A great number of excellent and pointed half-truths have been uttered
by various persons in illustration of all these contrasts. The
philosophy of Voltaire, for instance, is declared to be that of the
happy, while Rousseau is the philosopher of the unhappy. Voltaire steals
away their faith from those who doubt, while Rousseau strikes doubt into
the mind of the unbeliever. The gaiety of the one saddens, while the
sadness of the other consoles. If we pass from the marked divergence in
tendencies, which is imperfectly hinted at in such sayings as these, to
the divergence between them in all the fundamental conditions of
intellectual and moral life, then the variation which divided the
revolutionary stream into two channels, flowing broadly apart through
unlike regions and climates down to the great sea, is intelligible
enough. Voltaire was the arch-representative of all those elements in
contemporary thought, its curiosity, irreverence, intrepidity,
vivaciousness, rationality, to which, as we have so often had to say,
Rousseau's temperament and his Genevese spirit made him profoundly
antipathetic. Voltaire was the great high priest, robed in the dazzling
vestments of poetry and philosophy and history, of that very religion of
knowledge and art which Rousseau declared to be the destroyer of the
felicity of men. The glitter has faded away from Voltaire's philosophic
raiment since those days, and his laurel bough lies a little leafless.
Still this can never make us forget that he was in his day and
generation one of the sovereign emancipators, because he awoke one
dormant set of energies, just as Rousseau presently came to awake
another set. Each was a power, not merely by virtue of some singular
preeminence of understanding or mysterious unshared insight of his own,
but for a far deeper reason. No partial and one-sided direction can
permanently satisfy the manifold aspirations and faculties of the human
mind in the great average of common men, and it is the common average of
men to whom exceptional thinkers speak, whom they influence, and by whom
they are in turn influenced, depressed, or buoyed up, just as a painter
or a dramatist is affected. Voltaire's mental constitution made him
eagerly objective, a seeker of true things, quivering for action,
admirably sympathetic with all life and movement, a spirit restlessly
traversing the whole world. Rousseau, far different from this, saw in
himself a reflected microcosm of the outer world, and was content to
take that instead of the outer world, and as its truest version. He made
his own moods the premisses from which he deduced a system of life for
humanity, and so far as humanity has shared his moods or some parts of
them, his system was true, and has been accepted. To him the bustle of
the outer world was only a hindrance to that process of self-absorption
which was his way of interpreting life. Accessible only to interests of
emotion and sense, he was saved from intellectual sterility, and made
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