PIONEERS IN EDUCATION 
 
 JEAN JACQUES EQUSSEAU 
 
 AND EDUCATION FROM NATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 GABRIEL C0MPAYR]E; 
 
 CORRESPONDENT OF THE INSTITUTE ; DIRECTOR OP THE ACADEMY 
 OF LYONS; AUTHOR OF "PSYCHOLOGY APPLIED TO 
 
 LECTURES ON PEDAGOGY 
 ETC. 
 
 TRANSLATED BY 
 R. P. JAGG 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 
 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
fTi^HYofCOWGRESSJ 
 \wu Cooles RecelYod i 
 
 OCl 1 190f 1 
 
 COPY D. 
 
 Copyright, 1907, 
 By THOMAS Y. CEOWELL & COMPAlirS'. 
 
 Published, September, 1907. 
 
CONTENTS AND SUMMARY 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface vii 
 
 I. Novelty of Rousseau's views on education. — Emile a 
 
 mixture of truth and error. — Of greater importance to 
 lay stress on the abiding truths than to refute uto- 
 pianisms ... 1 
 
 II. Rousseau an initiator and revolutionary. — Despite his 
 originality, he had his forerunners : Montaigne, Fenelon, 
 
 V Locke, etc. — Turgot had previously preached the re- 
 
 turn to nature. — A study of children necessary in 
 order to educate them. — The psychology of infancy 
 contained in Emile. — Rousseau had observed the chil- 
 dren of others. — His deficiency in professional experi- 
 ence. — Lacking in connected study. — Influen«e of 
 personal reminiscences on Rousseau's pedagogical 
 theories. — Emile is self-taught. — Emile's education is 
 often conceived by Rousseau as a fancied antithesis to 
 the realities of his own life and character. — Rousseau, 
 in his visionary structure, reacted against himself . 6 
 
 ' III. Essential principles of Emile, and their results. — The 
 doctrine of original innocence. — Positive statements. 
 
 V — Pessimism in regard to society : optimism in regard 
 
 to nature. — Return to the natural man advocated, ^r-—- — 
 In consequence, "negative" education until the age of 
 twelve. — No moral authority. — No didactic teaching. 
 — Paradoxes on paradoxes. — Neither punishments nor 
 rewards. — The child is of necessity subjected to the laws 
 of nature. — Suppression of the authority of parents and 
 masters : Rousseau's capital error. — Inactive, expec- 
 iii 
 
iv CONTENTS AND SUMMARY 
 
 PAGE 
 
 tant education. — Abnormal isolation of Emile. — 
 Contrived situations. — Tricks of composition. — De- 
 spite his contradictions, Rousseau is a partisan of 
 domestic education. — Praise of family life. — The duty 
 of mothers to nurse their children. — Obligations of 
 fathers. — Another paradox: ''successive" education. 
 
 — Artificial division of the life of the child and the youth 
 into three periods. — Correct views concerning the char- 
 acteristics proper to each age. — Is it necessary to treat 
 the child as a man? — Unjustifiable postponement of 
 moral education. — Religious training delayed until 
 adolescence. — The Profession de foi du vicaire Savoyard. 
 
 — If Nature should speak, with what she could right- 
 fully reproach Rousseau 20 
 
 IV. The eternal truths of Emile. — Physical education. — 
 Minute directions regarding the hygiene of childhood. 
 
 — Importance of bodily exercise from a moral view- 
 point. — Education in the country. — Emile is taught 
 a manual trade : why ? — Education of the senses. — 
 Things, things ! — Exercise of the judgment in the 
 domain of tangible knowledge. — Programme of utili- 
 tarian studies. — The art of action. — Necessity of 
 adapting education to life. — Neither literature nor his- 
 tory. — Regarding the last point, Rousseau makes a 
 retraction in the Considerations sur le gouvernement de 
 Pologne. — As for the ancient languages, they are not a 
 utihty. — Nature study. — Astronomy, physics. — 
 Geography without maps. — Emile at fifteen : more 
 teachable than taught. — Education of the will. — 
 Emile brought up in liberty. — Make the child happy. 
 
 — Emile, however, knows how to bear suffering. — 
 Introduction to social feelings. — Emile a philanthro- 
 pist. — Rousseau has not written directly for the people, 
 but he has, however, prepared the way for popular in- 
 
CONTENTS AND SUMMARY v 
 
 PAGE 
 
 struction. — What he wished to form was "just a man. '* 
 
 — Unconcern regarding professional education. — 
 Occasional awakening of the practical spirit in Rous- 
 seau. — Travel abroad for purposes of study. — Emile 
 learns on the spot two or three modern languages . 52 
 
 V. Education of Sophie, the ideal woman. — The treatise 
 
 turns into a romance. — Sophie is not, however, alto- 
 gether an imaginary being: she existed. — Rousseau's 
 mistakes in his views on the education of women. — 
 Sophie's education is the reverse of Emile 's. — Subordi- 
 nation of the woman to the man. — Rousseau does 
 not admit the equality of the sexes. — Incomplete 
 psychology. — Woman's defects. — Her qualities. — 
 Woman should remain woman. — Rousseau not a 
 woman's rights man. — Sophie's education Hmited. — 
 "Household education." — Needlework. — A young 
 woman should go into society. — She should be given 
 rehgious instruction in good season. — Woman should 
 think, in order to fulfil her duties as a wife and mother. 
 
 — Her personality slightly overlooked. — The authority 
 which she exercises is based on her natural graces. — 
 Sophie is already to an extent the modern lovely and 
 attractive woman, created not for the church and the 
 convent, but for family life 81 
 
 VI. Success of Emile. — Extraordinary influence of Rous- 
 seau. — Numerous works in imitation or in refutation. 
 
 g — U El eve de la nature by de Beaurieu. — Effect of 
 Rousseau's inspiration on the French Revolution. — 
 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and the Ecole de la patrie. — 
 Mme. Roland's admiration for Rousseau. — Mme. de 
 Stael's, Mme. de Genlis, Mme. de Necker de Saussure. 
 
 — International reputation of Emile. — Enthusiastic 
 testimonies from Germany. — Basedow and Lavater. 
 
 — Kant and his Traite de pedagogie. — Goethe, Schiller, 
 
vi CONTENTS AND SUMMARY 
 
 J.-P. Richter, Herder, Pestalozzi, etc. — Favourable 
 appreciation of English writers: John Morley, R. H. 
 Quick, etc. — The least success in the United States. — 
 However, American education strives to attain the ideal 
 dreamed of by Rousseau. — How Rousseau's pedagogi- 
 cal spirit has insinuated itself into modern methods of 
 teaching and educational practices. — It has raised and 
 ennobled the educator's part. — How he is at times a 
 stoic. — He remains a great enticer of intellects. — Why 
 he will never cease to be loved 100 
 
 BiBLIOGKAPHY 119 
 
PEEFACE 
 
 In publishing a series of monographs on the 
 " Pioneers in Education/' those of all nations and 
 of every age, we have several aims in view. 
 
 In the first place, we wish to represent the men 
 who deserve to have their names on the honour 
 list in the history of education, all who have in 
 any remarkable way contributed to the reform 
 and progress of the instruction and advancement 
 of humanity ; to represent them as they lived ; to 
 show what they thought and did ; and to exhibit 
 their doctrines and methods, and their moral 
 character. 
 
 But after having portrayed each heroic figure 
 clearly, we must also sketch his background, the 
 general tendencies of the epoch in which the re- 
 former lived, the scholastic institutions of his coun- 
 try, and the genius, so to speak, of his race, in 
 order that we may set forth in successive pictures 
 the struggles and the progress of the civilized races. 
 
 In the last place, we wish to do more than write 
 a historical narrative merely. Our ambition is 
 higher : it is to bring face to face ideas held long 
 ago with modern opinions, with the needs and 
 
 vii 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 aspirations of society to-day, and thus to prepare 
 the way for a solution of the pedagogical problems 
 confronting the twentieth century. 
 
 If we have chosen J.-J. Rousseau to open this 
 gallery of portraits, it is not because he was a sure 
 guide, an irreproachable leader. But in the cause 
 of education he has been a great inciter of ideas in 
 others, the initiator of the modern movement, the 
 " leader " of most of the educators who came after 
 him. Pestalozzi, Spencer, to cite only two, have 
 undoubtedly been his disciples. He has assailed 
 the routine of tradition; he has broken short off 
 with the past ; and if he has not always sown the 
 seed in the field of education, he has at least 
 watered it, rid it of encumbering weeds, leaving to 
 his successors the care of its cultivation and fertili- 
 zation for later flowering. We therefore render 
 but simple justice and place him where he belongs, 
 when we mention him first. 
 
 We dedicate this study and those which follow 
 it to all people who are interested in the cause of 
 education, and who think, as we do, that this ques- 
 tion is the vital one, the one upon which depends 
 the future of the people ; without which no social 
 reform is possible; that, finally, the progress of 
 education is the question of life and death for soci- 
 ety and the individual alike. 
 
EOUSSEAU 
 
 For two centuries the works of J.-J. Rousseau have 
 been read and reread and perpetually annotated. 
 Everything concerning him having been said again 
 and again during this period, pretensions to origi- 
 nahty in so minutely explored a subject are scarcely 
 possible. It is, however, always interesting to return 
 to the ideas of an independent and intrepid thinker, 
 one in whose writings paradox and truth are sown 
 broadcast, whose extraordinary influence over the 
 minds of men is a kind of fascination, and of whom 
 M. Melchior de Vogiie could recently say that '^he 
 had monopoHzed our whole pohtical and social 
 future." Rousseau's ideas on education, which 
 also we intend to discuss here, were so original when 
 Emile was pubHshed in 1762 that they still have 
 claims to novelty, and many a pamphlet, many a 
 book on education, which in 1899 or 1900 earned 
 for its author the reputation of being a daring in- 
 novator is, nevertheless, merely the reissue of some 
 
 1 
 
2 ROUSSEAU 
 
 of the theories dear to Rousseau. Is it not also 
 true that the Hght of progress and the broader 
 horizons revealed by the succession of the ages are 
 able to rejuvenate and reillumine a subject to all 
 appearance exhausted? 
 
 Emile is a knotty, tangled book, full of matter, 
 and to such an extent is the true mingled with the 
 false, imagination and hazardous dream with keen, 
 accurate observation and reasoning power, that at 
 first a full comprehension of it is impossible. It is 
 not one of those simple, straightforward works which 
 yield their secret from the outset ; it is an intricate 
 composition, half novel, half philosophical treatise, 
 which — supposing that Rousseau had not written 
 La Nouvelle Heloise — would be sufficient to justify 
 the title of a recent study by M. Faguet, J -J, 
 Rousseau, romancier frangais, just as it gave him 
 the right to be called "a psychologist of the first 
 degree," an appellation bestowed on him by Mr. 
 Davidson, an American author. The propositions 
 advanced in it by Rousseau, with all the ardor of his 
 fervid imagination and all the allurements of an en- 
 chanted pen, are at first disconcerting to the reader : 
 some minds are captivated, others roused to distrust. 
 Many are the perusals necessary before a path can 
 be traced through this confusion of philosophic 
 meditation and sentimental fancy. Did not his own 
 
ROUSSEAU 3 
 
 steps wander, as when, for example, having intro- 
 duced Emile to us as an orphan, he makes him the 
 recipient of letters from his father and mother as a 
 means of inducing him to learn to read ? 
 
 Though at first one is tempted to protest against 
 the audacities and blunders of a venturesome mind 
 lacking in balance, yet, on reflection, it becomes ap- 
 parent that the greater part of his paradoxes conceal 
 a fund of truth — not, indeed, a commonplace, but 
 an original conception, a thought reaching into the 
 future, the accuracy of which will, Uttle by little, be 
 proved by experience. Oftentimes the myths with 
 which he seemed most infatuated receive from him- 
 self a decisive reply. Elsewhere, to find oneself in 
 agreement with him, it is only necessary to set aside 
 the tricks of style with which he chose to envelop 
 his ideas. In short, Emile is a combative book ^^full 
 of fire and smoke, '' and as on a battlefield a just idea 
 of the positions which have been carried can only 
 be obtained after the smoke of the cannonade has 
 cleared away, so, to grasp and distinguish the re- 
 sults of Rousseau^s rapid advance on the field of the 
 new education, the sound of the sonorous sentences, 
 the tumult of the figures of speech, apostrophe, and 
 prosopopseia in his inflamed harangues must be 
 allowed to die away. Unquestionably, certain por- 
 tions of Emile have grown old, but others have 
 
4 ROUSSEAU 
 
 required the passage of a hundred years and 
 more ere they could be truly understood and could 
 present themselves in their full force. 
 
 The preceding sentences describe the spirit in 
 which this study has been conceived : less to criticise 
 Rousseau than to bring to Hght the treasures of 
 abiding truth which he has, as it were, buried in a 
 book described truly by him as ^Hhe most useful 
 and considerable'' of his writings. It were an easy 
 matter to convict him of flagrant utopianism : this 
 commonplace task of refutation will occupy us no 
 more than is absolutely necessary. Without con- 
 cealing any of the sophisms of Emile, our principal 
 aim will be to ascertain in what Rousseau's guidance 
 may still be useful to us. True criticism is that 
 which insists upon the good, and deals with the bad 
 only to explain it. Rather for posterity and for the 
 future did Rousseau speak than for his contem- 
 poraries and the period in which he hved. In the 
 forgotten recesses of Emile lurk more than one 
 reflection which, hitherto unperceived, proves to be 
 fruitful in instruction for the people of our time, and 
 directly suited to present requirements; so great 
 was the perspicacity of a philosopher, a '^finder of 
 hidden springs," who, thirty years in advance, had 
 predicted the French Revolution at the same time 
 that he was preparing it. Par greater in importance, 
 
ROUSSEAU 5 
 
 however, than a multitude of isolated truths, is the 
 general spirit animating the entire book. Emile de- 
 serves to remain the eternal object of the educator's 
 meditation, were it only because it is an act of faith 
 and trust in humanity. 
 
II 
 
 Rousseau is truly an initiator; nay more, a revo- 
 lutionary. He forestalled the generations of 1789, 
 even those of 1793, which claimed to be the re- 
 constitutors of society and the regenerators of the 
 human race, as expressed in Barere's energetic speech 
 to his colleagues of the Convention, ^^You are con- 
 voked for the recommencement of history." In such 
 times of crisis and disturbance the attention of 
 vigilant thinkers is naturally directed to children 
 and education ; for by education alone can one expect 
 to guide new souls along the paths of a regenerated 
 existence. Such was Rousseau's ambition. He 
 was the reformer, the dreamer, if you will, who, in 
 his ardent protest against reahties which he con- 
 demns, aspires in all things to a radical renovation 
 of human institutions. This appeal to the ideal — 
 to leave unmentioned those first attempts by which 
 he had already trained his critical enthusiasm — 
 had as its result the splendid trilogy of his principal 
 works, pubhshed in quick succession in three years. 
 La Nouvelle Heloisej in 1759, the Contrat social and 
 
 6 
 
ROUSSEAU 7 
 
 Emile in a single year, 1762; three masterpieces 
 which, despite diversity of form and subject, proceed 
 from a common inspiration, tending equally, as they 
 do, to the reformation of society, the first in its 
 domestic morals, the second in its political constitu- 
 tion, and lastly Emile, in the laws of education for 
 children and youths. 
 
 Powerful as may be Rousseau^s inventive origi- 
 nahty, we are far from claiming that his educational 
 system, which for eight years occupied his medita- 
 tions, is a stroke of genius, a miraculous revelation, 
 neither prepared nor announced by anything in the 
 past. Rousseau had his forerunners and inspirers. 
 A Benedictine — Dom Cajot — who might have em- 
 ployed his time to better purpose, wrote a large 
 volume on Rousseau's Plagiarisms: the plagiarisms 
 we deny, but imitation and indebtedness must be 
 admitted. The glory of even the most original gen- 
 iuses suffers no diminution though it be estabUshed 
 that some of their most famous conceptions were 
 dimly perceived and outhned before they succeeded, 
 as it were, in giving substance to vague intellectual 
 shadow by the intensity of their personal reflection. 
 Rousseau was impregnated with Montaigne and 
 quotes him constantly. He had read and ''de- 
 voured" the Port Royal books. Fenelon, ''wise" 
 Locke, "good^Rollin, and " learned "Fleury dictated 
 
8 ROUSSEAU 
 
 some of his finest precepts. Locke, with his practical 
 mind and somewhat prosy sound sense, doubtless 
 has no great resemblance to Rousseau; he inspired 
 him, nevertheless, in his campaign against weak, 
 effeminate education, and also against '' bookish" 
 instruction. Rousseau does not appear to have been 
 familiar with Rabelais, yet there are obvious simi- 
 larities between Emile's education and that which 
 Epistemon instituted for the profit of young Gar- 
 gantua, that other imaginary being and pupil of 
 nature. Not only did Rousseau study and annotate 
 the Pro jet de paix perpetuelle by the abbe of Saint- 
 Pierre, that man so fertile in projects, he continues 
 it by his utihtarian tendencies and taste for ethical 
 education. Other names might well be mentioned. 
 . . . But the author of Emile transfigures what- 
 ever he touches, and transforms all that he borrows. 
 His exuberant imagination gives fresh form and 
 color to ideas lent by others : timid, they become 
 imperious; vague, they obtain a sharp definition; 
 like feeble shrubs, which, transplanted to a rich and 
 fertile soil, grow up into vigorous trees. 
 
 Of all Rousseau's predecessors it is perhaps Turgot 
 who most clearly traced out the new paths. The 
 author of Emile does not appear, indeed, to have had 
 any knowledge of the views which Turgot expounded 
 in the long epistle, — a veritable memoir, — which he 
 
ROUSSEAU 9 
 
 addressed in 1751 to Mme. de Graffigny, the then 
 celebrated authoress of Lettres peruviennes. It is not 
 a rare thing, however, for minds in motion to meet at 
 the same period of time in the same inspirations 
 without mutual arrangement. Earlier than Rousseau 
 by ten years, and with equal conviction, Turgot 
 preached the return to nature. '^Our education," 
 said he, ^^is mere pedantry: everything is taught us 
 quite against nature." — '^Nature must be studied 
 and consulted, so that she may be assisted and 
 we be saved the detriment of thwarting her." — 
 ^Thildren^s heads are filled with a mass of abstract 
 notions which they ^cannot grasp, and all the time 
 nature is calHng them to her through every percep- 
 tible object." Down to the fundamental maxim of 
 Emile on the original innocence of our inclinations, 
 everything has already been admitted by Turgot: 
 '^All the virtues have been sown by nature in the 
 heart of man : the one thing needful is to let them 
 blossom forth." 
 
 The examples quoted are sufficient to make it 
 apparent that ideas in germ were diffused in the 
 atmosphere around Rousseau and that he collected 
 them for development. It is, however, no less ap- 
 parent that from himself, from his own rich store 
 and a "priori views of human nature, if not from a 
 practical experience which he lacked, was drawn the 
 
10 ROUSSEAU 
 
 substance of his treatise De VEducation. Rousseau 
 reasoned and imagined still more than he beheld 
 and observed. This is not because he overlooked the 
 necessity for observation : he was fully ahve to it 
 and knew exactly in what he was deficient to treat 
 with competence the great subject upon which he 
 was entering. This is proved by the letter written 
 by him to one of his protectresses, Mme. de Crequy, 
 on the 15th of January, 1759, when. La Nouvelle 
 Heloise being finished, he had begun in earnest the 
 composition of Emile: '^Speaking of education, 
 there are some ideas on this subject which I should 
 be tempted to put on paper if I had a Uttle assistance ; 
 but some observations which I cannot supply are 
 necessary. You, Madam, are a mother and, though 
 devout, a philosopher ; you have educated your son. 
 Were you wilUng, in your spare moments, to jot 
 down some reflections on this matter and com- 
 municate them to me, you would be well repaid 
 for your trouble should they assist me in the pro- 
 duction of a useful work." The unnatural father 
 who had not reared his own offspring was reduced 
 to begging the experience of others. . . . 
 
