ack from the same sceptical armoury from which he had drawn his own
weapons for attacking revelation. It is impossible to tell how far
Diderot went at this moment. The trenchancy with which his atheist urges
his reasoning, proves that the writer was fully alive to its force. On
the other hand, the atheist is left in the midst of a catastrophe. On
his return home, he finds his children murdered, his house pillaged, and
his wife carried off. And we are told that he could not complain on his
own principles.

If the absence of witnesses allowed the robber to commit his crime with
impunity, why should he not? Again, there is a passage in which the
writer seems to be speaking his own opinions. An interlocutor maintains
the importance of keeping the people in bondage to certain prejudices.
"What prejudices? If a man once admits the existence of a God, the
reality of moral good and evil, the immortality of the soul, future
rewards and punishments, what need has he of prejudices? Supposing him
initiated in all the mysteries of transubstantiation, consubstantiation,
the Trinity, hypostatical union, predestination, incarnation, and the
rest, will he be any the better citizen?"[51]

In truth, Diderot's mind was at this time floating in an atmosphere of
rationalistic negation, and the moral of his piece, as he hints, points
first to the extravagance of Catholicism, next to the vanity of the
pleasures of the world, and lastly, to the unfathomable uncertainty of
philosophy. Still, we may discern a significant leaning towards the
theory of the eternity of matter, which has arranged itself and assumed
variety of form by virtue of its inherent quality of motion.[52]

It is a characteristic and displeasing mark of the time that Diderot in
the midst of these serious speculations, should have set himself (1748)
to the composition of a story in the kind which the author of the _Sofa_
had made highly popular. The mechanism of this deplorable piece is more
grossly disgusting--I mean aesthetically, not morally--than anything to
be found elsewhere in the too voluminous library of impure literature.
The idea would seem to have been borrowed from one of the old
Fabliaux.[53] But what is tolerable in the quaint and _naif_ verse of
the twelfth or thirteenth century, becomes shocking when deliberately
rendered by a grave man into bald unblushing prose of the eighteenth.
The humour, the rich sparkle, the wit, the merry _gaillardise_, have all
vanish