product of Diderot's own reasoning. When an author treats us in this way
our confidence in his facts is hopelessly lost. His reasons, however,
remain, and the most striking of these, in the "Letter on the Blind," is
the answer given to one who attempts to prove the existence of God by
pointing out the order found in nature, whence an intelligent Creator is
presumed. In answer to this, the dying Saunderson is made to say: "Let
me believe... that if we were to go back to the birth of things and of
times, and if we should feel matter move and chaos arrange itself, we
should meet a multitude of shapeless beings, instead of a few beings
that were well organized.... I can maintain that these had no stomach,
and those no intestines; that some, to which their stomach, palate, and
teeth seemed to promise duration, have ceased to exist from some vice of
the heart or the lungs; that the abortions were successively destroyed;
that all the faulty combinations of matter have disappeared, and that
only those have survived whose mechanism implied no important
contradiction, and which could live by themselves and perpetuate their
species."[Footnote: Diderot, i. 328.] The step from the idea here
conveyed to that of the struggle for existence and of the survival of
the most fit is not a very long one.

For his "Letter on the Blind," Diderot was imprisoned at Vincennes. The
real cause of this punishment is said to have been a slight allusion in
the "Letter" to the mistress of a minister of state. But this may not
have been the only cause. There occurred about this time one of those
temporary seasons of severity which are necessary under all governments
to meet occasional outbursts of crime, but to which weak and corrupt
governments are liable with capricious frequency. Diderot sturdily
denied the authorship of the "Letter," lying as thoroughly as he had
done in that piece of writing itself, when he invented the name of
Inchlif and forged the ideas of Saunderson. This time there was more