ole work was a protest. We need not
complain very loudly that while remonstrating against the restless
intrepidity of the rationalists of his generation, he passed over the
central truth, namely that the full and ever festal life is found in
active freedom of curiosity and search taking significance, motive,
force, from a warm inner pulse of human love and sympathy. It was not
given to Rousseau to see all this, but it was given to him to see the
side of it for which the most powerful of the men living with him had no
eyes, and the first Discourse was only a moderately successful attempt
to bring his vision before Europe. It was said at the time that he did
not believe a word of what he had written.[172] It is a natural
characteristic of an age passionately occupied with its own set of
ideas, to question either the sincerity or the sanity of anybody who
declares its sovereign conceptions to be no better than foolishness. We
cannot entertain such a suspicion. Perhaps the vehemence of controversy
carries him rather further than he quite meant to go, when he declares
that if he were a chief of an African tribe, he would erect on his
frontier a gallows, on which he would hang without mercy the first
European who should venture to pass into his territory, and the first
native who should dare to pass out of it.[173] And there are many other
extravagances of illustration, but the main position is serious enough,
as represented in the emblematic vignette with which the essay was
printed--the torch of science brought to men by Prometheus, who warns a
satyr that it burns; the satyr, seeing fire for the first time and being
fain to embrace it, is the symbol of the vulgar men who, seduced by the
glitter of literature, insist on delivering themselves up to its
study.[174] Rousseau's whole doctrine hangs compactly together, and we
may see the signs of its growth after leaving his hands in the crude
formula of the first Discourse, if we proceed to the more audacious
paradox of the second.

II.

The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among men opens with a
description of the natural state of man, which occupies considerably
more than half of the entire performance. It is composed in a vein which
is only too familiar to the student of the literature of the time,
picturing each habit and thought, and each step to new habits and
thoughts, with the minuteness, the fulness, the precision, of one who
narrates circumstances of which he