CHAPTER 19: ROUSSEAU, AND EDUCATION ACCORDING TO NATURE
In what Davidson wrote on Rousseau, and Education according to Nature there are many side lights as to his philosophical position, and his views on sociology. He gave lectures on the subject at Glenmore, as well as in New York; and they were amongst the most useful parts of his oral teaching. What he committed to writing in 1 898 is here summarized in four sections; the first on " Ideas and Aspirations as to Authority, Nature, and Culture, Current in Rousseau's Time"; the second on "Rousseau's Life"; the third on his "Social and Educational Theories"; and the fourth on his " Influence."
I. Ideas and Aspirations as to Authority, Nature, and Culture, Current in Rousseau's Time [1]
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. 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 Rousseau.
The ruling principle of the Middle Ages was authority. Man, created for God's glory, was only a means to that end, and had no freedom of thought, affection, or will. The task of the centuries since that time has been 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 Germanic Reformation claimed freedom for the individual intelligence; the Italian Renaissance, freedom for the individual feelings and emotions. Neither, however, 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; and what its absence meant we can perhaps most clearly see when we realize that the complete and logical outcome of the Reformation was found in Voltaire; that of the Renaissance, in Rousseau. It took the clear mathematical mind of the French to carry principles to their logical conclusions in thought and practice. What Rousseau demanded was 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.
The reformers appealed to reason, the humanists to nature. The notion of nature was an inheritance from the Greeks, but, as time went on, nature, and gradually mind or reason also, fell into disrepute; and the supreme object of interest became Plato's 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 as the origin of evil; and the ancient place of Plato's ideal world was taken by an authoritative revelation.
In the seventeenth century churchmen, for the most part, clung to revelation and authority; other thinkers tried to make peace between reason and nature. The English mind, generally preferring nature, tried to explain reason through it; the French, setting out with reason and finding no way of arriving at nature, left the dualism unsolved. Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke form a strong contrast to Pascal, Descartes, and Malebranche. Rousseau generally followed the former, especially Hobbes, who conceived the "state of nature" to be one of universal war. He taught that in spite of differences, mental and bodily, when all is taken into account men are not only equal, but have equal rights. "The right of nature" is the liberty of each man to use his own power as well as himself for the preservation of his own nature — that is, his life — " and to do anything which he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereto." A common power must be set up to maintain covenants between men, and to direct their actions for the common benefit.
"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 all others." Hobbes went on to say that the power once established can never be replaced or annulled, and is binding on all; that the sovereign, once elected, can do no injustice; and hence cannot be put to death, or be punished by his subjects. His views with regard to law are characteristic, and are as follows: " The law of nature 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 commonwealth is once settled they are actually laws, but not before. . . . The law of nature therefore is a part of the civil law." And again, " 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."
In 1689 Locke published two Treatises on Government. In considering how political power could rise 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 Hobbes, in maintaining that the state of nature was one of peace, governed by a natural law. He says: "The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it which obliges every one, and reason is that law. It 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. . . . All being the servants of one sovereign Master, they are made to last during his pleasure."
Locke rejected Hobbes's theory of despotic sovereignty, and believed that men, by submitting to common laws, gain freedom. He maintained that when a form of government failed to perform its functions it might be overthrown and another put into its place.
Hobbes and Locke were the chief inspirers of Rousseau's social and political theories. Among others that influenced him were Montesquieu and Morellet. By his scientific researches the former caused a reactionary effect upon Rousseau, many of whose theories may be simply considered as a protest. Morellet, though combating Rousseau's idea that human corruption is due to the arts and sciences, was at one with him in maintaining that men in a state of nature are good, and that most governments have corrupted them. He accordingly wished to return to the simplicity and equality of nature by the establishment of a community of goods, that is, socialism.
When Rousseau began to write, the chief questions were these: (1) Was the state of nature one of freedom and peace, or of war and slavery? (2) Are the laws of nature beneficent, or the opposite? (3) Do men gain freedom through the social contract, or lose it? (4) Are they improved, or degraded, by social union and culture? (5) Since all men are free and equal in the state of nature, how do the social subordination of one man to another and social inequality come about, and what is their justification? (6) Are men bound to submit to social regulations against their wills? While these questions were fermenting in men's minds Rousseau came upon the scene.
