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Updated: May 18, 2025
At the same time the intellect of France was busy with problems of science and was soon to express itself in the massive volumes of Diderot's Encyclopaedia. The soldiers of France were preparing to fight on many battlefields. The best of them took little part in the debilitating pleasures of Versailles.
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.
The last, a delightful work, won for the artist Diderot's powerful advocacy, and made him the popular interpreter of bourgeois intimacies. Other patient studies of still life are: 95, 96, 101, and 102; and R. wall 94. On the same wall hang, 97, The Ape as Antiquary, and 99, The Housewife.
The Hébertists might have taken for their motto Diderot's shocking couplet, if they could have known it, about using Les entrailles du prêtre Au défaut d'un cordon pour étrangler les rois.
Frederick the Great, whose literary taste was wholly in the vein of the conventional French classic, was never much interested by Diderot's writing, and felt little curiosity about him. Catherine of Russia was sufficiently an admirer of the Encyclopædia to be willing to serve its much-enduring builder.
Of these, the most important is Le Neveu de Rameau, where Diderot's whole soul gushes out in one clear, strong, sparkling jet of incomparable prose. In the sheer enchantment of its vitality this wonderful little book has certainly never been surpassed. It enthrals the reader as completely as the most exciting romance, or the talk of some irresistibly brilliant raconteur.
Without attempting to solve this problem in casuistry, we recognise Diderot's mood, and the hatred with which it would be sure to inspire him for the starved and mutilated passions of the Christian type. The humility, chastity, obedience, indolent solitude, which had for centuries been glorified by the Church, were monstrous to this vehement and energetic spirit.
Passing over various other remarks, we come to those pages in the Letter which apply the principle of relativity to the master-conception of God. Diderot's argument on this point naturally drew keener attention than the more disinterestedly scientific parts of his contribution.
Nor was it accident that drew Diderot's attention to Shaftesbury, rather than to any other of our writers.
To him all these beauties would seem to belong to the work itself, and his friends would be astonished, after hearing him praise some new book, to find in it but few of the good things which he had quoted from it. Diderot's good nature was boundless. One morning a young man, quite unknown to him, came with a manuscript, and begged him to read and correct it.
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