Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) by John Morley

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DIDEROT

AND

THE ENCYCLOPAEDISTS

BY JOHN MORLEY

VOL. I.

LONDON

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1905

_First published elsewhere_

_New Edition 1886. Reprinted 1891, 1897, 1905_

PREFACE.

The present work closes a series of studies on the literary preparation
for the French Revolution. It differs from the companion volumes on
Voltaire and Rousseau, in being much more fully descriptive. In the case
of those two famous writers, every educated reader knows more or less of
their performances. Of Diderot and his circle, such knowledge cannot be
taken for granted, and I have therefore thought it best to occupy a
considerable space, which I hope that those who do me the honour to read
these pages will not find excessive, with what is little more than
transcript or analysis. Such a method will at least enable the reader to
see what those ideas really were, which the social and economic
condition of France on the eve of the convulsion made so welcome to men.
The shortcomings of the encyclopaedic group are obvious enough. They have
lately been emphasised in the ingenious and one-sided exaggerations of
that brilliant man of letters, Mr. Taine. The social significance and
the positive quality of much of their writing is more easily missed, and
this side of their work it has been one of my principal objects, alike
in the case of Voltaire, of Rousseau, and of Diderot, to bring into the
prominence that it deserves in the history of opinion.

The edition of Diderot's works to which the references are made, is that
in twenty volumes by the late Mr. Assezat and Mr. Maurice Tourneux. The
only other serious book on Diderot with which I am acquainted is
Rosenkranz's valuable _Diderot's Leben_, published in 1866, and
abounding in full and patient knowledge. Of the numerous criticisms on
Diderot by Raumer, Arndt, Hettner, Damiron, Bersot, and above all by Mr.
Carlyle, I need not make more particular mention.

_May, 1878._

NOTE.

Since the following pages were printed, an American
correspondent writes to me with reference to the dialogue
between Franklin and Raynal, mentioned on page 218, Vol.
II.:--"I have now before me Volume IV. of the _American Law
Journal_, printed at Philadelphia in the year 1813, and at
page 458 find in full, 'The Speech of Miss Polly Baker,
delivered before a court of judicature in _Connecticut_, where
she was prosecuted.'" Raynal, therefore, would have been right
if instead of Massachusetts he had said Connecticut; and
either Franklin told an untruth, or else Silas Deane.

_September, 1878._

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

CHAPTER I.
PRELIMINARY.

The Church in the middle of the century
New phase in the revolt
The Encyclopaedia, its symbol
End of the reaction against the Encyclopaedia
Diderot's position in the movement

CHAPTER II.
YOUTH.

Birth and birthplace (1713)
His family
Men of letters in Paris
Diderot joins their company
His life in Paris: his friendly character
Stories of his good-nature
His tolerance for social reprobates
His literary struggles
Marriage (1743)

CHAPTER III.
EARLY WRITINGS.

Diderot's mismanagement of his own talents
Apart from this, a great talker rather than a great writer
A man of the Socratic type
Hack-work for the booksellers
The Philosophical Thoughts (1746)
Shaftesbury's influence
Scope of the Philosophical Thoughts
On the Sufficiency of Natural Religion (1747)
Explanation of the attraction of Natural Religion
Police supervision over men of letters
Two pictures of the literary hack
Seizure of the Sceptic's Walk (1747)
Its drift
A volume of stories (1748)
Diderot's view of the fate and character of women

CHAPTER IV.
THE NEW PHILOSOPHY.

Voltaire's account of Cheselden's operation
Diderot publishes the Letter on the Blind (1749)
Its significance
Condillac and Diderot
Account of the Letter on the Blind
The pith of it, an application of Relativity to the conception
of God
Saunderson of Cambridge
Argument assigned to him
Curious anticipation of a famous modern hypothesis
Voltaire's criticism
Effect of Diderot's philosophic position on the system
of the Church
Not merely a dispute in metaphysics
Illustration of Diderot's practical originality
Points of literary interest
The Letter on Deaf Mutes (1751)
Condillac's Statue
Diderot imprisoned at Vincennes (1749)
Rousseau's visit to him
Breach with Madame de Puisieux
Diderot released from captivity

CHAPTER V.
THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA.
(1) ITS HISTORY.

