irtually unmeaning doctrine that the will is free,
and therefore its followers never gave any quarter to the idea that man
was as proper an object of scientific scrutiny morally and historically,
as they could not deny him to be anatomically and physiologically. Their
enemies have been more concerned to dislodge them from this position,
than to fortify, organise, and cultivate their own. The consequences
have not been without their danger. Poetic persons have rushed in where
scientific persons ought not to have feared to tread. That human
character and the order of events have their poetic aspect, and that
their poetic treatment demands the rarest and most valuable qualities of
mind, is a truth which none but narrow and superficial men of the world
are rash enough to deny. But that there is a scientific aspect of these
things, an order among them that can only be understood and criticised
and effectually modified scientifically, by using all the caution and
precision and infinite patience of the truly scientific spirit, is a
truth that is constantly ignored even by men and women of the loftiest
and most humane nature. In such cases misdirected and uncontrolled
sensibility ends in mournful waste of their own energy, in the certain
disappointment of their own aims, and where such sensibility is backed
by genius, eloquence, and a peculiar set of public conditions, in
prolonged and fatal disturbance of society.

Rousseau was the great type of this triumphant and dangerous sophistry
of the emotions. The Rousseau of these times for English-speaking
nations is Thomas Carlyle. An apology is perhaps needed for mentioning a
man of such simple, veracious, disinterested, and wholly high-minded
life, in the same breath with one of the least sane men that ever lived.
Community of method, like misery, makes men acquainted with strange
bed-fellows. Two men of very different degrees of moral worth may
notoriously both preach the same faith and both pursue the same method,
and the method of Rousseau is the method of Mr. Carlyle. With each of
them thought is an aspiration, and justice a sentiment, and society a
retrogression. Each bids us look within our own bosoms for truth and
right, postpones reason, to feeling, and refers to introspection and a
factitious something styled Nature, questions only to be truly solved by
external observation and history. In connection with each of them has
been exemplified the cruelty inherent in sentimenta