Diderot, Vol. 1 (Classic Reprint)

By: Author, Unknown

Excerpt from Diderot, Vol. 1

After the middle of the eighteenth century the insurrection against the pretensions of the church and against the doctrines of Christianity was marked in one of its most important phases by a new and most Significant feature. In this phase it was animated at once by the scientific idea and by the social idea. It was an advance both in knowledge and in moral motive. It rested on a conception that was crude and imperfect enough, but was still almost, like the grand ecclesiastical conception itself, a conception of life as a whole. Morality, positive law, social order, economics, the nature and limits of human knowledge, the constitution of the physical universe, had one by one disengaged them selves from theological explanations. The final philosophical movement of the century in France, that was represented by Diderot, now tended to a new social synthesis resting on a purely positive basis. If this movement had only added to its other contents the historic idea, its destination would have been effectually reached. AS it was, its leaders surveyed the entire field with as much accuracy and with as wide a range as their instru ments allowed, and they scattered over the world a set of ideas which at once entered into energetic rivalry with the ancient scheme of authority. The truest symbol of this new comprehensiveness in the insurrection was the Encyclopaedia.

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1330863518
• ISBN13: 9781330863510
• Release Date: January 2024
• Publisher: Forgotten Books
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.79 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"