Voltaire’s incessant activity bore many fruits which survived him; he contributed powerfully to the triumph of those notions of humanity, justice, and freedom, which, superior to his own ideal, did honor to the eighteenth century; he became the model of a style, clear, neat, brilliant, the natural exponent of his own mind, far more than of the as yet confused hopes and aspirations of his age; he defended the rights of common sense, and sometimes withstood the anti-religious passion of his friends, but he blasted both minds and souls with his sceptical gibes; his bitter and at the same time temperate banter disturbed consciences which would have been revolted by the materialistic doctrines of the Encyclopaedists; the circle of infidelity widened under his hands; his disciples were able to go beyond him on the fatal path he had opened to them.  Voltaire has remained the true representative of the mocking and stone-flinging phase of free-thinking, knowing nothing of the deep yearnings any more than of the supreme wretchlessness of the human soul, which it kept imprisoned within the narrow limits of earth and time.  At the outcome from the bloody slough of the French Revolution and from the chaos it caused in men’s souls, it was the infidelity of Voltaire which remained at the bottom of the scepticism and moral disorder of the France of our day.  The demon which torments her is even more Voltairian than materialistic.

Other influences, more sincere and at the same time more dangerous, were simultaneously undermining men’s minds.  The group of Encyclopaedists, less prudent and less temperate than Voltaire, flaunted openly the flag of revolt.  At the head marched Diderot, the most daring of all, the most genuinely affected by his own ardor, without perhaps being the most sure of his ground in his negations.  His was an original and exuberant nature, expansively open to all new impressions.  “In my country,” he says, “we pass within twenty-four hours from cold to hot, from calm to storm, and this changeability of climate extends to the persons.  Thus, from earliest infancy, they are wont to shift with every wind.  The head of a Langrois stands on his shoulders like a weathercock on the top of a church-steeple; it is never steady at one point, and, if it comes round again to that which it had left, it is not to stop there.  As for me, I am of my country; only residence of the capital and constant application have corrected me a little.”

[Illustration:  Diderot——­314]

Narrow circumstances had their share in the versatility of Diderot’s genius as well as in the variety of his labors.  Son of a cutler at Langres, a strict and virtuous man, Denys Diderot, born in 1715, had at first been intended by his father for the church.  He was educated at Harcourt College, and he entered an attorney’s office.  The young man worked incessantly, but not a law-book did he open.  “What do you mean to be, pray?” the lawyer