Previous examples of the Encyclopaedic idea
True parentage of Diderot's Encyclopaedia
Origin of the undertaking
Co-operation of D'Alembert: his history and character
Diderot and D'Alembert on the function of literature
Presiding characteristic of the Encyclopaedia
Its more eminent contributors
The unsought volunteers
Voltaire's share in it
Its compliance with reigning prejudice
Its aim, not literature but life
Publication of first and second volumes (1751-52)
Affair of De Prades
Diderot's vindication of him (1752)
Marks rupture between the Philosophers and the Jansenists
Royal decree suppressing first two volumes (1752)
Failure of the Jesuits to carry on the work
Four more volumes published
The seventh volume (1757)
Arouses violent hostility
The storm made fiercer by Helvetius's _L'Esprit_
Proceedings against the Encyclopaedia
Their significance
They also mark singular reaction within the school of
Illumination
Retirement of D'Alembert
Diderot continues the work alone for seven years
His harassing mortifications
The Encyclopaedia at Versailles
Reproduction and imitations
Diderot's payment

(2) GENERAL CONTENTS.

Transformation of a speculative into a social attack
Circumstances of practical opportuneness
Broad features of Encyclopaedic revolution
Positive spirit of the Encyclopaedia
Why we call it the organ of a political work
Articles on Agriculture
On the _Gabelle_ and the _Taille_
On Privilege
On the _Corveee_
On the Militia
On Endowments, Fairs, and Industrial Guilds
On Game and the Chase
Enthusiasm for the details of industry
Meaning of the importance assigned to industry and science
Intellectual side of the change
Attitude of the Encyclopaedia to religion
Diderot's intention under this head
How far the scheme fulfilled his intention
The Preliminary Discourse
Recognition of the value of discussion
And of toleration

(3) DIDEROT'S CONTRIBUTIONS.

Their immense confusion
Constant insinuation of sound doctrines
And of practical suggestions
Diderot not always above literary trifling
No taste for barren erudition
On Montaigne and Bayle
Occasional bursts of moralising
Varying attitude as to theology
The practical arts
Second-hand sources
Inconsistencies
Treatment of metaphysics
On Spinosa
On Leibnitz
On Liberty
Astonishing self-contradiction
Political articles
On the mechanism of government
Anticipation of Cobdenic ideas
Conclusion

CHAPTER VI.
SOCIAL LIFE (1759-1770).

Diderot's relations with Madame Voland
His letters to her
His Regrets on My Old Dressing-gown
Domestic discomfort
His indomitable industry
Life at Grandval
Meditations on human existence
Interest in the casuistry of human feeling
Various sayings
A point in rhetoric
Holbach's impressions of England
Two cases of conscience
A story of human wickedness
Method and Genius: an Apologue
Conversation
Annihilation
Characteristic of the century
Diderot's inexhaustible friendliness
The Abbe Monnier
Mademoiselle Jodin
Landois
Rousseau
Grimm
Diderot's money affairs
Succour rendered by Catherine of Russia
French booksellers in the eighteenth century
Dialogue between Diderot and D'Alembert
English opinion on Diderot's circle

CHAPTER VII.
THE STAGE.

In what sense Diderot the greatest genius of the century
Mark of his theory of the drama
Diderot's influence on Lessing
His play, _The Natural Son_ (1757)
Its quality illustrated
His sense of the importance of pantomime
The dialogues appended to _The Natural Son_
His second play, _The Father of the Family_ (1758)
One radical error of his dramatic doctrine
Modest opinion of his own experiments
His admiration for Terence
Diderot translates Moore's _Gamester_
On Shakespeare
The Paradox on the Player
Account of Garrick
On the truth of the stage
His condemnation of the French classic stage
The foundations of dramatic art
Diderot claims to have created a new kind of drama
No Diderotian school
Why the Encyclopaedists could not replace the classic
drama
The great drama of the eighteenth century

CHAPTER VIII.
"RAMEAU'S NEPHEW."

The mood that inspired this composition
History of the text
Various accounts of the design of _Rameau's Nephew_
Juvenal's Parasite
Lucian
Diderot's picture of his original
Not without imaginative strokes
More than a literary diversion
Sarcasms on Palissot
The musical controversy

DIDEROT.

