Rousseau, using with stirring and caressing unction symbol after symbol, catch-word after catch-word, from the moral atmosphere of Christendom, draws us furiously after him, in a mad hysterical abandonment of all that every human symbol covers, toward a cataract of limitless and almost inhuman subjectivity. To certain types of mind Rousseau appears as a noble prophet of what is permanent in evangelic "truth" and of what is desirable and lovely in the future of humanity. To other types--to the pronounced classical or Goethean type, for instance--he must appear as the most pernicious, the most disintegrating, the most poisonous, the most unhealthy influence that has ever been brought to bear upon the world. Such minds--confronting him with a genuine and logical anarchist, such as Max Stirner--would find him far more dangerous. For Rousseau's anarchy is of an emotional, psychological, feminine kind; a kind that carries along upon the surface of its eloquence every sort of high-sounding abstraction; while, all the time, the sinuous waters of its world-sapping current filter through all the floodgates of human institution. One cannot but be certain that Rousseau would have been one of those irresistible but most injurious persons whom, honorably crowned with fillets of well-spun wool and fresh-grown myrtle, Plato would have dismissed from the gates of the great Republic. One asks oneself the question--and it is a question less often asked than one would expect--whether it is really possible that a man of immense genius and magnetic influence can actually, as the phrase runs, "do more harm than good" to the happiness of the human race. We are so absurdly sheep-like and conventional in these things that we permit our old-fashioned belief in a benignant providence turning all things to good, to transform itself into a vague optimistic trust in evolutionary progress; a progress which can never for one moment fail to make everything work out to the advantage of humanity. We have such pathetic trust too in the inherent friendliness of the universe that it seems inconceivable to us that a great genius, inspired from hidden cosmic depths, should be actually a power of evil, dangerous to humanity. And yet, why not? Why should there not appear sometimes from the secret reservoirs of Being, powerful and fatal influences that, in the long result, are definitely baleful and malign in their effect upon the fortunes of the human race? This was the underlying belief in the Middle Ages, and it led to the abominable persecution of persons who were obviously increasing the sum of human happiness. But may not there have been behind such unpardonable persecution, a legitimate instinct of self-protection--an instinct for which in these latter days of popular worship of "great names" there is no outlet of expression?