United States or Uzbekistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It is needless to give any account here of the minute and deliberate way in which Richardson filled in this outline. As one of his critics, D'Alembert, has unanswerably said "La, nature est bonne a imiter, mais non pas jusgu'a l'ennui" and the author of Pamela has plainly disregarded this useful law.
These savans were DIDEROT, D'ALEMBERT, and VOLTAIRE, all professed atheists, who, by the dissemination of their pernicious doctrine, introduced into France an absolute contempt for all religion. This infidelity, dissolving every social tie, every principle between man and man, between the governing and the governed, in the sequel, produced anarchy, rapine, and all their attendant horrors.
Engaging himself personally to Bailly for a situation that might not become vacant for ten or fifteen years, had D'Alembert, contrary to his duty as an academician, declared beforehand, that any other candidate, whatever might be his talents, would be to him as not existing? This is what ought to have been ascertained, before giving themselves up to such violent and odious imputations.
An early veto, soon, however, taken off, compelled the philosophers to a certain moderation; Voltaire ceased writing for the Encyclopaedia; it was not sufficiently free-going for him. "You admit articles worthy of the Trevoux journal," he said to D'Alembert.
Milord Marshal died in the month of May, 1778. A eulogium on Milord Marshal, by D'Alembert, is extant. I may serve as eyes to the blind goddess, and repair in some measure the injustice, and I beg you to offer on that account.
More and more absorbed by pure science, which he never neglected save for the French Academy, whose perpetual secretary he had become, D'Alembert left to Diderot alone the care of continuing the Encyclopaedia. When he died, in 1783, at fifty-six years of age, the work had been finished nearly twenty years.
For them nothing is too old, nothing is too new, for to their books of all others is applicable the saying of D'Alembert that the author kills himself in lengthening out what the reader kills himself in trying to shorten. There are practical books among these ancient volumes which can never grow old.
Feeble governments are ill served even by their worthiest servants; the severities ordered against the Encyclopaedia did not stop its publication; D'Alembert, however, weary of the struggle, had ceased to take part in the editorship.
The original and aggressive thought of men like Voltaire, Rousseau, d'Alembert, and Diderot, with its diversity of shading, but with the cardinal doctrine of freedom and equality pervading it all, had found a rapidly growing audience. It no longer needed careful nursing, in the second half of the century.
D'Alembert tells the story in a way entirely creditable to the latter. He says that Montesquieu saw the minister, told him that for private reasons he did not give his name to the "Persian Letters," but that he was far from disowning a book of which he did not think he had cause to be ashamed. He then insisted that the Letters should be judged after reading them, and not on hearsay.
Word Of The Day