must call a total bricolage with ideas borrowed from German and English examples30 but with French questions and identity. The fact that the only book Diderot took with him during his incarceration was Milton’s Paradise Lost31 (1667) is very symbolic, as Milton had been censored and imprisoned for his progressist ideas, nearly one century ago. Diderot seems to say to his prosecutors, you might put me in prison but you cannot stop ideas. In Paradise Lost (1667) we find the following words:
… and in his hand He took the golden Compasses prepar’d In God's Eternal store, to circumscribe This Universe, and all created things: One foot he center’d, and the other turn’d Round through the vast profunditie obscure, And said, thus farr extend, thus farr thy bounds, This be thy just Circumference, O World..32
This interpretation of the world in which all things are created by a God who draws the human limits goes against the Enlightenment’s philosophy expressed in the Architecture, Masonry plate’s tableau vivant: God is substituted by the thinker, the architect who circumscribes the world with his compass at the centre of the illustration (Img.11). The tableau vivant is a visual embodiment of Milton’s Paradise Lost33 (1667). The Encyclopaedia wants to circumscribe the entire Human knowledge but fails to do so. The Map of The System of Human Knowledge grid is rigid in its structure. It sets limits between knowledge domains; though, there seems to be leakages, moments of tacit knowledge, and one must say these obscure knowledge areas are intangible in the encyclopaedic plates; yet, they are primordial in the understanding of practical knowledge.
30. Encyclopedia: Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia or A universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (London, 1728). 31 . John Milton, Paradise Lost. (London : Penguin, 1996). 32. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 147. 33. John Milton, Paradise Lost.
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