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102 in the workshop of thought, who, amid much din and confusion, forged, with his comrades, those destructive weapons afterwards wielded by the Constituent Assembly—was, along with D'Alembert, the directing spirit of the Encyclopédie. The former bold and impetuous as the latter was discreet, they succeeded, between the years 1751 and 1760, in spite of Papal denunciations, legal decrees, and State prisons, in completing this engine for the destruction of feudal institutions and theological tenets, and for the propounding of their own systems of nature and society. To free men from the bondage of authority in religion and philosophy, to substitute for superstitious terror a faith in human reason and virtue, to transform regret for a lost Paradise to quenchless belief in the perfectibility of the race, was the prominent teaching of their school. Some of these men called themselves Deists, some Pyrrhonists, some Atheists; but, in spite of clashing divergencies of opinion, they all worshipped at one common shrine, that of Progress. The fact is, that a social rather than a philosophical idea lay at the root of their work, and that, in their efforts to rid their country of the incubus of superstition, they also tore away some of that transmitted inheritance of religious thought around which cluster the most sensitive fibres of the mind. Helvétius and D'Holbach, in the crude and dogmatic exposition of Materialism elaborated in De l'Esprit and the Système de la Nature, became the exponents of the Necessitarian doctrine, reducing the universe to a fortuitous concourse of atoms and man to an animated machine.

Apart and companionless, a "love in desolation masked—a power girt round with weakness," there came he who appeared in the eighteenth century like