 Rousseau was aware, then, that a study of child- 
 hood is necessary before rules for the management 
 of children can be estabhshed. If it is correct to 
 say that he endowed France with a new Uterature 
 
ROUSSEAU 11 
 
 and that he was one of the ancestors of romanticism, 
 it is equally correct to affirm that in his manner he 
 inaugurated those important studies which for some 
 years have been in vogue under the name of '^ psy- 
 chology of the child." A well-stocked chapter on 
 this new psychology could easily be made by collect- 
 ing the numerous accurate, subtle observations on 
 the character and tastes of infancy which are 
 scattered through the long pages of Emile. ^ Chil- 
 dren always think only of the present. ... I know 
 of nothing for which, with a Httle ingenuity, one 
 cannot inspire them with a taste, a passion even, 
 and this without rendering them vain or jealous of 
 the acquirements of others. Their vivacity, their 
 imitative mind, and especially their natural gayety 
 are sufficient for this. . . . Every age in fife, and 
 especially the age of infancy, desires to create, to 
 imitate, to produce, to manifest power and activity." 
 These quotations might be multiplied many 
 times, and it might be shown how greatly Rousseau 
 dehghted in studying children — alas ! why must it 
 be added, other people's children ? It is sad to see 
 him take up his position at the window of his dreary 
 house, empty through his own fault, to watch the 
 children coming out of school and to observe by 
 stealth the conversations, games, and childish actions 
 of the little scholars. . . . ''Never did a man," says 
 
12 ROUSSEAU 
 
 he in the last but one of the Reveries d'un promeneur 
 solitaire, ^^ find more pleasure than myself in watch- 
 ing youngsters romp and play together!" And he 
 adds, ^^If I have made some progress in the knowl- 
 edge of the human heart, it is the pleasure that I. 
 used to take in watching and observing children 
 which has earned me that knowledge/' 
 
 How much more accurate would Rousseau's 
 psychology have been, however, if, instead of a fleet- 
 ing attention paid to a few street Arabs, whom he 
 watched for a moment at their frolics, he had been 
 able to exercise the attentive observation of a father 
 who, day by day, watches the birth and develop- 
 ment of his son's mind. 
 
 It is, moreover, noteworthy that the solicitude 
 for education came to Rousseau because he had 
 criminally abandoned his five children, as though 
 he had felt himself compelled to make partial 
 reparation for the most serious of all his moral 
 shortcomings. ''The ideas with which my fault has 
 filled my mind have contributed to turn my medi- 
 tations to the subject of education. . . ." 
 
 Rousseau was also deficient in professional ex- 
 perience of instruction. I am well aware that to the 
 long list of occupations which he took up in the 
 course of his vagrant youth and Bohemian existence, 
 when he was successively engraver's apprentice, 
 
ROUSSEAU 13 
 
 recorder's clerk, clerk, secretary, music copyist, — ■ 
 Grimm, who did not like him, once advised him 
 to sell lemonade, — the occupation of tutor must be 
 added ; but he practised it so little and so ill ! . . . 
 In 1739 — he was then twenty-seven — Bonnot de 
 Mably, royal provost at Lyons, confided to him the 
 education of his two sons. At first he appUed him- 
 self to this task, thinking himself fitted for it. He 
 was soon disabused, however: '^I did nothing worth 
 doing.'' He could only employ three methods of 
 discipHne, '^always useless and pernicious with chil- 
 dren,'' — sentiment, argument, and anger. Sentiment 
 he never renounces, as, when reproving Emile for a 
 fault, the tutor will only say, ''My boy, you have 
 hurt me ! " . . . Argument, however, he excludes 
 pitilessly from the child's instruction, convinced 
 henceforth, contrary to Locke's doctrine, that it is 
 not advisable to argue and reason too early with 
 children, ''who, though they may be reasoners, are 
 no more reasonable for that." Quickly finding dis- 
 tasteful a profession for which he was in no way 
 suited, Rousseau resigned it at the end of a year, 
 but not before he had drawn up for M. de Sainte- 
 Marie, one of his two pupils, an educational scheme 
 in which neither thought nor style announce the 
 brilHant and profound author of Entile, 
 If Rousseau was neither an assiduous observer of 
 
14 ROUSSEAU 
 
 childhood nor a professor — nor even a pupil; as he 
 never studied in a connected manner, and was 
 a student only of what has been called 'Hhe Uni- 
 versity of Charmettes'^; as a compensation he felt 
 much and lived much ; and for the formation of a 
 powerful mind, a regular course of study at Plessis 
 College would certainly have been less advanta- 
 geous and efficacious than that agitated existence 
 which led Roussean into all grades of society, into 
 drawing-room and anteroom, which made him in 
 succession the friend of philosophers and the table 
 companion of great lords, a plebeian on good terms 
 with the people, and the petted favorite of great 
 ladies, countesses, duchesses, and marchionesses. 
 
 It is indisputable that Rousseau put much of his 
 personality, that he worked many reminiscences of 
 his life and reflections of his mind, into the con- 
 ception of the model pupil which he fashioned for 
 humanity. Montaigne said, ^'I am the substance of 
 my book." Is this so with Rousseau? Could he 
 also say, as Amiel insinuates, '^My system and my- 
 self make one"? Did he conceive Emile in his 
 hkeness and in his resemblance? Amiel claims 
 that he weaves nothing but his own substance into 
 his most magnificent theories, that he is first and 
 foremost a '^subjective." We do not deny this, and 
 we are aware that as a general rule educators have 
 
ROUSSEAU 15 
 
 a natural tendency to project themselves, as it were, 
 into the plans which they recommend for others' 
 imitation. When Rousseau, for example, sup- 
 presses all didactic teaching in instruction, what 
 does he do beyond setting up' as a rule his own 
 experience? ^^What little I know, I learned by 
 myself. I could never learn anything from a 
 master. ..." Rousseau is self-taught, and so is 
 Emile. 
 
 On the other hand, however, on how many other 
 points are the fancies of Emile's education in formal 
 opposition with the realities of Rousseau's existence ? 
 It follows naturally that people satisfied with their 
 destiny recommend to others what they have found 
 to answer in their own case. But Rousseau was dis- 
 satisfied with himself and his lot, no less than with 
 society. The education which he desired, appears, 
 as a consequence, to have been conceived in an effort 
 of reaction against his own condition, as a contrast 
 to the imprudences from which he had suffered, and 
 the errors or faults committed by him. Poor 
 stricken mind and infirm, diseased body, he consoles 
 himself by evoking the ideal image of a hardy child, 
 healthy in mind and body. He requites himself for 
 his wretchedness and imperfections by creating a 
 happy, perfect being. 
 
 He says, for example: '^As yet I had conceived 
 
16 ROUSSEAU 
 
 nothing. I had felt everything.'' Is it not so as 
 to escape the consequences of this precocious stimu- 
 lation, which had made him morbidly sensitive, and 
 demoralized for life, that, going to the opposite 
 extreme, he leaves Emile unacquainted with all 
 sentimental emotion until he is fifteen? He read 
 to excess; before he was ten years old he had de- 
 voured a whole library of novels. Is it because of 
 this that, detesting and anathematizing books, he 
 forbids them absolutely to Emile ? I do not know, 
 said M. Brunetiere, one of our great writers whose 
 childhood and youth were to such a degree lacking 
 in guidance. He cannot, indeed, be said to have 
 had a family: his mother died in giving birth to 
 him; his father, after having spoiled him, deserted 
 him. Nobody brought him up. . . . How, after 
 that, could the temptation be avoided of imagining 
 a situation quite the reverse, by which Emile is given 
 a tutor who does not lose sight of him for a second, 
 a mentor who will accompany and protect him in his 
 every action right up to the threshold of the nuptial 
 chamber ? 
 
 In evil surroundings, compromised by humiliating 
 society, Rousseau was conscious of all the dignity 
 and nobility of mind that he had lost in the con- 
 taminations of his existence: then, to educate a 
 man in honor and virtue, let us eliminate all 
 
ROUSSEAU 17 
 
 exterior circumstances which may sully and degrade 
 him. Emile shall hve alone, far from mankind. . . . 
 Rousseau lounged in servants' hall and antechamber ; 
 he took part in the distractions of fashionable hfe ; 
 he frequented the drawing-rooms of Paris, and now 
 and again allowed himself to be seduced by society's 
 artifices; he contracted numerous frivolous love 
 intrigues. None of these things for the ideal man : 
 the country, fresh air, outdoor hfe with its simphcity, 
 apurelove, single and deep, nothing but nature. . . . 
 ''Farewell, Paris, city of noise, smoke, and mud, 
 where woman no longer believes in purity nor man 
 in virtue ! Farewell, Paris, our quest is love, happi- 
 ness, and innocence; never shall we be sufficiently 
 remote from thee ! . . ." 
 
 Much of Emile is, then, a visionary structure 
 erected expressly to make a contrast to Rousseau's 
 actual hfe. To excuse, or at least explain, the gener- 
 ation of all the wild delusions of Emikj let us never 
 lose sight of the inward struggle which took place 
 in its author's heart between what was noble in 
 his aspirations and base in his existence : the strik- 
 ing incongruity between the adoration which he 
 professed for the ideal and the pitiful reaUty of the 
 circumstances in which he was placed and for which 
 he was in part responsible. This man, of whom 
 Grimm said that ''he had nearly always been miser- 
 
18 ROUSSEAU 
 
 able," bruised by the strangest adventures, weighed 
 down by physical sickness, and who felt that he was 
 dying whilst engaged in composing tlmile; still more 
 disturbed by imaginary ills which an anxious mind 
 invented for him ; embittered by that kind of mania 
 of persecution which from year to year was to in- 
 crease and was finally to drive him to suicide ; exas- 
 perated against a state of society with whose vices 
 he was the better acquainted through having par- 
 ticipated in them; humiliated by the remembrance 
 of what he called his youthful ^^rascalities " ; ashamed 
 later of his cohabitation with an inn servant whose 
 vulgarity must more than once have been a heavy 
 burden to him : he felt the need of throwing himself 
 back upon an ideal world, there to seek a fleeting 
 forgetfulness of his moral infirmities, a compensation 
 for his misfortunes, in revenge for the frailties of his 
 character and the gloom of his destiny. If his hfe 
 was often a painful drama, certain parts of Emile 
 shall be idyls and pastorals of real poetic charm. 
 He has said so: ^^The impossibility of attaining to 
 actual beings has cast me into the land of delusions : 
 I have made myself societies of perfect creatures. 
 ..." The exaggerations and phantasies to which 
 we shall have to direct attention in Emile will often 
 only be deliberate inventions which did not at all 
 delude their inventor. As he put it when writing 
 
ROUSSEAU 19 
 
 in 1763 to the prince of Wirtemberg concerning the 
 scheme of education which he had addressed to him 
 for his daughter Sophie, brought up in conformity 
 with the principles of Emile: '^ These are, perhaps, 
 only the hallucinations of a dehrious man. . . . The 
 comparison of what is with what should be has given 
 me a romantic mind, and has always driven me far 
 from what goes on." 
 
 What Rousseau would fain have been and was 
 not, Emile is to be, or at least that is Rousseau's 
 desire. 
 
Ill 
 
 ^Tardon me my paradoxes, ordinary reader," 
 exclaims Rousseau somewhere. The best way of 
 pardoning them is to attempt to extract the core of 
 truth which they contain. Once we have deprived 
 the essential principles of his system of the violent 
 form in which this conjurer of thought was pleased 
 to envelop them, it remains for us to gather together 
 the general rules, the characteristic positive and un- 
 questioned truths in Entile which modern education 
 will never relinquish. 
 
 ''Man is born free and everywhere he is fettered," 
 thus begins Contrat social. 
 
 ''Man is born good and everyivhere he has become 
 corrupt," such is the sense of the preamble to Emile. 
 
 Rousseau deHghts in these absolute statements: 
 he hkes concise, peremptory formulas which compel 
 attention. 
 
 To his political sophism, "The universal will of 
 the people is always right," corresponds his psy- 
 chological sophism, "Nature is fundamentally 
 good." 
 
 20 
 
ROUSSEAU 21 
 
 Such is the initial error which gives rise to all 
 that is false in Emile. The bitterest and most in- 
 cisive of pessimists when judging actual society, 
 Rousseau is the most indulgent of optimists when 
 he considers, beyond the work of man, the work of 
 Providence, that is to say, nature. 
 
 Nature is good and beneficent. Her creatures 
 are pure, so long as they have not been perverted, 
 corrupted, disfigured, and sophisticated by a pre- 
 tended civilization which is merely a long decadence. 
 On this point, Rousseau was in agreement with a 
 number of his contemporaries. D'Holbach said, 
 "Man is vicious because he has been made so^^; 
 and Diderot, '^A natural man -used to exist; into 
 this natural man an artificial man has been intro- 
 duced." Rousseau comes back insistently to the 
 same doctrine. '^Let us lay down as an incon- 
 testable maxim that the first movements of nature 
 are always right, and that there is no original per- 
 versity in man's heart. ... All characters are 
 good and healthy in themselves. . . . There is no 
 error in nature. ..." 
 
 Doubtless it would be within one's right to stop 
 Rousseau at once and ask him to explain this 
 flagrant contradiction: man is naturally good, and 
 society, man's work, is bad. . . . But he is not 
 disturbed by this incongruity. Faithful to the 
 
22 ROUSSEAU 
 
 opinion which he had expressed in the two Discours 
 which began his reputation, he cHngs tenaciously to 
 his Utopia. He repeats in every form that, with its 
 customs and prejudices, society is detestable and 
 perverted, that it must be thoroughly reformed. 
 Let us revive nature's authority and substitute it 
 for the rule of ancient and antiquated tradition ; let 
 us supersede the empire of stern discipline and op- 
 pressive restriction, which mutilate and deform the 
 human faculties, by the reign of young Hberty, which 
 will assist in their expansion. 
 
 By such a challenge hurled a^ every human in- 
 stitution, Rousseau had in view more than a simple 
 pedagogical reformation : he was announcing a social 
 revolution. Authentically he is the father of the 
 revolutionists whose idol he was to become : let us 
 not forget that Marat, in 1788, read Contrat social 
 to the cheers of an enthusiastic audience. 
 
 From the educational point of view, the principle 
 laid down by Rousseau has for consequence the 
 necessity of reconstructing natural man, '^ original'' 
 man according to the expression of which he had 
 already made use in his Discours sur Vinegalite 
 parmi les hommes, man as he was in the primitive 
 scheme of nature and Providence — for in Rousseau's 
 religious mind, behind nature is Providence, who is 
 the keystone of his philosophical doctrine ~ man, 
 
ROUSSEAU 23 
 
 in short, as he would be, if social hfe and its long 
 corruption had not perverted him, natural man, in 
 a word, and not ^^ human man." 
 
 Let us not stop to demonstrate that Rousseau is 
 in error, that there are in nature germs for evil as 
 well as good, and that education is consequently 
 something more than a complaisant auxiliary, that 
 it should be a resistive force which corrects and 
 compensates. Let us rather bear in mind that the 
 contrary opinion, which also was absolute, that of a 
 nature essentially bad, vitiated in its origin, and pre- 
 destined exclusively to evil had long prevailed and 
 still held sovereign sway. And from this radical 
 condemnation of humanity proceeded a strict and 
 rigid education, made up chiefly of repression, 
 bristling with prohibition and chastisement, which 
 conceded nothing to the child^s native hberty. Trial 
 had been made of all discipHnary instruments save 
 one, precisely the one which alone could succeed, — 
 well regulated Hberty. Rousseau arises, and with 
 eclat he opposes the conception of the old fallen 
 Adam whose fated inheritance must be eradicated 
 from every man by the contrary doctrine of a hu- 
 manity instinctively impelled to good and, accord- 
 ingly, destined to develop in full Hberty. The con- 
 tradictory movements of the ideas which appear in 
 succession on the theatre of human opinion recall 
 
24 ROUSSEAU 
 
 in some degree those comedies in which a speaker 
 primed with one side of a question is answered by 
 another, who goes to the opposite extreme, the better 
 to display the conflict of sentiments. Both the one 
 and the other are wrong, but the colhsion of opposite 
 opinions will cause the truth which lies between to 
 stand out. Even at the risk of straining his voice 
 and exaggerating his repartee, it Was good that an 
 eloquent thinker, in reply to those who for two 
 thousand years had repeated the lament of de- 
 generate mankind, should testify to his confidence 
 and happy faith in the natural powers and tendencies 
 of man : thus, thirty years before the French Revo- 
 lution promulgated the Declaration des droits de 
 Vhomme, a pedagogue announced the declaration of 
 childhood^s rights, of its right to an education of 
 liberty. ^^It is wrong," says Rousseau, *^ always to 
 speak to children of their duties, never of their 
 rights." Emile was, as it were, the charter of child- 
 hood's freedom. 
 
 Paradox begets paradox, and from the erroneous 
 principle which serves as the starting-point of Emile 
 has sprung the entire series of pedagogical falsities, 
 for which Rousseau has been so severely but so 
 justly reproved, what Nisard called his ^^enormi- 
 ties," and the EngUsh pedagogue, R. Hebert Quick, 
 '^his extravagances." 
 
ROUSSEAU 25 
 
 The first of these capital errors is that education, 
 at any rate to the age of twelve, should be strictly 
 ''negative.'^ ^Tositive'^ education will only begin 
 for Emile after a long intellectual idleness and an 
 equally lengthy moral inaction. Since nature tends 
 of itself towards its ends, she should be left alone. 
 In La Nouvelle Heloise, Julie was already of opinion 
 that education consists ^^in doing nothing at all.'' 
 The best educator is the one who acts least, inter- 
 vening only to remove obstacles which would hinder 
 the free play of nature, or to create circumstances 
 favorable to it. 
 
 Education is to be doubly negative : in discipHne 
 and instruction ahke. On the one hand, no com- 
 mands are to be given to the child; on the other, 
 he is to be taught nothing. 
 
 Hence, no moral authority, no material discipHne 
 in the child's upbringing. Neither precepts nor chas- 
 tisements, at least such as are inflicted by human 
 intention, nor rewards of any kind. No punish- 
 ments other than those which are the natural re- 
 sults of the action and the consequences of the fault 
 committed. It is the principle which we find again 
 in Herbert Spencer, ^' Never offer to the indiscreet 
 desires of a child any other obstacles than physical 
 ones." The hand of man is to be nowhere apparent. 
 Emile must remain alone in the presence of nature 
 
26 ROUSSEAU 
 
 and her might. Knowledge of good and evil is 
 not for children. . . . The inspiration of this kind 
 of discipHnary nihiUsm was perhaps obtained by 
 Rousseau from his personal remembrances. ^^He 
 had never obeyed," says Amiel. ^^He had known 
 neither kindly family control nor firm scholastic 
 discipHne.'' Emile does not know what obedience 
 is, nor disobedience either, as he never receives 
 commands. He has no idea that a human will other 
 than his own can exist. He is subjected to one law 
 only, an inflexible one, however, that of the possible 
 and the impossible. He knows no other authority 
 than that of nature ^s laws, no other dependence than 
 that of the imperative necessity of things. 
 
