ass, and the Rousseauists are guilty of onolatry. "Medical men have
given a learned name to the malady of those who neglect the members of
their own family and gush over animals (zooephilpsychosis). But Rousseau
already exhibits this 'psychosis.' He abandoned his five children one
after the other, but had, we are told, an unspeakable affection for his
dog." As for the worship of nature, it leads to a "wise passiveness"
instead of the wise energy of knowledge and virtue, and tempts man to idle
in pantheistic reveries. "In Rousseau or Walt Whitman it amounts to a sort
of ecstatic animality that sets up as a divine illumination." Professor
Babbitt distrusts ecstasy as he distrusts Arcadianism. He perceives the
mote of Arcadianism even in "the light that never was on sea or land." He
has no objection to a "return to nature," if it is for purposes of
recreation: he denounces it, however, when it is set up as a cult or "a
substitute for philosophy and religion." He denounces, indeed, every kind
of "painless substitute for genuine spiritual effort." He admires the
difficult virtues, and holds that the gift of sympathy or pity or
fraternity is in their absence hardly worth having.

On points of this kind, I fancy, he would have had on his side Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Browning, and many of the other "Rousseauists" whom he attacks.
Professor Babbitt, however, is a merciless critic, and the writers of the
nineteenth century, who seemed to most of us veritable monsters of ethics,
are to him simply false prophets of romanticism and scientific
complacency. "The nineteenth century," he declares, "may very well prove
to have been the most wonderful and the least wise of centuries." He
admits the immense materialistic energy of the century, but this did not
make up for the lack of a genuine philosophic insight in life and
literature. Man is a morally indolent animal, and he was never more so
than when he was working "with something approaching frenzy according to
the natural law." Faced with the spectacle of a romantic spiritual sloth
accompanied by a materialistic, physical, and even intellectual energy,
the author warns us that "the discipline that helps a man to self-mastery
is found to have a more important bearing on his happiness than the
discipline that helps him to a mastery of physical nature." He sees a
peril to our civilization in our absorption in the temporal and our
failure to discover that "something abiding" on which civil