What is compelling about Diderot’s retelling of his friend’s life is not the fact that this abandoned child grew up to become famous, but that the animal called d’Alembert — like Falconet’s statue — is no more than a temporary assemblage of atoms arising from, and soon to return to, a bubbling, material universe.19 The process, as Diderot explains it, is as simple as it is inevitable: “[T]he formation of a man or animal need refer only to material factors, the successive stages of which would be an inert body, a sentient being, a thinking being, and then a being who can resolve the problem of
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