It is very easy to show that the Encyclopædists had not established an

impregnable scientific basis for their philosophy. Anybody can now see

that their metaphysic and psychology were imperfectly thought out. The

important thing is that their metaphysic and psychology were calculated,

notwithstanding all their superficialities, to inspire an energetic

social spirit, because they were pregnant with humanistic sentiment. To

represent the Encyclopædia as the gospel of negation and denial is to

omit four-fifths of its contents. Men may certainly, if they please,

describe it as merely negative work, for example, to denounce such

institutions as examination and punishment by Torture (See _Question,

Peine_), but if so, what gospel of affirmation can bring better

blessings?[159] If the metaphysic of these writers had been a

thousandfold more superficial than it was, what mattered that, so long

as they had vision for every one of the great social improvements on

which the progress and even the very life of the nation depended? It

would be obviously unfair to say that reasoned interest in social

improvement is incompatible with a spiritualistic doctrine, but we are

justified in saying that energetic faith in possibilities of social

progress has been first reached through the philosophy of sensation and

experience.

In describing the encyclopædic movement as being, among other things,

the development of political interest under the presiding influence of a

humanistic philosophy, we are using the name of politics in its widest

sense. The economic conditions of a country, and the administration of

its laws, are far more vitally related to its well-being than the form

of its government. The form of government is indeed a question of the

first importance, but then this is owing in a paramount degree to the

influence which it may have upon the other two sets of elements in the

national life. Form of government is like the fashion of a man's

clothes; it may fret or may comfort him, may be imposing or mean, may

react upon his spirits to elate or depress them. In either case it is

less intimately related to his welfare than the state of his blood and

tissues. In saying, then, that the Encyclopædists began a political

work, what is meant is that they drew into the light of new ideas,

groups of institutions, usages, and arrangements which affected the real

well-being and happiness of France, as closely as nutrition affected the

health and strength of an individual Frenchman. It was the

Encyclopædists who first stirred opinion in France against the

iniquities of colonial tyranny and the abominations of the slave trade.

They demonstrated the folly and wastefulness and cruelty of a fiscal

system that was eating the life out of the land. They protested in

season and out of season against arrangements which made the

administration of justice a matter of sale and purchase. They lifted up

a strong voice against the atrocious barbarities of an antiquated penal

code. It was this band of writers, organised by a harassed man of

letters, and not the nobles swarming round Lewis XV., nor the churchmen

singing masses, who first grasped the great principle of modern society,

the honour that is owed to productive industry. They were vehement for

the glories of peace, and passionate against the brazen glories of

war.[160]

We are not to suppose that the Encyclopædia was the originating organ

of either new methods or new social ideas. The exalted and peculiarly

modern views about peace, for instance, were plainly inspired from the

writings of the Abbé Saint Pierre (1658-1743)--one of the most original

spirits of the century, who deserves to be remembered among other good

services as the inventor of the word _bienfaisance_. Again, in the mass

of the political articles we feel the immense impulse that was given to

sociological discussion by the Esprit des Lois. Few questions are

debated here, which Montesquieu had not raised, and none are debated

without reference to Montesquieu's line of argument. The change of which

we are conscious in turning from the Esprit des Lois to the Encyclopædia

is that political ideas have been grasped as instruments. Philosophy has

become patriotism. The Encyclopædists advanced with grave solicitude to

the consideration of evils, to which the red-heeled parasites of

Versailles were insolently and incorrigibly blind.

The articles on Agriculture, for example, are admirable alike for the

fulness and precision with which they expose the actual state of France;

for the clearness with which they trace its deplorable inadequateness

back to the true sources; and for the strong interest and sympathy in

the subject, which they both exhibit and inspire. If now and again the

touch is too idyllic, it was still a prodigious gain to let the country

know in a definite way that of the fifty million arpents of cultivable

land in the realm, more than one quarter lay either unbroken or

abandoned. And it was a prodigious gain to arouse the attention of the

general public to the causes of the forced deterioration of French

agriculture, namely, the restrictions on trade in grain, the

arbitrariness of the imposts, and the flight of the population to the

large towns. Then the demonstration, corroborated in the pages of the

Encyclopædia by the two patriotic vaunts of contemporary English

writers, of the stimulus given to agriculture by our system of free

exports, contained one of the most useful lessons that the French had to

learn.

Again, there are some abuses which cannot be more effectively attacked,

than by a mere statement of the facts in the plainest and least

argumentative terms. The history of such an impost as the tax upon salt

(_Gabelle_), and a bold outline of the random and incongruous fashions

in which it was levied, were equivalent to a formal indictment. It

needed no rhetoric nor discussion to heighten the harsh injustice of the

rule that "persons who have changed domicile are still taxed for a

certain time in the seat of their former abode, namely, farmers and

labourers for one year, and all other tax-payers for two years, provided

the parish to which they have removed is within the same district; and

if otherwise, then farmers to pay for two years, and other persons for

three years" (_Taille_). Thus a man under the given circumstances would

have to pay double taxes for three years as a penalty for changing his

dwelling. We already hear the murmur of the _cahiers_ of five-and-twenty

years later in the account of the transports of joy with which the

citizens of Lisieux saw the _taille proportionelle_ established (1718),

and how numerous other cities sent up prayers that the same blessing

might be conferred on them. "Reasons that it is not for us to divine,

caused the rejection of these demands; so hard is it to do a good act,

which everybody talks about, much more in order to seem to desire it,

than from any intention of really doing it.... To illustrate the

advantages of this plan, the impost of 1718 with all arrears for five

years was discharged in twelve months without needless cost or dispute.

By an extravagance more proper than any other to degrade humanity, the

common happiness made malcontents of all that class whose prosperity

depends on the misery of others,"--that is the privileged class.[161]

It is no innate factiousness, as flighty critics of French affairs

sometimes imply, that has made civil equality the passion of modern

France. The root of this passion is an undying memory of the curse that

was inflicted on its citizens, morally and materially, by the fiscal

inequalities of the old _régime_. The article, _Privilegé_, urges the

desirableness of inquiring into the grounds of the vast multitude of

fiscal exemptions, and of abolishing all that were no longer associated

with the performance of real and useful service. "A bourgeois," says

the writer, anticipating a cry that was so soon to ring through the

land, "a bourgeois in comfortable circumstances, and who could himself

pay half of the _taille_ of a whole parish, if it were imposed in its

due proportion,--on payment of the amount of his taxes for one or for

two years, and often for less; without birth, education, or talents,

buys a place in a local salt office, or some useless charge at court, or

in the household of some prince.... This man proceeds to enjoy in the

public eye all the exemptions possessed by the nobility and the high

magistracy.... From such an abuse of privileges spring two very

considerable evils: the poorer part of the citizens are always burdened

beyond their strength, though they are the most useful to the State,

since this class is composed of those who cultivate the land, and

procure a subsistence for the upper classes; the other evil is that

privileges disgust persons of education and talent with the idea of

entering the magistracy or other professions demanding labour and

application, and lead them to prefer small posts and paltry offices."

And so forth, with a gravity and moderation, that were then common in

political discussion in France. It gradually disappeared in 1789, when

it was found that the privileged orders, even at that time, in their

_cahiers_ steadily demanded the maintenance of every one of their most

odious and iniquitous rights.[162]

When it is said, then, that the Encyclopædists deliberately prepared

the way for a political revolution, let us remember that what they

really did was to shed the light of rational discussion on such

practical grievances as even the most fatuous conservative in France

does not now dream of bringing back.

Let us turn to two other of the most oppressive institutions that then

scourged France. First the _Corvée_, or feudal rule which forced every

unprivileged farmer and peasant in France to furnish so many days'

labour for the maintenance of the highways. Arthur Young tells us, and

the statement is confirmed by the Minutes of Turgot, that this wasteful,

cruel, and inefficient system was annually the ruin of many hundreds of

persons, and he mentions that no less than three hundred farmers were

reduced to beggary in filling up a single vale in Lorraine.[163] Under

this all-important head, the Encyclopædia has an article that does not

merely add to the knowledge of its readers by a history of the

_corvées_, but proceeds to discuss, as in a pamphlet or review article,

the inconveniences of the prevailing system, and presses schemes for

avoiding them. Turgot had not yet shown in practice the only right

substitute. The article was printed in 1754, and it was not until ten

years later that this great administrator, then become intendant of the

Limousin, did away in his district with compulsory personal service on

the roads, and required in its place a money payment assessed on the

parishes.[164] The writer of the article in the Encyclopædia does not

anticipate this obviously rational plan, but he paints a striking

picture of the thousand abuses and miserable inefficiencies of the

practice of _corvées_, and his piece illustrates that vigorous

discussion of social subjects which the Encyclopædia stimulated. It is

worth remarking that this writer was a sub-engineer of roads and bridges

in the generality of Tours. The case is one example among others of the

importance of the Encyclopædia as a centre, to which active-minded men

of all kinds might bring the fruits of their thought and observation.

Next to the _corvées_, the monster grievance of the third estate was the

system of enrolments for the militia. The article, _Milice_, is very

short, but it goes to the root of the matter. The only son of a

cultivator of moderate means, forced to quit the paternal roof at the

moment when his labour might recompense his straitened parents for the

expense of having brought him up, is justly described as an irreparable

loss. The writer, after hinting that it would be well if such an

institution were wholly dispensed with, urges that at least its object

might be more effectively and more humanely reached by allowing each

parish to provide its due contingent of men in its own way. This change

was indeed already (1765) being carried out by Turgot in the Limousin,

and with excellent results. The writer concludes with the highly

civilised remark, that we ought to weigh whether the good of the rural

districts, the culture of the land, and population, are not preferable

objects to the glory of setting enormous hosts of armed men on foot

after the example of Xerxes. Alas, it is one of the discouragements of

the student of history, that he often finds highly civilised remarks

made one or two or twenty centuries ago, which are just as useful and

just as little heeded now as they were when they were made.

