Voltaire thought that the sins of civilization are outweighed by its comforts and arts; Rousseau was uncomfortable everywhere, and denounced almost everything. Reformers listened to Voltaire; revolutionists heard Rousseau. When Horace Walpole remarked that “this world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel,”67 he unwittingly compressed into a line the lives of the two most influential minds of the eighteenth century.
