the scholarly tradition of
Gronovius and Graevius. But the eighteenth century was not the century of
erudition. Scholarship had given way to speculation.

Among the interesting persons whom Diderot saw at the Hague, the most
interesting is the amiable and learned son of the elder Hemsterhuys,
himself by the way not Dutch, but the son of a Frenchman. Hemsterhuys
had been greatly interested in what he had heard of Diderot's
character,[93] though we have no record of the impression that was made
by personal acquaintance. If Diderot was playfully styled the French
Socrates, the younger Hemsterhuys won from his friends the name of the
Dutch Plato. The Hollanders pointed to this meditative figure, to his
great attainments in the knowledge of ancient literature and art, to his
mellowed philosophising, to his gracious and well-bred style, as a proof
that their country was capable of developing both the strength and the
sensibility of human nature to their highest point.[94] And he has a
place in the history of modern speculation. As we think of him and
Diderot discussing, we feel ourselves to be placed at a point that seems
to command the diverging streams and eddying currents of the time. In
this pair two great tides of thought meet for a moment, and then flow
on in their deep appointed courses. For Hemsterhuys, born a Platonist to
the core, became a leader of the reaction against the French philosophy
of illumination--of sensation, of experience, of the verifiable. He
contributed a marked current to the mysticism and pietism which crept
over Germany before the French revolution, and to that religious
philosophy which became a point of patriotic honour both in Germany and
at the Russian Court, after the revolutionary war had seemed to identify
the rival philosophy of the Encyclopaedists with the victorious fury of
the national enemy. Jacobi, a chief of the mystic tribe, had begun the
attack on the French with weapons avowedly borrowed from the
sentimentalism of Rousseau, but by and by he found in Hemsterhuys more
genuinely intellectual arguments for his vindication of feeling and the
heart against the Encyclopaedist claim for the supremacy of the
understanding.

[93] _Oeuv. Phil. de Fr. Hemsterhuys_, iii. 141. (Ed. Meyboom.)

[94] Forster, ii. 398. Galiani, _Corresp._ ii. 189.

Diderot's hostess at the Hague is a conspicuous figure in the history of
this movement. Prince Galitzin had married the daughter of Frederic