They did not see that these axioms were nothing better than very vague and very uncertain propositions; that the definitions were inexact, defective, and bizarre.
We have no space to follow the reasoning by which Diderot supports this scornful estimate of the famous thinker, of whom it can never be settled whether he be pantheist, atheist, akosmist, or God-intoxicated man.

He returns to the charge again and again, as if he felt a certain secret uneasiness lest for scorn so loudly expressed he had not brought forward adequate justification.

And the reader feels that Diderot has scarcely hit the true line of cleavage that would have enabled him--from his own point of view--to shatter the Spinosist system.

He tries various bouts of logic with Spinosa in connection with detached propositions.

Thus he deals with Spinosa's third proposition, that, _in the case of things that have nothing in common with one another, one cannot be the cause of the other_.