The second element in the modern transition is only the intellectual
side of the first. It is the substitution of interest in things for
interest in words, of positive knowledge for verbal disputation. Few now
dispute the services of the schoolmen to the intellectual development of
Europe. But conditions had fully ripened, and it was time to complete
the movement of Bacon and Descartes by finally placing verbal analysis,
verbal definition, verbal inferences, in their right position. Form was
no longer to take precedence of matter. The Encyclopaedists are never
weary of contrasting their own age of practical rationalism with "the
pusillanimous ages of taste." A great collection of books is described
in one article (_Bibliomanie_) as a collection of material for the
history of the blindness and infatuation of mankind. The gatherer of
books is compared to one who should place five or six gems under a pile
of common pebbles. If a man of sense buys a work in a dozen volumes, and
finds that only half a dozen pages are worth reading, he does well to
cut out the half dozen pages and fling the rest into the fire. Finally,
it would be no unbecoming device for every great library to have
inscribed over its portal, The Bedlam of the Human Mind. At this point
one might perhaps suggest to D'Alembert that study of the pathology of
the mind is no bad means of surprising the secrets of humanity and life.
For his hour, however, the need was not knowledge of the thoughts,
dreams, and mental methods of the past, but better mastery of the aids
and instruments of active life. In any case Diderot was right when he
expressed his preference for the essay over the treatise: "an essay
where the writer throws me one or two ideas of genius, almost isolated,
rather than a treatise where the precious gems are stifled beneath a
mass of iteration.... A man had only one idea; the idea demanded no more
than a phrase; this phrase, full of marrow and meaning, would have been
seized with relish; washed out in a deluge of words, it wearies and
disgusts."[169] Rousseau himself does not surpass Diderot or D'Alembert
in contempt for mere bookishness. We wholly misjudge the Encyclopaedia,
if we treat it either as literature or philosophy.

The attitude of the Encyclopaedia to religion is almost universally
misrepresented in the common accounts. We are always told that the aim
of its conductors was to preach dogmatic atheism. Such a statement could
not be made by