A work of equal merit with the _Philosophie_ are the _Questions_, addressed to the lovers of science, upon the _Encyclopædia_, wherein, in the form of a dictionary, he treats, as the Marquis de Condorcet eloquently describes,
“Successively of theology, grammar, natural philosophy, and literature. At one time he discusses subjects of Antiquity; at another questions of policy, legislation, and public economy. His style, always animated and seductive, clothed these various subjects with a charm hitherto known to himself alone, and which springs chiefly from the licence with which, yielding to his successive emotions, adapting his style less to his subject than to the momentary disposition of his mind, sometimes he spreads ridicule over objects which seem capable of inspiring only horror, and almost instantaneously hurried away by the energy and sensibility of his soul, he vehemently and eloquently exclaims against abuses which he had just before treated with mockery. His anger is excited by false taste; he quickly perceives that his indignation ought to be reserved for interests more important, and he finishes by laughing in his usual way. Sometimes he abruptly leaves a moral or political discussion for a literary criticism, and in the midst of a lesson on taste he pronounces abstract maxims of the profoundest philosophy, or makes a sudden and terrible attack on fanaticism and tyranny.”
It is with his romances that we are here chiefly concerned, since it is in those lighter productions of his genius that he has most especially allowed us to see his opinions upon flesh-eating. In the charming tale of _The Princess of Babylon_, her attendant _Phœnix_ thus accounts to his mistress for the silence of his brethren of the inferior races:--
“It is because men fell into the practice of eating us in place of holding converse with and being instructed by us. The barbarians! Ought they not to have convinced themselves that, having the same organs as they, the same power of feeling, the same wants, the same desires, we have what they call _soul_ as well as themselves, that we are their brethren, and that only the wicked and bad deserve to be cooked and eaten? We are to such a degree your brethren that the Great Being, the Eternal and Creative Being, having made a covenant with men[164], expressly comprised us in the treaty. He forbad _you_ to feed yourselves upon our blood, and _us_ to suck yours. The fables of your Lokman, translated into so many languages, will be an everlasting witness of the happy commerce which you formerly had with us. It is true that there are many women among you who are always talking to their Dogs; but they have resolved never to make any answer, from the time that they were forced by blows of the whip to go hunting and to be the accomplices of the murder of our old common friends, the Deer and the Hares and the Partridges. You have still some old poems in which Horses talk and your coachmen address them every day, but with so much grossness and coarseness, and with such infamous words, that Horses who once loved you now detest you.... The shepherds of the Ganges, born all equal, are the owners of innumerable flocks who feed in meadows that are perpetually covered with flowers. They are never slaughtered there. It is a horrible crime in the country of the Ganges to kill and eat one’s fellows [_semblables_]. Their wool, finer and more brilliant than the most beautiful silk, is the greatest object of commerce in the Orient.”