the contrast and the incongruity are so marked that one is amused by
what looks like a subtle irony, mocking the censor under his very eyes.
Who can help smiling at the grave question, _Adam, le premier de tous
les hommes, a-t-il ete philosophe?_ Such disputes as whether it is
proper to baptize abortions, ceased to interest a public that had begun
to educate itself by discussions on the virtue of Inoculation.

Of the gross defects in the execution of the Encyclopaedia nobody was so
sensible as Diderot himself. He drew up a truly formidable list of the
departments where the work was badly done.[171] But when the blunders
and omissions in each subject were all counted, the value of the vast
grouping of the subjects was hardly diminished. The union of all these
secular acquisitions in a single colossal work invested them with
something imposing. Secular knowledge was made to present a massive and
sumptuous front. It was pictured before the curious eyes of that
generation as a great city of glittering palaces and stately mansions;
or else as an immense landscape, with mountains, plains, rocks, waters,
forests, animals, and a thousand objects, glorious and beautiful in the
sunlight. Theology became visibly a shrivelled thing. Men grew to be
conscious of the vastness of the universe. At the same time and by the
same process the Encyclopaedia gave them a key to the plan, a guiding
thread in the immense labyrinth. The genealogical tree, or
classification of arts and sciences, which with a few modifications was
borrowed from Bacon and appeared at the end of the Prospectus, is seen
to be faulty and inadequate. It distributes the various branches of
knowledge with reference to faculties of the human understanding,
instead of grouping them according to their objective relations to one
another. This led to many awkward results, as when the art of printing
is placed by the side of orthography as a subdivision of Logic, to which
also is given the art of heraldry or emblazonment. There is awkwardness
too in dividing architecture into three heads, and then placing civil
architecture under national jurisprudence, and naval architecture under
social jurisprudence, while under fine arts no kind of architecture has
any place. But when we have multiplied these objections to the
uttermost, the effect of the magnificence and vastness of the scheme
remains exactly what it was.

Even more important than the exposition of human knowledge was the