 Would it serve any useful purpose to reply to 
 Rousseau, to point out to him that he is in error, 
 that there is indeed nothing more artificial and con- 
 trary to nature than this so-called natural education, 
 in which is suppressed the most natural thing in the 
 world, — the authority of parents and masters? 
 What? No longer could anything be expected in 
 the direction of a child's conduct from either the 
 tender insinuations of a mother's affection, or the 
 injunctions of a father's strong will, at once gentle 
 and firm, or the persuasive exhortations of a kindly 
 and watchful master? It may be wise to exclude 
 from discipHne the caprices of maladroit parents who 
 
ROUSSEAU 27 
 
 command and countermand, who go from the ex- 
 treme of bhnd complacency to that of brutal severity ; 
 but what folly it would be to reject the benefits to 
 the moral education of a child permitted by the 
 action of authority exercised with prudence and 
 wisdom. Prevent the birth of vice, and you will 
 have done enough for virtue, protests Rousseau. 
 Just as he says a little later. Prevent error and 
 prejudice from obtaining entrance into Emile's mind, 
 and you will have done enough for knowledge. No, 
 prevention of evil is not sufficient: it is necessary 
 to teach good. If Emile^s intellect Hes fallow for 
 twelve years, it will be like those fields which the 
 husbandman does not till or sow : weeds will spring 
 up in alarming abundance ; and when their destruc- 
 tion is desired, it will be too late. Rousseau was 
 better inspired in La Nouvelle Helo'isej in which he 
 said: ''A good nature should be cultivated. . . . 
 Children must be taught to obey their mother." 
 
 In the study which he has devoted to Emile, and 
 which is the best we know, John Morley remarks 
 with reason that omission of the principle of authority 
 is the fundamental weakness of Rousseau^s system. 
 In this system, says he, in effect, the child is always 
 to suppose that it is following its own judgment or 
 impulses. ... It must not feel the constraint of 
 a will other than its own. The parent and the 
 
28 ROUSSEAU 
 
 master must not intervene ; ... as though parents 
 were not a part of nature? . . . And, moreover, 
 why are the effects of conduct upon the actor^s own 
 physical well-being to be the only effects honored 
 with the title of being natural, neglecting the feel- 
 ings of approbation or disapproval which this same 
 conduct inspires? One of the most important of 
 educating influences is lost if the young are not 
 taught to place the feelings of others in a front 
 place. The acquirement of many excellent quahties 
 is threatened if a child, in its ignorance and frailty, is 
 not inclined naturally to respect, in its parents and 
 masters, a better-informed authority and an expe- 
 rience riper than its own. 
 
 No less serious is the error in respect of the other 
 aspect of negative education, — the adjournment of 
 instruction. Here Rousseau becomes enthusiastic, 
 and he impressively eulogizes the supposed benefits 
 of the long mental idleness which he imposes on his 
 pupil. ^'May I venture to state the greatest, the 
 most important, the most useful rule in all education ? 
 it is, not to gain time, but to lose it. . . . Reading 
 is the scourge of childhood. . . . Apparent facility 
 in learning is the ruin of children. ... I teach the 
 art of being ignorant. . . .'' No books, then, no 
 verbal lesson. Emile will grow up Hke a httle 
 savage, without intellectual culture, exercising only 
 
ROUSSEAU 29 
 
 his body and his senses. The ideal is for him to 
 remain ignorant as long as possible, to reach the 
 age of twelve not even knowing ^^how to distinguish 
 his right hand from his left/' Rousseau, who goes 
 into ecstasies in face of his work, says, with humorous 
 exaggeration, ^^I would as soon require a child of 
 ten to be five feet tall as to be judicious ; " . . . and 
 again, ^^Emile would not hesitate to give the whole 
 Academie des sciences'' — supposing that he is 
 aware of its existence — '^for a pastry-cook's shop." 
 Undoubtedly, not everything is blameworthy in 
 the inactive, expectant education which Rousseau 
 recommends. Let us retain this much of it, that it 
 is well not to be in haste, not to outdistance the 
 progress natural to the age ; that it is imprudent and 
 dangerous to weary a child with a precocious and 
 premature education; that one risks exhausting its 
 powers by fatiguing them too soon. But what a 
 number of arguments array themselves against the 
 system which, by a contrary abuse, leaves the in- 
 tellectual faculties uncultured during the first twelve 
 years, perhaps the most fruitful of one's whole Hfe ! 
 Rousseau himself points out an objection that might 
 well be final : it is that the mind, so long enervated 
 by inaction, will become incapable of action, and 
 ^^will be absorbed by matter." How can it be hoped 
 that Emile, who has studied nothing, will all at 
 
30 ROUSSEAU 
 
 once have the desire and abiHty to learn everything, 
 that his dormant thought will spring into wakeful- 
 ness at the magic summons of his tutor, to acquire 
 as by enchantment all the attainments in which he 
 is deficient ? And especially, how can the versatility 
 and flexibihty of the intellectual organs required by 
 every study be assured him in a short time, when 
 their preparation by continued exercise and slow 
 initiation has been neglected ? Finally, if Rousseau^s 
 statement were true, if the child were incapable of 
 all abstract study, if it were necessary to prohibit 
 all mental work for it till the age of twelve, can the 
 result be imagined ? It would be necessary to close 
 all elementary schools, and the instruction of the 
 people would be impossible. 
 
 I am well aware that Rousseau, as a substitute 
 for books and formal lessons, appeals to nature^s 
 teachings. Emile has learned nothing by heart ; he 
 scarcely knows what a book is. To make up for 
 this, he knows much from experience; '^he reads in 
 nature^s book." First, let us point out that nature 
 does not consent to play the part of schoolmistress, 
 with which Rousseau wishes to saddle her, to such 
 an extent. The proof of this is that he is himself 
 forced to resort to artifices, to the most comphcated 
 stratagems, to inculcate into his pupil the rare gleams 
 of knowledge which hghten the darkness of his 
 
ROUSSEAU 31 
 
 ignorance. Nature needs a stage carpenter to 
 prepare the laboriously arranged scenes in which 
 an attempt is made to provide Emile with an equiva- 
 lent for the lessons of everyday education. Such is 
 the juggler episode, intended to reveal to him some 
 notions of elementary physics ; such is the conver- 
 sation with Robert the gardener on the origin 
 of property. Doubtless, Emile will know more 
 thoroughly the few Httle things thus learned by 
 himself. But not only will his instruction be 
 singularly limited, this teaching from experience 
 and nature will also be very slow. It will take him 
 months and years to discover what he might just 
 as well have learned in a few hours, by means of 
 well-arranged lessons or well-chosen reading. Is, 
 then, everything that the clear diction of a professor 
 can put within the reach of the smallest scholar, all 
 the hght that books can bring to the dawning intel- 
 ligence, to be useless? And is it to benefit Emile 
 nothing that he is heir to a long Hne of generations 
 who have worked, thought, and written, although 
 that effort of centuries has accumulated treasuries 
 of truths upon which newcomers need only draw 
 in order to derive instruction? 
 
 It is sufficient, moreover, to condemn a system 
 which would result in nothing less than the sup- 
 pression of all moral discipHne and all didactic 
 
32 ROUSSEAU 
 
 teaching during the first period of Hfe, that Rous- 
 seau, to apply it, is obUged to place his pupil in an ab- 
 normal situation, to set him free from the ordinary 
 conditions of existence, to isolate him in a kind of 
 exile, to withdraw him from his parents' control in 
 order to confide him to a stranger's keeping. Aston- 
 ishment has been expressed that Rousseau, a sincere 
 friend and an apostle of family Hfe, — we shall soon 
 be convinced of that, — suppressed parents, brothers, 
 and sisters in his educational novel. Where are the 
 exquisite pictures which he had outhned in La 
 Nouvelle Heloise of the games and education mutu- 
 ally shared by JuHe's children brought up under 
 their mother's eyes ? If Rousseau is recanting, it is 
 because he was forced into doing so by the necessity 
 of giving an appearance of practical achievement to 
 his dream of negative education. How, indeed, can 
 one suppose that a father and mother are capable 
 of holding sufficiently aloof from the education of a 
 son reared by themselves, to keep from influencing 
 him by admonitions, severe at need, or by affectionate 
 caresses ? It was absolutely necessary that the hero 
 of natural education should live alone in his child- 
 hood, without either parents, comrades, God, or 
 master, — for God is not mentioned to him till much 
 later, when he is eighteen ; and as for the tutor who 
 bears him company he is, properly speaking, neither 
 
ROUSSEAU 33 
 
 master nor professor: he is simply a guardian, a 
 vigilant sentinel, whose orders are to protect Emile 
 against influences from without, against everything 
 which could hinder nature ^s beneficent action, and 
 whose part is restricted to forming around his pupil, 
 as it were, an isolating wall. 
 
 This strange isolation of a child to whom all inter- 
 course with the rest of the human species is for- 
 bidden is, then, only a fanciful fabrication which 
 Rousseau required in order to throw into clear rehef 
 the novelties of his plan. We see Httle more in it 
 than a trick of composition, and it would conse- 
 quently be superfluous to indulge in irony against a 
 fiction which the author disavows in many passages 
 of his book ; a fiction the absurd improbabihty of 
 which is sufficient to demonstrate that he never 
 thought of making it the universal rule of educa- 
 tion. ^^I point out the goal to make for: I do not 
 say that it can be reached." How suppose that 
 Rousseau seriously thought it possible to realize a 
 system the least defect of which would be that it 
 suppress every other function than the tutor's, since 
 half mankind would be kept employed as educators 
 for twenty years, and as Mme. de Stael said, ^^Grand- 
 fathers at most would be free to begin a personal 
 career " ? A mentor, indeed, would have to be found 
 for every Telemachus ; that is, for every child to be 
 
34 ROUSSEAU 
 
 educated. The Christian faith, in its fervors, in- 
 spired the ^^styUtes," those extravagant anchorites 
 who passed their hves on the summit of a column, 
 'twixt earth and sky, as though it were desired in 
 this way to present in a striking and absurd form 
 the necessity of rupture with the world. Similarly, 
 Rousseau's naturaUstic faith suggested to him the 
 invention of an exceptional being who is to Uve and 
 grow up far from society, by a sort of hypothesis 
 whose object is to make the power of nature's educa- 
 tion evident. It is unthinkable that Rousseau should 
 so imperiously call upon a mother to suckle her 
 child, only to carry it away from her tenderness and 
 remove it from her care as soon as it is weaned. No, 
 he merely wished, in an artificial framework, to give 
 free rein to his visions. Emile is no real being : he 
 is a creature of reason, as it were, an engine of war 
 invented to combat society. 
 
 At bottom, as will be seen by reference to other 
 passages of Emile and to Rousseau's other writings, 
 domestic education never had a more fervent 
 partisan. 
 
 Often in his Correspondence does he return to the 
 praise of family hfe. It is true that in his Conside- 
 rations sur le gouvernement de Polognej dating from 
 1772, he has altered his opinion and, by a fresh con- 
 tradiction, declares himself ardently for a third solu- 
 
ROUSSEAU 35 
 
 tion, education in common. Rousseau is a man of 
 successive impulses, each in turn defended with the 
 same impetuosity. To the Poles he resolutely 
 advises national education pushed to its last 
 extreme, the teachings of the Republic of Plato, 
 which absorbs the man into the citizen, and con- 
 fiscates the individual to hand him bodily to the 
 State. Rousseau was divided all his life between 
 the doctrine of individualism and that of sociahsm, 
 between State sovereignty and man's Hberty. 
 
 He says: '^The good social institutions are those 
 which can best change man's nature, remove his 
 absolute existence to replace it by a quite relative 
 one. ... It is by pubhc education that minds are 
 given a national form. . . . Pubhc education, on 
 lines prescribed by the government, is one of the 
 fundamental maxims of all popular government. 
 ..." And again, in the Encyclopcedia article on 
 Political Economy J "As each man's reason is not 
 left sole arbiter of his duties, so much the less should 
 children's education be left to the opinions and 
 prejudices of fathers. . . ." 
 
 This is far removed from Emile's individuahstic 
 education, and we wilhngly admit that it is impos- 
 sible to push unconscious freedom in the mutability 
 of conflicting opinions and impetuous contradictions 
 farther than Rousseau does. And yet, in spite of 
 
36 ROUSSEAU 
 
 all, we maintain that, viewing his aspirations as a 
 whole, Rousseau is in favor of domestic educa- 
 tion. Let us first read that fine page of Emile, in 
 which he claims that a girl should be brought up 
 by her mother, and vigorously refutes the chimeras 
 of platonic education. He protests ^'against that 
 civil promiscuity which mixes both sexes in the same 
 employments, in the same labors, and which cannot 
 but give rise to the most intolerable abuses, — against 
 that subversion of the gentlest sentiments of nature 
 sacrificed to an artificial sentiment which owes its 
 existence to them, — as though it were not necessary 
 to have a natural hold to form conventional ties ; as 
 though love of kindred were not the principle of 
 that which is due to the State ; as though it were 
 not through the little fatherland, which is the 
 family, that the heart is attached to the larger one ; 
 as though it were not the good son, the good father, 
 and the good husband, who make the good citi- 
 zens. . . .'' 
 
 At the great word ^'family" Rousseau's imagina- 
 tion takes fire, so much the more, perhaps, as he ' 
 himself neither knew its joys nor performed its 
 obhgations. Talk not to him either of colleges for 
 boys or of convents for girls ! Colleges he dismisses 
 in a word as ^ laughable estabhshments,'' — and it is 
 because he had spoken of them in this disdainful 
 
ROUSSEAU 37 
 
 way that he thought, according to what he recounts 
 in the Confessions, that he had drawn upon himself 
 the hatred of the Jesuits, of whom, from prudence, 
 he had made it a rule '^ never to speak, either well 
 or ill/' As for convents, because they do not exist 
 in Protestant nations, he considered the latter supe- 
 rior to CathoUc nations. 
 
 In La Nouvelle Heloise, Rousseau sharply repri- 
 mands parents who put their children into the hands 
 of strange masters, ''as though a tutor could re- 
 place a father. ..." Elsewhere, in his letters to 
 the prince of Wlirtemberg, he writes: '^ There is no 
 paternal eye but a father's, and no maternal eye but 
 a mother's. I should Hke to devote twenty reams 
 of paper to repeating those two Hues to you, so 
 much am I convinced that everything depends on 
 them. . . ." 
 
 Besides this, it is known with what eloquence, 
 in Emile itself, Rousseau recalled mothers to their 
 duty, as far as nursing is concerned. Undoubtedly 
 he is not the first who did so. In Rome itself, in 
 the second century, the philosopher Favorinus said, 
 ''Is it not being only half a mother to confide one's 
 children to paid nurses? ..." Words of kindness, 
 in agreeable contrast with the harsh manners and 
 severity of a society, one of whose most illustrious 
 representatives, Cicero, wrote a century earlier, 
 
38 ROUSSEAU 
 
 in his TusculaneSj ''When a child dies young, con- 
 solation is easily found; when it dies in the cradle, 
 it is not even a matter for concern. . . /' 
 
 In the years which preceded the pubHcation of 
 EmiUj doctors and moralists had undertaken the 
 same campaign, but they had carried it on without 
 vigor. Rousseau put his whole heart into it, 
 and as Mme. de Genhs said, ''Wisdom is less per- 
 suasive than enthusiasm. Rousseau repeated what 
 others had said; but he did not advise: he com- 
 manded and was obeyed.^' 
 
 In bringing the mothers back to the cradles, Rous- 
 seau was not solely concerned with the child's in- 
 terest and its physical needs. "If he demanded the 
 nurse's milk, it was to have the mother's affection." 
 
 In his eyes, the child is, as it were, the bearer of the 
 family virtues, the pledge and at the same time the 
 guarantee of conjugal love. It is the sacred bond 
 which indissolubly unites husband and wife. It is 
 the child which sustains and rekindles the domestic 
 hearth, by the joy which its winning presence brings 
 to it, as by the common duties which its education 
 imposes. In the appeal which Rousseau addresses 
 to parents, the father is no more forgotten than the 
 mother. After saying : "Would you recall every one 
 to his highest duties? Begin with the mothers," he 
 adds: "As the mother is the true nurse, the father 
 
ROUSSEAU 39 
 
 is the true teacher. . . . The father will make 
 excuses : business, he will say, duties. . . . Doubt- 
 less, the least important is to be a father ! . . .'' 
 
 But let us return to Rousseau's chimeras, to what 
 he himself described in his Preface as the ^^ dreams 
 of a visionary," without giving up the idea of 
 seeking and finding in them some grains of truth. 
 To the illusion of negative education is attached that 
 of ^^ successive'' education. Here Rousseau is going 
 to contradict his essential principle, which is to 
 follow nature. If there be, indeed, a fixed law of 
 nature, it is that she creates nething abruptly, but 
 always proceeds by slow, imperceptible evolution. 
 '^With her," says Mme. Necker de Saussure, ^'one 
 can nowhere lay hold on a beginning ; she is not to 
 be surprised in the act of creation, and it seems that 
 she is forever developing." From this very accurate 
 conception has issued the fine system of '^progressive 
 education." But Rousseau imagined another thing : 
 a fragmentary, seriate education, divided into three 
 periods. He forgets that nature makes the several 
 functions of a human creature advance abreast in 
 their development, and that education should ac- 
 cordingly conform to this simultaneous evolution 
 of the various bodil}^ and mental faculties. Quite 
 otherwise, he shatters the true unity of the human 
 being. ''It is," says Mme. d'Epinay, "as though 
 
40 ROUSSEAU 
 
 children were forbidden to move their arms and use 
 their hands whilst learning to walk." In the first 
 place, by an absolute dualism, Rousseau disasso- 
 ciates the mind from the body. *' Nature intended 
 the body to develop before the mind.'' But of the 
 mind itself, instead of one, he makes three. In the 
 artificial story of Emile, there are three phases, 
 radically distinct and separate from each other. 
 Until twelve years old, physical hfe and sense 
 exercise: nothing for either intelligence or heart. 
 Emile, at the age of twelve, is only a hardy animal, 
 an agile '^roebuck.'' From twelve to fifteen, the 
 intellectual age, the very short period of study, in 
 which the child is rapidly initiated into the elements 
 of useful knowledge, is no longer submitted to the 
 necessary power of the natural laws, reflects at last, 
 and decides in accordance with a fresh principle, 
 the idea of utihty. Lastly, — third period, — after 
 the age of fifteen, sentiment and duty make their 
 long-delayed appearance, ^^We enter upon the 
 moral order." Abruptly, the social formation of 
 the man comes under consideration. 
 
 Such is Rousseau's bizarre programme: thus he 
 establishes three superposed divisions of education, 
 three stages ; and one may ask how, after this arti- 
 ficial distribution of the individual, the three sections 
 of the human person can join together again, and 
 
ROUSSEAU 41 
 
 combine to reconstitute the natural entirety formed 
 by the body and the mind. 
 
 None the less, there is, as always, a proportion of 
 just, true observation in Rousseau's arbitrary theory. 
 He is right in desiring that consideration be given 
 to the characteristics proper to each age of hfe, and 
 that, for example, a child be treated, not as a man, 
 but as a child. ^ ' Treat your pupil as his age demands. 
 The wisest, '^ says he, — and he evidently intends to 
 refer to Locke, — '^devote themselves to what a man 
 should know, without considering what children 
 are able to learn. They always seek the man in the 
 child, without thinking of what he is before he be- 
 comes a man." And again: ^^Let infancy mature 
 in the child. We have often heard of a finished man ; 
 let us at last think of a ^finished child.'" 
 
 On this point, Rousseau is not in agreement with 
 some of our modern educators, even with those who 
 draw their inspiration most from him. In a recent 
 book, which is extremely interesting, UEducation 
 nouvelle, M. Demolins, the founder of the school of 
 les Roches, the innovator who with praiseworthy 
 zeal is striving to acclimatize in France certain 
 portions of the manly, free English education, M. 
 Demohns formulates a contrary opinion. According 
 to him, it is never too soon to treat a child as a man. 
 '* Treated as men," says he, ^^ children actually and 
 
42 ROUSSEAU 
 
 speedily become men." And he quotes the anec- 
 dote of a child of nine, who, very quickly indeed, — 
 in two hours, — really became a man, simply because, 
 having been received with his parents by an Enghsh 
 family, the three members of this family took him 
 seriously during his visit, and were wilHng to talk 
 with him the whole time ! . . . 
 
