I confess that I have my son's education so much at heart, and that you are so necessary to me, that perhaps I press you too much.

Pardon my indiscretion for the reason's sake, and rest assured that it is esteem which has made me so selfish." D'Alembert declined the education of the hereditary Grand Duke, just as he had declined the presidency of the Academy at Berlin; an infidel and almost a materialist by the geometer's rule, who knows no power but the laws of mathematics, he did not carry into anti-religious strife the bitterness of Voltaire, or the violence of Diderot.

"Squelch the thing! you are always repeating to me," he said to Voltaire on the 4th of May, 1762.

"Ah! my good friend, let it go to rack and ruin of itself, it is hurrying thereto faster than you suppose." More and more absorbed by pure science, which he never neglected save for the French Academy, whose perpetual secretary he had become, D'Alembert left to Diderot alone the care of continuing the _Encyclopaedia_.

When he died, in 1783, at fifty-six years of age, the work had been finished nearly twenty years.
In spite of the bad faith of publishers, who mutilated articles to render them acceptable, in spite of the condemnation of the clergy and the severities of the council, the last volumes of the _Encyclopaedia_ had appeared in 1765.
This immense work, unequal and confused as it was, a medley of various and often ill-assorted elements, undertaken for and directed to the fixed end of an aggressive emancipation of thought, had not sufficed to absorb the energy and powers of Diderot.