mind in the great average of common men, and it is the common average of
men to whom exceptional thinkers speak, whom they influence, and by whom
they are in turn influenced, depressed, or buoyed up, just as a painter
or a dramatist is affected. Voltaire's mental constitution made him
eagerly objective, a seeker of true things, quivering for action,
admirably sympathetic with all life and movement, a spirit restlessly
traversing the whole world. Rousseau, far different from this, saw in
himself a reflected microcosm of the outer world, and was content to
take that instead of the outer world, and as its truest version. He made
his own moods the premisses from which he deduced a system of life for
humanity, and so far as humanity has shared his moods or some parts of
them, his system was true, and has been accepted. To him the bustle of
the outer world was only a hindrance to that process of self-absorption
which was his way of interpreting life. Accessible only to interests of
emotion and sense, he was saved from intellectual sterility, and made
eloquent, by the vehemence of his emotion and the fire of his senses. He
was a master example of sensibility, as Voltaire was a master example
of clear-eyed penetration.

This must not be taken for a rigid piece of mutually exclusive division,
for the edges of character are not cut exactly sharp, as words are.
Especially when any type is intense, it seems to meet and touch its
opposite. Just as Voltaire's piercing activity and soundness of
intelligence made him one of the humanest of men, so Rousseau's
emotional susceptibility endowed him with the gift of a vision that
carried far into the social depths. It was a very early criticism on the
pair, that Voltaire wrote on more subjects, but that Rousseau was the
more profound. In truth one was hardly much more profound than the
other. Rousseau had the sonorousness of speech which popular confusion
of thought is apt to identify with depth. And he had seriousness. If