eloquent, by the vehemence of his emotion and the fire of his senses. He
was a master example of sensibility, as Voltaire was a master example
of clear-eyed penetration.
This must not be taken for a rigid piece of mutually exclusive division,
for the edges of character are not cut exactly sharp, as words are.
Especially when any type is intense, it seems to meet and touch its
opposite. Just as Voltaire's piercing activity and soundness of
intelligence made him one of the humanest of men, so Rousseau's
emotional susceptibility endowed him with the gift of a vision that
carried far into the social depths. It was a very early criticism on the
pair, that Voltaire wrote on more subjects, but that Rousseau was the
more profound. In truth one was hardly much more profound than the
other. Rousseau had the sonorousness of speech which popular confusion
of thought is apt to identify with depth. And he had seriousness. If
profundity means the quality of seeing to the heart of subjects,
Rousseau had in a general way rather less of it than the shrewd-witted
crusher of the Infamous. What the distinction really amounts to is that
Rousseau had a strong feeling for certain very important aspects of
human life, which Voltaire thought very little about, or never thought
about at all, and that while Voltaire was concerned with poetry,
history, literature, and the more ridiculous parts of the religious
superstition of his time, Rousseau thought about social justice and duty
and God and the spiritual consciousness of men, with a certain attempt
at thoroughness and system. As for the substance of his thinking, as we
have already seen in the Discourses, and shall soon have an opportunity
of seeing still more clearly, it was often as thin and hollow as if he
had belonged to the company of the epigrammatical, who, after all, have
far less of a monopoly of shallow thinking than is often supposed. The
prime merit of Rousseau, in comparing him with the brilliant chief of
the rationalistic school of the time, is his reverence; reverence for
moral worth in however obscure intellectual company, for the dignity of
human character and the loftiness of duty, for some of those cravings of
the human mind after the divine and incommensurable, which may indeed
often be content with solutions proved by long time and slow experience
to be inadequate, but which are closely bound up with the highest
elements of nobleness of soul.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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