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Landmarks in French Literature by Giles Lytton Strachey
page 117 of 173 (67%)
Difficult, indeed; for, if we examine the doctrine that seems to be
Rousseau's fundamental one--that, at least, on which he himself lays
most stress--here, too, we shall find a mass of error. Rousseau was
perpetually advocating the return to Nature. All the great evils from
which humanity suffers are, he declared, the outcome of civilization;
the ideal man is the primitive man--the untutored Indian, innocent,
chaste, brave, who adores the Creator of the universe in simplicity, and
passes his life in virtuous harmony with the purposes of Nature. If we
cannot hope to reach quite that height of excellence, let us at least
try to get as near it as we can. So far from pressing on the work of
civilization, with the _Philosophes_, let us try to forget that we are
civilized and be natural instead. This was the burden of Rousseau's
teaching, and it was founded on a complete misconception of the facts.
The noble Indian was a myth. The more we find out about primitive man,
the more certain it becomes that, so far from being the ideal creature
of Rousseau's imagination, he was in reality a savage whose whole life
was dominated, on the one hand by the mere brute necessities of
existence, and on the other by a complicated and revolting system of
superstitions. Nature is neither simple nor good; and all history shows
that the necessary condition for the production of any of the really
valuable things of life is the control of Nature by man--in fact,
civilization. So far, therefore, the _Philosophes_ were right; if the
Golden Age was to have any place at all in the story of humanity, it
must be, not at the beginning, but the end.

But Rousseau was not, at bottom, concerned with the truth of any
historical theory at all. It was only because he hated the present that
he idealized the past. His primitive Golden Age was an imaginary refuge
from the actual world of the eighteenth century. What he detested and
condemned in that world was in reality not civilization, but the
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