Poor

and despised, forsaken by friends, persecuted and imprisoned for the truths and virtues that he strove to inculcate, be yet worked valiantly and died in peace, at the age of 71 —no thanks however to the political and ecclesiastical powers. He vexed his father’s heart by forsaking law and medicine to become a “bookseller’s hack”: he made an imprudent marriage; and wrote much trash up to the age of 33 years, after which many valuable booklets fell from his fertile pen. These began with Philosophie Thought in 1746, followed by the Sufficiency of Natwral Religion. He then wrote a series of papers on The Blind which, as Mr John Morley says (Zncycl. Brit.), introduced him to the worshipful company of philosophers, and to the Vincennes prison, in 1749. The Church could not brook his idea that “ knowledge depends on our five senses,” followed up by an application of the principle of relativity to the conception of a God, which he showed must change with our own development. In 1750 Diderot started the famous Encyclopedia, being aided by D’Alembert, who however, like Turgot and others, forsook him when it was suppre ed in 1759. He completed the writing by 1765, but it was not i ued complete to subscribers till 1772, after years of ceasele labour in his study, and beside the printers and engravers, Throughout this period he was hara ed by visits from the police of a government that feared the education of the people. He learned too late, to his dismay, that the publishers had mutilated his work, in many articles which they thought too bold. 575