permanent happiness, and this can be attained through virtue alone. The passions which are useful to society compel the affection and approval of our fellows. In order to interest others in our welfare we must interest ourselves in theirs-nothing is more indispensable to man than man. The clever man acts morally, interest binds us to the good; love for others means love for the means to our own happiness. Virtue is the art of making ourselves happy through the happiness of others. Nature itself chastises immorality, since she makes the intemperate unhappy. Religion has hindered the recognition of these rules, has misunderstood the diseases of the soul, and applied false and ineffective remedies; the renunciation which she requires is opposed to human nature. The true moralist recognizes in medicine the key to the human heart; he will cure the mind through the body, control the passions and hold them in check by other passions instead of by sermons, and will teach men that the surest road to personal ends is to labor for the public good. Illumination is the way to virtue and to happiness. Volney (Chassebœuf, died 1820; Catechism of the French Citizen, 1793, later under the title Natural Law or Physical Principles of Morals deduced from the Organization of Man and of the Universe; further, The Ruins; Complete Works, 1821) belongs among the moralists of self-love, although, besides the egoistic interests, he takes account of the natural sympathetic impulses also. This is still more the case with Condorcet (Sketch of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind, 1794), who was influenced alike by Condillac and by Turgot, and who defends a tendency toward universal perfection both in the individual and in the race. Besides the selfish affections, which are directed as much to the injury as to the support of others, there lies in the organization of man a force which steadily tends toward the good, in the form of underived feelings of sympathy and benevolence, from which moral self-judgment is developed by the aid of reflection. The aim of true ethics and social art is not to make the "great" virtues universal, but to make them needless; the nearer the nations approximate to mental and moral perfection, the less they stand in need of these-happy the people in which good deeds are so customary that scarcely an opportunity is left for heroism. The chief instrument for the moral cultivation of the people is the development of the reason, the conscience, and the benevolent affections. Habituation to deeds of kindness. is a source of pure and inexhaustible happiness. Sympathy with the good of others must be so cultivated that the sacrifice of personal enjoyment will be a sweeter joy than the pleasure itself. Let the child early learn to enjoy the delight of loving and of being loved. We must, finally, strive toward the gradual diminution of the inequalities of capacity, of property, and between ruler and ruled, for to abolish them is impossible. Of the remaining philosophers of the revolutionary period mention may be made of the physician Cabanis (Relations of the Physical and the Moral in Man, 1799), and Destutt de Tracy (Elements of Ideology, 1801 seq.). The former is a materialist in psychology (the nerves are the man, ideas are secretions of the brain), considers consciousness a property of organic matter (the soul is not a being, but a faculty), and makes moral sympathy develop out of the animal instincts of preservation and nourishment. De Tracy, also, derives all psychical activity from organization and sensation. His doctrine of the will, though but briefly sketched, is interesting. The desires have a passive and an active side (corresponding to the twofold action of the nerves, on themselves and on the muscles); on the one hand, they are feelings of pleasure or pain, and on the other, they lead us to action-will is need, and, at the same time, the source of the means for satisfying this need. Both these feelings and the external movements are probably based upon unconscious organic motions. The will is rightly identified with the personality, it is the ego itself, the totality of the physico-psychical life of man attaining to self-consciousness. The inner or organic life consists in the self-preserving functions of the individual, the outer or animal life, in the functions of relation (of sense, of motion, of speech, of reproduction); individual interests are rooted in the former, sympathy in the latter. The primal good is freedom, or the power to do what we will; the highest thing in life is love. In order to be happy we must avoid punishment, blame, and pangs of conscience. 4. Rousseau's Conflict with the Illumination. The Genevese, Jean Jacques Rousseau* (1712–78), stands in a similar relation of opposition to the French Illumination as the Scottish School to the English, and Herder and Jacobi to the German. He points us away from the cold sophistical inferences of the understanding to the immediate conviction of feeling; from the imaginations of science to the unerring voice of the heart and the conscience; from the artificial conditions of culture to healthy nature. The vaunted Illumination is not the lever of progress, but the source of all degeneration; morality does not rest on the shrewd calculation of self-interest, but on original social and sympathetic instincts (love for the good is just as natural to the human heart as self-love; enthusiasm for virtue has nothing to do with our interest; what would it mean to give up one's life for the sake of advantage?); the truths of religion are not objects of thought, but of pious feeling. Rousseau