In the poem, as in the preface, Voltaire rejected the doctrine of necessity; it provided no comfort for him. He came close to absolute despair when he wrote that all living things seem to be doomed to live in a cruel world, one of pain and slaughter. How then could one believe in providentialism? How could one say Tout est bien? Voltaire's frightening conclusion is that man knows nothing, that nature has no message for us, that God does not speak to him. Man is a weak, groping creature whose body will decay and whose fate is to experience one grief after another:
We rise in thought to the heavenly throne,
But our own nature still remains unknown.
Recall the pessimistic reply of the dervish to Pangloss, who expressed the desire to probe the meaning of life and man's destiny.
Voltaire sent a copy of the poem to Jean Jacques Rousseau. The answer he received is that which would be expected from the man who was confident that nature was beneficent and who endorsed providentialism. Rousseau's letter was sent on August 18, 1756. He criticized Voltaire for seeking to apply science to spiritual questions, and he argued (as all optimists did) that evil is necessary to the existence of the universe and that particular evils form the general good. Rousseau implied that Voltaire must either renounce the concept of Providence or conclude that it is, in the last analysis, beneficial. Voltaire avoided controversy with the man who was to become his leading adversary; he pleaded illness. The particular significance of all this is that Rousseau, as he tells us in the Confessions, remained convinced that Voltaire had written Candide as a rebuttal to the argument he had made.
