positive, categorical form of assertion into something of this kind—­“Such and such consequences ought logically to follow from the meaning of the name, or the definition of a principle, or from such and such motives.”  The change of this moderate form of provisional assertion into the unconditional statement that such and such consequences have actually followed, constantly lands the author in propositions which any reader who tests them by an appeal to the experience of mankind, written and unwritten, at once discovers to be false and absurd.  Rousseau himself took less trouble to verify his conclusions by such an appeal to experience than any writer that ever lived in a scientific age.  The other remark to be made on the above section is that the rejection of the Christian or ecclesiastical division of the powers of the church and the powers of the state, is the strongest illustration that could be found of the debt of Rousseau’s conception of a state to the old pagan conception.  It was the main characteristic of the polities which Christian monotheism and feudalism together succeeded in replacing, to recognise no such division as that between church and state, pope and emperor.  Rousseau resumed the old conception.  But he adjusted it in a certain degree to the spirit of his own time, and imposed certain philosophical limitations upon it.  His scheme is as follows.

Religion, he says, in its relation to the state, may be considered as of three kinds.  First, natural religion, without temple, altar, or rite, the true and pure theism of the natural conscience of man.  Second, local, civil, or positive religion, with dogmas, rites, exercises; a theology of a primitive people, exactly co-extensive with all the rights and all the duties of men.  Third, a religion like the Christianity of the Roman church, which gives men two sets of laws, two chiefs, two countries, submits them to contradictory duties, and prevents them from being able to be at once devout and patriotic.  The last of these is so evidently pestilent as to need no discussion.  The second has the merit of teaching men to identify duty to their gods with duty to their country; under this to die for the land is martyrdom, to break its laws impiety, and to subject a culprit to public execration is to devote him to the anger of the gods.  But it is bad, because it is at bottom a superstition, and because it makes a people sanguinary and intolerant.  The first of all, which is now styled a Christian theism, having no special relation with the body politic, adds no force to the laws.  There are many particular objections to Christianity flowing from the fact of its not being a kingdom of this world, and this above all, that Christianity only preaches servitude and dependence.[253] What then is to be done?  The sovereign must establish a purely civil profession of faith.  It will consist of the following positive dogmas:—­the existence of a divinity, powerful, intelligent, beneficent and foreseeing; the life to