Like many of his fellow philosophes, Diderot harbored a great deal of scorn for the “frivolities” of the scholastic method, which involved the often tortured application of Aristotelian ideas to Church dogma. While details of these years are scant, it is quite easy to imagine how this increasingly skeptical thinker would have become exasperated among a sea of aspiring ecclesiastics, all engaged in scholasticism’s impenetrable debates on the distinctness of substantial forms, the different types of matter, the immateriality of the soul, and the final causes of all bodies. Voltaire best summed
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