doctrine, no historic tradition, no effective discipline, and no definite, comprehensive, far-reaching, concentrated aim.  The characteristic of his activity is dispersiveness.  Its distinction is to popularise such detached ideas as society is in a condition to assimilate; to interest men in these ideas by dressing them up in varied forms of the literary art; to guide men through them by judging, empirically and unconnectedly, each case of conduct, of policy, or of new opinion as it arises.  We have no wish to exalt the office.  On the contrary, I accept the maxim of that deep observer who warned us that “the mania for isolation is the plague of the human throng, and to be strong we must march together.  You only obtain anything by developing the spirit of discipline among men."[5]

But there are ages of criticism when discipline is impossible, and the evils of isolation are less than the evils of rash and premature organisation.  Fontenelle was the first and in some respects the greatest type of this important class.  He was sceptical, learned, ingenious, eloquent.  He stretched hands (1657-1757) from the famous quarrel between Ancients and Moderns down to the Encyclopaedia, and from Bossuet and Corneille down to Jean Jacques and Diderot.  When he was born, the man of letters did not exist.  When he died, the man of letters was the most conspicuous personage in France.  But when Diderot first began to roam about the streets of Paris, this enormous change was not yet complete.

For some ten years (1734-1744) Diderot’s history is the old tale of hardship and chance; of fine constancy and excellent faith, not wholly free from an occasional stroke of rascality.  For a time he earned a little money by teaching.  If the pupil happened to be quick and docile, he grudged no labour, and was content with any fee or none.  If the pupil happened to be dull, Diderot never came again, and preferred going supperless to bed.  His employers paid him as they chose, in shirts, in a chair or a table, in books, in money, and sometimes they never paid him at all.  The prodigious exuberance of his nature inspired him with a sovereign indifference to material details.  From the beginning he belonged to those to whom it comes by nature to count life more than meat, and the body than raiment.  The outward things of existence were to him really outward.  They never vexed or absorbed his days and nights, nor overcame his vigorous constitutional instinct for the true proportions of external circumstance.  He was of the humour of the old philosopher who, when he heard that all his worldly goods had been lost in a shipwreck, only made for answer, Jubet me fortuna expeditius philosophari.  Once he had the good hap to be appointed tutor to the sons of a man of wealth.  He performed his duties zealously, he was well housed and well fed, and he gave the fullest satisfaction to his employer.  At the end of three months the mechanical toil had grown unbearable to him.  The father of his pupils