II. Rousseau's Life
Human beings may, roughly speaking, be divided into two classes, — those who live for passive enjoyment, and those who live for active mastery. The former seek to enjoy each moment; the latter live chiefly in the future and often attain a permanent place in the world's history. Rousseau belonged to the first class, Voltaire to the second. How, then, did Rousseau become an important factor in a great historic movement? (1) Because, like other men of his type, he was thrown into circumstances which wounded his sensibility, and was thus driven to imagine others in which it would find free play; (2) because the movement in question was toward the very things which he represented, — sensibility, subjectivism, and dalliance. He had, moreover, the rare advantage of being able to express his imaginings in a style which for simplicity, clearness, effectiveness, and nearly every other excellence, looks almost in vain for an equal. Keen sensibility, uttered with confident and touching eloquence, is the receipt for making fanatics, and Rousseau made them. Meanwhile his ambitious rival, Voltaire, was making sceptics.
Jean Jacques Rousseau was born at Geneva in 1712. His father, a watchmaker by trade, was descended from an old Parisian family and inherited the French characteristics, — love of pleasure, liveliness, sensibility, romanticism, and gallantry. Jean Jacques's mother died at his birth, leaving her son to the care of his aunt, who indulged him greatly. At the age of six Rousseau spent every evening, and occasionally an entire night, in reading with his father the highly colored romances that had formed his mother's library. A year or two later he was interested in such books as Plutarch's Lives, Ovid's Metamorphoses, La Sueur's History of Church and Empire, and Bossuet's Lectures on Universal History, besides certain volumes of Moliere. Plutarch was his favorite author. "To these readings," he says, "and the conversations with my father to which they gave rise, I owe the free, republican spirit and the unyielding pride, impatient of every form of servitude, which have tormented me all my life. . . . There grew in me this heart at once so haughty and so tender, this effeminate yet indomitable character, which, hovering between weakness and courage, has always placed me at odds with myself, and has caused me to miss the satisfaction of either abstinence or enjoyment, indulgence or self-control."
In 1720 when his father left Geneva Rousseau was placed in the care of a clergyman at Bossey for two years. The rule was kindly, but it was here that the lad suffered an unjust punishment to which may be traced the origin of one of Rousseau's chief doctrines — that it is discipline and the curbing of natural impulses that confuses and degrades human nature. Later he was apprenticed to an engraver, a rough and violent man. Of this experience Rousseau writes forty years afterwards: "I was driven to vices which otherwise I should have hated, such as lying, idleness, and theft. . . . Had I fallen into the hands of a better master I should have passed, in the bosom of my religion, my country, my family, and my friends, a quiet, peaceable life, such as my nature demanded, amid regular work, suited to my taste, and a society suited to my heart." The whole of Rousseau is here. Of heroic, moral goodness in the midst of circumstances offending both taste and heart, he had not even a conception.
After running away from his master, home, and relatives, Rousseau lingered a short time in the neighborhood of Geneva, getting food and shelter as best he could, and rioting in the sense of animal freedom, and in romantic visions of his future career. Thence he wandered into Savoy, was converted to Catholicism, and for many months endured the varying fortunes of a vagabond's life. Nothing, perhaps, is more characteristic of Rousseau than his description of his Arcadian longings and his self-pity at this time. " I must have an orchard on the banks of Lake Geneva," was his dream. "I must have a firm friend, a sweet wife, a cow, and a little boat. Till I have all these I shall never enjoy complete happiness on earth. ... I sighed and cried like a child. How often, sitting down on a big stone to weep at leisure, did I amuse myself by watching my tears fall into the water!"
Having one day entered a peasant's house and asked for dinner, offering to pay, he received nothing but skimmed milk and coarse barley bread. Later, feeling that his guest would not betray him, the man opened a trapdoor in the floor and brought out a ham, some good white bread, and a bottle of wine, on which, with an omelet, Rousseau made a royal dinner. The peasant then explained to him that in order to avoid ruin at the hands of the tax-gatherer he was obliged to feign abject poverty. "All this was absolutely new to me," writes Rousseau, "and it made an impression that will never be wiped out. This was the germ of that inextinguishable hatred which grew up in my heart against the oppressors of the unhappy people."
