[Footnote: The passage from Diderot's article Encyclopedie is
given as translated by Morley, Diderot, i, 145.] Hence psychology,
morals, the structure of society, were the subjects which riveted
attention instead of the larger supra-human problems which had occupied
Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibnitz. It mattered little whether the
universe was the best that could be constructed; what mattered was the
relation of man's own little world to his will and capacities.

Physical science was important only in so far as it could help social
science and minister to the needs of man. The closest analogy to this
development of thought is not offered by the Renaissance, to which the
description HUMANISTIC has been conventionally appropriated, but rather
by the age of illumination in Greece in the latter half of the fifth
century B.C., represented by Protagoras, Socrates, and others who turned
from the ultimate problems of the cosmos, hitherto the main study of
philosophers, to man, his nature and his works.

In this revised form of "anthropo-centrism" we see how the general
movement of thought has instinctively adapted itself to the astronomical
revolution. On the Ptolemaic system it was not incongruous or absurd
that man, lord of the central domain in the universe, should regard
himself as the most important cosmic creature. This is the view,
implicit in the Christian scheme, which had been constructed on the old
erroneous cosmology. When the true place of the earth was shown and
man found himself in a tiny planet attached to one of innumerable solar
worlds, his cosmic importance could no longer be maintained. He was
reduced to the condition of an insect creeping on a "tas de boue," which
Voltaire so vividly illustrated in Micromegas. But man is resourceful;
[words in Greek]. Displaced, along with his home, from the centre of
things, he discovers a new means of restoring his self-importance;
he interprets his humiliation as a deliverance. Finding himself in an
insignificant island floating in the immensity of space, he decides that
he is at last master of his own destinies; he can fling away the old
equipment of final causes, original sin, and the rest; he can construct
his own chart and, bound by no cosmic scheme, he need take the universe
into account only in so far as he judges it to be to his own profit. Or,
if he is a philosopher, he may say that, after all, the universe for
him is built out of his own sensations, and that