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: CHAPTER IV ROUSSEAU'S SOCIAL THEORIES The State is prior to the individual. Aristotle, Polities. All men are equally by nature free. Hobbes, Leviathan, Cap. XXI. All public regimen, of what kind soever, seemeth evidently to have risen from the deliberate advice, consultation, and composition between men, judging it convenient and behoveful, there being no impossibility in Nature, considered by itself, but that man might have lived without any public regimen. Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, Bk. I., § 10. Love thou thy land, with love far-brought From out the storied Past, and used Within the Present, but transfused Through future time by power of thought. But pamper not a hasty time, Nor feed with crude imaginings The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings That every sophister can lime. Tennyson. Bousseau, in his second letter to M. de Males- herbes, tells us that his discourse on the Sciences and Arts, that on the Origin of Inequality among Men, and Emile, are "three inseparable works, which together form a single whole." He ought to have added, as a fourth, the Social Contract; but it was not then published, though written, and he had hisreasons for not speaking of it. Since it is thus impossible to understand his educational theory, as laid down in Emile, without having first grasped his social and political doctrines, as expounded in the other three, we must now consider these works. We have already, in Chapter I., briefly traced the course of the reaction against the theocentric, authoritative teachings and institutions of the Middle Age, in favor of that anthropocentric, autonomous individualism which is the distinguishing characteristic of recent times, and have seen how the source of political authority was gradually transferred from the inscruta...