No More Learning

He was born at Geneva, June
28th, 1712, in a troubled atmosphere, among the riots and agitations
which were beginning to threaten the old Genevan oligarchy. He
lost his mother at birth. His father, who was a watchmaker, scarcely
concerned himself with his early education except to read Plutarch
and Richardson with him. When forced to leave Geneva, he in-
trusted the boy to the care of a maternal uncle. Jean Jacques was
a dreamy, romantic child, sentimental, and not without a touch of
perversity. Early embarked on a wandering and adventurous life,
he was successively engraver's apprentice, vagabond, lackey, secre-
tary. He improvised himself into a musician; he even made him-
self a traveling tradesman. The counsels of a benefactress whose
influence over him was very great-Madame de Warens - converted
him to Catholicism, a faith which he afterward renounced. He
traveled. He saw Italy. He read French, English, and German phi-
losophers pell-mell, while studying music, history, and mathematics
without method. Engaged as a preceptor at the elder Mably's,-
brother of the Abbé Mably,- he was introduced to the literary soci-
ety of the epoch. After some fruitless gropings he was to conquer
first place in a competition before the Academy of Dijon, by a memo-
rial (which was crowned) upon this question: 'Has the progress of
sciences and arts contributed to corrupt or to purify morals? ' (1749).
The success of this initial work, which contains the germs of most
of the ideas developed in his later works, was both brilliant and bel-
ligerent.
Suddenly famous, Rousseau became at the same time distrustful,
solitary, misanthropic; and these characteristics were intensified by
his alliance with her who was to be the companion of his life,- a
person of inferior heart and mind, from whom he suffered much,
and with whom he could not break. The 'Discourse on the Arts and
Sciences' was soon followed by a new competitive essay assigned by
the same Academy of Dijon,-'A Discourse on the Inequality among


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12436
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Men,' — which is a fuller and more authoritative exposition of the
earlier theme. The fundamental idea of this work the keystone
of all Rousseau's philosophy. It is summed up in this simple remark:
"Men are bad; my own sad experience furnishes the proof: yet man
is naturally good, as I think I have shown. What then can so have
degraded him, except the changes in his condition, the progress he
has made, and the knowledge he has acquired? " The Academy of
Dijon did not crown this second discourse, which was thought too
radical; and Rousseau continued a career filled with triumphs whose
bitterness alone he felt. His theories were violently opposed by the
literary and philosophic classes; but the public was with him.
In 1752, his opera 'Le Devin du Village' (The Village Sooth-
sayer), played at court under his direction, brought him a pension
from the King. He became the fashion; great lords and lovely ladies
invited him, petted him, patronized him. In less than five years
he was to launch on the world the works which made him the most
formidable protagonist of the new era: 'La Nouvelle Héloïse,' which
inaugurated "romantic" literature long before the word was found
to characterize it; the Contrat Social,' which preludes the doctrines
of the Revolution; and 'Émile,' which attempts to reform the princi-
ples of education. These three works brought Rousseau an unexam-
pled popularity. But the violent controversies they aroused, the real
hatreds they excited, the condemnations they drew upon him,- at
Paris where the Parliament decreed his arrest, and at Geneva where
'Émile' was burned by the executioner,- hurried him into a mel-
ancholy more and more bitter and afflicting. He took refuge with
different friends, whom his suspicions presently transformed into per-
secutors, in different places, where he always believed himself perse-
cuted.
Returning to Paris in 1770, he passed there several years of anxious
poverty: copying music for a livelihood; composing, in answer to
demands which honored him, such works as the 'Considerations on
the Government of Poland'; or to defend himself before posterity,
books like The Confessions,' and the Rêveries d'un Promeneur
Solitaire' (Musings of a Solitary Stroller), which did not appear until
after his death. In 1778 he accepted a refuge offered by one of
his faithful friends, René de Girardin, on his estate of Ermenonville.
There his mind seemed to be growing calmer in the serene contem-
plation of the green and smiling country, when he died suddenly, on
the 2d of July, 1778, in his sixty-seventh year. At first, suicide was
suspected; but an autopsy disclosed the cause of death to be serous
apoplexy. His body, buried at two o'clock at night under the pop-
lars of Ermenonville,- "by the most beautiful moonlight and in the
calmest weather," says a witness,- was transported to the Pantheon


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JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
12437
in 1794 by order of the Convention. But in 1814 it was exhumed,
as was Voltaire's, without official order; and the bones of the two
philosophers, placed in the same sack, were thrust under ground in
the waste land toward Bercy.
What especially strikes the writer who attempts to analyze the
moral and intellectual personality of Rousseau, is the predominance
of his imagination. He was a poet and a romancer,— a romancer
who made theories instead of making romances; but 'Émile' is cer-
tainly a pedagogical story, as the Contrat Social' is a story, as the
'Discours sur l'Inégalité' is a historical, or if you like, an anthro-
pological story. This fertile imagination was constantly excited by a
very lively sensibility, which exalted itself in ardent friendships, in
ardent passions, which embraced all humanity, reaching out to ani-
mals and even to inanimate things, and finding only in communion
with nature some little joy and compensation. The disordered ac-
tion of the romantic imagination upon this morbid sensibility would
naturally produce and did produce errors of judgment, such as the
doctrines of the Contrat, of Émile, etc. ; and also errors in life, of
which the gravest was that systematic and deliberate abandonment
of his children, with which Rousseau has been so strongly reproached.
But these errors came from the mind, not from the heart. Many
facts prove that despite his paradoxes of thought and conduct, this
man possessed a sincere kindness, a generosity which could pardon
the worst offenses, a simple and touching tenderness of soul, a dis-
interestedness so great as to deprive him of all profit from his tal-
ents. These qualities are sometimes spoiled or perverted by a pride
to which perhaps must be attributed some of his acts of generosity
or devotion, as well as some of his errors; and which later became
exaggerated to mania in the mental malady of which it is impossi-
ble to say whether it was cause or effect. This pride, from which
he suffered more than any one else, was his only vice; in spite of his
having allowed himself to be drawn into certain culpable acts, such
as once to have stolen and often to have lied,-offenses which would
never have been known but for his own confession.
In spite of such errors, committed in hours of temptation, and
expiated by long and sincere regrets, it would be unjust to deny
Rousseau's true nobility of soul. If that soul seems to us sullied,
the blame rests upon the hazards of his neglected childhood and
adventurous youth; upon the storms of his genius, his sufferings dur-
ing the long period when he was forced to seek his true self among
the worst obstacles, upon the tempests he aroused; and finally, later,
upon the maddening mirages with which his sick imagination sur-
rounded him.


