The chief spirit of the social and political destructives was as obviously Rousseau as Voltaire had been the chief spirit of the religious destructives. Our business for the moment is with neither of these schools and with neither of these famous men. As all heterodoxy seemed to be latent in the mordant criticism of Voltaire, so all subsequent political anarchy seems to be concentrated in the morbid passion of Rousseau. But though Rousseau must be regarded as in all essentials a destructive, there are many ways in which he had a share in the constructive movement of '89. In the splendour of his pleading for education, for respecting the dignity of the citizen, in his passion for art, in his pathetic dreams of an ideal simplicity of life, in his spiritual Utopia of a higher and more humane humanity, prophet of anarchy as he was, Rousseau has here and there added a stone to the edifice we are still building to-day.
When we turn to the constructive schools, there we find Diderot supreme in the intellectual world, Turgot in the political; whilst Condorcet is the disciple and complement of both. With the purely philosophical work of any of these three we are not now concerned. Our interest is entirely with the social and political question. And at first sight it may seem that Diderot has no share in any but the philosophical. But this most universal genius had a mind open to all sides of the human problem. His grand task the Eitcyclopddie (and we may remember that the first idea of it came from an English Encyclopaedia, which it was proposed to translate), the Encyclopedic is largely, and indeed mainly, concerned with economic and social matters. Throughout it runs the potent principle of the unity of man's knowledge, of man's life, and of the whole human race. Diderot does far more than discuss abstract questions of science. He traces out the ramifications of science into the minutest and humblest operations of industry private tour istanbul.
In the Encyclopaedia
In the Encyclopaedia we have installed for the first time on authority that conception of modern times — the marriage of Science with Industry. Machines, trades, manufactures, implements, tools, processes were each in turn the object of Diderot's enthusiastic study. He and his comrades, men like Turgot, d'Alembert, Condorcet, felt that the true destiny of man was the industrial. They strove to place labour on its right level, to dignify its task, and to glorify its mission. Never had philosophy been greater than when she girt up her robes, penetrated into the workshop, and shed her light upon the patient toil of the handicraftsman. For the first time in modern history thought and science took labour to their arms. Industry received its true honour, and was installed in a new sphere. It was a momentous step in the progress of society as much as in the progress of thought.
Chief of all the political reformers, in many things the noblest type of the men of '89, is the great Turgot; he, who if France could have been spared a revolution, was the one man that could have saved her. After him, Necker, a much inferior man, though with equally good intentions, attempted the same task; and the years from 1774-1781 sufficed to show that reform without revolution was impossible. But the twenty years of noble effort, from the hour when Turgot became intendant of Limoges in 1761 until the fall of Necker's ministry in 1781, contained an almost complete rehearsal, were a prelude and epitome, of the practical reforms which the Revolution accomplished after so much blood and such years of chaos.
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