The same reflection occurs to one in reading the article on Foundations.

As I have already said, this carefully written and sagacious piece still

remains the most masterly discussion we possess of the advantages and

disadvantages of endowments. Even now, and in our own country, the most

fertile and beneficent work to which a statesman of energy and courage

could devote himself, would be an application of the wise principles

which were established in the Encyclopædia. Passing from _Fondation_ to

_Foire_ in the same volume, also from the pen of Turgot, we see an

almost equally striking example of the economic wisdom of the

encyclopædic school. The provincial fairs, with their privileges,

exemptions, exclusions, were a conspicuous case of the mischief done by

that "mania for regulating and guiding everything," which then infected

commercial administration, and interrupted the natural course of trade

by imbecile vexations of police. Another vicious example of the same

principle is exposed in the article on _Maîtrises_. This must have

convinced every reader capable of rising above "the holy laws of

prejudice," how bad faith, idleness, disorder, and all the other evils

of monopoly were fomented by a system of jealous trade-guilds, carrying

compulsory subdivision and restriction of all kinds of skilled labour

down to a degree that would have been laughable enough, if it had only

been less destructive.

One of the loudest cries in 1789 was for the destruction of game and the

great manorial chases or capitaineries. "By game," says Arthur Young,

"must be understood whole droves of wild boars, and herds of deer not

confined by any wall or pale, but wandering at pleasure over the whole

country to the destruction of crops, and to the peopling of the galleys

by the wretched peasants who presumed to kill them, in order to save

that food which was to support their helpless children."[165] In the

same place he enumerates the outrageous and incredible rules which

ruined agriculture over hundreds of leagues of country, in order that

the seigneurs might have sport. In most matters the seven volumes of the

Encyclopædia which were printed before 1757, are more reserved than the

ten volumes which were conducted by Diderot alone after the great schism

of 1759. On the subject of sport, however, the writer of the article

_Chasse_ enumerates all the considerations which a patriotic minister

could desire to see impressed on public opinion. Some of the paragraphs

startle us by their directness and freedom of complaint, and even a very

cool reader would still be likely to feel some of the wrath that was

stirred in the breast of our shrewd and sober Arthur Young a generation

later (1787). "Go to the residence of these great nobles," he says,

"wherever it may be, and you would probably find them in the midst of a

forest, very well peopled with deer, wild boar, and wolves. Oh! if I

were the legislator of France for a day, I would make such great lords

skip!"[166]

This brings us to what is perhaps the most striking of all the guiding

sentiments of the book. Virgil's Georgics have been described as a

glorification of labour. The Encyclopædia seems inspired by the same

motive, the same earnest enthusiasm for all the purposes, interests, and

details of productive industry. Diderot, as has been justly said,

himself the son of a cutler, might well bring handiwork into honour;

assuredly he had inherited from his good father's workshop sympathy and

regard for skill and labour.[167] The illustrative plates to which

Diderot gave the most laborious attention for a period of almost thirty

years, are not only remarkable for their copiousness, their clearness,

their finish--and in all these respects they are truly admirable--but

they strike us even more by the semi-poetic feeling that transforms the

mere representation of a process into an animated scene of human life,

stirring the sympathy and touching the imagination of the onlooker as by

something dramatic. The bustle, the dexterity, the alert force of the

iron foundry, the glass furnace, the gunpowder mill, the silk calendry

are as skilfully reproduced as the more tranquil toil of the dairywoman,

the embroiderer, the confectioner, the setter of types, the compounder

of drugs, the chaser of metals. The drawings recall that eager and

personal interest in his work, that nimble complacency, which is so

charming a trait in the best French craftsman. The animation of these

great folios of plates is prodigious. They affect one like looking down

on the world of Paris from the heights of Montmartre. To turn over

volume after volume is like watching a splendid panorama of all the busy

life of the time. Minute care is as striking in them as their

comprehensiveness. The smallest tool, the knot in a thread, the ply in a

cord, the curve of wrist or finger, each has special and proper

delineation. The reader smiles at a complete and elaborate set of

tailor's patterns. He shudders as he comes upon the knives, the probes,

the bandages, the posture, of the wretch about to undergo the most

dangerous operation in surgery. In all the chief departments of industry

there are plates good enough to serve for practical specifications and

working drawings. It has often been told how Diderot himself used to

visit the workshops, to watch the men at work, to put a thousand

questions, to sit down at the loom, to have the machine pulled to pieces

and set together again before his eyes, to slave like any apprentice,

and to do bad work, in order, as he says, to be able to instruct others

how to do good work. That was no movement of empty rhetoric which made

him cry out for the Encyclopædia to become a sanctuary in which human

knowledge might find shelter against time and revolutions. He actually

took the pains to make it a complete storehouse of the arts, so perfect

in detail that they could be at once reconstructed after a deluge in

which everything had perished save a single copy of the Encyclopædia.

Such details, said D'Alembert, will perhaps seem extremely out of place

to certain scholars, for whom a long dissertation on the cookery or the

hair-dressing of the ancients, or on the site of a ruined hamlet, or on

the baptismal name of some obscure writer of the tenth century, would be

vastly interesting and precious. He suggests that details of economy,

and of arts and trades, have as good a right to a place as the

scholastic philosophy, or some system of rhetoric still in use, or the

mysteries of heraldry. Yet none even of these had been passed over.[168]

The importance given to physical science and the practical arts, in the

Encyclopædia, is the sign and exemplification of two elements of the

great modern transition. It marks both a social and an intellectual

revolution. We see in it, first, the distinct association with pacific

labour, of honour and a kind of glory, such as had hitherto been

reserved for knights and friars, for war and asceticism, for fighting

and praying.

It is the definite recognition of the basis of a new society. If the

nobles and the churchmen could only have understood, as clearly as

Diderot and D'Alembert understood, the irresistible forces that were

making against the maintenance of the worn-out system, all the worst of

the evils attending the great political changes of the last decade of

the century would have been avoided. That the nobles and churchmen would

not see this, was the fatality of the Revolution. We have a glimpse of

the profound transformation of social ideas which was at work in the

five or six lines of the article, _Journalier_. "Journeyman--a workman

who labours with his hands, and is paid day-wages. This description of

men forms the great part of a nation; it is their lot which a good

government ought to keep principally in sight. If the journeyman is

miserable, the nation is miserable." And again: "The net profit of a

society, if equally distributed, may be preferable to a larger profit,

if it be distributed unequally, and have the effect of dividing the

people into two classes, one gorged with riches, the other perishing in

misery" (_Homme_).

The second element in the modern transition is only the intellectual

side of the first. It is the substitution of interest in things for

interest in words, of positive knowledge for verbal disputation. Few now

dispute the services of the schoolmen to the intellectual development of

Europe. But conditions had fully ripened, and it was time to complete

the movement of Bacon and Descartes by finally placing verbal analysis,

verbal definition, verbal inferences, in their right position. Form was

no longer to take precedence of matter. The Encyclopædists are never

weary of contrasting their own age of practical rationalism with "the

pusillanimous ages of taste." A great collection of books is described

in one article (_Bibliomanie_) as a collection of material for the

history of the blindness and infatuation of mankind. The gatherer of

books is compared to one who should place five or six gems under a pile

of common pebbles. If a man of sense buys a work in a dozen volumes, and

finds that only half a dozen pages are worth reading, he does well to

cut out the half dozen pages and fling the rest into the fire. Finally,

it would be no unbecoming device for every great library to have

inscribed over its portal, The Bedlam of the Human Mind. At this point

one might perhaps suggest to D'Alembert that study of the pathology of

the mind is no bad means of surprising the secrets of humanity and life.

For his hour, however, the need was not knowledge of the thoughts,

dreams, and mental methods of the past, but better mastery of the aids

and instruments of active life. In any case Diderot was right when he

expressed his preference for the essay over the treatise: "an essay

where the writer throws me one or two ideas of genius, almost isolated,

rather than a treatise where the precious gems are stifled beneath a

mass of iteration.... A man had only one idea; the idea demanded no more

than a phrase; this phrase, full of marrow and meaning, would have been

seized with relish; washed out in a deluge of words, it wearies and

disgusts."[169] Rousseau himself does not surpass Diderot or D'Alembert

in contempt for mere bookishness. We wholly misjudge the Encyclopædia,

if we treat it either as literature or philosophy.

The attitude of the Encyclopædia to religion is almost universally

misrepresented in the common accounts. We are always told that the aim

of its conductors was to preach dogmatic atheism. Such a statement could

not be made by any one who had read the theological articles, whether

the more or the less important among them. Whether Diderot had himself

advanced definitely to the dogma of atheism at this time or not, it is

certain that the Encyclopædia represents only the phase of rationalistic

scepticism. That the criticism was destructive of much of the fabric of

popular belief, and was designed to destroy it, is undeniable, as it was

inevitable. But when the excesses of '93 and '94--and all the

revolutionary excesses put together are but a drop compared with the

oceans of bloodshed with which Catholicism and absolutism have made

history crimson--when the crimes and confusion of the end of the century

are traced by historians to the materialism and atheism of the

Encyclopædia, we can only say that such an account is a

misrepresentation. The materialism and atheism are not there. The

religious attack was prompted and guided by the same social feeling

that inspired the economic articles. The priest was the enemy of

society, the patron of indolence, the hater of knowledge, the mutineer

against the civil laws, the unprofitable devourer of the national

substance, the persecutor. Sacerdotalism is the object of the

encyclopædic attack. To undermine this, it was necessary first to

establish the principle of toleration, because the priest claims to be

recognised as the exclusive possessor of saving doctrine. Second, it was

necessary to destroy the principle of miracle, because the priest

professes himself in his daily rites the consecrated instrument of

thaumaturgy. "Let a man," says Rosenkranz very truly, "turn over

hundreds of histories of church, of state, of literature, and in every

one of them he will read that the Encyclopædia spread abroad an

irreligious spirit. The accusation has only a relative truth, to the

extent that the Encyclopædia assailed the belief in miracles, and the

oppression of conscience supported by a priestly aristocracy."[170]

It must be admitted that no consistent and definite language is adhered

to from beginning to end. D'Alembert's prophecy that time would disclose

to people what the writers really thought, behind what fear of the

censorship compelled them to say, is only partially fulfilled.

