Sensação inerte e sensação ativa em Diderot

This article intends to study four principles of the movement of matter (living force, dead force, inner force of the molecule, vital force) that appear in Diderot’s Le Rêve de d’Alembert (1769), Principes philosophiques sur la matière et le mouvement (1770) and Éléments de physiologie (≈1782). With such a study, we would like to show the possibility of what we call inert sensation and active sensation, based on a fifth principle: the neural force. Our hypothesis is that the reasoning, which underlies Diderot’s theory of the universal sensibility of matter, leads to the ideas of inert and active sensation.