“Speaking exactly and in the prosaic sense”, the French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and in particular French materialism, was not only a struggle against the existing political institutions and the existing religion and theology; it was just as much an open, clearly expressed struggle against the metaphysics of the seventeenth century, and against all metaphysics, in particular that of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza and Leibniz.
Dicono che l'Illuminismo francese non si limita ad una lotta contro lo Stato e la religione esistenti ma comporta anche una lotta aperta, esplicita, contro la metafisica del Seicento, in particolare di René Descartes (1596-1650), di Nicolas de Malebranche (1638-1715), di Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) e di Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716).