Diderot's femme savante (review)

118 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY could have presented some comments from his various authors, perhaps in correspondence or in the prefaces to their works, in which they testify to the influence of those criteria. Steffens records effectively the development of a devotion to the experimental method. He includes a telling comment by a tenacious Newtonian, John Robison, that he would accept as true whichever theory survived the crucial experiment of retardation or acceleration of light when refracted toward the perpendicular. And this acceptance would be made in spite of the violation of the very "principles of mechanics" by one of the contending theories, for example, Euler's wave theory. At the same time, Steffens shows that none of the rival theories had an overwhelmingly obvious superiority on any single set of criteria. But one thing remains a mystery: Why did it take so long for the undulatory theory to achieve the recognition it received in 1834in the comparison with particle theory written by Humphrey Lloyd? Extended discussion of wave theory is not in the scope of Steffens's book, but one wonders. Was the mathematical elegance and ability to handle diffraction phenomena, which Fresnel provided with his transverse waves, what was needed? How important was Young, given the evidence that his work was ignored for twenty years? If Young was of critical importance, then Steffens's account shows clearly that Young's own education set him apart from the dominant English influences in physics, both because it was mainly a medical education and because significant periods of his interest in optics and acoustics were spent in Europe. His willingnessto criticize the Newtonians is explicitly based on his view that the entire approach to science by the English was inferior to the mathematical elegance of the Continentals. This kind of sociological factor is fascinating. Steffens has given us an altogether a worthwhile book. Few serious misprints occur (if one drops the word "by" in the fourth last line of the quotation from the Principia appearing on page 97 it becomes intelligible).I would recommend that readers who have not reviewed their college physics recently keep open a text like Holton and Roller's Foundations of Modern Physical Science,4which provides all the physics and mathematics in historical context in an understandableform whenever Steffens has chosen to omit it. STANISLAUSJ. DUNDON California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo Laurence L. Bongie. Diderot's femme savante. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 166. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1977. Pp. 235. Diderot's "'femme savante" is a compelling academic detective story in which the bodily existence of one of Diderot's heroines is put under the scholarly microscope of Laurence L. Bongie. Despite the misleadinglygeneral title, in this book Bongie is concerned only to dispel what he calls the "legend" generated by Diderot's dialogue "Ce~i n'est pas un conte." In this work Diderot recounts the story of Gardeil and his maltreated mistress, mile de La Chaux, as a part of a self-conscious attempt at blurring the distinction between reality and convincing illusion. Diderot describes mile as the dedicatee of an important addition to his Lettre sur les sourds et muets. He also claims that she translated Hume's "premiers essais de mttaphysique," also described as the "premiers ouvrages de Hume." Scholars have accepted the reality of Diderot's tale; mile de la Chaux standardly appears in both these roles in secondary and bibliographical literature on Diderot, Hume, and the eighteenth century generally. Indeed, by a process of scholarly accretion, tulle has acquired friends, philosophical views, and a historical identity independent of the details provided in Diderot's dialogue. 4Reading,Mass.:Addison-Wesley,1958. BOOK REVIEWS 119 In this book Bongie argues that Diderot's story is simply convincing illusion; that mile de La Chaux never even existed. The fleshly reality of mile almost completely disintegrates into the ghostly insubstantiality of a rhetorical fiction. If historical flesh still remains in places, it is not because details of Gardeil's or Diderot's lives seem to prove mile de La Chaux's existence. Nor is it because Bongie fails to find a more plausible candidate for the dedication of the addition...