As it was, its leaders surveyed the entire field with as much accuracy and with as wide a range as their instruments allowed, and they scattered over the world a set of ideas which at once entered into energetic rivalry with the ancient scheme of authority.

The great symbol of this new comprehensiveness in the insurrection was the Encyclopaedia.
The Encyclopaedia was virtually a protest against the old organisation, no less than against the old doctrine.

Broadly stated, the great central moral of it all was this: that human nature is good, that the world is capable of being made a desirable abiding-place, and that the evil of the world is the fruit of bad education and bad institutions.

This cheerful doctrine now strikes on the ear as a commonplace and a truism.
A hundred years ago in France it was a wonderful gospel, and the beginning of a new dispensation.

It was the great counter-principle to asceticism in life and morals, to formalism in art, to absolutism in the social ordering, to obscurantism in thought.