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Lifeworlds

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Dialogs

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

Library ● Emile-top ● Bk 1 ● Bk 2 ● Bk 3 ● Bk 4 ● Bk 5

Rousseau's manuscript showing the opening paragraph of Book Three, Gallica

BOOK THREE

[¶550:] Although the whole course of man's life up to adolescence is a time of weakness, there comes a point during this first age when his strength progresses faster than his needs, and the growing creature who is still weak in an absolute sense becomes relatively strong Since his needs are not fully developed his present strength is more than enough for them. As a man he would be very weak, but as a child he is very strong.

[¶551:] Where does the weakness of man come from? From the inequality between his strength and his desires. It is our passions that make us weak, for to satisfy them requires more strength than nature gives us. Diminish desires, therefore, and it is as if you had increased strength. He who can do more than he desires has strength left over. He is certainly a very strong being. Here we are in the third stage of childhood, the one that I will be speaking of now. I continue to call it childhood for lack of the proper term with which to describe it, for this age approaches adolescence without being yet the age of puberty.

[¶552:] At about twelve or thirteen the child's strength develops far more rapidly than his needs. The strongest and fiercest of the passions is still unknown. Its very organ remains in a state of imperfection and in order to emerge from that state seems to be waiting for the force of the child's will. Largely insensitive to the assaults of air and the seasons, the child's growing warmth takes the place of a coat; his appetite substitutes for seasoning. Everything that can nourish is good at this age. If he is sleepy he stretches himself on the ground and goes to sleep. He sees himself surrounded by everything that is necessary to him. No imaginary need torments him; public opinion means nothing to him; his desires extend no further than his arms. Not only can he be sufficient to himself, but he has strength beyond what is necessary to him. This is the only time in his life that this will be the case.

[¶553:] I anticipate an objection. No one will say that the child has more needs than I give him, but they will deny that he has the strength that I attribute to him. You forget that I am speaking of my own pupil, not of those walking dolls who travel from one room to another, who toil indoors and carry bundles of paper. I will be told that manly strength appears only with manhood, that the vital spirits, distilled in their proper vessels and spreading through the whole body, can alone make the muscles firm, sensitive, tense, and springy, can alone cause real strength. This is the philosophy of the study; I appeal to that of experience. Out in the country I see tall boys hoeing, digging, guiding the plough, filling the wine-cask, driving the cart, like their fathers. You would think they were grown men if their voices did not betray them. Even in our towns, young workers -- ironsmiths, toolmakers, farriers -- are almost as strong as their masters and would not be less skillful if they had practiced as long. If there is a difference, and I agree there is, it is, I repeat, much less than the difference between the stormy passions of the man and the limited desires of a child. Moreover, here we are talking about not only physical strength, but more especially about the strength and capacity of the mind which reinforces and directs the physical strength.

[¶554:] This interval in which the individual can do more than he wants, even though it is not the time of his greatest absolute strength, is, as I have said, the time of his greatest relative strength. It is the most precious time in his life, a time that comes only once. It is very short, all the more short since we will see in what follows the importance of using it right.

[¶555:] What will he thus do with this surplus of faculties and strengths that he has too much of at present and that will be lacking to him at another age? He will try to use it in tasks which will profit him when needed. He will project, so to speak, the surplus of his present being into the future. The robust child will make provision for the feeble man. But he will store his goods neither in banks that can be robbed nor in barns that are unfamiliar to him. To truly appropriate his acquisitions it will be in his arms, in his head, in himself that he will store them. Now is the time for work, instruction, and study. And note that this is not I who makes this choice arbitrarily; it is nature itself that has pointed the way.

[¶556:] Human intelligence has its limits, and not only can a man not know everything, but he cannot even know in its entirety the little that other men know. Since the contrary of every false proposition is a truth, the number of truths is as unfathomable as the number of errors. We must, therefore, choose what to teach as well as when to teach it. Of the knowledge within our reach some is false, some is useless, some merely serves to feed the pride of him who has it. Only the small amount of knowledge which really contributes to our well-being merits the research of a wise man and therefore of a child whom one would like to make wise. It is not a question of knowing what is, but only of what is useful.

[¶557:] From this small number of things we must also subtract those truths which require a fully formed mind in order to be understood, those which suppose a knowledge of man's relations to his fellow-men -- a knowledge which no child can acquire, those which, although true in themselves, lead an inexperienced mind to think falsely about other subjects.

