70 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts^ and Letters. 
mentions him repeatedly in his Lettres sur les Anglais or Lettres 
Philosophiques. Diderot reproduced his Inquiry concerning Vir¬ 
tue in Essai sur le Merite et la Virtue (1745 and 1751); and in 
1769 a French translation of the whole of Shaftesbury’s works, the 
letters included, together with a French introduction of twenty-six 
pages, appeared in Geneva. Herder in 1794 said that this “vir¬ 
tuoso of humanity” had signally influenced the best heads of the 
eighteenth century.^® Leibnitz, Mendelssohn, and Wieland drank 
of his waters. He began to be turned into German in 1738, and in 
1768 and 1776-1779 translations of his Characteristics appeared. 
Here then we have an international as well as a national char¬ 
acter. In order to determine wherein lay his peculiar power and 
originality, it would be necessary first to look into the ethical and 
theological dogmas of his predecessors. When their thoughts had 
been compared with his thoughts, and their ways with his ways, we 
could move with some certainty into the literature of the century 
in an attempt to see to what extent it took color from his style and 
his ideas. But this, which has been done elsewhere,^® gains force 
in the light of the bibliographical facts just rehearsed. Shaftes¬ 
bury becomes at once an originator and a propagandist, whose 
ideas, regarded both as toxic and as therapeutic, were widely dis¬ 
seminated and increasingly accepted in the century of “prose and 
reason”. 
Beloit College. 
See Briefe zur Beforderung der Eumdnitat, Briefe 32, 33. 
See notes 4 and 8 supra. 
