ideal. That assumption puts us on the "high priori road" at once.
I do not suppose that any one is inclined to doubt the usefulness of a political ideal as a goal toward which social conduct should strive, whether it can ever be completely realized or not; any more than any one will doubt that it is useful to have a moral ideal toward which personal conduct should tend, even though one may never reach it. Certainly, I am the last person to question this, or to doubt that politics is as susceptible of treatment by scientific method as any other field of natural knowledge.[1] But it will be admitted that, great as are the advantages of having a political ideal, fashioned by an absolute rule of political conduct, it is perhaps better to do without one, rather than to adopt the first phantasm, bred of fallacious reasonings and born of the unscientific imagination, which presents itself. The benighted traveler, lost on a moor, who refuses to follow a man with a lantern, is surely not to be commended. But suppose his hesitation arises from a well-grounded doubt as to whether the seeming luminary is anything but a will o' the wisp? And, unless I fail egregiously in attaining my purpose, those who read this paper to the end will, I think, have no doubt that the political lantern of Rousseauism is a mere corpse-candle and will plunge those who follow it in the deepest of anarchic bogs.
There is another point which must be carefully borne in mind in any discussion of Rousseau's doctrines; and that is the meaning which he attaches to the word "inequality." A hundred and fifty years ago, as now, political and biological philosophers found they were natural allies.[2] Rousseau is not intelligible without Buffon, with whose earlier works he was evidently acquainted, and whose influence in the following passage is obvious:
- ↑ In the course of the correspondence in the "Times" to which I have referred, I was earnestly exhorted to believe that the world of politics does not lie outside of the province of science. My impression is that I was trying to teach the public that great truth, which I had learned from Mill and Comte, thirty-five years ago; when, if I mistake not, my well-meaning monitor was more occupied with peg-tops than with politics. See a lecture on the "Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences" delivered in 1854 ("Lay Sermons," p. 97).
- ↑ The publication of Buffon's "Histoire Naturelle" began in 1749. Thus Rousseau was indebted to the naturalists; on the other hand, in the case of the elder Darwin, who started what is now usually known as Lamarck's hypothesis, the naturalist was set speculating by the ideas of the philosopher Hartley, transmitted through Priestley. See "Zoonomia," I, sect. xxxix, p. 483 (ed. 1796). I hope some day to deal at length with this curious fact in scientific history.
at which the modern view of a Law of Nature has often ceased to resemble the ancient" (p. 77).
