A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 01

Between two servants of Humanity, who appeared eighteen hundred years apart, there is a mysterious relation. Let us say it with a sentiment of profound respect: JESUS WEPT: VOLTAIRE SMILED. Of that divine tear and of that human smile is composed the sweetness of the present civilization. VICTOR HUGO.
LIST OF PLATES—VOL. I
The DICTIONNAIRE PHILOSOPHIQUE is Voltaire's principal essay in philosophy, though not a sustained work. The miscellaneous articles he contributed to Diderot's ENCYCLOPÉDIE which compose this Dictionary embody a mass of scholarly research, criticism, and speculation, lit up with pungent sallies at the formal and tyrannous ecclesiasticism of the period and the bases of belief on which it stood.
These short studies reflect every phase of Voltaire's sparkling genius. Though some of the views enunciated in them are now universally held, and others have become obsolete through extended knowledge, they were startlingly new when Voltaire, at peril of freedom and reputation, spread them before the people of all civilized nations, who read them still with their first charm of style and substance.
Oliver H.G. Leigh

Voltaire at the age of thirty.
The letter A has been accounted sacred in almost every nation, because it was the first letter. The Egyptians added this to their numberless superstitions; hence it was that the Greeks of Alexandria called it hier'alpha ; and, as omega was the last of the letters, these words alpha and omega signified the beginning and the end of all things. This was the origin of the cabalistic art, and of more than one mysterious folly.
The letters served as ciphers, and to express musical notes. Judge what an infinity of useful knowledge must thus have been produced. A, b, c, d, e, f, g, were the seven heavens; the harmony of the celestial spheres was composed of the seven first letters; and an acrostic accounted for everything among the ever venerable Ancients.
Why has not the alphabet a name in any European language? Alphabet signifies nothing more than A , B , and A , B , signifies nothing, or but indicates two sounds, which two sounds have no relation to each other. Beta is not formed from alpha ; one is first, the other is second, and no one knows why.