Towards the same time, again, Diderot probably made acquaintance with Madame de Puisieux, of whom it has been said with too patent humour that she was without either the virtue or the merit on which her admirer had just been declaiming.  We are told that it was her need of money which inspired him with his first original work.  As his daughter’s memoir, from which the tale comes, is swarming with blunders, this may not be more true than some of her other statements.  All that we know of Diderot’s sense and sincerity entitles him to the benefit of the doubt.  The Philosophical Thoughts (1746) are a continuation of the vein of the annotations on the Essay.  He is said to have thrown these reflections together between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  Nor is there anything incredible in such rapid production, when we remember the sweeping impetuosity with which he flung himself into all that he undertook.  The Thoughts are evidently the fruits of long meditation, and the literary arrangement of them may well have been an easy task.  They are a robuster development of the scepticism which was the less important side of Shaftesbury.  The parliament of Paris ordered the book to be burnt along with some others (July 7, 1746), partly because they were heterodox, partly because the practice of publishing books without official leave was gaining an unprecedented height of license.[26] This was Diderot’s first experience of that hand of authority, which was for thirty years to surround him with mortification and torment.  But the disapproval of authority did not check the circulation or influence of the Thoughts.  They were translated into German and Italian, and were honoured by a shower of hostile criticism.  In France they were often reprinted, and even in our own day they are said not wholly to have lost their vogue as a short manual of scepticism.[27]

The historians of literature too often write as if a book were the cause or the controlling force of controversies in which it is really only a symbol, or a proclamation of feelings already in men’s minds.  We should never occupy ourselves in tracing the thread of a set of opinions, without trying to recognise the movement of living men and concrete circumstance that accompanied and caused the progress of thought.  In watching how the beacon-fire flamed from height to height—­

    [Greek:  phaos de telepompon ouk enaineto
    phroura, prosaithrizousa pompimonphloga—­]

we should not forget that its source and reference lie in action, in the motion and stirring of confused hosts and multitudes of men.  A book, after all, is only the mouthpiece of its author, and the author being human is moved and drawn by the events that occur under his eye.  It was not merely because Bacon and Hobbes and Locke had written certain books, that Voltaire and Diderot became free-thinkers and assailed the church.  “So long,” it has been said, “as a Bossuet, a Fenelon, an Arnauld, a Nicole, were alive, Bayle made few proselytes; the elevation of Dubois and its consequences multiplied unbelievers and indifferents."[28]