Diderot and the Encyclopdists Author:John Morley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: rhetoricae et musicae melle dulcedinis; turn tantum cum audiuntur oblectant. Sed miseris malorum altior sensus est. Itaque quum haec auribus insonare desierint, ... more »insitus animum moeror praegravat."1 III. We may close this chapter with a short account of the Supplement to Bougainville's Travels, which was composed in 1772, and published twenty- four years later. The second title is, A dialogue on the disadvantage of attaching moral ideas to certain physical actions which do not really comport with them. Those who believe that the ruling system of notions about marriage represents the last word that is to be said as to the relations between men and women, will turn away from Diderot's dialogue with some impatience. Those, on the contrary, who hold that the present system is no more immovably fixed in ultimate laws of human nature, no more final, no more unimprovable, no more sacred, and no more indisputably successful, than any other set of social arrangements and the corresponding moral ideas, will find something to interest them, though, as it seems to the present writer, very little to instruct. Bougainville was the first Frenchman who sailed round the world. He did in 1766-69 what Captain Cook did about the same time. The narrative of his expedition appeared in 1771, and the picture of life among the primitive people of the Southern Seas touched Diderot almost as deeply as if he had been Rousseau. As one says 1 Boethius. so often in this history of the intellectual preparation for the Revolution, the corruption and artificiality of Parisian society had the effect of colouring the world of primitive society with the very hues of paradise. Diderot was more free from this besetting weakness than any of his contemporaries. He never fell into Voltaire's fancy that China is a land...« less