[¶558:] Thus we are thus reduced to a very small circle relative to the existence of things. But what an immense sphere this circle still forms when measured by the child's mind! Dark shadows of the human understanding, what rash hand will dare to touch your veil? What abyss do I see our vain sciences opening up before this poor child! You should tremble, you who would wish to lead him down these perilous pathways and to draw open, before his eyes, the sacred drapery of nature. Be assured beforehand of his head and your own; beware that it may make either one or both of you dizzy. Beware of the specious attraction of falsehood and the intoxicating fumes of pride. Remember, remember always, that ignorance never did any harm, that error alone is fatal, and that we do not lose our way because of what we do not know but because of what we think we know.

[¶559:] His progress in geometry may serve as a test and a true measure of the growth of his intelligence, but as soon as he can distinguish between what is useful and what is not, it is important to use much discretion and art to lead him towards speculative studies. For example, do you want him to find a mean proportional between two lines? Begin by making him need to find a square equal to a given rectangle. If two mean proportionals are required, you must first make the problem of duplicating a cube interesting to him, etc. See how we are gradually approaching the moral ideas which distinguish between good and evil! Until now we have known no law but necessity; now we have regard for what is useful; soon we will arrive at what is right and good.

[¶560:] The diverse faculties of man are animated by the same instinct. The activity of the body which seeks development is succeeded by the activity of the mind which seeks instruction. At first children are only restless; then they become curious; and this curiosity, well directed, is the motivating force of the age at which we have arrived. Let us always distinguish between tendencies that come from nature and those that come from opinion. There is one ardor for learning which is founded only on the desire to be estimed as a scholar, and there is another which springs from a curiosity, natural to man, about all things far or near which may affect himself. The innate desire for well-being and the impossibility of its complete satisfaction make him search ceaselessly for fresh means of contributing to its satisfaction. This is the first principle of curiosity, a principle natural to the human heart, though its growth is proportional to the development of our passions and knowledge. Imagine a philosopher left on a desert island with his books and instruments, certain that he must spend the rest of his life there; he would hardly trouble himself about the system of the world, the laws of attraction, or the differential calculus. He might never even open a book again; but he would never rest till he had explored the furthest corner of his island, however large it might be. Let us therefore omit from our early studies such knowledge for which man has no natural taste and confine ourselves to that which instinct impels us to study.

[¶561:] The island of the human race is the earth; and the object the most striking to our eyes is the sun. As soon as we begin to move beyond ourselves our first observations must fall on one or the other. Thus the philosophy of almost all primitive people is mainly directed at the imaginary divisions of the earth and the divinity of the sun.

[¶562:] What a sudden shift, you will perhaps say. Just a moment ago we were concerned only with what touches ourselves, with our immediate environment; now all at once we are traversing the globe and leaping to the ends of the universe. This change is the result of our growing strength and of the natural inclinations of the mind. In the state of weakness and insufficiency, the cares for our own conservation concentrate our attention on ourselves. In the state of power and of force, the desire to extend our being carries us beyond ourselves and thrusts us as far into the distance as possible. But since the intellectual world is still unknown to us, our thinking will go no further than our eyes, and our understanding will only reach the spaces it can measure.

[¶563:] Let us transform our sensations into ideas, but do not let us jump all at once from sensible objects to intellectual objects. It is by the former that we should arrive at the latter. In the first operations of the mind, may the senses always be its guide. No book but the world, no teaching but that of fact. The child who reads does not think, he only reads. He is not being taught; he is only learning words.

[¶564:] Make your child attentive to the phenomena of nature; soon you will make him curious. But to nurture his curiosity, never hasten to satisfy it. Put questions within his reach and let him solve them himself. Let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself. Let him not be taught science, let him invent it. If ever you substitute in his mind authority for reason, he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other people's opinion.

[¶565:] You wish to teach this child geography and you provide him with globes, spheres, and maps. What a lot of machines! Why all these symbols? Why not begin by showing him the object itself so that he may at least know what you are talking about?

