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?

With the same hasty change of direction Rousseau says the true question
is not whether each of us suffers or not, but whether it is good that
the universe should be, and whether our misfortunes were inevitable in