FONTENELLE, BERNARD. - Writer and philosopher, born in Rouen on 11 Feb. 1657, died in Paris on 9 Jan. 1757. More than to cold poetry, his fame is tied to various dialogues and treatises, of extreme stylistic clarity, of refined but arid intelligence; in his long life he almost embodies the transition from Cartesianism to the more conscious Enlightenment.
In his works (among the most famous: *Dialogus des morts* [1683], *Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes* [1686], *Histoire des oracles* [1687], *Digression sur les anciens et sur les modernes* [1688], *De l'origine des fables* [1724]) there is an attempt to reduce ethics, logic, and the theory of knowledge to an essentially human plane, in clear denial of any positive essence of the idea of the infinite and in the admission of a naturalistic mechanism. Fontenelle is not, however, averse to accepting a finalistic explanation where mechanistic explanation falls short: even the animal world was not formed by the fortuitous meeting of atoms, but required the work of an intelligent being; the preordination of the mechanism of the universe postulates the existence of God, but of the small god of the deists, who is not imminent, moment by moment, in the life of the cosmos. Fontenelle rejects the idea of immortality and opposes every revealed religion, affirming among other things that miracles are impostures. He seems to believe in skepticism elevated almost to a creed: certainly he believes with great conviction in the myth of progress and in the superiority of the moderns over the ancients. The *Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes* were placed on the Index on 22 Sept. 1687. Yet, like his other works, they enjoyed enormous diffusion in the learned circles of his age, also because they relied on the author’s facile talent as a popularizer.