ce. If there were any inevitable compulsion to name a
masterpiece for Diderot, one must select this singular "farce-tragedy."
Its intention has been matter of dispute; whether it was designed to be
merely a satire on contemporary manners, or a reduction of the theory of
self-interest to an absurdity, or the application of an ironical
clincher to the ethics of ordinary convention, or a mere setting for a
discussion about music, or a vigorous dramatic sketch of a parasite and
a human original. There is no dispute as to its curious literary
flavour, its mixed qualities of pungency, bitterness, pity and, in
places, unflinching shamelessness. Goethe's translation (1805) was the
first introduction of _Le Neveu de Rameau_ to the European public. After
executing it, he gave back the original French manuscript to Schiller,
from whom he had it. No authentic French copy of it appeared until the
writer had been nearly forty years in his grave (1823).

It would take several pages merely to contain the list of Diderot's
miscellaneous pieces, from an infinitely graceful trifle like the
_Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre_ up to _Le Reve de D'Alembert_,
where he plunges into the depths of the controversy as to the ultimate
constitution of matter and the meaning of life. It is a mistake to set
down Diderot for a coherent and systematic materialist. We ought to look
upon him "as a philosopher in whom all the contradictions of the time
struggle with one another" (Rosenkranz). That is to say, he is critical
and not dogmatic. There is no unity in Diderot, as there was in Voltaire
or in Rousseau. Just as in cases of conduct he loves to make new ethical
assumptions and argue them out as a professional sophist might have
done, so in the speculative problems as to the organization of matter,
the origin of life, the compatibility between physiological machinery
and free will, he takes a certain standpoint, and follows it out more or
less digressively to its consequences. He seizes a hypothesis and works
it to its end, and this made him the inspirer in others of materialist
doctrines which they held more definitely than he did. Just as Diderot
could not attain to the concentration, the positiveness, the finality of
aim needed for a masterpiece of literature, so he could not attain to
those qualities in the way of dogma and system. Yet he drew at last to
the conclusions of materialism, and contributed many of its most
declamatory pages to the _