[DEATH OF REASON].
Oracion funebre dicha en las Exêquias del Ente de Razon.
Barc[elona], Pedro Gomita. c.1787.
8vo, pp. 16; some foxing, mainly to title, but otherwise clean and crisp; in contemporary plain wrappers, slightly foxed.
Barcelona printing, in the same year as the first, of this speech given in competition at the Provincial Chapter of the Franciscans in Malaga, offering a funereal eulogy for Reason.
The author, who remains anonymous, weeps at the ‘siglo de tristeza, yamargura’ in which the ‘venerablés Proémiales de la Logica’ have disappeared: we have no more the syllogisms,we have lost Barbara Celarent. But it is not just logic that depends on reason. There had been such an inventiveness in the system-building of the likes of Spinoza, Descartes, and Newton, and in the new physics, leading to the invention of the hot air balloon; metaphysics and dialectic, poetry, politics, and law, are all dependent on ‘Nuestro Ente, nuestro fecundo Ente’, Reason. And so we should celebrate it, but also preserve its memory. This will be done by the Franciscans of Granada, who will give it a decent burial, and inscribe on its tomb their Nuevo Plan de Estudios, published in 1782.
First printed in Malaga, this speech, which of the several presented to the Malaga chapter ‘mereció singular aplauso de los Padres Conscriptos’, saw printings in several places throughout Spain in the same year; not only Malaga and this Barcelona printing, but also Cadiz and Madrid. All are rare.
OCLC records two copies of this printing outside Spain, at Texas and Wisconsin,with copies of the Malaga printing at Wisconsin, Oxford, and the BL, and a copy of the Cadiz printing at Yale.
