Gather knowledge to change the common way of thinking.
Sensibility is treated as a general property of matter, inert in a stone and active in an animal; thought then arises from organized living matter, without any immaterial soul being needed to explain it.
In the conversation that opens D’Alembert’s Dream, a marble statue ground to powder, mixed with humus and eaten as plants becomes, in principle, sensitive flesh.
The Encyclopédie presents knowledge as a connected whole in which articles send the reader to one another; these links reveal unexpected relations and can quietly overturn prejudices that no one dared attack openly.
A deferential article on a religious subject can send the reader, by a cross-reference, to another entry that undermines it.
The Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage contrasts the code of nature, the civil code and the religious code; misery and hypocrisy grow when laws forbid what nature permits and contradict one another.
Orou, a Tahitian, asks a ship’s chaplain why a vow of chastity should forbid what harms no one and gives life.
The great actor does not feel what he portrays: cool judgment and close observation let him reproduce, night after night, signs of emotion that move the audience more surely than real tears.
An actor and his wife who detested each other played a lovers’ scene from Molière while trading insults under their breath, and the audience applauded.