n by every other nation of its wealth, its
industry, its banks, its luxury, its agriculture. The ruin of Leipsic,
of Lisbon, and of Lima has led to bankruptcies on all the exchanges of
Europe, and has affected the fortunes of many millions of persons."[191]
In the same spirit he foresees the decline of patriotism in its older
and narrower sense, and the predominance of the international over the
national sentiment. "All nations now have sufficiently just ideas of
their neighbours, and consequently they have less enthusiasm for their
country than in the old days of ignorance. There is little enthusiasm
where there is much light; enthusiasm is nearly always the emotion of a
soul that is more passionate than it is instructed. By comparing among
all nations laws with laws, talents with talents, and manners with
manners, nations will find so little reason to prefer themselves to
others, that if they preserve for their own country that love which is
the fruit of personal interest, at least they will lose that enthusiasm
which is the fruit of an exclusive self-esteem."

Yet Diderot had the perspicacity to discern the drawbacks to such a
revolution in the conditions of social climate. "Commerce, like
enlightenment, lessens ferocity, but also, just as enlightenment takes
away the enthusiasm of self-esteem, so perhaps commerce takes away the
enthusiasm of virtue. It gradually extinguishes the spirit of
magnanimous disinterestedness, and replaces it by that of hard justice.
By turning men's minds rather to use than beauty, to prudence rather
than to greatness, it may be that it injures the strength, the
generosity, the nobleness of manners."

All this, whether it comes to much or little, is at least more true than
Diderot's assurance that henceforth for any nation in Europe to make
conquests must be a moral impossibility. Napoleon Bonaparte was then a
child in arms. Whether his career was on the whole a fulfilment or a
contradiction of Diderot's proposition, may be disputed.

And so our sketch of the great book must at length end. Let us make one
concluding remark. Is it not surprising that a man of Diderot's
speculative boldness and power should have failed to rise from the
mechanical arrangement of thought and knowledge, up to some higher and
more commanding conception of the relation between himself in the
eighteenth century, or ourselves in the nineteenth, and all those great
systems of thought, method, and belief, which in