It may be added that one of the not too many merits of the essay is the way in which the writer, more or less in the Socratic manner, insists on dragging people out of the refuge of sonorous general terms, with a great public reputation of much too well-established a kind to be subjected to the affront of analysis.  It is true that Rousseau himself contributed nothing directly to that analytic operation which Socrates likened to midwifery, and he set up graven images of his own in place of the idols which he destroyed.  This, however, did not wholly efface the distinction, which he shares with all who have ever tried to lead the minds of men into new tracks, of refusing to accept the current coins of philosophical speech without test or measurement.  Such a treatment of the great trite words which come so easily to the tongue and seem to weigh for so much, must always be the first step towards bringing thought back into the region of real matter, and confronting phrases, terms, and all the common form of the discussion of an age, with the actualities which it is the object of sincere discussion to penetrate.

The refutation of many parts of Rousseau’s main contention on the principles which are universally accepted among enlightened men in modern society is so extremely obvious that to undertake it would merely be to draw up a list of the gratulatory commonplaces of which we hear quite enough in the literature and talk of our day.  In this direction, perhaps it suffices to say that the Discourse is wholly one-sided, admitting none of the conveniences, none of the alleviations of suffering of all kinds, nothing of the increase of mental stature, which the pursuit of knowledge has brought to the race.  They may or may not counterbalance the evils that it has brought, but they are certainly to be put in the balance in any attempt at philosophic examination of the subject.  It contains no serious attempt to tell us what those alleged evils really are, or definitely to trace them one by one, to abuse of the thirst for knowledge and defects in the method of satisfying it.  It omits to take into account the various other circumstances, such as climate, government, race, and the disposition of neighbours, which must enter equally with intellectual progress into whatever demoralisation has marked the destinies of a nation.  Finally it has for the base of its argument the entirely unsupported assumption of there having once been in the early history of each society a stage of mild, credulous, and innocent virtue, from which appetite for the fruit of the forbidden tree caused an inevitable degeneration.  All evidence and all scientific analogy are now well known to lead to the contrary doctrine, that the history of civilisation is a history of progress and not of decline from a primary state.  After all, as Voltaire said to Rousseau in a letter which only showed a superficial appreciation of the real drift of the argument, we must confess that these thorns attached to literature