not waste more words upon it. Chaque esprit a sa lie, wrote one who for a while had sat at Diderot’s feet;[57] and we may dismiss this tale as the lees of Diderot’s strong, careless, sensualised understanding.  He was afterwards the author of a work, La Religieuse, on which the superficial critic may easily pour out the vials of affected wrath.  There, however, he was executing a profound pathological study in a serious spirit.  If the subject is horrible, we have to blame the composition of human character, or the mischievousness of a human institution.  La Religieuse is no continuation of the vein of defilement which began and ended with the story of 1748—­a story which is one among so many illustrations of Guizot’s saying about the eighteenth century, that it was the most tempting and seductive of all centuries, for it promised full satisfaction at once to all the greatnesses of humanity and to all its weaknesses.  Hettner quotes a passage from the minor writings of Niebuhr, in which the historian compares Diderot with Petronius, as having both of them been honest and well-intentioned men, who in shameless times were carried towards cynicism by their deep contempt for the prevailing vice.  “If Diderot were alive now,” says Niebuhr, “and if Petronius had only lived in the fourth instead of the third century, then the painting of obscenity would have been odious to them, and the inducement to it infinitely smaller."[58] There is no trace in Diderot of this deep contempt for the viciousness of his time.  All that can be said is that he did not escape it in his earlier years, in spite of the natural wholesomeness and rectitude of his character.

It is worthy of remark that the dissoluteness of the middle portion of the century was not associated with the cynical and contemptuous view about women that usually goes with relaxed morality.  There was a more or less distinct consciousness of a truth which has ever since grown into clearer prominence with the advance of thought since the Revolution.  It is that the sphere and destiny of women are among the three or four foremost questions in social improvement.  This is now perceived on all sides, profound as are the differences of opinion upon the proper solution of the problem.  A hundred years ago this perception was vague and indefinite, but there was an unmistakable apprehension that the Catholic ideal of womanhood was no more adequate to the facts of life, than Catholic views about science, or property, or labour, or political order and authority.

Diderot has left some curious and striking reflections upon the fate and character of women.  He gives no signs of feeling after social reorganisation; he only speaks as one brooding in uneasy meditation over a very mournful perplexity.  There is no sentimentalising, after the fashion of Jean Jacques.  He does not neglect the plain physical facts, about which it is so difficult in an age of morbid reserve to speak with freedom, yet about which it is fatal to be silent.