got his natural equality and lost touch altogether with the kind of life he had lived in the state of nature, and consequently with what Rousseau considered the proper and natural aims of the individual. The development of the intelligence having become an end in itself, the struggle is now carried on, not in the interest of safely achieving the natural destiny of man, but merely in the interest of establishing supremacy and individual domination over one's fellows. Sentiment and conscience which lead man to fulfil this natural destiny were forced to a subordinate position in his life. His moral nature became warped and perverted, and instead of obeying his conscience he enters upon what may be called in theological terms the state of perversion or sin. Moral deterioration, in other words, follows in the wake of the arts and sciences which beget inequality and injustice. Yet the enlarging of his horizon and the development of his faculties need not necessarily be an evil. Through consciousness of sin, as in Julie's case, for instance, man may rise to a plane higher than that of his first stage of ignorant if blissful innocence. To do this he must pass into the third, or what we may call the political state.

To reëstablish justice and equality, society must now be transformed into the State, which shall at once protect life and again render possible the full realization of the individual destiny. This state is based upon an ideal contract by which man submits himself not to an alien power with an independent interest, which tends to degrade him, but to the power which he himself has

created for the purpose of completely realizing himself. This lends dignity to his new life. The State can act therefore only in accordance with the 'general will,' and under penalty of negating itself must not take any action which shall be hostile to the higher interest of its constituent members. In other words, the individuals, now joined by a mystic bond, merely through the exercise of certain of their rights, automatically become the State. The State "compels them to be free." It can therefore control the action of its members only up to a certain point. It guarantees equality and liberty which were lost in the social stage, and once again leaves man free to "pursue his happiness." Beyond him opens out again the free field for individual self-realization which must take place along the line of man's natural ends. For the purpose of his redemption, man must therefore, if he would enter into the highest stage of his progress, at once be educated as a citizen and again be put into touch with the great guiding natural forces. Feeling and conscience are again supreme.

"One moment now may give us more

Than years of toiling reason."'20

For the purpose of this regeneration the life of comparative solitude, or simple rusticity which is preached in Émile, and of constant communion with nature, is best. In the interest of this newer "normal" education he would have subscribed to the lines of his English disciple:

20 Wordsworth. To my Sister.

"Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife,

Let Nature be your teacher."

The warping of man's moral nature which Rousseau accepted as the result of his participation in the merely social life could thus be rectified, for as Wordsworth says,

"One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man

Of moral evil and of good

Than all the sages can."

Therefore in this sense Rousseau too would have said and did say:

"Enough of Science and of Art;

Close up those barren leaves;

Come forth and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives."21

It should be remembered that we have been trying to expound and make plain Rousseau's system in order to make clearer the place and bearing of the First Discourse in his completed work. It would be easy to show that from the point of view of a political instrument his state, as outlined in the Contrat Social, presents insuperable difficulties and that it would not accomplish in practice, the aim for which it was intended by this "utopian dreamer." It should, however, be borne in mind that Rousseau never intended the Contrat to be accepted as a constitution by any existing state. He designed it as a statement of general principles and of political ideals. There can be no ques

21 Wordsworth. The Tables Turned.

tion that as such it has exerted a highly important influence upon the development of democratic ideas. In politics Rousseau may well be regarded as the most important of the eighteenth century "radicals." On this question see the Introduction in this volume to the Discours sur l'Inégalité and the Contrat Social. With such criticism of details we are not for the present concerned. To understand his philosophy we must keep in mind, none the less, what, according to Rousseau's conception, was to be the function and end of this new State. His system as a whole is most easily open to attack because of the dualism which he sets up between the life of intellect and the life of feeling. Doubtless there is no such fundamental dichotomy in the human personality, and even if we grant that sentiment and reason may not always be in entire accord, the effects of this opposition are perhaps less bale

ful than he imagined and there may be other ways of bringing about a new modus vivendi. In the present discussion we desire, however, merely to point out the extraordinary importance to eighteenth and nineteenth century currents of thought of a philosophy so new, so striking, and so attractive.

We may conclude, then, that taken in isolation, it is possible to find parallels in earlier literature to many if not all of the ideas expressed by Rousseau. So far we may accept the conclusions of recent investigators. The belief in the goodness of man and of nature, the glorification of the simple life, the exalting of sentiment, the preaching of natural religion, all these have been abundantly shown to have existed before his

day.22
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22 On F Origines 803, and J.-J. Rou téraire d

p. 640; a

Rousseau sources 1909. V

les Idées

23 Cf. social.

day.22 So too, many of the conclusions drawn from such premises, many of his recommendations with regard to the rearing and training of children, or with the assembling and governing of men in states were known to his predecessors. Even the conception that the State is based on a contract and that it should be governed by the volonté générale was not exclusively his discovery.23 But it is not upon such details that his reputation must rest. His importance in the history of philosophy and of literature depends upon the general system which he presents and upon the peculiarly feverish earnestness with which he presents it.

The point may be readily illustrated by a brief comparison.

Perhaps from none of his predecessors did Rousseau borrow more extensively than from Montaigne. Yet their points of departure, their attitude and aims, were as diverse as they well could be. Montaigne was by habit a student and by temperament he had in him something of the fatalist. He observes the life about him, and his reflections are often not unlike Rousseau's

22 On Rousseau's sources cf. Lanson. Manuel Bibliographique, Origines et Sources des Euvres de Rousseau, Vol. III, pp. 802803, and more especially, Delaruelle, Les sources principales de J.-J. Rousseau dans le premier discours. Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France. 1912. Vol. XIX, pp. 245-271; also ibid., p. 640; also Vol. XX, p. 424: Krueger. Fremde Gedanken in Rousseau's ersten Discours. 1891; Morel, Recherches sur les sources du Discours sur l'Inégalité. Annales J.-J. Rousseau. 1909. Vol. V, pp. 119-198; Villey, L'Influence de Montaigne sur les Idées pédagogiques de Locke et de Rousseau. 1911.

23 Cf. Atger. Essai sur l'histoire des doctrines du contrat social. 1906.