Rousseau and education according to nature

Preface

In my volume on Aristotle in this series, I tried to give an account of ancient, classical, and social Education ; in the present volume I have endeavored to set forth the nature of modern, romantic, and unsocial Education. This education originates with Rousseau,

With much reluctance I have been obliged to dwell, at considerable length, on the facts of his life, in order to show that his glittering structure rests, not upon any broad and firm foundation of well-generalized and well-sifted experience, but upon the private tastes and preferences of an exceptionally capricious and self-centred nature. His Emile is simply his selfish and unsocial self, forcibly withheld, by an external Providence, in the shape of an impossible tutor, from those aberrations which led that self into the " dark forest " of misery. If my estimate of Rousseau's value as an educator proves disappointing to those who believe in his doctrines, I can only say, in excuse, that I am more disappointed than they are.

In preparing the present volume, I have depended solely upon the original sources, the works of Rousseau

PREFACE himself, and these I have allowed tc tj\ ■ for themselves. I owe a certain amount of dAxtion, and a few dates and references, to Mr. Morley's Rousseau.

THOMAS DAVIDSON.

" Glenmore,"

Keene, Essex Co., N.Y.,

Contents

CHAP. PAOB

Introddctorv 1

I. Ideas and Aspirations current in Rousseau's

Chapter I Ideas And Aspirations Current In Rousseau's Time

Authority, Nature, and Culture

If true human greatness consists in deep insight, strong and well-distributed affection, and free, beneficent will, Rousseau was not in any sense a great man. His insight, like his knowledge, was limited and superficial; his affections were capricious and undisciplined; and his will was ungenerous and selfish. His importance in literature and history is due to the fact that he summed up in his character, expressed in his writings, and exemplified in his experience, a group of tendencies and aspirations which had for some time been half blindly stirring in the bosom of society, and which in him attained to complete consciousness and manifestation for the first time.^

1 Rousseau has been undeservedly blamed for feeling and expressing this. In the opening of his Confessions he says: " I feel my heart, and I know men. I am not made like any that I have seen,

These tendencies and aspirations, which may be comprehended under the one term individualism, or, more strictly, subjective individualism, have a history, and this we must now sketch, if we are to understand the significance of our author.

Modern individualism is a reaction against the extreme socialism of the Middle Age. The ruling principle of that age was authority, conceived as derived from a Supreme Being of infinite power, and vested in the heads of two institutions, Church and Empire, or, more frequently, in that of the Church alone. ^ According to the views then prevalent, the individual was neither his own origin nor his own end. He was created by God, for God's glory, ^ and was merely a means to that. He had therefore, of course, no freedom, whether of thought, affection, or will. Tree inquiry into the laws and nature of reality gave way to a timid discussion of the meaning of authority. The natural affections were but grudgingly admitted to a place in life, and, even as late as the Council of Trent, in the sixteenth century, an anathema was pronounced upon any one who should say that the state of virand I venture to think that I am not made like any that exist. If I am not better, I am, at least, different. Whether nature did well or ill in breaking the mould in which she cast me, no one can tell till after he has read me." The truth is, Rousseau was the first of a new type, of which there are plenty of specimens in our day, the type of the subjective, sensuous, sentimental, dalliant, querulous individualist. Nature by no means broke the mould. See Morley, Bousseau, Vol. II., pp. 30i sqq.

1 See Dante, De Monarchia, and compare Bryce, The Holy Roman Umpire, passim.

2 " In His will is our peace," says a blessed spirit in the Paradise of Dante (III., 85).

ginity and celibacy was not better than the state of matrimony.^ Above all, free self-determination of the will, possible only through free inquiry and free affection, was placed under the ban. The task of the centuries since the close of the Middle Age has been gradually to shake off this yoke and to restore men to freedom, that is, to convince them that they are ends in and through themselves.

The first notable manifestations ^ of this tendency were the Germanic Reformation and the Italian Renaissance, both belonging to the sixteenth century. The former claimed freedom for the individual intelligence; the latter, freedom for the individual feelings and emotions. Neither of them thought of aspiring to freedom of the moral will, which is the only true freedom. This is a fact of the utmost importance in enabling us to comprehend the thought and practice of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. We look vainly in these for the conception of moral freedom.^ What the absence of this meant, we can perhaps most clearly see, when we realize that the complete, logical outcome of the Reformation was Voltaire ; that of the Renaissance, Rousseau. It takes the clear, mathematical mind of the French to carry principles to their logical conclusions in thought and

2 We can trace the tendency itself back to Abelard (1079-1142) , and even further.

8 In Goethe's great drama, Faust, who stands for the complete movement toward individualism, and who discovers its nature and limitations, takes his stand upon the will. " Allein ich will!" he says, in defiance of all Mephistopheles' suggestions. Part I., 1. 1432 (Schroer).

practice.^ What Eousseau demands is absolutely free play for the feelings and emotions. But it took a long time for any one to become clearly aware that this was the true meaning of the Renaissance.

