Dominique-Joseph GARAT (1749-1833), philosopher and politici - Lot 259

Lot 259
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Estimation :
3000 - 4000 EUR
Dominique-Joseph GARAT (1749-1833), philosopher and politici - Lot 259
Dominique-Joseph GARAT (1749-1833), philosopher and politician, member of the French Academy (1803). Autograph manuscript, 16 pp. very large in-folio (46 x 30 cm, divided into 2 columns, which makes 2 pages in one) on strong paper. [1778]. Corrections in the text and additions in the margin. Important manuscript containing drafts of articles for the Mercure de France: "L'Histoire de l'Amérique par M. Robertson []" (6 pp, version a little different from the previous batch), "Des historiens latins et des historiens anglois" (6 pp.), "Tableau de la vie sauvage" [suite de l'Histoire de l'Amérique] (20 pp.): "The most civilized nations, the most enlightened peoples, have always been concerned with wild life; in moving away from this point from which they all started, all nations have always returned their gaze to it, sighing as if they were far from happiness. The poet and the philosopher have always sought there the images of happiness, or the lights which can enlighten on its destination and on the road which it must take to arrive at happiness []. In this picture of wild life, which seems to us one of the best things that Mr. Robertson has written, there are two facts that are very well known, but which deserve, perhaps, that we dwell on them even more than on the others. One is that courage, that sort of impassivity which the savage, a prisoner of war, displays in the midst of the tortures he is made to suffer; the other is that coldness, that indifference which almost all the savages of America show towards women. Writers and philosophers are divided on the cause of this energy which raises the savage above all the terrors of a death of which he sees all the devices and especially above all the pains that the most ingenious barbarism can invent []. One can hardly conceive how nature can thus fail itself [] ".
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