“It would be a mistake,” wrote that sagacious and well-informed observer, D’Argenson, so early as 1753, “to attribute the loss of religion in France to the English philosophy, which has not gained more than a hundred philosophers or so in Paris, instead of setting it down to the hatred against the priests, which goes to the very last extreme.  All minds are turning to discontent and disobedience, and everything is on the high road to a great revolution, both in religion and in government.  And it will be a very different thing to that rude Reformation, a medley of superstition and freedom, which came to us from Germany in the sixteenth century!  As our nation and our century are enlightened in so very different a fashion, they will go whither they ought to go; they will banish every priest, all priesthood, all revelation, all mystery.”  This, however, only represents the destructive side of the vast change which D’Argenson then foresaw, six-and-thirty years before its consummation.  That change had also a constructive side.  If one of its elements was hate, another and more important element was hope.  This constructive and reforming spirit which made its way in the intelligence of the leading men in France from 1750 to 1789, was represented in the encyclopaedic confederation, and embodied in their forty folios.  And, to return to our first point, it was directly and inseparably associated with the philosophy of Bacon and Locke.  What is the connection between their speculations and a vehement and energetic spirit of social reform?  We have no space here to do more than barely hint the line of answer.

The broad features of the speculative revolution of which the Encyclopaedia was the outcome, lie on the surface of its pages and cannot be mistaken.  The transition from Descartes to Newton meant the definite substitution of observation for hypothesis.  The exaltation of Bacon meant the advance from supernatural explanations to explanations from experience.  The acceptance and development of the Lockian psychology meant the reference of our ideas to bodily sensations, and led men by what they thought a tolerably direct path to the identification of mind with functions of matter.  We need not here discuss the philosophical truth or adequateness of these ways of considering the origin and nature of knowledge, or the composition of human character.  All that now concerns us is to mark their tendency.  That tendency clearly is to expel Magic as the decisive influence among us, in favour of ordered relations of cause and effect, only to be discovered by intelligent search.  The universe began to be more directly conceived as a group of phenomena that are capable of rational and connected explanation.  Then, the wider the area of law, the greater is man’s consciousness of his power of controlling forces, and securing the results that he desires.  Objective interests and their conditions acquire an increasing preponderance in his mind.  On the other hand, as the limits of science expand,