Marivaux naturaliste : Les sciences naturelles à l’épreuve des belles-lettres

This article seeks to understand why and on what grounds Marivaux in his 1749 essay Réflexions sur l'esprit humain, expressed the view that moralists are scientists in their own right, and that their science was no different from that of philosophers. Marivaux undertook to demonstrate that preformation, which was then the predominant theory in natural sciences, fully revealed its deterministic ideology when transferred into the realm of moral philosophy. We show that Marivaux shared affinities of thought not only with Malebranche, but also with Maupertuis and Buffon. Marivaux's relative concept of transformation proved to be coherent with his esthetic rejection of fixed, traditional forms and with his interest in processes of development and change.