He wakes in
the morning and he is afraid, not of his own words whose deeper truth he
does not doubt, but of the incapacity of mankind to understand him. They
will read in the letter what was written in the spirit; their eyes will
see the words, but their ears will be stopped to the music. The
_mystique_ as Peguy would have said, will be degraded into _politique_.
To guard himself against this unhallowed destiny, at the last Rousseau
turns with decision and in the language of his day rewrites the hard
saying, that the things which are Caesar's shall be rendered unto Caesar.
In the light of this necessary truth all the contradictions which have
been discovered in Rousseau's work fade away. That famous confusion
concerning 'the natural man,' whom he presents to us now as a historic
fact, now as an ideal, took its rise, not in the mind of Jean-Jacques,
but in the minds of his critics. The _Contrat Social_ is a parable of
the soul of man, like the _Republic_ of Plato. The truth of the human
soul is its implicit perfection; to that reality material history is
irrelevant, because the anatomy of the soul is eternal.
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