The idea of miracle is sapped not by direct arguments, but by the

indirect influences of science, and the exposition of the successes of

scientific method. It was here that the Encyclopædia exerted really

destructive power, and it did so in the only way in which power of that

kind can be exerted either wisely or effectually. The miracle of a

divine revelation, of grace, of the mass, began to wear a different look

in men's eyes, as they learned more of the physical processes of the

universe. We should describe the work of the Encyclopædia as being to

make its readers lose their interest, rather than their belief, in

mysteries. This is the normal process of theological dissolution. It

unfolded a vast number of scientific conceptions in all branches of

human activity, a surprising series of acquisitions, a vivid panorama of

victories won by the ingenuity and travail of man. A contemplation of

the wonders that man had wrought for himself, replaced meditation on the

wonders that were alleged to have been wrought by the gods. The latter

were not so much denied by the plain reader, as they were gradually left

out of sight and forgotten. Nobody now cares to disprove Jupiter and

Juno, Satyrs and Hamadryads.

Diderot constantly insists on the propriety, the importance, the

indispensableness of keeping the provinces of science and philosophy

apart from the province of theology. This separation is much sought in

our own day as a means of saving theology. Diderot designed it to save

philosophy. He felt that the distinct recognition of positive thought as

supreme within the widest limits then covered by it, would ultimately

lead to the banishment of theological thought to a region of its own,

too distant and too infertile for men to weary themselves in pursuit of

it. His conception was to supplant the old ways of thinking and the old

objects of intellectual interest by new ones. He trusted to the

intrinsic fitness and value of the new knowledge and new views of human

life, to displace the old. This marks him for a constructive thinker. He

replaced barren theological interests that had outlived their time, by

all those great groups of living and fruitful interests which glow and

sparkle in the volumes of the Encyclopædia. Here was the effective

damage that the Encyclopædia inflicted on the church as the organ of a

stationary superstition. Some of the articles remind us on what a

strange borderland France stood in those days, between debasing

credulity and wholesome light. We are so sensible of the new air that

breathes impalpably over the book, that when the old theological fancies

appear for form's sake, and are solemnly marshalled in orthodox state,

the contrast and the incongruity are so marked that one is amused by

what looks like a subtle irony, mocking the censor under his very eyes.

Who can help smiling at the grave question, _Adam, le premier de tous

les hommes, a-t-il été philosophe?_ Such disputes as whether it is

proper to baptize abortions, ceased to interest a public that had begun

to educate itself by discussions on the virtue of Inoculation.

Of the gross defects in the execution of the Encyclopædia nobody was so

sensible as Diderot himself. He drew up a truly formidable list of the

departments where the work was badly done.[171] But when the blunders

and omissions in each subject were all counted, the value of the vast

grouping of the subjects was hardly diminished. The union of all these

secular acquisitions in a single colossal work invested them with

something imposing. Secular knowledge was made to present a massive and

sumptuous front. It was pictured before the curious eyes of that

generation as a great city of glittering palaces and stately mansions;

or else as an immense landscape, with mountains, plains, rocks, waters,

forests, animals, and a thousand objects, glorious and beautiful in the

sunlight. Theology became visibly a shrivelled thing. Men grew to be

conscious of the vastness of the universe. At the same time and by the

same process the Encyclopædia gave them a key to the plan, a guiding

thread in the immense labyrinth. The genealogical tree, or

classification of arts and sciences, which with a few modifications was

borrowed from Bacon and appeared at the end of the Prospectus, is seen

to be faulty and inadequate. It distributes the various branches of

knowledge with reference to faculties of the human understanding,

instead of grouping them according to their objective relations to one

another. This led to many awkward results, as when the art of printing

is placed by the side of orthography as a subdivision of Logic, to which

also is given the art of heraldry or emblazonment. There is awkwardness

too in dividing architecture into three heads, and then placing civil

architecture under national jurisprudence, and naval architecture under

social jurisprudence, while under fine arts no kind of architecture has

any place. But when we have multiplied these objections to the

uttermost, the effect of the magnificence and vastness of the scheme

remains exactly what it was.

Even more important than the exposition of human knowledge was the

exposition of the degrees by which it had been slowly reared. The

Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopædia, of which by far the greater

and more valuable portion was written by D'Alembert, contains a fine

survey of the progress of science, thought, and letters since the

revival of learning. It is a generous canonisation of the great heroes

of secular knowledge. It is rapid, but the contributions of Bacon,

Descartes, Newton, Locke, Leibnitz are thrown into a series that

penetrates the reader's mind with the idea of ordered growth and

measured progress. This excited a vivid hopefulness of interest, which

insensibly but most effectually pressed the sterile propositions of

dogmatic theology into a dim and squalid background. Nor was this all.

The Preliminary Discourse and the host of articles marshalled behind it,

showed that the triumphs of knowledge and true opinion had all been

gained on two conditions. The first of these conditions was a firm

disregard of authority; the second was an abstention from the premature

concoction of system. The reign of ignorance and prejudice was made

inveterate by deference to tradition: the reign of truth was hindered by

the artificial boundary-marks set mischievously deep by the authors of

systems. As the whole spirit of theology is both essentially

authoritative and essentially systematic, this disparagement was full of

tolerably direct significance. It told in another way. The Sorbonne, the

universities, the doctors, had identified orthodoxy with Cartesianism.

"It is hard to believe," says D'Alembert in 1750, "that it is only

within the last thirty years that people have even begun to renounce

Cartesianism." He might have added that one of the most powerful of his

contemporaries, Montesquieu himself, remained a rigid Cartesian to the

end of his days. "Our nation," he says, "singularly eager as it is for

novelties in all matters of taste, is in matters of science extremely

attached to old opinions." This remark remains true of France to the

present hour, and it would be an interesting digression, did time allow,

to consider its significance. France can at all events count one master

innovator, the founder of Cartesianism himself. D'Alembert points out

that the disciples violate the first maxims of their chief. He describes

the hypothesis of vortices and the doctrine of innate ideas as no longer

tenable, and even as ridiculous; but do not let us forget, he says with

a fine movement of candour, that it was Descartes who opened the way; he

who set an example to men of intelligence, of shaking off the yoke of

scholasticism, of opinion, of authority--in a word, of prejudices and

barbarism. Those who remain faithful to his hypothetical system, while

they abandon his method, may be the last of his partisans, but they

would assuredly never have been the first of his disciples.

By system the Encyclopædists meant more or less coherent bodies of

frivolous conjecture. The true merit of the philosopher or the physicist

is described as being to have the spirit of system, yet never to

construct a system. The notion expressed in this sentence promises a

union of the advantages of an organic synthesis, with the advantages of

an open mind and unfettered inquiry. It would be ridiculous to think,

says D'Alembert, that there is nothing more to discover in anatomy,

because anatomists devote themselves to researches that may seem to be

of no use, and yet often prove to be full of use in their consequences.

Nor would it be less absurd to lay a ban on erudition, on the pretext

that our learned men often give themselves up to matters of trivial

import.

We are constantly struck in the Encyclopædia by a genuine desire to

reach the best opinion by the only right way, the way of abundant,

many-sided, and liberal discussion. The article, for instance, on

_Fermes Générales_ contains an examination of the question whether it is

more expedient that the taxes of a nation should be gathered by farmers

of the revenue, or directly by the agents of the government acting on

its behalf and under its supervision. Montesquieu had argued strongly

in favour of a _Régie_, the second of these methods. The writer of the

article sets out the nine considerations by which Montesquieu had

endeavoured to establish his position, and then he offers on each of

them the strongest observations that occur to him in support of the

opposite conclusion. At the conclusion of the article, the editors of

the Encyclopædia append the following note: "Our professed impartiality

and our desire to promote the discussion and clearing up of an important

question, have induced us to insert this article. As the Encyclopædia

has for its principal aim the public advantage and instruction, we will

insert in the article, _Régie_, without taking any side, all such

reasons for and against, as people may he willing to submit to us,

provided they are stated with due sense and moderation." Alas, when we

turn to the article on _Régie_, the promise is unfulfilled, and a dozen

meagre lines disappoint the seeker. But eight years of storm had passed,

and many a beneficent intention had been wrecked. The announcement at

least shows us the aim and spirit of the original scheme.