 To form men, to '^ manufacture " them, as it is now 
 expressed, is the perpetual dream of educators of all 
 times and countries. To have a certain measure 
 of success, it is perhaps desirable to adopt a course 
 somewhere between the two extreme opinions of 
 M. Demohns and of Rousseau. On the one hand, 
 it is never too early to school a child in his duty and 
 to prepare the apprenticeship of personal responsi- 
 bihty by appeahng to his reason and reflection, 
 and Rousseau errs in causing the delays of which 
 we know to this education of reason. On the other 
 hand, however, — and here Rousseau triumphs, — 
 it must not be forgotten that the child is a child, 
 and that he cannot be required to exercise judgment 
 and act as a free man when his judgment is not 
 formed nor his hberty created. Our two peda- 
 gogues, moreover, are at bottom more in agreement 
 than one would think. They neither wish for a 
 premature instruction which throws the child from 
 the beginning into abstract studies, and according 
 
ROUSSEAU 43 
 
 to Goethe ^s expressions, tends to make him into ^'a, 
 subtle philosopher, a scholar, and not a man." 
 M. DemoHns certainly would indorse this conclu- 
 sion of Rousseau^s : '^The ordinary education is bad 
 because is makes old children and young professors/' 
 In the same way, as regards moral education, M. 
 Demolins, who is especially opposed to disciphne 
 based on ^Hhe principle of authority," cannot but 
 applaud Rousseau^s exaggerations, since the latter 
 expressly does away with all authority, and cen- 
 sures parents and masters who have never early 
 enough ^^ corrected, reprimanded, flattered, threat- 
 ened, promised, instructed, reasoned." 
 
 Where it is not permissible to fall in with Rous- 
 seau^s views is in the incomprehensible delay which 
 he imposes on moral education. This is, in another 
 manner, more pernicious than the adjournment of 
 intellectual culture. Emile has attained his fifteenth 
 year, and has not as yet felt any human sentiment. 
 Whom does he love? Nobody, save perhaps his 
 tutor, the only man whom he knows. His mind has 
 not been opened to any of those infantile affections 
 which prepare the social virtues. By what miracle 
 will he suddenly learn to love mankind, after hving 
 so long in the cold, sterile isolation of a strictly indi- 
 vidual life ? Rousseau, truly, is too summary in the 
 recital of his pedagogic methods. He says, '^ Emile 
 
44 ROUSSEAU 
 
 is this; Sophie is that." He endows both of them 
 with all kinds of marvellous quahties and virtues; 
 but he neglects to tell us how they have been ac- 
 quired. Concerning the genesis of affectionate sen- 
 timent, it is evident that he is reckoning on a mirac- 
 ulous result which he has done nothing to prepare. 
 He has left Emile^s heart empty for fifteen years, and 
 in an instant he thinks that he can fill it. What a 
 delusion ! Love cannot be taught like calculation. 
 The formation of social feehng is a deUcate and 
 difficult matter. Rousseau, moreover, compUcates 
 the problem by submitting Emile to the laws of 
 egoism alone. As Condillac, by a series of subtle 
 transformations, derives from primal sensation the 
 most abstract and general notions, so does Rousseau 
 pretend, by a strange metamorphosis, to obtain 
 from initial egoism alone all the altruistic sentiments. 
 Self-respect is, in his eyes, the sole and fundamental 
 atom of sensibihty. How could he forget that other 
 atom, sympathy, which makes itself apparent from 
 the dawn of fife, and whose development cannot 
 too soon be encouraged and stimulated? In the 
 smile which a new-born babe directs towards the one 
 who suckles and cares for it, there is more than the 
 expression of a material need satisfied : there is the 
 instinctive response of the child to the considerate 
 tenderness of the mother. ''So long as the child 
 
ROUSSEAU 45 
 
 pays attention only to what affects his senses, 
 arrange for all his ideas to be Hmited to sensations. 
 L . ." No, on the contrary, let us open wide the 
 door for the sentiments, which are, indeed, only too 
 ready to enter. With children, it is necessary at 
 once to mingle mind with body. 
 
 It is known that Rousseau, in his mania for post- 
 ponement, delayed until adolescence the revelation 
 of religious as well as moral ideas. The reason which 
 he gives is that a child, with its purely emotional 
 imagination — and it is very Hkely the fault of nega- 
 tive education if this be the case — could only form 
 a superstitious idea of God, and would picture him 
 as a human being, an old white-bearded man, a 
 monarch seated on a throne. . . . Hence the pro- 
 priety of awaiting the age of reason before speaking 
 of God to Emile, so that he may straightway form a 
 conception of him in the ideal subUmity of his 
 spiritual attributes. At least, if he has deferred 
 to the age of eighteen the revelation of the Supreme 
 Being, Rousseau makes up for it by the splendor 
 in which he invests him. He was a deist in all 
 sincerity. He beUeved in God with as much con- 
 viction as he beheved in the soul and in a future Hfe : 
 '^I desire too greatly that there be a God, not to 
 believe in him. . . .'^ Without seeking verification 
 in his other writings, the Profession de foi du vicaire 
 
46 ROUSSEAU 
 
 Savoyard demonstrates it in a striking manner. It 
 was, in his opinion, the principal portion of Emile. 
 For it he would have sacrificed all the rest. It was 
 that part of his manuscript that he intrusted to the 
 keeping of his surest friends, fearing, in the perpetual 
 apprehensions which the printing of the work caused 
 him, that his enemies, and particularly the Jesuits, 
 might cause it to disappear. This was the principal 
 cause of the wrath and tempest of persecution which 
 were about to be let loose against him. It was this, 
 on the other hand, which earned him the enthu- 
 siastic praise and even the admiration of Voltaire ; 
 for it is of the Profession de foi that Voltaire, so hard 
 upon Emile, intended to speak, when he says that this 
 ^^ stupid novel'' contains, however, '^ fifty pages which 
 deserve to be bound in morocco." At a distance, 
 and despite a superb setting and a magnificent style, 
 the Profession de foi, which is somewhat of a digres- 
 sion in an educational treatise, strikes us as an 
 emphatic declamation of a vague, irresolute spirit- 
 uaHsm. Its intrinsic value as a philosophical work 
 is, however, of small importance. The fault we find 
 with it is that it is the first word of rehgion which 
 Rousseau made his pupil hear, if so it be that he 
 really wishes to develop rehgious feeHng in him. 
 That Rousseau's conception cannot be realized is 
 indisputable: if Emile livedo hke all children, in a 
 
ROUSSEAU 47 
 
 family and in the world, he would be a witness of 
 exterior manifestations of religion on the part of his 
 parents and fellow-citizens, and in his curiosity 
 he would speedily ask what all this means : to hide 
 God from him would be impossible. But that is not 
 the question : what does matter, is to know whether 
 the method employed by Rousseau responds to his 
 intentions, whether it is of a nature to insure their 
 success. I should think it excellent rather to pro- 
 duce atheists. Will not Emile, who has dispensed 
 with God for so long, be tempted to dispense with 
 him altogether? In his desire to communicate to 
 his pupil the sentiment of rehgion with which he him- 
 self was so thoroughly imbued, Rousseau ought to 
 have taken thought that here also a slow develop- 
 ment is necessary, that Emile^s temporary atheism 
 is in great danger of becoming fixed, quite as much 
 as his egoism or his intellectual inertia. 
 
 In this, as in many another particular, Rousseau 
 has not followed his principle, which is to obey the 
 laws of nature. Borrowing from him one of his 
 metaphorical methods of expression, one would be 
 tempted to imagine that ^^Nature," speaking, would 
 address him nearly as follows : — 
 
 ''Truly, Rousseau, I should be very ungrateful, 
 did I not hail you as one of the mortals who have 
 most exerted themselves to restore my dominion. 
 
48 ROUSSEAU 
 
 You have avowed yourself my faithful servant. 
 Your incense has burned on my altars. You have 
 practised, with sincere enthusiasm, a simple, frugal 
 life, rustic pleasures, and innocent manners, in a 
 society given up to luxurious tastes, to vice, and the 
 compUcations of worldly Hfe. You have shown the 
 dawn to people who used not to rise till noon. You 
 have taken into the open air, into the broad sun- 
 shine, Httle children who were fading away in the 
 vitiated atmosphere of great towns. You have pro- 
 tested against unnatural requirements and the 
 caprice and artifice of fashion. You have endeav- 
 ored to restore to humanity the simpUcity of the 
 primal ages. ... All praise to you for this. 
 
 '^But on how many points, beheving your ii 
 spiration to come from me alone, you neverthelef 
 have erred? I have no proof that you really ur 
 derstand my nature. Everybody around you speak 
 'of the mystery of nature's law.' Are you quit 
 sure that you have thrown light upon this myster 
 and penetrated it ? 
 
 ''What am I in your eyes? 'The sum total, yoL 
 say, of humanity's instinctive tendencies before 
 falsified by opinion.' You forget that 'opinion' 
 has been in part formed by me ; that society is my 
 work, that I founded it, and count for much in its 
 organization. It seems that, in your mind, I have 
 
ROUSSEAU 49 
 
 remained, congealing in my immobility the wild, 
 primitive nature of the world's earhest ages. No, 
 I am not a motionless, invariable force. I advance 
 and keep abreast of progress. Some one who has no 
 liking for you, but who has much wit, said humorously 
 that you were making humanity move backwards 
 to the barbarian epoch in which men walked on all 
 fours and ate acorns. ... I grant you that Vol- 
 taire exaggerates; but all the same, by vaunting 
 the benefits of ignorance, by execrating arts and 
 letters and all the works of civiUzation, have you 
 not given excuse for this raillery ? 
 
 ^^ Heedlessly you ask that a clean sweep be made 
 of ^^"erything that your ancestors have instituted, 
 wh ,3as these institutions and customs have often 
 bee .1 dictated to them by me. You wish, in edu- 
 ca1 )n, to take in everything the side opposed to 
 cuftom, but do you not see that ^custom,' which 
 yo condemn in its entirety, could not have lasted 
 frc M century to century, if it had not agreed in part 
 wi 1 the laws over which I preside ? 
 
 ' I do not wish to take your errors in detail, but 
 h(r3 is one. You rightly teach your dear Emile 
 n.' ural religion alone, the one religion which I can 
 a* ' nit. You are right, acclaiming behind me 
 F )vidence, my creator, to oppose the internal and 
 p ofound sentiment of conscience to vain and super- 
 
50 ROUSSEAU 
 
 stitious forms of ritual. . . . But why, in this re- 
 Hgious education, have you not acted in conformity 
 with human progress itself, which, guided by me, has 
 advanced from primitive superstition and the feeble 
 light of later theology, to the fuller Hght of pure 
 reason ? Your predecessor, Fenelon, who also pleased 
 me greatly by the effort which he made to approach 
 me nearly, was wiser; and if it really is necessary 
 that men remain behevers, he understood that the 
 one means of insuring their faith was to lay its 
 foundations early in the child^s mind, by introducing 
 to him at first, as I have done for humanity, per- 
 ceptible ideas of God, imperfect, confused notions, 
 whose superstitious imageries will gradually be dis- 
 sipated by reason, in proportion as it develops, in 
 order to exhibit, as far as human frailty permits, 
 the pure and rational conception of Him who made 
 me. . . . 
 
 '^To sum up, Rousseau, your great error, the 
 principal fault with which you will be reproached in 
 succeeding centuries — for I foresee the future — is 
 lack of belief in progress ; failure to divine the great 
 law of the perpetual evolution of things. You have 
 missed my most important characteristic, which is 
 ceaseless motion. The word 'progress' comes 
 often from your pen, but you always find it evil. 
 It is for you, or nearly so, a synonym for decadence 
 
ROUSSEAU 51 
 
 and corruption. . . . Your successors, on the con- 
 trary, will consider progress as my supreme law, 
 my essential principle, as the reason for the existence 
 of humanity and the world. They will understand 
 that nature is not the product of a day, that the suc- 
 cessive acquisitions of inheritance form an integral 
 portion of my substance. 
 
 '^Let your errors be forgiven you, however, for 
 70U have loved me greatly. Others will come after 
 you who will also think that they have defined me. 
 They also will, perchance, be mistaken ; for I am not 
 as simple as may be thought ; I am infinitely complex, 
 and I remain the impenetrable enigma, unfathom- 
 able in its designs, whose solution will perhaps never 
 be accompUshed by man. . . ." 
 
IV 
 
 By his visions, even those which were in contra- 
 diction with the nature whose patronage he was 
 invoking, Rousseau has rendered signal service to 
 the science and art of education. '^His errors/' said 
 P. Girard, ^^are themselves wholesome warnings." 
 By violently shaking traditionary usages, he awoke 
 minds slumbering in routine, and by his flights of 
 fancy he suggested and prepared just and practical 
 solutions. 
 
 But Emile contains also, and in large number, 
 general views and detailed facts concerning the 
 various branches of education which may be ac- 
 cepted straightway almost without revision. These 
 form, as it were, quite a cluster of flowers, which will 
 blossom eternally in the garden of education. How 
 many eloquent sayings, taken from Emile ^ do we 
 constantly hear ? How many maxims, fresh in 1762, 
 and become almost trivial at the present time, 
 form the current coin of our pedagogics? How 
 many others, wrongly neglected, will be found to be 
 of value to us ? 
 
 52 
 
ROUSSEAU 53 
 
 It is now commonplace to recommend physical edu- 
 cation. And Rousseau is not the first who, in mod- 
 ern times, by a reversion to the ancient mode of Hfe, 
 urged youth to bodily exercises. Ten years earUer, 
 Turgot wrote, ^^We have especially forgotten that 
 the formation of the body is a part of education." 
 Rousseau, on this subject, refers his reader to Mon- 
 taigne and Locke ; he might also have referred him 
 to Rabelais. None the less do we praise him for 
 having, in his turn, insisted forcibly on precepts 
 more frequently recommended than practised. Let 
 us be grateful to him for entering, as he does, into 
 minute details on clothing, length of sleep, and food, 
 thus clearing the way for the hygienists of childhood. 
 
 Emile must strive to ^^ combine the vigor of an 
 athlete with the reason of a sage." He must think 
 like a philosopher and work like a peasant. Bodily 
 exercise is not prejudicial to the operations of the 
 mind. The two actions should proceed in harmony. 
 Sports were not yet fashionable in Rousseau's 
 time, and no one can blame him, when he prophesied 
 the French Revolution, for not having also predicted 
 the triumph of football. He at least recommends 
 swimming, which everybody can learn. Riding is 
 discarded, as too expensive. When he is twenty, 
 however, Emile will take rides, without prejudice 
 to his long excursions on foot. Rousseau, who had 
 
54 ROUSSEAU 
 
 walked across France, from Paris to Lyons, could 
 not help recommending pedestrian exercise. It is, 
 however, of the infant, principally, that Rousseau 
 thinks. Even before it can walk, it will be taken 
 daily into the lields and meadows, to froHc, to run 
 about as soon as it can. Let there be no longer any 
 question of an effeminate, confined education, suit- 
 able for maldng ^'scholars without muscle/' Health 
 and physical force are to be considered first. Rous- 
 seau comes back to this subject in his Considerations 
 sur le gouvernement de Pologne. In this work he 
 calls for the estabhshment in every school of a 
 gymnasium for bodily exercise. ^^This is,'' says he, 
 'Hhe most important item in education, not only as 
 regards the formation of a robust constitution, but 
 even more on the score of morality. ..." 
 
 Indeed, it is not solely from hygienic motives, 
 nor for the strengthening of the body, that Rousseau 
 proposes his scheme of education in the country, with 
 full hberty of movement, open-air excursions, and 
 joyous gambols : he sees in physical exercise a means 
 of development of moral power, — a prelude to edu- 
 cation in courage and innate virtue. Rousseau 
 seems to be inspired by memories of Spartan life 
 or Stoic doctrine. His Emile is rigorously brought 
 up ; he is inured to cold and heat and accustomed 
 to privation. None of his caprices, supposing such 
 
ROUSSEAU 55 
 
 possible in nature ^s pupil, are acceded to. If he 
 is granted what he asks for, it is not on account of 
 his having made the request, but because it is known 
 that it is really needed. And Rousseau, who a mo- 
 ment ago was wisely returning from paradox to 
 common sense, now, inversely, and with equal 
 facility, passes from equitable, just precept to ridicu- 
 lous and absurd exaggeration. Emile is to walk 
 barefoot ; he is to go about in the dark, without a 
 candle or other Hght. He will, perhaps, learn in this 
 way to have no fear of the dark, but will he not run 
 the risk of a broken neck, ^Hhe eyes which he has 
 at his finger-tips'' seeming scarcely sufficient to 
 insure him against a slip or a fall ? Let us pass 
 by these eccentricities in which Rousseau's genius 
 goes astray, and let us be satisfied with proving that 
 he anticipated all those who, nowadays, demand an 
 active, manly education, which shall produce vigor- 
 ous men, dexterous of Hmb and capable of standing 
 face to face with danger; ready and able to render 
 practical assistance both to themselves and others ; 
 truly equipped for fife as regards its material oc- 
 cupations as well as its difficulties and moral trials. 
 To view Rousseau's famous theory on the neces- 
 sity of serving an apprenticeship in a manual occu- 
 pation from the utihtarian standpoint alone, would 
 be to misinterpret his intentions. Undoubtedly, he 
 
56 ROUSSEAU 
 
 saw in it a resource, an assured livelihood, should 
 there come a time of adversity and ruin. A presci- 
 ent thought for the rich man, suddenly reduced to 
 poverty and obliged to work for his Uving, is not 
 foreign to Rousseau^s scheme. ^^We are drawing 
 near the age of revolutions. Who can say what 
 will then become of you?'' If, however, he makes 
 Emile a joiner, not a mock joiner, but a real workman, 
 who attends his workshop regularly, and does not 
 allow even the visit of his betrothed to distract him 
 from his occupation — there are other motives gov- 
 erning him : he wishes to reinstate work, and more 
 especially, manual work. ^^Rich or poor, whosoever 
 does not work is a cheat.'' There is also the peda- 
 gogical consideration that it is not alone the head, 
 the brain of a man, which must be exercised, as 
 though the brain were the entire man. We should be 
 able to use our hands as well as our reason, and 
 because it develops physical capability, endurance, 
 exertion, and practical acquirements, manual labor 
 is good for everybody. Rousseau would have en- 
 dorsed these recent words of M. Jules Lemaitre: 
 ^^Our collegians' time, wasted twice over by them, 
 since they spend it in not learning a dead language 
 which, if learned, would be of Httle use to them, 
 might better be employed, I do not say in studying 
 living tongues, natural science, and geography, — 
 
ROUSSEAU 57 
 
 that is too apparent, — but in games, gymnastics, 
 and joinery. . . /' Especially would he be de- 
 hghted to see in what honor the manual occupation 
 to which he gave the preference is held in certain 
 modern schools, in England, for example, at Bedale 
 College, the protot3^e of M. Demohns' des Roches 
 school, where gardening and farm work is succeeded 
 by exercise in woodwork. The pupils are seen 
 bringing real enthusiasm to the making of boxes, 
 racks, and book shelves, on which they then place 
 books bound by themselves. 
 
 The education of the sense is intimately connected 
 with that of the body. ^^Not only have we arms 
 and legs, we also have eyes and ears.'^ In this, again, 
 Rousseau is an excellent guide. Pestalozzi, and all 
 the patrons of the intuitive method, all those who 
 preach the lessons of things, are only his disciples. 
 Everything else depends on the education of the 
 senses. Rousseau has sometimes been compared 
 with Descartes. He would have been the ' ' Descartes 
 of sensibility '' following the Descartes of under- 
 standing. It is more accurate to Hken him to Con- 
 dillac, whom he classed ^^ among the best reasoners 
 and most profound metaphysicians of his time.^' 
 Like the author of the Trait e des sensations, he 
 accepts the maxim, ^^ Everything that enters the 
 understanding comes through the senses.^' The 
 
58 ROUSSEAU 
 
 senses are 'Hhe first faculties to form in us : the first, 
 accordingly, to be cultivated." To this cultivation 
 Rousseau devotes the twelve years of childhood, 
 satisfied if, '^ after this long journey through the 
 region of sensations to the boundaries of childish 
 reason,'' he has succeeded in forming Emile into a 
 sensitive being, able to see, hear, feel, calculate dis- 
 tance, and compare quantities and weights. . . . 
 ^'Yonder is a very ^ high cherry tree; how can we 
 manage to gather some cherries? Will the ladder 
 in the neighboring barn do ? There is a very wide 
 brook; will one of the planks lying in the yard be 
 long enough to cross by? . . ." 
 