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12438
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
-
The elements of Rousseau's character were also those of his gen-
ius. Although he delighted to reason according to the method
which Descartes had inaugurated, and from which he could not free
himself, that old vessel in which bubbled up the new wine of his
thought, yet it is unreasonable to expect much reason from him.
His logic usually ends in paradox. Upon going back to the origin of
his ideas and attempting to analyze them, one finds that taken sep-
arately they are neither very original nor very profound: all return
to that fundamental conception of the superiority of "the state of
nature" over "the social state," - a too inadequate conception, of
which it is impossible to prove the truth. It is that which inspired
his earliest Discourses. ' At first the 'Contrat Social' seemed to
contradict them: for how could a philosopher who hated society just-
ify the basis of its organization; and especially how could he conclude,
as he does, that to this fatal and illegitimate society the citizen owes
the sacrifice of himself? But after this passing infidelity to his dom-
inant faith, he returned to it again in 'Émile,' where he maintains
that normal education should isolate a child from society in order that
his natural qualities may develop; and he held this view to the end,
as appears in those Confessions,' which, in the portrait they give
of himself, explain without justifying the fundamental idea of all his
doctrine. The defects of his early education Rousseau never sup-
plied; his reading, insufficient and fantastic, left him defenseless to
all external influences. His religion was a vague spiritualism; his
morality, an unconvincing optimism; his politics, a Utopia, pastoral
in the 'Discours sur l'Inégalité,' epic in the 'Contrat Social. ' Finally,
he seems never to have known any other man than himself; and the
psychology of his 'Nouvelle Héloïse' remains essentially personal.
Whence comes it then, that in spite of so much weakness he was the
greatest French writer of his century,- or at least the most influen-
tial, the most universal, and the most persistent?
To understand this curious fact, we must consider Rousseau in his
century and environment. At that period, literature found itself in
flagrant conflict with the morality whose aspirations it was supposed
to express. The writers, most of them new-comers from another class,
usually ended by adding themselves to the old society and adopting
its conventions; or, penetrated with new sentiments, failed to adopt
new tools, and clung to the rhetoric inherited from the preceding
age. Dry, arid, "oldish" in Goethe's apt phrase, they tried in vain
to cultivate sensibility; and when they endeavored to depart from
routine, achieved only the artificial, as Diderot's plays show. The
strength and greatness of Rousseau was, above all, his sincerity: if
he was the first to discard conventional rhetoric, and to express his
own sensibility, it is because he possessed true sensibility; moreover,
---
-


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JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
12439
plebeian by birth, he remained plebeian from resolute pride. Differ-
ent from his contemporaries in these two essentials, which conse-
crated his superiority, he became the supreme interpreter of those
ideas, feelings, passions, which were fermenting in the decomposition
of the Old World. He was sentimental and revolutionary, romantic
and rebellious. Animated by the fierce breath of the spirit of nega-
tion, he set himself against all authority, against all tradition; and
his attack was the more resistless, that the charm of his romantic
spirit dissembled its violence.
In the discharge of this little understood and almost fatal office,
he was aided by his wonderful literary gifts. With his most illustri-
ous rivals, French prose had become a conversational language,—
rapid, facile, and brilliant; but without the life which captivates or
the power which impresses itself. Rousseau instinctively abandoned
this use to return to the great oratorical style, to rediscover the lost
secrets of eloquence. For the short sentence, dry, laconic, and inci-
sive, which is that of the best writers of his time, he adopted the long
balanced period, sometimes even too rhythmic, which seizes the atten-
tion and holds it to the end. For the abstract terms in which those
about him delighted, he substituted words of color, living and ardent;
words which paint, words which feel, words which vibrate and weep.
The same instinct which thus revealed to him a new skill in the
sentence, revealed to him also a new and corresponding skill in com-
position. His sentences-long, vivid, and musical-link themselves
together to form a kind of organic charm; so that the complete work
may exercise the same fascination as each of its component parts.
It was the language of passion succeeding that of reason, or rather
of reasoning. The effect could not be doubtful. This effect was
extremely violent, not only upon ideas but upon morals. Is it neces-
sary to recall that after the 'Nouvelle Héloïse,' everybody wanted to
love like Saint-Preux and Julie? that 'Émile' transformed the cur-
rent opinions upon education? that people wished to be emotional,
to dream in the fields, to reascend the current of civilization, to
make their spirits ingenuous, primitive, or at least "natural"? Who
then first uttered the cry of the period, "O Nature! Nature! " the cry
which soon became a new affectation?
Thus Rousseau appears to us as the most enticing guide of his
century. "Beside him," says M. Faguet, "Voltaire appears at times
merely a witty student, and Buffon only a very remarkable teacher
of rhetoric. Montesquieu alone, inferior as a man of imagination,
equals him in strength of view, and excels him in clearness of vis-
ion. " But exactly because he lacked imagination, Montesquieu was
not a harbinger. Rousseau was essentially a forerunner. One may
say that he has shaped the whole century which followed him. His


