Leibnitz, Descartes, and Malebranche. Losing Madame de Warens' favor, he went to Lyons, and in 1741 to Paris. He at first copied and composed music, afterwards held for a time the post of private secretary to the ambassador to Venice, got into the society of the celebrated Encyclopédistes, contributed to the "Encyclopédie," and won fame by taking a prize offered by the Academy of Dijon for the best essay on the "Effect of the Progress of Civilization on Morals" (1749). His literary success brought him offers of favor, of which, however, he did not avail himself to any great extent. He copied music, wrote operettas, comedies, novels, and essays. After a number of years of both popularity and prosperity (a Madame d'Épinay caused to be built for him a fine residence in the valley of Montmorency, near Paris), Rousseau fell under condemnation because of alleged Deism, immorality, and what-not in his writings, and was, by his enemies, driven about from place to place. He found refuge finally in England, under the auspices of Hume, in the year 1765. Quarrelling with his benefactor, he returned to France the next year. He was permitted to return to Paris on condition that he would not publish anything on religion or the government. He gained a livelihood for himself and a woman with whom he had informally united himself some years before but did not until now marry, by copying music. Stories of poverty, domestic infelicity, sorrow, and sickness are related of him at this time. In 1778 he determined to accept an oft-repeated invitation of a certain Marquis de Girardin to live on an estate of his near Paris. He died suddenly (by his own hand, some have imagined) a few months after accepting the invitation. His importance in the history of philosophy seems to be more that of a personal force and stimulator of other men than that of a scientific thinker.

Works.- Of Rousseau's works we may mention here: "Discours sur l'Origine et les Fondemens de l'Inégalité parmi les Hommes" (1753); "La Nouvelle Héloïse" (1761); "Émile, ou sur l'Éducation" (1762), containing

the "Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard," Rousseau's answer to the materialism of his day and the statement of his views on God and natural religion; "Du Contrat Social, ou Principes du Droit Politique" (1762), closely connected with the "Discours sur l'Origine," etc.

Philosophy: God and Nature. I receive impressions from objects, which I am able to distinguish from myself, even though they were merely ideas; hence they exist. I distinguish from myself as merely feeling or receiving impressions, myself as judging, exercising a power of reflection,

a power which only an active, intelligent being can possess; therefore I, as well as objects, exist. I perceive matter now in motion, and now at rest, and seek a cause. I perceive that if nothing acts upon matter, it does not move; that, therefore, its natural condition is one of rest. I distinguish in myself a voluntary cause of motion; but the visible universe is not an animal which moves itself, and its movements must have an external cause; matter receives and communicates motion, but does not originate it. We have to attribute motion to will as its cause: there is no action without will. Will, then, moves the world and animates nature: this is the first article of my creed. Matter moving according to law reveals an intelligence, — the second article of my creed. Intelligence implies comparing and choosing. Hence there exists a judging, choosing, willing, or acting, being as the cause of all things. The designs of this being I do not comprehend; but I perceive co-ordination and order everywhere, and cannot resist the conviction that the world is guided by a wise, powerful, and consequently a good will. My spontaneous attitude towards this being is that of a feeling of awe and gratitude; and, according to a simple dictate of nature herself, I worship this being. I do not find a written revelation of him. Man's freedom is only apparent his will is necessarily determined by his understanding; he wills the good only as he judges the true. His freedom, so called, consists merely in his willing what is, and what he holds to

be, suited to him. As free, man is animated by an immaterial substance the third article of my creed. The evil that man does, returns upon himself, without affecting the order of the world. The only evil in the world is what he does and suffers. That the soul is immortal I do not know, but I cannot conceive the dissolution and death of it as of the body. I assume that it does not die, because this assumption comforts me and is not in itself irrational. What happiness or punishment there may be besides those which result from the contemplation of the highest being and from the judgments of conscience, I do not know; but I must think that men will be rewarded according to their deserts, and that justice is done already in this life. I can conceive no greater good that any being could expect to realize hereafter than to be permitted to live according to its nature. The moral disorder of the world does not shake, but rather confirms, my faith in providence. I endeavor to shun the two extremes of heartless freethinking and blind credulity, I dare confess God before the philosophers, and preach humanity to persecutors. The various religions of men are so many modes of worship, differing merely according to requirements of climate, government, spirit of the people, etc.; they are essentially the same, and good only so far as God is in them. gion is essentially of the heart. The duties of religion are independent of the affairs of men, but no religion absolves from the duties of morality, which are alone truly essential.

