Systeme de la nature_ of his friend
D'Holbach,--the very Bible of atheism, as some one styled it. All that
he saw, if we reduce his opinions to formulae, was motion in space:
"attraction and repulsion, the only truth." If matter produces life by
spontaneous generation, and if man has no alternative but to obey the
compulsion of nature, what remains for God to do?

In proportion as these conclusions deepened in him, the more did
Diderot turn for the hope of the race to virtue; in other words, to such
a regulation of conduct and motive as shall make us tender, pitiful,
simple, contented. Hence his one great literary passion, his enthusiasm
for Richardson, the English novelist. Hence, also, his deepening
aversion for the political system of France, which makes the realization
of a natural and contented domestic life so hard. Diderot had almost as
much to say against society as even Rousseau himself. The difference
between them was that Rousseau was a fervent theist. The atheism of the
Holbachians, as he called Diderot's group, was intolerable to him; and
this feeling, aided by certain private perversities of humour, led to a
breach of what had once been an intimate friendship between Rousseau and
Diderot (1757). Diderot was still alive when Rousseau's _Confessions_
appeared, and he was so exasperated by Rousseau's stories about Grimm,
then and always Diderot's intimate, that in 1782 he transformed a life
of Seneca, that he had written four years earlier, into an _Essai sur
les regnes de Claude et de Neron_ (1778-1782), which is much less an
account of Seneca than a vindication of Diderot and Grimm, and is one of
the most rambling and inept productions in literature. As for the merits
of the old quarrel between Rousseau and Diderot, we may agree with the
latter, that too many sensible people would be in the wrong if Jean
Jacques was in the right.

Varied and incessant as was Diderot's mental activity, it was not of a
kind to bring him riches. He secured none of the posts that were
occasionally given to needy men of letters; he could not even obtain
that bare official recognition of merit which was implied by being
chosen a member of the Academy. The time came for him to provide a dower
for his daughter, and he saw no other alternative than to sell his
library. When the empress Catherine of Russia heard of his straits, she
commissioned an agent in Paris to buy the library at a price equal to
about L1000 of English money, an