[¶566:] One fine evening we are walking in a suitable place where the wide horizon gives us a full view of the setting sun, and we note the objects which mark the place where it sets. Next morning we return to the same place to breathe the fresh air before sunrise. We see the rays of light which announce the sun's approach; the glow increases, the east seems to be in flames; in the light we await the star a long time before it appears. At each moment we expect to see it. There it is at last! A shining point appears like a flash of lightning and soon fills the whole space; the veil of darkness rolls away, man perceives his dwelling place in fresh beauty. During the night the grass has assumed a fresher green; in the light of early dawn, and gilded by the first rays of the sun, it seems covered with a shining network of dew reflecting the light and colour. The birds raise their chorus of praise to greet the father of life; at this moment not one of them is quiet. Their gentle warbling is softer than by day, it expresses the langour of a peaceful waking. All these produce an impression of freshness which seems to reach the very soul. It is a brief hour of enchantment that no man can resist; a sight so grand, so fair, so delicious, that none can behold it unmoved.

[¶567:] Full of the enthusiasm that he is experiencing, the teacher wishes to impart it to the child. He expects to rouse his emotion by drawing attention to his own. Pure stupidity! The life of the spectacle of nature is in the heart of man; to see it one must feel it. The child sees the objects themselves, but he can not perceive the relations that link them; he cannot hear the sweet harmony of their concert. It needs knowledge that he has not yet acquired, feelings he has not yet experienced, to receive the complex impression which results all at once from these different sensations. If he has not wandered over arid plains, if his feet have not been scorched by the burning sands of the desert, if he has not breathed the hot and oppressive air reflected from the glowing rocks, how will he delight in the fresh air of a fine morning? The scent of flowers, the beauty of foliage, the moistness of the dew, the soft turf beneath his feet -- how will all these delight his senses? How will the song of the birds arouse voluptuous emotion if love and pleasure are still unknown to him? How will he behold with rapture the birth of this fair day, if his imagination cannot paint the joys with which it may be filled? Finally, how can he be moved by the beauty of the spectacle of nature if he is ignorant of the hand that formed it?

[¶568:] Never give the child speeches that he cannot understand. No descriptions, no eloquence, no figures of speech, no poetry. The time has not come for feeling or taste. Continue to be clear, simple, and cold; the time will come only too soon when you must adopt another tone.

[¶569:] Brought up in the spirit of our maxims, accustomed to make his own tools and not to appeal to others until he has recognized his own insufficiency, he will examine each new object he sees for a long time without saying anything. He thinks rather than questions. Be content, therefore, to show him things at at the right time. Then when you see that his curiosity is thoroughly aroused, ask him some brief question that will put him on the path to resolving it.

[¶570:] On the present occasion when you and he have carefully observed the rising sun, when you have made him notice the mountains and other objects visible from the same spot, after he has chattered freely about them, keep quiet for a few minutes as if lost in thought and then say, "I think the sun set over there last night; it rose here this morning. How can that be?" Do not say anything else; if he asks questions, do not answer them; talk of something else. Leave him by himself, and you can be sure that he will think about it.

[¶571:] In order that a child become accustomed to being attentive and really impressed by any truth of experience, he must spend anxious days before he discovers that truth. If he does not learn enough in this way, there is another way of drawing his attention to the matter. Turn the question around. If he does not know how the sun gets from the place where it sets to where it rises, he knows at least how it travels from from where it rises to where it sets; his eyes teach him that. Use the second question to throw light on the first; either your pupil is absolutely stupid or the analogy is too clear to be missed. This is his first lesson in cosmography.

[¶572:] As we always advance slowly from one sensible idea to another, and as we give time enough to each for him to become really familiar with it before we go on to another, and lastly as we never force our scholar's attention, there is still a long way from this first lesson to a knowledge of the course of the sun or the shape of the earth. But as all the apparent movements of the celestial bodies depend on the same principle and the first observation leads on to all the rest, less effort is needed, though more time, to proceed from the diurnal revolution to the calculation of eclipses than to get a thorough understanding of day and night.

[¶573:] Since the sun turns around the earth it describes a circle, and every circle must have a center; that we already know. This center cannot be seen, for it is in the middle of the earth, but we can mark out two opposite points on the earth's surface which correspond to it. A skewer passed through the three points and prolonged to the sky at either end would represent the earth's axis and the sun's daily course. A round spinning top revolving on its point represents the sky[?] turning on its axis, the two points of the top are the two poles. The child will easily become acquainted with one of them -- I show him the tail of the Little Bear. Here is a another game for the dark. Little by little we get to know the stars, and from this comes a wish to know the planets and observe the constellations.

