Because it was this, and because it rallied all that was then best in France round the standard of light and social hope, we ought hardly to grudge time or pains to its history.

For it was not merely in the field of religious ideas that the Encyclopaedists led France in a new way.

They affected the national life on every side, pressing forward with enlightened principles in all the branches of material and political organisation.

Their union in a great philosophical band gave an impressive significance to their work.

The collection within a single set of volumes of a body of new truths, relating to so many of the main interests of men, invested the book and its writers with an aspect of universality, of collective and organic doctrine, which the writers themselves would without doubt have disowned, and which it is easy to dissolve by tests of logic.