of the Political Institutions, first conceived at Venice, pressed upon his meditations. He had been earnestly requested to compose a treatise on education. Besides this, his thoughts wandered confusedly round the notion of a treatise to be called Sensitive Morality, or the Materialism of the Sage, the object of which was to examine the influence of external agencies, such as light, darkness, sound, seasons, food, noise, silence, motion, rest, on our corporeal machine, and thus indirectly upon the soul also. By knowing these and acquiring the art of modifying them according to our individual needs, we should become surer of ourselves and fix a deeper constancy in our lives. An external system of treatment would thus be established, which would place and keep the soul in the condition most favourable to virtue.' Though the treatise was never completed, and the sketch never saw the light, we perceive at least that Rousseau would have made the means of access to character wide enough, and the material influences that impress it and produce its caprices, multitudinous enough, instead of limiting them with the medical specialist to one or two organs, and one or two of the conditions that affect them. Nor, on the other hand, do the words in which he sketches his project, in the least justify the attribution to him of the doctrine of the absolute power of the physical constitution over the moral habits, whether that doctrine would be a credit or a discredit to his philosophical thoroughness of perception. No one denies the influence of external conditions on the moral habits, and Rousseau says no more than that he proposed to consider the extent and the modifiableness of this influence. It was not then deemed essential for a spiritualist thinker to ignore physical organization.

A third undertaking of a more substantial sort was to arrange and edit the papers and printed works of the Abbé de Saint Pierre (1658-1743), confided to him through the agency of Saint Lambert, and partly also of Madame Dupin, the warm friend of that singular and good man. This task involved reading, considering, and picking extracts from twenty-three diffuse and chaotic volumes, full of prolixity and repetition. Rousseau, dreamer as he was, yet had quite keenness of perception enough

1 Conf., ix. 239.

2 Ibid., ix. 237, 238, and 263, etc.

to discern the weakness of a dreamer of another sort; and he soon found out that the Abbé de Saint Pierre's views were impracticable, in consequence of the author's fixed idea that men are guided rather by their lights than by their passions. In fact, Saint Pierre was penetrated with the eighteenth-century faith to a peculiar degree. As with Condorcet afterwards, he was led by his admiration for the extent of modern knowledge, to adopt the principle that perfected reason is capable of being made the base of all institutions, and would speedily terminate all the great abuses of the world. "He went wrong," says Rousseau, "not merely in having no other passion but that of reason, but by insisting on making all men like himself, instead of taking them as they are and as they will continue to be." The critic's own error in later days was not very different from this, save that it applied to the medium in which men live, rather than to themselves, by refusing to take complex societies as they are, even as starting-points for higher attempts at organization. Rousseau had occasionally seen the old man, and he preserved the greatest veneration for his memory, speaking of him as the honour of his age and race, with a fulness of enthusiasm very unusual towards men, though common enough towards inanimate nature. The sincerity of this respect, however, could not make the twenty-three volumes which the good man had written, either fewer in number or lighter in contents, and after dealing as well as he could with two important parts of Saint Pierre's works, he threw up the task.' It must not be supposed that Rousseau would allow that fatigue or tedium had anything to do with a resolve which really needed no better justification. As we have seen before, he had amazing skill in finding a certain ingeniously contrived largeness for his motives. Saint Pierre's writings were full of observations on the government of France, some of them remarkably bold in their criticism, but he had not been punished for them because the ministers always looked upon

1 The extract from the Project for Perpetual Peace and the Polysynodia, together with Rousseau's judgments on them, are found at the end of the volume containing the Social Contract. The first, but without the judgment, was printed separately without Rousseau's permission, in 1761, by Bastide, to whom he had sold it for twelve louis for publication in his journal only (Conf., xi. 107. Corr., ii. 110, 128).

him as a kind of preacher rather than a genuine politician, and he was allowed to say what he pleased, because it was observed that no one listened to what he said. Besides, he was a Frenchman, and Rousseau was not, and hence the latter, in publishing Saint Pierre's strictures on French affairs, was exposing himself to a sharp question why he meddled with a country that did not concern him. "It surprised me," says Rousseau, "that the reflection had not occurred to me earlier," but this coincidence of the discovery that the work was imprudent, with the discovery that he was weary of it, will surprise nobody versed in study of a man who lives in his sensations, and yet has vanity enough to dislike to admit it. The short remarks which Rousseau appended to his abridgment of Saint Pierre's essays on Perpetual Peace, and on a Polysynodia, or Plurality of Councils, are extremely shrewd and pointed, and would suffice to show us, if there were nothing else to do so, the right kind of answer to make to the more harmful dreams of the Social Contract. Saint Pierre's fault is said, with entire truth, to be a failure to make his views relative to men, to times, to circumstances; and there is something that startles us when we think whose words we are reading, in the declaration that, "whether an existing government be still that of old times, or whether it have insensibly undergone a change of nature, it is equally imprudent to touch it if it is the same, it must be respected, and if it has degenerated, that is due to the force of time and circumstance, and human sagacity is powerless." Rousseau points to France, asking his readers to judge the peril of once moving by an election the enormous masses comprising the French monarchy; and in another place, after a wise general remark on the futility of political machinery without men of a certain character, he illustrates it by this scornful question: When you see all Paris in a ferment about the rank of a dancer or a wit, and the affairs of the academy or the opera making everybody forget the interest of the ruler and the glory of the nation, what can you hope from bringing political affairs close to such a people, and removing them from the court to the town? Indeed, there is perhaps not one of these pages which Burke might not well have owned."

