no means of distinguishing causation from sequence or simultaneity; that savages can understand and be understood with ease and certainty in a deaf-and-dumb school.[79] Diderot was acute enough to see that the questions of language could only be solved, not by the old metaphysical methods, but experientially.  For the experiential method in this matter the time was not ripe.  It was no wonder, then, that after a few pages, he broke away and hastened to aesthetics.

III.

Penalties on the publication of heretical opinion did not cease in England with the disappearance of the Licensing Act.  But they were at least inflicted by law.  It was the Court of King’s Bench which, in 1730, visited Woolston with fine and imprisonment, after all the forms of a prosecution had been duly gone through.  It was no Bishop’s court nor Star Chamber, much less a warrant signed by George the Third or by Bute, which in 1762 condemned Peter Annet to the pillory and the gaol for his Free Inquirer.  The only evil which overtook Mandeville for his Fable of the Bees was to be harmlessly presented (1723) as a public nuisance by the Grand Jury of Middlesex.  We may contrast with this the state of things which prepared a revolution in France.

One morning in July, 1749—­almost exactly forty years before that July of ’89, so memorable in the annals of arbitrary government and state prisons—­a commissary of police and three attendants came to Diderot’s house, made a vigorous scrutiny of his papers, and then produced a warrant for his detention.  The philosopher, without any ado, told his wife not to expect him home for dinner, stepped into the chaise, and was driven off with his escort to Vincennes.  His real offence was a light sneer in the Letter on the Blind at the mistress of a minister.[80] The atheistical substance of the essay, however, apart from the pique of a favourite, would have given sufficiently good grounds for a prosecution in England, and in France for that vile substitute for prosecution, the lettre-decachet.  And there happened to be special causes for harshness towards the press at this moment.  Verses had been published satirising the king and his manner of life in bitter terms, and a stern raid was made upon all the scribblers in Paris.  At the court there had just taken place one of those reactions in favour of the ecclesiastical party, which for thirty years in the court history alternated so frequently with movements in the opposite direction.  The gossip of the town set down Diderot’s imprisonment to a satire against the Jesuits, of which he was wrongly supposed to be the author.[81] It is not worth while to seek far for a reason, when authority was as able and as ready to thrust men into gaol for a bad reason as for a good one.  The writer or the printer of a philosophical treatise was at this moment looked upon in France much as a magistrate now looks on the wretch who vends infamous prints.