eighteenth century and in all social thought since. In comparison with the issue raised by Rousseau, which was nothing less than the entire and absolute transformation of the whole social system from foundation to coping stone, the quarrel between the doctors of the Church and the doctors of the Encyclopædia seemed little more than the proverbial jealousy of a profession on an enormous scale. The differences between Saducee and Pharisee sink into insignificance before the messenger of a new dispensation.

One way of describing the influence which Rousseau has impressed upon Europe, would be to draw up lists of the ideas which he expounded in his various capacities of novelist, moralist, publicist: such as, in politics, the indivisible, inalienable, irresistible sovereignity of peoples; the propriety of having a state religion; the folly of representative government, which only gives men a moment of freedom at the time of election: in education, the necessity of parents being the teachers of their own children; the mischief of any thing like premature competition, and forced rivalry; the superiority of the conditions of rustic isolation and rustic simplicity. But bare catalogues of these several orders of ideas do not sufficiently reveal the total force, by which Rousseau seized the imagination of France, surpassing the Philosophers in disrespect for tradition and authority, and the Church in devout religiosity; introducing decisively strange and hitherto unknown sentiments, the sentiment of nature for one, of worldweariness for another, into a front place in European literature; and finally achieving the sovereign distinction of true power, by making as deep a mark in the thought of adversaries as in the thought of avowed disciples. The royalist Chateaubriand and the Christian Lamennais are as much inspired by him as the Jacobin Robespierre and the transcendental deist George Sand. A man's influence only completes the circle in this way, when his conception has touched the whole circle of life, and this was the important characteristic of Rousseau,-far more important than what he thought specially about government or theology or education or morals, each independently and apart,-that he fused all these several sets of ideas into a whole, and subordinated them in their relations to a new type of character and a new type

of life. What were the elements of this type; and what was its secret? Its secret was the old appeal, which comes again and again, and always with stupendous effect, in moments when belief is exhausted, and purpose has become pitiful, and social circumstance has pinched and straitened the opportunity for social energy,— the old appeal away from outer society to the inner spirit of the individual. "The true philosophy," he said, "is to return within oneself-rentrer en soi-même—and to listen to the voice of conscience amid the stillness of the passions." This was the key-note, the key-note of reaction against a society which was rapidly falling into decrepitude in most of the functions for which a society exists. In decrepit times, if there is ever any revival of vigor, it always takes this form of a return to something to be sought internally in spirit and in truth. Rousseau invited men to turn from dogma in which certainty was unattainable to simple contemplation of the divinity of which the witness of their own conscience gave them full assurance; to quit the pompous sterilities of art and literature and science, and evolve from their own spiritual consciousness a simple and orderly system of life; to abandon the frivolous existence of an artificial society, its meanness, its luxury, its cupidities and covetousness, and wrap themselves in the sentiment of nature, in a feeling for mountain and wood, for birds and flowers, for all the glorious ordering of the outer universe. How familiar all this is to us; but try to measure its effect, when such a conception first dawned in the midst of the intellectual glitter, the social shallowness, of France a hundred years ago. Its very familiarity to us is the measure of this effect.

The stimulus which Rousseau's ideas gave to imagination, sometimes genuine noble, sometimes infected with a hot and sickly sensuality, and sometimes most unwholesomely substituting bombastic sentimentalism for the robust, direct, concrete, and spacious forms of older poetry, may be seen in the magnificent expansion which has taken place in imaginative literature since his time; and this in the direction of nature-worship, the glorification of solitude, the complaint against social bonds, the professed consciousness of inward capacities far transcending the niggardliness of opportunity, and all the oth

er notes of Rousseau's teaching. If Rousseau had stopped at the presentation of his ideal of the individual life, and of the modes by which you are to prepare us to lead it, his work would have taken its place along with the other Utopian visions by which men are cheered and elevated. But he did not stop here. He advanced from the consideration of the type of manhood to the consideration of the social milieu, and the way in which he considered this was the root of the vast mischief which he has done. His method was simple. He annihilated the milieu; he insisted not only on isolating his phenomena in thought, but in fact also. The whole past of the race was to drop off from us, any clinging roots and threads to be carefully cut away, the so-called progress of the race to be re-traced at a single bound, and man to be landed once more in the primeval paradise where there should no longer be any accursed tree of knowledge to tempt him to a second fall. All was to begin over again, history to be obliterated from memory, and the old social order from sight. Does this seem too extravagant? Why, this very spirit descended as by a kind of jerky apostolic succession, and with natural discrepancies, to Fourier, Proudhon, Owen, Leroux, Saint-Simon, and others, and has been seen in some American attempts within the memory of us all.

