7 66 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ideal. That assumption puts us on the "high priori road" at 

 once. 



I do not suppose that any one is inclined to doubt the useful- 

 ness 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 ques- 

 tion this, or to doubt that politics is as susceptible of treatment 

 by scientific method as any other field of natural knowledge.* 

 But it will be admitted that, great as are the advantages of hav- 

 ing 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 be- 

 nighted traveler, lost on a moor, who refuses to follow a man with 

 a lantern, is surely not to be commended. But suppose his hesita- 

 tion 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 mean- 

 ing which he attaches to the word " inequality." A hundred and 

 fifty years ago, as now, political and biological philosophers 

 found they were natural allies, f Rousseau is not intelligible 

 without Buff on, with whose earlier works he was evidently ac- 

 quainted, and whose influence in the following passage is obvious : 



It is easy to see that we must seek the primary cause of the differences hy 

 which men are distinguished in these successive changes of the human constitu- 

 tion ; since it is universally admitted that they are, naturally, as equal among 



at which the modern view of a Law of Nature has often ceased to resemble the an- 

 cient " (p. 77). 



* 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). 



f 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 spec- 

 ulating by the ideas of the philosopher Hartley, transmitted through Priestley. See " Zoo- 

 nomia," I, sect, xxxix, p. 483 (ed. 1796). I hope some day to deal at length with this 

 curious fact in scientific history. 



