taire, there can be little doubt, never designed a social revolution,
being in this the representative of the method of Hobbes. His single
object was to reinstate the understanding in its full rights, to
emancipate thought, to extend knowledge, to erect the standard of
critical common-sense. He either could not see, or else, as one
sometimes thinks, he closes his eyes and refuses for his part to see,
that it was impossible to revolutionize the spiritual basis of belief
without touching the social forms, which were inseparably connected with
the old basis by the strong bonds of time and a thousand fibres of
ancient association and common interest. Rousseau began where Voltaire
left off. He informs us that, in the days when his character was
forming, nothing which Voltaire wrote escaped him, and that the
_Philosophical Letters_ (that is, the Letters on the English), though
assuredly not the writer's best work, were what first attracted him to
study, and implanted a taste which never afterward became extinct. The
correspondence between Voltaire and the Prince of Prussia, afterward the
great Frederick, inspired Rousseau with a passionate desire to learn how
to compose with elegance, and to imitate the coloring of so fine an
author.[32] Thus Voltaire, who was eighteen years his elder, gave this
extraordinary genius his first productive impulse. But a sensibility of
temperament, to which perhaps there is no parallel in the list of
prominent men, impelled Rousseau to think, or rather to feel, about the
concrete wrongs and miseries of men and women, and not the abstract
rights of their intelligence. Hence the two great revolutionary schools,
the school which appealed to sentiment, and the school which appealed to
intelligence. The Voltairean principles of the strictest political
moderation and of literary common-sense, negative, merely emancipatory,
found their political outcome, as French historians early pointed out,
in the Constituent Assembly, which was the creation of the upper and
middle class, while the spirit of Rousseau, ardent, generous, passionate
for the relief of the suffering, overwhelmed by the crowding forms of
manhood chronically degraded and womanhood systematically polluted, came
to life and power in the Convention and the sections of the Commune of
Paris which overawed the Convention.

"It will not do," wrote D'Alembert to Voltaire as early as 1762, "to
speak too loudly against Jean Jacques or his book, for h