In his old age Goethe, speaking of Voltaire, uses the words "a universal source of light." But as a young man he was repelled by "the factious dishonesty of Voltaire, and his perversion of so many worthy subjects." "He would never have done," says Goethe, "with degrading religion and the sacred books, for the sake of injuring priestcraft, as they called it." Goethe, indeed, did not deny a use to the spirit of negation. Mephistopheles lives and works. Yet he lives and works as the unwilling servant of the Lord, and the service he renders is to provoke men from indolence to activity. Into the influence of Rousseau, on the contrary, and into the general movement of feeling to which Rousseau belonged, Goethe in his youth was caught, almost inevitably; and he abandoned himself to it for a time, it might seem without restraint. Yet Goethe differed from Rousseau as profoundly as he differed from Voltaire. Rousseau's undisciplined sensibility, morbidly excited by the harshness or imagined harshness of his fellows, by bodily torment, by broodings in solitude, became at last one quivering mass of disease. "No tragedy had ever a fifth act so squalid." What a contrast to the closing scenes of Goethe's life in that house of his, like a modest temple of the Muses, listening to Plutarch read aloud by his daughter-in-law, or serenely active, "ohne Hast aber ohne Rast" (without haste, but without rest), in widening his sympathies with men or enlarging his knowledge of nature. How was this? Why did the ways part so widely for Rousseau and for Goethe? The young creator of 'Werther' may seem to have started on his career as a German Rousseau. In reality, 'Werther' expressed only a fragment of Goethe's total self. A reserve force of will and an intellect growing daily in clearness and in energy would not permit him to end as Rousseau ended. In 'Götz von Berlichingen' there goes up a cry for freedom; it presents the more masculine side of that spirit of revolt from the bonds of the eighteenth century, that "return to nature," which is presented in its more feminine aspects by 'Werther.' But by degrees it became evident to Goethe that the only true ideal of freedom is a liberation not of the passions, not of the intellect, but of the whole man; that this involves a conciliation of all the powers and faculties within us; and that such a conciliation can be effected only by degrees, and by steadfast toil.