ajority of plain men unsuspectingly to take
so very egregious an assumption for granted. So far as Rousseau's
Discourse recalled the truth as against this sort of error it was full
of wholesomeness.

Unfortunately his indignation against the overweening pretensions of the
verse-writer, the gazetteer, and the great band of socialists at large,
led him into a general position with reference to scientific and
speculative energy, which seems to involve a perilous misconception of
the conditions of this energy producing its proper results. It is easy
now, as it was easy for Rousseau in the last century, to ask in an
epigrammatical manner by how much men are better or happier for having
found out this or that novelty in transcendental mathematics, biology,
or astronomy; and this is very well as against the discoverer of small
marvels who shall give himself out for the benefactor of the human
race. But both historical experience and observation of the terms on
which the human intelligence works, show us that we can only make sure
of intellectual activity on condition of leaving it free to work all
round, in every department and in every remotest nook of each
department, and that its most fruitful epochs are exactly those when
this freedom is greatest, this curiosity most keen and minute, and this
waste, if you choose to call the indispensable superfluity of force in a
natural process waste, most copious and unsparing. You will not find
your highest capacity in statesmanship, nor in practical science, nor in
art, nor in any other field where that capacity is most urgently needed
for the right service of life, unless there is a general and vehement
spirit of search in the air. If it incidentally leads to many
industrious futilities and much learned refuse, this is still the sign
and the generative element of industry which is not futile, and of
learning which is something more than mere water spilled upon
the ground.

We may say in fine that this first Discourse and its vindications were a
dim, shallow, and ineffective feeling after the great truth, that the
only normal state of society is that in which neither the love of virtue
has been thrust far back into a secondary place by the love of
knowledge, nor the active curiosity of the understanding dulled,
blunted, and made ashamed by soft, lazy ideals of life as a life only of
the affections. Rousseau now and always fell into the opposite extreme
from that against which his wh