Of the line of argument taken in the Encyclopædia as to Toleration we

need say nothing. The Encyclopædists were the most ardent propagators of

the modern principles of tolerance. No one has to be reminded that this

was something more than an abstract discussion among the doctors of

social philosophy, in a country where youths were broken on the wheel

for levity in face of an ecclesiastical procession, where nearly every

considerable man of the century had been either banished or imprisoned

for daring to use his mind, and which had been half ruined by the great

proscription of Protestants more than once renewed. The article

_Tolérance_ was greatly admired in its day, and it is an eloquent and

earnest reproduction of the pleas of Locke. One rather curious feature

in it is the reproduction of the passage from the Social Contract, in

which Rousseau explains the right of the magistrate to banish any

citizen who has not got religion enough to make him do his duties, and

who will not make a profession of civil faith. The writer of the article

interprets this as implying that "atheists in particular, who remove

from the powerful the only rein, and from the weak their only hope,"

have no right to claim toleration. This is an unexpected stroke in a

work that is vulgarly supposed to be a violent manifesto on behalf of

atheism.[172]

Diderot himself in an earlier article (_Intolérance_) had treated the

subject with more trenchant energy. He does not argue his points

systematically, but launches a series of maxims, as with set teeth,

clenched hands, and a brow like a thundercloud. He hails the oppressors

of his life, the priests and the parliaments, with a pungency that is

exhilarating, and winds up with a description of the intolerant as one

who forgets that a man is his fellow, and for holding a different

opinion, treats him like a ravening brute; as one who sacrifices the

spirit and precepts of his religion to his pride; as the rash fool who

thinks that the arch can only be upheld by his hands; as a man who is

generally without religion, and to whom it comes easier to have zeal

than morals. Every page of the Encyclopædia was, in fact, a plea for

toleration. This embittered the hostility of the churchmen to the work

more than its attack upon dogma. For most ecclesiastics valued power

more dearly than truth. And in power they valued most dearly the

atrocious right of silencing, by foul means or fair, all opinions that

were not official.

III.

Having thus described the general character and purport of the

Encyclopædia, we have still to look at a special portion of it from a

more particular point of view. We have already shown how multifarious

were Diderot's labours as editor. It remains to give a short account of

his labours as a contributor. Everything was on the same vast scale. His

industry in writing would have been in itself most astonishing, even if

it had not been accompanied by the more depressing fatigue of revising

what others had written. Diderot's articles fill more than four of the

large volumes of his collected works.

The confusion is immense. The spirit is sometimes historical, sometimes

controversial; now critical, now dogmatic. In one place Diderot speaks

in his own proper person, in another as the neutral scribe writing to

the dictation of an unseen authority. There is no rigorous measure and

ordered proportion. We constantly pass from a serious treatise to a

sally, from an elaborate history to a caprice. There are not a few pages

where we know that Diderot is saying what he does not think. Some of the

articles seem only to have found a place because Diderot happened to

have taken an interest in their subjects at the moment. After reading

Voltaire's concise account of Imagination, we are amazed to find Diderot

devoting a larger space than Voltaire had needed for the subject at

large, to so subordinate and remote a branch of the matter as the Power

of the Imagination in Pregnant Women upon the Unborn Young. The article

on Theosophs would hardly have been so disproportionately long as it is,

merely for the sake of Paracelsus and Van Helmont and Poiret and the

Rosicrucians, unless Diderot happened to be curiously and

half-sympathetically brooding over the mixture of inspiration and

madness, of charlatanry and generous aim, of which these semi-mystic,

semi-scientific characters were composed.[173]

Many of Diderot's articles, again, have no rightful place in an

Encyclopædia. _Genius_, for instance, is dealt with in what is neither

more nor less than a literary essay, vigorous, suggestive, diffuse; and

containing, by the way, the curious assertion that, although there are

few errors in Locke and too few truths in Shaftesbury, yet Locke is only

an acute and comprehensive intelligence, while Shaftesbury is a genius

of the first order.

Under the word _Laborious_, we have only a dozen lines of angry reproach

against the despotism that makes men idle by making property uncertain.

Under such words as _Frivolous_, _Gallantry_, _Perfection_,

_Importance_, _Politeness_, _Melancholy_, _Glorieux_, the reader is

amused and edified by miniature essays on manners and character, seldom

ending without some pithy sentence and pointed moral. Sometimes (e.g.

_Grandeur_) we have a charming piece after the manner of La Bruyère.

Under the verb _Naítre_, which is placed in the department of grammar,

we find a passage so far removed from grammar as the following:--

"The terms of life and death have nothing absolute; they only designate

the successive states of one and the same being; for him who has been

strongly nourished in this philosophy, the urn that contains the ashes

of a father, a mother, a husband, a mistress, is truly a touching

object. There still remains in it life and warmth; these ashes may

perhaps even yet feel our tears and give them response; who knows if the

movement that our tears stir, as they water those ashes, is wholly

without sensibility?"

This little burst of grotesque sentimentalism is one of the pieces that

justify the description of Diderot as the most German of all the

French.[174] Equally characteristic and more sensible is the writer's

outbreak against Formalists. "The formalist knows exactly the proper

interval between receiving and returning a visit; he expects you on the

exact day at the exact time; if you fail, he thinks himself neglected

and takes offence. A single man of this stamp is enough to chill and

embarrass a whole company. There is nothing so repugnant to simple and

upright souls as formalities; as such people have within themselves the

consciousness of the good-will they bear to everybody, they neither

plague themselves to be constantly displaying a sentiment that is

habitual, nor to be constantly on the watch for it in others." This is

analogous to his contempt for the pedants who object to the use of a

hybrid word: "If it happens that a composite of a Greek word and a Latin

word renders the idea as well, and is easier to pronounce or pleasanter

to the ear than a compound of two Greek words and two Latin words, why

prefer the latter?" (_Hibrides_). Some articles are simply diatribes

against the enemy. _Pardon_, for instance: "It needs much attention,

much modesty, much skill to wring from others pardon for our

superiority. The men who have executed a foolish work, have never been

able to pardon us for projecting a better. We could have got from them

pardon for a crime, but never for a good action." And so forth, with

much magnanimous acrimony. _Prostitution_ is only introduced for the

pleasure of applying the unsavoury word to certain critics "of whom we

have so many in these days, and of whom we say that they prostitute

their pens to money, to favour, to lying, and to all the vices most

unworthy of an honourable man."

We are constantly being puzzled and diverted by Diderot's ingenuity in

wandering away from the topic nominally in hand, to insinuate some of

those doctrines of tolerance, of suspended judgment, or of liberty,

which lay so much nearer to his heart than any point of mere erudition.

There is a little article on Aius-Locutius, the Announcing Speaker, one

of the minor Roman gods. Diderot begins by a few lines describing the

rise of the deity into repute. He then quotes Cicero's pleasantry on the

friendly divinity, that when nobody in the world had ever heard of him,

he delivered a salutary oracle, but after people had built him a fine

temple, then the god of speech fell dumb. This suggests to Diderot to

wonder with edifying innocence how so religious a people as the Romans

endured these irreverent jests in their philosophers. By an easy step we

pass to the conditions on which modern philosophers should be allowed by

authority to publish their speculations. Diderot throws out the curious

hint that it would be best to forbid any writing against government and

religion in the vulgar tongue, and to allow those who write in a learned

tongue to publish what they please. And so we bid farewell to

Aius-Locutius. In passing, we ask ourselves whether Diderot's suggestion

is not available in the discussion of certain questions, where freedom

of speech in the vernacular tongue is scarcely compatible with the

_reverentia quæ debetur pueris_?

Diderot is never prevented by any mistaken sense of the dignity of his

enterprise from interspersing his disquisitions on science and

philosophy with such practical thoughts on the common matters of daily

life as come into his ingenious head. He suggests, for instance, by way

of preventing the frauds of cab-drivers on their masters and on the

public, that all payments of fares should be made to appointed officers

at the various cab-stations, and that no driver should take up a fare

except at one of these stations.[175] In writing about lackeys, after a

word on their insolence and on the wretched case in which most of them

end their days, he points out that the multitude of them is causing the

depopulation of the fields. They are countrymen who have thronged to

Paris to avoid military service. Peasants turned lackeys to escape the

conscription, just as in our own days they turn priests. Then, says

Diderot, this evil ought to be checked by a tax upon liveries; but such

a tax is far too sensible ever to be imposed.

Yet, notwithstanding the practical and fervid temper of his

understanding, Diderot is not above literary trifling when the humour

seizes him. If he can write an exhaustive article on Encyclopædia, or

Spinosa, or Academies, or Weaving, he can also stoop to Anagrams, and

can tell us that the letters of Frère Jacques Clément, the assassin of

Henry III., make up the sinister words, _C'est l'enfer qui m'a créé_. He

can write a couple of amusing pages on Onomatomancy, or divination of a

man's fortune from his name; and can record with neutral gravity how

frequently great empires have been destroyed under princes bearing the

same name as their first founders; how, again, certain names are unlucky

for princes, as Cains among the Romans, John in France, England, and

Scotland, and Henry in France.

We have now and then an anecdote that is worth reading and worth

preserving. Thus, under Machiavellist: "I have heard that a philosopher,

being asked by a great prince about a refutation of Machiavellism, which

the latter had just published, replied, 'Sire, I fancy that the first

lesson that Machiavelli would have given to his disciple would have been

to refute his work.'" Whether Voltaire ever did say this to the great

Frederick, is very questionable, but it would not have been ill said.