His vagabondage, which lasted four years, did much for him. It satisfied his lust for adventure; it awoke in him a profound passion for rural simplicity; it made him acquainted with the common people, and awakened a lively sympathy for them; it inspired him with a love of natural scenery such as no one before him had ever felt; and it made his language the expression of genuine passion and first-hand experience.
For nine years Rousseau spent the greater part of his time at the home of his patroness, Madame de Warens. When in 1741 they wearied of each other he left her, resolving to try his fortune in Paris, and hoping, if he were successful, to save her from financial ruin. Up to this time he had been a bundle of ardent desires, undisciplined by either serious reflection or moral training. He was lying, faithless, slanderous, thievish, sensual, cruel, cowardly, selfish. Only toward the end of this period do germs of nobler things begin to appear.
Through the influence of Madame de Broglie he obtained a secretaryship at Venice, but having quarreled with the ambassador by whom he was employed, he returned to Paris and resumed his Bohemian way of living. Here he met Therese Le Vasseur. His loyalty to her through all changes of fortune is perhaps the noblest trait of his whole life.
The productive period of Rousseau's career is included between the years 1741 and 1778. It was during this time that his literary and musical work was done. In 1762 he published his famous Emile, a philosophical treatise on education that involved him in immediate difficulties. Threatened with arrest, he fled to Switzerland and thence to England. He returned to France in 1767 and lived for a time under an assumed name. The last eight years of his life were spent in Paris; some of his minor works belong to this period. A few weeks before his death he went to live at Ermenonville, about twenty miles from Paris, and there he died suddenly on July 2, 1778, at the age of sixty-six.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Rousseau is that he went through life, not only without learning the meaning of duty, but firmly believing that the life of pure caprice which he led was the ideal life, and that he himself was the best of men. This indeed he openly maintained. So far was he from being ashamed of his undisciplined spontaneity that he wrote his Confessions to prove that the spontaneous man is the best of men. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the whole aim of his literary activity was to show how men may be made happy and contented without being moral.
But what Rousseau sought to prove by eloquent words, by insidious appeals to man's natural craving for happiness on easy terms, he disproved by his own example. His obtrusive independence, due to absence of moral ties, was spongy, unmanly, and repellent. We might pity him if he did not pity himself so much; but we can in no case admire or love him. ... A sadder old age than his has not often been recorded.
III. Rousseau's Social and Educational Theories
In 1749 Rousseau wrote an essay, which won the Dijon Academy's prize, on " Has the Progress of the Sciences contributed to corrupt or to purify Morals? " This discourse was attacked from many quarters, but, by no means daunted, he wrote another entitled, "What is the Origin of Inequality among Men, and is it authorized by the Natural Law?" In this he assures us that reflection is contrary to nature, and that the man who thinks is a depraved animal. He draws a picture of man in his purely animal estate, wandering in the forests, without industry, without speech, without home, but free, strong, and happy.
Rousseau next shows us how every step in advancing civilization has led to corruption. The great evil of inequality began when what had previously been common to all was claimed as private property. From this point on it is easy to follow the development of civil society, involving, as it does, the decay of freedom, virtue, and happiness, and the growth of slavery, vice, and misery.
In a letter thanking the author for a copy of this discourse Voltaire wrote: " Never was such ability put forth in the endeavor to make us all stupid. On reading your book one longs to walk on all fours." The work is indeed in many respects absurd, yet it contains a large amount of solid truth. What Rousseau wrote of the origin of language and of ideas is better than anything that had been said before his time. The book contains not only the tinder that kindled the French Revolution, and the germ that burst into the American Declaration of Independence, but also the forces that are "toiling in the gloom "under the surface of our present social order. Lastly, there is in it an important pedagogical truth, which may be summed up in the Greek aphorism: " Education is learning to love and hate correctly."
This discourse was written in 1753, not long before Rousseau's reversion to Protestantism. Nine years later he published the Social Contract, in which, recognizing that a return to the state of nature is impossible, he tries to show how man's lost freedom may be recovered in the state of culture. According to his Social Contract each individual was to give up his personal freedom, and accept in exchange social freedom, by submitting himself to the supreme direction of the general will. There is always danger, however, that in the enforcement of laws there may be some tyranny and injustice. When this happens the "social contract" is broken and the parties to it return to a state of nature, free from all authority, but free at the same time to make a fresh contract. Here we have the justification of revolution.
