Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/599

 ORGANIC THEORY OF SOCIETY 585

Also, as bearing on the same point, it should be remembered that in general the consciousness of Rousseau's time was "phe- nomenalistic" in an unusual degree. This term is perhaps over- technical, but it means that names did not necessarily refer to realities ; that in political science and, of course, also in general literature and in religion, and in all forms of thought, men were actually saying one thing and thinking or perhaps I should say feeling another. In short, they were everywhere dealing in fictions. D'Alembert, for example, had his human machines ; Condillac, his animated statue ; Diderot and Buffon and others, their conceptions of like character. They have been said not to have gone back of their consciousness, and truthfully enough, for they could allow themselves to speak only after the analo- gies of things actually manifest ; but they were by no means unaware of their limitations, and Rousseau probably less so than any other among them. They were not blind to their fictions, as if, forsooth, one ever could be serious in arguing to automatism and fatalism from a knowledge of natural law. Knowledge sets free. Accordingly not only did they have a new wine in their old bottles, but also they were drinking it out. Thus, specifi- cally, the social-contract theory was only one effort among many in the protestant movement, the reaction against absolutism ; and, like all first efforts in reaction, it adopted the general standpoint, and so fell into the sin or error of its opponent. It opposed the divine right of kings, but treated the social contract as if it too possessed some peculiar indwelling supernatural power, going even to such an extreme as to arouse and justify the abusive words of Burke : " chaff and rags and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of men;" but nothing can ever be set over against itself without losing substance, without becoming only phenomenalistic and fictitious. Similarly that is, under the same conditions and with the same result the extreme mechanicalism was meeting creation with causation. In Hobbes' commonwealth, too, which he defines as "one person of whose acts a great multitude by mutual covenant, one with another, have made themselves, everyone the author, to the end that he may use the strength and means of them all as he shall think