CHAPTER I.

PRELIMINARY.

There was a moment in the last century when the Gallican church hoped
for a return of internal union and prosperity. This brief era of hope
coincided almost exactly with the middle of the century. Voltaire was in
exile at Berlin. The author of the Persian Letters and the Spirit of
Laws was old and near his end. Rousseau was copying music in a garret.
The Encyclopaedia was looked for, but only as a literary project of some
associated booksellers. The Jansenists, who had been so many in number
and so firm in spirit five-and-twenty years earlier, had now sunk to a
small minority of the French clergy. The great ecclesiastical body at
length offered an unbroken front to its rivals, the great judicial
bodies. A patriotic minister was indeed audacious enough to propose a
tax upon ecclesiastical property, but the Church fought the battle and
won. Troops had just been despatched to hunt and scatter the Protestants
of the desert, and bigots exulted in the thought of pastors swinging on
gibbets, and heretical congregations fleeing for their lives before the
fire of orthodox musketry. The house of Austria had been forced to
suffer spoliation at the hands of the infidel Frederick, but all the
world was well aware that the haughty and devout Empress-Queen would
seize a speedy opportunity of taking a crushing vengeance; France would
this time be on the side of righteousness and truth. For the moment a
churchman might be pardoned if he thought that superstition, ignorance,
abusive privilege, and cruelty were on the eve of the smoothest and most
triumphant days that they had known since the Reformation.

We now know how illusory this sanguine anticipation was destined to
prove, and how promptly. In little more than forty years after the
triumphant enforcement of the odious system of confessional
certificates, then the crowning event of ecclesiastical supremacy, Paris
saw the Feast of the Supreme Being, and the adoration of the Goddess of
Reason. The Church had scarcely begun to dream before she was rudely and
peremptorily awakened. She found herself confronted by the most
energetic, hardy, and successful assailants whom the spirit of progress
ever inspired. Compared with the new attack, Jansenism was no more than
a trifling episode in a family quarrel. Thomists and Molinists became as
good as confederates, and Quietism barely seemed a heresy. In every age,
even in the very depth of the times of faith, there had arisen
disturbers of the intellectual peace. Almost each century after the
resettlement of Europe by Charlemagne had procured some individual, or
some little group, who had ventured to question this or that article of
the ecclesiastical creed, to whom broken glimpses of new truth had come,
and who had borne witness against the error or inconsistency or
inadequateness of old ways of thinking. The questions which presented
themselves to the acuter minds of a hundred years ago, were present to
the acuter minds who lived hundreds of years before that. The more
deeply we penetrate into the history of opinion, the more strongly are
we tempted to believe that in the great matters of speculation no
question is altogether new, and hardly any answer is altogether new. But
the Church had known how to deal with intellectual insurgents, from
Abelard in the twelfth century down to Giordano Bruno and Vanini in the
seventeenth. They were isolated; they were for the most part submissive;
and if they were not, the arm of the Church was very long and her grasp
mortal. And all these meritorious precursors were made weak by one
cardinal defect, for which no gifts of intellectual acuteness could
compensate. They had the scientific idea, but they lacked the social
idea. They could have set opinion right about the efficacy of the
syllogism, and the virtue of entities and quiddities. They could have
taught Europe earlier than the Church allowed it to learn that the sun
does not go round the earth, and that it is the earth which goes round
the sun. But they were wholly unfitted to deal with the prodigious
difficulties of moral and social direction. This function, so
immeasurably more important than the mere discovery of any number of
physical relations, it was the glory of the Church to have discharged
for some centuries with as much success as the conditions permitted. We
are told indeed by writers ignorant alike of human history and human
nature, that only physical science can improve the social condition of
man. The common sense of the world always rejects this gross fallacy.
The acquiescence for so many centuries in the power of the great
directing organisation of Western Europe, notwithstanding its
intellectual inadequateness, was the decisive expression of that
rejection.

