(1728), "seems to me the finest didactic poem, the most useful, the most
sublime, that was ever written in any tongue. 'Tis true the whole
substance of it is to be found in Shaftesbury's Characteristics, and I
do not know why Pope gives all the honour of it to Bolingbroke, without
saying a word of the celebrated Shaftesbury, the pupil of Locke."[40]
The ground of this enthusiastic appreciation of the English naturalism
was not merely that it made morality independent of religion, which
Shaftesbury took great pains to do. It also identified religion with all
that is beautiful and harmonious in the universal scheme. It surrounded
the new faith with a pure and lofty poetry, that enabled it to confront
the old on more than equal terms of dignity and elevation. Shaftesbury,
and Diderot after him, ennobled human nature by placing the principle of
virtue, the sense of goodness, within the breast of man. Diderot held to
this idea throughout, as we shall see. That he did so explains a kind of
phraseology about virtue and morality in his letters to Madame Voland
and elsewhere, which would otherwise sound disagreeably like cant.
Finally, Shaftesbury's peculiar attribution of beauty to morality, his
reference of ethical matters to a kind of taste, the tolerably equal
importance attributed by him to a sense of beauty and to the moral
sense, all impressed Diderot with a mark that was not effaced. In the
text of the Inquiry the author pronounces it a childish affectation in
the eyes of any man who weighs things maturely to deny that there is in
moral beings, just as in corporeal objects, a true and essential beauty,
a real sublime. The eagerness with which Diderot seized on this idea
from the first, is shown in the declamatory foot-note which he here
appends to his original.[41] It was the source, by a process of
inverted application, of that ethical colouring in his criticisms on art
which made them so new and so interesting, because it carried æsthetic
beyond technicalities, and associated it with the real impulses and
circumstances of human life.[42]