THE DISCOURSES.
The busy establishment of local academies in the provincial centres of
France only preceded the outbreak of the revolution by ten or a dozen
years; but one or two of the provincial cities, such as Bordeaux, Rouen,
Dijon, had possessed academies in imitation of the greater body of Paris
for a much longer time. Their activity covered a very varied ground,
from the mere commonplaces of literature to the most practical details
of material production. If they now and then relapsed into inquiries
about the laws of Crete, they more often discussed positive and
scientific theses, and rather resembled our chambers of agriculture than
bodies of more learned pretension. The academy of Dijon was one of the
earliest of these excellent institutions, and on the whole the list of
its theses shows it to have been among the most sensible in respect of
the subjects which it found worth thinking about. Its members, however,
could not entirely resist the intellectual atmosphere of the time. In
1742 they invited discussion of the point, whether the natural law can
conduct society to perfection without the aid of political laws.[151]
In 1749 they proposed this question as a theme for their prize essay:
_Has the restoration of the sciences contributed to purify or to corrupt
manners?_ Rousseau was one of fourteen competitors, and in 1750 his
discussion of the academic theme received the prize.[152] This was his
first entry on the field of literature and speculation. Three years
afterwards the same academy propounded another question: _What is the
origin of inequality among men, and is it authorised by the natural
law?_ Rousseau again competed, and though his essay neither gained the
prize, nor created as lively an agitation as its predecessor had done,
yet we may justly regard the second as a more powerful supplement to
the first.
It is always interesting to know the circumstances under which pieces
that have moved a world were originally composed, and Rousseau's account
of the generation of his thoughts as to the influence of enlightenment
on morality, is remarkable enough to be worth transcribing. He was
walking along the road from Paris to Vincennes one hot summer afternoon
on a visit to Diderot, then in prison for his Letter on the Blind
(1749), when he came across in a newspaper the announcement of the theme
propounded by the Dijon academy. "If ever anything resembled a sudden
inspiration, it was the movement which began in me as I read this. All
at once I felt myself dazzled by a thousand sparkling lights; crowds of
vivid ideas thronged into my mind with a force and confusion that threw
me into unspeakable agitation; I felt my head whirling in a giddiness
like that of intoxication. A violent palpitation oppressed me; unable to
walk for difficulty of breathing, I sank under one of the trees of the
avenue, and passed half an hour there in such a condition of excitement,
that when I arose I saw that the front of my waistcoat was all wet with
my tears, though I was wholly unconscious of shedding them. Ah, if I
could ever have written the quarter of what I saw and felt under that
tree, with what clearness should I have brought out all the
contradictions of our social system; with what simplicity I should have
demonstrated that man is good naturally, and that by institutions only
is he made bad."[153] Diderot encouraged him to compete for the prize,
and to give full flight to the ideas which had come to him in this
singular way.[154]
People have held up their hands at the amazing originality of the idea
that perhaps sciences and arts have not purified manners. This sentiment
is surely exaggerated, if we reflect first that it occurred to the
academicians of Dijon as a question for discussion, and second that, if
you are asked whether a given result has or has not followed from
certain circumstances, the mere form of the question suggests No quite
as readily as Yes. The originality lay not in the central contention,
but in the fervour, sincerity, and conviction of a most unacademic sort
with which it was presented and enforced. There is less originality in
denouncing your generation as wicked and adulterous than there is in
believing it to be so, and in persuading the generation itself both that
you believe it and that you have good reasons to give. We have not to
suppose that there was any miracle wrought by agency celestial or
infernal in the sudden disclosure of his idea to Rousseau. Rousseau had
been thinking of politics ever since the working of the government of
Venice had first drawn his mind to the subject. What is the government,
he had kept asking himself, which is most proper to form a sage and
virtuous nation? What government by its nature keeps closest to the law?
What is this law? And whence?[155] This chain of problems had led him to
what he calls the historic study of morality, though we may doubt
whether history was so much his teacher as the rather meagrely nourished
handmaid of his imagination. Here was the irregular preparation, the
hidden process, which suddenly burst into light and manifested itself
with an exuberance of energy, that passed to the man himself for an
inward revolution with no precursive sign.
Rousseau's ecstatic vision on the road to Vincennes was the opening of a
life of thought and production which only lasted a dozen years, but
which in that brief space gave to Europe a new gospel. Emilius and the
Social Contract were completed in 1761, and they crowned a work which if
you consider its origin, influence, and meaning with due and proper
breadth, is marked by signal unity of purpose and conception. The key to
it is given to us in the astonishing transport at the foot of the
wide-spreading oak. Such a transport does not come to us of cool and
rational western temperament, but more often to the oriental after
lonely sojourning in the wilderness, or in violent reactions on the road
to Damascus and elsewhere. Jean Jacques detected oriental quality in his
own nature,[156] and so far as the union of ardour with mysticism, of
intense passion with vague dream, is to be defined as oriental, he
assuredly deserves the name. The ideas stirred in his mind by the Dijon
problem suddenly "opened his eyes, brought order into the chaos in his
head, revealed to him another universe. From the active effervescence
which thus began in his soul, came sparks of genius which people saw
glittering in his writings through ten years of fever and delirium, but
of which no trace had been seen in him previously, and which would
probably have ceased to shine henceforth, if he should have chanced to
wish to continue writing after the access was over. Inflamed by the
contemplation of these lofty objects, he had them incessantly present to
his mind. His heart, made hot within him by the idea of the future
happiness of the human race, and by the honour of contributing to it,
dictated to him a language worthy of so high an enterprise ... and for a
moment, he astonished Europe by productions in which vulgar souls saw
only eloquence and brightness of understanding, but in which those who
dwell in the ethereal regions recognised with joy one of their
own."[157]
This was his own account of the matter quite at the end of his life, and
this is the only point of view from which we are secure against the
vulgarity of counting him a deliberate hypocrite and conscious
charlatan. He was possessed, as holier natures than his have been, by an
enthusiastic vision, an intoxicated confidence, a mixture of sacred rage
and prodigious love, an insensate but absolutely disinterested revolt
against the stone and iron of a reality which he was bent on melting in
a heavenly blaze of splendid aspiration and irresistibly persuasive
expression. The last word of this great expansion was Emilius, its first
and more imperfectly articulated was the earlier of the two Discourses.
Rousseau's often-repeated assertion that here was the instant of the
ruin of his life, and that all his misfortunes flowed from that unhappy
moment, has been constantly treated as the word of affectation and
disguised pride. Yet, vain as he was, it may well have represented his
sincere feeling in those better moods when mental suffering was strong
enough to silence vanity. His visions mastered him for these thirteen
years, _grande mortalis oevi spatium_. They threw him on to that turbid
sea of literature for which he had so keen an aversion, and from which,
let it be remarked, he fled finally away, when his confidence in the
ease of making men good and happy by words of monition had left him. It
was the torment of his own enthusiasm which rent that veil of placid
living, that in his normal moments he would fain have interposed between
his existence and the tumult of a generation with which he was
profoundly out of sympathy. In this way the first Discourse was the
letting in of much evil upon him, as that and the next and the Social
Contract were the letting in of much evil upon all Europe.
