Nor must the influence of intellectual ideas, as bearing on problems which the French Revolution was to force on the attention of the more backward and more oppressed nations of Europe, be underrated. The great French writers of the eighteenth century—Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, and Rousseau—had been deeply impregnated with the ideas of Locke and the English political thinkers of his school. In their different lines they insisted that government existed for the good of the governed, and investigated the origins of government and the relations of man in the social state. It was their speculations which altered the character of absolute monarchy and based its retention on its benevolent purposes; they, too, insisted upon the rights of man to preserve his personal freedom, as long as it did not clash with the maintenance and security of civil society. The great French writers of the eighteenth century exercised by their works a smaller influence on the outbreak and actual course of the French Revolution than has been generally supposed. The causes of the movement were chiefly economical and political, not philosophical or social: its rapid development was due to historical circumstances, and mainly to the attitude of the rest of Europe. But the text-books of its leaders were the works of the French thinkers of the eighteenth century, and if their doctrines had little actual influence in bringing about the Revolution, they influenced its development and the extension of its principles throughout Europe. It is curious to contrast the opinions of the great French writers of the middle of the eighteenth century, whose arguments mainly affected the general conceptions of man living in society, that is, of government, with the views advocated by the great German writers of the end of the century, who concentrated their attention upon man in his individual capacity for culture and self-improvement. Schiller, Goethe, Kant, and Herder were, further, more cosmopolitan than German. The problems of man and his intellectual and artistic development proved more attractive to the great German thinkers than the difficulties presented by the economical, social, and political diversities of different classes of society. Goethe, for instance, understood the signification of the French Revolution, and was much interested in its effects on the human race, but he cared very little about its impression on Germany. [Sidenote: Morality and Religion in the eighteenth century.]