CHAPTER VII.
THE STAGE.
There is at first something incredible in the account given by some thinkers of Diderot, as the greatest genius of the eighteenth century; and perhaps an adjustment of such nice degrees of comparison among the high men of the world is at no time very profitable.

What is intended by these thoroughgoing panegyrists is that Diderot placed himself at the point of view whence, more comprehensively than was possible from any other, he discerned the long course and the many bearings, the complex faces and the large ramifications, of the huge movement of his day.

He seized the great transition at every point, and grasped all the threads that were to be inwoven into the pattern of the new time.
Diderot is in a thousand respects one of the most unsatisfactory of men and of writers.

Yet it is hard to deny that to whatever quarter he turned, he caught the rising illumination and was shone upon by the spirit of the coming day.

It was no copious and overflowing radiance, but they were the beams of the dawn.