After the reader has been taken through a short course of Arabian

philosophy, he is enlivened by a selection of poetic sayings about human

life from the Rose-garden of Sadi, and the whole article winds up with

an eastern fable, of no particular relevancy, of three men finding a

treasure, and of one of them poisoning the food for which the other two

had sent him; on his return they suddenly fell on him and slew him, and

then ate the poisoned food, and so the treasure fell to none of

them.[176]

We have spoken in the previous section of the contempt expressed by

D'Alembert for mere literary antiquarianism--a very different thing, let

us remember, from scientific inquiry into the origin and classification

of institutions and social organs. Diderot's article on the Germans is

an excellent illustration of this wholesome predominance of the

scientific spirit over the superficialities of barren erudition. The

word "Allemand," says Diderot, "has a great many etymologies, but they

are so forced, that it is almost as well to know none of them, as to

know them all. As for the origin of this famous stock, all that has been

said on that matter, between Tacitus and Clovis, is simply a tissue of

guesses without foundation." Of course in this some persons will see a

shameful levity; others will regard it as showing very good sense, and a

right estimate of what is knowable and worth knowing, and what is

neither one nor the other. In the article on Celibacy we notice the same

temper. A few sentences are enough for the antiquarianism of the

subject, what the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans thought and ordained

about celibacy. The substance of the article is a reproduction of the

Abbé Saint Pierre's discussion of the advantages that would be gained

for France, with her declining population, if her forty thousand curés

were allowed to marry, and to bring into the world eighty thousand

children. We may believe that Diderot smiled as he transcribed the

Abbé's cunning suggestion that a dispensing power to relieve from the

obligation of celibacy should be recognised in the Pope, and that the

Roman court should receive a sum of money for every dispensation so

granted.

Although, however, Diderot despised mere bookishness, his article on

Libraries is one of the longest and most painstaking, furnishing a

tolerably complete list of the most famous collections, from the

beginning of books down to the latest additions to the King's Library in

the Rue Vivienne. In the course of this article he quotes with seeming

approval the quaint words in which old Richard of Bury, the author of

the _Philobiblon_ (1340), praised books as the best of masters, much as

the immortal defender of the poet Archias had praised them: "Hi sunt

magistri qui nos instruunt sine virgis et ferulis, sine cholera, sine

pecuniâ; si accedis non dormiunt; si inquiris non se abscondunt; non

obmurmurant si oberres; cachinnos nesciunt si ignores."

In literature proper, as in philosophy, Diderot loses no opportunity of

insisting on the need of being content with suspended judgment. For

instance, he blames historians of opinion for the readiness with which

they attribute notions found in one or two rabbis to the whole of the

Jews, or because two or three Fathers say something, boldly set this

down as the sentiments of a whole century, although perhaps we have

nothing else save these two or three Fathers left of the century, and

although we do not know whether their writings were applauded, or were

even widely known. "It were to be wished that people should speak less

affirmatively, especially on particular points and remote consequences,

and that they should only attribute them directly to those in whose

writings they are actually to be found. I confess that the history of

the sentiments of antiquity would not seem so complete, and that it

would be necessary to speak in terms of doubt much more often than is

common; but by acting otherwise we expose ourselves to the danger of

taking false and uncertain conjectures for ascertained and

unquestionable truths. The ordinary man of letters does not readily put

up with suspensive expressions, any more than common people do so." All

this is an odd digression to be found under the head of Hylopathianism,

but it must always remain wholesome doctrine.

We cannot wonder at Diderot's admiration for Montaigne and for Bayle,

who, with Hume, would make the great trinity of scepticism. "The work of

Montaigne," said Diderot, "is the touchstone of a good intelligence; you

may be sure that any one whom the reading of Montaigne displeases has

some vice either of heart or understanding. As for Bayle, he has had few

equals in the art of reasoning, and perhaps no superior; and though he

piles doubt upon doubt, he always proceeds with order; an article of his

is a living polypus, which divides itself into a number of polypuses,

all living, engendered one from the other."[177] Yet Diderot had a

feeling of the necessity of advancing beyond the attitude of Bayle and

Montaigne. Intellectual suspense and doubt was made difficult to him by

his vehement and positive demand for emotional certainties.

Diderot is always ready to fling away his proper subject in a burst of

moralising. The article on _Man_, as a branch of natural history,

contains a correct if a rather superficial account of that curious

animal; at length the writer comes to a table showing the probable

duration of life at certain ages. "You will observe," he says, "1st,

that the age of seven is that at which you may hope a longer life; 2d,

that at twelve or thirteen you have lived a quarter of your life; at

twenty-eight or twenty-nine you have lived half; at fifty more than

three-quarters." And then he suddenly winds up the whole performance by

the exclamation: "O ye who have laboured up to fifty, who are in the

enjoyment of comfort, and who still have left to you health and

strength, what then are you waiting for before you take rest? How long

will you go on saying _To-morrow, to-morrow?_"

There are many casual brilliancies in the way of analogy and parallel,

many aptnesses of thought and phrase. The Stoics are called the

Jansenists of Paganism. "For a single blade of grass to grow, it is

necessary that the whole of nature should co-operate." "A man comes to

Pyrrhonism by one of two opposite ways; either because he does not know

enough, or because he knows too much; the latter is not the most common

way." And so forth.

If we turn to the group of articles dealing with theology, it is

difficult for us to know exactly where we are. Sometimes Diderot writes

of popular superstitions with the gravity proper to a dictionary of

mythology. Sometimes he sews on to the sober gray of his scepticism a

purple patch of theistic declamation.[178] The article on Jesus Christ

is obviously a mere piece of common form, and more than one passage in

his article on _Christianisme_ is undoubtedly insincere. When we come to

his more careful article, _Providence_, we find it impossible to extract

from it a body of coherent propositions of which we could confidently

say that they represented his own creed, or the creed that he desired

his readers to bear away in their minds.

It is hardly worth while to measure the more or the less of his

adherence to Christianity, or even to Deism, as inferred from the

Encyclopædia. We need only turn to his private letters to find that he

is in no degree nor kind an adherent, but the most hardy, contemptuous,

and thoroughgoing of opponents. At the risk of shocking devout persons,

I am bound to reproduce a passage from one of his letters, in which

there can be no doubt that we have Diderot's true mind, as distinguished

from what it was convenient to print. "The Christian religion," he says,

"is to my mind the most absurd and atrocious in its dogmas; the most

unintelligible, the most metaphysical, the most intertwisted and

obscure, and consequently the most subject to divisions, sects, schisms,

heresies; the most mischievous for the public tranquillity, the most

dangerous to sovereigns by its hierarchic order, its persecutions, its

discipline; the most flat, the most dreary, the most Gothic, and the

most gloomy in its ceremonies; the most puerile and unsociable in its

morality, considered not in what is common to it with universal

morality, but in what is peculiarly its own, and constitutes it

evangelical, apostolical, and Christian morality, which is the most

intolerant of all. Lutheranism, freed from some absurdities, is

preferable to Catholicism; Protestantism to Lutheranism, Socinianism to

Protestantism, Deism, with temples and ceremonies, to Socinianism. Since

it is necessary that man, being superstitious by nature, should have a

fetish, the simplest and most harmless will be the best fetish."[179] We

need not discuss nor extend the quotation; enough has been said to

relieve us from the duty of analysing or criticising articles in which

Christianity is treated with all the formal respect that the secular

authority insisted upon.

This formal respect is not incompatible with many veiled and secret

sarcasms, which were as well understood as they were sharply enjoyed by

those who read between the lines. It is not surprising that these

sarcasms were constantly unjust and shallow. Even those of us who

repudiate theology and all its works for ourselves, may feel a shock at

the coarseness and impurity of innuendo which now and then disfigures

Diderot's treatment of theological as of some other subjects. For this

the attitude of the Church itself was much to blame; coarse, virulent,

unspiritual as it was in France in those days. Voltaire, Diderot,

Holbach, would have written in a very different spirit, even while

maintaining and publishing the same attacks on theological opinion, if

the Church of France had possessed such a school of teachers as the

Church of England found in the Latitudinarians in the seventeenth

century; or such as she finds now in the nineteenth century in those who

have imported, partly from the poetry of Wordsworth, partly from the

historic references of the Oxford Tracts, an equity, a breadth, an

elevation, a pensive grace, that effectually forbid the use of those

more brutal weapons of controversy which were the only weapons possible

in France a century ago.

We have already said so much of the great and important group of

articles on arts and trades, that it is unnecessary to add anything

further as to Diderot's particular share in them. He visited all the

workshops in Paris; he sent for information and specifications to the

most important seats of manufacture in the kingdom; he sometimes

summoned workmen from the provinces to describe to him the paper works

of Montargis, and the silk works and velvet works of Lyons.[180] Much of

Diderot's work, even on great practical subjects, was, no doubt, the

reproduction of mere book-knowledge acquired at second-hand. Take, for

instance, Agriculture, which was undoubtedly the most important of all

subjects for France at that date, as indeed at every other date. There

are a dozen pages of practical precepts, for which Diderot was probably

indebted to one of the farmers at Grandval. After this, he fills up the

article with about twenty pages in which he gives an account of the new

system of husbandry, which our English Jethro Tull described to an

unbelieving public between 1731 and 1751. Tull's volume was translated

into French by Duhamel, with notes and the record of experiments of his

own; from this volume Diderot drew the pith of his article. Diderot's

only merit in the matter--and it is hardly an inconsiderable one in a

world of routine--is that he should have been at the pains to seek the

newest lights, and above all that he should have urged the value of

fresh experiments in agriculture. Tull was not the safest authority in

the world, but it is to be remembered that the shrewd-witted Cobbett

thought his ideas on husbandry worth reproducing, seventy years after

Diderot had thought them worth compiling into an article.

It was not merely in the details of the practical arts that Diderot

wrote from material acquired at second-hand. The article on the

Zend-Avesta is taken from the Annual Register for 1762. The long series

of articles on the history of philosophy is in effect a reproduction of

what he found in Bayle, in Deslandes, and in Brucker. There are one or

two considerable exceptions. Perhaps the most important is under the

heading of Spinosa, to which we shall return presently. The article on

_Hobbisme_ contains an analysis, evidently made by the writer's own

hand, of the bulk of Hobbes's propositions; it is scarcely, however,

illuminated by a word of criticism. If we turn to the article on

_Société_, it is true, we find Hobbes's view of the relations between

the civil and temporal powers tolerably effectively combated, but even

here Diderot hardly does more than arm himself with the weapons of

Locke.

