y cherished. It can only have been
in a moment of elated paradox that he made one of the interlocutors in
the dialogue on Bougainville pronounce Constancy, "The poor vanity of
two children who do not know themselves, and who are blinded by the
intoxication of a moment to the instability of all that surrounds them:"
and Fidelity, "The obstinacy and the punishment of a good man and a
good woman:" and Jealousy, "The passion of a miser; the unjust sentiment
of man; the consequence of our false manners, and of a right of property
extending over a feeling, willing, thinking, free creature."[8]

[8] _Oeuv._, ii. 243.

It is a curious example of the blindness which reaction against excess
of ascetic doctrine bred in the eighteenth century, that Diderot should
have failed to see that such sophisms as these are wholly destructive of
that order and domestic piety, to whose beauty he was always so keenly
alive. It is curious, too, that he should have failed to recognise that
the erection of constancy into a virtue would have been impossible, if
it had not answered first, to some inner want of human character at its
best, and second, to some condition of fitness in society at its best.

How is it, says one of the interlocutors, that the strongest, the
sweetest, the most innocent of pleasures is become the most fruitful
source of depravation and misfortune? This is indeed a question well
worth asking. And it is comforting after the anarchy of the earlier part
of the dialogue to find so comparatively sensible a line of argument
taken in answer as the following. This evil result has been brought
about, he says, by the tyranny of man, who has converted the possession
of woman into a property; by manners and usages that have overburdened
the conjugal union with superfluous conditions; by the civil laws that
have subjected marriage to an infinity of formalities; by religious
institutions that have attached the name of vices and virtues to actions
that are not susceptible of morality. If this means that human happiness
will be increased by making the condition of the wife more independent
in respect of property; by treating in public opinion separation between
husband and wife as a transaction in itself perfectly natural and
blameless, and often not only laudable, but a duty; and by abolishing
that barbarous iniquity and abomination called restitution of conjugal
rights, then the speaker points to what has been justly described as the