Of this essay the writer has recorded his own impression that, though
full of heat and force, it is absolutely wanting in logic and order, and
that of all the products of his pen, it is the feeblest in reasoning and
the poorest in numbers and harmony. "For," as he justly adds, "the art
of writing is not learnt all at once."[158] The modern critic must be
content to accept the same verdict; only a generation so in love as
this was with anything that could tickle its intellectual curiousness,
would have found in the first of the two Discourses that combination of
speculative and literary merit which was imputed to Rousseau on the
strength of it, and which at once brought him into a place among the
notables of an age that was full of them.[159] We ought to take in
connection with it two at any rate of the vindications of the Discourse,
which the course of controversy provoked from its author, and which
serve to complete its significance. It is difficult to analyse, because
in truth it is neither closely argumentative, nor is it vertebrate, even
as a piece of rhetoric. The gist of the piece, however, runs somewhat in
this wise:--
Before art had fashioned our manners, and taught our passions to use a
too elaborate speech, men were rude but natural, and difference of
conduct announced at a glance difference of character. To-day a vile and
most deceptive uniformity reigns over our manners, and all minds seem as
if they had been cast in a single mould. Hence we never know with what
sort of person we are dealing, hence the hateful troop of suspicions,
fears, reserves, and treacheries, and the concealment of impiety,
arrogance, calumny, and scepticism, under a dangerous varnish of
refinement. So terrible a set of effects must have a cause. History
shows that the cause here is to be found in the progress of sciences and
arts. Egypt, once so mighty, becomes the mother of philosophy and the
fine arts; straightway behold its conquest by Cambyses, by Greeks, by
Romans, by Arabs, finally by Turks. Greece twice conquered Asia, once
before Troy, once in its own homes; then came in fatal sequence the
progress of the arts, the dissolution of manners, and the yoke of the
Macedonian. Rome, founded by a shepherd and raised to glory by
husbandmen, began to degenerate with Ennius, and the eve of her ruin was
the day when she gave a citizen the deadly title of arbiter of good
taste. China, where letters carry men to the highest dignities of the
state, could not be preserved by all her literature from the conquering
power of the ruder Tartar. On the other hand, the Persians, Scythians,
Germans, remain in history as types of simplicity, innocence, and
virtue. Was not he admittedly the wisest of the Greeks, who made of his
own apology a plea for ignorance, and a denunciation of poets, orators,
and artists? The chosen people of God never cultivated the sciences, and
when the new law was established, it was not the learned, but the simple
and lowly, fishers and workmen, to whom Christ entrusted his teaching
and its ministry.[160]
This, then, is the way in which chastisement has always overtaken our
presumptuous efforts to emerge from that happy ignorance in which
eternal wisdom placed us; though the thick veil with which that wisdom
has covered all its operations seemed to warn us that we were not
destined to fatuous research. All the secrets that Nature hides from us
are so many evils against which she would fain shelter us.
Is probity the child of ignorance, and can science and virtue be really
inconsistent with one another? These sounding contrasts are mere
deceits, because if you look nearly into the results of this science of
which we talk so proudly, you will perceive that they confirm the
results of induction from history. Astronomy, for instance, is born of
superstition; geometry from the desire of gain; physics from a futile
curiosity; all of them, even morals, from human pride. Are we for ever
to be the dupes of words, and to believe that these pompous names of
science, philosophy, and the rest, stand for worthy and profitable
realities?[161] Be sure that they do not.
How many errors do we pass through on our road to truth, errors a
thousandfold more dangerous than truth is useful? And by what marks are
we to know truth, when we think that we have found it? And above all, if
we do find it, who of us can be sure that he will make good use of it?
If celestial intelligences cultivated science, only good could result;
and we may say as much of great men of the stamp of Socrates, who are
born to be the guides of others.[162] But the intelligences of common
men are neither celestial nor Socratic.
Again, every useless citizen may be fairly regarded as a pernicious man;
and let us ask those illustrious philosophers who have taught us what
insects reproduce themselves curiously, in what ratio bodies attract
one another in space, what curves have conjugate points, points of
inflection or reflection, what in the planetary revolutions are the
relations of areas traversed in equal times--let us ask those who have
attained all this sublime knowledge, by how much the worse governed,
less flourishing, or less perverse we should have been if they had
attained none of it? Now if the works of our most scientific men and
best citizens lead to such small utility, tell us what we are to think
of the crowd of obscure writers and idle men of letters who devour the
public substance in pure loss.
Then it is in the nature of things that devotion to art leads to luxury,
and luxury, as we all know from our own experience, no less than from
the teaching of history, saps not only the military virtues by which
nations preserve their independence, but also those moral virtues which
make the independence of a nation worth preserving. Your children go to
costly establishments where they learn everything except their duties.
They remain ignorant of their own tongue, though they will speak others
not in use anywhere in the world; they gain the faculty of composing
verses which they can barely understand; without capacity to distinguish
truth from error, they possess the art of rendering them
indistinguishable to others by specious arguments. Magnanimity, equity,
temperance, courage, humanity, have no real meaning to them; and if they
hear speak of God, it breeds more terror than awful fear.
Whence spring all these abuses, if not from the disastrous inequality
introduced among men by the distinction of talents and the cheapening of
virtue?[163] People no longer ask of a man whether he has probity, but
whether he is clever; nor of a book whether it is useful, but whether it
is well written. And after all, what is this philosophy, what are these
lessons of wisdom, to which we give the prize of enduring fame? To
listen to these sages, would you not take them for a troop of
charlatans, all bawling out in the market-place, Come to me, it is only
I who never cheat you, and always give good measure? One maintains that
there is no body, and that everything is mere representation; the other
that there is no entity but matter, and no God but the universe: one
that moral good and evil are chimeras; the other that men are wolves and
may devour one another with the easiest conscience in the world. These
are the marvellous personages on whom the esteem of contemporaries is
lavished so long as they live, and to whom immortality is reserved after
their death. And we have now invented the art of making their
extravagances eternal, and thanks to the use of typographic characters
the dangerous speculations of Hobbes and Spinoza will endure for ever.
Surely when they perceive the terrible disorders which printing has
already caused in Europe, sovereigns will take as much trouble to
banish this deadly art from their states as they once took to
introduce it.
If there is perhaps no harm in allowing one or two men to give
themselves up to the study of sciences and arts, it is only those who
feel conscious of the strength required for advancing their subjects,
who have any right to attempt to raise monuments to the glory of the
human mind. We ought to have no tolerance for those compilers who rashly
break open the gate of the sciences, and introduce into their sanctuary
a populace that is unworthy even to draw near to it. It may be well that
there should be philosophers, provided only and always that the people
do not meddle with philosophising.[164]
In short, there are two kinds of ignorance: one brutal and ferocious,
springing from a bad heart, multiplying vices, degrading the reason, and
debasing the soul: the other "a reasonable ignorance, which consists in
limiting our curiosity to the extent of the faculties we have received;
a modest ignorance, born of a lively love for virtue, and inspiring
indifference only for what is not worthy of filling a man's heart, or
fails to contribute to its improvement; a sweet and precious ignorance,
the treasure of a pure soul at peace with itself, which finds all its
blessedness in inward retreat, in testifying to itself its own
innocence, and which feels no need of seeking a warped and hollow
happiness in the opinion of other people as to its enlightenment."[165]
* * * * *
Some of the most pointed assaults in this Discourse, such for instance
as that on the pedantic parade of wit, or that on the excessive
preponderance of literary instruction in the art of education, are due
to Montaigne; and in one way, the Discourse might be described as
binding together a number of that shrewd man's detached hints by means
of a paradoxical generalisation. But the Rousseau is more important than
the Montaigne in it. Another remark to be made is that its vigorous
disparagement of science, of the emptiness of much that is called
science, of the deadly pride of intellect, is an anticipation in a very
precise way of the attitude taken by the various Christian churches and
their representatives now and for long, beginning with De Maistre, the
greatest of the religious reactionaries after Rousseau. The vilification
of the Greeks is strikingly like some vehement passages in De Maistre's
estimate of their share in sophisticating European intellect. At last
Rousseau even began to doubt whether "so chattering a people could ever
have had any solid virtues, even in primitive times."[166] Yet
Rousseau's own thinking about society is deeply marked with opinions
borrowed exactly from these very chatterers. His imagination was
fascinated from the first by the freedom and boldness of Plato's social
speculations, to which his debt in a hundred details of his political
and educational schemes is well known. What was more important than any
obligation of detail was the fatal conception, borrowed partly from the
Greeks and partly from Geneva, of the omnipotence of the Lawgiver in
moulding a social state after his own purpose and ideal. We shall
presently quote the passage in which he holds up for our envy and
imitation the policy of Lycurgus at Sparta, who swept away all that he
found existing and constructed the social edifice afresh from foundation
to roof.[167] It is true that there was an unmistakable decay of Greek
literary studies in France from the beginning of the eighteenth century,
and Rousseau seems to have read Plato only through Ficinus's
translation. But his example and its influence, along with that of Mably
and others, warrant the historian in saying that at no time did Greek
ideas more keenly preoccupy opinion than during this century.[168]
Perhaps we may say that Rousseau would never have proved how little
learning and art do for the good of manners, if Plato had not insisted
on poets being driven out of the Republic. The article on Political
Economy, written by him for the Encyclopædia (1755), rings with the
names of ancient rulers and lawgivers; the project of public education
is recommended by the example of Cretans, Lacedæmonians, and Persians,
while the propriety of the reservation of a state domain is suggested
by Romulus.
