Much of its philosophy could be appropriated by Hegel * in his defence of the Prussian
autocracy. Its first-fruits in practice was the reign of Robespierre; the dictatorships of Russia
and Germany (especially the latter) are in part an outcome of Rousseau's teaching. What further
triumphs the future has to offer to his ghost I do not venture to predict.
CHAPTER XX KantA. GERMAN IDEALISM IN GENERALPHILOSOPHY in the eighteenth century was dominated by the British empiricists, of whom
Locke, Berkeley, and Hume may be taken as the representatives. In these men there was a
conflict, of which they themselves appear to have been unaware, between their temper of mind
and the tendency of their theoretical doctrines. In their temper of mind they were socially
minded citizens, by no means self-assertive, not unduly anxious for power, and in favour of a
tolerant world where, within the limits of the criminal law, every man could do as he pleased.
They were good-natured, men of the world, urbane and kindly.
But while their temper was social, their theoretical philosophy led to subjectivism. This was not
a new tendency; it had existed in late antiquity, most emphatically in Saint Augustine; it was
revived in modern times by Descartes's cogito, and reached a momentary culmination in
Leibniz's windowless monads. Leibniz believed that everything in his experience would be
unchanged if the rest of the world were annihilated; nevertheless he devoted himself to the
reunion of
* Hegel selects for special praise the distinction between the general will and the will of all.
He says: " Rousseau would have made a sounder contribution towards a theory of the
State, if he had always kept this distinction in sight" (Logic, Sec. 163).