Rousseau's "state of nature" is a pure fiction of the imagination. Animal caprice is not freedom. The phrase "natural rights" is self -contradictory, for where there is no social order there are no rights; in so far all beings are equal. But his chief error lay in supposing that human nature could be transformed by the fiat of the legislator, and society be made to assume any arrangement which he might choose to give it. No good can ever be done to a people by trying to force it into any mold prepared for it from without. All that the wise reformer can do is to diffuse such knowledge and culture as shall give a deeper and wider meaning to experience and so make possible higher ideals. Any attempt to force the process, or to substitute for its slowly but freely attained results a rigid, unprogressive scheme such as Utopias are sure to be, can lead to nothing but slavery and death.
Rousseau's educational system was meant to be a preparation for that sort of life which his own nature pictured to him as the highest — a quiet, uneventful, unreflective, half animal, half childish "natural life, free from serious tasks, aims, and duties." . . . Had he been logical he would have sent children for nurture and education to a tribe of savages; but instead he propounded this problem: How can a child, born in civilized society, be so reared as to remain unaffected and uncorrupted by the vices inseparable from civilization? His solution is given in Emile, the first words of which are: "Everything is well as it comes from the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of men."
In dealing with infant life Rousseau lays down many sensible but chiefly negative rules. The young child is not to be swaddled, confined, or rocked, but to be allowed the utmost freedom of limb and voice. Its cries must be attended to at once, in so far as they express real needs, but no further. Father and mother must combine all their efforts to develop the nature of the child. The directions regarding the treatment and food of the infant are in the main excellent. They may be summed up in the one precept: Let nature have her way.
Rousseau considered that habit as regards set times for food, sleep, etc., was something to be avoided. In this respect his teaching is both unnatural and unwise, for it may safely be said that all evolution is due to the acquisition of habits. Habit is economy of energy.
To Rousseau the end of existence is happiness, and happiness is merely the sensuous enjoyment of each moment as it passes, without thought for higher things, without regard to others. Whatever interferes with present enjoyment is to be regarded as evil. It would hardly be possible to form a more pitiful conception of human life and education than this. There is not a moral or noble trait in it. Instead of Noblesse oblige, Rousseau's maxim amounts to Bonheur invite. In these days when uncontrolled individualism still has its advocates it is well fully to realize what it means. "See that children have a good time" is received as a divine oracle by millions of parents and teachers. No wonder that a good time has become America's chief god [2]
Rousseau's theory of education was destructive of all social institutions and all true civilization. He maintained that children should not be taught obedience. Since nature and things resist but do not command, the teacher should do the same. Human relations should be replaced by mechanical relations, if the precious individuality of the child is to be guarded. He is to meet the iron law of nature everywhere, the love of humanity nowhere.
Of course children as natural creatures are never to be reasoned with. "Use force with children and reason with men; such is the natural order. . . . The child may be bound, pushed, or held back with merely the chain of necessity, without his murmuring." In this way he will never learn what kindness is, and so he will not acquire the unnatural sentiment of gratitude, or indeed any sentiment of a human sort.
"Early education," says Rousseau, "should be purely negative. Exercise the child's body, his organs, his senses, his strength; but keep his mind indolent as long as possible." This is what he calls natural education, but it is a highly artificial one. Nature is made to exclude its highest manifestations, and then the child is watched, dogged, guided, and forcibly controlled at every step, and all for the sake of keeping him in a condition of sub-moral, sub-human innocence. The only moral lesson that he would teach children is to do harm to nobody. This "involves the injunction to have as little to do with society as possible; for in the social state the good of one is necessarily the evil of another." It is needless to say that the assertion is the exact opposite of the truth, and subversive of all civilization.
At the age of twelve Emile had learned only to play. Rousseau would now have him cultivate the "sixth sense, which is called 'common sense,' not so much because it is common to all men, as because it results from the well-regulated use of the other senses." The boy is still to be guided by immediate interests. When his curiosity is roused the natural sciences may be taught; but he is to study nothing which he does not see to be useful for his own special, sensuous ends. At the age of fifteen he is at last to learn to read, and his one book is to be Robinson Crusoe, which will make him eager to learn the natural arts. With regard to these Rousseau says: " The first and most respectable of all the arts is agriculture. I should give blacksmithing the second place, carpentry the third, and so on."
