a single set of volumes of a body of new truths,
relating to so many of the main interests of men, invested the book and
its writers with an aspect of universality, of collective and organic
doctrine, which the writers themselves would without doubt have
disowned, and which it is easy to dissolve by tests of logic. But the
popular impression that the Encyclopaedists constituted a single body
with a common doctrine and a common aim was practically sound. Comte has
pointed out with admirable clearness the merit of the conception of an
encyclopaedic workshop.[104] It united the members of rival destructive
schools in a great constructive task. It furnished a rallying-point for
efforts otherwise the most divergent. Their influence was precisely what
it would have been, if popular impressions had been literally true.
Diderot and D'Alembert did their best to heighten this feeling. They
missed no occasion of fixing a sentiment of co-operation and fellowship.
They spoke of their dictionary as the transactions of an Academy.[105]
Each writer was answerable for his own contribution, but he was in the
position of a member of some learned corporation. To every volume, until
the great crisis of 1759, was prefixed a list of those who had
contributed to it. If a colleague died, the public was informed of the
loss that the work had sustained, and his services were worthily
commemorated in a formal _eloge_.[106] Feuds, epigrams, and offences
were not absent, but on the whole there was steadfast and generous
fraternity.

As Voltaire eloquently said, officers of war by land and by sea,
magistrates, physicians who knew nature, men of letters whose taste
purified knowledge, geometers, physicists, all united in a work that was
as useful as it was laborious, without any view of interest, without
even seeking fame, as many of them concealed their names; finally
without any common understanding and agreement, and therefore without
anything of the spirit of party.[107] Turning over the pages on which
the list of writers is inscribed, we find in one place or another nearly
every name that has helped to make the literature of the time famous.
Montesquieu, who died in the beginning of 1755, left behind him the
unfinished fragment of an article on Taste, and it may be noticed in
passing that our good-natured Diderot was the only man of letters who
attended the remains of the illustrious writer to the grave.[108] The
article itself, though no more t