ways think they have described what the sciences do,
when they have in reality only described what the sciences ought
to do."[170]

What we are more likely to forget is that Rousseau's piece has a
positive as well as a negative side, and presents, in however vehement
and overstated a way, a truth which the literary and speculative
enthusiasm of France in the eighteenth century, as is always the case
with such enthusiasm whenever it penetrates either a generation or an
individual, was sure to make men dangerously ready to forget.[171] This
truth may be put in different terms. We may describe it as the
possibility of eminent civic virtue existing in people, without either
literary taste or science or speculative curiosity. Or we may express it
as the compatibility of a great amount of contentment and order in a
given social state, with a very low degree of knowledge. Or finally, we
may give the truth its most general expression, as the subordination of
all activity to the promotion of social aims. Rousseau's is an elaborate
and roundabout manner of saying that virtue without science is better
than science without virtue; or that the well-being of a country depends
more on the standard of social duty and the willingness of citizens to
conform to it, than on the standard of intellectual culture and the
extent of its diffusion. In other words, we ought to be less concerned
about the speculative or scientific curiousness of our people than about
the height of their notion of civic virtue and their firmness and
persistency in realising it. It is a moralist's way of putting the
ancient preacher's monition, that they are but empty in whom is not the
wisdom of God. The importance of stating this is in our modern era
always pressing, because there is a constant tendency on the part of
energetic intellectual workers, first, to concentrate their energies on
a minute specialty, leaving public affairs and interests to their own
course. Second, they are apt to overestimate their contributions to the
stock of means by which men are made happier, and what is more serious,
to underestimate in comparison those orderly, modest, self-denying,
moral qualities, by which only men are made worthier, and the continuity
of society is made surer. Third, in consequence of their greater command
of specious expression and their control of the organs of public
opinion, they both assume a kind of supreme place in the social
hierarchy, and persuade the m