It is one of the most deplorable things in the history of literature to
see a man endowed with Diderot's generous conceptions and high social
aims, forced to stoop to these odious economies. In reading his
Prospectus, and still more directly in his article,

_Encyclopedie_, we are struck by the beneficence and breadth of the
great designs which inspire and support him. The Encyclopaedia, it has
been said, was no peaceful storehouse in which scholars and thinkers of
all kinds could survey the riches they had acquired; it was a gigantic
siege-engine and armoury of weapons of attack.[125] This is only true in
a limited sense of one part of the work, and that not the most important
part. Such a judgment is only possible for one who has not studied the
book itself, or else who is ignorant of the social requirements of
France at the time. We shall show this presently in detail. Meanwhile it
is enough to make two observations. The implements which the
circumstances of the time made it necessary to use as weapons of attack,
were equally fitted for the acquisition in a happier season of those
treasures of thought and knowledge which are the object of disinterested
research. And what is still more important, we have to observe that it
was the characteristic note and signal glory of the French revolutionary
school, to subordinate mere knowledge to the practical work of raising
society up from the corruption and paralysis to which it had been
brought by the double action of civil and ecclesiastical authority. The
efforts of the Encyclopaedists were not disinterested in the sense of
being vague blows in the air. Their aim was not theory but practice, not
literature but life. The Encyclopaedists were no doubt all men of battle,
and some of them were hardly more than mere partisans.

But Diderot at least had constantly in mind the great work which
remained after the battle should be won. He was profoundly conscious
that the mere accumulation of knowledge of the directly physical facts
of the universe would take men a very short way towards reconstruction.
And he struck the key-note in such admirable passages as this: "One
consideration especially that we ought never to lose from sight is that,
if we ever banish a man, or the thinking and contemplative being, from
above the surface of the earth, this pathetic and sublime spectacle of
nature becomes no more than a scene of melancholy and silence. The
universe is dumb; the darkness a