[¶574:] We saw the sun rise at midsummer; we shall see it rise at Christmas or some other fine winter's day, for you know we are not lazy and for us it is a game to brave the cold. I take care to make this second observation in the same place as the first, and if skillfully lead up to, one or another of us will certainly exclaim, "What a funny thing! The sun is not rising in the same place; here are our earlier land-marks, but it is rising over there. So there is a summer east and the winter east, etc." Young teacher, you are on the right track. These examples should show you how to teach the sphere without any difficulty, taking the earth for the earth and the sun for the sun.

[¶575:] In general never substitute the sign for the thing unless it is impossible to show the thing itself. For the child's attention is so taken up with the sign that he will forget the thing that is represented.

[¶576:] I consider the armillary sphere a clumsy disproportioned bit of apparatus. The confused circles and the strange figures described on it suggest witchcraft and frighten the child. The earth is too small, the circles too large and too numerous; some of them, the colures for instance, are quite useless, and the thickness of the pasteboard gives them an appearance of solidity so that they are taken for circular masses having a real existence. And when you tell the child that these are imaginary circles he does not know what he is looking at and is none the wiser.

[¶577:] We are never able to put ourselves in the child's place, we fail to enter into his thoughts, we invest him with our own ideas, and while we are following our own chain of reasoning, we merely fill his head with errors and absurdities.

[¶578:] People debate about whether the method of studying science should be analytic or synthetic. It is not always necessary to choose between them. Sometimes the same experiments allow one to use both analysis and synthesis, and thus to guide the child by the method of instruction when he believes he is only analysing. Then, by using both at once, each method confirms the results of the other. Starting from opposite ends, without thinking of following the same road, he will unexpectedly reach their meeting place and this will be a delightful surprise. For example, I would begin geography at both ends and join to the study of the earth's revolution the measurement of its divisions, beginning in the place where we live. While the child is studying the sphere and is thus transported to the heavens, bring him back to the divisions of the earth and show him first his own home.

[¶579:] The first two points of geography will be the town where he lives and his father's country house, then the places in between, then the rivers near them, and finally the direction of the sun and how to find one's way by its aid. This is where everything comes together. Let him make his own map of all this, a very simple map, at first containing only two places. Others may be added from time to time as he is able to estimate their distance and position. You see at once what a good start we have given him by making his own eye his compass.

[¶580:] No doubt he will require some guidance in spite of this, but very little, and that little without his knowing it. If he goes wrong leave him alone; do not correct his mistakes. Wait quietly till he finds them out for himself and corrects them, or at most arrange something, as opportunity offers, which may show him his mistakes. If he never makes mistakes he will never learn anything thoroughly. Moreover, what he needs is not an exact knowledge of local topography but how to find out for himself. It matters little whether he carries maps in his head, provided he understands what they mean and has a clear idea of the art of making them. See what a difference there is already between the knowledge of your scholars and the ignorance of mine! They learn maps; he makes them. Here are fresh ornaments for his room.

[¶581:] Remember that the spirit of my instruction is not to teach the child many things, but to let only ideas that are right and clear enter his mind. I do not care if he knows nothing provided he in not mistaken, and I only acquaint him with truths to guard him against the errors he might put in their place. Reason and judgment come slowly, prejudices flock to us in crowds, and from them he must be preserved. But if you make science itself your object, you enter a bottomless and shoreless sea, a sea strewn with reefs from which you will never return. When I see a man in love with knowledge letting himself be seduced by its charms and running from one kind of learning to another without knowing how to stop, he seems to me like a child gathering shells on the sea-shore, now picking them up, then throwing them aside for others which he sees beyond them, then taking them again, till overwhelmed by their number and unable to choose between them, he flings them all away and returns home empty handed.

[¶582:] Time was long during early childhood; we only tried to pass our time for fear of using it badly. Now it is the other way; we do not have time enough for everything that would be useful. The passions, remember, are drawing near, and when they knock at the door your pupil will be attentive only to them. The peaceful age of intelligence is so short, it passes so rapidly, there are so many necessary uses for it, that it is insane to want to limit it to making the child into a scholar. It is not a question of teaching him the sciences, but to give him a taste for loving them and methods of learning them when this taste is more mature. That is very certainly a fundamental principle of all good education.

