Bearing in some exaggerations the marks of the excessive violencewith which its author's mind had recoiled from assumptionsusually suffered to pass without scrutiny, vet showing in someambiguities the traces of a desire to compromise with existingprejudice, the book of Montesquieu, with all its defects, stillproceeded on that Historical Method before which the Law ofNature has never maintained its footing for an instant. Itsinfluence on thought ought to have been as great as its generalpopularity; but, in fact, it was never allowed time to put itforth, for the counter-hypothesis which it seemed destined todestroy passed suddenly from the forum to the street, and becamethe key-note of controversies far more exciting than are everagitated in the courts or the schools. The person who launched iton its new career was that remarkable man who, without learning,with few virtues, and with no strength of character, hasnevertheless stamped himself ineffaceably on history by the forceof a vivid imagination, and by the help of a genuine and burninglove for his fellow-men, for which much will always have to beforgiven him. We have never seen in our own generation -- indeedthe world has not seen more than once or twice in all the courseof history -- a literature which has exercised such prodigiousinfluence over the minds of men, over every cast and shade ofintellect, as that which emanated from Rousseau between 1749 and1762. It was the first attempt to re-erect the edifice of humanbelief after the purely iconoclastic efforts commenced by Bayle,and in part by our own Locke, and consummated by Voltaire; andbesides the superiority which every constructive effort willalways enjoy over one that is merely destructive, it possessedthe immense advantage of appearing amid an all but universalscepticism as to the soundness of all foregone knowledge inmatters speculative. Now, in all the speculations of Rousseau,the central figure, whether arrayed in an English dress as thesignatory of a social compact, or simply stripped naked of allhistorical qualities, is uniformly Man, in a supposed state ofnature. Every law or institution which would misbeseem thisimaginary being under these ideal circumstances is to becondemned as having lapsed from an original perfection; everytransformation of society which would give it a closerresemblance to the world over which the creature of Naturereigned, is admirable and worthy to be effected at any apparentcost. The theory is still that of the Roman lawyers, for in thephantasmagoria with which the Natural Condition is peopled, everyfeature and characteristic eludes the mind except the simplicityand harmony which possessed such charms for the jurisconsult; butthe theory is, as it were, turned upside down. It is not the Lawof Nature, but the State of Nature, which is now the primarysubject of contemplation. The Roman had conceived that by carefulobservation of existing institutions parts of them could besingled out which either exhibited already, or could by judiciouspurification be made to exhibit, the vestiges of that reign ofnature whose reality he faintly affirmed. Rousseau's belief wasthat a perfect social order could be evolved from the unassistedconsideration of the natural state, a social order whollyirrespective of the actual condition of the world and whollyunlike it. The great difference between the views is that onebitterly and broadly condemns the present for its unlikeness tothe ideal past; while the other, assuming the present to be asnecessary as the past, does not affect to disregard or censureit. It is not worth our while to analyse with any particularitythat philosophy of politics, art, education, ethics, and socialrelation which was constructed on the basis of a state of nature.
It still possesses singular fascination for the looser thinkersof every country, and is no doubt the parent, more or lessremote, of almost all the prepossessions which impede theemployment of the Historical Method of inquiry, but its discreditwith the higher minds of our day is deep enough to astonish thosewho are familiar with the extraordinary vitality of speculativeerror. Perhaps the question most frequently asked nowadays is notwhat is the value of these opinions, but what were the causeswhich gave them such overshadowing prominence a hundred yearsago. The answer is, I conceive, a simple one. The study which inthe last century would best have corrected the misapprehensionsinto which an exclusive attention to legal antiquities is apt tobetray was the study of religion. But Greek religion, as thenunderstood, was dissipated in imaginative myths. The Orientalreligions, if noticed at all, appeared to be lost in vaincosmogonies. There was but one body of primitive records whichwas worth studying -- the early history of the Jews. But resortto this was prevented by the prejudices of the time. One of thefew characteristics which the school of Rousseau had in commonwith the school of Voltaire was an utter disdain of all religiousantiquities; and, more than all, of those of the Hebrew race. Itis well known that it was a point of honour with the reasoners ofthat day to assume not merely that the institutions called afterMoses were not divinely dictated, nor even that they werecodified at a later date than that attributed to them, but thatthey and the entire Pentateuch were a gratuitous forgery,executed after the return from the Captivity. Debarred,therefore, from one chief security against speculative delusion,the philosophers of France, in their eagerness to escape fromwhat they deemed a superstition of the priests, flung themselvesheadlong into a superstition of the lawyer.
