"No history is more interesting than the history of philosophers", observed the Journal encyclopédique when presenting Savérien's Histoire des philosophes modernes. It went on: "Men who, with their constant dedication and the power of their genius, lift the veil of prejudice from nature; men who enlighten our souls, raising them up and placing them above the whims of fate where that may find happiness: we can never be reminded too often of such men. But to write their history is much more difficult than writing the history of a conqueror. Battles, sieges, ambitious projects, or some act of mercy that shines out in the course of a barbarous life: all this can be easily depicted. But to succeed in grasping those elements that characterize the simple, uniform, and even obscure life of a sage; to take those delicate nuances that reveal the innermost part of the soul, to follow the wanderings of the mind, to find the fixed point among the feelings and, showing as much courage as skill, reject those opinions that were imposed by fanaticism, envy, or ignorance: this is the task of those who write the history of a philosopher" (JE, 1760, ii/3, p. 3). "How important is the use of the history of philosophy!", observed the Calvinist refugee Paul-Jérémie Bitaubé, a translator of Homer and a member of the Berlin Academy as well as a "foreign affiliate" to the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. "If it is certain that, before arriving at the truth, men stray in various ways, it is extremely important to know the mistakes made by those who preceded them; we see the mistakes made by others, but we might have made them ourselves: mistakes thus help to establish truth. Even more than that: the edifice of the sciences, like those of Egyptian pyramids built by the work of several generations, is the work of the whole of mankind". Hence we the need to use the opinions of the ancients as "terms of reference" and to rescue some truths "from oblivion" (P.-J. Bitaubé, "De l"influence des belles-lettres sur la philosophie", in Histoire de l"Académie Royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres, Année mdcclxvii, Berlin, 1769, p. 490).