Per l' altro modo quell' amor s' obblia DANTE, Inferno, XI., 55, 56, 61-63. IF true human greatness consists in deep insight, strong and well-distributed affection, and free, beneficent will, Rousseau was not in any sense a great man. His insight, like his knowledge, was limited and superficial; his affections were capricious and undisciplined; and his will was ungenerous and selfish. His importance in literature and history is due to the fact that he summed up in his character, expressed in his writings, and exemplified in his experience, a group of tendencies and aspirations which had for some time been half blindly stirring in the bosom of society, and which in him attained to complete consciousness and manifestation for the first time.1 1 Rousseau has been undeservedly blamed for feeling and expressing this. In the opening of his Confessions he says: "I feel my heart, and I know men. I am not made like any that I have seen, 3 These tendencies and aspirations, which may be comprehended under the one term individualism, or, more strictly, subjective individualism, have a history, and this we must now sketch, if we are to understand the significance of our author. 2 Modern individualism is a reaction against the extreme socialism of the Middle Age. The ruling principle of that age was authority, conceived as derived from a Supreme Being of infinite power, and vested in the heads of two institutions, Church and Empire, or, more frequently, in that of the Church alone.1 According to the views then prevalent, the individual was neither his own origin nor his own end. He was created by God, for God's glory, and was merely a means to that. He had therefore, of course, no freedom, whether of thought, affection, or will. Free inquiry into the laws and nature of reality gave way to a timid discussion of the meaning of authority. The natural affections were but grudgingly admitted to a place in life, and, even as late as the Council of Trent, in the sixteenth century, an anathema was pronounced upon any one who should say that the state of vir and I venture to think that I am not made like any that exist. If I am not better, I am, at least, different. Whether nature did well or ill in breaking the mould in which she cast me, no one can tell till after he has read me." The truth is, Rousseau was the first of a new type, of which there are plenty of specimens in our day, the type of the subjective, sensuous, sentimental, dalliant, querulous individualist. Nature by no means broke the mould. See Morley, Rousseau, Vol. II., pp. 304 sqq. 1 See Dante, De Monarchia, and compare Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, passim. 2 "In His will is our peace," says a blessed spirit in the Paradise of Dante (III., 85). 1 ginity and celibacy was not better than the state of matrimony. Above all, free self-determination of the will, possible only through free inquiry and free affection, was placed under the ban. The task of the centuries since the close of the Middle Age has been gradually to shake off this yoke and to restore men to freedom, that is, to convince them that they are ends in and through themselves. 2 The first notable manifestations of this tendency were the Germanic Reformation and the Italian Renaissance, both belonging to the sixteenth century. The former claimed freedom for the individual intelligence; the latter, freedom for the individual feelings and emotions. Neither of them thought of aspiring to freedom of the moral will, which is the only true freedom. This is a fact of the utmost importance in enabling us to comprehend the thought and practice of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. We look vainly in these for the conception of moral freedom. What the absence of this meant, we can perhaps most clearly see, when we realize that the complete, logical outcome of the Reformation was Voltaire; that of the Renaissance, Rousseau. It takes the clear, mathematical mind of the French to carry principles to their logical conclusions in thought and 1 See Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum et Definitionum, p. 231, § 856. 8 2 We can trace the tendency itself back to Abelard (1079–1142), and even further. 8 In Goethe's great drama, Faust, who stands for the complete movement toward individualism, and who discovers its nature and limitations, takes his stand upon the will. "Allein ich will!" he says, in defiance of all Mephistopheles' suggestions. Part I., 1. 1432 (Schröer). practice.1 What Rousseau demands is absolutely free play for the feelings and emotions. But it took a long time for any one to become clearly aware that this was the true meaning of the Renaissance. In trying to escape from authority, the men of the Reformation appealed to Reason; those of the Renaissance, to Nature. And the causes of this are obvious. Reason can find justification only in Reason; feeling, emotion, as claiming to be guiding principles, must look for theirs in Nature. Accordingly, while among the "Reformers" Reason played the chief part, and in the end gave rise to speculative philosophy, among the "Humanists" Nature received a homage which finally developed into physical science. The notion of "Nature was an inheritance from the Greeks, chiefly, it should seem, through Plato. Indeed, the distinction between Nature (púois) and convention (Béois), or law (vópos), is fundamental in Greek thinking, which may be said to have originated in an attempt to find in Nature, regarded as unerring because necessitated, a sure refuge from the manifold forms of capricious-seeming conventions. Already in the minds of the Greeks this distinction involves that dualism between the material and the spiritual which pervades almost their entire philosophy, and constitutes its chief defect. Accepting, without analysis, the ordinary, common-sense view of the world, which regards material things as entirely indepen 2 1 See Mrs. Browning, Aurora Leigh, Bk. VI. 2 See, especially, Plato's Cratylus and the opening lines of Æschylus' Agamemnon. Cf. Lersch, Sprachphilosophie der Alten, Vol. I., pp. 1 sqq. dent of thought, and governed by laws more rigid and reliable than it can claim, they were fain, like many equally unschooled scientists of the present day, to adopt these laws as the norm for human action; in a word, to naturalize spirit. Continuing to think, however, they were finally surprised to discover that Nature itself was purely conventional (éra, vóμw), that is, subject to the laws of spirit, and therefore incapable of furnishing a court of appeal from these. This was the work of the Sophists, who, by their open scepticism, made it very clear that, if there was any inexorable law, it must be sought elsewhere than in Nature. Socrates wisely sought it in the unity and completeness of thought; but his work was undone by his pupil Plato, who sought it in a world of ideas of his own invention, a world having no necessary connection with either matter or mind. From this time on, Nature, and gradually mind or Reason also, fell into disrepute, and the supreme object of interest became Plato's fantastic creation, the so-called ideal world. This tendency, along with many other things in Greek philosophy,1 passed over into Christianity, and reached its culmination in the Middle Age, when Nature and Reason were both equally regarded with suspicion, or even contempt, as the origin of evil, and the place of Plato's ideal world was taken by an authoritative Revelation. 2 As we have seen, the Reformation undertook to rehabilitate Reason, and the Renaissance, Nature. 1 See Hatch, Hibbert Lectures (1888), generally. 2 See the horrified speech of the Archbishop, in Faust, Pt. II., Act i., lines 285-304 (Schröer). |