In trying to escape from authority, the men of the Reformation appealed to Reason ; those of the Renaissance, to Nature. And the causes of this are obvious. Reason can find justification only in Reason ; feeling, emotion, as claiming to be guiding principles, must look for theirs in Nature. Accordingly, while among the " Reformers " Reason played the chief part, and in the end gave rise to speculative philosophy, among the "Humanists" Nature received a homage which finally developed into physical science. The notion of "Nature" was an inheritance from the Greeks, chiefly, it should seem, through Plato. Indeed, the distinction between Nature (^ucrts) and convention (^eVts), or law (vo/x,os), is fundamental in Greek thinking, which may be said to have originated in an attempt to find in Nature, regarded as unerring because necessitated, a sure refuge from the manifold forms of capricious-seeming conventions.^ Already in the minds of the Greeks this distinction involves that dualism between the material and the spiritual which pervades almost their entire philosophy, and constitutes its chief defect. Accepting, without analysis, the ordinary, common-sense view of the world, which regards material things as entirely indepen-

1 See Mrs. Browning, Aurora Leigh, Bk. VI.

2 See, especially, Plato's Cratylus and the opening lines of ^schylus' Againemnon. Cf. Lerscli, Sprachphilosophie der Alten, Vol. I., pp. 1 sqq.

dent of thought, and governed by laws more rigid and reliable than it can claim, they were fain, like many equally unschooled scientists of the present day, to adopt these laws as the norm for human action; in a word, to naturalize spirit. Continuing to think, however, they were finally surprised to discover that Nature itself was purely conventional {Oiau, vofjixS), that is, subject to the laws of spirit, and therefore incapable of furnishing a court of appeal from these. This was the work of the Sophists, who, by their open scepticism, made it very clear that, if there was any inexorable law, it must be sought elsewhere than in Nature. Socrates wisely sought it in the unity and completeness of thought ; but his work was undone by his pupil Plato, who sought it in a world of ideas of his own invention, a world having no necessary connection with either matter or mind. From this time on, Nature, and gradually mind or Eeason also, fell into disrepute, and the supreme object of interest became Plato's fantastic creation, the so-called ideal world. This tendency, along with many other things in Greek philosophy,^ passed over into Christianity, and reached its culmination in the Middle Age, when Nature and Reason were both equally regarded with suspicion, or even contempt,^ as the origin of evil, and the place of Plato's ideal world was taken by an authoritative Eevelation.

As we have seen, the Reformation undertook to rehabilitate Reason, and the Renaissance, Nature.

2 See the horrified speech of the Archbishop, in Faust, Pt. II., Act i., lines 285-304 (Schroer).

They did so without attempting to overcome their opposition, or, generally speaking, to reject Revelation, at least openly. Thus it came to pass that the thinkers of the seventeenth century found, in their inheritance from the past, three unreconciled conceptions, or groups of conceptions, whose opposing claims they were in no position to settle^ — Nature, Reason, Revelation. As might have been expected, some declared for one, some for another. Generally speaking, churchmen and their friends clung to Revelation and authority; while other thinkers tried to make peace between Reason and Nature. In general, the English mind showed a preference for Nature, and tried to explain Reason through it, while the French mind, setting out with Reason, could find no way of arriving at Nature, and so left the dualism unsolved. Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke form a strong contrast to Pascal, Descartes, and Malebranche. Rousseau generally follows the former, and especially Hobbes.

Hobbes conceived the human race as setting out on its career in a "state of Nature," which to him meant a state of universal war, resulting in a life " solitary, poor, brutish, nasty, and short. '"^ At the same time he regarded Nature as "the art whereby God hath made and governs the world," getting over the paradox herein involved by maintaining that Nature " is by the art of man . . . imitated that it can make an artificial animal,"* in other words, that 'art' is

1 Most of the thought of the Western world, for the last three hundred years, has been devoted to effecting this settlement, thus far with very indifferent success.

