Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary is a series of short essays, hortatory and propagandist, over an enormously wide range of subjects. It was deliberately planned as a revolutionary book and was duly denounced on all sides and described as 'a deplorable monument of the extent to which intelligence and erudition can be abused'. The subjects treated include Abraham, Angel and Anthropophages; Baptism, Beauty and Beasts; Fables, Fraud and Fanaticism; Metempsychosis, Miracles and Moses; all of them exposed to Voltaire's lucid scrutiny, his elegant irony and his passionate love of reason and justice

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