Rousseau may fairly claim the honor of being the father of manual training. While admitting that the isolated man may do as he pleases he insists that in society everybody must work. And manual labor is to be preferred to every other, as affording the greatest freedom. He poured contempt upon the accumulated treasures of human experience and upon all the means whereby they are made available to individual minds, — books, study, schools, colleges, universities, social intercourse. He continually speaks of science, learning, and all that depends upon them, as degradations and necessary evils.
But Rousseau had other teachings which were of a different nature. His attacks upon luxury, display, and the vain waste of wealth, and his eloquent praises of plain, simple, modest living, have laid humanity forever under deep obligations to him. When a century later Emerson said, " Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous," he had been to school to Rousseau. "Good-bye, proud world, I'm going home," might have been written by Rousseau.
Of Emile at the close of his boyhood Rousseau writes thus: "He has all the virtues that relate to himself. In order to have also the social virtues, he merely requires to have the relations which call for them, and the light which his mind is now completely ready to receive. Without disquieting any one he has lived contented and happy so far as nature has allowed." So far, rather, as Rousseau's utterly false views of nature have allowed! Smile has all the time been caged, watched, and trained in ignorance into complete artificiality. He is now an altogether fantastic and impossible creature, utterly unloving and unlovable.
Having hitherto represented rigid necessity, Smile's tutor must now become his intimate friend. Under his guidance Smile "must study society through men, and men through society," beginning with the study of the human heart. His surroundings must be such that "he shall think well of those who live with him, and become so well acquainted with the world as to think everything that is done in it bad. . . . Let him know," says Rousseau, "that man is naturally good, but let him see how society depraves and perverts men. . . . Direct your pupil to all good actions that are possible for him; let the interest of the poor be always his interest; let him aid them, not only with his purse but with his care; let him serve them, protect them, and devote his time to them; let him become their agent; he will never again in all his life fill so noble a place."
By what process the animal, self-centered Smile of sixteen becomes the bold philanthropist of eighteen, Rousseau says he is not bound to tell us, and we never find out; but the new Emile, if he could be considered a reality, is certainly an admirable creature and deserves all the encomiums of his maker.
To Rousseau, who had been both a Catholic and a Protestant, who had heard his father tell of the Moslems in Constantinople, and who had listened to Voltaire, sectarianism, with its exclusive dogmas, lost all meaning and authority. "Let everybody," he says, "think about these things as he pleases. I do not know how far they may interest other people; they do not interest me at all. But what interests me and others like me is that every one should know that there exists an Arbiter of the lot of men, whose children we all are; who orders us to be just; to love one another; to be kindly and merciful; to keep our agreements with everybody, even with our enemies and his; that the apparent happiness of this life is nothing; that after it there comes another in which this Supreme Being will be the rewarder of the good and the judge of the wicked. These are the dogmas which it is important to teach young people. . . . Keep your children always within the narrow circle of those dogmas which relate to morality."
Emile's courtship is carried on under the eye of the despotic tutor, who at first arranges everything for his pupil's gratification and enjoyment. Suddenly, however, this epicurean existence is changed and the young man undergoes the severe discipline of a stoic. Man must now rise above his natural desires and take Reason for a guide. Accordingly Smile is bidden to leave his Sophie for a time, and to set his strongest inclinations at defiance. After an absence of two years, which are devoted to travel, and in which Emile learns much of social obligations and responsibilities, he returns to Sophie and with their marriage the book ends.
The worst feature of Rousseau's treatment of the parting of the lovers is that, while Smile is urged to obey the voice of reason and conscience, he is not told why this voice should be obeyed any more than the voice of passion and interest. So far as we are shown, both are equally subjective and blind, and there is no third faculty to be umpire between them.
