inds without appreciating their full
value. He did not see that these manners, customs, opinions, have old
roots which must be sought in a historic past; that they are connected
with the constitution of human nature, and that then in turn they
prepare modifications of that constitution. His narrow, symmetrical,
impatient humour unfitted him to deal with the complex tangle of the
history of social growths. It was essential to his mental comfort that
he should be able to see a picture of perfect order and logical system
at both ends of his speculation. Hence, he invented, to begin with,
his ideal state of nature, and an ideal mode of passing from that to
the social state. He swept away in his imagination the whole series of
actual incidents between present and past; and he constructed a system
which might be imposed upon all societies indifferently by a
legislator summoned for that purpose, to wipe out existing uses, laws,
and institutions, and make afresh a clear and undisturbed beginning of
national life. The force of habit was slowly and insensibly to be
substituted for that of the legislator's authority, but the existence
of such habits previously as forces to be dealt with, and the
existence of certain limits of pliancy in the conditions of human
nature and social possibility, are facts of which the author of the
Social Contract takes not the least account.

Rousseau knew hardly any history, and the few isolated pieces of old
fact which he had picked up in his very slight reading were exactly
the most unfortunate that a student in need of the historic method
could possibly have fallen in with. The illustrations which are
scantily dispersed in his pages,--and we must remark that they are no
more than illustrations for conclusions arrived at quite independently
of them, and not the historical proof and foundations of his
conclusions,--are nearly all from the annals of the small states of
ancient Greece, and from the earlier times of the Roman republic. We
have already pointed out to what an extent his imagination was struck
at the time of his first compositions by the tale of Lycurgus. The
influence of the same notions is still paramount. The hopelessness of
giving good laws to a corrupt people is supposed to be demonstrated by
the case of Minos, whose legislation failed in Crete because the
people for whom he made laws were sunk in vices; and by the further
example of Plato, who refused to give laws to the Arcadians a