---
title: "A History of Philosophy, Vol. VI: Modern Philosophy — From the French Enlightenment to Kant"
author: "Frederick Copleston"
year: 1960
shelf: "ancient-roots"
purchase_url: "https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Copleston+History+of+Philosophy+French+Enlightenment+to+Kant"
in_stock: false
related: ["copleston-history-philosophy-5", "copleston-history-philosophy-4", "descartes-meditations-philosophy", "hegel-lectures-hist-phil-1"]
collections: []
content_type: "book-commentary"
key_takeaways:
  - "Volume VI closes the trilogy on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought that Copleston divided out of his originally projected Descartes-to-Kant book: it opens without the common introductory chapter, which stands at the front of Volume IV, and it carries the common Concluding Review as its final chapter, so the fourth, fifth and sixth volumes are meant to be read as one whole."
  - "Its four parts move from the French Enlightenment (Bayle, Montesquieu, Voltaire and deism, Condillac, the materialism of La Mettrie and d'Holbach, and Rousseau) through the German Enlightenment (Thomasius, Wolff and the break made by Hamann, Herder and Jacobi), then through the rise of the philosophy of history (Bossuet, Vico, and the line from Voltaire to Herder), before arriving at Kant as the volume's destination and summit."
  - "Copleston resists the common picture of the French Enlightenment as merely an assault on throne and altar, insisting that the deeper project is a science of man built on experience, and he presents Kant's critical philosophy not as one more system but as the attempt to fix the limits and lawful use of reason itself after both rationalism and empiricism had run their course."
references:
  - "Copleston, F. (1960). A History of Philosophy, Vol. VI: Modern Philosophy — From the French Enlightenment to Kant. Image Books/Doubleday."
  - "Copleston, F. (1959). A History of Philosophy, Vol. V: Modern Philosophy — The British Philosophers from Hobbes to Hume. Image Books/Doubleday."
  - "Kant, I. (1781). Critique of Pure Reason."
glossary_terms:
  - "deism"
  - "the general will"
  - "the philosophy of history"
  - "the Copernican revolution in philosophy"
  - "the categorical imperative"
  - "phenomena and noumena"
scholar_prompts:
  - "Copleston reads the French Enlightenment not primarily as an attack on religion and monarchy but as the pursuit of a science of man grounded in experience. Read against this library's insistence on the reality of psyche, what does that eighteenth-century science of man see clearly about the mind, and what does it foreclose by treating man as an object of natural science?"
  - "The volume gives the rise of the philosophy of history its own part, from Bossuet's providential scheme through Vico to Herder. Where does depth psychology stand between a history that unfolds a meaning already given and a history that men make without a script — and what would it mean to read the individual life the way Vico and Herder learned to read the life of peoples?"
  - "Kant's Copernican revolution makes the knowing mind the source of the form the world takes for us, while confining knowledge to phenomena and leaving the thing in itself unknown. How does this limit on what reason may claim to know bear on the depth-psychological wager that the inner world, though never grasped as a thing, is nonetheless real and lawful?"
seo_title: "Copleston's History of Philosophy, Vol. VI: French Enlightenment to Kant | Seba"
seo_description: "On Copleston's sixth volume — from the French and German Enlightenments and the rise of the philosophy of history to Kant's critical philosophy, and the Concluding Review that closes his eighteenth-century trilogy."
---

**The Closing Panel of a Trilogy**

The sixth volume should be read with the fourth and fifth beside it, because its own preface says why. Copleston had first meant to treat the whole philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in one book, *Descartes to Kant*; the material would not fit, and he divided it among three volumes — Volume IV on the Continental rationalists, Volume V on British thought from Hobbes to Hume, and this volume on the French and German Enlightenments, the rise of the philosophy of history, and the system of Kant. The original plan survives in one deliberate respect: a single introductory chapter and a single Concluding Review are shared across all three. The introduction stands at the front of Volume IV and is not repeated here; the Concluding Review forms the final chapter of this book, where Copleston weighs, historically and philosophically, the nature, importance and value of the chief styles of philosophizing in the two centuries. The fourth, fifth and sixth volumes therefore form a trilogy meant to be regarded as one whole, and Volume VI is the panel on which that whole is brought to a close.

