Chapter 27 26. Encyclopedia

There are three different schools of politicians.The doctrine taught by the first type goes something like this: "Our planet is full of poor ignorant people who can't think for themselves, and when they have to make their own decisions, they go out of their minds and are the first to be lobbied. Canvass politicians lead astray. It will not only be a good thing for the world if these common people are ruled by someone who understands their ideas, but they will also have a lot of fun because they don't have to ask parliament and the ballot box I can devote myself to my workshop, my children, my cheap car and my vegetable garden."

The adherents of this school became emperors, sultans, magnates, chieftains, archbishops, and they seldom saw unions as an essential part of civilization.They worked hard, building roads, barracks, cathedrals and prisons. Advocates of the second school of political thought have the following arguments: "Ordinary man is the noblest invention of God, and God has the power to be a ruler. He has supernatural wisdom, prudence, and noble motives. Seeking out his own interests, he wants to achieve world domination through a committee that is notoriously slow to deal with some of the country's thorniest problems. So people should leave governing to a few trusted friends , they don’t have to worry about raising their families all the time, so they can spend all their time doing good for people.”

It goes without saying that the logical advocates of this splendid ideal were oligarchies, dictators, first consuls, and protectors of the nobility. They worked like hell, building roads and barracks, but turning churches into prisons. But the third type of people is the people.They observe people with serious scientific eyes and recognize their true colors.They like the good qualities in man and understand his limitations.Through long-term observation of past events, they believe that ordinary people can indeed do their best to do the right thing so long as they are not influenced by emotion or selfishness.But they hold no false illusions about themselves.They know that the natural process of growth is very slow, and that it is as useless to try to hasten the growth of men's wisdom as to hasten the progress of the tide or the seasons.They were rarely invited to sit in a state's government, but every time they had the opportunity to turn their ideas into action, they began building roads, improving prisons, and spending the rest of their funds on schools and colleges.These staunch optimists believe that a proper education will gradually undo some of the world's legacy of age-old ills, and that such causes should be vigorously supported.

As a final step toward this ideal, they usually write an encyclopedia. Like many other things that require great intellect and extreme endurance, the first encyclopedic books originated in China.The Kangxi Emperor of China wanted to win the favor of his subjects with an encyclopedia of 5,020 volumes. The first to introduce the encyclopedia to the West was Perliny, who was content with thirty-seven volumes. The first fifteen hundred years of the Christian age produced nothing of value in terms of enlightenment.A fellow St. Augustine, an African, Felix Capela, wasted many years writing a book that he thought was a treasure trove of knowledge.To make it easy for people to remember the many interesting things he offered, he took the form of poetry.It was a mass of horrific misrepresentation, remembered by eighteen generations after the Middle Ages, who accepted it as the final word of literature, music, and science.

Two hundred years later, a bishop named Isidore in Seville wrote a brand new encyclopedia. Since then, the encyclopedia has grown at a rate of two every hundred years.What became of these books I have no idea.Bookworms (the most useful of poultry) probably acted as our porters.If all these books were preserved, there would be no place for anything else on earth. Finally, in the first half of the eighteenth century, Europe experienced a great intellectual movement, and the writers of the encyclopedias entered the real heaven.These books, as now, were usually written by impoverished scholars who lived on eight dollars a week, not enough to buy paper and ink.England is especially the great country of this literature, and it was only natural that John Mills, an Englishman living in Paris, think of translating into French the successful Universal Dictionary of Ephraim Chambers in order to convey it to the subjects of King Louis. Tout his work and get some money out of it.For this purpose he teamed up with a professor in Germany and then dealt with the king's printer, Rebeleton, to do the actual publishing.To make a long story short, Rebeleton discovered this little way of making money, deliberately blackmailed his associates, and after driving Mills and the Teutonic doctor away, continued to pirate for himself.He called his forthcoming book The Universal Encyclopedic Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, and sent out a series of attractive newsletters that would attract customers, and pre-orders filled quickly.

Then he hired a philosophy professor from a French secondary school as editor-in-chief, bought a lot of paper, and sat and waited for the results.Unfortunately, waiting for a great encyclopedia is not as simple as Rebeleton's wishful thinking.The professor got the notes, but it wasn't the article, and the bookers clamored to get the first volume, and everything was messed up. In this critical moment, Rebeleton recalled the popular "Universal Dictionary of Medicine" published a few months ago.He found the editor of the medical volume and hired him on the spot.In this way, a professional encyclopedia becomes an "encyclopedia".This new editor was Denis Diderot, and what had been a laborious and uninteresting job turned into one of the most important contributions to mankind in the eighteenth century.

Diderot was thirty-seven years old, and his life was neither easy nor happy.He refused to do what a decent young Frenchman should do, he refused to go to university.As soon as he left his Jesuit teacher, he went to Paris to become a man of letters.After a short period of starvation and coldness (according to the same logic of starvation for two as for one), he married a woman who turned out to be terribly pious, an unreasonable shrew, the kind of Couplings are not as rare as some might think.But he had to support her, and he had to do all sorts of odd jobs, editing books ranging from An Inquiry into Virtue and Value to the infamous revision of Boccaccio's.In his heart, however, the Beyler student remained loyal to his free thoughts.It was not long before the government (like governments in hard times) found this unobtrusive young author, who was seriously skeptical of the creation story described in the first chapter of Genesis, to be a serious heretic.As a result, Diderot was sent to the prison of Vincennes, where he was kept under strict confinement for three months.

