fact, a plea for
toleration. This embittered the hostility of the churchmen to the work
more than its attack upon dogma. For most ecclesiastics valued power
more dearly than truth. And in power they valued most dearly the
atrocious right of silencing, by foul means or fair, all opinions that
were not official.

III.

Having thus described the general character and purport of the
Encyclopaedia, we have still to look at a special portion of it from a
more particular point of view. We have already shown how multifarious
were Diderot's labours as editor. It remains to give a short account of
his labours as a contributor. Everything was on the same vast scale. His
industry in writing would have been in itself most astonishing, even if
it had not been accompanied by the more depressing fatigue of revising
what others had written. Diderot's articles fill more than four of the
large volumes of his collected works.

The confusion is immense. The spirit is sometimes historical, sometimes
controversial; now critical, now dogmatic. In one place Diderot speaks
in his own proper person, in another as the neutral scribe writing to
the dictation of an unseen authority. There is no rigorous measure and
ordered proportion. We constantly pass from a serious treatise to a
sally, from an elaborate history to a caprice. There are not a few pages
where we know that Diderot is saying what he does not think. Some of the
articles seem only to have found a place because Diderot happened to
have taken an interest in their subjects at the moment. After reading
Voltaire's concise account of Imagination, we are amazed to find Diderot
devoting a larger space than Voltaire had needed for the subject at
large, to so subordinate and remote a branch of the matter as the Power
of the Imagination in Pregnant Women upon the Unborn Young. The article
on Theosophs would hardly have been so disproportionately long as it is,
merely for the sake of Paracelsus and Van Helmont and Poiret and the
Rosicrucians, unless Diderot happened to be curiously and
half-sympathetically brooding over the mixture of inspiration and
madness, of charlatanry and generous aim, of which these semi-mystic,
semi-scientific characters were composed.[173]

Many of Diderot's articles, again, have no rightful place in an
Encyclopaedia. _Genius_, for instance, is dealt with in what is neither
more nor less than a literary essay, vigorous, suggestive, diffuse; and
containing, by the w