in unbelief he unhappily advanced farther than
either; his temper lacked moral earnestness; and in later life he was an
atheist. A growth of unbelief may be traced in him: at first he was a
doubter, next he became a deist, lastly an atheist. In the first stage he
only translated English works, and even condemned some of the English
deists. His views seem gradually to have altered, probably under the
influence of Voltaire's writings, and of the infidel books smuggled into
France; and he thenceforth assumed a tone bolder and marked by positive
disbelief. In 1746 he wrote his _Pensees Philosophiques_, intended to be
placed in opposition to the _Pensees_ of Pascal. Pascal, by a series of
sceptical propositions, had hoped to establish the necessity of
revelation. Diderot tried by the same method to show that this revelation
must be untrue.(549) The first portion of the propositions(550) bore upon
philosophy and natural religion, but at length he came to weaken the
proofs for the truth of Christianity, and controverted miracles, and the
truth of any system which reposes on miracles; yet even in this work he
did not evince the atheism which he subsequently avowed. It was soon after
the imprisonment in which he was involved by this book, that he projected
the plan of the magnificent work, the _Encyclopedie_, or universal
dictionary of human knowledge. Its object however was not only literary,
but also theological; for it was designed to circulate among all classes
new modes of thinking, which should be opposed to all that was
traditionary. Voltaire's unbelief was merely destructive: this was
reconstructive and systematic. The religion of this great work was deism:
the philosophy of it was sensationalist and almost materialist; seeming
hardly to allow the existence of anything but mechanical beings. Soul was
absorbed in body; the inner world in the outer;--a tendency fostered by
physics. It was the view of things taken by the scientific mind, and lacks
the poetical and feeling elements of nature--a true type of the cold and
mechanical age which produced it. Diderot's atheism is a still further
development of his unbelief. It is expressed in few of his writings, and
presents no subject of interest to us; save that it seeks to invalidate
the arguments for the being of a God, drawn from final causes. It has been
well observed, that the lesson to be derived from him(551) is, that the
mechanical view of the world is essentially atheisti