The importance given to physical science and the practical arts, in the Encyclopaedia, is the sign and exemplification of two elements of the great modern transition.  It marks both a social and an intellectual revolution.  We see in it, first, the distinct association with pacific labour, of honour and a kind of glory, such as had hitherto been reserved for knights and friars, for war and asceticism, for fighting and praying.

It is the definite recognition of the basis of a new society.  If the nobles and the churchmen could only have understood, as clearly as Diderot and D’Alembert understood, the irresistible forces that were making against the maintenance of the worn-out system, all the worst of the evils attending the great political changes of the last decade of the century would have been avoided.  That the nobles and churchmen would not see this, was the fatality of the Revolution.  We have a glimpse of the profound transformation of social ideas which was at work in the five or six lines of the article, Journalier.  “Journeyman—­a workman who labours with his hands, and is paid day-wages.  This description of men forms the great part of a nation; it is their lot which a good government ought to keep principally in sight.  If the journeyman is miserable, the nation is miserable.”  And again:  “The net profit of a society, if equally distributed, may be preferable to a larger profit, if it be distributed unequally, and have the effect of dividing the people into two classes, one gorged with riches, the other perishing in misery” (Homme).

The second element in the modern transition is only the intellectual side of the first.  It is the substitution of interest in things for interest in words, of positive knowledge for verbal disputation.  Few now dispute the services of the schoolmen to the intellectual development of Europe.  But conditions had fully ripened, and it was time to complete the movement of Bacon and Descartes by finally placing verbal analysis, verbal definition, verbal inferences, in their right position.  Form was no longer to take precedence of matter.  The Encyclopaedists are never weary of contrasting their own age of practical rationalism with “the pusillanimous ages of taste.”  A great collection of books is described in one article (Bibliomanie) as a collection of material for the history of the blindness and infatuation of mankind.  The gatherer of books is compared to one who should place five or six gems under a pile of common pebbles.  If a man of sense buys a work in a dozen volumes, and finds that only half a dozen pages are worth reading, he does well to cut out the half dozen pages and fling the rest into the fire.  Finally, it would be no unbecoming device for every great library to have inscribed over its portal, The Bedlam of the Human Mind.  At this point one might perhaps suggest to D’Alembert that study of the pathology of the mind is no bad means of surprising