of the greater minds is that they have no temptation to give the spectre a permanent home with them, as is done by theologians in order to prove the necessity of grace and another world, or by cynics in order to prove the wisdom of selfishness in this world.  The greater minds accept the worse facts of character for what they are worth, and bring them into a right perspective with the better facts.  They have no expectation of escaping all perplexities, nor of hitting on answers to all the moral riddles of the world.  Yet are they ever drawn by an invincible fascination to the feet of the mighty Sphinx of society.  She bewilders them with questions that are never overheard by common ears, and torments them with a mockery that is unobserved by common eyes.  The energetic—­a Socrates, a Diderot—­cannot content themselves with merely recording her everlasting puzzles; still less with merely writing over again the already recorded answers.  They insist on scrutinising the moral world afresh; they resolve the magniloquent vocabulary of abstract ethics into the small realities from which it has come; they break the complacent repose of opinion and usage by a graphic irony.  “The definitions of moral beings,” said Diderot, “are always made from what such beings ought to be, and never from what they are.  People incessantly confound duty with the thing as it is."[293] We shall proceed to give a short account of one or two dialogues in which he endeavours to keep clear of this confusion.

By far the most important of these is Rameau’s Nephew.  The fortunes of this singular production are probably unique in literary history.  In the year 1804 Schiller handed to Goethe the manuscript of a piece by Diderot, with the wish that he might find himself able to translate it into German.  “As I had long,” says Goethe, “cherished a great regard for this author, I cheerfully undertook the task, after looking through the original.  People can see, I hope, that I threw my whole soul into it."[294] When he had done his work, he returned the manuscript to Schiller.  Schiller died almost immediately (May 1805), and the mysterious manuscript disappeared.  Goethe could never learn either whence it had come, or whither it went.  He always suspected that the autograph original had been sent to the Empress Catherine at St. Petersburg, and that Schiller’s manuscript was a copy from that.  Though Goethe had executed his translation, as he says, “not merely with readiness but even with passion,” the violent and only too just hatred then prevailing in Germany for France and for all that belonged to France, hindered any vogue which Rameau’s Nephew might otherwise have had.  On the eve of Austerlitz and of Jena there might well be little humour for a satire from the French.