Critics such as Leibniz said no, since mathematical description was not the same thing as philosophical explanation, and Newton refused to offer an explanation of how and why gravity operated the way that it did. Voltaire worked to defend Civil Liberties. During Voltaires lifetime, this new acceptance translated into a final return to Paris in early 1778. At the center of the Newtonian innovations in natural philosophy was the argument that questions of body per se were either irrelevant to, or distracting from, a well focused natural science. Voltaire collapsed both challenges into a singular vision of his enemy as backward Cartesianism. At the one hand, Voltaire criticizes religion for its superstitions and fanaticism. Although only a few of his works are still read, he continues to be held in worldwide repute as a courageous crusader against tyranny, bigotry, and cruelty. In his voluminous correspondence especially, and in the details of many of his more polemical public texts, one does find Voltaire articulating a view of intellectual and civil liberty that makes him an unquestioned forerunner of modern civil libertarianism. Voltaire did bring out one explicitly philosophical book in support this campaign, his Dictionnaire philosophique of 17641770. Figures such as Descartes, Huygens, and Leibniz established their scientific reputations through efforts to realize this goal. Voltaire offered this book as a clear, accurate, and accessible account of Newtons philosophy suitable for ignorant Frenchman (a group that he imagined to be large). In 1729, the French government staged a sort of lottery to help amortize some of the royal debt. Some readers singled out this part of the book as the major source of its controversy, and in a similar vein the very materialist account of me, or the soul, which appeared in volume 1 of Diderot and dAlemberts Encyclopdie, was also a flashpoint of controversy. This being, The Creature, grows up around and observes humanity. The Newtonians countered that phenomenal descriptions were scientifically adequate so long as they were grounded in empirical facts, and since no facts had yet been discerned that explained what gravity is or how it works, no scientific account of it was yet possible. Its published title page also announced the new pen name that Voltaire would ever after deploy. Rather than returning home to Paris and restoring his reputation, Voltaire instead settled in Geneva. Yet Humes target remained traditional philosophy, and his contribution was to extend skepticism all the way to the point of denying the feasibility of transcendental philosophy itself. Yet even if Voltaire was introduced to English philosophy in this way, its influence on his thought was most shaped by his brief exile in England between 172629. How did Voltaire view human nature? This effort achieved victory in 1763, and soon the philosophes were attempting to infiltrate the academies and other institutions of knowledge in France. Voltaire installed himself permanently at Ferney in early 1759, and from this date until his death in 1778 he made the chateau his permanent home and capital, at least in the minds of his intellectual allies, of the emerging French Enlightenment. He sided with Maupertuis, ordering Voltaire to either retract his libelous text or leave Berlin. Philosophical, Comfort, Poverty. His famous conclusion in Candide, for example, that optimism was a philosophical chimera produced when dialectical reason remains detached from brute empirical facts owed a great debt to his Newtonian convictions.