Note 177 — Chapter XVII · FRENCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

It is recorded that Diderot’s own last words in serious conversation were: “The beginning of philosophy is incredulity”; and it may be inferred from his writings that his first impulses to searching thought came from his study of Montaigne, who must always have been for him one of the most congenial of spirits.177 At an early stage of his independent mental life we find him turning to the literature which in that age yielded to such a mind as his the largest measure both of nutriment and stimulus—the English. In 1745 he translated Shaftesbury’s Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit; and he must have read with prompt appreciation the other English freethinkers then famous. Ere long, however, he had risen above the deistical plane of thought, and grappled with the fundamental issues which the deists took for granted, partly because of an innate bent to psychological analysis, partly because he was more interested in scientific problems than in scholarly research. The Pensées philosophiques, published in 1746, really deserve their name; and though they exhibit him as still a satisfied deist, and an opponent of the constructive atheism then beginning to suggest itself, they contain abstract reasonings sufficiently disturbing to the deistic position.178 The Promenade du Sceptique (written about 1747, published posthumously) goes further, and presents tentatively the reply to the design argument which was adopted by Hume.