**The French Enlightenment as a Science of Man**

The first part opens by refusing an easy reading of the French Enlightenment. It is natural, Copleston grants, to picture the movement primarily through Voltaire's wit against the Church, or through the materialism of La Mettrie, d'Holbach and Cabanis, and so to cast eighteenth-century French thought as a prolonged attack on throne and altar. Both the religious and the political interpretations have foundations in fact — many of the philosophers did oppose the domination of the Church, and some were dogmatic atheists — but Copleston argues that either, taken alone, gives a thoroughly inadequate picture. Voltaire, after all, desired reforms and freedom of expression rather than democracy, and was no fomenter of revolution. What the exposition draws out instead is a constructive ambition: from the scepticism of Bayle, through Fontenelle and Montesquieu's study of law, to Maupertuis, Condillac's account of the human mind, and Helvétius on man, the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert, and the natural history of Buffon and Bonnet, the deeper current is the attempt to build a science of man on the ground of experience. The part ends with Rousseau, whose criticism of civilization, account of the origin of inequality, philosophy of feeling, and doctrine of the general will set him partly against his own contemporaries even as he belongs among them.

**The German Enlightenment and the Break With It**

The second part turns to Germany, where the Enlightenment takes a more academic and systematic form. Copleston traces it from Christian Thomasius through Christian Wolff — whose rationalist system, with its followers and opponents, gave the German universities their philosophical idiom — into the age of Frederick the Great, the "popular philosophers," the deism of Reimarus, the work of Mendelssohn, and the many-sided achievement of Lessing, together with the period's attention to psychology and educational theory. But the part's decisive movement is the break with the Enlightenment itself, carried by Hamann, Herder and Jacobi. Against the confidence that reason, taken as calculative and analytic, could exhaust the real, these thinkers press the claims of feeling, faith, language and living wholeness — Hamann and Jacobi setting immediate conviction against demonstrative reason, Herder opening the sense of organic development that the next part will need. The German Enlightenment is thus shown both at its most orderly and at the point where it begins to generate its own critics, preparing the ground on which Kant and, beyond him, the idealists would build.

**The Rise of the Philosophy of History and the Arrival of Kant**

The third part gives the philosophy of history a place of its own. Copleston sets Bossuet, whose universal history reads events within a providential design descended from the Greeks and St. Augustine, against Vico, whose *New Science* discerns intelligible laws in the development of nations, and he follows the theme forward through Montesquieu and along the line from Voltaire and Condorcet to Lessing and Herder, where history becomes the story of the progress or the formation of humanity. This new consciousness of historical development is one of the period's genuine additions to philosophy, and it prepares the reader for the volume's destination. The fourth part is given wholly to Kant, and it is the summit toward which the book has climbed: his life and pre-critical writings under the sign of Newtonian physics; the general problem of metaphysics and of a priori knowledge; the Copernican revolution by which the mind supplies the form of what it knows; the analysis of scientific knowledge through space, time, the categories and their schematism, ending in the distinction of phenomena and noumena; the fate of metaphysics under the criticism of the Dialectic; and the turn to morality and religion, where the good will, the categorical imperative, the autonomy of the will and the postulates of practical reason recover, as objects of moral faith, what speculative reason could not prove.

The volume ends where its preface said it must, in the Concluding Review that closes the trilogy. There Copleston looks back across Continental rationalism, British empiricism, the Enlightenment's science of man, the philosophy of history and Kant, not to summarize them but to weigh the styles of philosophizing themselves. For this library the volume earns its place as the record of a double movement: the Enlightenment's attempt to make man an object of natural knowledge, and Kant's counter-stroke fixing the limits of that knowledge and reserving, beyond the knowable phenomenon, a realm of freedom and moral vocation that later psychology would have to reckon with in its own terms.