It may be added that one of the not too many merits of the essay is the
way in which the writer, more or less in the Socratic manner, insists on
dragging people out of the refuge of sonorous general terms, with a
great public reputation of much too well-established a kind to be
subjected to the affront of analysis. It is true that Rousseau himself
contributed nothing directly to that analytic operation which Socrates
likened to midwifery, and he set up graven images of his own in place of
the idols which he destroyed. This, however, did not wholly efface the
distinction, which he shares with all who have ever tried to lead the
minds of men into new tracks, of refusing to accept the current coins of
philosophical speech without test or measurement. Such a treatment of
the great trite words which come so easily to the tongue and seem to
weigh for so much, must always be the first step towards bringing
thought back into the region of real matter, and confronting phrases,
terms, and all the common form of the discussion of an age, with the
actualities which it is the object of sincere discussion to penetrate.
The refutation of many parts of Rousseau's main contention on the
principles which are universally accepted among enlightened men in
modern society is so extremely obvious that to undertake it would merely
be to draw up a list of the gratulatory commonplaces of which we hear
quite enough in the literature and talk of our day. In this direction,
perhaps it suffices to say that the Discourse is wholly one-sided,
admitting none of the conveniences, none of the alleviations of
suffering of all kinds, nothing of the increase of mental stature, which
the pursuit of knowledge has brought to the race. They may or may not
counterbalance the evils that it has brought, but they are certainly to
be put in the balance in any attempt at philosophic examination of the
subject. It contains no serious attempt to tell us what those alleged
evils really are, or definitely to trace them one by one, to abuse of
the thirst for knowledge and defects in the method of satisfying it. It
omits to take into account the various other circumstances, such as
climate, government, race, and the disposition of neighbours, which must
enter equally with intellectual progress into whatever demoralisation
has marked the destinies of a nation. Finally it has for the base of its
argument the entirely unsupported assumption of there having once been
in the early history of each society a stage of mild, credulous, and
innocent virtue, from which appetite for the fruit of the forbidden tree
caused an inevitable degeneration. All evidence and all scientific
analogy are now well known to lead to the contrary doctrine, that the
history of civilisation is a history of progress and not of decline from
a primary state. After all, as Voltaire said to Rousseau in a letter
which only showed a superficial appreciation of the real drift of the
argument, we must confess that these thorns attached to literature are
only as flowers in comparison with the other evils that have deluged the
earth. "It was not Cicero nor Lucretius nor Virgil nor Horace, who
contrived the proscriptions of Marius, of Sulla, of the debauched
Antony, of the imbecile Lepidus, of that craven tyrant basely surnamed
Augustus. It was not Marot who produced the St. Bartholomew massacre,
nor the tragedy of the Cid that led to the wars of the Fronde. What
really makes, and always will make, this world into a valley of tears,
is the insatiable cupidity and indomitable insolence of men, from Kouli
Khan, who did not know how to read, down to the custom-house clerk, who
knows nothing but how to cast up figures. Letters nourish the soul, they
strengthen its integrity, they furnish a solace to it,"--and so on in
the sense, though without the eloquence, of the famous passage in
Cicero's defence of Archias the poet.[169] All this, however, in our
time is in no danger of being forgotten, and will be present to the mind
of every reader. The only danger is that pointed out by Rousseau
himself: "People always think they have described what the sciences do,
when they have in reality only described what the sciences ought
to do."[170]
What we are more likely to forget is that Rousseau's piece has a
positive as well as a negative side, and presents, in however vehement
and overstated a way, a truth which the literary and speculative
enthusiasm of France in the eighteenth century, as is always the case
with such enthusiasm whenever it penetrates either a generation or an
individual, was sure to make men dangerously ready to forget.[171] This
truth may be put in different terms. We may describe it as the
possibility of eminent civic virtue existing in people, without either
literary taste or science or speculative curiosity. Or we may express it
as the compatibility of a great amount of contentment and order in a
given social state, with a very low degree of knowledge. Or finally, we
may give the truth its most general expression, as the subordination of
all activity to the promotion of social aims. Rousseau's is an elaborate
and roundabout manner of saying that virtue without science is better
than science without virtue; or that the well-being of a country depends
more on the standard of social duty and the willingness of citizens to
conform to it, than on the standard of intellectual culture and the
extent of its diffusion. In other words, we ought to be less concerned
about the speculative or scientific curiousness of our people than about
the height of their notion of civic virtue and their firmness and
persistency in realising it. It is a moralist's way of putting the
ancient preacher's monition, that they are but empty in whom is not the
wisdom of God. The importance of stating this is in our modern era
always pressing, because there is a constant tendency on the part of
energetic intellectual workers, first, to concentrate their energies on
a minute specialty, leaving public affairs and interests to their own
course. Second, they are apt to overestimate their contributions to the
stock of means by which men are made happier, and what is more serious,
to underestimate in comparison those orderly, modest, self-denying,
moral qualities, by which only men are made worthier, and the continuity
of society is made surer. Third, in consequence of their greater command
of specious expression and their control of the organs of public
opinion, they both assume a kind of supreme place in the social
hierarchy, and persuade the majority of plain men unsuspectingly to take
so very egregious an assumption for granted. So far as Rousseau's
Discourse recalled the truth as against this sort of error it was full
of wholesomeness.
Unfortunately his indignation against the overweening pretensions of the
verse-writer, the gazetteer, and the great band of socialists at large,
led him into a general position with reference to scientific and
speculative energy, which seems to involve a perilous misconception of
the conditions of this energy producing its proper results. It is easy
now, as it was easy for Rousseau in the last century, to ask in an
epigrammatical manner by how much men are better or happier for having
found out this or that novelty in transcendental mathematics, biology,
or astronomy; and this is very well as against the discoverer of small
marvels who shall give himself out for the benefactor of the human
race. But both historical experience and observation of the terms on
which the human intelligence works, show us that we can only make sure
of intellectual activity on condition of leaving it free to work all
round, in every department and in every remotest nook of each
department, and that its most fruitful epochs are exactly those when
this freedom is greatest, this curiosity most keen and minute, and this
waste, if you choose to call the indispensable superfluity of force in a
natural process waste, most copious and unsparing. You will not find
your highest capacity in statesmanship, nor in practical science, nor in
art, nor in any other field where that capacity is most urgently needed
for the right service of life, unless there is a general and vehement
spirit of search in the air. If it incidentally leads to many
industrious futilities and much learned refuse, this is still the sign
and the generative element of industry which is not futile, and of
learning which is something more than mere water spilled upon
the ground.
We may say in fine that this first Discourse and its vindications were a
dim, shallow, and ineffective feeling after the great truth, that the
only normal state of society is that in which neither the love of virtue
has been thrust far back into a secondary place by the love of
knowledge, nor the active curiosity of the understanding dulled,
blunted, and made ashamed by soft, lazy ideals of life as a life only of
the affections. Rousseau now and always fell into the opposite extreme
from that against which his whole work was a protest. We need not
complain very loudly that while remonstrating against the restless
intrepidity of the rationalists of his generation, he passed over the
central truth, namely that the full and ever festal life is found in
active freedom of curiosity and search taking significance, motive,
force, from a warm inner pulse of human love and sympathy. It was not
given to Rousseau to see all this, but it was given to him to see the
side of it for which the most powerful of the men living with him had no
eyes, and the first Discourse was only a moderately successful attempt
to bring his vision before Europe. It was said at the time that he did
not believe a word of what he had written.[172] It is a natural
characteristic of an age passionately occupied with its own set of
ideas, to question either the sincerity or the sanity of anybody who
declares its sovereign conceptions to be no better than foolishness. We
cannot entertain such a suspicion. Perhaps the vehemence of controversy
carries him rather further than he quite meant to go, when he declares
that if he were a chief of an African tribe, he would erect on his
frontier a gallows, on which he would hang without mercy the first
European who should venture to pass into his territory, and the first
native who should dare to pass out of it.[173] And there are many other
extravagances of illustration, but the main position is serious enough,
as represented in the emblematic vignette with which the essay was
printed--the torch of science brought to men by Prometheus, who warns a
satyr that it burns; the satyr, seeing fire for the first time and being
fain to embrace it, is the symbol of the vulgar men who, seduced by the
glitter of literature, insist on delivering themselves up to its
study.[174] Rousseau's whole doctrine hangs compactly together, and we
may see the signs of its growth after leaving his hands in the crude
formula of the first Discourse, if we proceed to the more audacious
paradox of the second.