Reli

The State. The State rests upon a contract by which all individuals alienate to the community, or general will, their natural rights. Outside society man exists in a state of nature, which is not, indeed, a state of war, but a state similar to that in which brutes live: instinct, instead of reason, ruling action. But self-preservation and the satisfaction of need are with difficulty secured in such a condition, and to obviate the difficulty society is established. The alienation of rights through which society is established is an alienation of personal freedom and property. The

purpose of the alienation is a redistribution and equalization of rights; a legitimation of what were, before the alienation, rights merely, as it were, by usurpation. In society the general will (la volonté générale), or the will of the people, is sovereign, since the civil order should in its essence be as little as possible removed from the state of nature. The general will is infallible, and always attains to justice, since justice is merely what the general will determines: "if the people wrong itself, no one has a right to interfere." The general will must be ascertained, not through assemblies of deputies or representatives, but from a direct expression through meetings of the populace. At each meeting of the populace it must be formally decided whether or not the sovereign (the people) pleases to maintain the existing form of government, and whether or not it pleases to leave the administration of the government with those who actually have it in charge. The change of the existing form of government is not revolution; there is no revolution, whatever the State chooses to do being ipso facto legal. The general will must be executed by a power directly subject to itself. The monarchy, therefore, is the worst form of government, the republic the best. Religion, like property, must be under the control of the State. As individuals, men may think as seems reasonable to them, but as citizens they must recognize the public religion. The essentials of this religion are the belief in an intelligent, benevolent, prescient, providential God, a future life, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social contract. Non-believers must be punished with death. (At this point appears most plainly the connection between Rousseau's Deism and his theory of Society.)

Morality and Education. - Man is born good: instinct, primal sentiment, unaltered, tend spontaneously to the good. Goodness is life according to nature, or to what we are by nature. Goodness has to be attained by recalling conscience to the sentiment of good and evil, which VOL. I.- - 16

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sophistry and conventionality have obscured. This is the problem of education. Education is of a threefold nature: it comes from nature, from men, and from things. As coming from nature, it is, so far as the human teacher is concerned, negative. The teacher must, in dealing with the very young, let nature have her way almost entirely, must keep the child from doing anything." And even in later stages of instruction the teacher must not so much give information as cause the child, by the exertion of its natural powers, to discover of itself what it should know. The successive stages in education are (1) education of the body and the senses (till the twelfth year); (2) intellectual education (from the twelfth to the fifteenth year); (3) moral education (from the fifteenth to the twentieth year). Intellectual education should be entirely utilitarian, history, language, and literature must be proscribed, and, in their stead, the practical arts and sciences pursued; moral education should be sentimental; religious education must begin late, to avoid superstition. Females must be educated solely with reference to wifehood. The natural man, who is the beginning of the process of education, is not a "savage banished to the primal wilderness," but a "savage who is to dwell in towns," and to see with his own eyes and feel with his own heart; in a word, to be ruled by reason.

Result. Rousseau belongs almost, if not quite, as much to the third as to the second period of Modern Philosophy. In him, at least, individual self-consciousness receives something like its due. His Deism, however, connects him with the second period.

§ 82.

Charles Bonnet (1720-1793). Bonnet, though of French descent, was born in Switzerland, and always lived there. He early began studies in natural history, and made therein important discoveries, which won him membership in the Royal Society of London, the Academy