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Updated: May 3, 2025
Rousseau had long been brooding over certain private grievances of his own against Diderot; the dreary story has been told by me before, and happily need not be repeated. He took the occasion of D'Alembert's mischievous suggestion to his native Geneva, not merely to denounce the drama with all the force and eloquence at his command, but formally to declare the breach between himself and Diderot.
Bailly, on the contrary, with or without reason, seeing in these unfavourable results of the elections the immediate effect of D'Alembert's enmity, showed himself much more hurt at it, perhaps, than was suitable for a philosopher. In these somewhat envenomed contests, Buffon always gave Bailly a cordial and able support. Bailly pronounced his reception-discourse in February, 1784.
At length his opinion came round to D'Alembert's reiterated assertions of the shame and baseness of men of letters subjecting themselves to the humiliating yoke of ministers, priests, and police.
Under this would apparently fall the explanation of 'reality' which leads to a doctrine upon which he often insists, and which is most implicitly given in the fragment called Ontology. He there distinguishes 'real' from 'fictitious entities, a distinction which, as he tells us, he first learned from d'Alembert's phrase Êtres fictifs and which he applies in his Morals and Legislation.
From one slope to the other of the theorems, it grew to a heavy mass; and the mass became a mighty projectile which, flung backwards and retracing its course, split the darkness and spread it into one vast sheet of light. D'Alembert's precept is good and very good, provided you do not abuse it. Too much precipitation in turning over the intractable page might expose you to many a disappointment.
It is a magnanimous trait in D'Alembert's history that he should have procured for Lagrange a position and livelihood at Berlin, warmly commending him as a man of rare and superior genius, although Lagrange had vigorously opposed some of his own mathematical theories.
In Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédic, is figured an Umbrella, which is described as follows, in the excellent introduction to the "Abridgements of Specifications relating to Umbrellas," lately published by the Commissioners of Patents: They are double, each rib having a pair joined, one on each side of the rib, at the same point. Ribs and sticks are jointed, the latter in two places.
D'Alembert's fame was indeed so brilliant that Catherine the Great wrote to ask him to undertake the education of her Son, and promised the splendid income of a hundred thousand francs. He preferred, however, a quiet life of research in Paris, although there was but a modest salary attached to his office.
I followed d'Alembert's precept in his advice to young mathematical students: 'Have faith and go ahead, said the great geometrician. Faith I had; and I went on pluckily. And it was well for me that I did, for I often found behind the wall the enlightenment which I was seeking in front of it.
'This tragedy was the work of six days, he wrote to d'Alembert, enclosing Olympie. 'You should not have rested on the seventh, was d'Alembert's reply. But, on the whole, Voltaire's verses succeed in keeping up to a high level of mediocrity; they are the verses, in fact, of a very clever man. It is when his cleverness is out of its depth, that he most palpably fails.
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