[¶583:] This is also the time to accustom him little by little to giving his sustained attention to a single object. But it should never be by constraint; rather, it should be pleasure or desire which produces this attention. One must take care not to overwhelm him or push him to boredom. Keep a careful eye on him therefore, and whatever happens, stop before he gets bored. For it is never as important that he learn than that he do nothing against his will.

[¶584:] If he asks questions let your answers be enough to nurture his curiosity but not enough to satisfy it. Above all, when you see that instead of asking for information he is just beating around the bush and overwhelming you with silly questions, stop immediately; for it is clear that he no longer cares about the matter in hand but simply wants to make you submit to his interrogations. One must have less regard for the words that he pronounces than for the motives which prompt him to speak. This warning, which was scarcely needed before, becomes of supreme importance when the child begins to reason.

[¶585:] There is a chain of general truths by means of which all the sciences hold to common principles and are developed each in its turn. This chain is the method of the philosophers. It is not the one that we are concerned with here. There is a completely different method by which one particular object suggests another and always points to the one that follows it. This order, which nourishes the curiosity and so arouses the attention required by every object in turn, is the order followed by most men, and it is the right order for all children. To take our bearings so as to make our maps we must find meridians. Two points of intersection between the equal shadows morning and evening supply an excellent meridian for a thirteen-year-old astronomer. But these meridians disappear, it takes time to trace them, and you are obliged to work in one place So much trouble and attention will in the end bore him. We foresaw this and are ready for it.

[¶586:] Again I must enter into minute and detailed explanations. I hear my readers murmur, but I am prepared to meet their disapproval; I will not sacrifice the most important part of this book to your impatience. You may think me as long-winded as you please; I have my own opinion about your complaints.

[¶587:] For a long time my pupil and I have noticed that some substances such as amber, glass, and wax, when well rubbed, attracted straws, while others did not. We accidentally discover a substance which has a more unusual property, that of attracting filings or other small particles of iron from a distance and without rubbing. How much time do we devote to this game to the exclusion of everything else! At last we discover that this property is communicated to the iron itself, which becomes, so to speak, magnetized. One day we go to a fair. A magician has a wax duck floating in a basin of water, and he makes it follow a bit of bread. We are greatly surprised, but we do not call him a wizard because we do not know what a wizard is. Continually struck by effects whose causes are unknown to us, we are in no hurry to make judgments, and we remain peacefully in ignorance till we find an occasion to leave it.

[¶588:] When we get home, as a result of discussing the duck at the fair, we try to imitate it. We take a needle thoroughly magnetised, we surround it in white wax which we fashion as best we can into the shape of a duck, with the needle running through the body and its head forming the beak. We put the duck in water and put the end of a key near its beak, and you will easily understand our delight when we find that our duck follows the key just as the duck at the fair followed the bit of bread. At another time we may note the direction assumed by the duck when left at rest; for the present we are wholly occupied with our work and we want nothing more.

[¶589:] The same evening we return to the fair with some bread specially prepared in our pockets, and as soon as the magician has performed his trick, my little doctor, who can hardly restrain himself, tells him that the trick is not difficult and that he himself can do it as well. He is taken at his word. He at once takes the bread with a bit of iron hidden in it from his pocket. His heart throbs as he approaches the table and holds out the bread; his hand trembles with excitement. The duck approaches and follows his hand. The child cries out and jumps for joy. With the applause, the shouts of the crowd, the child becomes giddy and is beside himself. The magician, though disappointed, embraces him, congratulates him, begs the honour of his company on the following day, and promises to collect a still greater crowd to applaud his skill. My young naturalist, full of pride, wants to stay and chatter, but I check him at once and take him home overwhelmed with praise.

