We constantly pass from a serious treatise to a sally, from an elaborate history to a caprice.

There are not a few pages where we know that Diderot is saying what he does not think.

Some of the articles seem only to have found a place because Diderot happened to have taken an interest in their subjects at the moment.

After reading Voltaire's concise account of Imagination, we are amazed to find Diderot devoting a larger space than Voltaire had needed for the subject at large, to so subordinate and remote a branch of the matter as the Power of the Imagination in Pregnant Women upon the Unborn Young.

The article on Theosophs would hardly have been so disproportionately long as it is, merely for the sake of Paracelsus and Van Helmont and Poiret and the Rosicrucians, unless Diderot happened to be curiously and half-sympathetically brooding over the mixture of inspiration and madness, of charlatanry and generous aim, of which these semi-mystic, semi-scientific characters were composed.[173] Many of Diderot's articles, again, have no rightful place in an Encyclopaedia.