Diderot himself in an earlier article (Intolerance) had treated the subject with more trenchant energy.  He does not argue his points systematically, but launches a series of maxims, as with set teeth, clenched hands, and a brow like a thundercloud.  He hails the oppressors of his life, the priests and the parliaments, with a pungency that is exhilarating, and winds up with a description of the intolerant as one who forgets that a man is his fellow, and for holding a different opinion, treats him like a ravening brute; as one who sacrifices the spirit and precepts of his religion to his pride; as the rash fool who thinks that the arch can only be upheld by his hands; as a man who is generally without religion, and to whom it comes easier to have zeal than morals.  Every page of the Encyclopaedia was, in fact, a plea for toleration.  This embittered the hostility of the churchmen to the work more than its attack upon dogma.  For most ecclesiastics valued power more dearly than truth.  And in power they valued most dearly the atrocious right of silencing, by foul means or fair, all opinions that were not official.

III.

Having thus described the general character and purport of the Encyclopaedia, we have still to look at a special portion of it from a more particular point of view.  We have already shown how multifarious were Diderot’s labours as editor.  It remains to give a short account of his labours as a contributor.  Everything was on the same vast scale.  His industry in writing would have been in itself most astonishing, even if it had not been accompanied by the more depressing fatigue of revising what others had written.  Diderot’s articles fill more than four of the large volumes of his collected works.

The confusion is immense.  The spirit is sometimes historical, sometimes controversial; now critical, now dogmatic.  In one place Diderot speaks in his own proper person, in another as the neutral scribe writing to the dictation of an unseen authority.  There is no rigorous measure and ordered proportion.  We constantly pass from a serious treatise to a sally, from an elaborate history to a caprice.  There are not a few pages where we know that Diderot is saying what he does not think.  Some of the articles seem only to have found a place because Diderot happened to have taken an interest in their subjects at the moment.  After reading Voltaire’s concise account of Imagination, we are amazed to find Diderot devoting a larger space than Voltaire had needed for the subject at large, to so subordinate and remote a branch of the matter as the Power of the Imagination in Pregnant Women upon the Unborn Young.  The article on Theosophs would hardly have been so disproportionately long as it is, merely for the sake of Paracelsus and Van Helmont and Poiret and the Rosicrucians, unless Diderot happened to be curiously and half-sympathetically brooding over the mixture of inspiration and madness, of charlatanry and generous aim, of which these semi-mystic, semi-scientific characters were composed.[173]