Page:The Outline of History Vol 2.djvu/330

 author of the Code de la Nature, denounced the institution of private property and proposed a communistic organization of society. He was the precursor of that large and various school of collectivist thinkers in the nineteenth century who are lumped together as Socialists.

Both the Encyclopædists and the various Economists and Physiocrats demanded a considerable amount of hard thinking in their disciples. An easier and more popular leader to follow was that eloquent sentimentalist, Rousseau (1712-78). He preached the alluring doctrine that the primitive state of man was one of virtue and happiness, from which he had declined through the rather inexplicable activities of priests, kings, lawyers, and the like. (We have tried to convey to our readers in chap. ix, § 2, primitive man's state of virtue and happiness, as the vivid vision of Mr. Worthington Smith has realized it; and we have done our best to show both the necessity of priests and kings to early civilization, and the possible inconveniences of their later rôles in human affairs.) Rousseau's work was essentially demoralizing. It struck not only at the existing social fabric, but at any social organization. When he wrote of the Social Contract, he did so rather to excuse breaches of the covenant than to emphasize its necessity. Man is so far from perfect, that a writer who could show that the almost universal disposition, against which we all have to fortify ourselves, to repudiate debts, misbehave sexually, and evade the toil and expenses of education for ourselves and others, is not after all a delinquency, but a fine display of Natural Virtue, was bound to have a large following in every class that could read him. Rousseau's tremendous vogue did much to swamp the harder, clearer thinkers of this time, and to prepare a sentimental, declamatory, and insincere popular psychology for the great trials that were now coming upon France.