aedia to become a sanctuary in which human
knowledge might find shelter against time and revolutions. He actually
took the pains to make it a complete storehouse of the arts, so perfect
in detail that they could be at once reconstructed after a deluge in
which everything had perished save a single copy of the Encyclopaedia.
Such details, said D'Alembert, will perhaps seem extremely out of place
to certain scholars, for whom a long dissertation on the cookery or the
hair-dressing of the ancients, or on the site of a ruined hamlet, or on
the baptismal name of some obscure writer of the tenth century, would be
vastly interesting and precious. He suggests that details of economy,
and of arts and trades, have as good a right to a place as the
scholastic philosophy, or some system of rhetoric still in use, or the
mysteries of heraldry. Yet none even of these had been passed over.[168]

The importance given to physical science and the practical arts, in the
Encyclopaedia, is the sign and exemplification of two elements of the
great modern transition. It marks both a social and an intellectual
revolution. We see in it, first, the distinct association with pacific
labour, of honour and a kind of glory, such as had hitherto been
reserved for knights and friars, for war and asceticism, for fighting
and praying.

It is the definite recognition of the basis of a new society. If the
nobles and the churchmen could only have understood, as clearly as
Diderot and D'Alembert understood, the irresistible forces that were
making against the maintenance of the worn-out system, all the worst of
the evils attending the great political changes of the last decade of
the century would have been avoided. That the nobles and churchmen would
not see this, was the fatality of the Revolution. We have a glimpse of
the profound transformation of social ideas which was at work in the
five or six lines of the article, _Journalier_. "Journeyman--a workman
who labours with his hands, and is paid day-wages. This description of
men forms the great part of a nation; it is their lot which a good
government ought to keep principally in sight. If the journeyman is
miserable, the nation is miserable." And again: "The net profit of a
society, if equally distributed, may be preferable to a larger profit,
if it be distributed unequally, and have the effect of dividing the
people into two classes, one gorged with riches, the other perishing in
misery" (_Homme_).