He is said to have thrown these reflections together between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Nor is there anything incredible in such rapid production, when we remember the sweeping impetuosity with which he flung himself into all that he undertook.

The Thoughts are evidently the fruits of long meditation, and the literary arrangement of them may well have been an easy task.

They are a robuster development of the scepticism which was the less important side of Shaftesbury.

The parliament of Paris ordered the book to be burnt along with some others (July 7, 1746), partly because they were heterodox, partly because the practice of publishing books without official leave was gaining an unprecedented height of license.[26] This was Diderot's first experience of that hand of authority, which was for thirty years to surround him with mortification and torment.