t a bolt at his ecclesiastical foes in Paris, by urging the
people of Geneva to shake off irrational prejudices and straightway to
set up a playhouse. Rousseau had long been brooding over certain private
grievances of his own against Diderot; the dreary story has been told by
me before, and happily need not be repeated.[146] He took the occasion
of D'Alembert's mischievous suggestion to his native Geneva, not merely
to denounce the drama with all the force and eloquence at his command,
but formally to declare the breach between himself and Diderot. From
this moment he treated the Holbachians--so he contemptuously styled the
Encyclopaedists--as enemies of the human race and disseminators of the
deadliest poisons.

This was no mere quarrel of rival authors. It marked a fundamental
divergence in thought, and proclaimed the beginning of a disastrous
reaction in the very heart of the school of illumination. Among the most
conspicuous elements of the reaction were these: the subordination of
reason to emotion; the displacement of industry, science, energetic and
many-sided ingenuity, by dreamy indolence; and finally, what brings us
back to our starting-point, the suppression of opinions deemed to be
anti-social by the secular arm. The old idea was brought back in a new
dress; the absolutist conception of the function of authority,
associated with a theistic doctrine. Unfortunately for France,
Rousseau's idea prospered, and ended by vanquishing its antagonist. The
reason is plain. Rousseau's idea exactly fitted in with the political
traditions and institutions of the country. It was more easily and
directly compatible than was the contending idea, with that temper and
set of men's minds which tradition and institutions had fixed so
disastrously deep in the national character.

The crisis of 1758-59, then, is a date of the highest importance. It
marks a collision between the old principle of Lewis XIV., of the
Bartholomew Massacre, of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the
new rationalistic principle of spiritual emancipation. The old principle
was decrepit, it was no longer able to maintain itself; the hounds were
furious, but their fury was toothless. Before the new principle could
achieve mastery, Rousseau had made mastery impossible. Two men came into
the world at this very moment, whom destiny made incarnations of the
discordant principles. Danton and Robespierre were both born in 1759.
Diderot seems to have had a