liberty and toleration and French arbitrary government. His
'Discourses on Man,' and other verse of the same kind, are
verse-philosophy of the class of Pope's. The pompously named 'Treatise
on Metaphysics,' 1734, is very much the same in substance if not in
form. The remarks on Pascal's _Pensees_ are unimportant contributions to
the crusade against superstition; the Philosophical Dictionary, 1764, is
a heterogeneous collection of articles with the same object. The _Essai
sur les Moeurs_, 1756, composed not improbably in rivalry with
Montesquieu, contains much acute reflection on particulars, but is
injured by the author's imperfect information as to the subjects of
which he was treating, by his entirely unphilosophical contempt for the
'Dark Ages,' and indeed by the absence of any general conception of
history which can be called philosophical. Voltaire's real importance,
however, in connection with the _philosophe_ movement is to be found,
not in the merit or value of any one of his professedly philosophical
books, but in the fact that all his works, his poems, his plays, his
histories, his romances, his innumerable flying essays and papers of all
sorts, were invariably saturated with its spirit, and helped to
communicate it to others. It cannot be said that Voltaire had any clear
conception of the object which he wished to attain, except in so far as
the famous watchword 'Ecrasez l'Infame' goes. This means not, as has
been erroneously thought, 'crush Christianity,' but 'crush persecuting
superstition.' He was by no means in favour of any political reform,
except as far as private rights were concerned. He would have liked the
exaggerated political privileges of the Church (which enabled it to
persecute dissidents, and inflicted on laymen an unfair share of
taxation) to be revoked, the cruel and irrational procedure of the
French tribunals to be reformed, Church lands to be in great part
secularised, and so forth; but he never seems to have faced the
necessity of connecting these reforms with a radical alteration of the
whole system of government. The sharp point of his ridicule was,
however, always at the service of the aggressive party, especially for
what he had most at heart, the overthrow of dogmatic and traditional
theology and ecclesiasticism. For this purpose, as has been said
already, he was willing to make, and did make, all his works, no matter
of what kind (except a few scattered writings on mathematics and