Let us remark some of the more momentous consequences which ensued logically or otherwise from this unprecedented association of a moral ideal with the active negation of all existing society. Usually the projectors of new ways of living are content to leave the old ways to themselves, rendering unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and pursuing their ideas in such tranquillity as Cæsar may indulge them with. But the whole system was touched directly and aggressively by Rousseau. He maintained that you must study society by men and men by society; those, he said, who insist on treating politics and morals apart will never understand either one or the other. This was sound teaching enough, if you mean to treat them scientifically; in that case the two go together. But then his was not scientific treatment, but the à priori metaphysical erection of a fantastic moral ideal of his own, and the whole work consecrated in the name of Nature, which is

the modern euphemism for the great eyeless Moloch of force without a purpose. The moral ideal is full of admirable traits, and Emile, with all its faults, is one of the rare books that possess true psychagogic quality. It is possibly a question whether Rousseau meant it to be more than a Utopian romance. There is a story of some fervent disciple meeting Rousseau, and hastening to inform him that he was bringing up a son in strict conformity to the very letter of the precepts of Emile; to which the author replied, "Then so much the worse, sir, both for you and your son." However this may be, and whatever Rousseau may have meant, the fact that the author of Emile was also the author of the Contrat Social, produced a confusion between moral aspiration and the supposed ease of instant realization throughout society, which arising when it did, and falling on the soil which happened to be ready for it, has brought forth a great multitude of social dreams which would be purely grotesque and simply ridiculous, if men did not happen to be ready to die for them. Effect your moral transformation: the social transformation follows along with it by the same process. Rousseau neglected this, and it is a significant coincidence that the Contrat Social, or political gospel, even preceded by a little Emile, is the moral gospel. Both gospels, however, were equally forms of the doctrine that nature has given us all, if we choose to listen to her voice, an absolute ideal of the social union, and of the few slight and simple conditions which qualify a man for the discharge of all his duties. His practical disciples in the Convention acted in conformity with this kind of view. "It is necessary completely to refashion a people whom one wishes to make free," began one famous report,"to destroy its prejudices, alter its habits, limit its necessities, eradicate its vices and purify its desires. Strong forces, therefore, must be set in motion," and so forth. Here we see beyond mistake the finger of Rousseau, the confused association of swift and facile change in institution with swift and facile change in the habit and aspiration of man. The same fatal confusion of spiritual and temporal is to be seen in the ideas of Saint-Just, the most thorough-going fanatic of the Jacobin party. Observation and experience made him reverse Rousseau's benevolent pre

mise of the goodness of the human heart. Rousseau contended that man is good, and that if you only move the obstructions of society all would go well. SaintJust held that man is not good, and that it is for the state to see that he is made so. "The desire of riches," he said, " is universal, yet wealth is a crime." He conceived it to be the business of the legislators to stamp out desires which he admitted to be universal. The land was to be compulsorily divided; every one not a functionary and not an official was to cultivate the land himself; there were to be no servants, and no vessels of gold or silver; no child under sixteen was to eat meat, and no grown persons in three days of the decade. This was what nature appeared to Saint-Just. This, like all extravagances of socialistic Lycurgean thought since, had its root in the pernicious and headlong anticipations of moral reform by root and branch abolition of the existing social laws. But let us return to Rousseau's own doctrine, as it was originally promulgated.

To begin with, his doctrine contained the revolutionary dogma of the equality of man. There issued from it the poetized version of the old theory of the law of nature. If you strip away the surroundings of society, and pierce to what metaphysical dreamers like Rousseau view as the pure and abstract quality of manhood, there can be no reason why one should not partake as much of this abstract quality as another. In Emile, for instance, Rousseau's capital production, it is impossible not to feel, in spite of all protests to the contrary, that we are preparing a life of self-contained individualism without relation either to transmitted quality and heritable predispositions or to the active discharge of social functions. To such an ideal it is indeed indispensable that we may assume in all the material with which the educator has to deal equality of inborn capacity, benevolent sentiment, and strong generous inclination. That equality being assumed, and all the differences which we see around us being attributed to the depraving action of social arrangements, there is certainly nothing surprising in the vehement energy with which Rousseau's disciples alike in speculation and action have dealt with social arrange

ments.