After the middle of the last century the insurrection against the
pretensions of the Church and against the doctrines of Christianity was
marked in one of its most important phases by a new and most significant
feature. In this phase it was animated at once by the scientific idea
and by the social idea. It was an advance both in knowledge and in moral
motive. It rested on a conception which was crude and imperfect enough,
but which was still almost, like the great ecclesiastical conception
itself, a conception of life as a whole. Morality, positive law, social
order, economics, the nature and limits of human knowledge, the
constitution of the physical universe, had one by one disengaged
themselves from theological explanations. The final philosophical
movement of the century in France, which was represented by Diderot,
now tended to a new social synthesis resting on a purely positive basis.
If this movement had only added to its other contents the historic idea,
its destination would have been effectually reached. As it was, its
leaders surveyed the entire field with as much accuracy and with as wide
a range as their instruments allowed, and they scattered over the world
a set of ideas which at once entered into energetic rivalry with the
ancient scheme of authority. The great symbol of this new
comprehensiveness in the insurrection was the Encyclopaedia.

The Encyclopaedia was virtually a protest against the old organisation,
no less than against the old doctrine. Broadly stated, the great central
moral of it all was this: that human nature is good, that the world is
capable of being made a desirable abiding-place, and that the evil of
the world is the fruit of bad education and bad institutions. This
cheerful doctrine now strikes on the ear as a commonplace and a truism.
A hundred years ago in France it was a wonderful gospel, and the
beginning of a new dispensation. It was the great counter-principle to
asceticism in life and morals, to formalism in art, to absolutism in the
social ordering, to obscurantism in thought. Every social improvement
since has been the outcome of that doctrine in one form or another. The
conviction that the character and lot of man are indefinitely modifiable
for good, was the indispensable antecedent to any general and energetic
endeavour to modify the conditions that surround him. The omnipotence
of early instruction, of laws, of the method of social order, over the
infinitely plastic impulses of the human creature--this was the maxim
which brought men of such widely different temperament and leanings to
the common enterprise. Everybody can see what wide and deep-reaching
bearings such a doctrine possessed; how it raised all the questions
connected with psychology and the formation of character; how it went
down to the very foundation of morals; into what fresh and unwelcome
sunlight it brought the articles of the old theology; with what new
importance it clothed all the relations of real knowledge and the
practical arts; what intense interest it lent to every detail of
economics and legislation and government.

The deadly chagrin with which churchmen saw the encyclopedic fabric
rising was very natural. The teaching of the Church paints man as fallen
and depraved. The new secular knowledge clashed at a thousand points,
alike in letter and in spirit, with the old sacred lore. Even where it
did not clash, its vitality of interest and attraction drove the older
lore into neglected shade. To stir men's vivid curiosity and hope about
the earth was to make their care much less absorbing about the kingdom
of heaven. To awaken in them the spirit of social improvement was ruin
to the most scandalous and crying social abuse then existing. The old
spiritual power had lost its instinct, once so keen and effective, of
wise direction. Instead of being the guide and corrector of the organs
of the temporal power, it was the worst of their accomplices. The
Encyclopaedia was an informal, transitory, and provisional organisation
of the new spiritual power. The school of which it was the great
expounder achieved a supreme control over opinion by the only title to
which control belongs: a more penetrating eye for social exigencies and
for the means of satisfying them.

Our veteran humorist told us long ago in his whimsical way that the
importance of the Acts of the French Philosophes recorded in whole acres
of typography is fast exhausting itself, that the famed Encyclopaedical
Tree has borne no fruit, and that Diderot the great has contracted into
Diderot the easily measurable. The humoristic method is a potent
instrument for working such contractions and expansions at will. The
greatest of men are measurable enough, if you choose to set up a
standard that is half transcendental and half cynical. A saner and more
patient criticism measures the conspicuous figures of the past
differently. It seeks their relations to the great forward movements of
the world, and asks to what quarter of the heavens their faces were set,
whether towards the east where the new light dawns, or towards the west
after the old light has sunk irrevocably down. Above all, a saner
criticism bids us remember that pioneers in the progressive way are
rare, their lives rude and sorely tried, and their services to mankind
beyond price. "Diderot is Diderot," wrote one greater than Carlyle: "a
peculiar individuality; whoever holds him or his doings cheaply is a
Philistine, and the name of them is legion. Men know neither from God,
nor from Nature, nor from their fellows, how to receive with gratitude
what is valuable beyond appraisement" (_Goethe_). An intense
Philistinism underlay the great spiritual reaction that followed the
Revolution, and not even such of its apostles as Wordsworth and Carlyle
wholly escaped the taint.

