d'Alembert's Dream

He would later create a special version for his patroness, Catherine II of Russia,[5] replacing certain character's names.

Over the course of the next fifteen years, he studied recent medical knowledge, becoming interested in the work of Buffon, Albrecht von Haller, and Jean-Baptiste Robinet, discussing medicine with the physicians to whom he was connected through his entourage, such as Antoine Petit, Théodore Tronchin, and Théophile de Bordeu (who would appear as one of the interlocutors in the dialogues), following a course on surgery, and examining anatomical models from the likes of Marie Marguerite Bihéron.

[6] D'Alembert's Dream synthesizes the knowledge gained from these years of study into a text that offers tentative answers to the questions raised in his earlier work.

[7] It has further been suggested that d'Alembert's Dream was influenced by Diderot's recent reading of Lucretius’s De rerum natura, the author having aided Nicolas La Grange in his 1768 translation of the work.

)[14] Grimm's successor convinced Diderot to allow circulation of the work in the Correspondance littéraire in 1782, Julie de l'Espinasse having died in 1776, and d'Alembert having largely withdrawn from public and social life.

Based upon a manuscript copy of the dialogues among these papers, print editions of the book were produced starting in 1830.

This superior manuscript that had remained in the possession of de Vandeul until her death has been used as the basis for editions of the dialogues since 1951.

He likens the human organs to musical instruments, whose fibers are like sympathetic strings that vibrate in response to one another.

She has called for the doctor Bordeu, and explains to him that d'Alembert returned the previous night in an agitated state, and that when he went to sleep he started dreaming, ranting without waking up about some of the topics that had been broached in the conversation with Diderot.

At this point, in an aside, the dreaming d'Alembert expresses his support for John Turberville Needham's theory of spontaneous generation,[20] which would explain the existence of life without need of divine intervention.

His position is that there is no reason to condemn a sexual act that gives pleasure to both parties, as long as it causes no harm, even if the participants are of different species.