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Updated: May 18, 2025
Diderot's colossal labors were ended; his epitaph was written, and the great Encyclopaedia remained as his living monument. D'Holbach had just joined his friends in their eternal repose. A host of smaller men, also, but admirable soldiers of progress in their degree, had passed away. The gallant host had done its work. The ground was ploughed, the seed was sown, and the harvest was sure.
They are a robuster development of the scepticism which was the less important side of Shaftesbury. This was Diderot's first experience of that hand of authority, which was for thirty years to surround him with mortification and torment. But the disapproval of authority did not check the circulation or influence of the Thoughts.
Diderot was just as sensible of the originality and Aristophanic gaiety of Collé's brilliant play, Truth in Wine, though Collé detested the philosophic school from Voltaire downwards, and left behind him a bitterly contemptuous account of The Natural Son. Of all comic writers, however, the author of the Andria and the Heautontimorumenos was Diderot's favourite.
She says that he wanted to borrow a portfolio in which to carry the manuscripts to Paris; Rousseau says that they had already been in Diderot's possession for six months. As her letters containing this very circumstantial story were written at the moment, it is difficult to uphold the Confessions as valid authority against them. The scene is characteristic.
Never in Barbier's memory had any Manchester lad so applied himself to learn French before. And when the boy's knowledge of the Encyclopaedists came out, and he one day put the master right in class on some points connected with Diderot's relations to Rousseau, the ex-journalist gaped with astonishment, and then went home and read up his facts, half enraged and half enraptured.
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.
It was really not far removed from Diderot's problem in the Paradoxe sur le Comedien. What is the relation of the actor to the part represented? One actress is plain Rachel; another actress is beautiful, and more than beautiful, delightful Miss Anderson. But all the time, is there or is there not a region in which all these considerations count for nothing in comparison with certain others?
Three-fourths of Diderot's life were reckoned by his family to have been given up to people who had need of his purse, his knowledge, or his good offices. His daughter compares his library to a shop crowded by a succession of customers, but the customers took whatever wares they sought, not by purchase, but by way of free gift.
The free-thinkers were becoming strong enough to represent opposition to authority on their own principles and in their own persons. Diderot's vigorous remonstrance with the bishop of Auxerre incidentally marks for us the definite rupture of philosophic sympathy for the Jansenist champions.
And just as in Diderot's most wordy and tiresome pages we generally find some one phrase, some epithet, some turn of a sentence whose freshness or strength or daring reveals a genius, so in this scene we find a few lines whose energy reminds us that we are not after all in the hands of some obscure playwright, whose works ought long ago to have been eaten by moths or burnt by fire.
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