On the interpretation of Nature

In this work Diderot expounds on his views about nature, evolution, materialism, mathematics, and experimental science.

"[1] Diderot conceives of nature as operating on matter and giving rise to various life forms.

Nature is neutral and blind; she makes no distinction between saints and sinners, and destroys both fools and philosophers.

On the question of evolution, Diderot writes: Just as in the animal and plant kingdoms an individual begins,...grows, endures, perishes, and passes away, could it not be likewise with entire species?

If faith did not teach us that animals come from the hands of the Creator such as we see them, and if it were allowed to have the least doubt of their commencement and their end, might not the philosopher, abandoned to his conjectures, suppose that animality had from all eternity its particular elements, scattered and confounded in the mass of matter; that these elements happened to unite, since it was possible for this to happen; that the embryo formed from these elements passed through an infinity of organizations and developments; that it acquired in succession movement, sensation, ideas, thought, reflection, consciousness, feelings, passions, signs, gestures, articulate sounds, language, laws, sciences, and arts; that millions of years passed between these developments; that perhaps it [the organism] has still further developments to undergo, other additions to receive, now unknown to us;...that it may lose these faculties as it acquired them; that it may forever disappear from nature, or, rather, continue to exist under a form, and with faculties, quite other than those which we notice in it in this moment of time.