VII ON THE NATURAL INEQUALITY OF MEN 299 



qu'on ne pense a celui qui entreprendrait do 

 determiner exactement les precautions a prendre 

 pour faire sur ce sujet de solides observations." 

 And, certainly, the amount of philosophy required 

 to base an argument on that which does not exist, 

 has not existed, and, perhaps, never will exist, may 

 well seem unattainable at any rate, at first sight. 

 Yet, apart from analogies which might be drawn 

 from the mathematical sciences where, for ex- 

 ample, a straight line is a thing which has not 

 existed, does not exist, and probably never will 

 exist, and yet forms a good ground for reasoning ; 

 and the value of which I need not stop to discuss 

 I take it that Rousseau has a very comprehensible 

 idea at the bottom of this troublesome statement. 

 What I conceive him to mean is that it is 

 possible to form an ideal conception of what 

 ought to be the condition of mankind ; l and that, 

 having done so, we are bound to judge the existing 

 state of things by that ideal. That assumption 

 puts us on the " high priori road " at once. 



1 Compare Ancient Law : " The Law of Nature confused the 

 Past and the Present. Logically, it implied a state of Nature 

 which had once been regulated by Natural Law ; yet the juris- 

 consults do not speak clearly or confidently of the existence of 

 such a state " (p. 73). "There are some writers on the subject 

 who attempt to evade the fundamental difficulty by contending 

 that the code of Nature exists in the future and is the goal to 

 which all civil laws are moving" (p. 74). The jurisconsults 

 conceived of Natural Law "as a system which ought gradually 

 to absorb Civil Laws" (p. 76). " Its functions were, in short, 

 remedial, not revolutionary or anarchical. And this unfortun- 

 ately is the exact point at which the modern view of a Law of 

 Nature has often ceased to resemble the ancient" (p. 77). 



