of collective and organic doctrine, which the writers themselves would without doubt have disowned, and which it is easy to dissolve by tests of logic.  But the popular impression that the Encyclopaedists constituted a single body with a common doctrine and a common aim was practically sound.  Comte has pointed out with admirable clearness the merit of the conception of an encyclopaedic workshop.[104] It united the members of rival destructive schools in a great constructive task.  It furnished a rallying-point for efforts otherwise the most divergent.  Their influence was precisely what it would have been, if popular impressions had been literally true.  Diderot and D’Alembert did their best to heighten this feeling.  They missed no occasion of fixing a sentiment of co-operation and fellowship.  They spoke of their dictionary as the transactions of an Academy.[105] Each writer was answerable for his own contribution, but he was in the position of a member of some learned corporation.  To every volume, until the great crisis of 1759, was prefixed a list of those who had contributed to it.  If a colleague died, the public was informed of the loss that the work had sustained, and his services were worthily commemorated in a formal eloge.[106] Feuds, epigrams, and offences were not absent, but on the whole there was steadfast and generous fraternity.

As Voltaire eloquently said, officers of war by land and by sea, magistrates, physicians who knew nature, men of letters whose taste purified knowledge, geometers, physicists, all united in a work that was as useful as it was laborious, without any view of interest, without even seeking fame, as many of them concealed their names; finally without any common understanding and agreement, and therefore without anything of the spirit of party.[107] Turning over the pages on which the list of writers is inscribed, we find in one place or another nearly every name that has helped to make the literature of the time famous.  Montesquieu, who died in the beginning of 1755, left behind him the unfinished fragment of an article on Taste, and it may be noticed in passing that our good-natured Diderot was the only man of letters who attended the remains of the illustrious writer to the grave.[108] The article itself, though no more than a fragment, has all the charms of Montesquieu’s delightful style; it is serious without pedantry, graceful without levity, and is rich in observations that are precise and pointed without the vice of emphasis.  The great Turgot, diligently solicitous for the success of every enterprise that promised to improve human happiness by adding to knowledge and spreading enlightenment, wrote some of the most valuable articles that the work contained, and his discussion of Endowments perhaps still remains the weightiest contribution to that important subject.  Oddly enough, he was one of the very few writers who refused to sign his name to his contributions.[109] His assistance only ceased