Though Rousseau, like many other fanatics, had a remarkable vein of
common sense in him, (witness his remarks on duelling, on
landscape-gardening, on French poetry, and much of his thought on
education,) we cannot trace many practical results to his teaching, least
of all in politics. For the great difficulty with his system, if system
it may be called, is, that, while it professes to follow nature, it not
only assumes as a starting-point that the individual man may be made over
again, but proceeds to the conclusion that man himself, that human
nature, must be made over again, and governments remodelled on a purely
theoretic basis. But when something like an experiment in this direction
was made in 1789, not only did it fail as regarded man in general, but
even as regards the particular variety of man that inhabited France. The
Revolution accomplished many changes, and beneficent ones, yet it left
France peopled, not by a new race without traditions, but by Frenchmen.
Still, there could not but be a wonderful force in the words of a man
who, above all others, had the secret of making abstractions glow with
his own fervor; and his ideas--dispersed now in the atmosphere of thought
--have influenced, perhaps still continue to influence, speculative
minds, which prefer swift and sure generalization to hesitating and
doubtful experience.
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