We can imagine the eager interest that Diderot would have had in such curious observations as that gesture-language has something like a definite syntax; that it furnishes no means of distinguishing causation from sequence or simultaneity; that savages can understand and be understood with ease and certainty in a deaf-and-dumb school.[79] Diderot was acute enough to see that the questions of language could only be solved, not by the old metaphysical methods, but experientially.

For the experiential method in this matter the time was not ripe.

It was no wonder, then, that after a few pages, he broke away and hastened to aesthetics.
III.
Penalties on the publication of heretical opinion did not cease in England with the disappearance of the Licensing Act.

But they were at least inflicted by law.

It was the Court of King's Bench which, in 1730, visited Woolston with fine and imprisonment, after all the forms of a prosecution had been duly gone through.