D’Alembert in reply always admitted the blemishes for which the patriarch and master reproached them, but urged various pleas in extenuation.  He explains that Diderot is not always the master, either to reject or to prune the articles that are offered to him.[121] A writer who happened to be useful for many excellent articles would insist as the price of good work that they should find room for his bad work also; and so forth.  “No doubt we have bad articles in theology and metaphysics, but with theologians for censors, and a privilege, I defy you to make them any better.  There are other articles that are less exposed to the daylight, and in them all is repaired.  Time will enable people to distinguish what we have thought from what we have said."[122] This last is a bitter and humiliating word, but before any man hastens to cast a stone, let him first make sure that his own life is free from every trace of hypocritical conformity and mendacious compliance.  Condorcet seems to make the only remark that is worth making, when he says that the true shame and disgrace of these dissemblings lay not with the writers, whose only other alternative was to leave the stagnation of opinion undisturbed, but with the ecclesiastics and ministers whose tyranny made dissimulation necessary.  And the veil imposed by authority did not really serve any purpose of concealment.  Every reader was let into the secret of the writer’s true opinion of the old mysteries, by means of a piquant phrase, an adroit parallel, a significant reference, an equivocal word of dubious panegyric.  Diderot openly explains this in the pages of the Encyclopaedia itself.  “In all cases,” he says, “where a national prejudice would seem to deserve respect, the particular article ought to set it respectfully forth, with its whole procession of attractions and probabilities.  But the edifice of mud ought to be overthrown and an unprofitable heap of dust scattered to the wind, by references to articles in which solid principles serve as a base for the opposite truths.  This way of undeceiving men operates promptly on minds of the right stamp, and it operates infallibly and without any troublesome consequences, secretly and without disturbance, on minds of every description."[123] “Our fanatics feel the blows,” cried D’Alembert complacently, “though they are sorely puzzled to tell from which side they come."[124]

It is one of the most deplorable things in the history of literature to see a man endowed with Diderot’s generous conceptions and high social aims, forced to stoop to these odious economies.  In reading his Prospectus, and still more directly in his article,