hink of one of these things. You take me for an
imbecile, or else you are one. But you are no imbecile.... I see through
men's designs, and often enough I lend myself to them, without deigning
to disabuse them as to the stupidity which they impute to me. It is
enough if I perceive in their design some great service for them, and
not an excess of inconvenience for myself. It is not I who am the fool,
so often as people take me for one." Diderot then seems half to forget
to whom he is writing and pours out what reads like a long soliloquy on
morals, conduct, and the philosophy of life. He insists that man, with
all his high-flying freedom of will, is but a little link in a great
chain of events. He is a creature to be modified from without; hence the
good effects of example, discourse, education, pleasures, pains,
greatness, misery. Hence a sort of philosophy of commiseration, which
attaches us strongly to the good, and irritates us no more against the
bad than against a wind-storm that fills our eyes with dust. If you
adopt such principles as these, they will reconcile you with others and
yourself; you will neither praise nor blame yourself for what you are.
To reproach others with nothing, to repent yourself of nothing--these
are the two first steps towards wisdom; this is the philosophy that
reconciles us with the human race and with life.[228]

When he was in the very midst of all the toil and strife that the
Encyclopaedia brought upon him, he could not refuse to spend three whole
days in working like a galley-slave at an account of an important
discovery that had been made by some worthy people with whom he was
acquainted slightly. "But while I was busy about their affairs, my own
are at a standstill. I write to you from Le Breton's, with a mass of
uncorrected proofs before me, and the printers crying out for them.
Still Grimm must be right, when he says that time is not a thing of
which we are free to dispose at our own fancy; that we owe it first and
foremost to our friends, our relations, our daily duties; and that in
the lavish profusion of our time on people who are indifferent, there is
nothing less than vice."[229] Yet in spite of Grimm's most just
remonstrance, the lavish profusion always went on as before.

There was one man, and only one man, for whose perverse and intractable
spirit Diderot's most friendly patience, helpfulness, and devotion,
were no match. I have already, in dealing with Rousseau,[230] sa