[¶590:] The child counts the minutes till the next day with laughable impatience. He invites every one he meets; he wants the whole human race to be witness to his glory; he can scarcely wait till the appointed hour. He hurries to the place. The hall is full already. As he enters his young heart swells with pride. Other tricks are to come first. The magician surpasses himself and does the most surprising things. The child sees none of these; he wriggles, perspires, and hardly breathes; he spends his time in fingering with a trembling hand the bit of bread in his pocket. His turn comes at last; the master announces it to the audience ceremoniously. He goes up looking somewhat shamefaced and takes out his bit of bread. The vicissitudes of human things! The duck, so tame yesterday, has become wild to-day; instead of offering its beak it turns tail and swims away; it avoids the bread and the hand that holds it as carefully as it followed them yesterday. After a thousand useless tries accompanied by hoots from the audience the child complains that he is being cheated, that is not the same duck, and he defies the magician to attract it.

[¶591:] The magician, without further words, takes a bit of bread and offers it to the duck, which at once follows it and comes to the hand which holds it. The child takes the same bit of bread with no better success; the duck mocks his efforts and makes pirouettes around the basin. Overwhelmed with confusion the child abandons the attempt, ashamed to face the hoots any longer.

[¶592:] Then the magician takes the bit of bread the child brought with him and uses it as successfully as his own. He takes out the bit of iron before the audience -- another laugh at our expense -- then with this same bread he attracts the duck as before. He repeats the experiment with a piece of bread cut by a third person in full view of the audience. He does it with his glove, with his finger-tip. Finally he goes into the middle of the room and in the emphatic tones used by such persons he declares that his duck will obey his voice as readily as his hand. He speaks and the duck obeys; he bids him go to the right and he goes, to come back again and he comes. The movement is as ready as the command. The growing applause completes our discomfiture. We slip away unnoticed and shut ourselves up in our room, without relating our successes to everybody as we had expected.

[¶593:] Next day there is a knock at the door. When I open it there is the magician, who makes a modest complaint with regard to our conduct. What had he done that we should try to discredit his tricks and deprive him of his livelihood? What is there so wonderful in attracting a duck that we should purchase this honour at the price of an honest man's living? "My word, gentlemen! had I any other trade by which I could earn a living I would not pride myself on this. You may well believe that a man who has spent his life at this miserable trade knows more about it than you who only give your spare time to it. If I did not show you my best tricks at first, it was because one must not be so foolish as to display all one knows at once. I always take care to keep my best tricks for emergencies; and I have plenty more to prevent young folks from meddling. However, I have come, gentlemen, in all kindness, to show you the trick that gave you so much trouble; I only beg you not to use it to harm me, and to be more discreet in future."

[¶594:] He then shows us his apparatus, and we see with great surprise that it only consists of a strong and well armed magnet that a child, hidden under the table, was able to make move without anyone seeing him.

[¶595:] The man puts up his things, and after we have offered our thanks and apologies, we try to give him something. He refuses it. "No, gentlemen," says he, I owe you no gratitude and I will not accept your gift. I leave you in my debt in spite of all, and that is my only revenge. Generosity may be found among all sorts of people, and I earn my pay by doing my tricks, not by teaching them."

[¶596:] As he is going he addresses a reprimand to me in particular. "I can make excuses for the child," he says, "he sinned in ignorance. But you, sir, should know better. Why did you let him do it? As you are living together and you are older than he, you should look after him and give him good advice. Your experience should be his guide. When he is grown up he will reproach, not only himself, but you, for the faults of his youth."

[¶597:] He goes out and leaves us very embarrassed. I blame myself for my easy-going ways. I promise the child that another time I will put his interests first and warn him against faults before he falls into them, for the time is coming when our relations will be changed, when the severity of the master must give way to the friendliness of the comrade. This change must come gradually; you must look ahead, and very far ahead.

[¶598:] The next day we return to the fair to see the trick whose secret we have learned. We approach our Socrates, the magician, with profound respect; we scarcely dare to look him in the face. He overwhelms us with politeness and gives us the best places, which humiliates us even more. He goes through his tricks as usual, but he lingers affectionately over the duck, and often glances proudly in our direction. We are in on the secret, but we do not tell. If my pupil dared even open his mouth I'd want to squash him.

[¶599:] There is more meaning than you suspect in this detailed illustration. How many lessons in one! How mortifying are the results of a first impulse towards vanity! Young tutor, watch this first impulse carefully. If you can use it to bring about shame and disgrace, you may be sure a second impulse will not appear for a long time. What long preparations! you will say. I agree; and all to provide a compass which will enable us to dispense with a meridian.

