Diderot and the Encyclopædists (Vol 1 of 2) | Page 4

idea, its destination would have been effectually
reached. As it was, its leaders surveyed the entire field with as much
accuracy and with as wide a range as their instruments allowed, and
they scattered over the world a set of ideas which at once entered into
energetic rivalry with the ancient scheme of authority. The great
symbol of this new comprehensiveness in the insurrection was the
Encyclopædia.
The Encyclopædia was virtually a protest against the old organisation,
no less than against the old doctrine. Broadly stated, the great central
moral of it all was this: that human nature is good, that the world is
capable of being made a desirable abiding-place, and that the evil of the
world is the fruit of bad education and bad institutions. This cheerful
doctrine now strikes on the ear as a commonplace and a truism. A
hundred years ago in France it was a wonderful gospel, and the
beginning of a new dispensation. It was the great counter-principle to
asceticism in life and morals, to formalism in art, to absolutism in the
social ordering, to obscurantism in thought. Every social improvement
since has been the outcome of that doctrine in one form or another. The
conviction that the character and lot of man are indefinitely modifiable
for good, was the indispensable antecedent to any general and energetic
endeavour to modify the conditions that surround him. The
omnipotence of early instruction, of laws, of the method of social order,
over the infinitely plastic impulses of the human creature--this was the
maxim which brought men of such widely different temperament and
leanings to the common enterprise. Everybody can see what wide and
deep-reaching bearings such a doctrine possessed; how it raised all the
questions connected with psychology and the formation of character;
how it went down to the very foundation of morals; into what fresh and
unwelcome sunlight it brought the articles of the old theology; with
what new importance it clothed all the relations of real knowledge and
the practical arts; what intense interest it lent to every detail of
economics and legislation and government.
The deadly chagrin with which churchmen saw the encyclopedic fabric
rising was very natural. The teaching of the Church paints man as fallen
and depraved. The new secular knowledge clashed at a thousand points,

alike in letter and in spirit, with the old sacred lore. Even where it did
not clash, its vitality of interest and attraction drove the older lore into
neglected shade. To stir men's vivid curiosity and hope about the earth
was to make their care much less absorbing about the kingdom of
heaven. To awaken in them the spirit of social improvement was ruin to
the most scandalous and crying social abuse then existing. The old
spiritual power had lost its instinct, once so keen and effective, of wise
direction. Instead of being the guide and corrector of the organs of the
temporal power, it was the worst of their accomplices. The
Encyclopædia was an informal, transitory, and provisional organisation
of the new spiritual power. The school of which it was the great
expounder achieved a supreme control over opinion by the only title to
which control belongs: a more penetrating eye for social exigencies and
for the means of satisfying them.
Our veteran humorist told us long ago in his whimsical way that the
importance of the Acts of the French Philosophes recorded in whole
acres of typography is fast exhausting itself, that the famed
Encyclopædical Tree has borne no fruit, and that Diderot the great has
contracted into Diderot the easily measurable. The humoristic method
is a potent instrument for working such contractions and expansions at
will. The greatest of men are measurable enough, if you choose to set
up a standard that is half transcendental and half cynical. A saner and
more patient criticism measures the conspicuous figures of the past
differently. It seeks their relations to the great forward movements of
the world, and asks to what quarter of the heavens their faces were set,
whether towards the east where the new light dawns, or towards the
west after the old light has sunk irrevocably down. Above all, a saner
criticism bids us remember that pioneers in the progressive way are rare,
their lives rude and sorely tried, and their services to mankind beyond
price. "Diderot is Diderot," wrote one greater than Carlyle: "a peculiar
individuality; whoever holds him or his doings cheaply is a Philistine,
and the name of them is legion. Men know neither from God, nor from
Nature, nor from their fellows, how to receive with gratitude what is
valuable beyond appraisement" (Goethe). An intense Philistinism
underlay the great spiritual reaction that followed the Revolution, and
not even such of its apostles as Wordsworth and Carlyle wholly

escaped the taint.
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