. He prefers to brilliancy the pains of rightly
distinguishing his ideas, of finding their true extent and exact
connection. He is never so attached to a system as not to feel all the
force of the objections to it. Most men are so strongly given over to
their opinions that they do not take any trouble to make out those of
others. The philosopher, on the other hand, understands what he rejects,
with the same breadth and the same accuracy as he understands what he
adopts." Then Diderot turns characteristically from the intellectual to
the social side. "Our philosopher does not count himself an exile in the
world; he does not suppose himself in an enemy's country; he would fain
find pleasure with others, and to find it he must give it; he is a
worthy man who wishes to please and to make himself useful. The ordinary
philosophers who meditate too much, or rather who meditate to wrong
purpose, are as surly and arrogant to all the world as great people are
to those whom they do not think their equals; they flee men, and men
avoid them. But our philosopher who knows how to divide himself between
retreat and the commerce of men is full of humanity. _Civil society is,
so to say, a divinity for him on the earth_; he honours it by his
probity, by an exact attention to his duties, and by a sincere desire
not to be a useless or an embarrassing member of it. The sage has the
leaven of order and rule; he is full of the ideas connected with the
good of civil society. What experience shows us every day is that the
more reason and light people have, the better fitted they are and the
more to be relied on for the common intercourse of life."[182]

The transition is startling from this conception of

Philosopher as a very high kind of man of the world, to the definition
of Philosophy as "the science of possibles qua possibles." Diderot's own
reflection comes back to us, _Combien cette maudite metaphysique fait
des fous!_[183] We are abruptly plunged from a Baconian into a
Leibnitzian atmosphere. We should naturally have expected some such
account of Philosophy as that it begins with a limitation of the
questions to which men can hope for an answer, and ends in an ordered
arrangement of the principles of knowledge, with ultimate reference to
the conditions of morals and the structure of civil societies. We should
naturally have expected to find, what indeed we do find, that the
characteristic of the philosopher is to "admit nothing without p