[¶600:] Having learnt that a magnet acts through other bodies, our next business is to construct a bit of apparatus similar to that shown us. A bare table, a shallow bowl placed on it and filled with water, a duck rather better finished than the first, and so on. We often watch the thing and at last we notice that the duck, when at rest. always turns the same way. We follow up this observation; we examine the direction, we find that it is from south to north. Enough! we have found our compass or its equivalent; the study of physics is begun.

[¶601:] There are various regions of the earth, and these regions differ in temperature. The variation is more evident as we approach the poles. All bodies expand with heat and contract with cold; this is best measured in liquids and best of all in distilled liquids; from this we get the thermometer. The wind strikes the face, thus the air is a body, a fluid; we feel it though we have no way to see it. Invert a glass in water; the water will not fill it unless you leave a passage for the escape of the air; air is thus capable of resistance. Plunge the glass further in the water; the water will encroach on the air-space without filling it entirely; so air is capable of being compressed to a certain point. A ball filled with compressed air bounces better than one filled with anything else; so air is elastic. Raise your arm horizontally from the water when you are lying in your bath; you will feel a terrible weight on it; air is thus a heavy body. By establishing an equilibrium between air and other fluids its weight can be measured; from this the barometer, the siphon, the air-gun, and the air-pump. All the laws of statics and hydrostatics are discovered by such rough experiments. For none of these would I take the child into a physics laboratory; I dislike that array of instruments and apparatus. The scientific atmosphere kills science. Either all these instruments frighten the child, or their shapes divide and distract his attention, which should be focused on their effects.

[¶602:] We shall make all our machines ourselves. I would not begin by making the instrument before the experiment, but having caught a glimpse of the experiment by chance we would invent little by little an instrument that could verify it. I would prefer that our instruments not be so perfect and accurate, but that our ideas be clear as to what the apparatus ought to be and the results to be obtained by means of it. For my first lesson in statics, instead of going to find a scales, I lay a stick across the back of a chair, I measure the two parts when it is balanced; add equal or unequal weights to either end; by pulling or pushing it as is necessary, I find at last that equilibrium is the result of a reciprocal proportion between the amount of the weights and the length of the levers. Thus my little physicist is capable of rectifying a scales even before ever he sees one.

[¶603:] Undoubtedly one gets much clearer and surer notions of things that one learns thus by oneself than from those gotten from the instruction of others. And not only is our reason not accustomed to a slavish submission to authority, but we develop greater ingenuity in discovering relations, connecting ideas, and inventing apparatus than when we merely accept what is given us and allow our minds to be enfeebled by indifference -- like the body of a man whose servants always wait on him, dress him and put on his shoes, whose horse carries him, till he loses the use of his limbs. Boileau used to boast that he had difficulty teaching Racine the art of rhyming. Among the many admirable methods for shortening the study of the sciences, we badly need someone to teach us the art of learning them with difficulty.

[¶604:] The most obvious advantage of these slow and laborious inquiries is that in the midst of speculative studies one keeps an active body, supple limbs, and hands formed for work and for functions useful to man. Too many instruments invented to guide us in our experiments and to supplement the exactness of our senses makes us neglect to exercise those senses. The graphometer makes it unnecessary to estimate the size of angles. The eye which used to judge distances with much precision, trusts to the tape measure for its measurements. The portable balance dispenses with the need of judging weight by the hand as I used to do. The more ingenious are our tools, the more clumsy and awkward our organs become. By surrounding ourselves with machines we no longer find any within ourselves.

[¶605:] But when we put towards making these machines the skill which they replaced, when for their construction we use the wisdom which enabled us to dispense with them, we gain without losing anything. We add art to nature, and we become more ingenious without becoming less adroit. If instead of making a child stick to his books I let him occupy his time in a workshop, then his hands work for the benefit of his mind; he becomes a philosopher while seeing himself only as a workman. Moreover, this exercise has other advantages of which I shall speak later; and you will see how, from the games of philosohy, one may rise to the true functions of man.

[¶606:] I have said already that purely theoretical knowledge is hardly suitable for children, even for those approaching adolescence. But without going far into theoretical physics, be sure that all their experiments are connected together by some sort of deduction, so that with the help of this chain of reasoning they can put them in order in their mind and recall them when needed. For it is very difficult for isolated facts and even isolated reasons to stay long in the memory when one lacks a handle for retrieving them.

