[258] Considerations sur le gouvernement ancien et present de la France (1764).  Quoted by Rousseau from a manuscript copy.

[259] Leviathan, ch. xliii. 601.  Also ch. xlii.

[260] Cont.  Soc., III. xi.  Borrowed from Hobbes, who said, “Magnus ille Leviathan quae civitas appellatur, opificium artis est.”

[261] Mackintosh’s.

[262] Cont.  Soc., II. v.

[263] IV. ii.

[264] For instance, Gouvernement de la Pologne, ch. xi. p. 305.  And Corr., v. 180.

[265] Cont.  Soc., I. viii.

[266] Cont.  Soc., II. i.

[267] Ib., III. x.  “Let every individual who may usurp the sovereignty be instantly put to death by free men.”  Robespierre’s Declaration des droits de l’homme, Sec. 27.  “When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection becomes for the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.”  Sec. 35.

[268] Cont.  Soc., III. x.

[269] See May’s Constitutional Hist. of England, ch. iii; and Lord Stanhope’s Life of Pitt, vol. ii. ch. xii.

[270] In the 6th book of the Moral Philosophy (1785), ch. iii., and elsewhere.  In the preface he refers to the effect which Rousseau’s political theory was supposed to have had in the civil convulsions of Geneva, as one of the reasons which encouraged him to publish his own book.

[271] One side of this was the passion for geographical exploration which took possession of Europe towards the middle of the eighteenth century.  See the Life of Humboldt, i. 28, 29. (Eng.  Trans. by Lassell.)

[272] Rousseau’s influence on Condorcet is seen in the latter’s maxim, which has found such favour in the eyes of socialist writers, that “not only equality of right, but equality of fact, is the goal of the social art.”

CHAPTER IV.

EMILIUS.

One whose most intense conviction was faith in the goodness of all things and creatures as they are first produced by nature, and so long as they remain unsophisticated by the hand and purpose of man, was in some degree bound to show a way by which this evil process of sophistication might be brought to the lowest possible point, and the best of all natural creatures kept as near as possible to his high original.  Rousseau, it is true, held in a sense of his own the doctrine of the fall of man.  That doctrine, however, has never made people any more remiss in the search after a virtue, which if they ought to have regarded it as hopeless according to strict logic, is still indispensable in actual life.  Rousseau’s way of believing that man had fallen was so coloured at once by that expansion of sanguine emotion which marked his century, and by that necessity for repose in idyllic perfection of simplicity which marked his own temperament, that