Like the notion of “liberty” which is that of “being able to be yourself,” the notion of nature, which is that of “coming to be _of_ yourself, or _of_ itself,” has always, however imperfectly apprehended, exercised immense power over the mind. It is felt that you have touch with reality when you have found something which can grow of itself. But again, like the notion of liberty, the notion of nature is apt to be apprehended in a form so partial as to be practically negative, and in this form, to be given a hostile bearing against what are, in fact, completer phases of the same idea. That which is natural, or by nature, in the most obvious sense--what most plainly appears to have “come of itself”--is what comes first in time, and what comes with the least putting together the primitive and the simple as against the late and the complex. And so in the theoretical inquiry after what is solid and can be relied upon, there constantly recurs in all ages the tendency to story-telling; to the narration of what is supposed to have come first, as the simple {129} spontaneous beginning out of which the world as we know it has emerged with greatly altered attributes. The note of story-telling is unmistakable in this naïve theory, whether we find it in poets who portray the Golden Age, from Hesiod downwards, [1] or represented as a fallacy of social compact by Plato in the second book of the _Republic_ [2] or adopted as a juristic theory by Tacitus [3] and the writers who relied on the idea of a “state of nature,” down to Rousseau. [1] The resemblance between Hesiod’s dream of the Golden Age and modern doctrines of intensive culture is startling, and there is probably a true historical continuity between them. This does not involve the assertion that there can be no truth in the latter, but it does suggest that the disproportionate emphasis laid upon it (_e.g._ by Fourier and in _Merrie England_) indicates an element of the old “Nature” fallacy. [2] _Rep_., 358 E. [3] _Annals_, iii. 26; cf. _Germania_, ch. xix. 20, “Neque corrumpere et corrumpi ‘seculum’ vocatur. ...” Note the identification of “our age” with corruption; cp. use of _fin de siècle_.