Once men accepted the notion of Rousseau—that Nature had made man good and society had made him bad—it became not only permissible but morally right to destroy the order of things which had been evolved by society and to invest man, every single man, with the consciousness of his sovereignty. Of the two tendencies which have been compared to two streams, one was the naturalistic individualism rooted in the thoughts of his contemporaries and which he expressed merely as an artist, as the greatest artist of the time; the other was the idealistic universalism which was personal to him as a thinker, but that was bound to remain a source of fleeting intuitions on account of his incapacity to raise it to speculative consciousness. He roused a powerful echo where men like Voltaire and the Encyclopædists failed to command attention; and even his art of writing could not have provided him with so great a fascination if most of the ideas and feelings he expressed had not been a living reality throbbing in the hearts of his readers, even of the lowest classes. It was the lowest side of his doctrines that spread amongst the people, the part which appealed to envy and hatred, two very powerful levers indeed, but of which Rousseau might not have chosen to make use had he been able to choose. His insistence on the distinction between the will of all and the general will tells eloquently of the intuition he had of transcendental self and of the ethic essence of the state; but all this comes to nought on account of his lacking a theoretical ground for such a notion, and he is obliged to fall back on the intellectual stock of his time; in spite of his genius, in spite of all sentimental intuition of a universal will, he is thrown back on a will which is merely the sum, the numerical sum, of the single wills. Thus it is that he gave us the system which enthrones quantity while it aims at quality. His first principle that men are made all alike by Nature, happy and good, is, as most of the philosophy against which he was the first to react with the power of genius, perfectly anti-historical and, therefore, abstract. When it had received at the hands of Kant and Hegel a systematic and speculative treatment this principle was bound to have as necessary consequences Socialism and Communism. If the nature of man, thus hypothetically accepted, is as abstract and as unreal as an algebraical axiom, it was bound to lead to political and economic hypothesis just as abstract and as unreal. Since history shows us in the class struggles and individual competitions the main spring of progress, the condition _sine qua non_ of all social life, it is impossible even to dream of the elimination of such class and individual differences. Life would cease to be dynamic, cease to be a moving process, it would be static, everything being brought to a standstill, which is death.