The same spirit revived towards the middle of the sixteenth century.  In 1541 a book was published at Basel by one Ringelberg, which first took the name of Cyclopaedia, that has since then become so familiar a word in Western Europe.  This was followed within sixty years by several other works of the same kind.  The movement reached its height in a book which remained the best in its order for a century.  A German, one J.H.  Alsted (1588-1638), published in 1620 an Encyclopaedia scientiarum omnium.  A hundred years later the illustrious Leibnitz pronounced it a worthy task to perfect and amend Alsted’s book.  What was wanting to the excellent man, he said, was neither labour nor judgment, but material, and the good fortune of such days as ours.  And Leibnitz wrote a paper of suggestions for its extension and improvement.[94] Alsted’s Encyclopaedia is of course written in Latin, and he prefixes to it by way of motto the celebrated lines in which Lucretius declares that nothing is sweeter than to dwell apart in the serene temples of the wise.  Though he informs us in the preface that his object was to trace the outlines of the great “latifundium regni philosophici” in a single syntagma, yet he really does no more than arrange a number of separate treatises or manuals, and even dictionaries, within the limits of a couple of folios.  As is natural to the spirit of the age in which he wrote, great predominance is given to the verbal sciences of grammar, rhetoric, and formal logic, and a verbal or logical division regulates the distribution of the matter, rather than a scientific regard for its objective relations.

For the true parentage, however, of the Encyclopaedia of Diderot and D’Alembert, it is unnecessary to prolong this list.  It was Francis Bacon’s idea of the systematic classification of knowledge which inspired Diderot, and guided his hand throughout.  “If we emerge from this vast operation,” he wrote in the Prospectus, “our principal debt will be to the chancellor Bacon, who sketched the plan of a universal dictionary of sciences and arts at a time when there were not, so to say, either arts or sciences.”  This sense of profound and devoted obligation was shared by D’Alembert, and was expressed a hundred times in the course of the work.  No more striking panegyric has ever been passed upon our immortal countryman than is to be found in the Preliminary Discourse.[95] The French Encyclopaedia was the direct fruit of Bacon’s magnificent conceptions.  And if the efficient origin of the Encyclopaedia was English, so did the occasion rise in England also.

In 1727 Ephraim Chambers, a Westmoreland Quaker, published in London two folios, entitled, a Cyclopaedia or Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences.  The idea of it was broad and excellent.  “Our view,” says Chambers, “was to consider the several matters, not only in themselves, but relatively, or as they respect each other; both to treat them as so many wholes, and as so many parts of some greater whole.”