Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BACK TO NATURE 13 It is in the Emile that Rousseau most elaborately develops his conception of the state of nature and the natural man as a philosophic ideal rather than a historical reality. The general theme of the work is the rearing and training of a child, and the unceasing exhortation of the author is to abandon methods that have then- origin or justification in the real or fancied needs of social life. "Back to nature" is his cry. This does not mean that society must be destroyed and the savage state resumed. It means merely that nature must be the rule for men in society. The incoherence of Rousseau's definitions and explanations and rhapsodies about this matter is in his most characteristic style; and seeking to comprehend clearry his conception of "nature" is like trying to visualize the fauna of the Apocalypse. His purpose is in a general way intelligible; it is to strip the human mind of all the attributes that are in origin or manifestation ascribable to social life. The residue is the mental equipment of the natural man. At birth the human being is, through his senses, susceptible to impressions from without. Toward the objects that create the impressions he has a f eeling of attraction or repulsion according as they are agreeable or disagreeable, and, as his mind develops, according to the rational judgment he forms about their effect upon his happiness. But meanwhile he develops and falls under the constraint of habits and opinions, and through these his dispositions toward things are modified. " Prior to that modification they constitute what I call nature in us."1 11Smile, liv. i, ad trait. Such is the nearest approach to precise definition that Rousseau gives his readers. Despite its doubtful psychology it might, if adhered to, serve a useful philoso...