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12440
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
principal works not only called forth successions of imitations, but
the world is imbued with his ideas, whose consequences continue to
renew or overturn the human soul and society. The 'Contrat Social'
accounts in part for the excesses of the Revolution; and as to the
chief revolutionists, the most dangerous indeed were "Spartans," as
Rousseau had recommended. The vague yet ardent spiritualism pro-
claimed in the 'Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard' (The Savoyard
Vicar's Creed), led to the Festival of the Supreme Being, and pro-
voked the religious reaction of the beginning of the century. The
notions concerning a return to the primitive life which he developed
in his first work, and which remained the basis of his doctrine, may
be found again with the socialists of 1848, underlying the Utopias of
the Saint-Simons, the Fouriers, the Enfantiers, and perhaps even in
the origin of the "collectivism" which has replaced those innocent
dreams. His optimism, his faith in the constant progress of humanity,
inspired during the same period not only the "reformer" who trans-
ported the golden age of the past to the future, but also the most
moderate, most clear-sighted, and most politic minds. The 'Nouvelle
Héloïse' created romanticism, that perilous and seductive disposition
of spirit to which we owe so many affecting works: Saint-Preux is
an elder brother of Werther, and what a posterity follows them!
Before Rousseau, a few English poets alone had perceived Nature.
After him, no one dared longer ignore her. Every one prided him-
self upon loving her. She found sincere adorers who perhaps would
never have perceived her if they had not listened to her worshiper's
enchanting voice.
In such details we get the impression of the whole man. Others
have left works more perfect, and above all more beneficent; but I do
not believe that in the whole history of literature there exists the man
whose influence has been so decisive, so far-reaching, and upon whom
it is so difficult to form a fair judgment. Measured from the point
of view of to-day, this influence seems disproportioned to the genius
which exercised it, and to the value of the works of that genius.
But the most perfect works do not necessarily count the most; and
the keenest criticism cannot always explain the mysterious affinities
of genius, of thought, and of morals. It has been questioned whether
this influence, the extent and duration of which are incontestable, has
been a salutary one. We are not now to consider this. An alluring,
an irresistible guide, Rousseau has not been an infallible one. Many
have gone astray in following him. If he had a kind and feeling
heart, he had not less a faulty intellect; and his paradoxes often par-
alyzed his good intention. The ability with which he followed them
to their extreme conclusion, like the eloquence he employed in their
service, only served to render them more dangerous. Therefore in


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JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
12441
penetrating so deeply the consciousness of the generations that fol-
lowed im, Rousseau's thought has drawn upon them many ills. It
has involved them in many gropings and errors, in many delusive
visions and sufferings. It has spread abroad in the Old World a
general agitation, which the violent convulsions following it did not
succeed in dispelling. It has scattered abroad sadness which still
encompasses us. Passion is sad; nature breathes melancholy: all that
Rousseau loved and made us love puts the heart in mourning; it
may be that it is the memory of his teaching which spreads such dark-
ness over the end of the century. For by an amazing contradiction,
the optimist who believed so profoundly in the goodness of human
nature is the true father of the pessimists of our time. But what-
ever the proportions of the good and ill he has done us, we are still
responsive to his influence, while cherishing for him an affection not
unmingled with reproach. Those even who condemn or oppose him
do not always escape loving him. Although a whole century - one
of the centuries most freighted with historical events and evolutions
- has passed over his work, it is still too near to be fairly judged.
But we may feel sure that it will be reckoned in a balance whose
weights we do not know.
дол агония
Guard
FOREWORD
Copyright 1893, by G. P. Putnam's Sons
From The Social Contract.
I
WISH to discover whether, in the existing social order, there
may not be some rule of safe and legitimate administration,
taking men as they are and laws as they might be. I shall
try to ally, in this research, that which the law permits with that
which interest prescribes, so that justice and utility may not be
divided.
I enter upon this discussion without proving the importance
of the subject. I shall be asked if I am a prince or a legislator,
that I write about politics. I shall answer, No—and that for this
reason I write about politics. If I were a prince or a legislator,
I should not lose time in telling what ought to be done: I should
do it or be silent.


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12442
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Born citizen of a free State and member of the sovereign peo-
ple, however feeble the influence of my voice in public affairs,
the right to vote upon them imposes upon me the duty of in-
structing myself. Whenever I meditate upon governments, I am
happy to find in my investigations new reasons for loving that of
my own country.
THE PEOPLE
From The Social Contract. Copyright 1893, by G. P. Putnam's Sons
THE
HE architect, before erecting a great building, examines and
sounds the soil to see if it will bear its weight: so the wise
lawgiver will not begin by making good laws, but he will
first see whether the people for whom they are destined is ready
to hear them. It was for this reason that Plato refused to give
laws to the Arcadians and the Cyrenians, knowing that these two
nations were rich and would not endure equality.
The reason that in Crete there were good laws and bad men,
was because Minos had given laws to a people loaded with vices.
Thousands of nations have flourished upon earth which could
never have endured good laws; and those which could have borne
them had but a short existence.
Most nations, like most men, are docile only in youth; they
become incorrigible as they grow old.
hey grow old. When customs are once
established and prejudices rooted, it is a dangerous and useless
enterprise to try to reform them: the people will not permit
their misfortunes to be touched upon, even for their instruction,
-like the stupid and cowardly sick who shudder at sight of a
physician.
It is not that
as some maladies upset a man's head and
make him forget the past - there may not be, in the existence of
States, violent epochs when revolutions produce upon nations the
effect that certain crises produce upon individuals; when horror
of the past takes the place of forgetfulness, and when the State,
destroyed by civil wars, rises from its ashes and takes on the
vigor of youth.
Such was Sparta in the time of Lycurgus; such was Rome
after the Tarquins; and such have been among us Holland and
Switzerland after the expulsion of tyrants.
-
•


