We have basically grasped the fundamental ideas proposed by Montesquieu, but there is a problem here that I may need to further discuss. That is, if we interpret it in this way, should Montesquieu have been very much in favor of Descartes' thoughts? Should he have accepted the so-called "rationalist" tradition, because he based all his understanding of law on some kind of rule that transcends and precedes experience and has an innate nature?

If that's the case, he should accept Descartes' ideas rather than those of Locke or the British empiricists?

In fact, this issue should be viewed in this way. This is my personal understanding. Because the entire French philosophy, from Montesquieu to later Diderot, including Rousseau, was all deeply influenced by British empiricism. And the background of the era of British empiricism originated from where? It originated from the free development of science at that time.

In other words, empiricism is based on the progress of science itself. Especially the experimental science that emerged in the 17th century, which made philosophers, especially some broader thinkers, pay more attention to how we obtain our ideas from our experiential activities, including scientific experiments, making those originally not so easy or seemingly impossible to give clear answers to philosophical questions more likely to become scientific questions with scientific and practical significance.

Such scientific questions are presented through extremely precise, experimental, and even data-based methods. The generation of conclusions benefits from the development of science itself. However, the development of science has also led to some results, that is, while gradually occupying philosophy, it has also left some questions that science itself cannot answer for science.

In other words, while science has its progressive side, it also has its limitations. And these issues are related to human nature.

Let's think simply. Without the experimental science of the 17th century, it would be hard to produce the materialism of the 18th century. Without the development of experimental science, philosophers would not have regarded human beings and even human souls as some functions produced by a huge machine. Thus, "man is a machine".

And how machines observe themselves comes from science itself, which has brought people an exact understanding of the world. It comes from the universal triumph of the way we can verify our understanding of the world with strict, even mathematical methods. It also comes from people's dissatisfaction with the kind of speculative and even pedantic scholastic logical argumentation that medieval philosophers were trapped in.

So, in this sense, when we understand French philosophy of the 18th century, we have a very solid background of the times, and at the same time, it also has very reliable ideological roots.

Regarding the materialist issue, the part of my answer just now is correct. It should be said that it has grasped a core point that needs to be addressed all along. And this issue itself precisely reveals the huge predicament that French philosophers face when discussing some empirical problems.

Just as we mentioned just now, if the philosophy of empiricism attempts to take the science that we can verify through experiments as the model for philosophical construction, and if all our ideas come from experience and cannot break away from it, how can the universality of philosophical ideas themselves be guaranteed?

How can we say that philosophy is a universal knowledge? How can we say that a certain kind of knowledge that is applicable to all other fields without such universality is not purely personal or subjective, and is completely relative? If so, the very emergence of philosophy would turn into such a kind of knowledge.

Philosophical knowledge, if it does not possess a genuine universal significance, then French philosophers are always caught in a contradiction and conflict between an individual and limited empirical activity and a philosophical concept that aims to generate something universal, macroscopic and meaningful. On the one hand, they attempt to construct a theory that can be universally applied to all aspects of human, social and life.

However, the individual's experiential activities and the subjective consciousness activities of human beings themselves pose a kind of difficulty for such a human setting.

So, Montesquieu, as one of the earliest or among the first batch of French Enlightenment thinkers, actually while setting his own philosophical concepts, also planted a seed for the entire French philosophy. This seed is manifested in the contradictions, conflicts and problems we just mentioned.

French thinkers are intelligent and wise enough. They have distinct personality traits and attempt to express their understanding of the world and their emotional thoughts in their own unique ways.

However, in terms of philosophical concept analysis and pure logical reasoning, French philosophers are rather poor and superficial. This is why when we read the works of French philosophers, on the one hand, we are infected by their personal emotions. Whether it is Montesquieu, Voltaire, or Rousseau, we feel that we are not having a dialogue with a philosopher, but rather with a truly thoughtful friend, because of the way they express themselves and the tone of their speech, which makes us feel that they are right beside us, not in some distant country called the realm of ideas.

It is right within our experiential world, right beside us, so you feel very familiar with it. However, if you think about this issue more carefully and deeply, you will find that the temporary pleasure it offers us remains at the stage of our sensory perception of things. It is hard to rise to a realm of thought that truly possesses ideas, rationality, conceptualization, and logic.

In other words, these French philosophers have provided us with such a description of the world. Without the context of their times, it is very difficult for us to transplant the theoretical concepts they have offered into another era or another society.

Whether it was Montesquieu, Voltaire, or even Diderot later on, they all attached great importance to historical research. We could even say that Voltaire himself was the founder of contemporary historical philosophy because their descriptions and understandings of the history of their time and the history they knew of the past were all deeply marked by the imprint of their era on that period of history.

So, if we merely indulge in the history they describe for us, if we are merely content with the reverential fantasies they offer us, whether about the decline of the Roman Empire, or the birth of the era of Louis XIV, or about Chinese history, to a large extent, it actually reflects the extreme limitations of the thoughts of the philosophers and thinkers of that era.

So, in today's context, when we read the history of that period, we seldom rely on the historical accounts provided by such thinkers. Although there are no shortage of factual truths and insightful ideas, as a history book, it is probably less convincing for us to read than any history described by a historian.

The "whys" in the works on history written by 18th-century thinkers were basically regarded as works of thought rather than true historical records.

This conflict of ideas itself led to the fact that when French thinkers discussed any specific issue, or when they summarized the intellectual features of their era, or what could be called the essence of the times, they showed a certain inability.

This is also why later philosophers, including those of the German classical philosophy of the 19th century and contemporary philosophers, have rarely paid much attention to French philosophy.

I have described for you the entire Western philosophy from the 17th to the 19th century, their positions in the development history of Western philosophy, and thus briefly expressed our understanding of this period of history.

In fact, any intellectual resources that philosophers offer us can only be clearly recognized for their value after at least a century has passed.

And those philosophies that could have a brilliant impact at that time, or say, those philosophical concepts that were admired by philosophers or ordinary people of that era, and could continue to be admired by people in later times, this is the important criterion for testing whether an thinker's thoughts are great.

If they remain confined to their own times and eras, people will merely hold them in awe. There have been many such thinkers in history. However, as time goes by, their names have gradually faded from people's memory. The reason for this is not that they were never brilliant or that they had no impact on their times. On the contrary, it is precisely because their thoughts lack the profoundness that transcends their own eras.

This is precisely the significant sign or important basis for us to understand why a thinker becomes a great one.

When we discuss the thinkers of the 18th century today from the perspective of historical materialism, strictly speaking, we tend to view them more as philosophies that once emerged in history. This is quite different from how we understand the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, and Marx.