It was not until after his release from prison that Diderot became a servant of Rebeleton.Diderot was the most eloquent man of his time.He saw an opportunity to excel in this life's work.Merely revising Chambers' old profile is downgrading.At that time, it was in a vigorous and active period of thought.Great!Rebeleton's encyclopedia was to have up-to-date information on every conceivable subject, with articles written by the most authoritative men. Diderot's blood boiled, and he actually persuaded Rebeleton to give him carte blanche, unlimited time.Then he made a list of the people who worked with him, took out a large sheet of paper, and started writing: "A: the first letter of the alphabet," etc., etc.

Twenty years later, he wrote Z, and the job was done.However, very few people can work under such extremely unfavorable conditions.By the time Rebeleton hired Diderot, his original capital had been increased, but he never paid the editor more than five hundred dollars a year.As for those who are supposed to help, well, we all know what that's like.Either they were busy at the time, or they had to wait until next month, or they had to visit their grandmother in the country.So, despite the invectives of church and government officials that made him miserable, he had to do most of the work himself.

Editions of his encyclopedia are now very rare.Not because many people want it, but because many people want to get rid of it.A book that a century and a half ago was swallowed up by the roar as a poisonous form of radicalism reads today as flat and innocuous as an organ fed to a baby.But to the more conservative elements of the eighteenth-century clergy, the book sounded a clarion call to destruction, anarchy, atheism, and disorder. Of course, there was the usual accusation that the editor-in-chief was an enemy of society and religion, a dissolute villain who believed neither in God nor in the State nor in the ties of the holy family.But Paris in 1770 was just a country on a grand scale, well known to all.Diderot not only advocated that the purpose of life should be "doing good and seeking the truth", but also truly practiced his motto. He opened the door to the hungry and worked twenty hours a day for mankind. Apart from a writing desk and a stack of papers, nothing in return was ever asked.It is not easy to attack him from this point of view, since this pure, simple, hard-working man was a model of those virtues which prelates and kings conspicuously lack.So the authorities went out of their way to get him into trouble, setting up a network of spies who were always poking around his office, raiding Diderot's home, confiscating his notes or sometimes banning him from work altogether.

None of these obstacles dampened his enthusiasm, however.The work was finally completed, and the Encyclopedia was indeed completed as Diderot expected.Those who already had a certain sense of a new era, knew that the world was in dire need of a complete overhaul, and that the Encyclopedia was their turning point. It looks like I'm exaggerating a little bit about the editor's real image.But he was still Diderot after all, dressed in rags, dancing with joy every week when his wise friend, Baron Holbazie, invited him to have a full meal.Will he be very satisfied when four thousand copies are sold out?He was a contemporary of Rousseau, D'Alembert, Turgot, Helvetius, Volgne, Condorcet, and many others, all of whom enjoyed a much higher reputation than himself.But these good men would not have been able to exert their influence without the Encyclopedia.This is more than a book, it is a social and economic programme.It tells us what the leaders of the time were really thinking.It spelled out the ideas that soon came to rule the world.It is a defining moment in human history. Those with ears and eyes who knew that France had come to a critical juncture, and that some drastic measure must be taken to avert impending doom, yet these ears and eyes refused to do so.They were all very stubborn in their insistence that peace could only be maintained by the strict enforcement of an obsolete set of Merovingian laws.The two parties were evenly matched at the time, and both remained the same, which led to strange complications.France played a conspicuous part in the defense of Liberty, wrote a most gracious letter to Mr. George Washington (a Masonic), and arranged pleasant weekend parties for Minister Mr. Benjamin Franklin, others Call Franklin an "agnostic" and we call him a plain atheist.The same country that stands on the shores of the Atlantic and is the enemy of every kind of progress shows an unbiased sense of democracy only when it condemns philosophers and peasants to the same life of monotonous poverty. In the end, all of that changed. However, the way of change was unexpected. This struggle was to remove the spiritual and social barriers of non-imperial people, but it was not the slaves themselves who participated in the struggle.It was the activity of a disinterested few, whom the Protestants hated as much as the Catholic oppressors hated them.The only hope for those who are selfless is to expect that all honest people will go to heaven. Defenders of the cause of tolerance in the eighteenth century seldom belonged to a particular sect.For personal convenience, they sometimes took part in ostensible religious activities that drove the gendarmes away from their desks.However, in terms of inner activities, they might as well be said to be living in Athens in the fourth century BC or in the age of Confucius in China. They often regret not having the awe that most of their contemporaries have for all kinds of things, seeing it as a harmless but childish relic of the past. They paid little attention to the history of the ancient peoples, and for some curious reason men in the West singled out some records from the history of the Babylonians, Egyptians, Hittites, and Chaldeans as an act of morality and custom. guide.But the true disciples of the master Socrates listened only to their own conscience, regardless of the consequences, and lived without fear in a world that had long since become docile.