of the Church paints man as fallen
and depraved. The new secular knowledge clashed at a thousand points,
alike in letter and in spirit, with the old sacred lore. Even where it
did not clash, its vitality of interest and attraction drove the older
lore into neglected shade. To stir men's vivid curiosity and hope about
the earth was to make their care much less absorbing about the kingdom
of heaven. To awaken in them the spirit of social improvement was ruin
to the most scandalous and crying social abuse then existing. The old
spiritual power had lost its instinct, once so keen and effective, of
wise direction. Instead of being the guide and corrector of the organs
of the temporal power, it was the worst of their accomplices. The
Encyclopaedia was an informal, transitory, and provisional organisation
of the new spiritual power. The school of which it was the great
expounder achieved a supreme control over opinion by the only title to
which control belongs: a more penetrating eye for social exigencies and
for the means of satisfying them.

Our veteran humorist told us long ago in his whimsical way that the
importance of the Acts of the French Philosophes recorded in whole acres
of typography is fast exhausting itself, that the famed Encyclopaedical
Tree has borne no fruit, and that Diderot the great has contracted into
Diderot the easily measurable. The humoristic method is a potent
instrument for working such contractions and expansions at will. The
greatest of men are measurable enough, if you choose to set up a
standard that is half transcendental and half cynical. A saner and more
patient criticism measures the conspicuous figures of the past
differently. It seeks their relations to the great forward movements of
the world, and asks to what quarter of the heavens their faces were set,
whether towards the east where the new light dawns, or towards the west
after the old light has sunk irrevocably down. Above all, a saner
criticism bids us remember that pioneers in the progressive way are
rare, their lives rude and sorely tried, and their services to mankind
beyond price. "Diderot is Diderot," wrote one greater than Carlyle: "a
peculiar individuality; whoever holds him or his doings cheaply is a
Philistine, and the name of them is legion. Men know neither from God,
nor from Nature, nor from their fellows, how to receive with gratitude
what is valuable beyond appraisement" (_Goethe_). An intense
Philistinism underlay the