break the sounding board itself.” It is not surprising Ruskin makes other men as subject to “skyey influences” as himself. “The mountains of the earth are,” he says, “its natural cathedrals. True religion can scarcely be achieved away from them. The curate or hermit of the field and fen, however simple his life or painful his lodging, does not often attain the spirit of the hill pastor or recluse: we may find in him a decent virtue or a contented ignorance, rarely the _prophetic vision or the martyr’s passion_.” The corruptions of Romanism “are traceable for the most part to lowland prelacy.”[106] Is then the Rousseauist totally unable to regulate his impressions? It is plain that he cannot control them from within because the whole idea of a vital control of this kind is, as we have seen, foreign to the psychology of the beautiful soul. Yet it is, according to Rousseau, possible to base morality on the senses--on outer perception that is--and at the same time get the equivalent of a free-will based on inner perception. He was so much interested in this subject that he had planned to devote to it a whole treatise to be entitled “Sensitive morality or the materialism of the sage.” A man cannot resist an outer impression but he may at least get out of its way and put himself in the way of another impression that will impel him to the desired course of conduct. “The soul may then be put or maintained in the state most favorable to virtue.” “Climates, seasons, sounds, colors, darkness, light, the elements, food, noise, silence, movement, rest, everything, acts on our physical frame.” By a proper adjustment of all these outer elements we may govern in their origins the feelings by which we allow ourselves to be dominated.[107] Rousseau’s ideas about sensitive morality are at once highly chimerical and highly significant. Here as elsewhere one may say with Amiel that nothing of Rousseau has been lost. His point of view has an inner kinship with that of the man of science who asserts that man is necessarily the product of natural forces, but that one may at least modify the natural forces. For example, moral effort on the part of the individual cannot overcome heredity. It is possible, however, by schemes of eugenics to regulate heredity. The uneasy burden of moral responsibility is thus lifted from the individual, and the moralist in the old-fashioned sense is invited to abdicate in favor of the biologist. It would be easy enough to trace similar assumptions in the various forms of socialism and other “isms” almost innumerable of the present hour.