I trust that these passages selected almost at random from Rousseau’s treatise on education, “Emile,” do not give a wholly unfair impression of this author’s philosophy of life. Man in the state of nature is wise and good. Civilization has corrupted him by enslaving him. If he does evil it is not because he is bad, but because he is weak. We should not hang the criminal but blame the society which made him what he is. The proper function of education is to enable the individual--the little innocent--to grow up naturally without discipline, without forming any habits, never sacrificing present enjoyment to future knowledge, inspired always by the ideal of that happy state in which one may be good without effort. The ideal education therefore is the life of the North American aborigine or what Rousseau imagined such a life to be. Freedom here is the return to nature. From the times of Hobbes and of Montaigne onward there seems to have been a growing interest in “Man in the state of nature.” But whereas with most writers this interest was largely a matter of theory and speculation, with Rousseau man in the state of nature becomes an ideal, a norm. It would appear that in this dream of the return to nature, there is symbolized an infantile wish to escape from the tasks and responsibilities and restraints of adult life. Psychologists speak of such an “infantile return” as _regression_. This regressive ideal of freedom is a very different thing from the liberalizing influence of education as I understand it. I have characterized education as a victory won over one’s wish-fancies and childish egoism, as the lifting of the problems of life to higher and more significant dilemmas, as the attainment of mastery. A humanistic liberalism seeks freedom as broadmindedness; it strives for a highly civilized, urbane and sophisticated state of mind in which insight is deepened and interest is widened. Rousseauian liberalism seeks freedom in relaxation of effort, in denial of the claims of civilization, in the idealization of nature and of primitive man. Many persons who today style themselves liberals are of the Rousseauian type. There are those who proudly call themselves rebels. A certain naturalism is carried to the point of hostility to form as such and to orderliness of any sort. There is frequently a disdain of “respectability,” and a tendency to play the intellectual vagabond. I think this is one reason why certain liberals are much taken with modern imitations of the primitive in art. The element of regression which characterizes the paintings and sculpture of certain “rebels” is patent to the psychologist. Many of these works of art closely resemble the typical drawings of dementia praecox patients. In dementia, regression, or infantile return, is complete and final. The patient is free from a disturbing world, having returned to precisely the “sensibility,” as Rousseau terms it, with which he was born.