Baron d'Holbach

From his Paris salon, the most famous table of the Enlightenment, d'Holbach fed and provoked Diderot, Hume, and half the thinkers of Europe. Under cover of anonymity he wrote the System of Nature, the era's frankest statement of atheistic materialism: there is only matter and motion, no soul apart from the body, no purpose written into things, and morality is simply what serves human happiness in this one life. Even allies found it bleak, yet its insistence that the universe needs no author to be understood pushed the secular thought of the century to its limit.