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But these events are rare; they are exceptions, and their
cause is always found in the particular constitution of the excep-
tional State. They cannot even take place twice with the same
nation; for a nation can make itself free as long as it is barbar-
ous, but it can do so no more when its civil energy is exhausted.
Troubles may then destroy, without its being possible for rev-
olutions to re-establish it: as soon as its chains are broken it
falls apart and exists no longer, needing thereafter a master, not
a liberator.
Let free nations remember this truth: "Liberty may be ac-
quired, but never recovered. "
Youth is not infancy. There is a time of youth for nations.
as well as man, or if you will, of maturity,- which must be
waited for before subjecting them to laws: but the maturity of
a people is not always easy to recognize, and if begun too early
the labor is lost. Certain peoples may be disciplined from their
earliest existence; others cannot be disciplined at the end of ten
centuries.
-
The Russians will never be truly civilized, because they were
taken in hand too early. Peter had the genius of imitation: he
had not the true genius which creates all from nothing. Some
things which he did were good, most of them were ill-timed.
He saw that his was a barbarous people: he did not see that
it was not ripe for civilization; he tried to civilize it when he
should have accustomed it to war. He tried at first to make
Germans or English, when he should have begun by making
Russians; he prevented his subjects from ever becoming what
they might have been, by persuading them that they were what
they were not.
It is thus that a French preceptor teaches his pupil to shine
in his infancy, and then to amount to nothing afterward. The
empire of Russia will desire to subjugate Europe, and will itself
be subjugated. The Tartars, its subjects or neighbors, will
become its masters and ours: this revolution seems to me inev-
itable. All the kings of Europe are working together to acceler-
ate it.


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JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
FROM ÉMILE>
Copyright 1892, by D. Appleton & Co. , and reprinted by permission of the
Translator
R
ATTLE-HEADED children become commonplace men. I know of
no observation more general and more certain than this.
Nothing is more difficult than to distinguish, in infancy,
real stupidity from that apparent and deceptive stupidity which
is the indication of strong characters. It seems strange, at
first sight, that the two extremes should have the same signs, and
yet this must needs be so; for at an age when the man has as
yet no real ideas, all the difference that exists between him
who has genius and him who has it not is, that the latter gives
admittance only to false ideas, while the former, finding no oth-
ers, gives admittance to none. In so far then as one is capable
of nothing, and nothing is befitting the other, both appear to be
stupid. The only sign that can distinguish them depends on
chance, which may offer to the last some idea within his com-
prehension; whereas the first is always and everywhere the same.
During his infancy the younger Cato seemed an imbecile in the
family. He was taciturn and obstinate, and this was all the judg
ment that was formed of him. It was only in the antechamber
of Sylla that his uncle learned to know him. If he had not
gone into that antechamber, perhaps he would have passed for a
dolt till the age of reason. If Cæsar had not lived, perhaps men
would always have treated as a visionary that very Cato who
penetrated his baleful genius, and foresaw all his projects from
afar. Oh, how liable to be deceived are they who are so precipi-
tate in their judgments of children! They are often the more
childish. I myself have seen a man somewhat advanced in age,
who honored me with his friendship, who was regarded by his
family and his friends as lacking in intelligence; but this was
a superior mind maturing in silence. All at once he has shown
himself a philosopher, and I doubt not that posterity will assign
him a distinguished and honorable place among the best reason.
ers and the most profound metaphysicians of his age.
Respect childhood, and do not hastily judge of it either for
good or for evil. Allow a long time for the exceptions to be
manifested, proved, and confirmed, before adopting special meth-
ods for them. Allow Nature to act in her place, for fear of
thwarting her operations. You know, you say, the value of time,


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JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
12445
and do not wish to waste it. You do not see that to make a bad
use of time is much more wasteful than to do nothing with it;
and that a poorly taught child is further from wisdom than one
who has not been taught at all. You are alarmed at seeing him.
consume his early years in doing nothing! Really! Is it noth-
ing to be happy? Is it nothing to jump, play, and run, all day
long? In no other part of his life will he be so busy. Plato,
in his 'Republic,' which is deemed so austere, brings up children
only in festivals, games, songs, and pastimes. It might be said
that he has done all when he has really taught them how to
enjoy themselves; and Seneca, speaking of the ancient Roman
youth, says they were always on their feet, and were
taught anything which they could learn while seated. Were they
of less value for this when they reached the age of manhood?
Be not at all frightened, therefore, at this so-called idleness.
What would you think of a man who, in order to turn his whole
life to profitable account, would never take time to sleep? You
will say that he is a man out of his senses: that he does not
make use of his time but deprives himself of it; and that to fly
from sleep is to run toward death. Reflect, therefore, that this is
the same thing, and that childhood is the slumber of reason.
never
The apparent facility with which children learn is the cause
of their ruin. We do not see that this very facility is the proof
that they are learning nothing. Their smooth and polished brain
reflects like a mirror the objects that are presented to it; but
nothing remains, nothing penetrates it. The child retains words,
but ideas are reflected. Those who hear these words understand
them, but the child who utters them does not.
Although memory and reasoning are two essentially different
faculties, yet the first is not truly developed save in conjunction
with the second. Before the age of reason a child does not re-
ceive ideas, but images; and there is this difference between
them: images are but the faithful pictures of sensible objects,
while ideas are notions of objects determined by their rela-
tions. An image may exist alone in the mind which forms the
representation of it; but every idea supposes others.
When we
imagine, we do no more than see; but when we conceive, we com-
pare. Our sensations are purely passive, whereas all our percep-
tions or ideas spring from an active principle which judges.
I say then, that children, not being capable of judgment, have
no real memory. They retain sounds, forms, sensations, but rarely


