cially referred to by Diderot himself. Falconet
flattered himself that he had the best of the argument, and was eager
that they should be published, but Diderot was sluggish or busy. The
correspondence was imparted to Catherine of Russia, who took a lively
interest in it, and to some others, but it was not given to the
public--and then only partially--until 1830.

[220] Above, vol. ii. p. 104.

[221] xix. 200.

Diderot's position in these twelve letters may be described in general
terms as being that the sentiment of immortality and respect for
posterity move the heart and elevate the soul; they are two germs of
great things, two promises as solid as any other, and two delights as
real as most of the delights of life, but more noble, more profitable,
and more virtuous. What Diderot means by immortality is not the
religious dogma, that the individual personality will be objectively
preserved and prolonged in some other mode of existence. On the
contrary, it was his disbelief in this dogma of the churches that gave a
certain keenness to his pleading for that other kind of immortality,
which prolongs our personality only in the grateful and admiring
memories of other people who come after us. He intended by the sentiment
of immortality "the desire to surround one's name with lustre among
posterity; to be the admiration and the talk of centuries to come; to
obtain after death the same honours as we pay to those who have gone
before us; to furnish a fine line to the historian; to inscribe one's
own name by the side of those which we never pronounce without shedding
a tear, heaving a sigh, or being touched by regret; to secure for
ourselves the blessings that we have such a thrill in bestowing on
Sully, Henry IV., and all the other benefactors of the human race."[222]
The sphere that surrounds us, and in which the world admires us, the
time in which we exist and listen to praise, the number of those who
directly address to us the eulogy that we have deserved of them--all
this is too small for the capacity of our ambitious souls. By the side
of those whom we see prostrated before us, we place those who are not
yet in the world. It is only this uncounted throng of adorers that can
satisfy a mind whose impulses are ever towards the infinite. At night it
is sweet to hear a distant concert, of which only snatches reach the
ear, all to be bound into a melodious whole by the imagination, which is
all the more charmed as t