1 P. 485.

2 For a sympathetic account of the Abbé de Saint Pierre's life and specula

A violent and prolonged crisis followed this not entirely unsuccessful effort after sober and laborious meditation. Rousseau was now to find that if society has its perils, so too has solitude, and that if there is evil in frivolous complaisance for the puppetwork of a world that is only a little serious, so there is evil in a passionate tenderness for phantoms of an imaginary world that is not serious at all. To the pure or stoical soul the solitude of the forest is strength, but then the imagination must know the yoke Rousseau's imagination, in no way of the strongest either as receptive or inventive, was the free accomplice of his sensations. The undisciplined force of animal sensibility gradually rose within him, like a slowly welling flood. The spectacle does not either brighten or fortify the student's mind, yet if there are such states, it is right that those who care to speak of human nature, should have an opportunity of knowing its less glorious parts. They may be presumed to exist, though in less violent degree, in many people whom we meet in the street and at the table, and there can be nothing but danger in allowing ourselves to be so narrowed by our own virtuousness, viciousness being conventionally banished to the remoter region of the third person, as to forget the presence of "the brute brain within the man's." In Rousseau's case, at any rate, it was no wicked broth nor magic potion that "confused the chemic labour of the blood," but the too potent wine of the joyful beauty of nature herself, working misery in a mental structure that no educating care nor envelope of circumstance had ever hardened against her intoxication. Most of us are protected against this subtle debauch of sensuous egoism by a cool organization, while even those who are born with senses and appetites of great strength and keenness, are guarded by accumulated disci pline of all kinds from without, especially by the necessity for active industry which brings the most exaggerated native sensibility into balance. It is the constant and rigorous social parade which keeps the eager regiment of the senses from making furious rout Rousseau had just repudiated all social obligation, and he had never gone through external discipline. He was at an age when

tions, see M. Léonce de Lavergne's Economistes français du 18ième siècle (Paris: 1870). Also Comte's Lettres à M. Valat, p. 73.

passion that has never been broken in has the beak of the bald vulture, tearing and gnawing a man; but its first approach is in fair shapes.

Wandering and dreaming "in the sweetest season of the year, in the month of June, under the fresh groves, with the song of the nightingale, and the soft murmuring of the brooks in his ear," he began to wonder restlessly why he had never tasted in their plenitude the vivid sentiments which he was conscious of possessing in reserve, or any of that intoxicating delight which he felt potentially existent in his soul. Why had he been created with faculties so exquisite, to be left thus unused and unfruitful? The feeling of his own quality, with this of a certain injustice and waste superadded, brought warm tears which he loved to let flow. Visions of the past, from girl playmates of his youth down to the Venetian courtesan, thronged in fluttering tumult into his brain. He saw himself surrounded by a seraglio of houris whom he had known, until his blood was all aflame and his head in a whirl. His imagination was kindled into deadly activity. "The impos✓ sibility of reaching to the real beings plunged me into the land of chimera; and seeing nothing actual that rose to the height of my delirium, I nourished it in an ideal world, which my creative imagination had soon peopled with beings after my heart's desire. In my continual ecstasies, I made myself drunk with torr.nts of the most delicious sentiments that ever entered the heart of man. Forgetting absolutely the whole human race, I invented for myself societies of perfect creatures, as heavenly for their virtues as their beauties; sure, tender, faithful friends, such as I never found in our nether world. I had such a passion for haunting this empyrean with all its charming objects, that I passed hours and days in it without counting them as they went by; and losing recollection of everything else, I had hardly swallowed a morsel in hot haste, before I began to burn to run off in search of my beloved groves. If, when I was ready to start for the enchanted world, I saw unhappy mortals coming to detain me on the dull earth, I could neither moderate nor hide my spleen, and, no longer master over myself, I used to give them greeting so rough that it might well be called brutal."1

1 Conf., ix. 270-274.