imagination, he was in reality a savage whose whole life was dominated, on the one hand by the mere brute necessities of existence, and on the other by a complicated and revolting system of superstitions.  Nature is neither simple nor good; and all history shows that the necessary condition for the production of any of the really valuable things of life is the control of Nature by man—­in fact, civilization.  So far, therefore, the Philosophes were right; if the Golden Age was to have any place at all in the story of humanity, it must be, not at the beginning, but the end.

But Rousseau was not, at bottom, concerned with the truth of any historical theory at all.  It was only because he hated the present that he idealized the past.  His primitive Golden Age was an imaginary refuge from the actual world of the eighteenth century.  What he detested and condemned in that world was in reality not civilization, but the conventionality of civilization—­the restrictions upon the free play of the human spirit which seemed to be inherent in civilized life.  The strange feeling of revolt that surged up within him when he contemplated the drawing-rooms of Paris, with their brilliance and their philosophy, their intellect and their culture, arose from a profounder cause than a false historical theory, or a defective logical system, or a mean personal jealousy and morbid pride.  All these elements, no doubt, entered into his feeling—­for Rousseau was a very far from perfect human being; but the ultimate source was beyond and below them—­in his instinctive, overmastering perception of the importance and the dignity of the individual soul.  It was in this perception that Rousseau’s great originality lay.  His revolt was a spiritual revolt.  In the Middle Ages the immense significance of the human spirit had been realized, but it had been inextricably involved in a mass of theological superstition.  The eighteenth century, on the other hand, had achieved the great conception of a secular system of society; but, in doing so, it had left out of account the spiritual nature of man, who was regarded simply as a rational animal in an organized social group.  Rousseau was the first to unite the two views, to revive the medieval theory of the soul without its theological trappings, and to believe—­half unconsciously, perhaps, and yet with a profound conviction—­that the individual, now, on this earth, and in himself, was the most important thing in the world.

This belief, no doubt, would have arisen in Europe, in some way or other, if Rousseau had never lived; but it was he who clothed it with the splendour of genius, and, by the passion of his utterance, sowed it far and wide in the hearts of men.  In two directions his influence was enormous.  His glowing conception of individual dignity and individual rights as adhering, not to a privileged few, but to the whole mass of humanity, seized upon the imagination of France, supplied a new and potent stimulus to the movement towards political change, and produced a deep effect upon the development of the Revolution.  But it is in literature, and those emotions of real life which find their natural outlet in literature, that the influence of Rousseau’s spirit may be most clearly seen.