commenced his career as an author with the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, 1750 (the discussion of a prize question, crowned by the Academy of Dijon), which he describes as entirely pernicious, and the Discourse on the Origin and the Bases of the Inequality among Men, 1753. By nature man is innocent and good, becoming evil only in society. Reflection, civilization, and egoism are unnatural. In the happy state of nature pity and innocent self-love (amour de soi) ruled, and the latter was first corrupted by the reason into the artificial feeling of selfishness (amour propre) in the course of social development-thinking man is a degenerate animal. Property has divided men into rich and poor; the magistracy, into strong and weak; arbitrary power, into masters and slaves.. Wealth generated luxury with its artificial delights of science and the theater, which make us more unhappy and evil than we otherwise are; science, the child of vice, becomes in turn the mother of new vices. All nature, all that is characteris * Cf. Brockerhoff, Leipsic, 1863-74; L. Moreau, Paris, 1870. the Principles of tic, all that is good, has disappeared with advancing culture; the only relief from the universal degeneracy is to be hoped for from a return to nature on the part of the individual and society alike-from education and a state conformed to nature. The novel Emile is devoted to the pedagogical, and the Social Contract, or Political Law, to the political problem. 1762, followed two years later by the Mountain, a defense against the attacks of the clergy. In these later writings Rousseau's naturalistic hatred of reason appears essentially softened. Both appeared in Social order is a sacred right, which forms the basis of all others. It does not proceed, however, from nature-no man has natural power over his fellows, and might confers no right-consequently it rests on a contract. Not, however, on a contract between ruler and people. The act by which the people chooses a king is preceded by the act in virtue of which it is a people. In the social contract each devotes himself with his powers and his goods to the community, in order to gain the protection of the latter. With this act the spiritual body politic comes into being, and attains its unity, its ego, its will. The sum of the members is called the people; each member, as a participant in the sovereignty, citizen, and, as bound to obedience to the law, subject. The individual loses his natural freedom, receiving in exchange the liberty of a citizen, which is limited by the general will, and, in addition, property rights in all that he possesses, equality before the law, and moral freedom, which first really makes him master of himself. The impulse of mere desire is slavery, obedience to selfimposed law, freedom. The sovereign is the people, law the general popular will directed to the common good, the supreme goods, "freedom and equality," the chief objects of legislation. The lawgiving power is the moral will of the body politic, the government (magistracy, prince) its executive physical power; the former is its heart, the latter its brain. Rousseau calls the government the middle term between the head of the state and the individual, or between the citizen as lawgiver and as subject-the sovereign (the people) commands, the government executes, the subject obeys. The act by which the people submits itself to its head is not a contract, but merely a mandate; whenever it chooses it can limit, alter, or entirely recall the delegated power. In order to security against illegal encroachments on the part of the government, Rousseau recommends regular assemblies of the people, in which, under suspension of governmental authority, the confirmation, abrogation, or alteration of the constitution shall be determined upon. Even the establishment of the articles of social belief falls to the sovereign people. The essential difference between Rousseau's theory of the state and that of Locke and Montesquicu consists in his rejection of the division of powers and of representation by delegates, hence in its unlimited democratic character. A generation after it was given to the world, the French Revolution made the attempt to translate it into practice. "The masses carried out what Rousseau himself had thought, it is true, but never willed" (Windelband). Rousseau's theory of education is closely allied to Locke's (cf. p.180), whose leading idea-the development of individuality was entirely in harmony with the subjectivism of the philosopher of feeling. Posterity has not found it a difficult task to free the sound kernel therein from the husks of exaggeration and idiosyncrasy which surrounded it. Among the latter belong the preference of bodily over intellectual development, and the unlimited faith in the goodness of human nature. Exercise the body, the organs, the senses of the pupil, and keep his soul unemployed as long as possible; for the first, take care only that his mind be kept free from error and his heart from vice. In order to secure complete freedom from disturbance in this development, it is advisable to isolate the child from society, nay, even from the family, and to bring him up in retirement under the guidance of a private tutor. As the Swiss republican spoke in Rousseau's politics, so his religious theories* betray the Genevan Calvinist. "The Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith" (in Emile) proclaims deism as a religion of feeling. The rational proofs brought forward for the existence of God-from the motion of matter * Cf. Ch. Borgeaud, Rousseaus Religionsphilosophie, Geneva and Leipsic, 1883. |