affected only the possibilities of ontological knowledge, leaving the grounds of faith on the one hand, and practical conduct on the other, exactly where they were. His intense feeling for actualities would draw Voltaire irresistibly to the writer who, in his judgment, closed the gates of the dreamland of metaphysics, and banished the vaulting ambition of a priori certainties, which led nowhere and assured nothing. Voltaire’s keen practical instinct may well have revealed to him that men were most likely to attribute to the great social problem of the improvement of mankind its right supremacy, when they had ceased to concentrate intellectual effort on the insoluble; and Locke went a long way towards showing how insoluble those questions were, on which, as it chanced, the most strenuous efforts of the intellect of Europe since the decline of theology had been concentrated. That he should have acquired more scientific views either upon the origin of ideas, or the question whether the soul always thinks, or upon the reason why an apple falls to the ground, or why the planets remain in their orbits, was on the whole very much less important for Voltaire, than a profound and very vital sentiment which was raised to supreme prominence in his mind, by the spectacle of these vast continents of knowledge newly discovered by the adventurous yet sure explorers of English thought. This sentiment was a noble faith, none the less firm because it was so passionate, in the ability of the relative and practical understanding to reach truth; a deep-rooted reverence for it, as a majestic power bearing munificent and unnumbered gifts to mankind. Hence the vivacity of the annotations which about this time (1728) Voltaire affixed to Pascal’s famous Thoughts, and which were regarded at that time as the audacious carpings of a shallow poet against a profound philosopher. They were in truth the protest of a lively common sense against a strained, morbid, and often sophistical, misrepresentation of human nature and human circumstance. Voltaire shot a penetrative ray through the clouds of doubt, out of which Pascal had made an apology for mysticism. Even if there were no direct allusions to Locke, as there are, we should know from whom the writer had learnt the art of insisting on the relativity of propositions, reducing them to definable terms,[41] and being very careful against those slippery unobserved transitions from metaphor to reality, and from a term used in its common sense to the same term in a transcendental sense, by which Pascal brought the seeming contradictions of life, and its supposed pettiness, into a light as oppressively glaring as it was artificial. ‘These pretended oppositions that you call contradictions are necessary ingredients in the composition of man, who is, like the rest of nature, what he is bound to be.’[42] And where is the wise man who would be full of despair because he cannot find out the exact constitution of his thought,