Rousseau's first philosophical work was occasioned by the offer of a prize on the part of a provincial academy for a thesis on the problem "Whether the restoration of the sciences and arts has contributed to purify manners?" "The question pierced Rousseau's soul like a flash of lightning." He felt (he tells us) that he saw a new world, and felt a new man; he saw no longer the world of culture, of science, of philosophy (which he felt to be as artificial as it was ineffective and vain), but the _real_ world of personality, of living feeling, of the inner life. It flashed upon him that it was the primitive and elementary feelings, the great and simple relations of life, which gave to existence its value. The rest was superficial and irrelevant. ROUSSEAU AND RELIGION.--The intellectualist is ever the aristocrat.[25] Voltaire and the philosophers of the "enlightenment" spoke of the unenlightened multitude as _la canaille_. Its beliefs were superstitions. Rousseau knew that the things which men have in common are more vital than those in which they differ, and the primitive instincts of the race which we all share, are the most important part of our nature. Among these primitive instincts, indomitable and irrepressible, is the instinct of religion. Thus Rousseau transferred the religious problem from the sphere of external observation and explanation of the world (to which the rationalists had promoted or degraded it), back to inner personal feeling. This marked an epoch in the philosophy of religion. Moreover, Rousseau was able to write in a convincing fashion of religion, because (and here he differed from the intellectuals of his day) he had personal experience of what it meant. Hence wherever he alludes to religion his language has the ring of sincerity; it is always spontaneous, and sometimes it is passionate and poetic. His religious experience took the form of nature-mysticism, undogmatic (because non-intellectualist), but rich and deep: "I can find no more worthy adoration of God than the silent admiration which the contemplation of His works begets in us, and which cannot be expressed by any prescribed acts.... In my room I pray seldomer and more coldly; but the sight of a beautiful landscape moves me, I cannot tell why. I once read of a certain bishop, who, when visiting in his diocese, encountered an old woman whose only prayers consisted in a sigh 'Oh!' The bishop said to her, 'Good mother, always pray like that; your prayer is worth more than ours.' My prayer is of that kind."[26]