 Emile, who uses the plane adroitly later on, is 
 clever in the use of his fingers at an early age. Rous- 
 seau, who does not say much of how he taught him 
 to write, being ashamed, as he says, of troubUng 
 over such trifles, — and yet speUing is not taught by 
 nature, — takes great interest in the study of draw- 
 ing: '^Children, who are great imitators, all try 
 to draw." In these attempts, however, it is not 
 the art of drawing for its own sake which Rousseau 
 values so highly, it is more on account of the profit 
 accruing from it to the training of the senses and 
 the organs of the body. Practice in drawing makes 
 the eye more accurate and the hand more flexible. 
 The child, of course, is only to draw from nature ; 
 
ROUSSEAU 59 
 
 he is not to imitate imitations; objects will be his 
 only models. Let us add that all idea of beauty is 
 absent from this first initiation into the material 
 representation of things. Rousseau is not thinking 
 of producing an artist ; the result will, at most, be 
 a geometrician; moreover, if he recommends draw- 
 ing, it is less for Emile to imitate objects than to be- 
 come acquainted with them. 
 
 Sensations prepare ideas. By perceiving objects 
 clearly, Emile trains himself to judge, that is to 
 say, to grasp their affinities. His first judgments, 
 however, are confined strictly to the domain of tangible 
 knowledge. He must obtain his instruction from 
 actual objects and not from words. '^Do not talk 
 to the child of matters which it cannot understand. 
 Use no descriptions, no eloquence, no figurative lan- 
 guage. Be satisfied with introducing him to ob- 
 jects opportunely. Let us transform our sensations 
 into ideas, but without leaping at one bound from 
 perceptible to intellectual objects. — Turgot had 
 already said: 'I wish abstract and general notions 
 to come to children in the same way that they come 
 to men, — by degrees, and by a regular progress from 
 sensible ideas.' — Let us pass slowly from one sen- 
 sible idea to another. In general, never replace a 
 thing by its representation unless it be impossible 
 to show the thing itself. I dishke explanations and 
 
60 ROUSSEAU 
 
 discourses. Things ? things ? I cannot repeat often 
 enough that we attach too much importance to 
 words; our chattering education produces nothing 
 but chatterers. . , J^ 
 
 A time comes, however, when the employment of 
 words and abstract ideas is forced upon us, when 
 something more than perceptible objects must be 
 studied. In the selection of studies which he offers 
 Emile, Rousseau is obedient to a principle, a single 
 criterion, — that of utility. This great visionary is 
 a utihtarian. His programme certainly is short : it 
 is calculated to displease those who demand a com- 
 plete education, universal knowledge for a youth. 
 But in his practical tendencies he inaugurates, with 
 omissions, the programmes of reahstic instruction 
 which will be adopted more and more for fresh gen- 
 erations. Rousseau may well be the father of this 
 instruction which our contemporaries are endeavor- 
 ing, not without gropings, to estabhsh and organize 
 under the fine title of up-to-date education. The 
 name is found: the thing itself is by no means 
 reaUzed. 
 
 However this may be, the end in view is now 
 settled. A fact which must be recognized is that 
 intellectual education should be a direct preparation 
 for life, and that the current system is in part bad 
 and doomed to disappear, because, between the 
 
ROUSSEAU 61 
 
 ultra-speculative studies which it inflicts on youth 
 and the reahties of existence, between the scholar's 
 Mfe and the man's calling, there is a profound disa- 
 greement, — what Taine called an '^incompatibihty." 
 Goethe was even then saying, fifty years later than 
 Rousseau, however: ^^So much theoretical knowl- 
 edge, so much science, is what exhausts our young 
 people, both physically and morally. They lack 
 the physical and moral energy necessary to make 
 a suitable entry into the world. . . .'' 
 
 Rousseau's language is to the same effect. It has 
 been seen that he wished to endow Emile with physi- 
 cal energy. He was no less thoughtful for moral 
 energy. This philosopher, thought to be lost in the 
 land of chimera, says : ^^ When I see that, at the most 
 active time of life, youths are kept to purely specu- 
 lative studies, and are afterwards, without the least 
 experience, cast upon the world and into business, 
 it seems to me the offence against society is as great 
 as that against nature ; it does not, therefore, surprise 
 me that so few people know how to order their con- 
 duct. What bizarre deception causes the persistent 
 teaching of so many useless things, whilst the ^art 
 of action' counts for nothing? Nominally, we are 
 formed for society, and we are instructed as though 
 each of us had to pass his life in a cell, engaged in 
 solitary thought." 
 
62 ROUSSEAU 
 
 ^^The art of action/^ is not this the watchword of 
 future education ? To Rousseau belongs the credit 
 of having uttered it, though he may not have had 
 the talent necessary to combine the means which can 
 make it effective. There is some temptation to reply 
 to him that it is not by rearing Emile in solitude, ^^as 
 though he had to pass his Hfe in solitary thought" 
 in the fields, that a youth is made fit for actual 
 human hfe. But what does one more inconsistency 
 matter? Rousseau, at least, understood that in- 
 struction must be reheved of all the superfluity of 
 show study. He, however, carries this also to excess. 
 How can we refrain from reproving him for the way 
 in which he despises the old classical studies, the 
 ancient languages in particular, which he dares to 
 describe as '^a useless feature of education." As 
 an educator he went too far in rejecting the literary 
 sources, by draughts from which, as a thinker and 
 writer, he formed his genius. Men of letters will 
 protest, and not unreasonably, against such culpa- 
 ble infidehty; but all men of good sense will praise 
 him for having shown that the aim of education 
 is not the accumulation of sterile knowledge in the 
 memory; that it is the formation of inteUigence by 
 a discreet introduction to a moderate selection of 
 useful studies, giving preference to attainments 
 which nourish the mind and train it to be ready 
 
ROUSSEAU 63 
 
 for action, rather than to those attainments which 
 are only a useless ornament. 
 
 Emile has reached the age of fifteen: his short 
 studies have come to an end. He has little knowl- 
 edge, but he is prepared for knowledge of every kind, 
 and this is the most important consideration. Do 
 not take him for a scholar: he is not meant to be 
 one ; but he has a taste for knowledge. His natural 
 curiosity has been aroused. According to the say- 
 ing which Rousseau borrows from Montaigne, if not 
 taught, he is at least ^^ teachable." No prejudice 
 has perverted his mind or impaired the accuracy of 
 his judgment. He knows nothing on authority; 
 he has acquired all his knowledge for himself. He 
 has not been taught the facts themselves, so much as 
 the method of finding them out. He has been told 
 to look, and he has found. Thus will he continue 
 all his Hfe on the path to knowledge, which he has 
 been shown, '^long, stupendous, tedious to follow.'^ 
 
 In Rousseau's methods of instruction we perceive 
 two excellent tendencies : firstly, that, in order to 
 thoroughly master what is learned, a personal effort 
 is required, a research, a sort of original discovery, 
 and not merely an effort of memory and mechanical 
 acquisition; secondly, that the most important 
 thing is not the knowledge acquired at the end of 
 study, the fight baggage of attainments which serve 
 
64 ROUSSEAU 
 
 too often as an excuse for mental slumber after 
 leaving college, but the desire to enlarge one's 
 knowledge and aptitude for acquiring it. Those 
 who draw up the overladen, encyclopaedic pro- 
 grammes of our education, before beginning delib- 
 erations which almost always result in yet another 
 burden, even when schemes of reduction are the 
 order of the day, should read over and meditate 
 well upon this pleasing passage from Emile: ''When 
 I see a man carried away by his love for knowledge, 
 hastening from one alluring study to another, with- 
 out knowing where to stop, I think I see a child 
 gathering shells upon the seashore. At first he 
 loads himself with them ; then, tempted by others, 
 he throws these away and gathers more. At last, 
 weighed down by so many, he ends by throwing all 
 away, and returning empty-handed. . . .^' 'Is not 
 this a very clever and correct picture of many modern 
 scholars, weighed down by their burden of useless 
 acquirements, embarrassed with ideas of every kind, 
 disgusted by wearisome studies, and finally leaving 
 college almost empty-handed ? o Rousseau attaches 
 himself here to the great tradition of French peda- 
 gogics, a tradition too often set at naught in our 
 schemes for study. It advocates, as Nicole said, 
 ^Hhe use of knowledge only as an instrument for the 
 formation of reason"; which, of course, applies to 
 
ROUSSEAU 65 
 
 knowledge only in so far as it plays a part in that 
 general culture aimed at by secondary education. 
 
 If we now examine in detail the programme of 
 utiHtarian studies which Rousseau intends for Emile, 
 we shall be surprised more than once, both on ac- 
 count of what he includes and what he omits. 
 Rousseau is the most disconcerting and deceptive of 
 educators. Thus, he forbids the study of history, 
 and this is one of his most provoking paradoxes. 
 In this he is, however, logical with himself. Since 
 Emile is ^Ho be removed from humankind," he must 
 be denied knowledge of the dead as well as contact 
 with the living. History is the great agent by 
 which social consciousness is developed; now, in 
 his early education, Emile is only an individuahst, 
 a perfect egoist, without any social sentiment. It 
 is known, moreover, what special argument Rous- 
 seau advanced and upheld to excuse the omission 
 of history ; namely, that a child is incapable of un- 
 derstanding it. History is as much out of his reach 
 as the philosophic idea of God: as though there 
 were not a history for children, ^ history made up of 
 description, narrative, and great men's lives. For- 
 tunately, in the matter of history, as in so many 
 other things, Rousseau contradicted himself, and 
 to rectify his errors or correct his semi-voluntary 
 paradoxes, it is sufficient to appeal from Rousseau 
 
66 ROUSSEAU 
 
 to Rousseau. As legislator of the Polish govern- 
 ment, his language is quite different from that used 
 by the theorist of Emile, Far from condemning 
 history^ he will be found rather to carry it to 
 excess. 
 
 In language which, in its animation, recalls the 
 words used by Rabelais to extol the study of natural 
 science when he makes Gargantua say to his son: 
 ^^I want you to be acquainted with the fish of every 
 sea, river, and spring, — with all the birds of the 
 air, the trees and shrubs of the forest, and all the 
 herbs of the earth; . . .'' similarly, Rousseau says: 
 ^^I want the young Pole, when learning to read, to 
 read things concerning his country ; so that when he 
 is ten years old he shall be acquainted with all its 
 products ; when twelve, all its provinces, roads, and 
 towns; when fifteen, its entire history; when six- 
 teen, all its laws; thus, every fine deed which has 
 been done, and every noted man who shall have 
 lived, in all Poland, shall fill his heart and mind." 
 The education of a httle citizen, a future patriot, 
 could not have a better preparation. Let us take 
 note, however, that Rousseau's retraction is not 
 complete ; he speaks only of national history, leav- 
 ing the general history of mankind, which has no 
 interest for him, a sealed book to his pupil. 
 
 Emile, having been cheated of knowledge of the 
 
ROUSSEAU 67 
 
 ethical world, will, in compensation, be nourished 
 with knowledge of the material world. The study of 
 nature must come before everything else. Is not 
 the same thing thought at the present day by the 
 educators of the United States, who attach so much 
 importance to knowledge of natural truths ? What 
 does cause surprise, is that, in his programme, 
 Rousseau should put astronomy in the forefront. 
 Auguste Comte also mentions it first in his cata- 
 logue of sciences and in his system of positive edu- 
 cation. One has the right to ask why. Utility 
 cannot be its recommendation. Emile is to travel, 
 but he is not intended to navigate, and it does not 
 seem at all hkely that he would find a knowledge of 
 the constellations and heavenly bodies of any use 
 to him. Likely enough what decided Rousseau was 
 the fact that astronomy, physical astronomy at 
 least, is one of the sciences most suitable for the 
 appUcation of his beloved method, — the method of 
 conscious and direct observation of things. Emile, 
 who does not know what a class room or a study is, 
 gains his knowledge in the open; he contemplates 
 nature's great spectacles, and reflects in the presence 
 of the starry sky. 
 
 In virtue of the same system, astronomy is fol- 
 lowed by physical science and geography, keeping 
 to tangible and concrete studies in which abstrac- 
 
68 ROUSSEAU 
 
 tion plays the least important part. Emile learns 
 geography without maps, during his walks and in 
 presence of the actual objects. ^'Why all these 
 representations ? . . . I recollect seeing somewhere 
 a text-book on geography which began thus : ^ What 
 is the world? — A pasteboard globe.' . . .'' The 
 only method of preventing these fallacies is to in- 
 troduce to the child the thing itself and not its arti- 
 ficial representation. 
 
 An elementary knowledge of astronomy, physics, 
 and geography will be practically everything till the 
 age of fifteen is reached. Has Emile learned gram- 
 mar? Not otherwise than by using his mother- 
 tongue and hearing his master talk : ^^ Always speak 
 correctly in his presence." At all events, at this 
 age, he as yet knows nothing of either ancient or 
 modern literature. Poets and prose-writers of every 
 degree are as unknown to him as historians. Rous- 
 seau, before Condorcet and so many others, is already 
 an expert in scientific education; but in science 
 itself he rejects all that is pure speculation and 
 abstract generaUty. He admits that there is a 
 chain of general truths by which all sciences are 
 linked to common principles and successively un- 
 folded. But '^with this we have nothing to do" in 
 the formation of the mind. ^^ There is another, 
 altogether different, which shows each object as the 
 
ROUSSEAU 69 
 
 cause of another, and always points out the one 
 following. This order, which by a perpetual curi- 
 osity keeps ahve the attention demanded by all, 
 is the one followed by most men, and of all others 
 necessary with children/' Thus, in the study of 
 physics, arrangements will be made to connect all 
 experiments by a kind of deduction, so that, assisted 
 by this connection, children can arrange them 
 methodically in their minds, and recall them when 
 required. All this, however, only deals with the 
 estabHshment of a material order between percep- 
 tible truths. To the senses, Rousseau subordinates 
 even the deduction of ideas and their Hnking to- 
 gether. No doubt it is on this account that mathe- 
 matics do not figure in Rousseau's programme. 
 Emile, who is forbidden to read even La Fontaine's 
 Fables, on the ground that he would not understand 
 them, does not seem to be any more acquainted with 
 arithmetical rules. . . . Decidedly his instruction 
 is insufficient and hmited. Rousseau had none of 
 that holy horror of ignorance which characterizes 
 later educators: '^Ignorance," said he, ''never did 
 harm ; error alone is pernicious." Education has an 
 importance beyond instruction. ''We prefer good 
 men to scholars." 
 
 Rousseau is more happily inspired in the educa- 
 tion of the will than he is when dealing with the 
 
70 ROUSSEAU 
 
 mind. Despite appearances, and despite the con- 
 tinual presence of a guardian whose surveillance 
 would not seem altogether favorable to the develop- 
 ment of individuality, Emile is really brought up in 
 liberty. It is certain, and we do not forget it, that 
 Rousseau was chiefly deficient in character and 
 energy. He could never overcome temptation. 
 ^'It was always impossible for me to act against 
 my inchnation.'' All through his hfe he was the 
 plaything of circumstances, the victim of his pas- 
 sions. This, however, rather disposed him to desire 
 for Emile a better education than the one from 
 which he himself suffered, an education of a kind to 
 accustom a child to act on his own initiative, in 
 fine, an education of '^ self-government": '^The 
 child must be left to himself, both as regards body 
 and mind. The boon of freedom is worth many 
 scars." 
 
 By emancipating the child, Rousseau intends, 
 primarily, to make him happy, and that at once; 
 for the poor Httle one may die young, and before 
 he dies he must taste hfe. Now a child^s happiness, 
 like a man's, consists in the exercise of libert3^ 
 Rousseau had a sincere affection for children. In 
 all his wise recommendations concerning the care 
 to be taken with an infant, an inspiration of ten- 
 derness almost unknown before his time may be 
 
ROUSSEAU 71 
 
 detected, a lively feeling of pity for these frail 
 creatures who are, as a first consideration, to be 
 made to hve. What a number of tender things he 
 has written on children ! What treasures of affec- 
 tion left unused by this culpable father! '^Nature 
 made children to be loved and succored. . . . 
 Does it not seem as though a child displays such a 
 sweet face and affecting manner only that every- 
 thing which comes near it may be touched by its 
 feebleness and may hasten to its assistance?" 
 Tutors of all ages will have to draw inspiration from 
 cautions hke the following: '^If you do not open 
 your heart, others^ hearts will remain closed to 
 you. It is your care and affection that you must 
 give." 
 
 But beyond the child^s present, and the joy in life 
 which he wishes to insure for it immediately, Rous- 
 seau also thought of the future, and the require- 
 ments of social Hfe. By the independence which 
 he grants it from the cradle, when he abohshes the 
 imprisonment of swaddhng clothes; as later, in 
 boyhood^s years, when he wars against prohibitions 
 and verbal injunctions, in order to substitute for 
 them instruction from facts alone and the hving 
 lessons of example, — ^^ Example, example ! lacking 
 this, success with children was never obtained;" — 
 when, finally, he appeals to all that is spontaneous 
 
72* ROUSSEAU 
 
 in the intelligence and personal in the will of his 
 pupil, it is evident that he wishes, in this way, to 
 form men of stronger physique, more vigorous 
 morals, and greater control over their actions, than 
 the scholars of old-style colleges, in the austerity of 
 their cloistered Ufe, were prepared to become, and 
 than the students of our modern high schools are, 
 even at the present day, in spite of the achievement 
 of so much progress. 
 
 Note, however, that Emile's education is by no 
 means one of complacency and enervating laxity: 
 rather is he submitted to a regimen of severity. 
 His room is in every way like a peasant's. And if 
 Rousseau has made a gleam of joy shine in his Ufe 
 by the Hberty which he grants him, he none the 
 less wishes the child to know how to bear suffering. 
 Suffering will leave Emile stronger, and is the first 
 thing that he must learn. Primarily, he is thus 
 early armed against the evils which existence has 
 in store for him. But he also learns to sympathize 
 with the misfortunes of others. 
 
 Man is an apprentice, with affliction for his master. 
 
 EarHer than De Musset, Rousseau said in his fine 
 prose, '^The man who is ignorant of affliction, knows 
 neither human tenderness nor the sweetness of 
 commiseration." 
 
 In spite of the sort of antisocial sequestration 
 
ROUSSEAU 73 
 
 which Rousseau imposed on 6mile for fifteen years, 
 it must not be imagined that he gave up all idea of 
 making a feehng, loving being of him a little later. 
 Even as a child, he must be shown '^this world^s 
 unfortunates." The spirit of fraternity fills Rous- 
 seau ^s generous soul to overflowing: '^Proclaim 
 yourself aloud the protector of the unhappy. Be 
 just, humane, and kindly. Do not give alms alone, 
 give charity." Rousseau advances toward modern 
 sociahsm. Note, for example, this bold reflection: 
 '^AVhen poor people were wilUng there should be 
 rich people, the rich promised to take care of those 
 without means of subsistence, either from their 
 property or labor." Arrived at man's estate, 
 Emile spends a part of his time in doing good to 
 those around him. When in love, he does not allow 
 the thought of Sophie alone to absorb him. He 
 interrupts his attentions to his betrothed that he 
 may act as a true philanthropist. He travels the 
 country ; he examines the land, its productions, and 
 their cultivation; he himself ploughs on occasion. 
 His knowledge of natural history is utihzed for the 
 benefit of the cultivators; he teaches them better 
 methods. He visits the peasants in their homes; 
 and, after inquiring into their needs, he helps them 
 with his person and his money. Does a peasant 
 fall ill? He has him cared for; he himself attends 
 
74 ROUSSEAU 
 
 to him. Simple medicine, indeed, and such as can 
 be allowed by an enemy of doctors, consisting, as it 
 does, in more substantial nourishment. He makes 
 his future wife a partner in these good works: he 
 takes her to visit the poor, to see a laborer who 
 has broken his leg, and whose wife is about to be 
 confined. ''With her gentle, light hand,'' Sophie 
 puts dressings on the wounded man : she waits on, 
 pities, and consoles him. 
 
