Voltaire[1] (1694-1778)—­he himself had made this anagram from his name, Arouet l(e) j(eune)—­seemed by his many-sided receptivity almost made to be the interpreter of English ideas; in the words of Windelband, he “combines Newton’s mechanical philosophy of nature, Locke’s noetical empiricism, and Shaftesbury’s moral philosophy under the deistic point of view.”  The same qualities which made him the first journalist, enabled him to free philosophy from its scholastic garb, and, by concentrating it on the problems which press most upon the lay mind (God, freedom, immortality), to make it a living force among the people.  His superficiality, as Erdmann acutely remarks, was his strength.  True religion, so reason teaches us, consists in loving God and in being just and forbearing to our fellow-men as to our brothers; morality is so natural and necessary that it is no wonder that all philosophers since Zoroaster have inculcated the same principles.  The less of dogma the better the religion; atheism is not so bad as superstition, which teaches men to commit crimes with an easy conscience.  He considered it the chief mission of his life to destroy these two miserable errors.  He endeavored to controvert atheism by rational arguments, while with passionate hatred and contemptuous wit he attacked positive Christianity and his persecutors, the priesthood.  The existence of God is for him not merely a moral postulate, but a result of scientific reasoning.  One of his famous sayings was:  “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him; but all nature cries out to us that he exists.”  He defends immortality in spite of theoretical difficulties, because of its practical necessity; his attitude toward the freedom of the will, which he had energetically defended in the beginning, grows constantly more skeptical with increasing age.  His position in regard to the question of evil experiences a similar change—­the Lisbon earthquake made him an opponent of optimism, though he had previously favored it.

[Footnote 1:  David Friedrich Strauss, Voltaire, sechs Vortraege, 1870.]

%2.  Theoretical and Practical Sensationalism.%

We turn next from the popular introduction and dissemination of Locke’s doctrines, which left their contents unchanged, to their principiant development by the French sensationalists.  Condillac (1715-80) always thinks of his work as a completion of Locke’s, whose Essay he held not to have gone down to the final root of the cognitive process.  Locke did not go far enough, Condillac thinks, in his rejection of innate elements; he failed to trace out the origin of perception, reflection, cognition, and volition, as also the relation between the external senses, the internal sense, and the combining intellect, which he discussed as separate sources, the two former of particular, and the last of complex, ideas; in short, he omitted to inquire into the origin of the first function of the soul.  Berkeley was right in feeling