=The Encyclopædists.=[49] In modern times the French have been unequaled in their encyclopædias and dictionaries. The famous _Encyclopédie_ or _Dictionnaire Raisonné_ was what its name implies. It was published in seventeen volumes during the years from 1751 to 1766, and had an addition of eleven volumes of plates (1766–1772). Thirty thousand copies were printed in the first instance, and in 1774 it was translated into four foreign languages. The moving spirit and editor-in-chief was Diderot (1713–1784) and his chief assistant d’Alembert. They were assisted by many notable French writers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Grimm, von Holbach, etc., who wrote separate articles. There was a host of unsolicited contributors. Two years before the _Encyclopædia_, Buffon had begun to publish his _Natural History_ in forty-three volumes, the last volume appearing in 1789. The _Encyclopædia_ had two predecessors,――Bacon’s chapter on _Experimental History_ and Chambers’s _Encyclopædia_. The articles in the _Encyclopædia_ were presumably scientific explanations alphabetically arranged, such as would appear in any work of the sort. Frequently they were disguised attacks upon existing French institutions. Often a detailed description, as on the subject “Taxes” or “God,” would reveal existing French conditions. As Comte says, “The _Encyclopædia_ furnished a rallying ground for the most divergent efforts without any sacrifice of essential independence, and made a mass of incoherent speculation appear like a coherent system.” The two successive periods of the movement of the Enlightenment unite in the _Encyclopædia_ against the common enemy of authority. There are two things to be noticed in connection with the _Encyclopædia_: the men who wrote it went much further toward individualism and skepticism than did Voltaire; and the _Encyclopædia_ reached a wider circle and different classes than did the works of Voltaire. Instead of the deism of Voltaire we find contributions from skeptics, atheists, and materialists,――men who are becoming more negative in their opinions as the century advances. The thorough-going agnosticism of the Encyclopædist group reached a point where it ceased to be a philosophy. Diderot had said that the first step in philosophy is unbelief, and his associates went so far as to think that unbelief is all of philosophy. Their extreme sensationalism, naturalism, and materialism sometimes appeared in disguised form in the _Encyclopædia_, but more often in independent writings. The _Encyclopædia_ became the source of information for everybody. It spread information among all classes and undermined their reverence for French institutions. The result was that what had been sacred to the court and the laborer because it was traditional, now became the object of scorn to all.