It is inevitable that such a dogma as

this of equality, in whatever sense it may be originally propounded, should be transformed into a proposition of politics, whenever outer circumstances should make such a transformation possible, with or without the chance of translating it from theory into practice. Rousseau declared that a king should not hesitate to give his son in marriage to the daughter of the executioner, if he found in the pair a proper conformity of tastes, humor, character. From this to the doctrine that a king is a mere functionary like another, is not far, and the influence of Rousseau, with his sovereignty of peoples, and equality of man, and law of nature, was decisively attested before his death in the opening words of the American Declaration of Independence.

Democracy was never more effectively formulated than in the passage in Emile which declares that, "It is the common people who compose the human race; what is not people is so trifling that it is hardly worth the trouble of counting. Man is the same in all ranks; and that being so, the ranks which contain the greatest numbers deserve most respect. In the eyes of the thinker, all civil distinctions vanish; he sees the same passions and the same sentiments in the rough and the man of quality; he only finds a difference in their way of talking, a more or less elaborate coloring; and if any essential distinction marks them, it is to the disadvantage of the more dissimulative... Respect, then, your kind; remember that it is composed essentially of the collection of the common peoples; that were all the kings and all the philosophers to be taken away, it would hardly be perceived, and things would go none the worse." (Emile, liv. 4.) It was the students of Emile who put Louis XVI. to death, and sent Lavoisier to the scaffold with the apophthegm that the Republic has no need of chemists.

A second consequence of Rousseau's notion of the right life according to nature was the further development of the doctrine of equality beyond both its moral and its political aspects, into equality of material condition. If merit, under fair circumstances without original advantage or disadvantage, is the same in every case, how much more than unrighteous it must be that they who sow the seed, and tend and watch and bear all the heat and burden of the day, should have even less of the fruits

than the loiterer who has done no more than look on. Rousseau went further than this, and unsealed a fountain which has since then expanded into a torrent, by this memorable declaration: "The first person who having inclosed a piece of ground bethought himself to say, This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, what miseries and what horrors, would not have been spared to the human race by one who should have plucked the stakes out of the ground or filled up the trench, exclaiming to his fellows, Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost if you forget that the fruits are for all, and that the earth belongs to no one." The significance of the fact that no one did thus rise up, and interfere with the trespasser on this interesting and momentous occasion, is as entirely ignored as the significance of the fact of the founder of the institution of property being drawn, in spite of the goodness of his nature, which no society could as yet have warped or disturbed, into so disastrous a transgression. With Rousseau you are always equally distant from positive evidence of what actually happened, and from a rational explanation of what he alleges to have happened. Yet the air of rigorous deduction and close reasoning which he maintains even when in the height of his passion has misled not a few into taking for genuinely scientific forms the solemn dialectic with which he works out his most preposterous sophisms. People made heedless of logic, either by misery or by intense compassion for the misery of others, never stopped to inquire as to the exact accuracy of a man's syllogisms who was so fervent in his assurance that the poverty which cries aloud on the earth is due to a simple and easily removable accident, and that misery is not only unnecessary but is preventible by such simple processes as declaring men equal and abolishing property.

It is sometimes complained that the impulse which Rousseau gave to democracy has only led men to think in an envious and ignoble way of material comfort and gratification of sense as the aim and end of the life of the people. This complaint, we may observe, is usually found on the lips of persons whose own senses are sedulously lapped in material comfort, but

wherever found, it is unjust. Rousseau did not envy the luxurious liver, he despised him; he did not wish all to become rich, he wished all to become poor; the plain effect of his teaching was not to make the modest poor envious, but to make the rich and luxurious ashamed. We lose the key to all his thoughts if we cease to remember that his notion of democracy was not materialist, but spiritualist, and had its fountain in a strictly moral revolt.

