e
process when he had done with it, the state of nature came out blooming
as the rose, it was fundamentally only the dry, current abstraction of
his time, artificially decorated to seduce men into embracing a strange
ideal under a familiar name.

Before analysing the Discourse on Inequality, we ought to make some
mention of a remarkable man whose influence probably reached Rousseau in
an indirect manner through Diderot; I mean Morelly.[176] In 1753 Morelly
published a prose poem called the Basiliade, describing the corruption
of manners introduced by the errors of the lawgiver, and pointing out
how this corruption is to be amended by return to the empire of nature
and truth. He was no doubt stimulated by what was supposed to be the
central doctrine of Montesquieu, then freshly given to the world, that
it is government and institutions which make men what they are. But he
was stimulated into a reaction, and in 1754 he propounded his whole
theory, in a piece which in closeness, consistency, and thoroughness is
admirably different from Rousseau's rhetoric.[177] It lacked the
sovereign quality of persuasiveness, and so fell on deaf ears. Morelly
accepts the doctrine that men are formed by the laws, but insists that
moralists and statesmen have always led us wrong by legislating and
prescribing conduct on the false theory that man is bad, whereas he is
in truth a creature endowed with natural probity. Then he strikes to the
root of society with a directness that Rousseau could not imitate, by
the position that "these laws by establishing a monstrous division of
the products of nature, and even of their very elements--by dividing
what ought to have remained entire, or ought to have been restored to
entireness if any accident had divided them, aided and favoured the
break-up of all sociability." All political and all moral evils are the
effects of this pernicious cause--private property. He says of
Rousseau's first Discourse that the writer ought to have seen that the
corruption of manners which he set down to literature and art really
came from this venomous principle of property, which infects all that
it touches.[178] Christianity, it is true, assailed this principle and
restored equality or community of possessions, but Christianity had the
radical fault of involving such a detachment from earthly affections, in
order to deliver ourselves to heavenly meditation, as brought about a
necessary degeneration in social activity.