Though he informs us in the preface that his object was to trace the outlines of the great "latifundium regni philosophici" in a single syntagma, yet he really does no more than arrange a number of separate treatises or manuals, and even dictionaries, within the limits of a couple of folios.
As is natural to the spirit of the age in which he wrote, great predominance is given to the verbal sciences of grammar, rhetoric, and formal logic, and a verbal or logical division regulates the distribution of the matter, rather than a scientific regard for its objective relations.
For the true parentage, however, of the Encyclopaedia of Diderot and D'Alembert, it is unnecessary to prolong this list.

It was Francis Bacon's idea of the systematic classification of knowledge which inspired Diderot, and guided his hand throughout.

"If we emerge from this vast operation," he wrote in the Prospectus, "our principal debt will be to the chancellor Bacon, who sketched the plan of a universal dictionary of sciences and arts at a time when there were not, so to say, either arts or sciences." This sense of profound and devoted obligation was shared by D'Alembert, and was expressed a hundred times in the course of the work.

No more striking panegyric has ever been passed upon our immortal countryman than is to be found in the Preliminary Discourse.[95] The French Encyclopaedia was the direct fruit of Bacon's magnificent conceptions.

And if the efficient origin of the Encyclopaedia was English, so did the occasion rise in England also.
In 1727 Ephraim Chambers, a Westmoreland Quaker, published in London two folios, entitled, a Cyclopaedia or Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences.