I have already said enough to make clear that the title of this chapter and the last is in a way a misnomer. There is no such thing as romantic morality. The innovations in ethics that are due to romanticism reduce themselves on close scrutiny to a vast system of naturalistic camouflage. To understand how this camouflage has been so successful one needs to connect Rousseauism with the Baconian movement. Scientific progress had inspired man with a new confidence in himself at the same time that the positive and critical method by which it had been achieved detached him from the past and its traditional standards of good and evil. To break with tradition on sound lines one needs to apply the utmost keenness of analysis not merely to the natural but to the human law. But man’s analytical powers were very much taken up with the new task of mastering the natural law, so much so that he seemed incapable of further analytical effort, but longed rather for relaxation from his sustained concentration of intellect and imagination on the physical order. At the same time he was so elated by the progress he was making in this order that he was inclined to assume a similar advance on the moral plane and to believe that this advance could also be achieved collectively. A collective salvation of this kind without any need of a concentration of the intellect and imagination is precisely what was opened up to him by the Rousseauistic “ideal” of brotherhood. This “ideal,” as I have tried to show, was only a projection of the Arcadian imagination on the void. But in the abdication of analysis and critical judgment, which would have reduced it to a purely recreative rôle, this Arcadian dreaming was enabled to set up as a serious philosophy, and to expand into innumerable Utopias. Many who might have taken alarm at the humanitarian revolution in ethics were reassured by the very fervor with which its promoters continued to utter the old words--conscience, virtue, etc. No one puts more stress than Rousseau himself on conscience, while in the very act of transforming conscience from an inner check into an expansive emotion.