[BOULAINVILLIERS, Henri de.]
Lettre d'Hypocrate à Damagette. Traduction. 'Cologne, chez Jacques le Sage', 1700.
12mo, pp. 58, [2 blank]; engraved vignette to title, head-piece; some marks to title, slightly browned; good in contemporary mottled calf, gilt spine label, marbled endpapers and edges; upper joint split but firm, some wear to extremities and rubbing to boards; a few marginal notes in red pencil.
Rare second edition (following the first of 1699, of which we have traced only one copy, at the Wellcome Library) of this important clandestine tract, attributed to the historian and political writer Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658-1722).
The Lettre 'claims to be an authentic letter from Hippocrates to an unknown correspondent, using a device which was to be common in an age of strict censorship. Its author adopts an entirely sociological attitude towards religion: in the beginning men did not need religions; they lived according to pure nature in perfect innocence; the passions, ambition, avarice, love other than physical love, were unknown to them; there were no masters, no slaves; but the formation of societies gave rise to the passions, to social inequalities, to conquests and resistance thereto: such a state of affairs produced religion and the cult of the gods as a necessary instrument of government. No religion is of divine origin, but all should be respected for their social utility' (J.S. Spink, French free-thought from Gassendi to Voltaire, 1960, p. 300).
The work was influential: 'Montesquieu's adoption of the letter form for Les lettres persanes may owe something to the Lettre à Damagette' (Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
OCLC locates only 2 copies in the US (UC San Diego and University of Minnesota); not on Library Hub.