ance, born of a lively love for virtue, and inspiring
indifference only for what is not worthy of filling a man's heart, or
fails to contribute to its improvement; a sweet and precious ignorance,
the treasure of a pure soul at peace with itself, which finds all its
blessedness in inward retreat, in testifying to itself its own
innocence, and which feels no need of seeking a warped and hollow
happiness in the opinion of other people as to its enlightenment."[165]

* * * * *

Some of the most pointed assaults in this Discourse, such for instance
as that on the pedantic parade of wit, or that on the excessive
preponderance of literary instruction in the art of education, are due
to Montaigne; and in one way, the Discourse might be described as
binding together a number of that shrewd man's detached hints by means
of a paradoxical generalisation. But the Rousseau is more important than
the Montaigne in it. Another remark to be made is that its vigorous
disparagement of science, of the emptiness of much that is called
science, of the deadly pride of intellect, is an anticipation in a very
precise way of the attitude taken by the various Christian churches and
their representatives now and for long, beginning with De Maistre, the
greatest of the religious reactionaries after Rousseau. The vilification
of the Greeks is strikingly like some vehement passages in De Maistre's
estimate of their share in sophisticating European intellect. At last
Rousseau even began to doubt whether "so chattering a people could ever
have had any solid virtues, even in primitive times."[166] Yet
Rousseau's own thinking about society is deeply marked with opinions
borrowed exactly from these very chatterers. His imagination was
fascinated from the first by the freedom and boldness of Plato's social
speculations, to which his debt in a hundred details of his political
and educational schemes is well known. What was more important than any
obligation of detail was the fatal conception, borrowed partly from the
Greeks and partly from Geneva, of the omnipotence of the Lawgiver in
moulding a social state after his own purpose and ideal. We shall
presently quote the passage in which he holds up for our envy and
imitation the policy of Lycurgus at Sparta, who swept away all that he
found existing and constructed the social edifice afresh from foundation
to roof.[167] It is true that there was an unmistakable decay of Greek
l