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His writings are mostly lost but his teaching survives in the Roman poet Lucretius’s masterpiece, De rerum natura, a poem which Diderot often quotes or alludes to, most prominently perhaps in his epigraph to the Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature: ‘Quae sunt in luce tuemur/ E tenebris’. Epicurus, forty years younger than Aristotle, taught that everything in nature is made from atoms and from the fortuitous ways in which they combine to create different beings: whether there is any role for divine powers in this is a moot point, but ethics are important (virtue and happiness being interchangeable). 1 As this double quotation which is also a refutation amply demonstrates, Diderot is writing in a thriving and self-aware tradition, one which goes back to Ancient Greece, and in so doing, he is also taking sides in similarly long-lived arguments—about the operation of nature, about infinity, about the existence or otherwise of immaterial beings: his particular tradition is that of Epicureanism. The sorts of concepts and frameworks he was using were already present in Aristotle’s Physics, which discusses nature, change, time, continuity, and finalism, and also in the Metaphysics, which thinks about man, desire, knowledge, the senses (in particular, sight), animals, and memory, asserting that knowledge is based on perception, or, as Diderot put it in the Réfutation d’Helvétius, crediting Aristotle for being the first ever to say it: ‘il n’y a rien dans l’entendement qui n’ été antérieurement dans la sensation’, although Diderot’s formulation is a direct French translation of the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas ’s version, ‘nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu’. Denis Diderot’s subjects of material world and embodied mind were not new when he came to write about them in the Eléménts de physiologie in the 1770s, nor had they been new when he had written about them before, in his Pensées philosophiques (published 1746), Lettre sur les aveugles (published 1749), Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature (published 1753), Rêve de d’Alembert (drafted 1769), Principes philosophiques sur la matière et le mouvement (written 1770), Observations sur Hemsterhuis and Réfutation d’Helvétius (both written 1773), or of course in the many articles he contributed to the Encyclopédie (published 1751â€∶5).