tide.

"Oh, Liberty!" one can hear the voice of many heroic souls
protesting, "Oh, Liberty--what things are done in thy name!"

For it is of the essential nature of Rousseau's eloquence, as it is of
the essential nature of his temperament, that any kind of sensual
abandonment, slurred over by rich orchestral litanies of human
freedom, should be more than tolerated.

This Religion of Liberty lends itself to strange hypocrisies when the
torrent of his imaginative passion breaks upon the jagged rocks of
reality. That is why--from Robespierre down to very modern
persons--the eloquent use of such vague generalisations as Justice,
Virtue, Simplicity, Nature, Humanity, Reason, excites profound
suspicion in the psychological mind.

From the antinomian torrent of this voluptuous anarchy the spirits of
Epicurus, of Spinoza, of Goethe, of Nietzsche, turn away in horror.
This is indeed an insurrection from the depths; this is indeed a
breaking loose of chaos; this is indeed a "return to Nature." For there
is a perilous intoxication in all this, and, like chemical ingredients in
some obsessing drug these great vague names work magically and
wantonly upon us, giving scope to all our weaknesses and
perversities.

If I were asked--taking all the great influences which have moulded
human history together--what figure, what personality, I would set
up as the antipodal antagonist of the influence of Nietzsche, I would
retort with the name of Rousseau.

Here is an "immoralism" deeper and far more anti-social than any
"beyond good and evil." Nietzsche hammered furiously at Christian
ethics; but he did so with the sublime intention of substituting for
what he destroyed a new ethical construction of his own.

Rousseau, using with stirring and caressing unction symbol after
symbol, catch-word after catch-word, from the moral atmosphere of
Christendom, draws us furiously after him, in a mad hysterical
abandonment of all that every human symbol covers, toward a
cataract of limitless and almost inhuman subjectivity.

To certain types of mind Rousseau appears as a noble prophet of
what is permanent in evangelic "truth" and of what is desirable and
lovely in the future of humanity. To other types--to the pronounced
classical or Goethean type, for instance--he must appear as the most
pernicious, the most disintegrating, the most poisonous, the most
unhealthy influence that has ever been brought to bear upon the
world. Such minds--confront