Voltaire and Rousseau are often spoken of as though they were fellow-workers, and are associated in many minds as sharing the same convictions. Nothing can be more untrue. They were radically opposite in the very structure of their minds, and their followers and admirers are equally different. If all men can be divided into Platonists and Aristotelians, they may be in like manner classified as those who prefer Voltaire to Rousseau, and _vice versa_. Both were indeed theists, and both opposed to the popular religion of their time. Both were brilliant writers, masters of the French language, listened to by the people, and with a vast popularity. Both were more or less persecuted for their religious heresies. So far they resemble each other. But these are only external resemblances; radically and inwardly they were polar opposites. What attracted one repelled the other. Voltaire was a man of the world, fond of society and social pleasures; the child of his time, popular, a universal favorite. Rousseau shrank from society, hated its fashions, did not enjoy its pleasures, and belonged to another epoch than the eighteenth century. Rousseau believed in human nature, and thought that if we could return to our natural condition the miseries of life would cease. Voltaire despised human nature; he forever repeated that the majority of men were knaves and fools. Rousseau distrusted education and culture as they are commonly understood; but to Voltaire's mind they were the only matters of any value,--all that made life worth living. Rousseau was more like Pascal than like Voltaire; far below Pascal, no doubt, in fixed moral principles and ascetic virtue. Yet he resembled him in his devotion to ideas, his enthusiasm for some better day to come. Both were out of place in their own time; both were prophets crying in the wilderness. Put Voltaire between Pascal and Rousseau, and it would be something like the tableau of Goethe between Basedow and Lavater. "Prophete rechts, Propliete links, Das Weltkind in der Mitte."