Barren and uninviting is the waste of politics in Switzerland at this period of our story, and it seemed as if the republic was quietly crumbling out of active existence. But the literary and scientific renaissance runs through it all like a fertilizing stream, and saves it from utter sterility. Feeble though it was politically, Switzerland yet produced on all sides men of mark in science, in literature, in philosophy. Time would fail to tell of them all, and we must be content to follow briefly the three great currents of the movement, which centred respectively around Geneva, Zurich, and the Helvetic Society. The two former of these may indeed be said to form a part (and an important part) of the great general awakening of the eighteenth century, an awakening beginning with the French "period of enlightenment," and crowned by the era of German classicism. Yet the French movement itself was based on English influence. Just as, at the Restoration, England had copied the France of Louis Quatorze, so France in return drew intellectual strength from the England of the second half of the eighteenth century--England was then vastly ahead of the Continent--and brought forth the "_siècle de la philosophie_." Of the great Frenchmen who learned in the school of English thought, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire stand foremost, and of these again Voltaire occupies indisputably the highest place. Voltaire was not only the founder, but the very heart of the philosophic school which reared its front against the statutes and traditions and pretensions of the Church. He had drunk deeply of the spirit of Newton and of Locke during his exile in England, and spread abroad their views and discoveries, assisted by his genius, his sparkling wit, his lashing satire, and his graceful style. None equally with him naturalized on the Continent English free thought and English rationalism. Voltaire and Rousseau were as two great beacons planted in the century guiding as they would the course of philosophy. Both were champions of personal freedom and religious tolerance in a benighted and down-trodden age. But the influence of the two men worked in very different ways, for in the one it was based on the head, in the other on the heart. Voltaire, the realist, by his venomous and even reckless satires on the Church and on Christianity, dealt a severe blow to religion at large. Rousseau, the idealist, plunged into the mystery of good and evil, and was wrecked by the very impracticability of his system.