meaning, it is hardly deniable that evil is a mere word and not a reality, and whatever is is indeed right and best, because no better is within our reach.  Voltaire, however, like the man of sense that he was, exclaimed that at any rate relatively to us poor creatures the existence of pain, suffering, waste, whether caused or uncaused, whether in accordance with stern immutable law or mere divine caprice, is a most indisputable reality:  from our point of view it is a cruel puerility to cry out at every calamity and every iniquity that all is well in the best of possible worlds, and to sing hymns of praise and glory to the goodness and mercy of a being of supreme might, who planted us in this evil state and keeps us in it.  Voltaire’s is no perfect philosophy; indeed it is not a philosophy at all, but a passionate ejaculation; but it is perfect in comparison with a cut and dried system like this of Rousseau’s, which rests on a mocking juggle with phrases, and the substitution by dexterous sleight of hand of one definition for another.

Rousseau really gives up the battle, by confessing frankly that the matter is beyond the light of reason, and that, “if the theist only founds his sentiment on probabilities, the atheist with still less precision only founds his on the alternative possibilities.”  The objections on both sides are insoluble, because they turn on things of which men can have no veritable idea; “yet I believe in God as strongly as I believe any other truth, because believing and not believing are the last things in the world that depend on me.”  So be it.  But why take the trouble to argue in favour of one side of an avowedly insoluble question?  It was precisely because he felt that the objections on both sides cannot be answered, that Voltaire, hastily or not, cried out that he faced the horrors of such a catastrophe as the Lisbon earthquake without a glimpse of consolation.  The upshot of Rousseau’s remonstrance only amounted to this, that he could not furnish one with any consolation out of the armoury of reason, that he himself found this consolation, but in a way that did not at all depend upon his own effort or will, and was therefore as incommunicable as the advantage of having a large appetite or being six feet high.  The reader of Rousseau becomes accustomed to this way of dealing with subjects of discussion.  We see him using his reason as adroitly as he knows how for three-fourths of the debate, and then he suddenly flings himself back with a triumphant kind of weariness into the buoyant waters of emotion and sentiment.  “You sir, who are a poet,” once said Madame d’Epinay to Saint Lambert, “will agree with me that the existence of a Being, eternal, all powerful, and of sovereign intelligence, is at any rate the germ of the finest enthusiasm."[339] To take this position and cleave to it may be very well, but why spoil its dignity and repose by an unmeaning and superfluous flourish of the weapons of the reasoner?