HERBERT Edouard De la Vérité en tant qu’elle est distincte de la révélation, du vray-semblable, du possible & du faux. Reveu & augementé par le mesme auteur. Troisième édition.

First edition in French of the earliest purely metaphysical treatise written by an Englishman, translated by Father Marin Mersenne. A presentation copy for Edward Herbert of Cherbury with his device on both covers.

Born in 1583, Herbert of Cherbury entered University College, Oxford, in May 1596, married Mary Herbert in 1599, living at first in London but returning in 1605 to Montgomery where he was appointed magistrate and sheriff. In 1608 he made the first of many journeys to Europe which he describes so vividly in his Life, one of the earliest autobiographies in the English language. In 1619 he was appointed English ambassador at Paris and lived there in great state until his dismissal in 1624. Created lord Herbert of Cherbury in 1629, he seems to have been disappointed by the rewards which followed his services to the Crown. In the Civil War he remained neutral and refused repeated invitations to join the Royalist cause. His castle falling to the Parliamentarians, Herbert moved to London and died there 20 August 1648.

A handsome, vain, sensitive man, a bold and profound thinker, Edward Herbert was a strange mixture of philosopher and buffoon. His is a rich personality moulded by an age of transition from the activity of the Elizabethan age to the rationalism of the late Stuart period. His De Veritate, 1624, bridges the gulf between Renaissance thought and that of the modern age, and his writings on religion point the way to deism and to the liberal theology of a later period.

“Herbert’s chief philosophical treatise, ‘De Veritate, prout distinguitur a Revelatione, verisimili, possibili, et a falso,’ was first published in Paris in 1624. It is all in Latin, and is often very obscurely expressed; it is dedicated ‘Lectori cuivis integri et illibati judicii;’ and is the earliest purely metaphysical treatise written by an Englishman. After accepting as an axiom that truth exists, Herbert evolves a somewhat hazy but interesting theory of perception to the effect that the mind consists of an almost infinite number of ‘faculties,’ exactly corresponding to the number of objects in the world. When an object is brought into contact with the mind, the corresponding ‘faculty’ grows active, and thus perception is established. The ‘faculties’ are reducible to four classes, of which the chief is natural instinct. This somewhat resembles the Aristotelian νούς, or the commonsense of other philosophies. It is the source of primary truths (κοιναί έυυοιαι, notitiæ communes) which are implanted in man at his birth, come direct from God, and have priority of all other notions. The other three classes of ‘faculties’ are the internal sense, or conscience, distinguishing good from evil; the external sense, or sensation; and the discursus, or reason, which distinguishes the relations between conceptions produced by the other faculties. Finally, Herbert asserts that man’s capacity for religion rather than his reason distinguishes him from animals. The ‘De Veritate’ was republished in Paris in 1636. A French translation appeared in the same city in 1639. It was first published in London in 1645, and again in 1659.” Dictionary of National Biography

This celebrated book contains Herbert’s doctrine on the divine Human Understanding (La vérité de l’entendement, p. 37), which was subsequently taken on and refuted by John Locke in his Essay on Human Understanding (London 1690).

Two other presentations copies are known in the University Library, Cambridge, and another in the British Museum. 

A previous owner noted on the fly-leaf  : “Exemplaire d’Herbert de Cherbury lui-même, comme on le voit à sa devise imprimée sur les plats de la reliure ‘Eustokos’- en droite ligne, droit au but”.

Provenance: Edward Herbert of Cherbury (presentation copy) — Edward Herbert, Viscount Clive, 2nd Earl of Powis (signature “Clive” on upper right corner of first blank; his sale Sotheby’s London, 16 January 1956, lot 217) – Robert S. Pirie (with his bookplate).