2 Leviathan, Cap. XIII. 8 Ibid,, Introduction.

an extension of Nature.^ "Nature," according to Hobbes, " has made men so equal in faculties of the body and mind, as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind, than another, yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he." And not only are men equal, but they have equal rights. "The right of Nature," he says, " which writers commonly call jus naturale, is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as well as himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life; and consequently of doing anything, which in his own judgment and reason he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereto. By 'liberty ' is understood, according to the proper signification of the word, the absence of external impediments." ... "A 'law of Nature,' lex naturalis, is a precept or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same; and to omit that by which he thinketh it may best be preserved." In this " condition of war of every one against every one, . . . every one is governed by his own reason " and

1 Shakespeare, Wi7iter's Tale, Act IV., sc. iii. :

" Yet nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean : so over that art, Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art That nature makes. . . .

. . . This is an art Which does mend nature — change it rather : but The art itself is nature."

"every man has a right to everything, even to another's body. And, therefore, as long as the natural right of every man to everything endureth, there can be no security to any man." . . . "And consequently it is a precept, or general rule of reason, that every man ought to endeavor peace as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it that he may seek, and use, all helps and advantages of war. The first branch of which rule containeth the first, the fundamental law of Nature, which is, to seek peace and follow it. The second, the sum of the right of Nature; which is, by all means we can, to defend ourselves. From this fundamental law of Nature, by which men are commanded to endeavor peace, is derived this second law : that a man be willing, when others are so too, as far-forth as, for peace, and defence of himself, he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things ; and be contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself." . . . "The mutual transferring of right, is that which men call 'contract.' "^

" From the law of Nature, by which we are obliged to transfer to another such rights as, being retained, hinder the peace of mankind, there followeth a third, which is this, that men perform their covenants made." . . . "In this law of Nature consisteth the fountain and original of 'justice.'" . . . "When a covenant is made, then to break it is 'unjust'; and the definition of 'injustice ' is no other than the nonperformance of covenant. And whatsoever is not 1 Leviathan, Cap. XIV.

unjust is 'just.'"^ . . . "The agreement ... of men is by covenant only, which is artificial; and therefore it is no wonder if there be somewhat else required, besides covenant, to make their agreement constant and lasting; which is a common power, to keep them in awe, and to direct their actions to a common benefit." ^ . . . "The only way to erect such a common power ... is to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will; which is as much as to say, to appoint one man, or assembly of men, to bear their person;® and every one to own, and to acknowledge, himself to be author of whatsoever he that so beareth their person shall act, or cause to be acted, in those things which concern the common peace and safety; and therein to submit their wills, every one to his will, and their judgments to his judgment. This is more than consent or concord; it is a real unity of them all, in one and the same person made by covenant of every man with every man."* . . . " He that carrieth this person is called 'sovereign,' and, said to have 'sovereign power'; and every one besides his 'subject.'" . . . " The attaining of this sovereign power is by two ways. One is by natural force." . . . " The other is, when men agree amongst themselves to submit to some man, or assembly of men, voluntarily, on confidence to be protected by him against

1 Leviathan, Cap. XV.

2 Cf. Dante, De Monarchia, Bk. III., Cap. XVI.

3 Used here in the sense of the Latin persona, for which see Institutes of Justinian.

* Cf. the story of Menenius Agrippa, Livy, Bk. II., Cap. 32.

all others. The latter may be called a political commonwealth, or commonwealth by ' institution ' ; and the former a commonwealth by 'acquisition.' "^ . . . "A 'commonwealth' is said to be 'instituted,' when a multitude of men do agree, and covenant, every one with every one, that to whatsoever man, or assembly of men, shall be given by the major part, the 'right ' to 'present ' the person of all of them, that is to say, to be their 'representative,' every one, as well he that voted for it, as he that voted against it, shall 'authorize ' all the actions and judgments of that man, or assembly of men, in the same manner as if they were his own, to the end, to live peaceably among themselves, and be protected against other men. From this institution of a commonwealth are derived all the 'rights ' and 'faculties ' of him, or them, to whom sovereign power is conferred by the consent of the people assembled." ^

Hobbes now goes on to say that the compact, thus once made, can never be either replaced or annulled ; that it is binding on all; that the sovereign, once elected, can do no injustice, and hence cannot be put to death, or otherwise punished, by his subjects ; that he has the right to prescribe or proscribe opinion, to determine the laws of property, to decide all controversies, to make war and peace, to choose all officials, to reward "with riches or honor," and to punish, " with corporal or pecuniary punishment, or with ignominy, every subject," and to confer titles of honor. ^ Though, theoretically speaking, the sovereign may be

