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Updated: June 6, 2025


The eighteenth century was crowning its gray hairs with the wreath of progress. On every hand science was bearing testimony against the church. Voltaire had filled Europe with light. D'Holbach was giving to the elite of Paris the principles contained in his "System of Nature." The encyclopaedists had attacked superstition with information for the masses.

Thomas Jefferson was an exponent of the democracy of his day, and with him democracy came into the National Administration. The "well-born" were discomfited. Yet it was not the democracy of Andrew Jackson's time. It was a democracy reflected from Europe like everything else in America at the time. It was the democracy of Montesquieu and the encyclopaedists.

"For the moment I don't remember, but he read the writings of the Fathers, for instance, and explained them to Natasha and me, to my great advantage. We also read with him Voltaire and Spinoza. Why do you laugh?" she asked, looking at Raisky. "There seems a remarkable gap between the Fathers and Spinoza and Voltaire. The Encyclopaedists are also included in my library. Did you read them?"

But these particular defects are largely due to a fundamental error which runs through his whole book and was inherent in the social speculations of the Encyclopaedists. Condorcet, like all his circle, ignored the preponderant part which institutions have played in social development.

In France, the highest intelligence was at war with established institutions, the Encyclopaedists, Voltaire, Rousseau, against the Catholic church and the reigning authorities: on the one side persecution, but growing feeble; on the other side derision or evasion or attack.

His work was condemned by the Sorbonne, the pope, and the parliament; it was burned by the hand of the hangman, and the author was compelled to retract it. The Encyclopaedists had flattered themselves that they had tuned the opinion of all Europe to their philosophical strain, when suddenly they heard his discordant note.

The Imperial disciple and friend of the Encyclopaedists became in the last years of her reign a decided reactionnaire. During the Napoleonic wars, when the patriotic feelings were excited, there was a violent hostility to foreign intellectual influence; and feeble intermittent attempts were made to throw off the intellectual bondage.

The eighteenth century encyclopaedists procured tolerance for the sorcerer; he is no longer amenable to a court of law, unless, indeed, he lends himself to fraudulent practices, and frightens his "clients" to extort money from them, in which case he may be prosecuted on a charge of obtaining money under false pretences.

It is in our blessed epoch that atheism, by some, and pantheism, by others, are boldly taught and vindicated, as once they were by Greeks or Orientals, and with an earnestness and enthusiasm very different from the sneer with which Encyclopaedists of Voltaire's time attacked Christianity and Deism.

The encyclopaedists, with Diderot and d'Alembert in the van, were holding council in France, mobilizing the intellects of the time, and, like Bacon, taking all knowledge for their province, for a fierce attack on the old philosophy, the old statecraft, the old art, and the old religion.

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