II.
The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among men opens with a
description of the natural state of man, which occupies considerably
more than half of the entire performance. It is composed in a vein which
is only too familiar to the student of the literature of the time,
picturing each habit and thought, and each step to new habits and
thoughts, with the minuteness, the fulness, the precision, of one who
narrates circumstances of which he has all his life been the close
eye-witness. The natural man reveals to us every motive, every process
internal and external, every slightest circumstance of his daily life,
and each element that gradually transformed him into the non-natural
man. One who had watched bees or beetles for years could not give us a
more full or confident account of their doings, their hourly goings in
and out, than it was the fashion in the eighteenth century to give of
the walk and conversation of the primeval ancestor. The conditions of
primitive man were discussed by very incompetent ladies and gentlemen at
convivial supper parties, and settled with complete assurance.[175]
Rousseau thought and talked about the state of nature because all his
world was thinking and talking about it. He used phrases and formulas
with reference to it which other people used. He required no more
evidence than they did, as to the reality of the existence of the
supposed set of conditions to which they gave the almost sacramental
name of state of nature. He never thought of asking, any more than
anybody else did in the middle of the eighteenth century, what sort of
proof, how strong, how direct, was to be had, that primeval man had such
and such habits, and changed them in such a way and direction, and for
such reasons. Physical science had reached a stage by this time when its
followers were careful to ask questions about evidence, correct
description, verification. But the idea of accurate method had to be
made very familiar to men by the successes of physical science in the
search after truths of one kind, before the indispensableness of
applying it in the search after truths of all kinds had extended to the
science of the constitution and succession of social states. In this
respect Rousseau was not guiltier than the bulk of his contemporaries.
Voltaire's piercing common sense, Hume's deep-set sagacity,
Montesquieu's caution, prevented them from launching very far on to this
metaphysical sea of nature and natural laws and states, but none of them
asked those critical questions in relation to such matters which occur
so promptly in the present day to persons far inferior to them in
intellectual strength. Rousseau took the notion of the state of nature
because he found it to his hand; he fitted to it his own characteristic
aspirations, expanding and vivifying a philosophic conception with all
the heat of humane passion; and thus, although, at the end of the
process when he had done with it, the state of nature came out blooming
as the rose, it was fundamentally only the dry, current abstraction of
his time, artificially decorated to seduce men into embracing a strange
ideal under a familiar name.
Before analysing the Discourse on Inequality, we ought to make some
mention of a remarkable man whose influence probably reached Rousseau in
an indirect manner through Diderot; I mean Morelly.[176] In 1753 Morelly
published a prose poem called the Basiliade, describing the corruption
of manners introduced by the errors of the lawgiver, and pointing out
how this corruption is to be amended by return to the empire of nature
and truth. He was no doubt stimulated by what was supposed to be the
central doctrine of Montesquieu, then freshly given to the world, that
it is government and institutions which make men what they are. But he
was stimulated into a reaction, and in 1754 he propounded his whole
theory, in a piece which in closeness, consistency, and thoroughness is
admirably different from Rousseau's rhetoric.[177] It lacked the
sovereign quality of persuasiveness, and so fell on deaf ears. Morelly
accepts the doctrine that men are formed by the laws, but insists that
moralists and statesmen have always led us wrong by legislating and
prescribing conduct on the false theory that man is bad, whereas he is
in truth a creature endowed with natural probity. Then he strikes to the
root of society with a directness that Rousseau could not imitate, by
the position that "these laws by establishing a monstrous division of
the products of nature, and even of their very elements--by dividing
what ought to have remained entire, or ought to have been restored to
entireness if any accident had divided them, aided and favoured the
break-up of all sociability." All political and all moral evils are the
effects of this pernicious cause--private property. He says of
Rousseau's first Discourse that the writer ought to have seen that the
corruption of manners which he set down to literature and art really
came from this venomous principle of property, which infects all that
it touches.[178] Christianity, it is true, assailed this principle and
restored equality or community of possessions, but Christianity had the
radical fault of involving such a detachment from earthly affections, in
order to deliver ourselves to heavenly meditation, as brought about a
necessary degeneration in social activity. The form of government is a
matter of indifference, provided you can only assure community of goods.
Political revolutions are at bottom the clash of material interests, and
until you have equalised the one you will never prevent the other.[179]
Let us turn from this very definite position to one of the least
definite productions to be found in all literature.
* * * * *
It will seem a little odd that more than half of a discussion on the
origin of inequality among men should be devoted to a glowing imaginary
description, from which no reader could conjecture what thesis it was
designed to support. But we have only to remember that Rousseau's object
was to persuade people that the happier state is that in which
inequality does not subsist, that there had once been such a state, and
that this was first the state of nature, and then the state only one
degree removed from it, in which we now find the majority of savage
tribes. At the outset he defines inequality as a word meaning two
different things; one, natural or physical inequality, such as
difference of age, of health, of physical strength, of attributes of
intelligence and character; the other, moral or political inequality,
consisting in difference of privileges which some enjoy to the detriment
of the rest, such as being richer, more honoured, more powerful. The
former differences are established by nature, the latter are authorised,
if they were not established, by the consent of men.[180] In the state
of nature no inequalities flow from the differences among men in point
of physical advantage and disadvantage, and which remain without
derivative differences so long as the state of nature endures
undisturbed. Nature deals with men as the law of Sparta dealt with the
children of its citizens; she makes those who are well constituted
strong and robust, and she destroys all the rest.
The surface of the earth is originally covered by dense forest, and
inhabited by animals of every species. Men, scattered among them,
imitate their industry, and so rise to the instinct of the brutes, with
this advantage that while each species has only its own, man, without
anything special, appropriates the instincts of all. This admirable
creature, with foes on every side, is forced to be constantly on the
alert, and hence to be always in full possession of all his faculties,
unlike civilised man, whose native force is enfeebled by the mechanical
protections with which he has surrounded himself. He is not afraid of
the wild beasts around him, for experience has taught him that he is
their master. His health is better than ours, for we live in a time when
excess of idleness in some, excess of toil in others, the heating and
over-abundant diet of the rich, the bad food of the poor, the orgies and
excesses of every kind, the immoderate transport of every passion, the
fatigue and strain of spirit,--when all these things have inflicted more
disorders upon us than the vaunted art of medicine has been able to keep
pace with. Even if the sick savage has only nature to hope from, on the
other hand he has only his own malady to be afraid of. He has no fear of
death, for no animal can know what death is, and the knowledge of death
and its terrors is one of the first of man's terrible acquisitions
after abandoning his animal condition.[181] In other respects, such as
protection against weather, such as habitation, such as food, the
savage's natural power of adaptation, and the fact that his demands are
moderate in proportion to his means of satisfying them, forbid us to
consider him physically unhappy. Let us turn to the intellectual and
moral side.
If you contend that men were miserable, degraded, and outcast during
these primitive centuries because the intelligence was dormant, then do
not forget, first, that you are drawing an indictment against
nature,--no trifling blasphemy in those days--and second, that you are
attributing misery to a free creature with tranquil spirit and healthy
body, and that must surely be a singular abuse of the term. We see
around us scarcely any but people who complain of the burden of their
lives; but who ever heard of a savage in full enjoyment of his liberty
ever dreaming of complaint about his life or of self-destruction?
With reference to virtues and vices in a state of nature, Hobbes is
wrong in declaring that man in this state is vicious, as not knowing
virtue. He is not vicious, for the reason that he does not know what
being good is. It is not development of enlightenment nor the
restrictions of law, but the calm of the passions and ignorance of vice,
which keep them from doing ill. _Tanto plus in illis profitcit vitiorum
ignoratio, quam in his cognitio virtutis._
Besides man has one great natural virtue, that of pity, which precedes
in him the use of reflection, and which indeed he shares with some of
the brutes. Mandeville, who was forced to admit the existence of this
admirable quality in man, was absurd in not perceiving that from it flow
all the social virtues which he would fain deny. Pity is more energetic
in the primitive condition than it is among ourselves. It is reflection
which isolates one. It is philosophy which teaches the philosopher to
say secretly at sight of a suffering wretch, Perish if it please thee; I
am safe and sound. They may be butchering a fellow-creature under your
window; all you have to do is to clap your hands to your ears, and argue
a little with yourself to hinder nature in revolt from making you feel
as if you were in the case of the victim.[182] The savage man has not
got this odious gift. In the state of nature it is pity that takes the
place of laws, manners, and virtue. It is in this natural sentiment
rather than in subtle arguments that we have to seek the reluctance that
every man would feel to do ill, even without the precepts of
education.[183]
Finally, the passion of love, which produces such disasters in a state
of society, where the jealousy of lovers and the vengeance of husbands
lead each day to duels and murders, where the duty of eternal fidelity
only serves to occasion adulteries, and where the law of continence
necessarily extends the debauching of women and the practice of
procuring abortion[184]--this passion in a state of nature, where it is
purely physical, momentary, and without any association of durable
sentiment with the object of it, simply leads to the necessary
reproduction of the species and nothing more.
