1756.] was written to show that all the objections which Deists like Bolingbroke urged against artificial religion could be brought with greater force against artificial society, and he worked out in detail a historical picture of the evils of civilisation which is far more telling than Rousseau's generalities.
[Footnote: In his admirable edition of The Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1915), p.

89, Vaughan suggests that in Rousseau's later works we may possibly detect "the first faint beginnings" of a belief in Progress, and attributes this to the influence of Montesquieu.] 3.
If civilisation has been the curse of man, it might seem that the logical course for Rousseau to recommend was its destruction.

This was the inference which Voltaire drew in Timon, to laugh the whole theory out of court.

But Rousseau did not suggest a movement to destroy all the libraries and all the works of art in the world, to put to death or silence all the savants, to pull down the cities, and burn the ships.
He was not a mere dreamer, and his Arcadia was no more than a Utopian ideal, by the light of which he conceived that the society of his own day might be corrected and transformed.

He attached his hopes to equality, democracy, and a radical change in education.
Equality: this revolutionary idea was of course quite compatible with the theory of Progress, and was soon to be closely associated with it.