It is enough if I perceive in their design some great service for them, and not an excess of inconvenience for myself.

It is not I who am the fool, so often as people take me for one." Diderot then seems half to forget to whom he is writing and pours out what reads like a long soliloquy on morals, conduct, and the philosophy of life.

He insists that man, with all his high-flying freedom of will, is but a little link in a great chain of events.

He is a creature to be modified from without; hence the good effects of example, discourse, education, pleasures, pains, greatness, misery.

Hence a sort of philosophy of commiseration, which attaches us strongly to the good, and irritates us no more against the bad than against a wind-storm that fills our eyes with dust.