description: This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1919. Not illustrated. ... CHAPTER IV ROMANTIC THE IDEAL The period that began in the late eighteenth century and in the midst of which we are still living has witnessed an almost unparalleled triumph, as I have just said, of the sense of the individual (sens propre) over the general sense of mankind (sens commuri). Even the collectivistic schemes that have been opposed to individualism during this period are themselves, judged by traditional standards, violently individualistic. Now the word individualr jsna needs as much as any other general term to be treated we need in the interests of our present subject to discriminate between different varieties of individualism. Perhaps as good a working classification as any is to distinguish three main a man may wish to act, or think, or feel, differently from other men, and those who are individualistic in any one of these three main ways may have very little in common with one another. To illustrate concretely, Milton's plea in his "Areopagitica" for freedom of conscience makes above all for individualism of action. (La foi qui n'agit pas estrce unefoi sincere ?) Pierre Bayle, on the other hand, pleads in his Dictionary and elsewhere for tolerance, not so much because he wishes to act or feel in his own way as because he wishes to think his own thoughts. Rousseau is no less obviously ready to subordinate both thought and action to sensibility. His message is summed up once for all in the exclamation of Faust, "Feeling is all." He urges war on the general sense only because of the restrictions it imposes on the free expansion of his emotions and the enhancing of these emotions by his imagination. Now the warfare that Rousseau and the individualists of feeling have waged on the general sense has meant in pract...
language: English
title: Rousseau and Romanticism
publisher: University of Texas Press