[203] Les Eleutheromanes, ou les Furieux de la Liberté. Œuv., ix. 16.
[204] It is a curious illustration of the carelessness with which the so-called negative school have been treated, that so conscientious a writer as M. Henri Martin (Hist. de France, xvi. 146) should have taxed Diderot, among other sinister maxims, with this, that “the public punishment of a king changes the spirit of a nation for ever.” Now the words occur in a collection of observations on government, which Diderot wrote on the margin of his copy of Tacitus, and which are entitled Principes de Politique des Souverains (1775). Some of the most pungent maxims are obviously intended for irony on the military and Machiavellian policy of Frederick the Great, while others on the policy of the Roman emperors are shrewd and sagacious. The maxim from which M. Martin quotes is the 147th, and in it the sombre words of his quotation follow this:—“Let the people never see royal blood flow for any cause whatever. The public punishment of a king,” etc.! See Œuv., ii. 486.
[205] Mém. sur la Vie et les Ouvrages de Diderot, p. 412.
[206] Grimm, Corr. Lit., xi. 120.
[207] As to the precise drift of Maupertuis’s theme, see Lange, Gesch. d. Materialismus, i. 413, n. 37. Also Rosenkranz, i. 134.
[208] In 1765 Grimm describes the principle of Leibnitz and Maupertuis as “gaining on us on every side.”—Corr. Lit., iv. 186.
[209] Palissot, in the Philosophers, concocted some very strained satire on the too pompous opening of the Interpretation of Nature. Act I. sc. 2.
[210] Comte’s System of Positive Polity, i. 380, etc. English translation, 1875.
[211] By F. Sclopis, quoted in M. Vian’s Hist. de Montesquieu, p. 51.
[212] Œuv., ii. 12, 13, § 6. See the same idea in the Encyclopædia, above, vol. i. pp. 225-227.