To Voltaire history offered no direct lesson. His belief in the supremacy of reason could only bring him to despise the incoherency of historical facts through which very often the rationality of history displays itself. His clearness of sight limited his outlook to the present, and this focussing of life was an abstraction which prevented him from realising the historical forces at play in the political and social circumstances of his country. His religiousness is strongly tinged with utilitarianism, as he held, like many Englishmen had done, that the purpose of Churches was to act as moral check to the lower class. All these fathers of Liberalism and Radicalism are more aristocrats than democrats. Their worship of culture and reason makes for political tyranny and a social system of caste as distinct as that of the Indians. Hence it evoked a reaction, and this found its spokesman in Jean Jacques Rousseau. People were tired of dry reason and its negativeness, they felt parched and longed for affirmative works; he came out, a man of genius, devoid of the mathematical and classical grounding of the others; entirely led by feelings and, alternately, by the most generous and lowest impulses he was a democrat. Until Rousseau appeared the writers on political matters had been either followers of the _jus naturalism_ or of the constitutionalist schools. In Rousseau two streams mingle their waters, for he is an artist as well as the most original thinker France had after Bayle. As an artist he is the spokesman of his generation, and it is as such that his contemporaries took to him as they did in spite of his disreputable personal life. As a thinker, although the statement may sound very daring, he ought to share with Berkeley and Hume the honour of being considered as one who made the way for Kant. His were mere intuitions; they could not be more as he had no scientific or philosophic training. But as Professor Saitta has pointed out, his reaction against rationalism transcends very much what was grasped by most of his readers and even sometimes by recent critics. His passionate claim for the important part played by sentiment in the life of man and by all irrational forces, original though it is, is the impulsive reaction of an artist, whereas by the time he wrote, Italy had already had for some quarter of a century the works of a man who had claimed, with a speculative genius far superior to his, the acknowledgment of all the different activities of mind. And Giambattista Vico had been a jurist and an historian as well as a philosopher. So that his notion of Man was capable of taking in, not only his rational activity, or his sense relation to the exterior world, or his sentimental life, or his religious position, as rationalism, empiricism, sensism and mysticism had respectively done; but the whole range of man’s spiritual manifestations. Therefore, is it that Rousseau’s greatest intuitions