the centre of the world.  Self-development and self-idealisation as ends in themselves would have struck Diderot as effeminate drolleries.  The daily and hourly interrogation of experience for the sake of building up the fabric of his own character in this wise or that, would have been incomprehensible and a little odious to him in theory, and impossible as a matter of practice.  In the midst of all the hardships of his younger time, as afterwards in the midst of crushing Herculean taskwork, he was saved from moral ruin by the inexhaustible geniality and expansiveness of his affections.  Nor did he narrow their play by looking only to the external forms of human relation.  To Diderot it came easily to act on a principle which most of us only accept in words:  he looked not to what people said, nor even to what they did, but wholly to what they were.

Those whom he had once found reason to love and esteem might do him many an ill turn, without any fear of estranging him.  Any one can measure character by conduct.  It is a harder thing to be willing, in cases that touch our own interests, to interpret conduct by previous knowledge of character.  His father, for instance, might easily have spared money enough to save him from the harassing privations of Bohemian life in Paris.  A less full-blooded and generous person than Diderot would have resented the stoutness of the old man’s persistency.  Diderot on the contrary felt and delighted to feel, that this conflict of wills was a mere accident which left undisturbed the reality of old love.  “The first few years of my life in Paris,” he once told an acquaintance, “had been rather irregular; my behaviour was enough to irritate my father, without there being any need to make it worse by exaggeration.  Still calumny was not wanting.  People told him—­well what did they not tell him?  An opportunity for going to see him presented itself.  I did not give it two thoughts.  I set out full of confidence in his goodness.  I thought that he would see me, that I should throw myself into his arms, that we should both of us shed tears, and that all would be forgotten.  I thought rightly."[7] We may be sure of a stoutness of native stuff in any stock where so much tenacity united with such fine confidence on one side, and such generous love on the other.  It is a commonplace how much waste would be avoided in human life if men would more freely allow their vision to pierce in this way through the distorting veils of egoism, to the reality of sentiment and motive and relationship.

Throughout his life Diderot was blessed with that divine gift of pity, which one that has it could hardly be willing to barter for the understanding of an Aristotle.  Nor was it of the sentimental type proper for fine ladies.  One of his friends had an aversion for women with child.  “What monstrous sentiment!” Diderot wrote; “for my part, that condition has always touched me.  I cannot see a woman of the common people so, without a tender commiseration."[8]