A materialist philosophical theory that developed from the camp of Enlightenment thinkers in the preparatory period of the French bourgeois revolution in the 18th century, representing the second form in the history of development of materialism (also known as “mechanical materialism”). The 18th-century French materialism has inherited and developed the materialist thoughts of the ancient Greek philosophers such as Democritus, Epicurus and others as well as the mechanical materialist thought in Cartesian physics, inherited the thoughts of the 17th-century British materialist empiricism, especially Locke’s thought of materialist empiricism. Tightly coupled with the achievements of the then development of natural sciences and on the basis of natural materialism and atheism, it made a fierce criticism of Descartes’ doctrine of innate notions, Berkeley’s subjective idealism, Hume’s agnosticism as well as various religious theologies, and constructed a unique materialist philosophical system. Its main representatives were La Mettrie, Helvetius, Diderot andd’Holbach. . .
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