y are left to grow
to manhood, the society into which they are thrown is a mere moral
wilderness. They are to make such way through it as they can, with
egotism for their only trusty instrument. This egotism may either be a
bludgeon, as with the most part, or it may be a delicately adjusted
and fastidiously decorated compass, as with an Emilius. In either case
is no perception that the gross outer contact of men with another is
transformed by worthiness of common aim and loyal faith in common
excellences, into a thing beautiful and generous. It is our business
to fix and root the habit of thinking of that _moral_ union, into
which, as Kant has so admirably expressed it, the _pathological_
necessities of situation that first compelled social concert, have
been gradually transmuted. Instead of this, it is exactly the
primitive pathological conditions that a narrow theory of education
brings first into prominence; as if knowledge of origins were
indispensable to a right attachment to the transformed conditions of a
maturer system.

It has been said that Rousseau founds all morality upon personal
interest, perhaps even more specially than Helvetius himself. The
accusation is just. Emilius will enter adult life without the germs of
that social conscience, which animates a man with all the associations
of duty and right, of gratitude for the past and resolute hope for the
future, in face of the great body of which he finds himself a part. "I
observe," says Rousseau, "that in the modern ages men have no hold
upon one another save through force and interest, while the ancients
on the other hand acted much more by persuasion and the affections of
the soul."[310] The reason was that with the ancients, supposing him
to mean the Greeks and Romans, the social conscience was so much wider
in its scope than the comparatively narrow fragment of duty which is
supposed to come under the sacred power of conscience in the more
complex and less closely contained organisation of a modern state. The
neighbours to whom a man owed duty in those times comprehended all the
members of his state. The neighbours of the modern preacher of duty
are either the few persons with whom each of us is brought into actual
and palpable contact, or else the whole multitude of dwellers on the
earth,--a conception that for many ages to come will remain with the
majority of men and women too vague to exert an energetic and
concentrating influence upon action, and