ce the
reflections of _Pantophile Diderot on Tancrede,_" wrote Voltaire:
"everything is within the sphere of activity of his genius: he passes
from the heights of metaphysics to the weaver's trade, and thence he
comes to the stage."

The stage, indeed, occupied largely the attention of Diderot, who sought
to introduce reforms, the fruit of his own thought as well as of
imitation of the Germans, which he had not perhaps sufficiently
considered. For the classic tragedies, the heritage of which Voltaire
received from the hands of Racine, Diderot aspired to substitute the
natural drama. His two attempts in that style, _Le Pere de Famille_ and
_Le Fils natural,_ had but little success in France, and contributed to
develop in Germany the school already founded by Lessing. An excess of
false sensibility and an inflation of expression had caused certain true
ideas to fall flat on the French stage.

"You have the inverse of dramatic talent," said Abbe Arnauld to Diderot;
"the proper thing is to transform one's self into all the characters, and
you transform all the characters into yourself." The criticism did
Diderot wrong: he had more wits than his characters, and he was worth
more at bottom than those whom he described. Carried away by the
richness as well as the unruliness of his mind, destitute as he was of
definite and fixed principles, he recognized no other moral law than the
natural impulse of the soul. "There is no virtue or vice," he used to
say, "but innate goodness or badness." Certain religious cravings,
nevertheless, sometimes: asserted themselves in his conscience: he had.
a glimmering perception of the necessity for a higher rule and law.
"O God, I know not whether Thou art," he wrote in his _Interpretation de
la Nature,_ but I will think as if Thou didst see into my soul, I will
act as if I were in Thy presence."

A strange illusion on the part of the philosopher about the power of
ideas as well as about the profundity of evil in the human heart!
Diderot fancied he could regulate his life by a perchance, and he was
constantly hurried away by the torrent of his passion into a violence of
thought and language foreign to his natural benevolence. It was around
his name that the philosophic strife had waxed most fierce: the active
campaign undertaken by his friends to open to him the doors of the French
Academy remained unsuccessful. "He has too many enemies," said Louis XV.
"his election shall not be san