"Let us conclude, then, that wandering in the forests, without industry,
without speech, without habitation, without war, without connection of
any kind, without any need of his fellows or without any desire to harm
them, perhaps even without ever recognising one of them individually,
savage man, subject to few passions and sufficing to himself, had only
the sentiments and the enlightenment proper to his condition. He was
only sensible of his real wants, and only looked because he thought he
had an interest in seeing; and his intelligence made no more progress
than his vanity. If by chance he hit on some discovery, he was all the
less able to communicate it; as he did not know even his own children.
An art perished with its inventor. There was neither education nor
progress; generations multiplied uselessly; and as each generation
always started from the same point, centuries glided away in all the
rudeness of the first ages, the race was already old, the individual
remained always a child."
This brings us to the point of the matter. For if you compare the
prodigious diversities in education and manner of life which reign in
the different orders of the civil condition, with the simplicity and
uniformity of the savage and animal life, where all find nourishment in
the same articles of food, live in the same way, and do exactly the same
things, you will easily understand to what degree the difference between
man and man must be less in the state of nature than in that of
society.[185] Physical inequality is hardly perceived in the state of
nature, and its indirect influences there are almost non-existent.
Now as all the social virtues and other faculties possessed by man
potentially were not bound by anything inherent in him to develop into
actuality, he might have remained to all eternity in his admirable and
most fitting primitive condition, but for the fortuitous concurrence of
a variety of external changes. What are these different changes, which
may perhaps have perfected human reason, while they certainly have
deteriorated the race, and made men bad in making them sociable?
What, then, are the intermediary facts between the state of nature and
the state of civil society, the nursery of inequality? What broke up the
happy uniformity of the first times? First, difference in soil, in
climate, in seasons, led to corresponding differences in men's manner of
living. Along the banks of rivers and on the shores of the sea, they
invented hooks and lines, and were eaters of fish. In the forests they
invented bows and arrows, and became hunters. In cold countries they
covered themselves with the skins of beasts. Lightning, volcanoes, or
some happy chance acquainted them with fire, a new protection against
the rigours of winter. In company with these natural acquisitions, grew
up a sort of reflection or mechanical prudence, which showed them the
kind of precautions most necessary to their security. From this
rudimentary and wholly egoistic reflection there came a sense of the
existence of a similar nature and similar interests in their
fellow-creatures. Instructed by experience that the love of well-being
and comfort is the only motive of human actions, the savage united with
his neighbours when union was for their joint convenience, and did his
best to blind and outwit his neighbours when their interests were
adverse to his own, and he felt himself the weaker. Hence the origin of
certain rude ideas of mutual obligation.[186]
Soon, ceasing to fall asleep under the first tree, or to withdraw into
caves, they found axes of hard stone, which served them to cut wood, to
dig the ground, and to construct hovels of branches and clay. This was
the epoch of a first revolution, which formed the establishment and
division of families, and which introduced a rough and partial sort of
property. Along with rudimentary ideas of property, though not
connected with them, came the rudimentary forms of inequality. When men
were thrown more together, then he who sang or danced the best, the
strongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent, acquired the most
consideration--that is, men ceased to take uniform and equal place. And
with the coming of this end of equality there passed away the happy
primitive immunity from jealousy, envy, malice, hate.
On the whole, though men had lost some of their original endurance, and
their natural pity had already undergone a certain deterioration, this
period of the development of the human faculties, occupying a just
medium between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant
activity of our modern self-love, must have been at once the happiest
and the most durable epoch. The more we reflect, the more evident we
find it that this state was the least subject to revolutions and the
best for man. "So long as men were content with their rustic hovels, so
long as they confined themselves to stitching their garments of skin
with spines or fish bones, to decking their bodies with feathers and
shells and painting them in different colours, to perfecting and
beautifying their bows and arrows--in a word, so long as they only
applied themselves to works that one person could do, and to arts that
needed no more than a single hand, then they lived free, healthy, good,
and happy, so far as was compatible with their natural constitution, and
continued to enjoy among themselves the sweetness of independent
intercourse. But from the moment that one man had need of the help of
another, as soon as they perceived it to be useful for one person to
have provisions for two, then equality disappeared, property was
introduced, labour became necessary, and the vast forests changed into
smiling fields, which had to be watered by the sweat of men, and in
which they ever saw bondage and misery springing up and growing ripe
with the harvests."[187]
The working of metals and agriculture have been the two great agents in
this revolution. For the poet it is gold and silver, but for the
philosopher it is iron and corn, that have civilised men and undone the
human race. It is easy to see how the latter of the two arts was
suggested to men by watching the reproducing processes of vegetation. It
is less easy to be sure how they discovered metal, saw its uses, and
invented means of smelting it, for nature had taken extreme precautions
to hide the fatal secret. It was probably the operation of some volcano
which first suggested the idea of fusing ore. From the fact of land
being cultivated its division followed, and therefore the institution of
property in its full shape. From property arose civil society. "The
first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, could think of saying,
_This is mine_, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the
real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries,
and horrors would not have been spared to the human race by one who,
plucking up the stakes, or filling in the trench, should have called out
to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if
you forget that the earth belongs to no one, and that its fruits are for
all."[188]
Things might have remained equal even in this state, if talents had only
been equal, and if for example the employment of iron and the
consumption of agricultural produce had always exactly balanced one
another. But the stronger did more work; the cleverer got more advantage
from his work; the more ingenious found means of shortening his labour;
the husbandman had more need of metal, or the smith more need of grain;
and while working equally, one got much gain, and the other could
scarcely live. This distinction between Have and Have-not led to
confusion and revolt, to brigandage on the one side and constant
insecurity on the other.
Hence disorders of a violent and interminable kind, which gave rise to
the most deeply designed project that ever entered the human mind. This
was to employ in favour of property the strength of the very persons who
attacked it, to inspire them with other maxims, and to give them other
institutions which should be as favourable to property as natural law
had been contrary to it. The man who conceived this project, after
showing his neighbours the monstrous confusion which made their lives
most burdensome, spoke in this wise: "Let us unite to shield the weak
from oppression, to restrain the proud, and to assure to each the
possession of what belongs to him; let us set up rules of justice and
peace, to which all shall be obliged to conform, without respect of
persons, and which may repair to some extent the caprices of fortune, by
subjecting the weak and the mighty alike to mutual duties. In a word,
instead of turning our forces against one another, let us collect them
into one supreme power to govern us by sage laws, to protect and defend
all the members of the association, repel their common foes, and
preserve us in never-ending concord." This, and not the right of
conquest, must have been the origin of society and laws, which threw new
chains round the poor and gave new might to the rich; and for the profit
of a few grasping and ambitious men, subjected the whole human race
henceforth and for ever to toil and bondage and wretchedness
without hope.
The social constitution thus propounded and accepted was radically
imperfect from the outset, and in spite of the efforts of the sagest
lawgivers, it has always remained imperfect, because it was the work of
chance, and because, inasmuch as it was ill begun, time, while revealing
defects and suggesting remedies, could never repair its vices; _people
went on incessantly repairing and patching, instead of which it was
indispensable to begin by making a clean surface and by throwing aside
all the old materials, just as Lycurgus did in Sparta_.
Put shortly, the main positions are these. In the state of nature each
man lived in entire isolation, and therefore physical inequality was as
if it did not exist. After many centuries, accident, in the shape of
difference of climate and external natural conditions, enforcing for the
sake of subsistence some degree of joint labour, led to an increase of
communication among men, to a slight development of the reasoning and
reflective faculties, and to a rude and simple sense of mutual
obligation, as a means of greater comfort in the long run. The first
state was good and pure, but the second state was truly perfect. It was
destroyed by a fresh succession of chances, such as the discovery of the
arts of metal-working and tillage, which led first to the institution of
property, and second to the prominence of the natural or physical
inequalities, which now began to tell with deadly effectiveness. These
inequalities gradually became summed up in the great distinction between
rich and poor; and this distinction was finally embodied in the
constitution of a civil society, expressly adapted to consecrate the
usurpation of the rich, and to make the inequality of condition between
them and the poor eternal.
