16 
(After a brief description of the doctrines of the Discourses 
and of the Social Contract, the lecture proceeded). 
We may trace the influence of Rousseau in the domain of 
literature. His Discourses had placed nature as ordinarily 
understood in opposition to human development as expressed 
in civilization. They tended to produce a reaction against 
artificiality and conventions, including a re-action against 
the artificial versification of the generation which followed 
Pope. They prepared a public which could appreciate “ The 
Traveller,” and “ The Deserted Village,” with dreams of a 
pantisocracy in which the evils of contemporaneous government 
should disappear. His theories led to that communion with 
nature to which we owe not only “ The Ancient Mariner ” 
and the “ Excursion,” but also “ Endymion ” and a long 
line of later poetry. Shelley and Wordsworth were both 
affected bv Rousseau. Wordsworth followed Rousseau 
blindly and often extols nature at the expense of man. 
Wordsworth in his “ Ode on the Imitations of Immortality ” 
wrongly called the Platonic ode, shows strongly the influence 
of Rousseau. Plato taught that the soul at birth loses all 
remembrance of the close connection with the universal 
soul in which it had been living prior to its rebirth on earth, 
and only by degrees and after much striving after good is it 
permitted to realize something of its essential kinship with 
the universal essence of good. Wordsworth, following 
Rousseau, inverts this. In his Ode he tells us again and 
again that man is born good and his education, culture and 
civilization corrupt him until little trace of his goodness 
remains. We cannot accept this or Rousseau’s assumption 
that the cumulative effect of human institutions is to bring 
man from original goodness to acquired badness. Moreover, 
it is not consistent with his belief in the effects of right educa- 
tion set forth in the “ Emile.” There is no good reason 
for assuming that there is necessarily opposition between 
nature and man. Man is rather the completion towards 
which nature has been striving. Rousseau’s doctrine could 
only be true if the world were governed by a malignant demon 
making sport of man by giving him ideas which he would 
struggle to grasp and which should turn into dust and ashes 
in his hands. 
American thought has been permeated by Rousseau’s 
influence. Emerson and Thoreau both came under his spell. 
Thoreau was especially in sympathy with Rousseau’s indict- 
ment of civilization and he retired into the country to live 
by himself for three years, reducing his scale of living till 
six weeks work per year sufficed. 