Forty years ago, when Carlyle wrote, it might really seem to a
prejudiced observer as if the encyclopaedic tree had borne no fruit. Even
then, and even when the critic happened to be a devotee of the sterile
transcendentalism then in vogue, one might have expected some
recognition of the fact that the seed of all the great improvements
bestowed on France by the Revolution, in spite of the woful evils which
followed in its train, had been sown by the Encyclopaedists. But now that
the last vapours of the transcendental reaction are clearing away, we
see that the movement initiated by the Encyclopaedia is again in full
progress. Materialistic solutions in the science of man, humanitarian
ends in legislation, naturalism in art, active faith in the
improvableness of institutions--all these are once more the marks of
speculation and the guiding ideas of practical energy. The philosophical
parenthesis is at an end. The interruption of eighty years counts for no
more than the twinkling of an eye in the history of the transformation
of the basis of thought. And the interruption has for the present come
to a close. Europe again sees the old enemies face to face; the Church,
and a Social Philosophy slowly labouring to build her foundations in
positive science. It cannot be other than interesting to examine the
aims, the instruments, and the degree of success of those who a century
ago saw most comprehensively how profound and far-reaching a
metamorphosis awaited the thought of the Western world. We shall do this
most properly in connection with Diderot.

Whether we accept or question Comte's strong description of Diderot as
the greatest genius of the eighteenth century, it is at least undeniable
that he was the one member of the great party of illumination with a
real title to the name of thinker. Voltaire and Rousseau were the heads
of two important schools, and each of them set deep and unmistakable
marks both on the opinion and the events of the century. It would not be
difficult to show that their influence was wider than that of the
philosopher who discerned the inadequateness of both. But Rousseau was
moved by passion and sentiment; Voltaire was only the master of a
brilliant and penetrating rationalism. Diderot alone of this famous trio
had in his mind the idea of scientific method; alone showed any feeling
for a doctrine, and for large organic and constructive conceptions. He
had the rare faculty of true philosophic meditation. Though immeasurably
inferior both to Voltaire and Rousseau in gifts of literary expression,
he was as far their superior in breadth and reality of artistic
principle. He was the originator of a natural, realistic, and
sympathetic school of literary criticism. He aspired to impose new forms
upon the drama. Both in imaginative creation and in criticism, his work
was a constant appeal from the artificial conventions of the classic
schools to the actualities of common life. The same spirit united with
the tendency of his philosophy to place him among the very few men who
have been great and genuine observers of human nature and human
existence. So singular and widely active a genius may well interest us,
even apart from the important place that he holds in the history of
literature and opinion.

CHAPTER II.

YOUTH.

Denis Diderot was born at Langres in 1713, being thus a few months
younger than Rousseau (1712), nearly twenty years younger than Voltaire
(1694), nearly two years younger than Hume (1711), and eleven years
older than Kant (1724). His stock was ancient and of good repute. The
family had been engaged in the great local industry, the manufacture of
cutlery, for no less than two centuries in direct line. Diderot liked to
dwell on the historic prowess of his town, from the days of Julius
Caesar and the old Lingones and Sabinus, down to the time of the Great
Monarch. With the taste of his generation for tracing moral qualities to
a climatic source, he explained a certain vivacity and mobility in the
people of his district by the great frequency and violence of its
atmospheric changes from hot to cold, from calm to storm, from rain to
sunshine. "Thus they learn from earliest infancy to turn to every wind.
The man of Langres has a head on his shoulders like the weathercock at
the top of the church spire. It is never fixed at one point; if it
returns to the point it has left, it is not to stop there. With an
amazing rapidity in their movements, their desires, their plans, their
fancies, their ideas, they are cumbrous in speech. For myself, I belong
to my country side." This was thoroughly true. He inherited all the
versatility of his compatriots, all their swift impetuosity, and
something of their want of dexterity in expression.

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