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JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
ideas; and still more rarely their combinations. The objection
that they learn some elements of geometry is thought to be a
proof that I am wrong; but directly to the contrary, it is a proof
in my favor. It is shown that, far from knowing how to rea-
son for themselves, they cannot even retain the reasonings of
others; for if you follow these little geometricians in their recita-
tions, you will at once see that they have retained only the exact
expressions of the figure and the terms of the demonstration.
If you interpose the least unforeseen objection to the argument,
or if you reverse the figure they are following, they are at once
disconcerted. All their knowledge is in sensation, and nothing
has penetrated the understanding. Their memory itself is hardly
more perfect than their other faculties; since they must almost
always learn over again, when grown, the things which they
learned by rote in childhood.
I am very far from thinking, however, that children are in-
capable of any kind of reasoning. On the contrary, I see that
they reason very well on whatever they know, and on whatever
is related to their present and obvious interests. But it is with
respect to their knowledge that we are deceived. We give them
credit for knowledge which they do not have, and make them
reason on matters which they cannot comprehend. We are de-
ceived, moreover, in trying to make them attentive to considera-
tions which in no wise affect them;-as that of their prospective
interest, of their happiness when grown to be men, or of the
esteem in which they will be held when they have become great,
talk which, addressed to creatures deprived of all foresight,
has absolutely no significance for them. Now, all the premature
studies of these unfortunates relate to objects entirely foreign to
their minds; and we may judge of the attention which they can
give them.
The pedagogues who make such a great display of the subjects
which they teach their disciples, are paid to speak of this matter
in different terms; but we see by their own course of action that
they think exactly as I do. For what do they really teach their
pupils? Words, words, nothing but words. Among the different
sciences which they boast of teaching, they are very careful not
to choose those which are really useful to them, because they are
the sciences of things, and they would never succeed in teaching
them; but they prefer the sciences which we seem to know when
we have learned their terminology,- such as heraldry, geography,


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JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
12447
chronology, the languages, etc. , all of them studies so remote
from man, and especially from the child, that it would be a mar-
vel if a single item of all this could be useful to him once in the
course of his life.
―――――
It will seem surprising to some that I include the study of
languages among the inutilities of education; but it will be recol-
lected that I am speaking here only of primary studies; and that,
whatever may be thought of it, I do not believe that up to the
age of twelve or fifteen years, any child, prodigies excepted, has
ever really learned two languages.
I grant that if the study of languages were but the study of
words, that is, of the forms or sounds which express them,-
it might be suitable for children; but languages, by the changing
symbols, also modify the ideas which they represent. Languages
have their several and peculiar effects in the formation of the
intellectual faculties; the thoughts are tinged by their respect-
ive idioms. The only thing common to languages is the reason.
The spirit of each language has its peculiar form; and this dif-
ference is doubtless partly the cause and partly the effect of
national characteristics. This conjecture seems to be confirmed
by the fact that among all the nations of the earth, language
follows the vicissitudes of manners, and is preserved pure or is
corrupted just as they are.
Use has given one of these different forms of thought to
the child; and it is the only one which he preserves to the age
of reason. In order to have two of these forms, he must needs
know how to compare ideas; and how can he compare them
when he is hardly in a condition to conceive them? Each thing
may have for him a thousand different symbols; but each idea
can have but one form. Nevertheless, we are told that he learns
to speak several. This I deny. I have seen such little prodi-
gies, who thought they were speaking five or six languages. I
have heard them speak German in terms of Latin, French, and
Italian, respectively. In fact, they used five or six vocabularies,
but they spoke nothing but German. In a word, give children
as many synonyms as you please, and you will change the words
they utter, but not the language: they will never know but one.
It is to conceal their inaptitude in this respect that they
are drilled by preference on dead languages, since there are no
longer judges of those who may be called to testify. The famil-
iar use of these languages having for a long time been lost, we
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JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
are content to imitate the remains of them which we find written
in books; and this is what we call speaking them. If such is
the Greek and Latin of the teachers, we may imagine what the
Greek and Latin of the children is! Scarcely have they learned
by heart the rudiments of these languages, of which they under-
stand absolutely nothing, when they are taught, first to turn a
French discourse into Latin words; and then when they are
more advanced, to tack together in prose, sentences from Cicero,
and in verse, scraps from Virgil. Then they think that they are
speaking Latin: and who is there to contradict them?
Translation of William H. Payne.
ON THE USES OF TRAVEL
From 'Émile. Copyright 1892, by D. Appleton & Co. , and reprinted by
permission of the Translator
TH
HE abuse of books kills science. Thinking they know what
they have read, men think that they can dispense with
learning it. Too much reading serves only to make pre-
sumptuous ignoramuses. Of all the centuries of literature, there
is not one in which there has been so much reading as in this,
and not one in which men have been less wise; of all the coun-
tries of Europe, there is not one where so many histories and
travels have been printed as in France, and not one where less
is known of the genius and customs of other countries. So many
books make us neglect the book of the world; or if we still read
in it, each one confines himself to his leaf.
A Parisian fancies he knows men, while he knows only
Frenchmen. In his city, always full of strangers, he regards
each foreigner as an extraordinary phenomenon, which has no
fellow in the rest of the universe. We must have had a near
view of the citizens of that great city, we must have lived with
them, in order to believe that with so much spirit they can also
be so stupid. The queer thing about it is that each of them has
read, perhaps ten times, the description of the country one of
whose inhabitants has filled him with so much wonder.
It is too much to have to wade through at the same time the
prejudices of authors and our own in order to arrive at the truth.
I have spent my life in reading books of travel, and I have never


