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Updated: May 6, 2025
Let me premise, however, that the savans to whom I allude, must not be confounded with the philosophers, called Encyclopaedists, from their having been the first to conceive and execute the plan of the Encyclopaedia.
He was an infidel and a libertine, like the majority of the young men of his day and of his age; the crime he expiated so cruelly was attributed to reading bad books, which had corrupted him. "I am told," writes Voltaire to D'Alembert, "that they said at their examination that they had been led on to the act of madness they committed by the works of the Encyclopaedists.
The first, during which d'Alembert was pre-eminent, came to an end with the violent expulsion of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. During the second, which lasted for the rest of her life, her salon, purged of the Encyclopaedists, took on a more decidedly worldly tone; and the influence of Horace Walpole was supreme.
But as for appealing to natural law for that which is good for men, and to reason for the power of discerning that same good if man cannot find truth by that method, by what method shall he find it? And thus it happened that, though these philosophers and encyclopaedists were not men of science, they were at least the heralds and the coadjutors of science.
Just as the sceptical philosophy of the Encyclopaedists in France promoted the Revolution, and the Revolution in its turn developed and confirmed the philosophic scepticism, so also the collapse of contending philosophies in Greece promoted the collapse of contending systems of political authority, and the collapse of political authority facilitated the growth of that individualism in thought with which the name of the Sophists is associated.
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