 By birth and extraction Rousseau was of the 
 people. He remained one of them by the simpHcity 
 of his tastes, living like a laborer, fond of associat- 
 ing with the lowly, though at times he did not 
 disdain the complaisance of great lords, and was not 
 insensible to the caresses of great ladies. Does this 
 imply that in his educational projects he worked 
 directly for the people and for the people's instruc- 
 tion ? No. Emile, if not a gentleman hke Locke's 
 pupil, is at any rate of the middle classes, rich and 
 well born. But by the fact that he eliminated ancient 
 languages and all expensive studies, and replaced 
 ''book" education by the simple, natural cultivation 
 of the talents which every human creature brings 
 into the world at its birth, Rousseau suggested 
 the idea of the universal emancipation of inteUi- 
 gence; he inspired the democratic idea of making 
 instruction general. He did not wish for the "cere- 
 
ROUSSEAU 75 
 
 monious'' education of the rich, for what he still 
 called '^exclusive'' education, which only tends to 
 distinguish from the common people those who have 
 received it. Moreover, the object being to make 
 men, and not scholars, the poor would, in truth, 
 ^^ require no education.^' Freed by their Hfe of 
 toil from all the conventions of society, subjected 
 to nature's laws alone, ^Hhe poor can of themselves 
 become men." 
 
 Rousseau — and for it he has been severely 
 blamed — wished to form, not a man of a certain 
 station, or of a settled profession, but just a man. 
 He thought too much, says Taine, of '^man in the 
 abstract,'' and not enough of actual man, such as he 
 is made by the circumstances of time and place, 
 and as he should be trained by education, so that he 
 may be fitted for his place in hfe. '^Whether my 
 pupil be intended for the army, the church, or the 
 bar, matters httle to me. Before he adopts the 
 vocation of his parents, nature calls upon him to 
 be a man. How to hve is the business I wish to 
 teach him. On leaving my hands, he will not, I 
 admit, be a magistrate, a soldier, or a priest : first 
 of all he will be a man. All that a man should be, 
 he can be." Let us give praise to Rousseau for 
 having reminded men that they have a personal 
 destiny, that first and foremoB-t they should, if pos- 
 
76 ROUSSEAU 
 
 sible, set up and strengthen in themselves the prin- 
 ciples of human dignity. Let us, however, censure 
 him for keeping too strictly to the absolute, without 
 considering the contingencies and relative conditions 
 which require the individual to graft on the common 
 stem that branch of special acquirements which the 
 place that he will occupy in hfe exacts, as a con- 
 dition of being worthily held. He did not suffi- 
 ciently reflect on the principle, which is becoming 
 more and more insistent on recognition, that edu- 
 cation must be diversified and speciaUzed in a score 
 of forms, that it may be in conformity with the 
 various exigencies of social [labor, no less than in 
 correspondence with the multiplicity of individual 
 talents. Rousseau has erred in a manner analogous 
 to those religious educators who, forgetful of the 
 present hfe, and thoughtful only for the hfe to 
 come, — which alone has any value in their eyes, — 
 aspire only to the rearing of a pure and virtuous 
 creature for the bhss of hfe everlasting. The 
 philosopher of nature and ideal humanity joins 
 hands, without suspecting it, with the mystical 
 constructors of God's City. When his '^one and 
 indivisible" education is finished, Emile may be the 
 type of a man; but he must not be expected to be 
 an engineer, a doctor, or a lawyer. Of what use, 
 then, will he be in society, since he can bring no 
 
ROUSSEAU 77 
 
 special attainments beyond those proper to his trade 
 of joiner ? 
 
 It is well that Emile has learned a manual trade ; 
 it is well that he is '^fit for all stations of life '^ ; but 
 perhaps no harm would ensue from the addition of 
 a professional preparation for one of the functions 
 to which society calls men. 
 
 At times, however, the practical spirit awakens in 
 Rousseau and timidly takes its revenge. After he 
 has betrothed Emile to Sophie, he forces him to 
 leave her and travel abroad for two years. By a 
 fresh contradiction, Rousseau, who so long kept 
 Emile from coming into contact with his own com- 
 patriots, and did not introduce him into society till 
 he was twenty, now enlarges the circle of his social 
 connections to the extent of wishing him to enter 
 into relations with the men of other countries. 
 Travel, says he, forms part of education : travel, not 
 for pleasure, however, but for instruction and study, 
 a kind of ^^ scholastic course ^^ abroad. Emile must 
 be acquainted with the genius and ways of foreign 
 nations ; truly it was wasted time to forbid so long 
 the reading of histories ! It is true that books are 
 worth nothing. It is with his eyes that Emile should 
 see foreign things, as all other things. Rousseau 
 never abandons the method of direct observation. 
 If we are to beheve him, the French are, of all the 
 
78 ROUSSEAU 
 
 peoples of the world, the greatest travellers. Was 
 this true in 1762 ? We doubt it. At all events, it 
 is regrettable that it is not now the case. Emile 
 travels, then. So that, in the course of his wander- 
 ings, he be not turned aside and diverted from the 
 serious objects of his observations, Rousseau has 
 taken care that he is enamoured before his departure. 
 The love sworn to Sophie is to preserve him from all 
 dissipation, and to shelter him from passion and 
 vice in the great towns which he visits. On his 
 travels, Emile devotes himself entirely to his obser- 
 vations, which are not, however, concerned with 
 monuments and antiquities, or on the relics and ruins 
 of the past. That is of no interest ; it is the present 
 which should be known. Emile is not an archae- 
 ologist. His attention is directed especially to ques- 
 tions of government, to customs and laws. He will 
 study poUtics and comparative legislation on the 
 spot. And when he returns to his native land, he 
 can usefully examine the institutions of France, in 
 order to judge of them by comparison. Perhaps he 
 may deem them inferior and bad, and will conse- 
 quently be moved to the ambition of contributing 
 to their reformation. On the contrary, this cos- 
 mopohtan of a few months' standing may have 
 become a more ardent patriot, attached to his own 
 country the more for being better informed regard- 
 
ROUSSEAU 79 
 
 ing the vices and evils of other countries. Let us 
 be assured, if Rousseau had Uved in our time, he 
 would have joined his eloquent rebukes to those of 
 the present-day educators, who urge young French- 
 men to become colonists. It was not a fit time to 
 think of that in 1762, when, through the fault of its 
 monarchy, France was on the point of losing her 
 magnificent colonial empire. 
 
 The most important of the results of Emile^s 
 travel is that he learned 'Hwo or three foreign 
 languages. '^ Rousseau did not give him much time 
 for that ; difficulty of achievement, as we know, does 
 not trouble him. It is scarcely apparent how Emile, 
 who as yet has studied no foreign language, living 
 or dead, is able so rapidly to learn German and 
 EngUsh. What matters this? The main thing is 
 that here again Rousseau pointed out the goal and 
 drew attention to the importance of studying the 
 Uving languages. Further, in the course of his 
 travels, Emile took care to cultivate acquaintance 
 with foreigners of parts, so that, having returned 
 home, he continues to correspond with them. This 
 exchange of letters, which lasts his whole fife, will 
 raise his thoughts and sentiments above national 
 prejudice, and will make him a citizen of the 
 world. Thus did Rousseau prepare the way for 
 the modern educators, who protest against French- 
 
80 ROUSSEAU 
 
 men confining themselves to devout contemplation 
 of themselves, and who exhort them to mix with 
 the universal Hfe of humanity, that they may see 
 and comprehend the world outside. 
 
Emile is a perfect man ; to be worthy of becoming 
 his wife, Sophie should be an ideal woman. But 
 Rousseau is far from successful in this second part 
 of his task; and woman's education, as displayed 
 by him, is certainly not so well understood as man's. 
 
 It is with special care, however, that Rousseau 
 wrote the fifth book of Eynile, which is almost en- 
 tirely devoted to feminine instruction. He com- 
 posed it, he says, ^'in a continual ecstasy'' (he was 
 at the time the guest of the duchess of Luxembourg, 
 at Montmorency), ^^in the midst of woods and 
 streams and choirs of birds of every kind, with the 
 fragrance of the orange-blossom in the air"; and 
 he in part attributes ^Hhe rather fresh coloring" 
 of these pages, more poetical than philosophical, to 
 the pleasant impressions which he experienced in 
 this earthly paradise. But he Uved there with his 
 Therese, — a companion and model ill-fitted to 
 assist him in the conception of an educated woman. 
 He was constantly at the mansion and received 
 visits from briUiant and titled ladies, — a compan- 
 
 81 
 
82 ROUSSEAU 
 
 ionship ill-suited perhaps to the conception of a 
 simple, strong woman, whose Ukeness he wished to 
 sketch. The material surroundings themselves, also 
 the delicious abode at Mont-Louis was more con- 
 ducive to re very than analysis. The book of 
 Sophie is only a pleasant idyl. The poet and 
 novehst decidedly gain the upper hand in it. Of 
 all things that Rousseau fails to understand, said 
 Saint-Marc Girardin, it is woman that he under- 
 stands least. Certain of her refinements, her noble 
 dignity and pure moral grandeur have, at all events, 
 eluded him. He has for her more tenderness and 
 loving adoration than true respect and esteem. Even 
 in the most exquisite descriptions of his heroine, 
 looked at both physically and morally, an indefin- 
 able, sensual appetite is always to be detected, — a 
 memory of common or worldly women, coquettish 
 and artificial, whom he had known and loved. 
 
 Sophie, moreover, is not altogether an imaginary 
 being. When outlining her lineaments, Rousseau 
 asserts that he had in his mind an actual model. 
 Sophie existed then, and the name alone was of his 
 invention. Dead in the springtime of her life, he 
 merely '^revived" her to make ^Hhis lovable girl" 
 Emile^s companion. The story is dramatic and 
 touching. Having read Telemachus, at the age of 
 twenty the real Sophie was smitten with love for 
 
ROUSSEAU 83 
 
 Fenelon^s hero, and, being unable to find in the world 
 a youth Uke him, she died of unsatisfied love, of 
 languor and despair. Fenelon is thus responsible 
 for the death of a maiden. . . . How does it come 
 about that this tragic episode of real hfe did not 
 prevent Rousseau from making his Sophie, who was 
 the image of the other, too sensitive and romantic ? 
 It is true that, overtaken with tardy remorse, he 
 seems to have reaHzed the vanity of his efforts, and 
 himself emphasized the insufficiency and inefficacy 
 of his scheme of feminine education, when, with 
 strange irony, in the Roman des Solitaires, he shows 
 us the virtuous Sophie become an unfaithful wife, 
 although she saw in woman's misconduct nothing 
 but ^^ misery, disorder, unhappiness, opprobrium, 
 and ignominy. '^ 
 
 Between Emile's education and that which Sophie 
 receives, there is more than a contrast, there is an 
 abyss. Rousseau emancipated Emile; he enslaves 
 Sophie. To the same degree that he showed him- 
 self bold in his views on the '^ foundation '^ of men, 
 is he timid, backward, and conservative in his ideas 
 on woman's education. The apostle of individual- 
 ism renounces his doctrine. He subordinates woman 
 to man; of her he makes an humble subject whose 
 only value Hes in ministering to her husband's hap- 
 piness. He confines her strictly to her duties as 
 
84 ROUSSEAU 
 
 daughter, wife, and mother. If he invites her elo- 
 quently to fulfil her obHgations as a teacher, he for- 
 gets to provide her, by a sufficiently well-developed 
 instruction, with the means of acquitting herself 
 worthily in this great mission. Finally, he does not 
 appear to suppose that woman also has a claim to 
 acquire personalty, that she legitimately aspires to 
 extension of her acquirements and development of 
 her faculties, so that, with her enhghtened intelh- 
 gence and emancipated reason, she may truly be 
 man^s equal and, indeed, the ^'abstract woman." 
 
 Rousseau^s maxim is that woman should be obe- 
 dient to man, that her existence is, as it were, con- 
 ditional on that of man. Listen to these continual 
 repetitions which, like a monotonous refrain, re- 
 appear on every page: ''The whole education of 
 women ought to be relative to men. . . . Woman 
 is specially made to please men, to be useful to 
 them, to make themselves loved and honored by 
 them, to rear them when young, to care for them 
 when grown up, to advise them, to console them, to 
 render their Hves agreeable and sweet to them, — 
 these are the duties of women at all times, and should 
 be taught to them from their childhood. . . . All 
 their caprices must be overcome so as to make them 
 submissive to the will of others. . . . Dependence 
 is the woman's natural condition. . . . Woman is 
 
ROUSSEAU 85 
 
 created to be all her life subject to man and to man's 
 judgment. ... It is a law of nature that woman 
 shall obey man. . . . She is created to give way to 
 man, and to suffer even his injustice. . . .'' 
 
 There is, then, no idea of educating Sophie for 
 herself. Rousseau does not, at heart, admit the 
 equahty of the sexes. He says of woman that she 
 is ^^an imperfect man," that in many respects she 
 is only '^a grown-up child." I am aware that 
 Rousseau, with his customary inconsistency, con- 
 tradicts himself in other passages: '^The question 
 of superiority," he says, ^^must not be urged: 
 differences account for all. . . . Each sex has 
 qualities suited to its destiny and part in Ufe. . . . 
 It is perhaps one of the marvels of nature that two 
 beings so similar, and at the same time so differently 
 constituted, should have been made. ..." But 
 he insists upon these differences: '^It is demon- 
 strated that man and woman are not constituted 
 aUke, either in temperament or character." By 
 speaking of differences, does not one singularly 
 compromise the idea of equality? 
 
 What, then, is Rousseau's idea of the character 
 and temperament proper to woman ? He expounds 
 it to us twice : first, somewhat ponderously in the 
 long pages of general philosophy which begin the 
 fifth book of Entile, and form a kind of outhne of 
 
86 ROUSSEAU 
 
 feminine psychology ; and later, with a quite poetic 
 charm, when, putting away abstract considerations, 
 he raises the curtain to show Sophie in her grace 
 and beauty. 
 
 Woman is weak. She is passionate: ^'If she 
 pretends to be unable to bear the Ughtest burdens, 
 it is not only to appear dehcate, it is to arrange ex- 
 cuses for herself and the right to be feeble should 
 occasion require." Her heart feeds on unUmited 
 desires of love; it is true that ''the Supreme Being 
 added modesty '^ in order to counterbalance and 
 restrain them. Sophie, hke all women, is a natural 
 coquette. She is fond of finery, almost from the 
 moment of her birth. She is not displeased to dis- 
 play ''her well-turned leg." She is inquisitive, too 
 much so. She is artful, and necessarily so, to com- 
 pensate for what she lacks in strength. "You tell 
 me that httle Sophie is very artful," wrote Rous- 
 seau to the prince of Wurtemberg, "so much the 
 better! ..." Artfulness is a natural talent, and 
 everything natural is "good and right." The in- 
 stinct of artfulness, then, must be cultivated. Rous- 
 seau, however, is good enough to admit that it is 
 as well "to prevent its abuse." Sophie is talkative. 
 She is imperious. She is by nature a glutton — 
 here Rousseau forgets that he has declared all 
 primitive instincts to be excellent. Does not the 
 
ROUSSEAU 87 
 
 doctrine of original goodness apply to woman with 
 as much force as to man ? Sophie is temperate, but 
 she has become so. . . . 
 
 So much for the defects, and we have minimized 
 them. The portrait is not overdrawn. Let us now 
 examine the other side: the good, the qualities. 
 Woman is more docile than man. She has more 
 deUcacy than man. She is more skilful in reading 
 the human heart. Her dominant passion is virtue. 
 Let us note, moreover, that it is never certain 
 whether Rousseau means to speak of woman in 
 general, or of the exceptional creature which he 
 has personified in Sophie. Her chief happiness 
 is to make her parents happy. She is chaste and 
 honest till her last sigh: here the ideal woman is 
 obviously intended, the one of whom he says, 
 '^A virtuous woman is almost the equal of the 
 angels! ..." 
 
 But woman, in general, is not man's equal. A 
 charming being whom Rousseau idoHzes, yet none 
 the less binds down to the subordinate position of 
 her part as younger sister, and inferior in the human 
 family. Her natural quahties must be respected, 
 be they good or ill. It does not seem as though 
 Rousseau wishes even her faults to be corrected, 
 because they may perchance help her to captivate 
 men. A woman should remain a woman. It would 
 
88 ROUSSEAU 
 
 be folly to wish for the cultivation of man^s qualities 
 in her. Rousseau, who, on so many other points 
 forestalled the tendencies and innovations of the 
 modern mind, can in no wise be considered an expert 
 in what is nowadays called ^^ woman's rights." 
 Nothing would have offended him more than the 
 claim to mingle and assimilate the two sexes in 
 the same habits and functions. The modeUing of 
 woman's education and hfe on man's would, to him, 
 have seemed an aberration, a usurpation of the 
 rights of the stronger sex, and, in another sense, a 
 profanation. 
 
 It is more especially when he considers woman's 
 intellectual faculties that Rousseau shows himself 
 unjust to them. He admits that their judgment is 
 earlier formed, but he asserts that they soon allow 
 themselves to be outdistanced. They have not 
 sufficient attention and accuracy of mind to succeed 
 in the exact sciences : — we may note, in passing, that 
 Emile gives no evidence of any training in them, 
 either. — Everything that tends to generahze ideas 
 is outside their competence. All their reflections 
 should centre in the study of men, or in agreeable 
 acquirements which have ^Haste" as their object. 
 Search after abstract truths is not suitable for them. 
 No women philosophers or women mathematicians 
 then : Rousseau would have refused another Sophie 
 
ROUSSEAU 89 
 
 — Sophie Germain — the right to exist. Works of 
 genius are beyond them. Is it not true, however, 
 that, as a novehst, George Sand, to mention no 
 others, has indeed some genius, at any rate as much 
 as Rousseau? ... In short, feminine studies 
 should relate exclusively to practical matters, and 
 Rousseau would wilHngly repeat Mohere's words : — 
 Is it not seemly, and for many reasons, 
 That a woman should study and know so many things. . . . 
 
 Sophie's instruction, then, is extremely Hmited. 
 It could not be otherwise in a system which, on the 
 one hand, lowers the function of woman, and, on the 
 other hand, disparages her intelligence and powers. 
 How can she be asked to acquire knowledge which 
 will be useless to her in her role of humble subordi- 
 nation, or to undertake studies which exceed the 
 capacity of her mind ? In her Ubrary, Rousseau puts 
 only two books, Telemachus — and even this is out 
 of place, if it be true, as Rousseau tells us, that it 
 excites a girPs imagination — and Comptes faits, by 
 BarrSme. Sophie ought to understand thoroughly 
 the keeping of household accounts. She must be a 
 true housewife, knowing the prices of provisions, 
 superintending her servants, such a wife as Xenophon 
 had already pictured the partner of Ischomachus. 
 
 In her youth, Sophie was especially engaged in 
 learnino; needlework: she sews and embroiders. 
 
