ROYER, Clémence Augustine (1830-1902), French... - Lot 305 - Gros & Delettrez

Lot 305
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ROYER, Clémence Augustine (1830-1902), French... - Lot 305 - Gros & Delettrez
ROYER, Clémence Augustine (1830-1902), French scientist and philosopher. She translated for the first time into French Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. L.A.S. Paris, January 6, 1875. 3 pp. 1/2 in-8. Exceptional letter dedicated to the theories of DARWIN, SPENCER, ROUSSEAU, BENTHAM, KANT, etc. Royer relies on the Darwinist doctrine according to which an individual or a species transforms itself according to the environment in which it lives (biotope, food, etc.) and applies it to the human society by opposing the egalitarian theory of Rousseau: "This will be an occasion for me to thank you for the kindness with which you have placed me between Darwin and Herbert Spencer [an English philosopher (1869-1941) who explained the creation of the world by the succession of stages: inorganic, biological, psychological and social], and at the same time to congratulate you on the correctness of your appreciations, concerning the social tendencies of transformism in general These tendencies towards an aristocracy of real merit [...]. I was the first to point this out in my preface to The Origin of Species, which has caused me to incur many reproaches from some of our egalitarian democrats, natural if not legitimate children of Christianity. If I fight evangelicalism as ardently as Catholicism itself, it is precisely because it starts from the absolute principle of the initial equality and the identity of nature of all the representatives of humanity, whatever their race and their genealogy [...]. Moreover, my whole last book on the origin of man [De l'origine de l'homme et des sociétés, 1869] had as its principal aim the reputation of ROUSSEAU's doctrines on the initial inequality of men and on the state of nature to which he claimed to bring us back. The true democracy must be founded on the initial inequality of the social individuals and on the free accession of real merit recognized to the highest functions that only it can fill worthily: it is then that it is identical with the aristocracy understood according to the very etymology of the word: the Government of the best. Unfortunately, words have this strange fortune that the passions of the parties almost always manage to give them a meaning contrary to the one they originally had [...]. She evokes the Journal des Economistes, the Congress of Social Sciences of Ghent, an article on Social Justice, Bentham's utilitarianism and Kant's "categorical imperative" "which is the very negation of the rest of his philosophy".
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