What Man has made of Man?”
This passage might be taken as the motto of Rousseauism. According to that philosophy man is the great disturber and perverter of the natural order. Other animals simply follow nature, but man has no instinct, and is thus left to find his own way. What is the consequence? A very different authority from Rousseau, the poet Cowper, tells us in language which Rousseau might have adopted—
“Reasoning at every step he treads,
Man yet mistakes his way:
While meaner things whom instinct leads,
Are seldom known to stray.”
Man has to investigate the sequences of Nature, and to arrange them for himself. In this way he brings about a great number of foreseen results, but in doing this he also brings about perhaps even a greater number of unforeseen results; and alas! it turns out that many, if not most, of these unforeseen results are the reverse of beneficial.
§ 19. Another thing is observable. Other animals are guided by instinct; we, for the most part, are guided by tradition. Man, it has been said, is the only animal that capitalises his discoveries. If we capitalised nothing but our discoveries, this accumulation would be an immense advantage to us; but we capitalise also our conjectures, our ideals, our habits, and unhappily, in many cases, our blunders.[212] So a great deal of action which is purely mischievous in its effects, comes not from our own mistakes, but from those of our ancestors. The consequence is, that what with our own mistakes and the mistakes we inherit, we sometimes go far indeed out of the course which “Nature” has prescribed for us.
§ 20. The generation which found a mouthpiece in Rousseau had become firmly convinced, not indeed of its own stupidity, but of the stupidity of all its predecessors; and the vast patrimony bequeathed to it seemed nothing but lumber or worse. So Rousseau found an eager and enthusiastic audience when he proposed a return to Nature, in other words, to give up all existing customs, and for the most part to do nothing and “give Nature a chance.” His boy of twelve years old was to have been taught nothing. Up to that age the great art of education, says Rousseau, is to do everything by doing nothing. The first part of education should be purely negative.
§ 21. Rousseau then was the first who escaped completely from the notion of the Renascence, that man was mainly a learning and remembering animal. But if he is not this, what is he? We must ascertain, said Rousseau, not a priori, but by observation. We need a new art, the art of observing children.