The end of life did not seem to worry him in the least, however. To begin with, as a disciple of both Montaigne and Seneca, he knew that the only thing one accomplished by dreading the inevitable was ruining the present. Yet more than simply accepting Montaigne’s tenet that “to philosophize is to learn how to die,” Diderot had also cultivated a thoughtful atheist understanding of life and death. In the materialist primer that he worked on well into the 1780s — the Elements of Physiology — he summed up what he believed to be the important things in life: “There is only one virtue, justice; one
...more