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found two of them which gave me the same idea of the same
people. On comparing the little which I was able to observe
with what I had read, I have ended by abandoning travelers,
and by regretting the time which I had spent in order to instruct
myself in their reading; thoroughly convinced that in respect of
observations of all sorts we must not read but see. This would
be true if all travelers were sincere; if they related only what
they have seen or what they believe, and if they disguised the
truth only by the false colors which it takes in their eyes. What
must it be when, in addition, we have to discern the truth
through their falsehoods and their bad faith?
Let us, then, abandon to those made to be contented with
them the expedient of books commended to us. Like the art of
Raymond Lully, they are useful for teaching us to prate about
what we do not know. They are useful for preparing Platos of
fifteen for philosophizing in clubs, and for instructing a company
on the customs of Egypt and India, on the faith of Paul Lucas
or of Tavernier.
I hold it for an incontestable maxim, that whoever has seen
but one people, instead of knowing men, knows only those with
whom he has lived. Here then is still another way of stating
the same question of travels. Is it sufficient for a well-educated
man to know only his own countrymen, or is it important for
him to know men in general? There no longer remains dispute
or doubt on this point. Observe how the solution of a difficult
question sometimes depends on the manner of stating it.
But in order to study men, must we make the tour of the
whole earth? Must we go to Japan to observe Europeans? In
order to know the species, must we know all the individuals?
No: there are men who resemble one another so closely that it
is not worth the trouble to study them separately. He who has
seen ten Frenchmen has seen them all. Although we cannot say
the same of the English and of some other peoples, it is never-
theless certain that each nation has its peculiar and specific
character, which is inferred by induction, not from the observa-
tion of a single one of its members, but of several. He who has
compared ten peoples knows mankind, just as he who has seen
ten Frenchmen knows the French.
For purposes of instruction it is not sufficient to stroll
through countries, but we must know how to travel. In order to
observe, we must have eyes, and must turn them toward the
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JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
object which we wish to examine. There are many people whom
travel instructs still less than books, because they are ignorant of
the art of thinking; whereas in reading, their mind is at least
guided by the author, while in their travels they do not know
how to see anything for themselves. Others are not instructed
because they do not wish to be instructed. Their object is so
different that this hardly affects them. It is very doubtful whether
we can see with exactness what we are not anxious to observe.
Of all the people in the world, the Frenchman is he who travels
the most; but, full of his own ways, he slights indiscriminately
everything which does not resemble them. There are Frenchmen
in every corner of the world. There is no country where we
can find more people who have traveled than we find in France.
But notwithstanding all this, of all the people of Europe, the one
that sees the most of them knows the least. The English also
travel, but in a different way; and it seems that these two nations
must be different in everything. The English nobility travel,
the French nobility do not travel; the French people travel, the
English people do not travel. This difference seems to me hon-
orable to the latter. The French have almost always some per-
sonal interest in their travels; but the English do not go to seek
their fortune abroad, unless it is through commerce, and with full
pockets. When they travel it is to spend their money abroad,
and not to live there on the fruits of their industry; they are too
proud to go prowling about away from home. This also causes
them to learn more from foreigners than the French do, who have
a totally different object in view. The English, however, have
their national prejudices also, and even more of them than any
one else; but these prejudices are due less to ignorance than to
passion. The Englishman has the prejudices of pride, and the
Frenchman those of vanity.
There is a great difference between traveling to see the country
and traveling to see the people. The first object is always that
of the curious, while the other is only incidental for them. It
ought to be the very opposite for one who wishes to philosophize.
The child observes things, and waits until he can observe men.
The man ought to begin by observing his fellows; and then he
can observe things if he has the time.
It is bad reasoning to conclude that travels are useless because
we travel in the wrong way. But admitting the utility of travels,
does it follow that they are best for everybody? Far from it;


