[Footnote 33:  On this, see Lange, i. 294.]

[Footnote 34:  Pensees Philosophiques.  Oeuv., i. 128, 129.]

[Footnote 35:  Oeuv., xix. 87.  Grimm, Supp. 148.]

[Footnote 36:  Volney, in a book that was famous in its day, Les Ruines, ou Meditation sur les revolutions des empires (1791), resorted to a slight difference of method.  Instead of leaving the pretensions of the various creeds to cancel one another, he invented a rather striking scene, in which the priests of each creed are made to listen to the professions of their rival, and then inveigh against his superstition and inconsistency.  The assumption on which Diderot’s argument rests is, that as so many different creeds all make the same exclusive claim, the claim is equally false throughout.  Volney’s argument turns more directly on the merits, and implies that all religions are equally morbid or pathological products, because they all lead to conduct condemned by their own most characteristic maxims.  Volney’s concrete presentation of comparative religion was highly effective for destructive purposes, though it would now be justly thought inadequate. (See Oeuv. de Volney, i. 109, etc.)]

[Footnote 37:  See on this, Lange, ii. 308.]

[Footnote 38:  De la Suffisance de la Religion Naturelle, Sec. 5.]

[Footnote 39:  It is well to remember that torture was not abolished in France until the Revolution.  A Catholic writer makes the following judicious remark:  “We cannot study the eighteenth century without being struck by the immoral consequences that inevitably followed for the population of Paris from the frequency and the hideous details of criminal executions.  In reading the journals of the time, we are amazed at the place taken in popular life by the scenes of the Greve.  It was the theatre of the day.  The gibbet and the wheel did their work almost periodically, and people looked on while poor wretches writhed in slow agony all day long.  Sometimes the programme was varied by decapitation and even by the stake.  Torture had its legends and its heroes—­the everyday talk of the generation which, having begun by seeing Damiens torn by red-hot pincers, was to end by rending Foulon limb from limb.”  (Carne, Monarchie francaise au 18ieme Siecle, p. 493.)]

[Footnote 40:  Lettres sur les Anglais, xxiii.]

[Footnote 41:  Essai sur le Merite, I. ii.  Sec. 3. Oeue., i. 33.]

[Footnote 42:  “Shaftesbury is one of the most important apparitions of the eighteenth century.  All the greatest spirits of that time, not only in England, but also Leibnitz, Voltaire, Diderot, Lessing, Mendelssohn, Wieland, and Herder, drew the strongest nourishment from him.” (Hettner, Literaturgeschichte des 18ten Jahrhunderts:  ler Theil. 188.) See also Lange’s Gesch. des Materialismus, i. 306, etc.  An excellent account of Shaftesbury is given by Mr. Leslie Stephen, in his Essays on Free-thinking and Plain-speaking.]