of all arts and sciences"; "the moment evil ceases
the society must be spoiled, if not totally dissolved."

The significance of Mandeville's book lay in the challenge it flung to
the optimistic doctrines of Lord Shaftesbury, that human nature is good
and all is for the best in this harmonious world. "The ideas he had
formed," wrote Mandeville, "of the goodness and excellency of our nature
were as romantic and chimerical as they are beautiful and amiable;
he laboured hard to unite two contraries that can never be reconciled
together, innocence of manners and worldly greatness."

Of these two views Rousseau accepted one and rejected the other. He
agreed with Shaftesbury as to the natural goodness of man; he agreed
with Mandeville that innocence of manners is incompatible with the
conditions of a civilised society. He was an optimist in regard to human
nature, a pessimist in regard to civilisation.

In his first Discourse he begins by appreciating the specious splendour
of modern enlightenment, the voyages of man's intellect among the stars,
and then goes on to assever that in the first place men have lost,
through their civilisation, the original liberty for which they were
born, and that arts and science, flinging garlands of flowers on the
iron chains which bind them, make them love their slavery; and secondly
that there is a real depravity beneath the fair semblance and "our souls
are corrupted as our sciences and arts advance to perfection." Nor is
this only a modern phenomenon; "the evils due to our vain curiosity are
as old as the world." For it is a law of history that morals fall and
rise in correspondence with the progress and decline of the arts and
sciences as regularly as the tides answer to the phases of the moon.
This "law" is exemplified by the fortunes of Greece, Rome, and China, to
whose civilisations the author opposes the comparative happiness of
the ignorant Persians, Scythians, and ancient Germans. "Luxury,
dissoluteness, and slavery have been always the chastisement of the
ambitious efforts we have made to emerge from the happy ignorance
in which the Eternal Wisdom had placed us." There is the theological
doctrine of the tree of Eden in a new shape.

Rousseau's attempt to show that the cultivation of science produces
specific moral evils is feeble, and has little ingenuity; it is a
declamation rather than an argument; and in the end he makes concessions
which undo the effect of his impeachment. Th