ually became summed up in the great distinction between
rich and poor; and this distinction was finally embodied in the
constitution of a civil society, expressly adapted to consecrate the
usurpation of the rich, and to make the inequality of condition between
them and the poor eternal.

We thus see that the Discourse, unlike Morelly's terse exposition,
contains no clear account of the kind of inequality with which it deals.
Is it inequality of material possession or inequality of political
right? Morelly tells you decisively that the latter is only an accident,
flowing from the first; that the key to renovation lies in the abolition
of the first. Rousseau mixes the two confusedly together under a single
name, bemoans each, but shrinks from a conclusion or a recommendation
as to either. He declares property to be the key to civil society, but
falls back from any ideas leading to the modification of the institution
lying at the root of all that he deplores.

The first general criticism, which in itself contains and covers nearly
all others, turns on Method. "Conjectures become reasons when they are
the most likely that you can draw from the nature of things," and "it is
for philosophy in lack of history to determine the most likely facts."
In an inductive age this royal road is rigorously closed. Guesses drawn
from the general nature of things can no longer give us light as to the
particular nature of the things pertaining to primitive men, any more
than such guesses can teach us the law of the movement of the heavenly
bodies, or the foundations of jurisprudence. Nor can deduction from
anything but propositions which have themselves been won by laborious
induction, ever lead us to the only kind of philosophy which has fair
pretension to determine the most probable of the missing facts in the
chain of human history. That quantitative and differentiating knowledge
which is science, was not yet thought of in connection with the
movements of our own race upon the earth. It is to be said, further,
that of the two possible ways of guessing about the early state, the
conditions of advance from it, and the rest, Rousseau's guess that all
movement away from it has been towards corruption, is less supported by
subsequent knowledge than the guess of his adversaries, that it has
been a movement progressive and upwards.

This much being said as to incurable vice of method, and there are
fervent disciples of Rousseau now living who