1 Leviathan, Cap. XVII. 8 Leviathan, Cap. XVII.

2 Leviathan, Cap. XVIII.

either a monarch, an aristocracy, or a democracy, yet Hobbes, for various reasons assigned, advocates the first. But, in any case, as soon as the sovereign is in power, "the liberty of a subject lieth . . . only in those things which, in regulating their actions, the sovereign hath pretermitted." This is the less to be regretted, that "liberty or freedom signifieth, properly, the absence of opposition; by opposition I mean external impediments, and may be applied no less to irrational and inanimate creatures than to rational." ^ Indeed, " liberty and necessity are consistent, as the water that hath not only liberty but a necessity of descending by the channel ; so likewise in the actions that men voluntarily do ; which, because they proceed from their will, proceed from liberty; and yet, because every act of man's will, and every desire and inclination, proceedeth from some cause, and that from another cause, in a contimial chain, whose first link is in the hand of God, the first of causes proceed from necessity." . . . "And did not His will assixre the necessity of man's will . . . the liberty of men would be a contradiction and impediment to the omnipotence and liberty of God." ^

Hobbes' views with regard to law are characteristic. "The law of Kature," he says, "and the civil law contain each other. For the laws of Nature, which consist in equity, justice, gratitude, and other moral virtues on these depending in the condition of mere nature . . . are not properly laws, but qualities that dispose men to peace and obedience. When a com-

1 This confusion of ideas was inherited by Rousseau.

2 Leviathan, Cap. XXI.

monwealtli is once settled, they are actually laws, and not before." . . . "The law of Nature therefore is a part of the civil law." . . . "Reciprocally, also, the civil law is a part of the dictates of Nature. For justice, that is to say, performance of covenant, and giving to every one his own, is a dictate of the law of Nature." . . . "Civil and natural law are not different kinds, but different parts of law, whereof one part, being written, is called civil, the othei', unwritten, natural." ^

We have made these long quotations from Hobbes, because he may be regarded as the father of that system of ideas which found their complete expression in Rousseau. Looking back on them, let us consider (1) what he borrowed from previous thought, (2) what he altered or added, and (3) what he arrived at. (1) He borrowed from Greek thought the notions of Nature (4>v<n<:) and convention (^eVis), or law (vo/xos), of necessity and freedom, and of hypostatic unity; from Latin thought, the notions of person and natural law;^ from mediaeval theology the notions of God's omnipotence and man's consequent dependence and unfreedom; and from "the judicious Hooker," apparently, the notion of a "social contract."^ (2) He identified convention with nature, by making the former a mere conscious, that is, rational, expression of the latter ; * and freedom with necessity, by calling

1 Leviathan, Cap. XXVI. Note the naturalization of spirit !

2 See Justinian, Institutes.

3 See Ecclesiastical Polity, Bk. I.

^ Here we have the germ of Hegel's objective and subjective reason, and, indeed, of modern idealism generally.

that whicli proceeds from a necessitated will, voluntary and, therefore, free. He assumed that men lived originally in a state of Nature, which was at once a state of freedom and a state of universal warfare, and that they passed out of that into a civic condition by a social contract, resulting in the creation of a new hypostatic person, of which all individuals thenceforth became mere organs. This new person, he maintained, had no real liberty of its own, but, being a product of Nature, was a mere implement in the hands of God, for His own ends. Thus (3), in his attempt to correlate Revelation, Nature, and Reason, or Convention, Hobbes arrived at the notion of a state or commonwealth as a mere automaton, whose motive force was externally communicated through its head — a notion which underlies many forms of theistic religion, for example, Islam and Calvinism, and finds its most complete realization in the Turkish and Russian empires of to-day. It is due to a mere shuffling and combining of old, unanalyzed concepts, such as those above enumerated, in a mind essentially servile.

But, though Hobbes was the avowed champion of moral determinism and political despotism, he unwittingly paved the way for freedom, by admitting that all sovereign or despotic rights were derived from a primitive convention. His readers forgot that this convention was, at bottom, due to Nature and God, and fixed their attention upon men as the source of civic rights. So true was this that even Charles II., Hobbes' pupil, was highly offended at what seemed a denial of the "divine right of kings." To maintain this right, Sir Robert Filmer wrote his Patriarcha,^ which tried to show that all sovereign rights were derived from the sovereignty of the world originally conceded by God to Adam, and had descended in a direct line from him ; hence, that all primitive equality among men and all occasion for a social contract were impossible. Princes are born princes; the rest of mankind, subjects or thralls. Against this plea for royal absolutism and popular enslavement, Locke raised his voice, and published in 1689, just after the revolution which expelled James II., his Two Treatises on Government. In the former of these he refuted, with needless gravity, the flimsy arguments of Filmer, and, in the latter, undertook to show what were the true origins of civil government.

