e steps of
the process by which the change is effected are these. First, we have the
Rousseaus asserting that the natural man is essentially good, but that he
has been depraved by an artificial social system imposed on him from
without. Instead of the quarrel between good and evil in his breast, they
see only the quarrel between the innate good in man and his evil
environment. They hold that all will be well if only he is set free--if
his genius or natural impulses are liberated. "Rousseauism is ... an
emancipation of impulse--especially of the impulse of sex." It is a gospel
of egoism and leaves little room for conscience. Hence it makes men
mengalomaniacs, and the lust for dominion is given its head no less than
the lust of the flesh. "In the absence of ethical discipline," writes
Professor Babbitt in _Rousseau and Romanticism_, "the lust for knowledge
and the lust for feeling count very little, at least practically, compared
with the third main lust of human nature--the lust for power. Hence the
emergence of that most sinister of all types, the efficient megalomaniac."
In the result it appears that not only Rousseau and Hugo, but Wordsworth,
Keats, and Shelley, helped to bring about the European War! Had there been
no wars, no tyrants, and no lascivious men before Rousseau, one would have
been ready to take Professor Babbitt's indictment more seriously.

Professor Babbitt, however, has a serious philosophic idea at the back of
all he says. He believes that man at his noblest lives the life of
obligation rather than of impulse; and that romantic literature
discourages him in this. He holds that man should rise from the plane of
nature to the plane of humanism or the plane of religion, and that to live
according to one's temperament, as the romanticists preach, is to sink
back from human nature, in the best sense, to animal nature. He takes the
view that men of science since Bacon, by the great conquests they have
made in the material sphere, have prepared man to take the romantic and
boastful view of himself. "If men had not been so heartened by scientific
progress they would have been less ready, we may be sure, to listen to
Rousseau when he affirmed that they were naturally good." Not that
Professor Babbitt looks on us as utterly evil and worthy of damnation. He
objects to the gloomy Jonathan-Edwards view, because it helps to
precipitate by reaction the opposite extreme--"the boundless sycophancy of
human nature from