t was wanting to the excellent
man, he said, was neither labour nor judgment, but material, and the
good fortune of such days as ours. And Leibnitz wrote a paper of
suggestions for its extension and improvement.[94] Alsted's Encyclopaedia
is of course written in Latin, and he prefixes to it by way of motto the
celebrated lines in which Lucretius declares that nothing is sweeter
than to dwell apart in the serene temples of the wise. Though he informs
us in the preface that his object was to trace the outlines of the
great "latifundium regni philosophici" in a single syntagma, yet he
really does no more than arrange a number of separate treatises or
manuals, and even dictionaries, within the limits of a couple of folios.
As is natural to the spirit of the age in which he wrote, great
predominance is given to the verbal sciences of grammar, rhetoric, and
formal logic, and a verbal or logical division regulates the
distribution of the matter, rather than a scientific regard for its
objective relations.

For the true parentage, however, of the Encyclopaedia of Diderot and
D'Alembert, it is unnecessary to prolong this list. It was Francis
Bacon's idea of the systematic classification of knowledge which
inspired Diderot, and guided his hand throughout. "If we emerge from
this vast operation," he wrote in the Prospectus, "our principal debt
will be to the chancellor Bacon, who sketched the plan of a universal
dictionary of sciences and arts at a time when there were not, so to
say, either arts or sciences." This sense of profound and devoted
obligation was shared by D'Alembert, and was expressed a hundred times
in the course of the work. No more striking panegyric has ever been
passed upon our immortal countryman than is to be found in the
Preliminary Discourse.[95] The French Encyclopaedia was the direct fruit
of Bacon's magnificent conceptions. And if the efficient origin of the
Encyclopaedia was English, so did the occasion rise in England also.

In 1727 Ephraim Chambers, a Westmoreland Quaker, published in London
two folios, entitled, a Cyclopaedia or Universal Dictionary of the Arts
and Sciences. The idea of it was broad and excellent. "Our view," says
Chambers, "was to consider the several matters, not only in themselves,
but relatively, or as they respect each other; both to treat them as so
many wholes, and as so many parts of some greater whole." The compiler
lacked the grasp necessary to realise this laudable purpose