Of course, he honestly refers his readers to these sources of wider

information.[181] All that we can say of the articles on the history of

philosophy is that the series is very complete; that Diderot used his

matter with intelligence and the spirit of criticism, and that he often

throws in luminous remarks and far-reaching suggestions of his own. This

was all that the purpose of his book required. To imitate the laborious

literary search of Bayle or of Brucker, and to attempt to compile an

independent history of philosophy, would have been to sacrifice the

Encyclopædia as a whole, to the superfluous perfection of a minor part.

There is only one imperative condition in such a case, namely, that the

writer should pass the accepted material through his own mind before

reproducing it. With this condition it was impossible for a man of

Diderot's indefatigable energy of spirit, not as a rule to comply.

But this rule too had exceptions. There were cases in which he

reproduced, as any mere bookmaker might have done, the thought of his

authority, without an attempt to make it his own. Of the confusion and

inequalities in which Diderot was landed by this method of mingling the

thoughts of other people with his own, there is a curious example in the

two articles on Philosopher and Philosophy. In the first we have an

essentially social and practical description of what the philosopher

should be; in the second we have a definition of philosophy, which takes

us into the regions most remote from what is social and practical. We

soar to the airiest heights of verbal analysis and pure formalism.

Nothing can be better, so far as it goes, than the picture of the

philosopher. Diderot begins by contrasting him with the crowd of people,

and clever people, who insist on passing judgment all day long. "They

ignore the scope and limits of the human mind; they think it capable of

knowing everything; hence they think it a disgrace not to pronounce

judgment, and imagine that intelligence consists in that and nothing

else. The philosopher believes that it consists in judging rightly. He

is better pleased with himself when he has suspended his faculty of

coming to a conclusion, than if he had come to a conclusion without the

proper grounds. He prefers to brilliancy the pains of rightly

distinguishing his ideas, of finding their true extent and exact

connection. He is never so attached to a system as not to feel all the

force of the objections to it. Most men are so strongly given over to

their opinions that they do not take any trouble to make out those of

others. The philosopher, on the other hand, understands what he rejects,

with the same breadth and the same accuracy as he understands what he

adopts." Then Diderot turns characteristically from the intellectual to

the social side. "Our philosopher does not count himself an exile in the

world; he does not suppose himself in an enemy's country; he would fain

find pleasure with others, and to find it he must give it; he is a

worthy man who wishes to please and to make himself useful. The ordinary

philosophers who meditate too much, or rather who meditate to wrong

purpose, are as surly and arrogant to all the world as great people are

to those whom they do not think their equals; they flee men, and men

avoid them. But our philosopher who knows how to divide himself between

retreat and the commerce of men is full of humanity. _Civil society is,

so to say, a divinity for him on the earth_; he honours it by his

probity, by an exact attention to his duties, and by a sincere desire

not to be a useless or an embarrassing member of it. The sage has the

leaven of order and rule; he is full of the ideas connected with the

good of civil society. What experience shows us every day is that the

more reason and light people have, the better fitted they are and the

more to be relied on for the common intercourse of life."[182]

The transition is startling from this conception of

Philosopher as a very high kind of man of the world, to the definition

of Philosophy as "the science of possibles quâ possibles." Diderot's own

reflection comes back to us, _Combien cette maudite métaphysique fait

des fous!_[183] We are abruptly plunged from a Baconian into a

Leibnitzian atmosphere. We should naturally have expected some such

account of Philosophy as that it begins with a limitation of the

questions to which men can hope for an answer, and ends in an ordered

arrangement of the principles of knowledge, with ultimate reference to

the conditions of morals and the structure of civil societies. We should

naturally have expected to find, what indeed we do find, that the

characteristic of the philosopher is to "admit nothing without proof,

never to acquiesce in illusory notions; to draw rigorously the dividing

lines of the certain, the probable, the doubtful; above all things never

to pay himself with mere words." But then these wholesome prescriptions

come in an article whose definitions and distribution of philosophy are

simply a reproduction from Christian Wolff, and the methods and dialect

of Wolff are as essentially alien from the positive spirit of the

Encyclopædia as they were from the mystic spirit of Jacobi.

Wolff's place in the philosophical succession of German speculation

(1679-1754) is between Leibnitz and Kant, and until Kant came his

system was dominant in the country of metaphysics.[184] It is from

Wolff that Diderot borrows and throws unassimilated into the pages of

the Encyclopædia propositions so fundamentally incongruous as this,

that "among all possibles there must of necessity be a Being subsisting

by himself; otherwise there would be possible things, of the

possibility of which no account could be given, an assertion that could

never be made." It is a curious thing, and it illustrates again the

strangely miscellaneous quality of Diderot's compilation, that the very

article which begins by this incorporation of the author of a

philosophical system expounded in a score of quartos, ends by a

vigorous denunciation of the introduction of the systematic spirit into

philosophy.

I shall venture to quote a hardy passage from another article

(_Pyrrhonienne_) which some will think a measure of Diderot's

philosophical incompetency, and others will think a measure of his good

sense. "We will conclude," he says, "for our part that as all in nature

is bound together, there is nothing, properly speaking, of which man has

perfect, absolute, and complete knowledge, because for that he would

need knowledge of all. Now as all is bound together, it inevitably

happens that, from discussion to discussion, he must come to something

unknown: then in starting again from this unknown point, we shall be

justified in pleading against him the ignorance or the obscurity or the

uncertainty of the point preceding, and of that preceding this, and so

forth, up to the most evident principle. So we must admit a sort of

sobriety in the use of reason. When step by step I have brought a man to

some evident proposition, I shall cease to dispute. I will listen no

longer to a man who goes on to deny the existence of bodies, the rules

of logic, the testimony of the senses, the difference between good and

evil, true and false, etc. etc. I will turn my back on everybody who

tries to lead me away from a simple question, to embark me in discussion

as to the nature of matter, of the understanding of thought, and other

subjects shoreless and bottomless."[185] Whatever else may be said of

this, we have to recognise that it is exactly characteristic of the

author. But then why have written on metaphysics at all?

We have mentioned the article on Spinosa. It is characteristic both of

the good and the bad sides of Diderot's work. Half of it is merely a

reproduction of Bayle's criticisms on Spinosa and his system. The other

half consists of original objections propounded by Diderot with marked

vigour of thrust against Spinosa, but there is no evidence that he had

gone deeper into Spinosa than the first book of the Ethics. There is no

certain sign that he had read anything else, or that he had more of that

before him than the extracts that were furnished by Bayle. Such

treatment of a serious subject hardly conforms to the modern

requirements of the literary conscience, for in truth the literary

conscience has now turned specialist and shrinks from the encyclopædic.

Diderot's objections are, as we have said, pushed with marked energy of

speech. "However short away," he says, "you penetrate into the thick

darkness in which Spinosa has wrapped himself up, you discover a

succession of abysses into which this audacious reasoner has

precipitated himself, of propositions either evidently false or

evidently doubtful, of arbitrary principles, substituted for natural

principles and sensible truths; an abuse of terms taken for the most

part in a wrong sense, a mass of deceptive equivocations, a cloud of

palpable contradictions." The system is monstrous, it is absurd and

ridiculous. It is Spinosa's plausible method that has deceived people;

they supposed that one who employed geometry, and proceeded by way of

axioms and definitions, must be on the track of truth. They did not see

that these axioms were nothing better than very vague and very uncertain

propositions; that the definitions were inexact, defective, and bizarre.

We have no space to follow the reasoning by which Diderot supports this

scornful estimate of the famous thinker, of whom it can never be settled

whether he be pantheist, atheist, akosmist, or God-intoxicated man. He

returns to the charge again and again, as if he felt a certain secret

uneasiness lest for scorn so loudly expressed he had not brought forward

adequate justification. And the reader feels that Diderot has scarcely

hit the true line of cleavage that would have enabled him--from his own

point of view--to shatter the Spinosist system. He tries various bouts

of logic with Spinosa in connection with detached propositions. Thus he

deals with Spinosa's third proposition, that, _in the case of things

that have nothing in common with one another, one cannot be the cause of

the other_. This proposition, Diderot contends, is false in all moral

and occasional causes. The sound of the name of God has nothing in

common with the idea of the Creator which that name produces in my mind.

A misfortune that overtakes my friend has nothing in common with the

grief that I feel in consequence. When I move my arm by an act of will,

the movement has nothing in common in its nature with the act of my

will; they are very different. I am not a triangle, yet I form the idea

of one and I examine its properties. So with the fifth proposition, that

_there cannot be in the universe two or more substances of the same

nature or the same attributes_. If Spinosa is only talking of the

essence of things or of their definition, what he says is naught; for it

can only mean that there cannot be in the universe two different

essences having the same essence. Who doubts it? But if Spinosa means

that there cannot be an essence which is found in various single

objects, in the same way as the essence of triangle is found in the

triangle A and the triangle B, then he says what is manifestly untrue.

It is not, however, until the last two or three pages that Diderot sets

forth his dissent in its widest form.

"To refute Spinosa," he says at last, "all that is necessary is to stop

him at the first step, without taking the trouble to follow him into a

mass of consequences; all that we need do is to substitute for the

obscure principle which he makes the base of his system, the following:

namely, that _there are several substances_--a principle that in its own

way is clear to the last degree. And, in fact, what proposition can be

clearer, more striking, more close to the understanding and

consciousness of man? I here seek no other judge than the most just

impression of the common sense that is spread among the human race....

