There are some teachers whose distinction is neither correct thought, nor an eye for the exigencies of practical organisation, but simply depth and fervour of the moral sentiment, bringing with it the indefinable gift of touching many hearts with love of virtue and the things of the spirit.  The Christian organisations which saved western society from dissolution owe all to St. Paul, Hildebrand, Luther, Calvin; but the spiritual life of the west during all these generations has burnt with the pure flame first lighted by the sublime mystic of the Galilean hills.  Aristotle acquired for men much knowledge and many instruments for gaining more; but it is Plato, his master, who moves the soul with love of truth and enthusiasm for excellence.  There is peril in all such leaders of souls, inasmuch as they incline men to substitute warmth for light, and to be content with aspiration where they need direction.  Yet no movement goes far which does not count one of them in the number of its chiefs.  Rousseau took this place among those who prepared the first act of that revolutionary drama, whose fifth act is still dark to us.

At the heart of the Revolution, like a torrid stream flowing undiscernible amid the waters of a tumbling sea, is a new way of understanding life.  The social changes desired by the various assailants of the old order are only the expression of a deeper change in moral idea, and the drift of the new moral idea is to make life simpler.  This in a sense is at the bottom of all great religious and moral movements, and the Revolution emphatically belongs to the latter class.  Like such movements in the breast of the individual, those which stir an epoch have their principle in the same craving for disentanglement of life.  This impulse to shake off intricacies is the mark of revolutionary generations, and it was the starting-point of all Rousseau’s mental habits, and of the work in which they expressed themselves.  His mind moved outwards from this centre, and hence the fact that he dealt principally with government and education, the two great agencies which, in an old civilisation with a thousand roots and feelers, surround external life and internal character with complexity.  Simplification of religion by clearing away the overgrowth of errors, simplification of social relations by equality, of literature and art by constant return to nature, of manners by industrious homeliness and thrift,—­this is the revolutionary process and ideal, and this is the secret of Rousseau’s hold over a generation that was lost amid the broken maze of fallen systems.

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