Rousseau himself is not absolutely consistent in his aversion for society, and there is at least one place where he speaks with reference to Poland distinctly like a disciple of the historic method-a man of true genius can not help having glimpses of common sense,-but the general tendency of his teaching, and that which was seized most eagerly by all his followers, was to hold up the social order as the evil bulwark restraining and penning up this vast and generous flood of human nature. They never explained, and never seemed to have felt the need for having it explained, how this monstrous bulwark had been raised. been raised. Voltaire's attack on religion manifested the same shallowness: mankind, he said, were very intelligent, and their intelligence would have made them very happy, only by evil chance they were all overtaken by religion; where all the religions in the world came from, and how it was that men all over the face of the globe opened their hearts to them, and how it was that their intelligence did not prove a shield against such an enemy, he never thought it necessary to inquire. What religion was to Voltaire, society was to Rousseau. Men would all be leading sweet and lovely lives, with souls open to the highest, and senses fresh for all the simple delights of nature, if only they had not been perverted by society; but whence this frightful monster, gorgon, and chimæra dire had its origin, who invented society, why men with all the vigor of young and unsophisticated humanity strong within them came to accept the detestable invention-these were questions which the school of Rousseau never thought of asking. The fundamental problem of origins once put, they would have been launched in that scientific path from which they revolted. They would have had to perceive that the conditions of the social union, with all its miseries and all its inadequateness, are as much the outcome of human

nature as the most heroic type of character or the most perfect ideal of life. Rousseau maintained that bad institutions are in reality not institutions in any right sense; and by the same process of reasoning he counted the bad qualities of men and women as no qualities at all. Society was the unfortunate scape-goat on whose head the sins of the whole congregation were solemnly laid, leaving humanity free of spot and stain.

It will be perceived that we are immersed in the abstract or metaphysical method, that our social teacher is just as competent to talk about society as the men who believed in occult virtues were to talk about chemistry, or those who believed in vital spirits to constitute biology. He was persuaded of the real existence of entities corresponding to his own abstract conceptions. As if society were something apart from the men and women who compose it; as if human nature were something apart from any actual qualities which men and women have ever shown; as if the Laws of Nature or the Rights of Man existed or had once existed in some known document. There is a story that at the time when the Convention were deliberating upon a new constitution in 1793, one of its members went to the national library and inquired for a copy of the laws of Minos. The librarian had to explain that Minos was the son of Zeus and Europa, a Homeric person, a mere shadow of a name in a myth, and that though no doubt his laws would have been of great service for France if only they had survived, as a matter of fact no copy had been preserved. Men thought in the same real and corporeal way about the Laws of Nature, and all the other metaphysical figments with which Rousseau had deluged their minds. They supposed that there had once been really seen on the earth that noble, pure, elevated life which Rousseau called the State of Nature, and which was in truth nothing but a private invention, evolved from his own consciousness, leading to the most fatal retrogression in the path of civilization, but yet eagerly welcomed by a decaying and unhappy nation.

For the material exhaustion and administrative debility of France were what gave such fatal illustration to the dialectic of the Social Contract. If the people had been materially prosperous, and the gov

ernment of the time a strong and coherent organ of national life, the Contrat Social and Emile would of course no more have led to the destruction of the old framework and the triumph of Jacobin principles, than the publication of a new translation of Plato's Republic would have done so. The concurrence of certain economic and political conditions was required here as always to turn mere speculation into a violent explosive. Of all the known misfortunes of western societythere may be many more of a primitive kind of which we are blissfully ignorantwe can hardly point to one more disastrous than the external circumstances which happened to give to the speculations of Rousseau a short moment of absolute power, before there had been time or opportunity of sifting the sound grain of truth in them from their evil and drastic husk.

That there was a sound grain in them, we perceive by considering the opposite way of seeking social truth. This opposite conception, which arose in modern thought with Montesquieu, Turgot, Condorcet, Adam Smith, more or less at the same time as Rousseau's, regards society as an organism, the subject of growth and development, the direct resultant of the forces of human nature and the forces of our outer circumstance and surrounding, the final issue at any given time of an accumulation of preceding states, and therefore spontaneously regulated at any given moment by a number of conditions which are capable of scientific examination and statement.

This historic or positive conception of every social state has a constant tendency to narrow the limits of social endeavor by freezing men's hopes of what is possible; to exaggerate the tightness of the grip which the past has on the present and future; to reduce social truth to a mere business of historical exposition, and to confound the explanation of an institution or a use with its permanent justification and eternal warrant. The irrefragable principle not only of the value of social continuity, but of the proved impossibility of suddenly breaking that continuity in any of its deeper elements, is in perpetual danger-first through the natural disposition of men towards the extreme application of any principle, secondly from the comfort which the extreme application of