are those that could not affect Italy in a speculative way. The man who was to pick them up was a German whose genius had all the robustness of his country at that stage, coming as it was to the fore after having fed on the intellectual production of Italy, France and England. What affected Italian thought most was the weakest part of Rousseau. The idea to which he owed his immediate fame is that nature made man happy and good, but that society had made him bad and unhappy. He was thereby contradicting rationalism and empiricism, he was flinging his glove in the face of all Illuminism. And he could do it not on philosophical ground, but merely calling upon life to justify his assertion. That age of light was an age of corruption and misery. The lack of religion had brought in its trail the lack of seriousness; the abstract subjectivism of a century had made of each man a self-centred world. Liberty was, so to speak, constantly cried for out of tune since it could not be accompanied by the assertion of law. For all that the Jus-naturalists and Constitutionalists had admitted the liberty of men to make a contract and give themselves the form of government which suited them best; they had denied the citizens the liberty of declaring such contract lapsed when it had ceased to satisfy them. As this was due to their training in a philosophy that considered the world as a machine, Rousseau had no reason to follow them nor to see in the state a mechanism subject to laws as inalterable as those of nature. Therefore he realised the real essence of liberty as inalienable. It could be transferred, not alienated. Strong in this sense of liberty Man must fight all the unnatural edifice of society which, according to him, is the cause of all immorality through the inequalities of men it begets.