90 ROUSSEAU 
 
 The wife of Emile, who has his working hours, must 
 not be capable of neglecting manual occupations. 
 Rousseau felt the importance of what is nowadays 
 called the ^^ household education. '^ Sophie cuts out 
 and makes her own dresses. She has a preference, 
 it is true, for lace. \Vhy is this? It is because 
 there is no form of needlework which ^ Ogives a more 
 pleasing pose.^' Sophie remains somewhat coquet- 
 tish, even in her household occupations. Rous- 
 seau wishes — must he be blamed for it ? — a 
 woman to be always attractive and elegant, to do 
 everything gracefully. Nothing should detract from 
 the charm of her personal appearance, even when she 
 is cooking. Somewhat '^ foppish,^ ^ Sophie prefers 
 burning the dinner to soiHng her cuff. Is Emile, who 
 dines badly that evening, consoled by admiring the 
 spotless cleanHness of Sophie's attire? There is, 
 let us confess, something sickly and too deUcately 
 refined in the education of this young woman who, 
 for example, dislikes gardening, giving as a reason 
 that '^the earth seems dirty to her." 
 
 Sophie cultivates accompHshments, less for her 
 personal benefit than to contribute later to her hus- 
 band's amusement. She has a nice voice, and sings ; 
 a taste for music, and plays. She can dance. But 
 from all other points of view, she is decidedly an 
 ignoramus. A little arithmetic — enough to total 
 
ROUSSEAU 91 
 
 up the household expenses — has been taught her : 
 ^Terhaps women should before all learn to cipher," 
 according to the natural method, however: ^'A 
 httle girl can easily be persuaded to learn arith- 
 metic, if care be taken to give her cherries for her 
 lunch only on condition that she count them." 
 But literature, poetry, and history she knows noth- 
 ing of. Bluestockings are an affliction. ^^ Every 
 learned girl will remain single all her life, when only 
 men of sense are to be found." Rousseau would 
 certainly not have approved of the creation of high 
 schools, nor even elementary schools, for girls. 
 " There are no colleges for women : what a misfor- 
 tune. . . . Would to God there were none for 
 boys. . . ." 
 
 However insufficient Emile^s instruction may 
 seem to us, Sophie's remains on a yet much lower 
 plane. She is in no wise the enlightened woman 
 whose action is necessary to regenerate the family 
 and society. Rousseau, though he detested Paris, 
 has made of her a frivolous Parisian, who is rather 
 a grace than a power in the house, a charming play- 
 thing or a thing of fashion. 
 
 It is not alone by her insufficient instruction, 
 which practically amounts to nothing, that Sophie 
 differs from Emile; it is also in the nature of her 
 education. The system on which a woman is 
 
92 ROUSSEAU 
 
 educated should be different from that adopted in 
 the case of a man. Emile does not make his entry 
 into society till he is about twenty; Sophie is ad- 
 mitted at a very early age. Before becoming a wife 
 and mother, she must be acquainted with society 
 and life. Reversing the usual practice by which a 
 girl is kept in almost cloistered seclusion, and a 
 woman is thrown into the whirlpool of society Hfe, 
 Rousseau wishes Sophie to go often to balls, plays, 
 suppers, accompanied by her mother, of course; 
 but once married, she shuts herself up in the peace of 
 domestic Hfe. Here we have quite a fresh inspira- 
 tion, a scheme of education in the EngHsh or Ameri- 
 can style. If Sophie is shown society, it is, however, 
 that she may be made to feel its emptiness and vice, 
 and may be sickened of it forever. Is it quite 
 certain that this precocious emancipation would give 
 the results that Rousseau expects ? Let us praise 
 him, nevertheless, for having introduced the ele- 
 ments of gayety, good temper, and Hberty, into a 
 girl's life. Sophie is merry and ^'skittish"; she 
 is not to live ^'\ike a grandmother.'' 
 
 Another difference: from the earliest years of 
 her infancy, rehgion will be mentioned to Sophie. 
 The reason which Rousseau gives for this is the 
 very one which we advanced against him, when he 
 delayed for Emile this reUgious teaching which he 
 
ROUSSEAU 93 
 
 hastens for Sophie. If we had to wait until a woman 
 was able to conceive a true idea of religion, 'Ho dis- 
 cuss these deep questions methodically, we should 
 run a risk of never mentioning it to her." This is, 
 then, only a fresh proof of the Httle esteem which 
 Rousseau professed for feminine intelHgence. Sub- 
 missive to the judgment of others, Sophie Mindly 
 accepts her mother's religion. ''Every girl ought 
 to have the rehgion of her mother, and every wife 
 that of her husband.'' Opinion and authority, so 
 boldly expelled from Emile's education, resume their 
 sovereign sway when Sophie is in question. "Opin- 
 ion," says Rousseau, emphatically "is with men the 
 tomb of virtue, with women it is its throne" : which 
 is to say that, in their beliefs as in their behavior, 
 women are subject to the opinion of others. Wom- 
 en's religion, moreover, is confined "in the nar- 
 row circle of dogmas which derive from morahty." 
 She is simple and reasonable, — "reasonable" is 
 a word already used by Mme. de Maintenon. 
 "Persuade her well that no knowledge is useful 
 except such as teaches us well-doing. Do not make 
 theologians and logicians of your daughters: teach 
 them such of heaven's things alone as are of use for 
 human wisdom. . . ." Morality is the essential 
 part of rehgion, and we serve God by good actions. 
 At times Rousseau hesitates, desisting from keep- 
 
94 ROUSSEAU 
 
 ing woman in her state of subordination ; he seems to 
 perceive that, to be a wife and mother, Sophie needs 
 a Uttle more instruction. ^' There are," says he, 
 ''only two classes in humanity : those who think and 
 those who do not think." And guiding Emile in 
 the choice of a wife, he exhorts him to put aside all 
 consideration of fortune or social rank, 'Ho take 
 for his wife even the hangman's daughter, so Httle 
 should he care for class." What does matter, 
 is that a wife should think, know how to bring up 
 her children, and be able to hve in communion of 
 ideas with her husband. In that case, however, 
 is it not evident that it would be indispensable to 
 arrange for her a wider and more thorough instruc- 
 tion? ''It is the husband," replies Rousseau, "who 
 will teach her everything and be her instructor. . . ." 
 I admit that he will complete and widen her in- 
 struction, but on condition that, already as a girl, 
 she has been initiated into the things of the mind. 
 Let her be forbidden to read novels, — "never did 
 a chaste girl read a novel," — this is already very 
 severe ; but how sanction her never having a serious 
 book in her hands and being as ignorant of Hterature 
 as of science, "fatal science " ? This is, nevertheless, 
 really the conclusion come to by Rousseau, who 
 seemed to fear that by instructing woman she 
 might be made man's equal, and that "the pre- 
 
ROUSSEAU 95 
 
 eminence which nature gives to the husband might 
 thus be conveyed to the wife/' 
 
 It is true that Rousseau, if he abases woman on 
 the one hand, exalts her on the other. ''Women,'' 
 says he, '^have a supernatural talent for governing 
 men. ..." But this so-called supernatural talent 
 is nothing but their grace and beauty, and, in short, 
 the very natural power which they exercise over 
 man's senses. ''The best households," he says 
 again, "are those in which the wife has most au- 
 thority." Yes; but in his theories, this authority is 
 not that of a cultured intelligence and tested reason ; 
 it is simply a rule founded on gentleness, made last- 
 ing by the httle methods which a wife's ingenuity or 
 indulgence suggest to her. It it by her caresses 
 that Sophie orders, it is by tears that she threatens. 
 Mme. Roland's father, discussing the choice of a hus- 
 band with her one day, said to her, "I understand 
 you would hke to subjugate some one who thinks 
 himself the master, doing everything that you wish. 
 . . ." Sophie is of the same school. She appears 
 to obey, but in fact she reigns and governs, and her 
 sovereignty is due only to the seductions of her 
 sex. 
 
 A strange book, it must be admitted, is this 
 romance of Sophie's education. In it charming 
 things are mingled with pedantic dissertations. 
 
96 ROUSSEAU 
 
 Delicate thoughts are near neighbors to declama- 
 tions that might be described as the ramblings of a 
 disordered brain. In it the highest lessons of virtue 
 alternate with loose passages of vicious gallantry, 
 and with rather free observations. The eulogy of 
 Spartan or Roman manners is followed by pages in 
 which one guesses that Rousseau found as much 
 pleasure in reading Brantome as in reading the Bible, 
 — which he had read right through more than six 
 times, during the sleeplessness of his nights of sick- 
 ness. We must not require from Rousseau the lofty 
 purity of sentiment which the mission of woman's 
 educator demands. How can we be touched by his 
 enthusiasm for decency, modesty, and seemUness, 
 when we have just heard him say that, '^Sophie 
 does not display her charms ; on the contrary, she 
 covers them up, but in covering them up she knows 
 how to suggest them''? Or again, '^In Sophie's 
 simple and modest attire, everything seems to have 
 been put in its place only to be removed piece by 
 piece. ..." We do not know, sometimes, when 
 reading Emilej whether we are in presence of a severe 
 morahst or a man of gallant adventures. What is 
 not subject to doubt, is that the too reahstic memory 
 of Mme. de Warens, or the ideal representation of 
 Mme. Sophie d'Houdetot, — whom he loved too 
 much 'Ho wish to possess her," — accompany and 
 
ROUSSEAU 97 
 
 partly direct Rousseau^s pen when he is sketching 
 Sophie's portrait. . . . 
 
 I Do not let us, however, finish with this unfavor- 
 able impression. If Sophie is not the strong, sen- 
 sible, and enlightened woman that we could wish 
 her to be, if she is rather a ^^weak, silly woman,'' 
 more graceful than reasonable, seeking, above all, to 
 please, not disdaining, in her coquetry, to display 
 her white hand and shapely foot, let us, nevertheless, 
 salute in her a pleasant wife, who can retain her 
 husband's affections, a devoted mother, who feeds 
 and brings up her children ; lastly, one who compen- 
 sates by rare merits for the imperfections of her 
 incomplete education. Of her independent hfe and 
 her own personality, Rousseau takes no heed. It 
 is conjugal intimacy alone which can make of two 
 beings united for hfe one moral person. Woman is, 
 then, only a part, a fragment of this moral person. 
 As a compensation she will be the most seductive of 
 companions for the man whose complement she is. 
 Sophie is not one of ^Hhose who banish from mar- 
 riage everything that can be agreeable to men." 
 She is not a wearisome devotee, enslaved by those 
 rigorous dogmas which, ^' by pushing duties to absurd 
 hmits, make them imipracticable and vain." Rous- 
 seau asserts that in his time ''so much had been done 
 to prevent wives from being amiable, that husbands 
 
98 ROUSSEAU 
 
 had been made indifferent." To the scolding, 
 sullen wife he opposes one who is smihng and cheer- 
 ful, who wishes to please and succeeds in doing so ; 
 who makes the obligation of fidelity pleasant and 
 easy for her lifers companion. One may be tempted 
 to wonder how, after all the evil that he spoke of 
 women, Rousseau met among them so many im- 
 passioned admirers. It is because, if he did not 
 assign to them their true rank, he at least flat- 
 tered them ; hp encouraged them in their tendency 
 to rule by the power of their natural charms 
 alone. He hked and cajoled them a great deal. 
 Observe with what satisfaction he forgets himself 
 when depicting the early love passages between Emile 
 and Sophie, what delicious trifles occupy him in the 
 portrait which he paints of his heroine. To figure 
 her as perfect, he draws upon all the races of human- 
 ity. Sophie has the temperament of an ItaUan, the 
 pride of a Spaniard, and the sensibiHty of an EngHsh- 
 woman. All that she lacks to be perfect is, perhaps, 
 the good sense and sedate simphcity of an instructed 
 and cultured Frenchwoman. She also is a pupil of 
 nature : ''She makes use only of scent which comes 
 from flowers." — ''I never praise her so much as 
 when she is simply clothed. ..." There are wise 
 and beautiful sayings in the confusion of the fifth 
 book of Emile; as, for example: ''Show woman in 
 
ROUSSEAU 99 
 
 her duties the very source of her pleasures and 
 foundation of her rights. Is it so difficult to love so 
 as to be loved, to make oneself amiable so as to be 
 happy, to make oneself esteemed so as to be obeyed, 
 and to respect oneself so as to be respected? 
 . . ." Many other passages explain, without how- 
 ever justifying it entirely, the opinion of a German 
 educational historian, Frederic Dittes, who went 
 so far as to say that he considered the fifth part of 
 Emile to be ^Hhe best book which has been written 
 on woman's education." And, at all events, Sophie, 
 despite the gaps in her education, is already the 
 modern woman, created not for the church and the 
 convent, but for family life ; despite her defects, she 
 possesses this precious and fresh quaUty, that her 
 virtue is amiable. 
 
VI 
 
 The influence of Rousseau and his pedagogic 
 thought was preponderant, as we shall see presently, 
 chiefly in Germany. But the fame of Emile was uni- 
 versal, and the echoes of it have not yet died away. 
 As a man who sought after glory, and whose gloomy 
 temper took umbrage at everything, Rousseau com- 
 plained that Emile did not obtain the same success 
 as his other writings. He was truly hard to please ! 
 . . . The anger of some, the ardent sympathy of 
 others ; on the one hand, parliamentary decrees con- 
 demning the book and issuing a warrant for the 
 author^s arrest, the thunders of the church and the 
 famous mandate of the archbishop of Paris ; on the 
 other hand, the applause of philosophers, of Clairaut, 
 Duclos, and d'Alembert, . . . what more, then, did 
 he want ? Emile was burned at Paris and Geneva ; 
 but it was read with passion ; it was twice translated 
 in London, an honor which no French work had 
 received up tifl then. In truth, never did a book 
 make more noise and thrust itself so much on the 
 attention of men. By its defects, no less than by 
 
 100 
 
 il 
 
ROUSSEAU 101 
 
 its qualities, by the inspired and prophetic character 
 of its style, as well as by the paradoxical audacity 
 of its ideas, Emile swayed opinion and stirred up the 
 most generous parts of the human soul. It were 
 too difficult to enumerate all the imitations and 
 counterfeits which have been prompted by Rous- 
 seau's powerful influence, to say nothing of the 
 refutations, contradictions, and criticisms. The 
 end of the eighteenth century witnessed the appear- 
 ance of quite a succession, a posterity of Emiles: 
 first, Anti-Emiles, then Christian Emiles, Corrected 
 Emiles, New Emiles, Emiles retouched, improved, 
 shortened, amphfied, and even Emiles converted to 
 social fife. In many a place were attempts made to 
 put into practice the education extolled by Rous- 
 seau ; children were brought up in the Jean- Jacques 
 style. Fashion took part in it. There were also 
 '^ dresses in the Jean- Jacques style,'' of which it was 
 said, in pecuhar language, that they were '^analo- 
 gous to that author's principles." 
 
 Rousseau had already carried utopianism very far ; 
 it was, however, carried still farther. Let us mention, 
 for example, a very curious book, which is, as it were, 
 a caricature of Emile, VEleve de la nature, by Gas- 
 pard de Beaurieu. However silly this utopianism 
 may have been, it passed through no less than eight 
 editions, between 1763 and 1794. So as the better 
 
102 ROUSSEAU 
 
 to insure his Emile^s isolation, de Beaurieu had the 
 idea of shutting him up in a wooden cage till he 
 reached the age of fifteen; then he landed him on 
 a desert island. . . . Nothing more extravagant 
 could be conceived. And yet Rousseau did not 
 disclaim his fantastic disciple: he loved his para- 
 doxes to the extent of excusing and approving their 
 exaggeration. In a letter of the 25th of May, 1764, 
 he wrote: '^I have read UEleve de la nature. One 
 cannot think with more intelligence, or write more 
 pleasantly. . . .'' Without confusion, Rousseau 
 looked at himself in the magnifying mirror in which 
 an indiscreet admirer had already exaggerated his 
 dreams. It is true that he added, not without a 
 touch of irony: '^I advise M. de Beaurieu to always 
 keep more to subjects which can be dealt with 
 by descriptions and representations, than to those 
 needing discussion and analysis. ... An agricul- 
 tural treatise would suit him perfectly. ..." 
 
 Happily, Rousseau found more serious imitators. 
 The end would never be reached if we mentioned all 
 the great men who, in literature or politics, make 
 for him in posterity a long train of admirers. How 
 many revolutionists fed on the maxims of Contrat 
 social, and felt the political influence of Rousseau, 
 a ^^ disastrous" influence, however, according to 
 Auguste Comte, who describes his doctrines as 
 
 4 
 
ROUSSEAU 103 
 
 '^anarchical"? Are not Chateaubriand, George 
 Sand, and many others, the progeny of the author of 
 La Nouvelle Heloise? . . . But we have only to 
 occupy ourselves in this place with educators, and 
 it is perhaps on them that the salutary action of 
 Rousseau's thought has most usefully been exercised. 
 
 The revolution of 1789 did not last long enough to 
 make it possible that anything of permanence in the 
 matter of education should be accompHshed. But 
 Rousseau's inspiration is apparent in the majority 
 of the projects which it improvised without ever 
 succeeding in putting them into operation. The 
 chimerical plans of Saint-Just and Lepelletier de 
 Saint-Fargeau' emanate directly from Emile, In 
 year III, Marie- Joseph Chenier asked 'Hhat the 
 method pursued by Rousseau in Emile's education 
 should be appUed to the entire nation." 
 
 Rousseau's teachings, in truth, obtained more 
 theoretical admiration than practical appHcation. 
 It has never been proposed, for example, to bring 
 into existence those Schools of the fatherland imagined 
 by the gentle and sentimental Bernardin de Saint- 
 Pierre, the cheerful Utopian, idylhc reformer, and 
 nature enthusiast. At least it must be admitted 
 that in suppressing punishments and rewards in 
 his educational scheme, in removing the motive 
 of emulation, and on yet many other points, Ber- 
 
104 ROUSSEAU 
 
 nardin merely copies Rousseau, whose friend, con- 
 fidant, and consoler he had been. 
 
 Women have had a special fondness for Rous- 
 seau. Who loved and extolled him more than Mme. 
 Roland, ^^Jean-Jacques' daughter," or the "Jean- 
 Jacques of women," as she has been called? In 
 1777, she wrote to one of her friends : ^^I love Rous- 
 seau beyond expression. ... I carry Rousseau in 
 my heart. ..." She especially esteemed him for 
 having revealed to her domestic happiness and the 
 ineffable deUghts which may be tasted in family 
 hfe. For her part, Mme. de Stael greets Emile as 
 "an admirable book, which puts envy to shame after 
 exciting it," and she tells us that, in her youth, she 
 fell in love with negative education. Rousseau's 
 influence is perceptible on even those women educa- 
 tors who most contested the conclusions of Emile. 
 The principal work of Mme. de GenHs, Adele et Theo- 
 dore, often recalls Emile et Sophie: the indirect 
 lessons, the artificial and prepared scenes, dear to 
 Rousseau, are found again in it. Mme. Necker de 
 Saussure, though opposed to the principles of eigh- 
 teenth-century philosophy, often draws inspiration 
 from him, after contradicting him. Like him, she 
 sees in the child a being apart, whose education has 
 rules of its own. She holds again, after him, the 
 idea of a progressive development of the faculties, 
 
ROUSSEAU 105 
 
 and consequently that of the sequence of methods 
 appropriate to the age and powers of the child. 
 
 It has been said of Rousseau that he introduced 
 into French hterature the genius of the north, that 
 he was of a German or Enghsh temperament. I 
 do not know whether this view is very accurate. 
 Rousseau knew nothing of Germany. He did not 
 hke the EngUsh. ^'I have no penchant for England. 
 . . .'' He was brought especially under French 
 influence during his wanderings across France and 
 his long sojourn in Paris ; and, indeed, nourished by 
 classical reading, he may quite as properly be re- 
 garded as a representative of the extreme sensibihty 
 of southern races. What, however, is certain, is 
 that this child of Geneva, if not of '^Teutonic" 
 genius, became Teutonic by his influence. As the 
 lamented Joseph Texte has shown in his fine book, 
 Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les origines du cosmo- 
 politisme litteraire, his light has gone forth into all 
 lands. The success of his works and the propaga- 
 tion of his ideas made him a cosmopoHtan. 
 
