The questions of the theology of earthquakes and of the morality of stage plays caused a bitter enmity between Voltaire and Rousseau, in which all the philosophes took sides. Voltaire treated Rousseau as a mischievous madman; Rousseau spoke of Voltaire as “that trumpet of impiety, that fine genius, and that low soul.” Fine sentiments, however, must find expression, and Rousseau wrote to Voltaire
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( 1760): “I hate you, in fact, since you have so willed it; but I hate you like a man still worthier to have loved you, if you had willed it. Of all the sentiments with which my heart was full towards you, there only remain the admiration that we cannot refuse to your fine genius, and love for your writings. If there is nothing in you that I can honour but your talents, that is no fault of mine.”
We come now to the most fruitful period of Rousseau’s life. His novel La nouvelle Héloïse appeared in 1760; Emile and The Social Contract both in 1762. Emile, which is a treatise on education according to “natural” principles, might have been considered harmless by the authorities if it had not contained “The Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar,” which set forth the principles of natural religion as understood by Rousseau, and was irritating to both Catholic and Protestant orthodoxy. The Social Contract was even more dangerous, for it advocated democracy and denied the divine right of kings. The two books, while they greatly increased his fame, brought upon him a storm of official condemnation. He was obliged to fly from France; Geneva would have none of him * ; Bern refused him asylum. At last Frederick the Great took pity on him, and allowed him to live at Motiers, near Neuchatel, which was part of the philosopher-king’s dominions. There he lived for three years; but at the end of that time ( 1765) the villagers of Motiers, led by the pastor, accused him of poisoning, and tried to murder him. He fled to England, where Hume, in 1762, had proffered his services.
In England, at first, all went well. He had a great social success, and George III granted him a pension. He saw Burke almost daily, but their friendship soon cooled to the point where Burke said: “He entertained no principle, either to influence his heart, or guide his understanding, but vanity.” Hume was longest faithful, saying he loved him much, and could live with him all his life in mutual friendship and esteem. But by this time Rousseau, not unnaturally, had come to suffer from the persecution mania which ultimately drove him insane, and he suspected Hume of being the agent of plots against his life. At moments he would realize the absurdity of such suspicions,
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* The Council of Geneva ordered the two books burnt, and gave instructions that Rousseau was to be arrested if he came to Geneva. The French Government had ordered his arrest; the Sorbonne and the Parlement of Paris condemned Emile.
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and would embrace Hume, exclaiming “No, no, Hume is no traitor,” to which Hume (no doubt much embarrassed) replied, “Quoi, mon cher Monsieur!” But in the end his delusions won the day and he fled. His last years were spent in Paris in great poverty, and when he died suicide was suspected.
After the breach, Hume said: “He has only felt during the whole course of his life, and in this respect his sensibility rises to a pitch beyond what I have seen any example of; but it still gives him a more acute feeling of pain than of pleasure. He is like a man who was stripped not only of his clothes, but of his skin, and turned out in this situation to combat with the rude and boisterous elements.”
This is the kindest summary of his character that is in any degree compatible with truth.
There is much in Rousseau’s work which, however important in other respects, does not concern the history of philosophical thought. There are only two parts of his thinking that I shall consider in any detail; these are, first, his theology, and second, his political theory.
In theology he made an innovation which has now been accepted by the great majority of Protestant theologians. Before him, every philosopher from Plato onwards, if he believed in God, offered intellectual arguments in favour of his belief. * The arguments may not, to us, seem very convincing, and we may feel that they would not have seemed cogent to anyone who did not already feel sure of the truth of the conclusion. But the philosopher who advanced the arguments certainly believed them to be logically valid, and such as should cause certainty of God’s existence in any unprejudiced person of sufficient philosophical capacity. Modern Protestants who urge us to believe in God, for the most part, despise the old “proofs,” and base their faith upon some aspect of human nature–emotions of awe or mystery, the sense of right and wrong, the feeling of aspiration, and so on. This way of defending religious belief was invented by Rousseau. It has become so familiar that his originality may easily not be appreciated by a modern reader, unless he will take the trouble to compare Rousseau with (say) Descartes or Leibniz.
“Ah, Madame!” Rousseau writes to an aristocratic lady, “sometimes in the privacy of my study, with my hands pressed tight over
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* We must except Pascal. “The heart has its reasons, of which reason is ignorant” is quite in Rousseau’s style.
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my eyes or in the darkness of the night, I am of opinion that there is no God. But look yonder: the rising of the sun, as it scatters the mists that cover the earth, and lays bare the wondrous glittering scene of nature, disperses at the same moment all cloud from my soul. I find my faith again, and my God, and my belief in Him. I admire and adore Him, and I prostrate myself in His presence.”
On another occasion he says: “I believe in God as strongly as I believe any other truth, because believing and not believing are the last things in the world that depend on me.” This form of argument has the drawback of being private; the fact that Rousseau cannot help believing something affords no ground for another person to believe the same thing.
He was very emphatic in his theism. On one occasion he threatened to leave a dinner party because Saint Lambert (one of the guests) expressed a doubt as to the existence of God. “Moi, Monsieur,” Rousseau exclaimed angrily, “je crois en Dieu!” Robespierre, in all things his faithful disciple, followed him in this respect also. The “Fête de l’Etre Suprême” would have had Rousseau’s whole-hearted approval.
“The Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar,” which is an interlude in the fourth book of Emile, is the most explicit and formal statement of Rousseau’s creed. Although it professes to be what the voice of nature has proclaimed to a virtuous priest, who suffers disgrace for the wholly “natural” fault of seducing an unmarried woman * the reader finds with surprise that the voice of nature, when it begins to speak, is uttering a hotch-pot of arguments derived from Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Descartes, and so on. It is true that they are robbed of precision and logical form; this is supposed to excuse them, and to permit the worthy Vicar to say that he cares nothing for the wisdom of the philosophers.
The later parts of “The Confession of Faith” are less reminiscent of previous thinkers than the earlier parts. After satisfying himself that there is a God, the Vicar goes on to consider rules of conduct. “I do not deduce these rules,” he says, “from the principles of a high philosophy, but I find them in the depths of my heart, written by Nature in ineffaceable characters.” From this he goes on to develop the view that conscience is in all circumstances an infallible guide to
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* “Un prêtre en bonne règle ne doit faire des enfants qu’aux femmes mariées,” he elsewhere reports a Savoyard priest as saying.
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right action. “Thanks be to Heaven,” he concludes this part of his argument, “we are thus freed from all this terrifying apparatus of philosophy; we can be men without being learned; dispensed from wasting our life in the study of morals, we have at less cost a more assured guide in this immense labyrinth of human opinions.” Our natural feelings, he contends, lead us to serve the common interest, while our reason urges selfishness. We have therefore only to follow feeling rather than reason in order to be virtuous.
Natural religion, as the Vicar calls his doctrine, has no need of a revelation; if men had listened to what God says to the heart, there would have been only one religion in the world. If God has revealed Himself specially to certain men, this can only be known by human testimony, which is fallible. Natural religion has the advantage of being revealed directly to each individual.
There is a curious passage about hell. The Vicar does not know whether the wicked go to eternal torment, and says, somewhat loftily, that the fate of the wicked does not greatly interest him; but on the whole he inclines to the view that the pains of hell are not everlasting. However this may be, he is sure that salvation is not confined to the members of any one Church.
It was presumably the rejection of revelation and of hell that so profoundly shocked the
