French materialism evolved through distinct philosophical foundations, exhibiting a pronounced opposition to seventeenth-century metaphysics and ultimately forming a direct link to nineteenth-century socialism and communism.
Here's an overview of its evolution and relationships with various intellectual movements:
Philosophical Foundations and Evolution
French materialism, "speaking exactly and in the prosaic sense," primarily developed along two main trends: one originating from Descartes and the other from Locke.
• Cartesian Materialism (Mechanical Materialism)
◦ Descartes' physics endowed matter with self-creative power, conceiving mechanical motion as the manifestation of its life. He explicitly separated his physics from his metaphysics, making matter the sole substance and basis of being and knowledge within his physics.
◦ Mechanical French materialism adopted Descartes' physics while opposing his metaphysics, with its followers identifying as anti-metaphysicians or physicists.
◦ This school began with physician Le Roy, reached its peak with physician Cabanis, and physician La Mettrie was its central figure. Le Roy, and later La Mettrie, transposed Descartes' animal-machine concept to the human soul, declaring the soul a "modus of the body" and ideas as "mechanical motions".
◦ Cartesian materialism continues to exist in France today, achieving significant successes in mechanical natural science, which is "least of all reproached with romanticism".
◦ Gassendi, the restorer of Epicurean materialism, and the English materialist Hobbes were early antagonists to Cartesian metaphysics. French and English materialism maintained a close relationship with the philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus.
• Lockean Materialism (Empirical/Sensationalist Materialism)
◦ English materialism is considered the "natural-born son of Great Britain". Its intellectual lineage traces back to the British schoolman Duns Scotus (who pondered if matter could think and was a nominalist, the "first form of materialism") and, more definitively, to Bacon.
◦ Bacon championed natural philosophy, with physics based on sense experience as its core. He cited Anaxagoras and Democritus, asserted the infallibility of the senses as the source of all knowledge, and emphasized experience, rational investigation methods (induction, analysis, experiment), and motion (including vital impulse) as a primary quality of matter.
◦ Hobbes systematized Baconian materialism, focusing on abstract experience and proclaiming geometry as the queen of sciences. He argued that human knowledge originates from the senses, and concepts are "phantoms" of the real world. For Hobbes, "unbodily substance" was an absurdity, body, being, and substance were terms for the same reality, and thought could not be separated from thinking matter. He viewed human passions as mechanical movements and man as subject to nature's laws.
◦ Locke, in his Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, provided the crucial proof for Bacon's fundamental principle: the origin of all human knowledge and ideas from the world of sensation. His work was enthusiastically received in France and founded the philosophy of "bon sens" or common sense.
◦ Locke's immediate pupil, Condillac, translated him into French and applied his sensualism directly against seventeenth-century metaphysics. Condillac proved that the soul and senses, and the creation of ideas and sensuous perception, are matters of experience and habit, asserting that human development depends entirely on educatio

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