antimythic position, that rationalist condescension and derogation of
all myth and all religion that was never far from the surface during the
Romantic era. Holbach was and is a reminder that the Romantic
affirmation of myth was never easy, uncritical, or unopposed. Any new
endorsement of myth had to be made in the teeth of Holbach and the other
skeptics. The very vigor of the Holbachian critique of myth impelled the
Romantics to think more deeply and defend more carefully any new claim
for myth. Secondly, although Holbach's argument generally drove against
myth and religion both, he did make an important, indeed a saving
distinction between mythology and theology. Mythology is the more or
less harmless personification of the power in and of nature; theology
concerns itself with what for Holbach was the nonexistent power beyond
or behind nature. By exploiting this distinction it would become
possible for a Shelley, for example, to take a strong antitheological--
even an anti-Christian--position without having to abandon myth.

Holbach was one of William Godwin's major sources for his ideas about
political justice, and Shelley, who discussed Holbach with Godwin,
quotes extensively from _The System of Nature_ in _Queen Mab_.
Furthermore, Volney's _Ruins_, another important book for Shelley, is
directly descended from _The System of Nature_. On the other side,
Holbach was a standing challenge to such writers as Coleridge and Goethe
and was reprinted and retranslated extensively in America, where his
work was well known to the rationalist circle around Jefferson and
Barlow.

Issued in 1770 as though by Jean Baptiste de Mirabaud (a former
perpetual secretary to the Academie francaise who had died ten years
before), _La Systeme de la nature_ was translated and reprinted
frequently. The Samuel Wilkinson translation we have chosen to reprint