The Genevese, Jean Jacques Rousseau[1] (1712-78), stands in a similar relation of opposition to the French Illumination as the Scottish School to the English, and Herder and Jacobi to the German.  He points us away from the cold sophistical inferences of the understanding to the immediate conviction of feeling; from the imaginations of science to the unerring voice of the heart and the conscience; from the artificial conditions of culture to healthy nature.  The vaunted Illumination is not the lever of progress, but the source of all degeneration; morality does not rest on the shrewd calculation of self-interest, but on original social and sympathetic instincts (love for the good is just as natural to the human heart as self-love; enthusiasm for virtue has nothing to do with our interest; what would it mean to give up one’s life for the sake of advantage?); the truths of religion are not objects of thought, but of pious feeling.

[Footnote 1:  Cf.  Brockerhoff, Leipsic, 1863-74; L. Moreau, Paris, 1870.]

Rousseau commenced his career as an author with the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, 1750 (the discussion of a prize question, crowned by the Academy of Dijon), which he describes as entirely pernicious, and the Discourse on the Origin and the Bases of the Inequality among Men, 1753.  By nature man is innocent and good, becoming evil only in society.  Reflection, civilization, and egoism are unnatural.  In the happy state of nature pity and innocent self-love (amour de soi) ruled, and the latter was first corrupted by the reason into the artificial feeling of selfishness (amour propre) in the course of social development—­thinking man is a degenerate animal.  Property has divided men into rich and poor; the magistracy, into strong and weak; arbitrary power, into masters and slaves.  Wealth generated luxury with its artificial delights of science and the theater, which make us more unhappy and evil than we otherwise are; science, the child of vice, becomes in turn the mother of new vices.  All nature, all that is characteristic, all that is good, has disappeared with advancing culture; the only relief from the universal degeneracy is to be hoped for from a return to nature on the part of the individual and society alike—­from education and a state conformed to nature.  The novel Emile is devoted to the pedagogical, and the Social Contract, or the Principles of Political Law, to the political problem.  Both appeared in 1762, followed two years later by the Letters from the Mountain, a defense against the attacks of the clergy.  In these later writings Rousseau’s naturalistic hatred of reason appears essentially softened.