e senses, the difference between good and
evil, true and false, etc. etc. I will turn my back on everybody who
tries to lead me away from a simple question, to embark me in discussion
as to the nature of matter, of the understanding of thought, and other
subjects shoreless and bottomless."[185] Whatever else may be said of
this, we have to recognise that it is exactly characteristic of the
author. But then why have written on metaphysics at all?

We have mentioned the article on Spinosa. It is characteristic both of
the good and the bad sides of Diderot's work. Half of it is merely a
reproduction of Bayle's criticisms on Spinosa and his system. The other
half consists of original objections propounded by Diderot with marked
vigour of thrust against Spinosa, but there is no evidence that he had
gone deeper into Spinosa than the first book of the Ethics. There is no
certain sign that he had read anything else, or that he had more of that
before him than the extracts that were furnished by Bayle. Such
treatment of a serious subject hardly conforms to the modern
requirements of the literary conscience, for in truth the literary
conscience has now turned specialist and shrinks from the encyclopaedic.
Diderot's objections are, as we have said, pushed with marked energy of
speech. "However short away," he says, "you penetrate into the thick
darkness in which Spinosa has wrapped himself up, you discover a
succession of abysses into which this audacious reasoner has
precipitated himself, of propositions either evidently false or
evidently doubtful, of arbitrary principles, substituted for natural
principles and sensible truths; an abuse of terms taken for the most
part in a wrong sense, a mass of deceptive equivocations, a cloud of
palpable contradictions." The system is monstrous, it is absurd and
ridiculous. It is Spinosa's plausible method that has deceived people;
they supposed that one who employed geometry, and proceeded by way of
axioms and definitions, must be on the track of truth. They did not see
that these axioms were nothing better than very vague and very uncertain
propositions; that the definitions were inexact, defective, and bizarre.

We have no space to follow the reasoning by which Diderot supports this
scornful estimate of the famous thinker, of whom it can never be settled
whether he be pantheist, atheist, akosmist, or God-intoxicated man. He
returns to the charge again and again, as if he felt a certain sec