umanity, as
Voltaire said, had lost its title-deeds, and the task of the eighteenth
century was to recover them. Under all Voltaire's zeal for destruction
in matters of religious belief lay a positive faith and a creative
sentiment,--a faith in human intellect and the sentiment of social
justice. What indefatigable toil! what indefatigable play! Surely it was
not all to establish a negation. Voltaire poured a gay yet bitter _elan_
into the intellectual movement of his time. Yet amid his various efforts
for humanity he wanted love; he wanted reverence. And although a
positive tendency underlies his achievements, we are warranted in
repeating the common sentence, that upon the whole he destroyed more
than he built up.

Voltaire fought to enfranchise the understanding. Rousseau dreamed,
brooded, suffered, to emancipate the heart. A wave of passion, or at
least of sentiment, swept over Europe with the 'Nouvelle Heloise,' the
'Emile,' the 'Confessions.' It was Rousseau, exclaims Byron, who "threw
enchantment over passion," who "knew how to make madness beautiful."
Such an emancipation of the heart was felt, in the eighteenth century,
to be a blessed deliverance from the material interests and the eager
yet too arid speculation of the age. But Byron in that same passage of
'Childe Harold' names Rousseau "the self-torturing sophist." And a
sophist Rousseau was. His intellect fed upon fictions, and dangerous
fictions,--fictions respecting nature, respecting the individual man,
respecting human society. Therefore his intellect failed to illuminate,
clarify, tranquilize his heart. His emotions were turbid, restless, and
lacking in sanity.

Here then were Goethe's two great predecessors: one a most vivacious
intelligence, the other a brooding sensibility; one aiming at an
emancipation of the understanding, but deficient in reverence and in
love; the other aiming at an emancipation of the affections, but
deficient in sanity of thought. In what relation stood Goethe to these
great forces of the eighteenth century?

In his old age Goethe, speaking of Voltaire, uses the words "a universal
source of light." But as a young man he was repelled by "the factious
dishonesty of Voltaire, and his perversion of so many worthy subjects."
"He would never have done," says Goethe, "with degrading religion and
the sacred books, for the sake of injuring priestcraft, as they called
it." Goethe, indeed, did not deny a use to the spirit of negation.