In like manner the secular scientific impulse, which, in the last century, was working towards an altogether mechanical and external explanation of the world, begins, with Goethe himself, to bring back in a higher sense, under the names of organism and development, that explanation of the world by final causes, which in a lower sense it has rejected. And the vain attempts still made to explain spirit by nature are rapidly teaching us to revive the truth which underlay the mediæval supernaturalism, that in the last resort nature is only to be explained by spirit. Perhaps it may be found that no one has done more to prepare the way for such a reunion of ancient and mediæval ideas than our great modern poet and prophet of the religion of nature, Goethe, ROUSSEAU. His ROUSSEAU is one of those authors whom we can never afford wholly to forget. value indeed does not consist in any consummate literary achievement: for he is too much of a prophet to be ever completely successful as an artist. That persistent reiteration of certain ideas, that perpetual insistance upon certain modes of feeling, which was the condition of his power over his own generation, makes him often tedious, and sometimes, it must be confessed, even nauseous to readers of the present time, in spite of the point and dignity and riches of his utterance. Just because he spoke to such willing and attentive ears in his own time, ours are now shut against him. Like his Julia, we have "drunk the sweet and bitter cup of sensibility to the lees," and the Nouvelle Héloïse, with its fruitless selfanalysing ecstasy of feeling, can no longer tempt us. If the reign of Puritanism has all but taken all meaning and reality out of the Scriptural language of the Protestant Reformers, it is not wonderful that Robespierre and St. Just with their many followers have made the cant of abstract patriotism and natural right intolerable to us. And the sentimental Deism of the Savoyard vicar has long been recognized both by believers and unbelievers to have too little substance, too little definiteness and concrete meaning, to make a religion. In art and politics, in philosophy and theology, we have outgrown, at least we have ceased to relish, the abstract Gospel of subjective feeling and individual right, and we can no longer revive in its original intensity the charm which it had for those to whom it was first addressed. Yet without a study of Rousseau and his contemporaries, it is impossible for us to understand ourselves, or the great change which has taken place in human thought within the last century. Rousseau is the "short abstract and chronicle of his time." The tragedy of revolution, which was necessary to the new birth of European civilization, was enacted in his breast ere it passed on to the stage of history. In his Confessions, and many vindications of himself, with their mad self-exaltation and self-exposure, their deification of the individual Ego, which is yet at the same time shown in all its naked meanness and littleness, we have the diseased spirit of the time gathered to a focus of intensity in which all its contradiction is clearly displayed. The infinite ambition combined with the sordid reality of Rousseau's life, his confident and yet impotent aspiration after better forms of social union, both in the family and the state, combined with his utter incapacity for establishing healthy relations with one single human being, his constant reiteration of good wishes and intentions, and his persistent claim that the will should be taken for the deed, combined with the ever-reviving consciousness that the will is not the deed, and the desire to thrust upon society the responsibility of his own failure-all this forms a picture of complicated mental agony which we can scarcely bear to contemplate, except as a phase of the Welt-Schmerz, which is the condition of progress. The easy external interpretation has often been given that Rousseau was maddened with vanity, and that even his flight from the world was an effort to attract its notice. But, as Mr. Morley says in his admirable biography, Rousseau's vanity, if it can be so called, "belonged to another sphere of motive" than any ordinary affectation of singularity. The truth is, that he was so intensely occupied with the endless struggle with himself, the endless effort to find anodynes for his own self-dissatisfaction, that he could not possibly have cherished that care for the opinion of others, that common kind of vanity, which characterised so many of the literary men of his time. Rousseau lived in a world of his own phantasy, and in his later days at least, the world without was to him little more than an impersonal Greek chorus to the intense drama that was being enacted within his own soul. He had, indeed, a diseased desire to reveal himself, a diseased craving for the confirmation by others of his own judgment of himself; and failing of this confirmation, he turned bitterly away from the world as his enemy. But for the world's opinion in itself he had no such respect as would induce him either to hide anything from it, or to put anything but what he believed to be truth before it. Those who opposed, even those who interfered with him in any way, he seemed to identify with the accusing voices within him which he sought |