Defining political power as "a right of making laws, with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the commonwealth from foreign injury, and all this only for the public good," ^ he proceeded to consider how such power could rise. In dealing with this question, he made the two fundamental assumptions of Hooker and Hobbes, (1) that mankind started on its career in a state of Nature, in which all individuals enjoyed complete liberty and equality, (2) that the transition from this to the civic state was through a social contract; but he sided with Hooker, against

1 Leviathan was published in 1G51 ; Patriarcha was written before 1653, but not published till 1680.

2 Bk. II., Cap. I., ad Jin.

Hobbes, in maintaining that the state of Nature was not a state of war, but one of peace, governed by a natural law. "The state of Nature," he says, "has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that laiv, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions; for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker, all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order and about His business, they are His property whose workmanship they are, made to last during His, not one another's pleasure." Here we have to observe two things : (1) that, as in Hobbes, Reason is identified with the law of Nature, (2) that man is still conceived as being a mere instrument in the hands of a Higher Power. At the same time, Locke does not, on that account, deprive him of either moral ^ or political liberty, or submit him irrevocably to the tender mercies of a despot. He says: "To this strange doctrine, viz., That in the state of Nature, every one has the executive power of the law of Nature, I doubt not but it will be objected that it is unreasonable for men to be judges in their own cases . . . and that therefore God hath certainly appointed government to restrain the partiality and violence of men. I easily grant that civil government is the proper remedy for the inconveniences of the state of Nature, which must certainly be great when men may be judges in their own cases." . . . "But I desire those who make this objection to remember

1 See Two Treatises, Bk. II., Cap. VI., § 58. c that absolute monarchs are but men ; and, if government is to be the remedy of those evils which necessarily follow from men being judges in their own cases, and the state of Nature is therefore not to be endured, I desire to know what kind of government that is, and how much better it is than the state of Nature, where one man commanding a multitude has the liberty to be judge in his own case, and may do to all his subjects whatever he pleases without the least question or control of those who execute his pleasure? and in whatsoever he doth, whether led by reason, mistake, or passion, must be submitted to? which men in the state of Nature are not bound to do to one another. " ^

Locke not only rejects Hobbes' theory of despotic sovereignty, but he stoutly maintains that men, by submitting to common laws, do not lose, but gain, freedom. He says : " However it may be mistaken, the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom." . . . "Where there is no law there is no freedom." . . . "For who could be free, when every other man's humor might domineer over him." ^ He holds that all property is rightfully due to labor, and all inequality of possession (wrongfully) to the introduction of money. ^ The origin of civil society is thus described : " Whenever any number of men so unite into one society as to quit every one his executive power of the law of Nature, and to resign it to the public, there and there only is a political or civil society. And this is done

1 Two Treatises, Bk. II., Cap. II., § 13. Cf. Cap. VII., § 90.

2 Two Treatises, Bk. II., Cap. VI., § 57. 3 Ibid., Cap. V.

wherever any number of men, in the state of Nature, enter into society to make one people, one body politic, under one supreme government; or else when he joins himself to, and incorporates with, any government already made." ^ And Locke agrees with Aristotle in holding that men unite in this way because "man is by nature a political animal." "God," he says, " having made man such a creature that, in His own judgment, it was not good for him to be alone, put him under strong obligations of necessity, convenience, and inclination, to drive him into society, as well as fitted him with understanding and language to continue and enjoy it." ^ And Locke firmly believed, not only that all civil societies were due to original contracts, voluntarily entered into, but also that they might be dissolved when that contract was broken. Distinguishing, moreover, between society and government, which latter he held to be the act of a society already formed, he maintained that, when a government, or form of government, failed to perform the functions for which it was instituted, society might overthrow it, and put another in its place — an excuse for the revolution of 1688, and for revolutions generally.

Comparing Locke with Hobbes, we find a considerable advance, on the part of the former, in the direction of liberty. Men are no longer moral automata; they are no longer drawn into a social contract by mere selfishness, but by a beneficent law of their nature ; the social contract no longer extends to the whole of human life, and is no longer irrevocable; by