If, for the relation of the child to the father, we substitute the relation to the mother, as being even a closer one, the reasoning is perfectly correct. But Rousseau, leaving this solution out of the question, desired to show what ideas had led men to hold together, what aim they proposed to themselves in so doing, and by what means they could best attain this aim. Now, it admits of no dispute that it is only by the mutual consent of its members that society exists. This consent or contract is most undoubtedly the spiritual basis on which society rests; but the contract is entered into tacitly, is an understood thing, has always existed, has consequently no external actuality. In exactly the same manner we accept the geometric definition of the origin of a ball: A ball, or sphere, is generated by the revolution of a semicircle about its diameter. The definition is perfectly correct, but has no connection whatever with the material conditions requisite to the existence of any given ball. Never yet has a ball been made by causing a semicircle to revolve round its axis.
This same figure may be retained as giving an exact idea of the style of reasoning on social subjects characteristic of the eighteenth century, nay, of the whole intellectual tendency of the century. It is a dissolving, isolating tendency; it is in the direction of geometry and algebra; men endeavour to comprehend the most difficult and most complicated real situations by the aid of abstract ideas. This is a weakness which enables Bonald to gain an easy victory by an appeal to the principle of power. He opposes Rousseau's disintegrating theories with the doctrines of the days of the old absolute monarchy: "God is the sovereign power that rules all beings; the God-man is the power that rules mankind, the head of the state is the power that rules all his subjects, the head of the family is the power in his house. As all power is created in the image of God and originates with God, all power is absolute."[5]
Rousseau is, thirdly, attacked in the domain of morality. He had endeavoured to make "the inward, unwritten law," of which Antigone speaks, the source of every outward moral law. He had said: "What God desires man to do, He does not let him know through another man; He tells him it Himself, writes it on the table of his heart." If this be the case, what becomes of tradition and authority and revelations at second hand? Bonald consequently replies: "If man were obliged to obey this inward law, he would be as devoid of will as the stone, which must submit to the law of gravitation; if, on the contrary, he is at liberty not to obey it, an authority is required, which shall direct his attention to these laws and teach him to obey them." Thus in morals too the guiding power is transferred from man's own inward feeling to outward authority.
The antagonism to Rousseau is so strong that Bonald, for instance, writes page upon page of declamation against the philosopher's appeal to mothers to nurse their children themselves. One would imagine that, in this instance at least, Rousseau's theories would meet with the approval of the stern inculcators of duty. Not at all—the appeal in question shows that Jean-Jacques looked upon human beings as simply animals. "J. J. Rousseau declared in the name of nature that it was the duty of women to suckle their children, exactly as she-animals do, and for the same reason.... Fathers and mothers, regarded by the philosophers as simply males and females, in turn regarded their children simply as their young."[6] And why is Bonald so wrathful? Evidently because he fears that Rousseau may deprive religion of some of its credit by issuing a reasonable commandment not inscribed on the tables of its laws. "Rousseau," he goes on to say, "probably imagined that he had surprised religion in the neglect of a duty; but possibly religion, more far-sighted than he, feared anything which might serve young married people as a reason or excuse for living separated from each other, even momentarily." The motherly solicitude of the Catholic church for the happiness of spouses and the multiplication of the human race—this also is to be placed in the clearest light by means of an attack on Rousseau.
We have seen to what misunderstanding of the idea of society the unhistoric, mathematical line of thought of the eighteenth century led. A kindred line of thought produced a very similar misunderstanding of poetry. In their admiration for mathematical reasonableness, and for the certainty with which general truths had been arrived at by mathematical inferences, men were eager to communicate to language, as far as possible, the quality of mathematically exact expression. Condillac defined science as une langue bien faite, i.e. a perfectly clear and perfectly exact language. The fact was not sufficiently appreciated that, when it is desired to reproduce impressions which are different in different persons, and which even in the same person may change from one moment to another, a flexible, impressionable language is required, a language which accepts its spirit and whole stamp from the person using it. Scientific men began to deride what they called poetry and style, and maintained that in writing thought was everything, form nothing. Barante, who, in a critical work published at the beginning of the new century, was the first to protest against these ideas of his age, argues cleverly: "When Chimène says to Rodrigue: 'Go! I do not hate thee,' it is plain, if we submit these words to calm investigation, that they mean the same as if she had said: 'Go! I love thee'; and yet, if she used the latter expression, she would be quite a different being; her consideration for her father would be gone, and so would her modesty and her charm."