 There is hardly a German writer but has borne 
 him favorable testimony, usually, indeed, enthusi- 
 astic homage. Basedow, a pedagogue who had in 
 his time a great but httle deserved reputation, 
 swears only by Rousseau, whose theories he uses, 
 in his way, with frenzied zeal. Having no son, he 
 
106 ROUSSEAU 
 
 finds consolation in calling his daughter ^'Emilie." 
 Lavater shows himself as eager as Basedow for the 
 reformation of education in the direction of the 
 doctrines of Entile. But here are weightier authori- 
 ties. Lessing declares that he cannot pronounce 
 the name of Rousseau '^without respect/' Schiller 
 extols 'Hhe new Socrates, who of Christians wished 
 to make men." Goethe calles Emile ^Hhe teacher's 
 gospel." Kant affirms that no book ^' moved him 
 so deeply." He read it with such avidity, that, in 
 his strictly ordered fife, 'Hhe regularity of his daily 
 walks was for a time disturbed." In his httle 
 Treatise on Pedagogics, many principles are bor- 
 rowed from Entile: for him also nature is good. 
 Herder, who has been named ^Hhe German Rous- 
 seau," cries out, 'Tome, Rousseau, be thou my 
 guide"; and in a letter to his beloved Carohne, he 
 acclaims Entile as ' 'a divine work." In his Levana, 
 Jean-Paul Richter says that, of all previous works 
 to which he feels himself indebted, it is to Emile 
 that he must assign the front rank, that ''no pre- 
 ceding work can be compared to it." But it is to 
 Pestalozzi especially that is due the honor of 
 developing and popularizing, whilst attempting to 
 apply them, the methods of Rousseau, whose works 
 had early fixed his imagination: "The system of 
 Uberty founded ideally by the author of Entile 
 
ROUSSEAU 107 
 
 excited in me a boundless enthusiasm." Lastly, 
 Froebel, who wished to replace books by things, 
 who had nothing so much at heart as the preserva- 
 tion of the child^s spontaneity, deserves a place in 
 the golden book of Rousseau's disciples. And it 
 is not only in the great men of Germany that Rous- 
 seau inspired new sentiments: thinkers of lesser 
 importance, Jacobi, Heinse, KHnger, and yet many 
 others, took part in this adoring veneration which 
 Germany professed for the French educator. 
 
 Rousseau has been somewhat less appreciated in 
 England. There also, however, despite the scandal 
 of his ridiculous rupture with Hume, he found im- 
 mediate favor and success. Emile was translated 
 in London as soon as it appeared; and a second 
 edition was soon called for. In 1789 David Will- 
 iams said, ^^ Rousseau is in full possession of the 
 pubhc attention.'' It is true that opinion was 
 occupied with the political theories of Contrat social 
 rather than the pedagogical conceptions of Emile. 
 Somewhat neglected for a century, Rousseau was 
 again brought forward by Mr. John Morley, and 
 also by a distinguished educational historian, Robert 
 Quick. The latter opines that 'Hhe truths contained 
 in Emile will survive the fantastic forms in which 
 the author enveloped them." In his eyes, Emile is 
 *Hhe most influential book ever written on educa- 
 
108 ROUSSEAU 
 
 tion.'' This is also the opinion of John Morley, 
 who states that Emile is '^one of the seminal books 
 in the history of Hterature." Again we have George 
 Eliot's avowal: ^^ Rousseau has breathed life into 
 my soul, and awakened new faculties in me. ..." 
 And lastly, is it not true that Rousseau's principle, 
 the return to nature, dominates the pedogogics of 
 Herbert Spencer, the most briUiant educational 
 theorist of contemporary England? 
 
 Apparently it is in America that Rousseau has 
 met with least sympathy, and we must not be much 
 surprised at this. How could this dreamer, this 
 indolent idler, this heroic representative of the 
 sensibihty of the Latin races, be gifted with the 
 power of pleasing the virile, rugged minds and busy, 
 practical temperaments of the citizens of the New 
 World ? In the study which he recently devoted to 
 him, Mr. Thomas Davidson admits his discomfiture. 
 On examination, the most vaunted theories of Rous- 
 seau have disappointed him. He did not find in 
 them the firm and sohd substance which he expected 
 to obtain from a study of Emile. And yet, when 
 closely examined, American education, as we see it 
 practically developing at the present time, has more 
 than one point of resemblance with the ideal peda- 
 gogics of Rousseau. One of the leaders of American 
 education, Dr. Charles W. Ehot, the revered president 
 
ROUSSEAU 109 
 
 of Harvard University, summarizing the progress 
 accomplished in his country during the nineteenth 
 century, draws attention especially to the intro- 
 duction of two essential things into the school cur- 
 riculum: nature study and manual training. The 
 American child is no longer a logical phantom, stuffed 
 with words and abstractions, but a hving creature, 
 working with hands as well as mind. . . . But is 
 not all this Rousseau ? Similarly, Dr. Eliot points 
 out that an improvement has come about in dis- 
 cipline. In rehgion, love has been substituted for 
 fear; in poHtics, people have begun to understand 
 that the government of nations should no longer re- 
 main what for thousands of years it has been, — the 
 work of an absolute and arbitrary will; that in its 
 place must be put the free government of the people 
 by the people ; and consequently people have come 
 to think that the modern and more accurate con- 
 ception of a good government for a nation^s citizens 
 held lessons for us on the subject of a good govern- 
 ment for children, who also should be freed, as far 
 as possible, from the yoke of the old tutelage, and 
 trained in self-government. . . . But is not this 
 also Rousseau? 
 
 Without our suspecting it, Rousseau's pedagogical 
 spirit has insinuated itself into and penetrated the 
 methods of teaching and the educational practices 
 
110 ROUSSEAU 
 
 which the present time endeavors more and more to 
 honor. Go into one of the infant schools: object- 
 lessons are given ; the children are shown the things 
 themselves, and the method of observation and direct 
 intuition is put into practice. Make obeisance: 
 Rousseau it is who inspired these methods. . . . 
 Pay a visit to one of those English colleges which 
 M. Demohns is attempting to imitate and popularize 
 in France : there you will find masters who are both 
 guardians and professors, never leaving their pupils, 
 who, hke them, five in the college from morning till 
 night; how can we avoid recognizing in them the 
 actual descendants of the imaginary tutor to whom 
 Rousseau confided the care of Emile ? . . . Enter 
 one of those American schools in which the abuse of 
 books and manuals is condemned, and in which the 
 mental slavery of mechanical instruction has been 
 exchanged for methods of intellectual freedom, so 
 that the child shall acquire what it is requisite to 
 know as far as possible by himself and by his per- 
 sonal effort. In this, again, you will be forced to 
 acknowledge the hand of Rousseau. . . . Where- 
 soever discipHne has become more liberal, where 
 active methods are supreme, and where the child is 
 kept constantly in a state of interest, Hvely curiosity, 
 and sustained attention, his dignity being at the 
 same time respected, there we may say Rousseau 
 has passed by. 
 
ROUSSEAU 111 
 
 Utopias perish, but the truth endures. The spirit 
 survives the letter. We cannot, indeed, hope to 
 derive from Rousseau's pedagogics a definite and 
 final system of methods and procedure. But what 
 is perhaps better, he handed on to his successors and 
 still imparts to all who read him a spark, at least, 
 of the flame which burned in him. As Mme. de Stael 
 said, he has perhaps discovered nothing, but he has 
 set everything ablaze. His eloquence was the most 
 powerful appeal ever addressed to parents and 
 masters to exhort them to take their task as educa- 
 tors seriously. With him, education became a 
 sacred mission, a subhme ministry. Into educa- 
 tional questions he instilled a spirit of life, a move- 
 ment of passion, unknown to the cold, dry peda- 
 gogues who had dealt with such questions before 
 him. Henceforth the educator's part is raised and 
 ennobled ; and, by the fire of his enthusiasm, Rous- 
 seau stamped the science and art of rearing men with 
 the majesty and solemnity of a kind of rehgious reve- 
 lation. 
 
 And as, in Rousseau's works, time, eliminating 
 his mistakes, maintains and develops the Hving seed 
 which he sowed abundantly in the field of education, 
 so with the man himself, in his character and 
 acts, distance and the flight of ages hide from us 
 defects and misdeeds, which, httle by Httle, return to 
 
112 ROUSSEAU 
 
 shadow, in order to let us see only his quahties 
 and virtues. 
 
 If Rousseau still exercises great seduction over the 
 human intellect, it is not solely by virtue of the force 
 of his innovating genius. Neither is it by the mere 
 effect of his style, sometimes somewhat heavy, but 
 whence at every moment flashes forth the lightning ; 
 that style which earned him the title of the ^^king 
 among prose- writers.'' It is because, behind the 
 writer and thinker, we feel the pulsations of the most 
 sincere heart which ever throbbed in the breast of 
 man. Voltaire's enmity must have been strong indeed 
 to blind him to such a degree that he could write : ^'It 
 is useless for Rousseau to play now the stoic and now 
 the cynic : he beUes himself continually. The man 
 is factitious from head to foot." The opposite is 
 the truth. Rousseau's great charm, the secret of the 
 irresistible sympathy which he inspires, is precisely 
 that he yields his entire self, that he displays him- 
 self, as it were, stripped to the skin. With a soul 
 more sensitive than meditative, a mind more aes- 
 thetic than philosophic, he did not know that self- 
 possession, that mastery of a firm, cool judgment, 
 which permits a thinker to control the turmoil 
 of sentiments and the confusion of images, so as to 
 construct and organize a system of connected and 
 consistent argument. From this arises the hesita- 
 
ROUSSEAU 113 
 
 tions and contradictions of his thought. On the 
 other hand, a dreamer guided by his senses, he could 
 offer no resistance to instinctive impulses; whence 
 the faihngs of his moral Hfe, faihngs, moreover, which 
 we are aware of only through his own confession. 
 Many men of genius have doubtless had these same 
 passions and frailties; they, however, have hidden 
 them as much as possible, whilst he spread them 
 abroad in the shameless candor of his Confessions. 
 
 There is nothing fixed or precise in Rousseau's 
 moral philosophy. Rules of conduct strongly 
 enough estabhshed to suffice for the rearing of men 
 cannot be found in it. There is something of the 
 stoic in him, but the epicurean gets the upper hand. 
 '^The man who has lived most,'' says he, '^is not the 
 one who counts most years, but the one who has most 
 felt Hfe." To enjoy hfe, that is the object he pre- 
 scribes for Emile. It is true that Rousseau im- 
 mediately writes: ''Shall I add that his object is 
 also to do good, when he is able ? No ; for that 
 is itself to enjoy hfe. ..." The accomplishment 
 of duty is presented, not as a law and an obhgation, 
 but as a source of pleasure. The stoic reappears 
 when Rousseau advises the hmitation of desires, 
 when he says that the essentially good man is he who 
 has least needs, who is self-sufficing. In this respect, 
 Rousseau generally acted in accordance with his 
 
114 ROUSSEAU 
 
 maxims. He was intemperate at times. In his 
 youth he pilfered from M. de Mably's cellars bottles 
 of a white wine for which he had a hking, and many 
 other peccadillos could be mentioned. But taking 
 his Ufe as a whole, he was sober, simple in his tastes, 
 an enemy of luxury, temperate, and even austere. 
 
 What he lacked, more than lofty and noble inspi- 
 rations, was the necessary energy to keep to them. 
 His senses and imagination governed his existence. 
 Could it be otherwise, considering the education 
 which he had received ? While yet a child, his father 
 read novels with him till morning; and only when 
 he heard the swallow's notes did he say, '^Let us 
 go to bed, Jean- Jacques ! . . .'' A friend of virtue 
 rather than virtuous, agitated rather than active, 
 a slave to his sensations when he would fain have 
 been the apostle of hberty, tossed about by the ca- 
 prices of his fancy when he claimed to be estabUshing 
 among men the reign of sovereign reason, capable 
 of being at times a hero of courage and disinterested- 
 ness, to descend afterwards to unworthy and even 
 criminal actions; sentimentaHst and ideahst, yet 
 often allowing I know not what coarse echo of erotic 
 sensuaUty to be heard in his most poetic hymns to 
 love and beauty, in the torrent of his Hfe he mingled 
 muddy waters with the purest streams. At times in- 
 toxicated with subhme thoughts, he nevertheless 
 
ROUSSEAU 115 
 
 evaded the strictest and pleasantest duties ; and he 
 has not absolved himself from his faults by a too pla- 
 tonic enthusiasm for righteousness. Too often has he 
 hved selfishly, seeking the solitude which was sooth- 
 ing to his reveries, flying the men who troubled his 
 pride. He was imbued with his own opinion to the 
 point of wilhngly parting company with common 
 sense, and was so elated with his personaUty that 
 he thought himself an exceptional being, of a race 
 apart: ^^WTiy did Providence cause me to be born 
 among men, having made me of a species different 
 from them? ..." 
 
 Yet this somewhat wild misanthrope has contrib- 
 uted to a greater love of hfe by introducing into 
 it more Hberty, joy, and faith; by arousing and 
 strengthening, according to Mme. Roland^s phrase, 
 ''all the affections which attach us to existence": 
 devotion to humanity, enthusiasm for the ideal, 
 friendship and love. He has been generous and 
 helpful. His dream was the happiness of man: 
 ''Make your paradise upon earth, whilst awaiting 
 the other." He worked for a fresh, rejuvenated 
 society, freed from the prejudices of the past : "Woe 
 to thee, thou stream of custom!" In an age of 
 courtiers, he courageously safeguarded his right of 
 free speech, and under an oppressive rule he main- 
 tained his independence at the cost of his happiness. 
 
116 ROUSSEAU 
 
 He was a citizen. One of Geneva's sons, he drew 
 from the traditions of his first fatherland the love 
 of hberty, the repubhcan pride: '^With us, maxims 
 are imbibed with the mother's milk." In a society 
 of sceptics and profligates, he was simple and a be- 
 hever. Literary critics have praised Rousseau for 
 introducing into France the dreamy melancholy 
 of northern lands. Yes, but this melancholy is not 
 found in Emile, which is, on the contrary, an opti- 
 mistic book, with a joyous confidence in the future. 
 Really Hving and fertile minds are those which look, 
 not to the past, but to the future ages : Rousseau is of 
 their number. In his sovereign disdain of antiquated 
 tradition, he prepared the youth of the newly dawn- 
 ing era. With Voltaire, said Goethe, a world has 
 come to an end; with Rousseau, a world begins. 
 The eighteenth century, especially with Rousseau, 
 is the rally to eternal nature, the commencement 
 of a forward movement, a bold anticipation of the 
 future. 
 
 I am wilUng that Rousseau be criticised and his 
 errors blamed : but let us not be forbidden to ad- 
 mire him. He will not cease to be read, followed, and 
 obeyed, in some, at least, of his prescriptions. He 
 will always be a leaven of life and moral regeneration. 
 He can proudly say to his critic, ^^ Strike, but 
 hsten.'' Above all, he will be loved to all eternity. 
 
ROUSSEAU 117 
 
 I am well aware that Mme. du Deffand, who re- 
 proached him with wishing to plunge everything 
 back into chaos, called him ^'an antipathetic 
 sophist." But this is merely an exception, a voice 
 lost in the chorus of praise which is everywhere 
 uplifted in his honor. The women at all times have 
 been enraptured with Rousseau, and men have been 
 no more niggardly with the tribute of their devotion. 
 ''I love Emile,^^ said Saint-Marc Girardin, and he 
 learnedly expounded his reasons. He is not the 
 only one who has spoken in this way. ^^It will 
 always be impossible for us not to love Jean- Jacques 
 Rousseau," declared Sainte-Beuve fifty years ago. 
 And recently, the same declaration came, like a 
 refrain, from the pen of M. Jules Lemaitre: '^It is 
 impossible for me not to love him : I feel that he was 
 good." Let us love him, because he was indeed 
 good, because, thanks to him, a breath of humanity 
 and good-will penetrated and softened men's hearts, 
 because he himself loved truth, and because he con- 
 ceived an ardent love of justice, and from his child- 
 hood was inspired with transports of anger at its 
 violation. Let us love him and pity him also because 
 of his sufferings. Let us leave to curious and prying 
 minds the task of deciding what was the cause of 
 these sufferings, the mental malady, the kind of 
 madness with which he was afflicted. We wish 
 
118 ROUSSEAU 
 
 not to know whether he were neurotic, hysterical, or 
 simply melancholy mad. What is certain and enough 
 for us, is that he was a man of heart and of genius 
 to boot. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Of Rousseau's own works, besides Emile, should be read : — 
 
 Projet pour V education de M. de Sainte-Marie (1740). 
 
 La Nouvelle Helolse, 5th part, Letter III (1761). 
 
 Emile et Sophie ou les Solitaires (1778). 
 
 Lettre a Christophe de Beaumont, archeveque de Paris (1763). 
 
 Considerations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur la rejorme 
 projetee en 1772 (1772). 
 
 In the Correspondance, the Letters to the prince of Wiirtem- 
 berg (1763), and passim. 
 
 Only the most important and recent of the numerous publica- 
 tions dealing with Emile and Rousseau's ideas are mentioned 
 below : — 
 
 F. Brockerdoff, J. -J. Rousseau, sein Leben und seine WerkCy 
 3 vols., Leipzig, 1863. 
 
 H. Beaudouin, La vie et les oeuvres de J. -J. Rousseau, 2 vols., 
 Paris, 1871. 
 
 Saint-Marc Girardin, J. -J. Rousseau, sa vie et ses ouvrages, 
 2 vols., Paris, 1875. 
 
 J. -J. Rousseau juge par les Genevois d'aujourd'hui, lectures 
 given at Geneva, on the occasion of the centenary of 2d July, 
 1878, Geneva, 1879. See especially : Les idees de Rousseau sur 
 Veducation, by Andr^ Oltramare, and Caracteristique generate 
 de Rousseau, by H. Frederic Amiel. 
 
 John Morley, Rousseau, 2 vols., London, 1888 (1st edition, 
 1873). 
 
 E. Ritter, La famille et la jeunesse de J -J. Rousseau, Paris, 
 1896. 
 
 119 
 
120 ROUSSEAU 
 
 Streckeisen-Moulton, J. -J. Rousseau, ses amis et ses enne- 
 mis, 2 vols., Paris, 1865. 
 
 A. Chuquet, J. -J. Rousseau, in the Great French Writers series, 
 Paris, 1893. 
 
 Davidson, Rousseau and Education according to Nature, in 
 The Great Educators series, New York and London, 1898. 
 
 J. Texte, J.-J. Rousseau et les origines du cosmopolitisme 
 litter aire, Paris, 1895. 
 
 A. EspiNAS, Le systeme de J.-J. Rousseau, in la Revue inter- 
 naiionale de Venseignement, vols. XXX and XXXI, 1895 and 
 1896. See also: Musset-Pathay, Histoire de la vie et des 
 ouvrages de J.-J. Rousseau (1821) ; Robert H. Quick, Essays on 
 educational reformers, London, 1868; Rousseau's Emile, trans- 
 lated and abridged by E. Worthington, with notes by Jules Steeg, 
 Boston and London, 1883; Emile, abridged and annotated by 
 William H. Payne, New York, 1893 ; Hanus, Rousseau and 
 Education accordi7ig to Nature, New York, 1897; M. Greard, 
 L' education des femmes par les femmes; and finally, articles or 
 chapters devoted to Rousseau by M. Brunetiere, Etudes 
 critiques sur la litterature frangaise, 3d and 4th series; by 
 M. Faguet, XVIIP siecle : Etudes litteraires, 1890 ; by Taine, 
 Les origines de la France contemporaine : VAncien regime, 1882; 
 by Melchior de Vogue, Histoire et Poesie, 1898; by M. E. 
 LiNTiLHAC, Litterature frangaise, etc. 
 
 i\ 
 
 BD 6,8.