We thus see that the Discourse, unlike Morelly's terse exposition,
contains no clear account of the kind of inequality with which it deals.
Is it inequality of material possession or inequality of political
right? Morelly tells you decisively that the latter is only an accident,
flowing from the first; that the key to renovation lies in the abolition
of the first. Rousseau mixes the two confusedly together under a single
name, bemoans each, but shrinks from a conclusion or a recommendation
as to either. He declares property to be the key to civil society, but
falls back from any ideas leading to the modification of the institution
lying at the root of all that he deplores.
The first general criticism, which in itself contains and covers nearly
all others, turns on Method. "Conjectures become reasons when they are
the most likely that you can draw from the nature of things," and "it is
for philosophy in lack of history to determine the most likely facts."
In an inductive age this royal road is rigorously closed. Guesses drawn
from the general nature of things can no longer give us light as to the
particular nature of the things pertaining to primitive men, any more
than such guesses can teach us the law of the movement of the heavenly
bodies, or the foundations of jurisprudence. Nor can deduction from
anything but propositions which have themselves been won by laborious
induction, ever lead us to the only kind of philosophy which has fair
pretension to determine the most probable of the missing facts in the
chain of human history. That quantitative and differentiating knowledge
which is science, was not yet thought of in connection with the
movements of our own race upon the earth. It is to be said, further,
that of the two possible ways of guessing about the early state, the
conditions of advance from it, and the rest, Rousseau's guess that all
movement away from it has been towards corruption, is less supported by
subsequent knowledge than the guess of his adversaries, that it has
been a movement progressive and upwards.
This much being said as to incurable vice of method, and there are
fervent disciples of Rousseau now living who will regard one's craving
for method in talking about men as a foible of pedantry, we may briefly
remark on one or two detached objections to Rousseau's story. To begin
with, there is no certainty as to there having ever been a state of
nature of a normal and organic kind, any more than there is any one
normal and typical state of society now. There are infinitely diverse
states of society, and there were probably as many diverse states of
nature. Rousseau was sufficiently acquainted with the most recent
metaphysics of his time to know that you cannot think of a tree in
general, nor of a triangle in general, but only of some particular tree
or triangle.[189] In a similar way he might have known that there never
was any such thing as a state of nature in the general and abstract,
fixed, typical, and single. He speaks of the savage state also, which
comes next, as one, identical, normal. It is, of course, nothing of the
kind. The varieties of belief and habit and custom among the different
tribes of savages, in reference to every object that can engage their
attention, from death and the gods and immortality down to the uses of
marriage and the art of counting and the ways of procuring subsistence,
are infinitely numerous; and the more we know about this vast diversity,
the less easy is it to think of the savage state in general. When
Rousseau extols the savage state as the veritable youth of the world, we
wonder whether we are to think of the negroes of the Gold Coast, or the
Dyaks of Borneo, Papuans or Maoris, Cheyennes or Tierra-del-Fuegians or
the fabled Troglodytes; whether in the veritable youth of the world they
counted up to five or only to two; whether they used a fire-drill, and
if so what kind of drill; whether they had the notion of personal
identity in so weak a shape as to practise the couvade; and a hundred
other points, which we should now require any writer to settle, who
should speak of the savage state as sovereign, one, and indivisible, in
the way in which Rousseau speaks of it, and holds it up to our vain
admiration.
Again, if the savage state supervened upon the state of nature in
consequence of certain climatic accidents of a permanent kind, such as
living on the banks of a river or in a dense forest, how was it that the
force of these accidents did not begin to operate at once? How could the
isolated state of nature endure for a year in face of them? Or what was
the precipitating incident which suddenly set them to work, and drew the
primitive men from an isolation so profound that they barely recognised
one another, into that semi-social state in which the family
was founded?
We cannot tell how the state of nature continued to subsist, or, if it
ever subsisted, how and why it ever came to an end, because the agencies
which are alleged to have brought it to an end must have been coeval
with the appearance of man himself. If gods had brought to men seed,
fire, and the mechanical arts, as in one of the Platonic myths,[190] we
could understand that there was a long stage preliminary to these
heavenly gifts. But if the gods had no part nor lot in it, and if the
accidents that slowly led the human creature into union were as old as
that nature, of which indeed they were actually the component elements,
then man must have quitted the state of nature the very day on which he
was born into it. And what can be a more monstrous anachronism than to
turn a flat-headed savage into a clever, self-conscious, argumentative
utilitarian of the eighteenth century; working the social problem out in
his flat head with a keenness, a consistency, a grasp of first
principles, that would have entitled him to a chair in the institute of
moral sciences, and entering the social union with the calm and
reasonable deliberation of a great statesman taking a critical step in
policy? Aristotle was wiser when he fixed upon sociability as an
ultimate quality of human nature, instead of making it, as Rousseau and
so many others have done, the conclusion of an unimpeachable train of
syllogistic reasoning.[191] Morelly even, his own contemporary, and
much less of a sage than Aristotle, was still sage enough to perceive
that this primitive human machine, "though composed of intelligent
parts, generally operates independently of its reason; its deliberations
are forestalled, and only leave it to look on, while sentiment does its
work."[192] It is the more remarkable that Rousseau should have fallen
into this kind of error, as it was one of his distinctions to have
perceived and partially worked out the principle, that men guide their
conduct rather from passion and instinct than from reasoned
enlightenment.[193] The ultimate quality which he named pity is, after
all, the germ of sociability, which is only extended sympathy. But he
did not firmly adhere to this ultimate quality, nor make any effort
consistently to trace out its various products.
We do not find, however, in Rousseau any serious attempt to analyse the
composition of human nature in its primitive stages. Though constantly
warning his readers very impressively against confounding domesticated
with primitive men, he practically assumes that the main elements of
character must always have been substantially identical with such
elements and conceptions as are found after the addition of many ages of
increasingly complex experience. There is something worth considering in
his notion that civilisation has had effects upon man analogous to those
of domestication upon animals, but he lacked logical persistency enough
to enable him to adhere to his own idea, and work out conclusions
from it.
It might further be pointed out in another direction that he takes for
granted that the mode of advance into a social state has always been one
and the same, a single and uniform process, marked by precisely the same
set of several stages, following one another in precisely the same
order. There is no evidence of this; on the contrary, evidence goes to
show that civilisation varies in origin and process with race and other
things, and that though in all cases starting from the prime factor of
sociableness in man, yet the course of its development has depended on
the particular sets of circumstances with which that factor has had to
combine. These are full of variety, according to climate and racial
predisposition, although, as has been justly said, the force of both
these two elements diminishes as the influence of the past in giving
consistency to our will becomes more definite, and our means of
modifying climate and race become better known. There is no sign that
Rousseau, any more than many other inquirers, ever reflected whether the
capacity for advance into the state of civil society in any highly
developed form is universal throughout the species, or whether there are
not races eternally incapable of advance beyond the savage state.
Progress would hardly be the exception which we know it to be in the
history of communities if there were not fundamental diversities in the
civilisable quality of races. Why do some bodies of men get on to the
high roads of civilisation, while others remain in the jungle and
thicket of savagery; and why do some races advance along one of these
roads, and others advance by different roads?
Considerations of this sort disclose the pinched frame of trim theory
with which Rousseau advanced to set in order a huge mass of boundlessly
varied, intricate, and unmanageable facts. It is not, however, at all
worth while to extend such criticism further than suffices to show how
little his piece can stand the sort of questions which may be put to it
from a scientific point of view. Nothing that Rousseau had to say about
the state of nature was seriously meant for scientific exposition, any
more than the Sermon on the Mount was meant for political economy. The
importance of the Discourse on Inequality lay in its vehement
denunciation of the existing social state. To the writer the question
of the origin of inequality is evidently far less a matter at heart,
than the question of its results. It is the natural inclination of one
deeply moved by a spectacle of depravation in his own time and country,
to extol some other time or country, of which he is happily ignorant
enough not to know the drawbacks. Rousseau wrote about the savage state
in something of the same spirit in which Tacitus wrote the Germania. And
here, as in the Discourse on the influence of science and art upon
virtue, there is a positive side. To miss this in resentment of the
unscientific paradox that lies about it, is to miss the force of the
piece, and to render its enormous influence for a generation after it
was written incomprehensible. We may always be quite sure that no set of
ideas ever produced this resounding effect on opinion, unless they
contained something which the social or spiritual condition of the men
whom they inflamed made true for the time, and true in an urgent sense.
