Author: BERGIER (Nicolas-Sylvestre):
Title: Deism Self-refuted; Or an Examination of the Principles of Infidelity scattered throughout The different Works of Mons. Rousseau; In form of Letters. Translated from The Fourth Edition, printed at Paris, revised and corrected by the Author.
Description: [?London] No publisher, 1775. FIRST ENGLISH TRANSLATION. 2 volumes. 12mo, 169 x 103 mms., pp. xii, 228; [3] 4 - 214 [215 contents, 216 Errata], contemporary marbled boards (worn), sheepskin spines, with gilt numbering lables; edges of boards slightly worn and wormed, but a very good set in a rather uncommon binding style for the period. Bergier (1718 - 1790) published Le déisme réfute par lui-même in 1765, and the fourth edition, the text used for this translation, was published in 1769. The unknown translator might have been established at Aberdeen University, as the library there has four copies of this work. He is probably a Roman Catholic, as he makes note of some of the differences of opinion between Protestants and Catholics, and remarks, "Some of my Protestant acquaintance, who were so kind as to encourage me in undertaking the following translation for the sake of our common Christianity...." Towards the end of his preface there is a allusion to a famous phrase in David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, when the translator comments that the "only weapons they [deists] make use of, are misrepresentation, and sophisms: that they appeal more to the passions than to reason, which they pretend to take for their only guide...." The passage from the Treatise that I think is being alluded to is this: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." ESTC T119559 locates ten copies in UK libraries, including the four at Aberdeen; in North American, the work is found in Duke, Ohio, St. Louis University; and McGill; there is also a copy in the Veech Library at the Catholic Institute of Sydney.

Keywords: deism Christianity prose


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