Pierre’s discussion of the advantages that would be gained for France, with her declining population, if her forty thousand cures were allowed to marry, and to bring into the world eighty thousand children.  We may believe that Diderot smiled as he transcribed the Abbe’s cunning suggestion that a dispensing power to relieve from the obligation of celibacy should be recognised in the Pope, and that the Roman court should receive a sum of money for every dispensation so granted.

Although, however, Diderot despised mere bookishness, his article on Libraries is one of the longest and most painstaking, furnishing a tolerably complete list of the most famous collections, from the beginning of books down to the latest additions to the King’s Library in the Rue Vivienne.  In the course of this article he quotes with seeming approval the quaint words in which old Richard of Bury, the author of the Philobiblon (1340), praised books as the best of masters, much as the immortal defender of the poet Archias had praised them:  “Hi sunt magistri qui nos instruunt sine virgis et ferulis, sine cholera, sine pecunia; si accedis non dormiunt; si inquiris non se abscondunt; non obmurmurant si oberres; cachinnos nesciunt si ignores.”

In literature proper, as in philosophy, Diderot loses no opportunity of insisting on the need of being content with suspended judgment.  For instance, he blames historians of opinion for the readiness with which they attribute notions found in one or two rabbis to the whole of the Jews, or because two or three Fathers say something, boldly set this down as the sentiments of a whole century, although perhaps we have nothing else save these two or three Fathers left of the century, and although we do not know whether their writings were applauded, or were even widely known.  “It were to be wished that people should speak less affirmatively, especially on particular points and remote consequences, and that they should only attribute them directly to those in whose writings they are actually to be found.  I confess that the history of the sentiments of antiquity would not seem so complete, and that it would be necessary to speak in terms of doubt much more often than is common; but by acting otherwise we expose ourselves to the danger of taking false and uncertain conjectures for ascertained and unquestionable truths.  The ordinary man of letters does not readily put up with suspensive expressions, any more than common people do so.”  All this is an odd digression to be found under the head of Hylopathianism, but it must always remain wholesome doctrine.

We cannot wonder at Diderot’s admiration for Montaigne and for Bayle, who, with Hume, would make the great trinity of scepticism.  “The work of Montaigne,” said Diderot, “is the touchstone of a good intelligence; you may be sure that any one whom the reading of Montaigne displeases has some vice either of heart or understanding.  As for Bayle, he has had few equals in the art of reasoning,