Both on his father's and his mother's side he was descended from ancient families whose members had held the highest legal offices in the province of Normandy ...

M de Fontenelle, who, at the age of twenty, possesses more knowledge than one ordinarily has at forty... He is from Rouen; he makes his home there, and several of our finest noblemen who have seen him here admit that it is tantamount to murder to leave him in the provinces ... He values his great knowledge only insofar as he can avail himself of it as a gentleman. He has a quick, elegant, and delicate wit.

When Fontenelle arrived in Paris, he soon made contact with the groups of scientists and free thinkers who gathered around men like Henri Justel, the physician Bourdelot, the chemist Lémery, and the geometer Sauveur. He spent many hours at the home of his friends the abbé de Saint-Pierre and Varignon, also from Rouen; he may have met Malebranche there. ... Fontenelle became a well-known figure not only in such groups, but also in the fashionable salons held by Ninon de Lenclos, Mme de la Mésangère, the duchesse Du Maine, and Mme Tencin. It has often been suggested that Fontenelle served as an intermediary between the savants and the worldly salons, and that he regarded the latter as his essential audience.

I wished to represent philosophy in a way that was not philosophical; I have attempted to compose a book that shall neither be too abstruse for the light-hearted, nor too recreational for the learned. ... possibly in attempting to find a middle way which would accommodate philosophy to every class, I have chosen one which will not please any. It is very difficult to maintain a medium, and I think I shall never be inclined to make a second attempt of this nature. I should warn those that have some knowledge of physics, that I do not suppose this book capable of giving them any information; it will merely afford them some amusement, by presenting in a lively manner what they have already become acquainted with by dint of study. I would also inform those who are ignorant of these subjects that it has been my desire to amuse and instruct them at the same time: the former will counteract my intention if they here expect improvement, and the latter, if they only seek for entertainment.

When we describe Fontenelle as a "populariser", then, we must remember that he did not address himself to the public at large, but only to a limited elite. ... [However] Fontenelle's public was ... from the outset far more extensive and far more diverse than that of many other writers of the late seventeenth century.

... language is anti-pedantic and pleasurable. Although this language often borders on that of love, it never quite becomes that.

... the work is an attack on Cartesian metaphysics as it affected science and a plea for a general law of nature that would free science from dependence upon God as explanation.

It is no accident that Bernard de Fontenelle, a humanist and littérateur, should have been chosen as secretary of the Académie des Sciences at its renewal in 1699, not to act as a populariser of science as many have believed, but to serve as its critic and to write its defence.

To what purpose should People become fond of the Mathematicks and Natural Philosophy? ... People very readily call Useless what they do not understand. It is a sort of Revenge ... .

One would think at first that if the Mathematicks were to be confin'd to what is useful in them, they ought only to be improv'd in those things which have an immediate and sensible Affinity with Arts, and the rest ought to be neglected as a Vain Theory. But this would be a very wrong Notion. As for Instance, the Art of Navigation hath a necessary Connection with Astronomy, and Astronomy can never be too much improv'd for the Benefit of Navigation. Astronomy cannot be without Optics by reason of Perspective Glasses: and both, as all parts of the Mathematicks are grounded upon Geometry ... .

... it is for the Éloges that he is more usually remembered today. Simple, exact, unaffected, and as varied in their scientific content as the sixty-nine astronomers, chemists, physicists, anatomists and others whom they commemorated, the Éloges exemplify a new literary form, moulded and created by Fontenelle, peculiarly French and still neither easily nor very successfully imitated in other languages ...

The real meaning of science for Fontenelle, therefore, lay not in material improvement, nor even in the scientist's growing knowledge of the process of nature, although these achievements gave added value to his activity, but in the gradual emancipation of the mind from ignorance and error that a newly formed methodology made possible. Those susceptible to the latter process, Fontenelle sensed, were creating a new way of life for themselves that was indeed revolutionary in its implications. Nowhere is the meaning of science made more clear, and its value so appreciated, as in that series of "lives of the scientists" that we know as the "Éloges."

But what eulogy should we tender to Fontenelle for those so estimable éloges in which he not only succeeded in overcoming the human prejudice against funeral orations but made an art out of praising a particular person and a new kind of talent? I seem to hear them all at this moment, all those famous dead urging me to honour their debt. Endowed with different merits and unequal reputations, almost all of them were elevated to the same degree of celebrity by the eloquence and insight of the eulogist, an orator who knew somewhat better how to praise them than to emulate or judge them.