VOLNEY, CONSTANTIN-FRANÇOIS de CHASSELBOURG, Count of. – French philosopher, scholar, and politician, b. at Craon (Anjou) in 1757, d. at Paris in 1820.
Coming to Paris at a very young age, he devoted himself to studies in law, medicine, and the classics, frequenting the cultural and philosophical currents of the Enlightenment circles, and engaging in intense political activity both under the revolutionary regime and with Napoleon, who in vain sought to have him as an adherent. Philosophical works: *Ruines ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires* (1791); *De la naturelle* (1793). His output was even more extensive in the fields of historical and Orientalist studies.
Volney, a sensist in philosophy, drew from the Parisian milieu but above all from personal reflection, enriched by his knowledge of diverse peoples, to emphasize in human nature the love of self as the motive and end of individual and social actions: it is in this law of self-preservation and the development of one’s faculties that he found the simple and fruitful principle, the origin, center, and measure of all ideas of good and evil, vice and virtue, truth and error. A denier of every positive religion, from his consideration of the universe he conceived of a supreme active God, the universal and identical mover, to whom alone belongs the worship of obedience to the laws of nature.