ABSTRACT
The dialogue, as a form of exposition, has this disadvantage, that it stimulates the pugnacious, or, more politely speaking, the chivalrous instinct in human nature. One of the paradoxes of Diderot’s “Paradoxe” is that it may be said almost literally of the second speaker that as a sheep before the shearers he is dumb. In a rash moment, indeed, Diderot is actually betrayed into defining “sensibility,” and at once the debate is practically at an end. Diderot’s sensibility, however, is not to be bound by a definition. Every one’s experience must be sufficient to assure him that only a certain range of emotions, and these of the tender or pathetic order, has any power of passing through imitation into physical actuality. One cannot avoid an occasional suspicion that Diderot’s attack upon sensibility is in fact a covert satire upon the French classic tragedy. .
