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?