Comenius, Rousseau, and, in fact, all the realists from Bacon to Herbert Spencer, have emphasized the thought that education should follow the order and method of nature; though, as Professor Payne suggests, it is not always easy to form a clear notion of what they mean by nature, when they say that education should be natural, and that teachers should follow the method of nature. The key-note of Rousseau’s theory, as expressed in the opening paragraph of the _Émile_, is that “everything is good as it comes from the hands of the author of nature, but everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Mr. Davidson points out in his study of Rousseau that the air was full of nature panaceas during the middle years of the eighteenth century, and that these were applied alike to social, political, and educational institutions. He says: “The chief of these notions were (1) a state of nature as man’s original condition—a state conceived sometimes as one of goodness, peace, freedom, equality, and happiness, sometimes as one of badness, war, slavery, inequality, and misery; (2) a law of nature independent of all human enactment, and yet binding upon all men; (3) a social contract, voluntarily and consciously made, as the basis of justification for civil society and authority—a contract by which men united for the protection of rights and the enforcement of laws which had existed already in the state of nature; (4) false inequality among men, as due to private property, or the usurpation by some of what, by natural right, belonged to all; (5) a peaceful, untroubled, unenterprising, unstruggling existence as the normal form of human life.” While less sane, less practical, less comprehensive in his educational views than Comenius, it can scarcely be said that he was less influential. Differing in many important particulars, a common ideal permeates the writings of the two reformers—an unbounded faith in the possibilities of youth, and a deep conviction that it is the business of teachers to view the world and nature from the standpoint of young and growing children, and to cling with less tenacity to points of view established by antiquity and convention. _Basedow_[42]