The passages of the “Confessions” that deserve this verdict do not, it is hardly necessary to add, reflect directly Rousseau’s moral ideal. In his dealings with morality as elsewhere he is, to come back to Schiller’s distinction, partly idyllic and partly satirical. He is satiric in his attitude towards the existing forms--forms based upon the Christian tradition that man is naturally sinful and that he needs therefore the discipline of fear and humility, or else forms based upon the classical tradition that man is naturally one-sided and that he needs therefore to be disciplined into decorum and proportionateness. He is idyllic in the substitutes that he would offer for these traditional forms. The substitutes are particularly striking in their refusal to allow any place for fear. Fear, according to Ovid, created the first Gods, and religion has been defined by an old English poet as the “mother of form and fear.” Rousseau would put in the place of form a fluid emotionalism, and as for fear, he would simply cast it out entirely, a revulsion, as I have pointed out, from the excessive emphasis on fear in the more austere forms of Christianity. Be “natural,” Rousseau says, and eschew priests and doctors, and you will be emancipated from fear. Rousseau’s expedient for getting rid of man’s sense of his own sinfulness on which fear and humility ultimately rest is well known. Evil, says Rousseau, foreign to man’s constitution, is introduced into it from without. The burden of guilt is thus conveniently shifted upon society. Instead of the old dualism between good and evil in the breast of the individual, a new dualism is thus set up between an artificial and corrupt society and “nature.” For man, let me repeat, has, according to Rousseau, fallen from nature in somewhat the same way as in the old theology he fell from God, and it is here that the idyllic element comes in, for, let us remind ourselves once more, Rousseau’s nature from which man has fallen is only an Arcadian dream. The assertion of man’s natural goodness is plainly something very fundamental in Rousseau, but there is something still more fundamental, and that is the shifting of dualism itself, the virtual denial of a struggle between good and evil in the breast of the individual. That deep inner cleft in man’s being on which religion has always put so much emphasis is not genuine. Only get away from an artificial society and back to nature and the inner conflict which is but a part of the artificiality will give way to beauty and harmony. In a passage in his “Supplément au voyage de Bougainville,” Diderot puts the underlying thesis of the new morality almost more clearly than Rousseau: “Do you wish to know in brief the tale of almost all our woe? There once existed a natural man; there has been introduced within this man an artificial man and there has arisen in the cave a civil war which lasts throughout life.”