.

THE ENCYCLOPAEDISTS AND ECONOMISTS.
1.
The intellectual movement which prepared French opinion for the Revolution and supplied the principles for reconstituting society may be described as humanistic in the sense that man was the centre of speculative interest.
"One consideration especially that we ought never to lose from sight," says Diderot, "is that, if we ever banish a man, or the thinking and contemplative being, from above the surface of the earth, this pathetic and sublime spectacle of nature becomes no more than a scene of melancholy and silence...

It is the presence of man that gives its interest to the existence of other beings...

Why should we not make him a common centre ?...

Man is the single term from which we ought to set out." [Footnote: The passage from Diderot's article Encyclopedie is given as translated by Morley, Diderot, i, 145.] Hence psychology, morals, the structure of society, were the subjects which riveted attention instead of the larger supra-human problems which had occupied Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibnitz.