ry of God, and the firmament sheweth his
handiwork_, they have given themselves up to the superstition of
their conjectures. Instead of adoring the All-Powerful in the
creation of nature, they have prostrated themselves before the
phantoms of their imagination. If any one doubts the justice of my
reproach, I invite him to compare Galen's treatise on the use of
parts of the human body, with the physiology of Boerhaave, and the
physiology of Boerhaave with that of Haller; I invite posterity to
compare the systematic or passing views of Haller with what will be
the physiology of future times. Man praises the Eternal for his own
poor views; and the Eternal who hears from the elevation of his
throne, and who knows his own design, accepts the silly praise and
smiles at man's vanity" (Sec. 56).

The world has advanced rapidly along this path since Diderot's day, and
has opened out many new and unsuspected meanings by the way. Perhaps the
advance has been less satisfactory in working out, in a scientific way,
the philosophy that is implied in the following adaptation of the
Leibnitzian and Maupertuisian suggestion of the law of economy in
natural forces:--"Astonishment often comes from our supposing several
marvels, where in truth there is only one; from our imagining in nature
as many particular acts as we can count phenomena, whilst _nature has
perhaps in reality never produced more than one single act_. It seem
even that, if nature had been under the necessity of producing several
acts, the different results of such acts would be isolated; that there
would be collections of phenomena independent of one another, and that
the general chain of which philosophy assumes the continuity, would
break in many places. _The absolute independence of a single fact is
incompatible with the idea of an All; and without the idea of a Whole,
there can be no Philosophy_" (Sec. 11).

At length Diderot concludes by a series of questions which he thinks
that philosophers may perhaps count worthy of discussion. What is the
difference, for example, between living matter and dead? Does the energy
of a living molecule vary by itself, or according to the quantity, the
quality, the forms of the dead or living matter with which it is united?
We need not continue the enumeration, because Diderot himself suddenly
brings them to an end with a truly admirable expression of his sense of
how unworth