“You have the inverse of dramatic talent,” said Abbe Arnauld to Diderot; “the proper thing is to transform one’s self into all the characters, and you transform all the characters into yourself.”  The criticism did Diderot wrong:  he had more wits than his characters, and he was worth more at bottom than those whom he described.  Carried away by the richness as well as the unruliness of his mind, destitute as he was of definite and fixed principles, he recognized no other moral law than the natural impulse of the soul.  “There is no virtue or vice,” he used to say, “but innate goodness or badness.”  Certain religious cravings, nevertheless, sometimes:  asserted themselves in his conscience:  he had. a glimmering perception of the necessity for a higher rule and law.  “O God, I know not whether Thou art,” he wrote in his Interpretation de la Nature, but I will think as if Thou didst see into my soul, I will act as if I were in Thy presence.”

A strange illusion on the part of the philosopher about the power of ideas as well as about the profundity of evil in the human heart!  Diderot fancied he could regulate his life by a perchance, and he was constantly hurried away by the torrent of his passion into a violence of thought and language foreign to his natural benevolence.  It was around his name that the philosophic strife had waxed most fierce:  the active campaign undertaken by his friends to open to him the doors of the French Academy remained unsuccessful.  “He has too many enemies,” said Louis XV. “his election shall not be sanctioned.”  Diderot did not offer himself; he set out for St. Petersburg; the Empress Catherine had loaded him with kindnesses.  Hearing of the poverty of the philosopher who was trying to sell his library to obtain a dower for his daughter, she bought the books, leaving the enjoyment of them to Diderot, whom she appointed her librarian, and, to secure his maintenance in advance, she had a sum of fifty thousand livres remitted to him.  “So here I am obliged, in conscience, to live fifty years,” said Diderot.

[Illustration:  Diderot and Catherine II——­321]

He passed some months in Russia, admitted several hours a day to the closet of the empress, chatting with a frankness and a freedom which sometimes went to the extent of license.  Catherine II. was not alarmed.  “Go on,” she would say; amongst men anything is allowable.”  When the philosopher went away, he shed hot tears, and “so did she, almost,” he declares.  He refused to go to Berlin; absolute power appeared to him more arbitrary and less indulgent in the hands of Frederick than with Catherine.  “It is said that at Petersburg Diderot is considered a tiresome reasoner,” wrote the King of Prussia to D’ Alembert in January, 1774; “he is incessantly harping on the same things.  All I know is that I couldn’t stand the reading of his, books, intrepid reader as I am; there is a self-sufficient tone and an arrogance in them which revolts my sense of freedom.”  The same sense of freedom which the king claimed for himself whilst refusing it to the philosopher, the philosopher, in his turn, refused to Christians not less intolerant than he.  The eighteenth century did not practise on its own account that respect for conscience which it, nevertheless, powerfully and to its glory promoted.