ertuis's theme, see Lange,
_Gesch. d. Materialismus_, i. 413, _n._ 37. Also Rosenkranz, i. 134.

[208] In 1765 Grimm describes the principle of Leibnitz and
Maupertuis as "gaining on us on every side."--_Corr. Lit._, iv. 186.

The _Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature_ are, in form as in title,
imitated from those famous _Aphorismi de Interpretatione Naturae et Regni
Hominis_, which are more shortly known to all men as Bacon's _Novum
Organum_.[209] The connection between the aphorisms is very loosely
held. Diderot began by premising that he would let his thoughts follow
one another under his pen, in the order in which the subjects came up in
his mind; and he kept his word. Their general scope, so far as it is
capable of condensed expression, may be described as a reconciliation
between the two great classes into which Diderot found thinkers upon
Nature to be divided; those who have many instruments and few ideas, and
those who have few instruments and many ideas,--in other words, between
men of science without philosophy, and philosophers without knowledge
of experimental science.

[209] Palissot, in the _Philosophers_, concocted some very strained
satire on the too pompous opening of the _Interpretation of Nature_.
Act I. sc. 2.

In the region of science itself, again, Diderot foresees as great a
change as in the relations between science and philosophy. "We touch the
moment of a great revolution in the sciences. From the strong
inclination of men's minds towards morals, literature, the history of
nature and experimental physics, I would almost venture to assert that
before the next hundred years are over, there will not be three great
geometers to be counted in Europe. This science will stop short where
the Bernouillis, the Eulers, the Maupertuis, the Clairauts, the
Fontaines, the D'Alemberts, the Lagranges have left it. They will have
fixed the Pillars of Hercules. People will go no further." Those who
have read Comte's angry denunciations of the perversions of geometry by
means of algebra, and of the waste of intellectual force in modern
analysis,[210] will at least understand how such a view as Diderot's was
possible. And no one will be likely to deny that, whether or not the
pillars of the geometrical Hercules were finally set a hundred years
ago, the great discoveries of the hundred years since Diderot have been,
as he predicted, in the higher sciences. The great misfortune of Franc