Edward Bruce Hamley

“ All the enjoyers of privilege and authority,—all the lesser people whose interest it was to propitiate these—all who, knowing nothing of the questions, wished to obtain a cheap repute for orthodoxy and loyalty,—joined with those who honestly believed in the mischievous tendencies of free thought to denounce its advocates. ”

“ Some one spreads a rumour in the world that there is a giant in existence 70 feet high. Very soon all the doctors discuss the questions what colour his hair must be, what is the size of his thumb, what the dimensions of his nails; there is outcry, caballing, fighting; those who maintain that the giant's little finger is only an inch and a half in diameter, bring those to the stake who affirm that the little finger is a foot thick. ”

“ D'Alembert, a man of science, and a friend of Voltaire, whose junior he was by more than twenty years, and Diderot, already famous in philosophy and letters, first gave distinct form to the project, which was to bring together in one work full information respecting all the sciences, and all the arts, in their existing stages and conditions, and thus to render it a delineation of the progress of the human mind and of civilisation. ”

“ It is easy to understand that neither Jesuits nor Jansenists would approve of writings which dealt thus with their quarrels, any more than the Romish clergy generally would like his ridicule of such modern miracles as, even now, an amazed world is sometimes called on to credit. ”

“ On the contrary, works of philosophy and religion that bring their authors high repute and esteem are published every day, which seem to have made a starting-point of the theories of the French philosophers. ”

“ After enumerating some hotly-disputed points of theology, such as even now agitate the Catholic world, he goes on:—
"When the confidants of the Divinity were seen to agree so little among themselves, and to pronounce curses against each other from age to age, while all agreed in their uncontrolled thirst for riches and grandeur ”

“ Some of the most eminent men of letters in France took part in the French work, forming a body that came to be known as the Encyclopedists—a title which in its later acceptation signified enunciators of bold and subversive modes of thought. ”