Now, since common sense revolts against each of Spinosa's propositions,

no less than against the first, of which they are the pretended proofs,

instead of stopping to reason on each of these proofs where common sense

is lost, we should be right to say to him:--Your principle is contrary

to common sense; from a principle in which common sense is lost, nothing

can issue in which common sense is to be found again."

The passage sounds unpleasantly like an appeal to the crowd in a matter

of science, which is as the sin against the Holy Ghost in these high

concerns. What Diderot meant, probably, was to charge Spinosa with

inventing a conception of substance which has no relation to objective

experience; and further with giving fantastic answers to questions that

were in themselves never worth asking, because the answers must always

involve a violent wrench of the terms of experience into the sphere

transcending experience, and because, moreover, they can never be

verified. Whether he meant this or something else, and whether he would

have been right or wrong in such an intention, we may admit that it

would have been more satisfactory if in dealing with such a master-type

of the metaphysical method as Spinosa, so acute a positive critic as

Diderot had taken more pains to give to his objections the utmost

breadth of which they were capable.[186]

The article on Leibnitz has less original matter in it than that on

Spinosa. The various speculations of that great and energetic intellect

in metaphysic, logic, natural theology, natural law, are merely drawn

out in a long table of succinct propositions, while the account of the

life and character of Leibnitz is simply taken from the excellent

_éloge_ which had been published upon him by Fontenelle in 1716.

Fontenelle's narrative is reproduced in a generous spirit of admiration

and respect for a genius that was like Diderot's own in encyclopædic

variety of interest, while it was so far superior to Diderot's in

concentration, in subtlety, in precision, in power of construction. If

there could exist over our heads, says Diderot, a species of beings who

could observe our works as we watch those of creatures at our feet, with

what surprise would such beings have seen those four marvellous insects,

Bayle, Descartes, Leibnitz, and Newton. And he then draws up a little

calendar of the famous men, out of whom we must choose the name to be

placed at the very head of the human race. The list contains, besides

Julian the Apostate--who was inserted, we may presume, merely by way of

playful insult to the ecclesiastical enemy--Socrates, Marcus Aurelius,

Trajan, Bacon, and the four great names that have just been cited.

Germany derives as much honour from Leibnitz alone, he concludes with

unconsidered enthusiasm, as Greece from Plato, Aristotle, and

Archimedes, all put together. As we have said, however, there is no

criticism, nor any other sign that Diderot had done more than survey the

façade of the great Leibnitzian structure admiringly from without.

The article on Liberty would be extremely remarkable, appearing where it

does, and coming from a thinker of Diderot's general capacity, if only

we could be sure that Diderot was sincere. As it happens, there is good

reason to suppose that he was wholly insincere. It is quite as shallow,

from the point of view of philosophy, as his article on the Jews or on

the Bible is from the point of view of erudition. One reason for this

might not be far to seek. We have repeatedly observed how paramount the

social aim and the social test are in Diderot's mind over all other

considerations. But this reference of all subjects of discussion to the

good of society, and this measurement of conclusions by their presumed

effect on society, is a method that has its own dangers. The aversion of

ecclesiastics to unfettered discussion, lest it should damage

institutions and beliefs deemed useful to mankind, is the great leading

example of this peril. Diderot, it might be said by those who should

contend that he wrote what he thought, did not escape exactly the same

predicament, as soon as ever he forgot that of all the things that are

good for society, Truth is the best. Now, who will believe that it is

Diderot, the persecuted editor of the Encyclopædia, and the author of

the manly article on Intolerance, who introduces such a passage as the

following into the discussion of the everlasting controversy of Free

Will and Necessity: "Take away Liberty, and you leave no more vice nor

virtue nor merit in the world; rewards are ridiculous, and punishments

unjust. The ruin of Liberty overthrows all order and all police,

confounds vice and virtue, authorises every monstrous infamy,

extinguishes the last spark of shame and remorse, degrades and

disfigures beyond recovery the whole human race. _A doctrine of such

enormity as this ought not to be examined in the schools; it ought to be

punished by the magistrates._"[187] Of course, this was exactly what the

Jesuits said about a belief in God, about revelation, and about the

institutions of the church. To take away these, they said, is to throw

down the bulwarks of order, and an attempt to take them away, as by

encyclopædists or others, ought to be punished by the magistrates.

Diderot had for the moment clearly lost himself.

We need hardly be surprised if an article conceived in this spirit

contains no serious contribution to the difficult question with which

it deals. Diderot had persuaded himself that, without Free Will, all

those emotional moralities in the way of sympathy and benevolence and

justice which he adored would be lowered to the level of mere mechanism.

"If men are not free in what they do of good and evil, then," he cries,

in what is surely a paroxysm of unreason, "good is no longer good, and

evil no longer evil." As if the outward quality and effects of good and

evil were not independent of the mental operations which precede human

action. Murder would not cease to be an evil simply because it had been

proved that the murderer's will to do a bad deed was the result of

antecedents. Acts have marks and consequences of their own, good or bad,

whatever may be the state of mind of those who do them. But Diderot does

not seem to divine the true issue; he writes as if Necessarians or

Determinists denied the existence of volitions, and as if the question

were whether volitions do exist. Nobody denies that they exist; the real

question is of the conditions under which they exist. Are they

determined by antecedents, or are they self-determined, spontaneous, and

unconnected? Is Will independent of cause?

Diderot's argumentation is, in fact, merely a protest that man is

conscious of a Will. And just as in other parts of his article Diderot

by Liberty means only the existence of Will, so by Liberty he means only

the healthy condition of the soul, and not its independence of

causation. We need not waste words on so dire a confusion, nor on the

theory that Will is sometimes dependent on cerebral antecedents and

sometimes not. The curious thing is that the writer should not have

perceived that he was himself in this preposterous theory propounding

the very principle which he denounced as destructive to virtue, ruinous

to society, and worthy of punishment by the government. For it seems

that, after all, the Will of those whose "dispositions are not moderate"

is not free; and we may surely say that those whose dispositions are

least moderate, are exactly the most violent malefactors against the

common weal. One more passage is worth quoting to show how little the

writer had seized the true meaning of the debate. "According to you," he

says to Bayle, "it is not clear that it is at the pure choice of my will

to move my arm or not to move it: if that be so, it is then necessarily

determined that within a quarter of an hour from now I shall lift my

hand three times together, or that I shall not. Now, if you seriously

pretend that I am not free, you cannot refuse an offer that I make you;

I will wager a thousand pistoles to one that I will do, in the matter of

moving my hand, exactly the opposite to what you back; and you may take

your choice. If you do think the wager fair, it can only be because of

your necessary and invincible judgment that I am free." As if the will

to move or not to move the arm would be uncaused and unaffected by

antecedents, when you have just provided so strong an antecedent as the

desire to save a thousand pistoles. It was, perhaps, well enough for

Voltaire to content himself with vague poetical material for his

poetical discourse on Liberty, but from Diderot, whether as editor or as

writer, something better might have been expected than a clumsy

reproduction of the reasoning by which men like Turretini had turned

philosophy into the corrupted handmaid of theology.

The most extraordinary thing about this extraordinary article still

remains to be told. It was written, we may suppose, between 1757 and

1762, or about that time. In June, 1756, Diderot wrote to a certain

Landois, a fellow-worker on the Encyclopædia, a letter containing the

most emphatic possible repudiation of the whole doctrine of Liberty.

"Liberty is a word void of sense; there are not and there never can have

been free beings; we are only what fits in with the general order, with

organisation, with education, and with the chain of events. We can no

more conceive a being acting without a motive than we can conceive one

of the arms of a balance acting without a weight; and the motive is

always exterior and foreign to us, attached either by nature or by some

cause or other that is not ourselves. _There is only one sort of causes,

properly speaking, and those are, physical causes._"[188] And so forth

in the vein of hard and remorseless necessarianism, which we shall find

presently in the pages of the System of Nature.[189]

There is only one explanation of this flagrant contradiction. Diderot

must have written on Liberty just as he wrote on Jesus Christ or the

Bible. He cannot have said what he thought, but only what the persons in

authority required him to pretend to think. We may he sure that a letter

to an intimate would be more likely to contain his real opinion than an

article published in the Encyclopædia. That such mystifications are

odious, are shameful, are almost too degrading a price to pay for the

gains of such a work, we may all readily enough admit. All that we can

do is to note so flagrant a case, as a striking example of the common

artifices of the time. One other point we may note. The fervour and

dexterity with which Diderot made what he knew to be the worse appear

the better cause, make a still more striking example of his astonishing

dramatic power of throwing himself, as dialectician, casuist, sophist,

into a false and illusive part.

Turning from the philosophical to the political or social group of

articles, we find little to add to what has been said in the previous

section. One of the most excellent essays in this group is that on

Luxury. Diderot opens ingeniously with a list of the propositions that

state the supposed evils of luxury, and under each proposition he places

the most striking case that he can find in history of its falseness. He

goes through the same process with the propositions asserting the gains

of luxury to society. Having thus effectually disposed of any wholesale

way of dealing with the subject, he proceeds to make a number of

observations on the gains and drawbacks of luxury; these are full of

sense and freedom from commonplace. Such articles as _Pouvoir,

Souverain, Autorité_, do little more than tell over again the old

unhistoric story about a society surrendering a portion of its sovereign

power to some individual or dynasty to hold in trust. It is worth

remarking how little democratic were Diderot and his school in any

Jacobinical, or anarchic, or even more respectable modern sense. There

is in Diderot's contributions many a firm and manly plea for the

self-respect of the common people, but not more than once or twice is

there a syllable of the disorder which smoulders under the pages of

Rousseau. Thus: "When the dwellers among the fields are well treated,

the number of proprietors insensibly grows greater, the extreme distance

and the vile dependence of poor on rich grow less; hence the people have

courage, force of soul, and strength of body; they love their country,

they respect the magistrates, they are attached to a prince, to an

order, and to laws to which they owe their peace and well-being. And you

will no longer see the son of the honourable tiller of the soil so ready

to quit the noble calling of his forefathers, nor so ready to go and

sully himself with the liveries and with the contempt of the man of

wealth."[190]

No one can find fault with democratic sentiment of this kind, nor with

the generous commonplaces of the moralist, about virtue being the only

claim to honour, and vice the only true source of shame and inferiority.