Is it not tenable that the state of certain savage tribes is more
normal, offers a better balance between desire and opportunity, between
faculty and performance, than the permanent state of large classes in
western countries, the broken wreck of civilisation?[194] To admit this
is not to conclude, as Rousseau so rashly concluded, that the movement
away from the primitive stages has been productive only of evil and
misery even to the masses of men, the hewers of wood and the drawers of
water; or that it was occasioned, and has been carried on by the
predominance of the lower parts and principles of human nature. Our
provisional acquiescence in the straitness and blank absence of outlook
or hope of the millions who come on to the earth that greets them with
no smile, and then stagger blindly under dull burdens for a season, and
at last are shovelled silently back under the ground,--our acquiescence
can only be justified in the sight of humanity by the conviction that
this is one of the temporary conditions of a vast process, working
forwards through the impulse and agency of the finer human spirits, but
needing much blood, many tears, uncounted myriads of lives, and
immeasurable geologic periods of time, for its high and beneficent
consummation. There is nothing surprising, perhaps nothing deeply
condemnable, in the burning anger for which this acquiescence is often
changed in the more impatient natures. As against the ignoble host who
think that the present ordering of men, with all its prodigious
inequalities, is in foundation and substance the perfection of social
blessedness, Rousseau was almost in the right. If the only alternative
to the present social order remaining in perpetuity were a retrogression
to some such condition as that of the islanders of the South Sea, a
lover of his fellow-creatures might look upon the result, so far as it
affected the happiness of the bulk of them, with tolerably complete
indifference. It is only the faith that we are moving slowly away from
the existing order, as our ancestors moved slowly away from the old want
of order, that makes the present endurable, and makes any tenacious
effort to raise the future possible.
* * * * *
An immense quantity of nonsense has been talked about the equality of
man, for which those who deny that doctrine and those who assert it may
divide the responsibility. It is in reality true or false, according to
the doctrines with which it is confronted. As against the theory that
the existing way of sharing the laboriously acquired fruits and delights
of the earth is a just representation and fair counterpart of natural
inequalities among men in merit and capacity, the revolutionary theory
is true, and the passionate revolutionary cry for equality of external
chance most righteous and unanswerable. But the issues do not end here.
Take such propositions as these:--there are differences in the capacity
of men for serving the community; the well-being of the community
demands the allotment of high function in proportion to high faculty;
the rights of man in politics are confined to a right of the same
protection for his own interests as is given to the interests of others.
As against these principles, the revolutionary deductions from the
equality of man are false. And such pretensions as that every man could
be made equally fit for every function, or that not only each should
have an equal chance, but that he who uses his chance well and sociably
should be kept on a level in common opinion and trust with him who uses
it ill and unsociably, or does not use it at all,--the whole of this is
obviously most illusory and most disastrous, and in whatever decree any
set of men have ever taken it up, to that degree they have paid
the penalty.
What Rousseau's Discourse meant, what he intended it to mean, and what
his first direct disciples understood it as meaning, is not that all men
are born equal. He never says this, and his recognition of natural
inequality implies the contrary proposition. His position is that the
artificial differences, springing from the conditions of the social
union, do not coincide with the differences in capacity springing from
original constitution; that the tendency of the social union as now
organised is to deepen the artificial inequalities, and make the gulf
between those endowed with privileges and wealth and those not so
endowed ever wider and wider. It would have been very difficult a
hundred years ago to deny the truth of this way of stating the case. If
it has to some extent already ceased to be entirely true, and if violent
popular forces are at work making it less and less true, we owe the
origin of the change, among other causes and influences, not least to
the influence of Rousseau himself, and those whom he inspired. It was
that influence which, though it certainly did not produce, yet did as
certainly give a deep and remarkable bias, first to the American
Revolution, and a dozen years afterwards to the French Revolution.
It would be interesting to trace the different fortunes which awaited
the idea of the equality of man in America and in France. In America it
has always remained strictly within the political order, and perhaps
with the considerable exception of the possibles share it may have had,
along with Christian notions of the brotherhood of man, and
statesmanlike notions of national prosperity, in leading to the
abolition of slavery, it has brought forth no strong moral sentiment
against the ethical and economic bases of any part of the social order.
In France, on the other hand, it was the starting-point of movements
that have had all the fervour and intensity of religions, and have made
men feel about social inequalities the burning shame and wrath with
which a Christian saw the flourishing temples of unclean gods. This
difference in the interpretation and development of the first doctrine
may be explained in various ways,--by difference of material
circumstance between America and France; difference of the political and
social level from which the principle of equality had to start; and not
least by difference of intellectual temperament. This last was itself
partly the product of difference in religion, which makes the English
dread the practical enforcement of logical conclusions, while the French
have hitherto been apt to dread and despise any tendency to stop
short of that.
* * * * *
Let us notice, finally, the important fact that the appearance of
Rousseau's Discourses was the first sign of reaction against the
historic mode of inquiry into society that had been initiated by
Montesquieu. The Spirit of Laws was published in 1748, with a truly
prodigious effect. It coloured the whole of the social literature in
France during the rest of the century. A history of its influence would
be a history of one of the most important sides of speculative activity.
In the social writings of Rousseau himself there is hardly a chapter
which does not contain tacit reference to Montesquieu's book. The
Discourses were the beginning of a movement in an exactly opposite
direction; that is, away from patient collection of wide multitudes of
facts relating to the conditions of society, towards the promulgation of
arbitrary systems of absolute social dogmas. Mably, the chief dogmatic
socialist of the century, and one of the most dignified and austere
characters, is an important example of the detriment done by the
influence of Rousseau to that of Montesquieu, in the earlier stages of
the conflict between the two schools. Mably (1709-1785), of whom the
remark is to be made that he was for some years behind the scenes of
government as De Tencin's secretary and therefore was versed in affairs,
began his inquiries with Greece and Rome. "You will find everything in
ancient history," he said.[195] And he remained entirely in this groove
of thought until Rousseau appeared. He then gradually left Montesquieu.
"To find the duties of a legislator," he said, "I descend into the
abysses of my heart, I study my sentiments." He opposed the Economists,
the other school that was feeling its way imperfectly enough to a
positive method. "As soon as I see landed property established," he
wrote, "then I see unequal fortunes; and from these unequal fortunes
must there not necessarily result different and opposed interests, all
the vices of riches, all the vices of poverty, the brutalisation of
intelligence, the corruption of civil manners?" and so forth.[196] In
his most important work, published in 1776, we see Rousseau's notions
developed, with a logic from which their first author shrunk, either
from fear, or more probably from want of firmness and consistency as a
reasoner. "It is to equality that nature has attached the preservation
of our social faculties and happiness: and from this I conclude that
legislation will only be taking useless trouble, unless all its
attention is first of all directed to the establishment of equality in
the fortune and condition of citizens."[197] That is to say not only
political equality, but economic communism. "What miserable folly, that
persons who pass for philosophers should go on repeating after one
another that without property there can be no society. Let us leave
illusion. It is property that divides us into two classes, rich and
poor; the first will alway prefer their fortune to that of the state,
while the second will never love a government or laws that leave them in
misery."[198] This was the kind of opinion for which Rousseau's diffuse
and rhetorical exposition of social necessity had prepared France some
twenty years before. After powerfully helping the process of general
dissolution, it produced the first fruits specifically after its own
kind some twenty years later in the system of Baboeuf.[199]
The unflinching application of principles is seldom achieved by the men
who first launch them. The labour of the preliminary task seems to
exhaust one man's stock of mental force. Rousseau never thought of the
subversion of society or its reorganisation on a communistic basis.
Within a few months of his profession of profound lament that the first
man who made a claim to property had not been instantly unmasked as the
arch foe of the race, he speaks most respectfully of property as the
pledge of the engagements of citizens and the foundation of the social
pact, while the first condition of that pact is that every one should be
maintained in peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to him.[200] We need
not impute the apparent discrepancy to insincerity. Rousseau was always
apt to think in a slipshod manner. He sensibly though illogically
accepted wholesome practical maxims, as if they flowed from theoretical
premisses that were in truth utterly incompatible with them.
