without official leave
was gaining an unprecedented height of license.[26] This was Diderot's
first experience of that hand of authority, which was for thirty years
to surround him with mortification and torment. But the disapproval of
authority did not check the circulation or influence of the Thoughts.
They were translated into German and Italian, and were honoured by a
shower of hostile criticism. In France they were often reprinted, and
even in our own day they are said not wholly to have lost their vogue
as a short manual of scepticism.[27]

The historians of literature too often write as if a book were the cause
or the controlling force of controversies in which it is really only a
symbol, or a proclamation of feelings already in men's minds. We should
never occupy ourselves in tracing the thread of a set of opinions,
without trying to recognise the movement of living men and concrete
circumstance that accompanied and caused the progress of thought. In
watching how the beacon-fire flamed from height to height--

[Greek: phaos de telepompon ouk enaineto
phroura, prosaithrizousa pompimonphloga--]

we should not forget that its source and reference lie in action, in the
motion and stirring of confused hosts and multitudes of men. A book,
after all, is only the mouthpiece of its author, and the author being
human is moved and drawn by the events that occur under his eye. It was
not merely because Bacon and Hobbes and Locke had written certain books,
that Voltaire and Diderot became free-thinkers and assailed the church.
"So long," it has been said, "as a Bossuet, a Fenelon, an Arnauld, a
Nicole, were alive, Bayle made few proselytes; the elevation of Dubois
and its consequences multiplied unbelievers and indifferents."[28]

The force of speculative literature always hangs on practical
opportuneness. The economic evils of monasticism, the increasing
flagrancy and grossness of superstition, the aggressive factiousness of
the ecclesiastics, the cruelty of bigoted tribunals--these things
disgusted and wearied the more enlightened spirits, and the English
philosophy only held out an inspiring intellectual alternative.[29]

Nor was it accident that drew Diderot's attention to Shaftesbury, rather
than to any other of our writers. That author's essay on Enthusiasm had
been suggested by the extravagances of the French prophets, poor
fanatics from the Cevennes, who had fled to London after the revocation
of the edi