The experience of what the royal authority could achieve encouraged men to imagine that one enlightened will, with a centralised administration at its command, might accomplish endless improvements in civilisation.

There was no age had ever been more glorious, no age more agreeable to live in.
The world had begun to abandon the theory of corruption, degeneration, and decay.
Some years later the optimistic theory of the perfection of the universe found an abler exponent in Leibnitz, whom Diderot calls the father of optimism.

[Footnote: See particularly Monadologie, ad fin.

published posthumously in German 1720, in Latin 1728; Theodicee, Section 341 (1710); and the paper, De rerum originatione radicali, written in 1697, but not published till 1840 (Opera philosophica, ed.

Erdmann, p.