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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.
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.
Especially there is to be little emphasis a warning grievously needed by ninety-nine English speakers out of a hundred for emphasis is hardly ever natural; it is only a forced imitation of nature. Diderot had perceived very early that the complacency with which his countrymen regarded the national theatre was extravagant.
I have spoken of the teaching of Diderot and his friends that mans energies should be devoted to making the earth pleasant. new ideal was substituted for the old ideal based on theological propositions. This ideal was powerfully reinforced by the doctrine of historical progress, which was started in France by Turgot, who made progress the organic principle of history.
She bewilders them with questions that are never overheard by common ears, and torments them with a mockery that is unobserved by common eyes. The energetic a Socrates, a Diderot cannot content themselves with merely recording her everlasting puzzles; still less with merely writing over again the already recorded answers.
Outside of the strict frontiers of philosophy, masterpieces of the dialectic might be found occasionally of which I can only recall "Rameau's Nephew" by Diderot, and the treatise upon the origin of human inequality by Rousseau. We now give briefly the essential features of the two modes of thought: we will return to them more fully later.
The place was indeed well worth a careful study; for in 1830 it was not the orderly and decent bazaar of the Second Empire, but was still that compound of Parnassus and Bohemia which is painted in vivid colours in the "Grand Homme de Province" of Balzac, still the paradise of such ineffable rascals as Diderot has drawn with terrible fidelity in his "Neveu de Rameau."
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." Yet Diderot had a feeling of the necessity of advancing beyond the attitude of Bayle and Montaigne.
The stage, indeed, occupied largely the attention of Diderot, who sought to introduce reforms, the fruit of his own thought as well as of imitation of the Germans, which he had not perhaps sufficiently considered. For the classic tragedies, the heritage of which Voltaire received from the hands of Racine, Diderot aspired to substitute the natural drama.
While the priests wanted to burn, he did all he could to put out the fire he has been lost long, long ago. His cry for water has, become so common that his voice is now recognized through all the realms of hell, and they say to one another, "That is Diderot." David Hume, the philosopher, he is there with the rest.
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