Denis Diderot

DIDEROT, DENIS (1713-1784), French man of letters and encyclopaedist, was horn at Langres on Oct. 5, 1713. He was ! educated by the Jesuits, and then threw himself into the vagabond life of a bookseller's hack in Paris. An imprudent marriage ) did not better his position. His wife, Anne Toinette Champion, was a devout Catholic, but her piety did not restrain a narrow and fretful temper, and Diderot's domestic life was irregular and unhappy. He sought consolation, first with a Madame Puisieux, and then with Sophie Voland, to whom he was constant for the rest of her life. His letters to her are among the most graphic of all the pictures that we have of the daily life of the philosophes who dined once a week at the baron D'Holbach's, to listen to the wild sallies and the inspiring declamations of Diderot.

Diderot earned a little by doing various translations, among these being one of Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit with some original notes of his own. He then com posed a volume of stories, the Bijoux indiscrets (1748), of which he afterwards repented. From tales Diderot went back to the more congenial region of philosophy. Between the morning of Good Friday and the evening of Easter Monday he wrote the Pensees philosophiques (1746), and he presently added a short complementary essay on the sufficiency of natural religion. In these he pressed the ordinary rationalistic objections to a super natural revelation. In 1747 he wrote the Promenade du sceptique. Diderot's next piece was his famous Lettre sur les aveugles The immediate object of this short but pithy writing was to show the dependence of men's ideas on their five senses. It considers the case of the intellect deprived of the aid of one of the senses ; and in a second piece, published afterwards, Diderot considered the case of a similar deprivation in the deaf and dumb. The Lettre sur les sounds et meets, however, is substantially a di gressive examination of some points in aesthetics. The philosophic significance of the two essays is in the advance they make towards the principle of relativity. But what interested the militant philosophers of that day was an episodic application of the prin ciple of relativity to the master-conception of God. What makes the Lettre sur les aveugles interesting is its presentation, in a distinct though undigested form, of the modern theory of vari ability, and of survival by superior adaptation. It is worth notic ing, too, as an illustration of the comprehensive freedom with which Diderot felt his way round any subject he approached, that in this theoretic essay he suggests the possibility of teaching the blind to read through the sense of touch. The speculation of the Lettre sur les aveugles was too hardy for the authorities, and he was thrown into the prison of Vincennes, where he spent three months; on his release he entered on the gigantic undertaking of his life.

The Encyclopaedia.

The bookseller Lebreton had suggested to him the publication of a translation into French of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia, undertaken in the first instance by an Englishman, John Mills, and a German, Gottfried Sellius (for particulars see ENCYCLOPAEDIA). Diderot accepted the proposal, but in his busy and pregnant intelligence the scheme became trans formed. He persuaded the bookseller to enter upon a new work, which should collect under one roof all the active writers, all the new ideas, all the new knowledge, that were then moving the culti vated class to its depths, but still were comparatively ineffectual by reason of their dispersion. His enthusiasm infected the pub lishers; D'Alembert was persuaded to become Diderot's colleague; the requisite permission was procured from the Government ; and in 1751 the first volume was given to the world. The last of the letterpress was issued in 1765, but it was 1772 before the subscribers received the final volumes of the plates. These 20 years were to Diderot years not merely of incessant drudgery, but of harassing persecution, of sufferings from the cabals of enemies, and of injury from the desertion of friends. The ecclesiastical party detested the Encyclopaedia, in which they saw a rising stronghold for their philosophic enemies. By 1757 they could en dure the sight no longer. To any one who turns over the pages of these redoubtable volumes now, it seems surprising that their doctrines should have stirred such portentous alarm. There is no atheism, no overt attack on any of the cardinal mysteries of the faith, no direct denunciation even of the notorious abuses of the church. Yet the atmosphere of the book may well have been dis pleasing to authorities who had not yet learnt to encounter the modern spirit on equal terms. The Encyclopaedia takes for granted the justice of religious tolerance and speculative freedom. It asserts in distinct tones the democratic doctrine that it is the common people in a nation whose lot ought to be the main con cern of the nation's Government. From beginning to end it is one unbroken process of exaltation of scientific knowledge on the one hand, and pacific industry on the other. All these things were odious to the old governing classes of France; their spirit was absolutist, ecclesiastical and military. Perhaps the most alarming thought of all was the current belief that the Encyclopaedia was the work of an organized band of conspirators against society, and that a pestilent doctrine was now made truly formidable by the confederation of its preachers into an open league. When the seventh volume appeared, it contained an article on "Geneva," written by D'Alembert. The writer contrived a panegyric on the pastors of Geneva, of which every word was a stinging reproach to the abbes and prelates of Versailles. At the same moment Hel vetius's book, L'Esprit, appeared, and gave a still more profound shock to the ecclesiastical party. In 1759 the Encyclopaedia was formally suppressed.

The decree, however, did not arrest the continuance of the work : it went on, but with its difficulties increased by the necessity of being clandestine. D'Alembert, wearied of shifts and indignities, withdrew from the enterprise. Other powerful colleagues, Turgot among them, declined to contribute further. Diderot was left to bring the task to an end as he best could. For seven years he laboured like a slave at the oar. He wrote several hundred articles, some of them very slight, but many of them most laborious, com prehensive and ample. He spent his days in the workshops, mas tering the processes of manufactures, and his nights in reproducing on paper what he had learnt during the day. And he was inces santly harrassed all the time by alarms of a descent from the police. At the last moment, when his immense work was just drawing to an end, he discovered that the bookseller had struck out from the proof sheets, after they had left Diderot's hands, all passages that he chose to think too hardy. The monument to which Diderot had given the labour of 20 long and oppressive years was irreparably mutilated and defaced. It is calculated that the average annual salary received by Diderot for his share in the Encyclopaedia was about sterling. "And then to think," said Voltaire, "that an army contractor makes £boo in a day !" Other Works.—Although the Encyclopaedia was Diderot's monumental work, he is the author of a shower of dispersed pieces that sowed nearly every field of intellectual interest with new and fruitful ideas. He wrote plays—Le Fils naturel (1757), and Le Pere de famille (1758), which he accompanied by essays on drama tic poetry, including especially the Paradoxe sur le comedien, in which he announced the principles of a new drama—the serious, domestic, bourgeois drama of real life, in opposition to the stilted conventions of the classic French stage. Diderot's lessons and ex ample gave a decisive bias to the dramatic taste of Lessing, whose plays and Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1768) mark an epoch in dramatic history. Diderot's most intimate friend was Grimm, who wrote news-letters to various high personages in Germany, reporting what was going on in the world of art and literature in Paris. Diderot helped his friend at one time and another between and 1779, by writing for him an account of the annual ex hibitions of paintings. These Salons are among the most readable of all pieces of art criticism. They have a freshness, a reality, a life, which take their readers into a different world from the dry and conceited pedantries of the ordinary virtuoso.