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One can hardly love Rousseau, though one does not wonder that there were many found to do so; and instead of judging him, one cries out with horror at the slime of the pit where he lay bound. April 14, 1889. A delusion of which we must beware is the delusion that we can have a precise and accurate knowledge of spiritual things.
All these men who are supposed to have inspired the Revolution had opinions which were far from subversive, and it is really difficult to see that they had any real influence on the development of the revolutionary movement. Rousseau was one of the very few democratic philosophers of his age, which is why his Contrat Social became the Bible of the men of the Terror.
The theory of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Jefferson, though not formally abandoned, and still held by many, has latterly been much modified, if not wholly transformed. Sovereignty, it is now maintained, is inherent in the people; not individually, indeed, but collectively, or the people as society.
It concerns a woman placed between two men who dispute over her. This woman, placed between two men, has dreams which appear to the author very agreeable. Shall we sum up, Mr. Attorney? Or is it necessary for me to quote you Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Confessions, and some others?
"Ah, I do well," he says, "not to let the access to my heart be too easy; when anybody has once found a place in it, he does not leave it without making a grievous rent; 'tis a wound that can never be thoroughly cauterised." It is needless to remind the neutral reader that Rousseau uses exactly the same kind of language about his heart.
It is the constant and rigorous social parade which keeps the eager regiment of the senses from making furious rout. Rousseau had just repudiated all social obligation, and he had never gone through external discipline. He was at an age when passion that has never been broken in has the beak of the bald vulture, tearing and gnawing a man; but its first approach is in fair shapes.
Even J. J. Rousseau confounding communism and equality has said somewhere that, without slavery, he did not think equality of conditions possible. The communities of the early Church did not last the first century out, and soon degenerated into monasteries.
The unflinching application of principles is seldom achieved by the men who first launch them. The labour of the preliminary task seems to exhaust one man's stock of mental force. Rousseau never thought of the subversion of society or its reorganisation on a communistic basis.
A too-ready expression of the Rousseau philosophy had made things a bit unpleasant for Marat in Edinburgh, but in London he found ready listeners, and the coffeehouses echoed back his radical sentiments. These underground debating-clubs of London started more than one man off on the oratorical transverse.
In order that the Revolution should take place, it does not suffice that Montesquieu should foresee it, that Diderot should preach it, that Beaumarchais should announce it, that Condorcet should calculate it, that Arouet should prepare it, that Rousseau should premeditate it; it is necessary that Danton should dare it. The cry: Audacity! is a Fiat lux.
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