e Newton is acclaimed as the greatest man who
ever lived.] He was superficial in his knowledge both of history and of
science, and his conception of utility was narrow and a little vulgar.
Great theoretical discoverers like Newton and Leibnitz he sets in a
lower rank than ingenious persons who used their scientific skill to
fashion some small convenience of life. Monuments of art, like Notre
Dame, possessed little value in his eyes compared with a road, a bridge,
or a canal.

Like most of his distinguished contemporaries he was a Deist. On his
deathbed he received the usual rites of the Church in the presence of
his household, and then told the priest that he did not believe a word
of all that. His real views are transparent in some of his works through
the conventional disguises in which prudent writers of the time were
wont to wrap their assaults on orthodoxy. To attack Mohammedanism by
arguments which are equally applicable to Christianity was a device for
propagating rationalism in days when it was dangerous to propagate
it openly. This is what the Abbe did in his Discourse against
Mohammedanism. Again, in his Physical Explanation of an Apparition he
remarks: "To diminish our fanatical proclivities, it would be useful if
the Government were to establish an annual prize, to be awarded by the
Academy of Sciences, for the best explanation, by natural laws, of the
extraordinary effects of imagination, of the prodigies related in Greek
and Latin literature, and of the pretended miracles told by Protestants,
Schismatics, and Mohammedans." The author carefully keeps on the right
side of the fence. No Catholic authorities could take exception to
this. But no intelligent reader could fail to see that all miracles were
attacked. The miracles accepted by the Protestants were also believed in
by the Catholics.

He was one of the remarkable figures of his age. We might almost say
that he was a new type--a nineteenth century humanitarian and pacifist
in an eighteenth century environment. He was a born reformer, and he
devoted his life to the construction of schemes for increasing human
happiness. He introduced the word bienfaisance into the currency of
the French language, and beneficence was in his eyes the sovran virtue.
There were few departments of public affairs in which he did not point
out the deficiencies and devise ingenious plans for improvement. Most
of his numerous writings are projets--schemes of reform in governmen