The poets, who were in reality influenced by the same ideas as the scientists, and were as far as they from conceiving of style as the direct outcome of the personality, set themselves to work to fabricate style, and spoke of it as we speak of the music composed for any given libretto. They looked upon the art of writing as a perfectly external art, and the descriptive school, with Delille at their head, took unpoetic themes—physics, botany, astronomy, sea-voyages—and out of them manufactured style. (See poetical works of Boisjolin, Gudin, Aimé Martin, and Esménard.) Cournand actually wrote a poem in four cantos on style itself and its various species. Poetry was regarded as an artificial form communicated to the matured thought. This was the idea which Buffon had contradicted in his notable proposition: Le style c'est l'homme même, a proposition which was presently to become the most hackneyed of quotations, inevitable whenever the subject of style was broached, and employed by none so frequently as by those who were neither men nor possessors of style.[7] The poets of the eighteenth century derived their conception of the nature of poetry from their own practice. As their own poetry, their own language, was not a natural product, but the result of labour and the observance of certain rules respecting elegance of expression, choice of similes, and employment of mythology, they naturally believed that language and thought originated independently of each other.
When Bonald, in opposition to their theory, propounds his, namely, that language and thought cannot be separated—the theory upon which (in his principal work, La législation primitive) he founds his whole system—he is unquestionably in the right. But this doctrine meets with the same fate as other doctrines propounded by the restorers of the past; the disease of orthodoxy from which the author suffers causes him to twist and turn every true thought until he makes a perfect monster out of it. "The answer to the vital question regarding the intellectual life of man may," says Bonald, "be given in the following form: Man must think his words before he speaks his thought. In other words, man must know the word before he speaks it, which self-evident fact excludes all possibility of his having himself invented language." Thus Bonald arrives at the favourite theory of the nineteenth-century reactionaries, namely, that language was originally given to man by God. Kierkegaard expresses the same idea when he declares that it cannot possibly be conceded that man himself invented language (On the Idea of Fear). Why? Because it was revealed to him by God, ready made.
It is Locke's and Condillac's reasonable theory of the slow evolution of language and ideas which Bonald contradicts with his principle of the necessity of an original revelation of language and ideas. Upon this belief of his he bases nothing less than the dogma of the existence of God, which entails all the others. To it we always come back, turn where we will. As none of the reactionaries have any idea of science—they are men of good parts with such an education as is given in the Jesuit schools—there is nothing in the way of scientific nonsense which they do not talk and write. The science of language is sacrificed along with political and social science on the altar of theocracy. It may be mentioned as a remarkable instance of the manner in which these reactionaries held together that in 1814 Bonald published a new edition of De Maistre's work, Sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques, that is to say, he circulated a book in which written constitutions were strongly condemned, although he himself, arguing from the standpoint of his theory of the direct revelation of language, had come to the conclusion that every commandment, from the ten commandments downwards, must have been noted down, must exist in black and white. But to him, as to De Maistre, the real matter of importance was that the constitution should make no concession to the spirit of the times, that authority should stand secure, unimperilled by the gales of liberty; therefore he did not hesitate to profit by the aid of a co-religionary, even though he differed from him on an important point.
It was not enough for the reactionaries that they themselves had been brought up in the Jesuit schools; they were fain to have the whole youth of the nation sent there. De Maistre was all his life the patron and ardent champion of the Jesuits. At the court of St. Petersburg he exposed himself to much unpleasantness rather than throw them over.
The third part of Bonald's Législation primitive, which treats chiefly of education, is directed against Rousseau's Émile; he cannot forgive this book for teaching that religion ought not to form a part of children's education. In all seriousness he mentions, as an example of the fatal results of Rousseau's principles of education, that during the last five months seventy-five children have been sentenced to punishment for various crimes. He then proceeds to expound his own principles. Their aim, as was to be expected, is the suppression of all individuality. "We require a continuous, universal, uniform (perpétuel, universel, uniforme) course of instruction, and consequently continuity, universality, and uniformity in our teachers; therefore we must have a corps of teachers, for without a corps we can ensure neither continuity nor universality nor uniformity." He maintains that married teachers cannot be expected to sacrifice themselves to their calling, and unmarried ones are equally unserviceable unless they are under the restraint of religious vows; "for secular teachers, even though they be unmarried, are incapable of forming a real corps, because they enter it and leave it according to their own inclination and caprice; moreover, no father of a family would dare to entrust his children to an unmarried man whose morals were not certified by his religious vows and discipline." By force of these arguments he arrives at the conclusion that the whole education of the nation should be entrusted to the clergy, should be distinctly religious, and should early accustom children to reverence that authority to which they are to submit throughout their lives.