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12451
on the contrary, they are good for only a very few people: they
are good only for men who have sufficient self-control to listen
to the lessons of error without allowing themselves to go astray,
and to see the example of vice without permitting themselves to
be drawn into it. Travel develops the natural bent of character,
and finally makes a man good or bad. Whoever returns from a
tour of the world is, on his return, what he will be for the rest
of his life. Of those who return, more are bad than good, because
more of those who start out are inclined to evil rather than
good. Badly educated and badly trained young men contract
during their travels all the vices of the peoples whom they visit,
but not one of the virtues with which these vices are mingled;
but those who are happily born, those whose good nature has
been well cultivated, and who travel with the real purpose of
becoming instructed, all return better and wiser than when they
started out. It is thus that my Émile shall travel.
Whatever is done through reason ought to have its rules:
travels, considered as a part of education, ought to have theirs.
To travel for the sake of traveling is to be a wanderer, a vaga-
bond; to travel for the sake of instruction is still too vague an
object; for instruction which has no determined end amounts to
nothing.
Translation of William H. Payne.
IN THE ISLE OF ST. PETER
From the Fifth of the 'Rêveries>
I
FOUND my existence so charming, and led a life so agreeable
to my humor, that I resolved here to end my days. My only
source of disquiet was whether I should be allowed to carry
my project out. In the midst of the presentiments that disturbed
me, I would fain have had them make a perpetual prison of my
refuge, to confine me in it for all the rest of my life. I longed
for them to cut off all chance and all hope of leaving it; to for-
bid my holding any communication with the mainland, so that
knowing nothing of what was going on in the world, I might
have forgotten the world's existence, and people might have for-
gotten mine too. They suffered me to pass only two months in
the island, but I could have passed two years, two centuries, and
all eternity, without a moment's weariness; though I had not,


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JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
with my companion, any other society than that of the steward,
his wife, and their servants. They were in truth honest souls
and nothing more, but that was just what I wanted.
Carried thither in a violent hurry, alone and without a thing, I
afterwards sent for my housekeeper, my books, and my scanty
possessions, of which I had the delight of unpacking nothing,-
leaving my boxes and chests just as they had come, and dwelling
in the house where I counted on ending my days exactly as if
it were
an inn whence I must set forth on the morrow.
All
things went so well, just as they were, that to think of ordering
them better were to spoil them. One of my greatest joys was
to leave my books fastened up in their boxes, and to be without
even a case for writing. When any luckless letter forced me to
take up a pen for an answer, I grumblingly borrowed the stew-
ard's inkstand, and hurried to give it back to him with all the
haste I could, in the vain hope that I should never have need
of the loan any more. Instead of meddling with those weary
quires and reams and piles of old books, I filled my chamber with
flowers and grasses; for I was then in my first fervor for botany.
Having given up employment that would be a task to me, I
needed one that would be an amusement, nor cause me more
pains than a sluggard might choose to take.
I undertook to make the 'Flora Petrinsularis'; and to describe
every single plant on the island, in detail enough to occupy me
for the rest of my days. In consequence of this fine scheme,
every morning after breakfast, which we all took in company, I
used to go with a magnifying-glass in my hand, and my 'Sys-
tema Naturæ' under my arm, to visit some district of the island.
I had divided it for that purpose into small squares, meaning to
go through them one after another in each season of the year.
At the end of two or three hours I used to return laden with an
ample harvest,- a provision for amusing myself after dinner in-
doors, in case of rain. I spent the rest of the morning in going
with the steward, his wife, and Theresa, to see the laborers and
the harvesting, and I generally set to work along with them:
many a time when people from Berne came to see me, they
found me perched on a high tree, with a bag fastened round my
waist; I kept filling it with fruit, and then let it down to the
ground with a rope. The exercise I had taken in the morning,
and the good-humor that always comes from exercise, made the
repose of dinner vastly pleasant to me. But if dinner was kept


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up too long, and fine weather invited me forth, I could not
wait; but was speedily off to throw myself all alone into a boat,
which, when the water was smooth enough, I used to pull out
to the middle of the lake. There, stretched at full length in the
boat's bottom, with my eyes turned up to the sky, I let myself
float slowly hither and thither as the water listed, sometimes for
hours together; plunged in a thousand confused delicious mus-
ings, which, though they had no fixed nor constant object, were
not the less on that account a hundred times dearer to me than
all that I had found sweetest in what they call the pleasures of
life. Often warned by the going down of the sun that it was
time to return, I found myself so far from the island that I was
forced to row with all my might to get in before it was pitch
dark. At other times, instead of losing myself in the midst of
the waters, I had a fancy to coast along the green shores of the
island, where the clear waters and cool shadows tempted me to
bathe.
But one of my most frequent expeditions was from the larger
island to the less: there I disembarked and spent my afternoon,
-sometimes in mimic rambles among wild elders, persicaries,
willows, and shrubs of every species; sometimes settling myself
on the top of a sandy knoll, covered with turf, wild thyme,
flowers, even sainfoin and trefoil that had most likely been sown
there in old days, making excellent quarters for rabbits. They
might multiply in peace without either fearing anything or
harming anything. I spoke of this to the steward. He at once
had male and female rabbits brought from Neuchâtel, and we
went in high state-his wife, one of his sisters, Theresa, and I—
to settle them in the little islet. The foundation of our colony
was a feast-day. The pilot of the Argonauts was not prouder
than I, as I bore my company and the rabbits in triumph from
our island to the smaller one.
When the lake was too rough for me to sail, I spent my
afternoon in going up and down the island, gathering plants to
right and left; seating myself now in smiling lonely nooks to
dream at my ease, now on little terraces and knolls, to follow
with my eyes the superb and ravishing prospect of the lake and
its shores, crowned on one side by the neighboring hills, and
on the other melting into rich and fertile plains up to the feet
of the pale-blue mountains on their far-off edge.


