Instead of being the guide and corrector of the organs of the temporal power, it was the worst of their accomplices.

The Encyclopaedia was an informal, transitory, and provisional organisation of the new spiritual power.

The school of which it was the great expounder achieved a supreme control over opinion by the only title to which control belongs: a more penetrating eye for social exigencies and for the means of satisfying them.
Our veteran humorist told us long ago in his whimsical way that the importance of the Acts of the French Philosophes recorded in whole acres of typography is fast exhausting itself, that the famed Encyclopaedical Tree has borne no fruit, and that Diderot the great has contracted into Diderot the easily measurable.

The humoristic method is a potent instrument for working such contractions and expansions at will.

The greatest of men are measurable enough, if you choose to set up a standard that is half transcendental and half cynical.