lism, when
circumstances draw away the mask. Not the least conspicuous of the
disciples of Rousseau was Robespierre. His works lay on the table of the
Committee of Public Safety. The theory of the Reign of Terror was
invented, and mercilessly reduced to practice, by men whom the visions
of Rousseau had fired, and who were not afraid nor ashamed to wade
through oceans of blood to the promised land of humanity and fine
feeling. We in our days have seen the same result of sentimental
doctrine in the barbarous love of the battle-field, the retrograde
passion for methods of repression, the contempt for human life, the
impatience of orderly and peaceful solution. We begin with introspection
and the eternities, and end in blood and iron. Again, Rousseau's first
piece was an anathema upon the science and art of his time, and a
denunciation of books and speech. Mr. Carlyle, in exactly the same
spirit, has denounced logic mills, warned us all away from literature,
and habitually subordinated discipline of the intelligence to the
passionate assertion of the will. There are passages in which he speaks
respectfully of Intellect, but he is always careful to show that he is
using the term in a special sense of his own, and confounding it with
'the exact summary of human _Worth_,' as in one place he defines it.
Thus, instead of co-ordinating moral worthiness with intellectual
energy, virtue with intelligence, right action of the will with
scientific processes of the understanding, he has either placed one
immeasurably below the other, or else has mischievously insisted on
treating them as identical. The dictates of a kind heart are of superior
force to the maxims of political economy; swift and peremptory
resolution is a safer guide than a balancing judgment. If the will works
easily and surely, we may assume the rectitude of the moving impulse.
All this is no caricature of a system which sets sentiment, sometimes
hard sentiment and sometimes soft sentiment, above reason and method.

In other words, the writer who in these days has done more than anybody
else to fire men's hearts with a feeling for right and an eager desire
for social activity, has with deliberate contempt thrust away from him
the only instruments by which we can make sure what right is, and that
our social action is wise and effective. A born poet, only wanting
perhaps a clearer feeling for form and a more delicate spiritual
self-possession, to have added another name