In Rousseau's next work, Emile and Sophie, we find the hero in adversity. Having been captured by Corsairs and sent to the galleys, he writes: " In my present state what can I desire? Alas! to prevent me from sinking into annihilation I need to be animated with another's will in default of my own." This piece of characteristic sophistry, which would justify any form of slavery, convinces him that his change of condition is more apparent than real; " that, if liberty consisted in doing what one wishes, no man would be free; that all are weak, dependent upon things and upon stern necessity; that he who can best will all that it ordains is the most free, since he is never forced to do what he does not wish." Here we have the germs of the Schopenhauerian doctrine that true freedom consists in renouncing all will, even the "will to live," which means that to be happy is not to be at all — the last conclusion of pessimism.
Rousseau proved to his own satisfaction two things: (1) that his education according to nature will enable men and women to stand the test of the severest adversity, and (2) that the life of cities is altogether corrupt and corrupting.
IV. Rousseau's Influence
No one can deny that the influence of Rousseau's ideas upon educational theory and practice has been, and still is, very great. His passionate rhetoric and his scorn for the conventions as contrasted with the ideal simplicity of nature roused men from their slumbers and made them reconsider what they had so long blindly accepted. So far his work was invaluable. His bitter, sneering condemnation of the fashionable life of his time, corrupt and' hypocritical, with its distorting and almost dehumanizing views of education; his eloquent plea for a return to a life that was truly and simply human, and to an education calculated to prepare for such a life, were righteous and well timed. His purpose was thoroughly right, and he knew how to make himself heard in giving expression to it. But when he came to inform the world in detail how this purpose was to be carried out, he undertook a task for which he was not fitted either by natural endowment or by education. His passionate, dalliant nature prevented him from seeing wherein man's highest being consists, while his contemptuous ignorance of study, science, and philosophy closed his eyes to the historic process by which men have not only come to be what they now are, but by which their future course must be freely determined.
Gathering up the various defects of Rousseau's social and pedagogical theories, we can clearly see the false assumption that lay at the bottom of them all. It is a very common and widespread error, and is fatal wherever it occurs. It consists in assuming that the later and higher stages in evolution are to be explained by the laws that manifest themselves in the earlier and lower, and must be made to square with these. It throws forward the darkness of the earlier upon the later, instead of casting back the light of the later upon the earlier. Thus it continually tries to explain human nature by the laws manifested in sub-human nature. It insists that man should go back and allow himself to be governed by the necessary laws of the latter as the fatalistic Stoics said. This is the sum and substance of Rousseau's teaching in sociology, ethics, and pedagogy. It is the sum and substance of much popular teaching in all departments of theory and practice to this day. Yet nothing could be more misleading or more fatal to progress. The acorn does not explain the oak, but the oak the acorn. The meaning of the acorn is revealed in the oak, and the meaning of nature in culture. Each to-day reveals the meaning of all yesterdays and contains the free promise of all to-morrows. And so the problem of life is not to make man live according to nature, but to make nature live according to man; or in less ambitious phrase, to elevate the " natural " into the "spiritual" man; blind instinct into rational freedom. Rousseau's system, therefore, exactly inverts the order of nature and progress. It advocates the descent, not the ascent, of man.
In spite of this, it has been given to few men to exert by their thought an influence so deep and pervasive as that of Rousseau. It extended to all departments of human activity, — philosophy, science, religion, art, politics, ethics, economics, and pedagogy.
In philosophy Rousseau influenced Kant, and through him all German, and therefore all modern, philosophy. Even its latest development, agnosticism, can be traced back through Kant's unknowable "thing-in-itself " to the same source.
Rousseau's influence in religion was felt by many of the French Revolutionists, especially by Robespierre and St. Just, and contributed important elements to the neo-Catholic renaissance in the Latin countries and to the Protestant reaction in the Germanic, as well as to English and American Unitarianism. It was also the determining influence in the theological movements initiated by Schleiermacher and Ritschl. In art his influence has been almost paramount throughout Christendom. We may trace his footsteps in the rural cottages and picturesque parks so common in Europe and America; in the landscape paintings and genre pictures that fill our galleries; and in the nature groups, and sentimentally posed figures that delight the majority of our sculptors.
French literature, for the last hundred years, has been soaked in Rousseau's teaching; and in Germany both Goethe and Schiller were powerfully affected by him. In England — where the poison has for the most part been rejected — his influence has been mainly beneficial and can be traced in the writings of the following: Burns, Lady Nairne, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, the Brownings, Carlyle and Ruskin, Cloughand Tennyson, Morris and Swinburne, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Mrs. Ward. On the other side of the Atlantic we find Longfellow and Lowell, Whittier and Emerson; and among the Italians, Leopardi, Manzoni, Carducci, and D'Annunzio. What is true here is equally true of the literature of Greece, Scandinavia, and Russia. Ibsen, for example, is Rousselian to the core.
