She bewilders them with questions that are never overheard by common ears, and torments them with a mockery that is unobserved by common eyes.

The energetic--a Socrates, a Diderot--cannot content themselves with merely recording her everlasting puzzles; still less with merely writing over again the already recorded answers.

They insist on scrutinising the moral world afresh; they resolve the magniloquent vocabulary of abstract ethics into the small realities from which it has come; they break the complacent repose of opinion and usage by a graphic irony.

"The definitions of moral beings," said Diderot, "are always made from what such beings ought to be, and never from what they are.

People incessantly confound duty with the thing as it is."[293] We shall proceed to give a short account of one or two dialogues in which he endeavours to keep clear of this confusion.
By far the most important of these is _Rameau's Nephew_.