all. The natural man of Rousseau was simply an ideal
creation, inspired with that intense and even morbid consciousness of
self, and that fixed resolve to submit to no external law, which were
characteristic of Rousseau himself, and which in him were the last
product and quintessence of the individualism of the eighteenth century.
The simplicity of this ideal figure was not the first simplicity of
nature, but the simplicity of a spirit which has returned upon itself
and asserted itself against the world; a kind of simplicity which never
existed, at least in the same form, before the great Protestant revolt.
The unhistorical character of this idea becomes doubly evident when we
find that, as time goes on, and the spirit of the age alters, the
qualities of the natural man are also changed. To St. Simon and Fourier,
as to Rousseau, man is good by nature, and it is bad institutions or bad
external influences which are the source of all the ills that flesh is
heir to. But while with the latter the natural man is a solitary, whose
chief good lies in the preservation of his independence, with the former
he is essentially social, and what is wanted for his perfection and
happiness is only to contrive an outward organization in which his
social sympathies shall have free play. Comte, as we might expect, rises
above these imperfect theories, in so far as he refuses to attribute all
the evils of humanity to its external circumstances; but he does not get
rid of the essential error which was common to them all, the error of
seeking for the explanation of the higher life of humanity in the
feelings of the natural man--feelings which are prior to, and
independent of, the exercise of his reason, and which supply all the
possible motives for that exercise. There are, in his view, two sets of
"innate" feelings or desires, between which man's life is divided--the
egoistic and the altruistic tendencies, each separate from the others as
well as from the intelligence, and having its "organ" in a separate part
of the brain. The egoistic feelings at first exist in man in far greater
strength than the altruistic; but by the reaction of circumstances, and
the influence of men upon each other, the latter have in the past
gradually attained to greater power; and it is the ideal of the future
to make their victory complete. Meanwhile, the intelligence is
necessarily the instrument of desire, and its highest good is to be the
instrument of altruisti