you set up rewards and penalties among matters which have no proportion nor relation with one another.  Are you sure that you have never committed wrong acts, for which you pardoned yourselves because their object was so slight, though at bottom they implied more wickedness than a crime prompted by misery or fury?  Even magistrates, supported by experience, by the law, by conventions which force them sometimes to give judgment against the testimony of their own conscience, still tremble as they pronounce the doom of the accused.  And since when has it been lawful for the same person to be at once judge and informer?"[14]

Such reasoned leniency is the noblest of traits in a man.  “I am more affected,” he said, in words of which better men that Diderot might often be reminded, “by the charms of virtue than by the deformity of vice.  I turn mildly away from the bad, and I fly to embrace the good.  If there is in a work, in a character, in a painting, in a statue, a single fine bit, then on that my eyes fasten; I see only that:  that is all I remember; the rest is as good as forgotten."[15]

This is the secret of a rare and admirable temperament.  It carried Diderot well through the trial and ordeal of the ragged apprenticeship of letters.  What to other men comes by culture, came to him by inborn force and natural capaciousness.  We do not know in what way Diderot trained and nourished his understanding.  The annotations to his translation of Shaftesbury, as well as his earliest original pieces, show that he had read Montaigne and Pascal, and not only read but meditated on them with an independent mind.  They show also that he had been impressed by the Civitas Dei of Augustine, and had at least dipped into Terence and Horace, Cicero and Tacitus.  His subsequent writings prove that, like the other men of letters of his day, he found in our own literature the chief external stimulant to thought.  Above all, he was impressed by the magnificent ideas of the illustrious Bacon, and these ideas were the direct source of the great undertaking of Diderot’s life.  He is said to have read little and to have meditated much—­the right process for the few men of his potent stamp.  The work which he had to do for bread was of the kind that crushes anything short of the strongest faculty.  He composed sermons.  A missionary once ordered half-a-dozen of them for consumption in the Portuguese colonies, and paid him fifty crowns apiece, which Diderot counted far from the worst bargain of his life.  All this was beggarly toil for a man of genius, but Diderot never took the trouble to think of himself as a man of genius, and was quite content with life as it came.  If he found himself absolutely without food and without pence, he began moodily to think of abandoning his books and his pen, and of complying with the wishes of his father.  A line of Homer, an idea from the Principia, an interesting problem in algebra or geometry, was enough to restore the eternally invincible spell of knowledge.  And no sooner was this commanding interest touched, than the cloud of uncomfortable circumstance vanished from before the sun, and calm and serenity filled his spirit.