Encyclopedie, we are struck by the beneficence and breadth of the great designs which inspire and support him.  The Encyclopaedia, it has been said, was no peaceful storehouse in which scholars and thinkers of all kinds could survey the riches they had acquired; it was a gigantic siege-engine and armoury of weapons of attack.[125] This is only true in a limited sense of one part of the work, and that not the most important part.  Such a judgment is only possible for one who has not studied the book itself, or else who is ignorant of the social requirements of France at the time.  We shall show this presently in detail.  Meanwhile it is enough to make two observations.  The implements which the circumstances of the time made it necessary to use as weapons of attack, were equally fitted for the acquisition in a happier season of those treasures of thought and knowledge which are the object of disinterested research.  And what is still more important, we have to observe that it was the characteristic note and signal glory of the French revolutionary school, to subordinate mere knowledge to the practical work of raising society up from the corruption and paralysis to which it had been brought by the double action of civil and ecclesiastical authority.  The efforts of the Encyclopaedists were not disinterested in the sense of being vague blows in the air.  Their aim was not theory but practice, not literature but life.  The Encyclopaedists were no doubt all men of battle, and some of them were hardly more than mere partisans.

But Diderot at least had constantly in mind the great work which remained after the battle should be won.  He was profoundly conscious that the mere accumulation of knowledge of the directly physical facts of the universe would take men a very short way towards reconstruction.  And he struck the key-note in such admirable passages as this:  “One consideration especially that we ought never to lose from sight is that, if we ever banish a man, or the thinking and contemplative being, from above the surface of the earth, this pathetic and sublime spectacle of nature becomes no more than a scene of melancholy and silence.  The universe is dumb; the darkness and silence of the night take possession of it....  It is the presence of man that gives its interest to the existence of other beings; and what better object can we set before ourselves in the history of these beings, than to accept such a consideration?  Why shall we not introduce man into our work in the same place which he holds in the universe?  Why shall we not make him a common centre?  Is there in infinite space any other point from which we can with greater advantage draw those immense lines that we propose to extend to all other points?  What a vivid and softening reaction must result between man and the beings by whom he is surrounded?...  Man is the single term from which we ought to set out, and to which we ought to trace all back, if we would please, interest, touch, even in the most arid reflections and the driest details.  If you take away my own existence and the happiness of my fellows, of what concern to me is all the rest of nature."[126]