ing him with a genuine and logical
anarchist, such as Max Stirner--would find him far more dangerous.
For Rousseau's anarchy is of an emotional, psychological, feminine
kind; a kind that carries along upon the surface of its eloquence
every sort of high-sounding abstraction; while, all the time, the
sinuous waters of its world-sapping current filter through all the
floodgates of human institution.

One cannot but be certain that Rousseau would have been one of
those irresistible but most injurious persons whom, honorably
crowned with fillets of well-spun wool and fresh-grown myrtle,
Plato would have dismissed from the gates of the great Republic.

One asks oneself the question--and it is a question less often asked
than one would expect--whether it is really possible that a man of
immense genius and magnetic influence can actually, as the phrase
runs, "do more harm than good" to the happiness of the human race.
We are so absurdly sheep-like and conventional in these things that
we permit our old-fashioned belief in a benignant providence
turning all things to good, to transform itself into a vague optimistic
trust in evolutionary progress; a progress which can never for one
moment fail to make everything work out to the advantage of
humanity.

We have such pathetic trust too in the inherent friendliness of the
universe that it seems inconceivable to us that a great genius,
inspired from hidden cosmic depths, should be actually a power of
evil, dangerous to humanity. And yet, why not? Why should there
not appear sometimes from the secret reservoirs of Being, powerful
and fatal influences that, in the long result, are definitely baleful and
malign in their effect upon the fortunes of the human race?

This was the underlying belief in the Middle Ages, and it led to the
abominable persecution of persons who were obviously increasing
the sum of human happiness. But may not there have been behind
such unpardonable persecution, a legitimate instinct of
self-protection--an instinct for which in these latter days of popular
worship of "great names" there is no outlet of expression?

The uneasiness of the modern English-speaking world in the
presence of free discussion of sex is, of course, quite a different
matter. This objection is a mere childish prejudice reinforced by
outworn superstitions. The religious terror excited by certain
formidable free-thinkers and anti-social philosophers in earlier days
went much deeper th