collected the material of war to demolish
traditional doctrines. The Encyclopaedia carried on the campaign against
authority and superstition by indirect methods, but it was the work of
men who were not sceptics like Bayle, but had ideals, positive purposes,
and social hopes. They were not only confident in reason and in
science, but most of them had also a more or less definite belief in the
possibility of an advance of humanity towards perfection.

As one of their own band afterwards remarked, they were less occupied in
enlarging the bounds of knowledge than in spreading the light and making
war on prejudice. [Footnote: Condorcet, Esquisse, p. 206 (ed. 1822).]
The views of the individual contributors differed greatly, and they
cannot be called a school, but they agreed so far in common tendencies
that they were able to form a co-operative alliance.

The propaganda of which the Encyclopaedia was the centre was reinforced
by the independent publications of some of the leading men who
collaborated or were closely connected with their circle, notably those
of Diderot himself, Baron d'Holbach, and Helvetius.

3.

The optimism of the Encyclopaedists was really based on an intense
consciousness of the enlightenment of their own age. The progressiveness
of knowledge was taken as axiomatic, but was there any guarantee that
the light, now confined to small circles, could ever enlighten the world
and regenerate mankind? They found the guarantee they required, not in
an induction from the past experience of the race, but in an a priori
theory: the indefinite malleability of human nature by education
and institutions. This had been, as we saw, assumed by the Abbe de
Saint-Pierre. It pervaded the speculation of the age, and was formally
deduced from the sensational psychology of Locke and Condillac. It was
developed, in an extreme form, in the work of Helvetius, De l'esprit
(1758).

In this book, which was to exert a large influence in England, Helvetius
sought, among other things, to show that the science of morals is
equivalent to the science of legislation, and that in a well-organised
society all men are capable of rising to the highest point of mental
development. Intellectual and moral inequalities between man and man
arise entirely from differences in education and social circumstances.
Genius itself is not a gift of nature; the man of genius is a product of
circumstances--social, not physical, for Helvetius rejects th