All this, whether it comes to much or little, is at least more true than Diderot’s assurance that henceforth for any nation in Europe to make conquests must be a moral impossibility.  Napoleon Bonaparte was then a child in arms.  Whether his career was on the whole a fulfilment or a contradiction of Diderot’s proposition, may be disputed.

And so our sketch of the great book must at length end.  Let us make one concluding remark.  Is it not surprising that a man of Diderot’s speculative boldness and power should have failed to rise from the mechanical arrangement of thought and knowledge, up to some higher and more commanding conception of the relation between himself in the eighteenth century, or ourselves in the nineteenth, and all those great systems of thought, method, and belief, which in various epochs and over different spaces of the globe have given to men working answers to the questions that their leading spirits were moved to put to themselves and to the iron universe around them?  We constantly feel how near Diderot is to the point of view that would have brought light.  We feel how very nearly ready he was to see the mental experiences of the race in east and west, not as superstition, degradation, grovelling error, but as aspects of intellectual effort and aspiration richly worthy of human interest and scientific consideration, and in their aim as well as in their substance all of one piece with the newest science and the last voices of religious or anti-religious development.  Diderot was the one member of the party of Philosophers who was capable of grasping such a thought.  If this guiding idea of the unity of the intellectual history of man, and the organic integrity of thought, had happily come into Diderot’s mind, we should have had an Encyclopaedia indeed; a survey and representation of all the questions and answers of the world, such as would in itself have suggested what questions are best worth putting, and at the same time have furnished its own answers.

For this the moment was not yet.  An urgent social task lay before France and before Europe; it could not be postponed until the thinkers had worked out a scheme of philosophic completeness.  The thinkers did not seriously make any effort after this completeness.  The Encyclopaedia was the most serious attempt, and it did not wholly fail.  As I replace in my shelves this mountain of volumes, “dusky and huge, enlarging on the sight,” I have a presentiment that their pages will seldom again be disturbed by me or by others.  They served a great purpose a hundred years ago.  They are now a monumental ruin, clothed with all the profuse associations of history.  It is no Ozymandias of Egypt, king of kings, whose wrecked shape of stone and sterile memories we contemplate.  We think rather of the gray and crumbling walls of an ancient stronghold reared by the endeavour of stout hands and faithful, whence in its own day and generation a band once went forth against barbarous hordes, to strike a blow for humanity and truth.