FOOTNOTES:
[151] Delandine's _Couronnes Académiques, ou Recueil de prix proposés
par les Sociétés Savantes_. (Paris, 2 vols., 1787.)
[152] Musset-Pathay has collected the details connected with the award
of the prize, ii. 365-367.
[153] Second Letter to M. de Malesherbes, p. 358. Also _Conf._, viii.
135.
[154] Diderot's account (_Vie de Sénèque_, sect. 66, _Oeuv._, iii. 98;
also ii. 285) is not inconsistent with Rousseau's own, so that we may
dismiss as apocryphal Marmontel's version of the story (_Mém._ VIII.),
to the effect that Rousseau was about to answer the question with a
commonplace affirmative, until Diderot persuaded him that a paradox
would attract more attention. It has been said also that M. de
Francueil, and various others, first urged the writer to take a
negative line of argument. To suppose this possible is to prove one's
incapacity for understanding what manner of man Rousseau was.
[155] _Conf._, ix. 232, 233.
[156] _Rousseau Juge de Jean Jacques, Dialogues_, i. 252.
[157] _Dialogues_, i. 275, 276.
[158] _Conf._, viii. 138.
[159] "It made a kind of revolution in Paris," says Grimm. _Corr.
Lit._, i. 108.
[160] _Rép. au Roi de Pologne_, p. 111 and p. 113.
[161] _Rép. à M. Bordes_, 138.
[162] _Ib._ 137.
[163] "The first source of the evil is inequality; from inequality
come riches ... from riches are born luxury and idleness; from luxury
come the fine arts, and from idleness the sciences." _Rép. au Roi de
Pologne_, 120, 121.
[164] _Rép. à M. Bordes_, 147. In the same spirit he once wrote the
more wholesome maxim, "We should argue with the wise, and never with
the public." _Corr._, i. 191.
[165] _Rép. au Roi de Pologne_, 128, 129.
[166] _Rép. à M. Bordes_, 150-161.
[167] P. 174.
[168] Egger's _Hellénisme en France_, 28ième leçon, p. 265.
[169] Voltaire to J.J.R. Aug. 30, 1755.
[170] _Rép. au Roi de Pologne_, 105.
[171] In 1753 the French Academy, by way no doubt of summoning a
counter-blast to Rousseau, boldly offered as the subject of their
essay the thesis that "The love of letters inspires the love of
virtue," and the prize was won fitly enough by a Jesuit professor of
rhetoric. See Delandine, i. 42.
[172] Preface to _Narcisse_, 251.
[173] _Rép. à M. Bordes_, 167.
[174] P. 187.
[175] See for instance a strange discussion about _morale universelle_
and the like in _Mém. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, i. 217-226.
[176] Often described as Morelly the Younger, to distinguish him from
his father, who wrote an essay on the human heart, and another on the
human intelligence.
[177] _Code de la Nature, ou le véritable esprit de ses loix, de tout
tems négligé ou méconnu._
[178] P. 169. Rousseau did not see it then, but he showed himself on
the track.
[179] At the end of the _Code de la Nature_ Morelly places a complete
set of rules for the organisation of a model community. The base of it
was the absence of private property--a condition that was to be
preserved by vigilant education of the young in ways of thinking, that
should make the possession of private property odious or
inconceivable. There are to be sumptuary laws of a moderate kind. The
government is to be in the hands of the elders. The children are to be
taken away from their parents at the age of five; reared and educated
in public establishments; and returned to their parents at the age of
sixteen or so when they will marry. Marriage is to be dissoluble at
the end of ten years, but after divorce the woman is not to marry a
man younger than herself, nor is the man to marry a woman younger than
the wife from whom he has parted. The children of a divorced couple
are to remain with the father, and if he marries again, they are to be
held the children of the second wife. Mothers are to suckle their own
children (p. 220). The whole scheme is fuller of good ideas than such
schemes usually are.
[180] P. 218.
[181] This is obviously untrue. Animals do not know death in the sense
of scientific definition, and probably have no abstract idea of it as
a general state; but they know and are afraid of its concrete
phenomena, and so are most savages.
[182] This is one of the passages in the Discourse, the harshness of
which was afterwards attributed by Rousseau to the influence of
Diderot. _Conf._, viii. 205, _n._
[183] P. 261.
[184] As if sin really came by the law in this sense; as if a law
defining and prohibiting a malpractice were the cause of the
commission of the act which it constituted a malpractice. As if giving
a name and juristic classification to any kind of conduct were adding
to men's motives for indulging in it.
[185] P. 269.
[186] P. 278.
[187] Pp. 285-287.
[188] P. 273.
[189] P. 250.
[190] _Politicus_, 268 D-274 E.
[191] Here for instance is D'Alembert's story:--"The necessity of
shielding our own body from pain and destruction leads us to examine
among external objects those which are useful and those which are
hurtful, so that we may seek the one and flee the others. But we
hardly begin our search into such objects before we discover among
them a great number of beings which strike us as exactly like
ourselves; that is, whose form is just like our own, and who, so far
as we can judge at the first glance, appear to have the same
perceptions. Everything therefore leads us to suppose that they have
also the same wants, and consequently the same interest in satisfying
them, whence it results that we must find great advantage in joining
with them for the purpose of distinguishing in nature what has the
power of preserving us from what has the power of hurting us. The
communication of ideas is the principle and the stay of this union,
and necessarily demands the invention of signs; such is the origin of
the formation of societies." _Discours Préliminaire de
l'Encyclopédie._ Contrast this with Aristotle's sensible statement
(_Polit._ I. ii. 15) that "there is in men by nature a strong impulse
to enter into such union."
[192] _Code de la Nature._
[193] See, for example, his criticism on the Abbé de St. Pierre.
_Conf._, viii. 264. And also in the analysis of this very Discourse,
above, vol. i. p. 163.
[194] "I have lived with communities of savages in South America and
in the East, who have no laws or law courts but the public opinion of
the visage freely expressed. Each man scrupulously respects the rights
of his fellow, and any infraction of those rights rarely or never
takes place. In such a community all are nearly equal. There are none
of those wide distinctions of education and ignorance, wealth and
poverty, master and servant, which are the products of our
civilisation; there is none of that widespread division of labour
which, while it increases wealth, produces also conflicting interests;
there is not that severe competition and struggle for existence, or
for wealth, which the dense population of civilised countries
inevitably creates. All incitements to great crimes are thus wanting,
and petty ones are repressed, partly by the influence of public
opinion, but chiefly by that natural sense of justice and of his
neighbour's right, which seems to be in some degree inherent in every
race of man. Now, although we have progressed vastly beyond the savage
state in intellectual achievements, we have not advanced equally in
morals. It is true that among those classes who have no wants that
cannot be easily supplied, and among whom public opinion has great
influence, the rights of others are fully respected. It is true, also,
that we have vastly extended the sphere of those rights, and include
within them all the brotherhood of man. But it is not too much to say,
that the mass of our populations have not at all advanced beyond the
savage code of morals, and have in many cases sunk below it."
Wallace's _Malay Archipelago_, vol. ii. pp. 460-461.
[195] So too Bougainville, a brother of the navigator, said in 1760,
"For an attentive observer who sees nothing in events of the utmost
diversity of appearance but the natural effects of a certain number of
causes differently combined, Greece is the universe in small, and the
history of Greece an excellent epitome of universal history." (Quoted
in Egger's _Hellénisme en France_, ii. 272.) The revolutionists of the
next generation, who used to appeal so unseasonably to the ancients,
were only following a literary fashion set by their fathers.
[196] _Doutes sur l'Ordre Naturel_; _Oeuv._, xi. 80. (Ed. 1794, 1795.)
[197] _La Législation_, I. i.
[198] _Ibid._
[199] It is not within our province to examine the vexed question
whether the Convention was fundamentally socialist, and not merely
political. That socialist ideas were afloat in the minds of some
members, one can hardly doubt. See Von Sybel's _Hist. of the French
Revolution_, Bk. II. ch. iv., on one side, and Quinet's _La
Révolution_, ii. 90-107, on the other.
[200] _Economie Politique_, pp. 41, 53, etc.