r him,. . . do your best to poison
him with a theory of morals against nature; impose every kind of
fetter on him; embarrass his movements with a thousand obstacles; place
phantoms around him to frighten him. . . . Would you see him happy and
free? Do not meddle with his affairs. . . Remain convinced of this,
(wrote Diderot) that these wise legislators have formed and shaped you
as they have done, not for your benefit, but for their own. I appeal
to every civil, religious, and political institution; examine these
closely, and, if I am not mistaken, you will find the human species,
century after century, subject to a yoke which a mere handful of knaves
chose to impose on it.... Be wary of him who seeks to establish order;
to order is to obtain the mastery of others by giving them trouble."

There nothing any more to be ashamed of; the passions are good, and if
the herd would eat freely, its first care must be to trample under its
wooden shoes the mitered and crowned animals who keep it in the fold for
their own advantage.[3327]

VI. The Abolition Of Society. Rousseau.

Rousseau and the spiritualists.--The original goodness of
man.--The mistake committed by civilization.--The injustice
of property and of society.

A return to nature, meaning by this the abolition of society, is the
war-cry of the whole encyclopedic battalion. The same shout is heard
in another quarter, coming the battalion of Rousseau and the socialists
who, in their turn, march up to the assault of the established regime.
The mining and the sapping of the walls practiced by the latter seems
less extensive, but are nevertheless more effective, and the destructive
machinery it employs consists of a new conception of human nature. This
Rousseau has drawn exclusively from the spectacle in his own heart:
[3328] Rousseau, a strange, original and superior man, who, from his
infancy, harbored within him a germ of insanity, and who finally became
wholly insane; a wonderful, ill-balanced mind in which sensations,
emotions and images are too powerful: at once blind and perspicacious,
a veritable poet and a morbid poet, who, instead of things and events
beheld reveries, living in a romance and dying in a nightmare of his own
creation; incapable of controlling and of behaving himself, confounding
resolution with action, vague desire with resolution, and the role
he assumed with the character he thought he possessed; wholly
disproportionate to