But neither Diderot nor Voltaire ever allowed himself to flatter the

crowd for qualities which the crowd can scarcely possess. The little

article on Multitude seems merely inserted for the sake of buffeting

unwarranted pretensions. "Distrust the judgment of the multitude in all

matters of reasoning and philosophy; there its voice is the voice of

malice, folly, inhumanity, irrationality, and prejudice. Distrust it

again in things that suppose much knowledge or a fine taste. The

multitude is ignorant and dulled. Distrust it in morality; it is not

capable of strong and generous actions; it rather wonders at such

actions than approves them; heroism is almost madness in its eyes.

Distrust it in the things of sentiment; is delicacy of sentiment so

common a thing that you can accord it to the multitude? In what then is

the multitude right? In everything, but only at the end of a very long

time, because then it has become an echo, repeating the judgment of a

small number of sensible men who shape the judgment of posterity for it

beforehand. If you have on your side the testimony of your conscience,

and against you that of the multitude, take comfort and be assured that

time does justice." It is far from being a universal gift among men of

letters and others to unite this fastidious estimation of the incapacity

of the crowd in the higher provinces of the intellectual judgment, with

a fervid desire that the life of the crowd should be made worthy of

self-respecting men.

The same hand that wrote the defiance of the populace that has just been

quoted, wrote also this short article on Misery: "There are few souls so

firm that misery does not in the long run cast them down and degrade

them. The poor common people are incredibly stupid. I know not what

false dazzling prestige closes their eyes to their present wretchedness,

and to the still deeper wretchedness that awaits the years of old age.

Misery is the mother of great crimes. It is the sovereigns who make the

miserable, and it is they who shall answer in this world and the other

for the crimes that misery has committed."

So far as the mechanism of government is concerned, Diderot writes much

as Montesquieu had done. Under the head of _Représentants_ he proclaims

the advantages, not exactly of government by a representative assembly,

but of assisting and advising the royal government by means of such an

assembly. There is no thought of universal suffrage. "_It is property

that makes the citizen_; every man who has possessions in the state is

interested in the state, and whatever be the rank that particular

conventions may assign to him, it is always as a proprietor; it is by

reason of his possessions that he ought to speak, and that he acquires

the right of having himself represented." Yet this very definite

statement does not save him from the standing difficulty of a democratic

philosophy of politics. Nor can it be reconciled in point of logic with

other propositions to which Diderot commits himself in the same article.

For instance, he says that "no order of citizens is capable of

stipulating for all; if one order had the right, it would very soon

come to stipulate only for itself; each class ought to be represented by

men who know its condition and its needs; _these needs are only well

known to those who actually feel them_." But then, in that case, the

poorest classes are those who have most need of direct representation;

they are the most numerous, their needs are sharpest, they are the

classes to which war, consumption of national capital and way of

expending national income, equal laws, judicial administration, and the

other concerns of a legislative assembly, come most close. The problem

is to reconcile the sore interests of the multitude with the ignorance

and the temper imputed in Diderot's own description of them.

An interesting study might be made, if the limits of our subject

permitted such a digression, on the new political ideas which a

century's experience in England, France, Germany, the American Union,

has added to the publicist's stock. Diderot's article on the Legislator

is a curious mixture of views which political thinkers have left behind,

with views which the most enlightened statesmen have taken up. There is

much talk after the fashion of Jean Jacques Rousseau about the admirable

legislation of Lycurgus at Sparta, the philosophical government of the

great empire of China, and the fine spirit of the institutions of Peru.

We perceive that the same influences which made Rousseau's political

sentimentalism so popular also brought even strong heads like Diderot to

believe in the unbounded power of a government to mould men at its

will, and to impose institutions at discretion. The idea that it is the

main function of a government to make its people virtuous, is generally

as strong in Diderot as it was in Rousseau, and as it became in

Robespierre. He admires the emperors of China, because their edicts are

as the exhortation of a father to his children. All edicts, he says,

ought to instruct and to exhort as much as they command. Yet two years

after the Encyclopædia was finished (1774), when Turgot prefaced his

reforming edicts by elaborate and reasoned statements of the grounds for

them, it was found that his prefaces caused greater provocation than the

very laws that they introduced.

Apart from the common form of enthusiasm for the "sublime legislation"

of countries which the writer really knew nothing about, the article on

the Legislator has some points worth noticing. We have seen how Diderot

made the possession of property the true note of citizenship, and of a

claim to share in the government. But he did not pay property this

compliment for nothing. It is, he says, the business of the legislator

to do his best to make up to mankind for the loss of that equality which

was one of the comforts that men surrendered when they gave up the state

of nature. Hence the legislator ought to take care that no one shall

reach a position of extreme opulence otherwise than by an industry that

enriches the state. "He must take care that the charges of society shall

fall upon the rich, who enjoy the advantages of society." Even those who

agree with Diderot, and are ready to vote for a graduated income-tax,

will admit that he comes to his conclusion without knowing or reflecting

about either the serious arguments for it, or the serious objections

against it.

What is really interesting in this long article is its anticipation of

those ideas which in England we associate with the name of Cobden. "All

the men of all lands have become necessary to one another for the

exchange of the fruits of industry and the products of the soil.

Commerce is a new bond among men. Every nation has an interest in these

days in the preservation by every other nation of its wealth, its

industry, its banks, its luxury, its agriculture. The ruin of Leipsic,

of Lisbon, and of Lima has led to bankruptcies on all the exchanges of

Europe, and has affected the fortunes of many millions of persons."[191]

In the same spirit he foresees the decline of patriotism in its older

and narrower sense, and the predominance of the international over the

national sentiment. "All nations now have sufficiently just ideas of

their neighbours, and consequently they have less enthusiasm for their

country than in the old days of ignorance. There is little enthusiasm

where there is much light; enthusiasm is nearly always the emotion of a

soul that is more passionate than it is instructed. By comparing among

all nations laws with laws, talents with talents, and manners with

manners, nations will find so little reason to prefer themselves to

others, that if they preserve for their own country that love which is

the fruit of personal interest, at least they will lose that enthusiasm

which is the fruit of an exclusive self-esteem."

Yet Diderot had the perspicacity to discern the drawbacks to such a

revolution in the conditions of social climate. "Commerce, like

enlightenment, lessens ferocity, but also, just as enlightenment takes

away the enthusiasm of self-esteem, so perhaps commerce takes away the

enthusiasm of virtue. It gradually extinguishes the spirit of

magnanimous disinterestedness, and replaces it by that of hard justice.

By turning men's minds rather to use than beauty, to prudence rather

than to greatness, it may be that it injures the strength, the

generosity, the nobleness of manners."

All this, whether it comes to much or little, is at least more true than

Diderot's assurance that henceforth for any nation in Europe to make

conquests must be a moral impossibility. Napoleon Bonaparte was then a

child in arms. Whether his career was on the whole a fulfilment or a

contradiction of Diderot's proposition, may be disputed.

And so our sketch of the great book must at length end. Let us make one

concluding remark. Is it not surprising that a man of Diderot's

speculative boldness and power should have failed to rise from the

mechanical arrangement of thought and knowledge, up to some higher and

more commanding conception of the relation between himself in the

eighteenth century, or ourselves in the nineteenth, and all those great

systems of thought, method, and belief, which in various epochs and over

different spaces of the globe have given to men working answers to the

questions that their leading spirits were moved to put to themselves and

to the iron universe around them? We constantly feel how near Diderot is

to the point of view that would have brought light. We feel how very

nearly ready he was to see the mental experiences of the race in east

and west, not as superstition, degradation, grovelling error, but as

aspects of intellectual effort and aspiration richly worthy of human

interest and scientific consideration, and in their aim as well as in

their substance all of one piece with the newest science and the last

voices of religious or anti-religious development. Diderot was the one

member of the party of Philosophers who was capable of grasping such a

thought. If this guiding idea of the unity of the intellectual history

of man, and the organic integrity of thought, had happily come into

Diderot's mind, we should have had an Encyclopædia indeed; a survey and

representation of all the questions and answers of the world, such as

would in itself have suggested what questions are best worth putting,

and at the same time have furnished its own answers.

For this the moment was not yet. An urgent social task lay before France

and before Europe; it could not be postponed until the thinkers had

worked out a scheme of philosophic completeness. The thinkers did not

seriously make any effort after this completeness. The Encyclopædia was

the most serious attempt, and it did not wholly fail. As I replace in my

shelves this mountain of volumes, "dusky and huge, enlarging on the

sight," I have a presentiment that their pages will seldom again be

disturbed by me or by others. They served a great purpose a hundred

years ago. They are now a monumental ruin, clothed with all the profuse

associations of history. It is no Ozymandias of Egypt, king of kings,

whose wrecked shape of stone and sterile memories we contemplate. We

think rather of the gray and crumbling walls of an ancient stronghold

reared by the endeavour of stout hands and faithful, whence in its own

day and generation a band once went forth against barbarous hordes, to

strike a blow for humanity and truth.