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JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
As evening drew on, I used to come down from the high
ground, and sit on the beach at the water's brink in some hid-
den sheltering-place. There the murmur of the waves and their
agitation charmed all my senses, and drove every other move-
ment away from my soul: they plunged it into delicious dream-
ings, in which I was often surprised by night. The flux and
reflux of the water, its ceaseless stir, swelling and falling at
intervals, striking on ear and sight, made up for the internal
movements which my musings extinguished; they were enough
to give me delight in mere existence, without taking any trouble
of thinking. From time to time arose some passing thought of
the instability of the things of this world, of which the face of
the waters offered an image: but such light impressions were
swiftly effaced in the uniformity of the ceaseless motion, which
rocked me as in a cradle; it held me with such fascination that
even when called at the hour and by the signal appointed, I
could not tear myself away without summoning all my force.
After supper, when the evening was fine, we used to go all
together for a saunter on the terrace, to breathe the freshness
of the air from the lake. We sat down in the arbor,-laughing,
chatting, or singing some old song,- and then we went home to
bed, well pleased with the day, and only craving another that
should be exactly like it on the morrow.
All is a continual flux upon the earth. Nothing in it keeps
a form constant and determinate; our affections-fastening on
external things- necessarily change and pass just as they do.
Ever in front of us or behind us, they recall the past that is
gone, or anticipate a future that in many a case is destined never
to be. There is nothing solid to which the heart can fix itself.
Here we have little more than a pleasure that comes and passes
away; as for the happiness that endures, I cannot tell if it be
so much as known among men. There is hardly in the midst
of our liveliest delights a single instant when the heart could
tell us with real truth, "I would this instant might last forever. "
And how can we give the name of happiness to a fleeting state
that all the time leaves the heart unquiet and void,- that makes
us regret something gone, or still long for something to come?
But if there is a state in which the soul finds a situation
solid enough to comport with perfect repose, and with the ex-
pansion of its whole faculty, without need of calling back the
•


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past or pressing on towards the future; where time is nothing
for it, and the present has no ending; with no mark for its own
duration, and without a trace of succession; without a single
other sense of privation or delight, of pleasure or pain, of desire
or apprehension, than this single sense of existence,- so long
as such a state endures, he who finds himself in it may talk of
bliss, not with a poor, relative, and imperfect happiness such as
people find in the pleasures of life, but with a happiness full,
perfect, and sufficing, that leaves in the soul no conscious unfilled
void. Such a state was many a day mine in my solitary musings
in the isle of St. Peter, either lying in my boat as it floated on
the water, or seated on the banks of the broad lake, or in other
places than the little isle,- on the brink of some broad stream,
or a rivulet murmuring over a gravel bed.
What is it that one enjoys in a situation like this? Nothing
outside of one's self, nothing except one's self and one's own
existence.
But most men, tossed as they are by unceas-
ing passion, have little knowledge of such a state: they taste it
imperfectly for a few moments, and then retain no more than an
obscure confused idea of it, that is too weak to let them feel its
charm. It would not even be good, in the present constitution
of things, that in their eagerness for these gentle ecstasies, they
should fall into a disgust for the active life in which their duty
is prescribed to them by needs that are ever on the increase.
But a wretch cut off from human society, who can do nothing
here below that is useful and good either for himself or for other
people, may in such a state find for all lost human felicities many
recompenses, of which neither fortune nor men can ever rob
·
·
him.
'Tis true that these recompenses cannot be felt by all souls,
nor in all situations. The heart must be in peace, nor any pas-
sion come to trouble its calm. There must be in the surrounding
objects neither absolute repose nor excess of agitation; but a uni-
form and moderated movement, without shock, without interval.
With no movement, life is only a lethargy. If the movement be
unequal or too strong, it awakes us; by recalling us to the objects
around, it destroys the charm of our musing, and plucks us from
within ourselves, instantly to throw us back under the yoke of
fortune and man, in a moment to restore us to all the conscious-
ness of misery. Absolute stillness inclines one to gloom. It
offers an image of death: then the help of a cheerful imagination


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JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
is necessary, and presents itself naturally enough to those whom
Heaven has endowed with such a gift. The movement which
does not come from without then stirs within us. The repose is
less complete, it is true; but it is also more agreeable when light
and gentle ideas, without agitating the depths of the soul, only
softly skim the surface. This sort of musing we may taste when-
ever there is tranquillity about us; and I have thought that in
the Bastile, and even in a dungeon where no object struck my
sight, I could have dreamed away many a thrice pleasurable day.
But it must be said that all this came better and more hap-
pily in a fruitful and lonely island, where nothing presented itself
to me save smiling pictures, where nothing recalled saddening
memories, where the fellowship of the few dwellers there was
gentle and obliging, without being exciting enough to busy me
incessantly; where, in short, I was free to surrender myself all
day long to the promptings of my taste or to the most luxurious
indolence.
As I came out from a long and most sweet
musing fit, seeing myself surrounded by verdure and flowers and
birds, and letting my eyes wander far over romantic shores that
fringed a wide expanse of water bright as crystal, I fitted all
these attractive objects into my dreams; and when at last I slowly
recovered myself, and recognized what was about me, I could not
mark the point that cut off dream from reality, so equally did all
things unite to endear to me the lonely retired life I led in this
happy spot! Why can that life not come back to me again?
Why can I not go finish my days in the beloved island, never to
quit it, never again to see in it one dweller from the mainland,
to bring back to me the memory of all the woes of every sort
that they have delighted in heaping on my head for all these
long years? . . Freed from the earthly passions engendered
by the tumult of social life, my soul would many a time lift
itself above this atmosphere, and commune beforehand with the
heavenly intelligences, into whose number it trusts to be ere long
taken.
•


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FRIEDRICH RÜCKERT
(1788-1866)
ÜCKERT was not only a great poet and fervid patriot, but a
man of wide learning and solid scholarly attainments.