It may be said that even from this side Voltaire was destructive only, and undoubtedly, owing to the circumstances of the time, the destructive side seemed to predominate in his social influence. To say this, however, is not to bring an end to the matter. The truth is that no negative thinking can stop at the negative point. To teach men to hate superstition and injustice is a sure, if an indirect, way of teaching them to seek after their opposites. Voltaire could only shake obscurantist institutions by appealing to man’s love of light, and the love of light, once stirred, leads far. He appealed to reason, and it was reason in Frederick and the others, which had quickened and strengthened the love of good order, that produced the striking reforming spirit which moved through the eighteenth century, until the reaction against French revolutionary violence arrested its progress. It is one of the most difficult questions in all history to determine whether the change from the old order to the new has been damaged or advanced by that most memorable arrest of the work of social renovation in the hands of sovereign and traditional governments, administered by wise statesmen with due regard to traditional spirit; and how far the passionate efforts of those classes, whose only tradition is a tradition of squalor and despair, have driven the possessors of superior material power back into obstructive trepidation. The question is more than difficult, it is in our generation insoluble, because the movement is wholly incomplete. But whether the French outbreak from 1789 to 1794 may prove to have been the starting-point of a new society, or only to have been a detrimental interruption and parent of interruptions to stable movement forwards, we have in either case to admit that there was a most vigorous attempt made in all the chief countries in Europe, between the middle of the century and the fall of the French monarchy, to improve government and to perfect administration; that Frederick of Prussia was the author of the most permanently successful of these endeavours; and that Frederick learnt to break loose from dark usage, to prefer equity of administration, to abandon religious superstition, and to insist on tolerance, from the only effective moral and intellectual masters he ever had, first the French Calvinists, and then the French critical school, with Voltaire for chief. It is true, as we shall presently see, that an important change in the spirit of French writers was marked by the Encyclopædia, which was so much besides being critical. But then this famous work only commenced in the year when Voltaire reached Berlin, and Frederick’s character had received its final shape long before that time.