore that of 1750, which I edited in 1981.

I intend to prove that, however much philosophy contradicts morality and religion, not only can it not destroy these two bonds of society, as is commonly thought, but it can only tighten and strengthen them more and more. A dissertation of such great importance, if it is well done, will in my opinion be worth at least as much as one of those trite prefaces in which the author, kneeling humbly before the public, nevertheless praises himself with his customary modesty; and I hope it will not be considered out of place at the head of works like those I am daring to republish here, despite the outcry dictated by a hatred which deserves only the most perfect contempt.