Turning to the field of politics we find that the French Revolution was in very large degree Rousseau's work; and the formulas in which the American Declaration of Independence was couched were largely drawn from him. Upon political theory the effect of his teaching has been so great that he may be fairly called the father of modern political science. He gave wrong answers to the questions which he propounded; but these questions were just the ones that required to be answered.
Hovering between two equally immoral systems, Epicureanism and Stoicism, and having apparently no experience of free will, Rousseau developed no moral system. Nevertheless, his views were not without effect upon subsequent ethical theories.
In the sphere of economics Rousseau's influence, though great, is quite different from what he expected. Though entirely averse to socialism and anarchism, he was in large degree the parent of both. His stoicism is virtual socialism, while his epicureanism is virtual anarchism, as could easily be shown. It ought to be added that one of the noblest and most conspicuous traits in Rousseau's character was unfailing sympathy with the poor and the oppressed, involving hatred of their oppressors; and it is this sympathy and this hatred — which his example did much to make common — that have, respectively, caused the socialistic and anarchistic movements of this century.
Of his educational demands perhaps only three have been responded to: (1) that children should, from the moment of their birth, be allowed complete freedom of movement; (2) that they should be educated through direct experience, and not through mere information derived from books; (3) that they should be taught to use their hands in the production of useful articles. But certain others of his notions lingered on for a time, much to the detriment of education, and were with difficulty shaken off.
To give an account of all the educators influenced by Rousseau would be to write a history of modern pedagogy. Among the chief, however, are Pestalozzi, Herbart, Froebel, and Antonio Rosmini-Serbati; the latter far less known, but well deserving of careful study by educators.
Rousseau's Emile has made men attempt to defend existing systems of education, and, finding that they could not, resolve and endeavor to discover better ones. There is still much to be done. We have, even now, no scientific theory of pedagogy; and the reason is that we have no scientific theory of human nature. We are still distracted and blinded to the truth, on the one hand by certain traditional conceptions that once formed part of a view of world economy long since rendered unbelievable and obsolete, and on the other, by certain modern philosophic prejudices of a dualistic sort for which Kant is in the main responsible. The former make us still inclined to believe that the soul is a created substance beyond the reach of experience, a transcendental monad, possessed of certain fixed faculties and capable of being trained only in a certain definite direction to a fore-appointed end. The latter make us believe that it is a bundle of categories, empty thought-forms, existing prior to all sensation or experience, and conditioning it. In either case we are irrationally induced to regard, and to talk about, the soul as something other than what by experience — the only source of true knowledge — we know it to be, and thus to build our educational theories upon a mere chimera. There is not one fact in our experience going to show that the soul is either a substance or a bundle of categories. Indeed, when subtly considered these words are absolutely without meaning. When we ask what we know the soul to be we can only answer: A sentient desire, or desiderant feeling, which through its own effort after satisfaction gradually differentiates itself into a world, or, which is the same thing, gradually learns to refer its satisfactions to a world of things in time and space. Feeling is primary; ideas, or differentiations in feeling, are secondary; — exactly the contrary of what Herbart believed. The world that we know, whether material or spiritual, is entirely made up of feeling differentiated by ideas.
The end of education, therefore, can be none other than the complete satisfaction of feeling by an ever-increasing, harmonious, that is, unitary, differentiation of it into a world of sources of satisfaction. This satisfaction will be greater in proportion as the sources are richer and more numerous. Hence, every soul will be consulting for its own satisfaction by doing its best to satisfy every other soul, and to make it as rich as possible. Thus the most perfect egoism will be found to be one with the most perfect altruism, and the law of virtue to be one with the law of blessedness, as in the end it must be, unless all existence be a mockery. On this view of the soul, and on this alone, will it be possible to erect an intelligible and coherent structure of education — intellectual, affectional, and moral.
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Notes:
1. Summarized from Rousseau, and Education according to Nature. Copyright, 1898, by Charles Scribner's Sons, Publishers.