 Aside from the early translation projects discussed in Part I, Diderot’s first philosophical writings, such as the Pensées philosophiques (1746, expanded in 1762) and the Promenade du sceptique (1747), play a complicated rhetorical game with deism (rather than overt materialism), skepticism, and natural religion. In the Pensées, Diderot even toys with a “design argument” using the classic example of the complexity of a butterfly’s wing (§ XVIII), although he seems to retract this a few years later, in the Apologie de l’Abbé de Prades (1752), writing that “I thought the wing of a butterfly brought me closer to divinity than a volume of metaphysics” (DPV IV: 361, translations always ours unless otherwise indicated). Even if he is not yet a materialist in these works, Diderot does speak of the necessity to “widen” or “enlarge” God (Pensées philosophiques, § XXVI), a phrase which has fairly strong Spinozist and/or deist overtones.