women is added to the cruelty of Nature. They have been treated like
weak-minded children. There is no sort of vexation which, among
civilised peoples, man cannot inflict upon woman with impunity."[60]

The thought went no further, in Diderot's mind, than this pathetic
ejaculation. He left it to the next generation, to Condorcet and others,
to attack the problem practically; effectively to assert the true theory
that we must look to social emancipation in women, and moral discipline
in men, to redress the physical disadvantages. Meanwhile Diderot
deserves credit for treating the position and character of women in a
civilised society with a sense of reality; and for throwing aside those
faded gallantries of poetic and literary convention, that screen a broad
and dolorous gulf.




CHAPTER IV.

THE NEW PHILOSOPHY.


It is a common prejudice to treat Voltaire as if he had done nothing
save write the Pucelle and mock at Habakkuk. Every serious and
instructed student knows better. Voltaire's popularisation of the
philosophy of Newton (1738) was a stimulus of the greatest importance to
new thought in France. In a chapter of this work he had explained with
his usual matchless terseness and lucidity Berkeley's theory of vision.
The principle of this theory is, as every one knows, that figures,
magnitudes, situations, distances, are not sensations but inferences;