And so, as the universe is for the great thinkers {132} at once natural and divine, the same applies to human society. Not only in Aristotle’s trenchant expressions to the effect that the City State is a natural growth, but in the whole of Plato’s careful analysis of moral and social life, we find society depicted as a living and growing creature, in which man’s nature expands itself from more to more, having its own essence progressively communicated to it. And so we find that the peculiar naturalness of the primitive and the simple is only an illusion, caused by the greater difficulty of recognising the larger individuality which comes both of and to itself in the later and more complex phases of life. But whatever it was that was real and that came of itself in the primitive and simple is there to a greater degree--with more reality and as the same self, only more complete--in the later and complex. The idea of a diminution of being as we pass from the simpler to the more developed self is a fallacy of non-recognition. Rousseau, as we saw, maintains in words the traditional opposition between the natural and the civil or moral condition of man. From the tendency of his views, however, we might have expected that in his philosophy the wheel would come full circle, and the term “nature” would revert to its Greek meaning. But this is not the case, though in Émile there is a compromise which points in some such direction. Yet a remarkable passage [1] from Burlamaqui, a Genevese jurist, the earlier contemporary of Rousseau, shows the reversion to the Greek view of social nature completed in principle. “La liberté civile l’emporte de {133} beaucoup sur la liberté naturelle, et, par conséquent, l’état civil qui l’a produit est de tous les états de l’homme le plus parfait, et, à parler exactement, le veritable état naturel de l’homme. L’établissement d’un gouvernement et d’une puissance souveraine, ramenant les hommes à l’observation des lois naturelles, [2] et par conséquent dans la route de bonheur, les fait rentrer dans leur état naturel, duquel ils étaient sortis par le mauvais usage qu’ils faisaient de leur liberté.” [1] Cited in Dreyfus-Brisac’s edition of the _Contrat Social_, p. 39. [2] Note the value of “natural law” as a middle term equivalent to the general and rational features of positive law, and forming a step by which the “natural” is carried beyond the supposed “state of nature.” Upon this reversion to ancient usage there followed the movement of the age of romantic genius and of organic science, and with Goethe’s Erdgeist and Wordsworth’s religion of Nature the restriction of the natural to the primitive and simple was destroyed. Nature still remains a point of view under which we regard what relatively speaking “comes of itself,” but it has ceased to exist as a question-begging predicate, attached to pre-social or extra-social conditions of man.