[¶607:] In your inquiry into the laws of nature, always begin with the commonest and most conspicuous phenomena and train your scholar not to accept these phenomena as reasons but as facts. I take a stone; I pretend to place it in the air; I open my hand; the stone falls. I see Emile attentive to what I am doing and I say to him: "Why did this stone fall?"

[¶608:] What child will hesitate over this question? None, not even Emile, unless I have taken great pains to teach him not to answer. All of them will say that the stone falls because it is heavy. And what is heavy? That which falls. So the stone falls because it falls? Here my little philosopher is stopped short. This is his first lesson in systematic physics, and whether he takes advantage of it or not in this way, it is a good lesson in common-sense.

[¶609:] As the child develops in intelligence, other important considerations require us to be still more careful in our choice of his occupations. As soon as he has sufficient self-knowledge to understand what constitutes his well-being, as soon as he can grasp such far-reaching relations as to judge what is good for him and what is not, from then on he is able to discern the difference between work and play and to consider the latter merely as a relaxation from the former. Then the objects of real usefulness may enter into his studies and compel him to give them a more constant application than he gave to his simple games. The ever-recurring law of necessity soon teaches a man to do what he does not like in order to prevent an evil which he would dislike still more. Such is the use of foresight, and from this foresight, well or ill used, arises all of human wisdom or misery.

[¶610:] Every man wants to be happy, but in order to become happy he must begin by knowing what happiness is. The happiness of natural man is as simple as his life: it consists in the absence of pain. Health, freedom, the necessaries of life are its elements. The happiness of moral man is something else, but that is not the question here. I cannot repeat too often that it is only physical objects that can interest children, especially children whose vanity has not been aroused and whose minds have not been corrupted beforehand by the poison of public opinion.

[¶611:] As soon as they foresee their needs before they feel them, their intelligence has made a great step forward; they are beginning to know the value of time. It is important therefore to accustom them to direct its use towards useful objects, but this usefulness should be easily perceptible and within the reach of their enlightenment. All that concerns the moral order and the customs of society should not yet be presented to them them, for they are not in a condition to understand it. It is wrongheaded to expect them to apply themselves to things vaguely described as good for them when they do not know what this good is. They are assured these things will be to their advantage when they are grown up, but they can take no interest in a so-called advantage that they cannot understand.

[¶612:] Let the child do nothing on anyone's word. Nothing is good for him but what he recognises as good. By always pushing him beyond his present enlightenment, you believe you are exercising a foresight which you really lack. To arm him with a few vain tools which he may never use, you deprive him of man's most universal tool -- common-sense. You accustom him to being always led, of never being anything but a machine in the hands of others. You wish him to be docile when he is little; that is to wish that he will be will be gullible and easily duped when he grows up. You ceaselessly tell him, "What I ask is for your good, though you cannot understand it. What does it matter to me whether you do what I'm asking or not? It is for you alone that I am making this effort." With all these fine speeches you give him now to make him wise, you are paving the way for a fortune-teller, pied-piper, quack, imposter, or some kind of crazy person to catch him in his snare or draw him into his folly.

[¶613:] A man must know many things which seem useless to a child, but need the child learn, or can he indeed learn, all that the man must know? Try to teach the child everthing that is useful to his age and you will find that his time will be well filled. Why impose on him the studies of an age he may never reach while neglecting those studies which are right for him today? But, you ask, will there be time for him to learn what he ought to know when the time comes to use it? I do not know; but this I do know, that it is impossible to teach it sooner, for our real teachers are experience and feeling, and man will never feel what is suitable for man except in the relationships in which he finds himself. A child knows he is made to become a man; all the ideas he may have as to man's estate are for him opportunities for instruction, but of those ideas which are beyond his reach he should remain in complete ignorance. My whole book is nothing but a continual proof of this fundamental principle of education.

[¶614:] As soon as we have been able to give our pupil an idea of the word "useful," we have got an additional means of governing him, for this word makes a great impression on him provided that its meaning for him is a meaning relative to his own age and provided he clearly sees its relation to his present well-being. This word makes no impression on your scholars because you have taken no pains to give it a meaning they can understand. And because other people always undertake to provide what is useful to them, they never need to think about it themselves and do not know what utility is.

[¶615:] "What is that good for?" From now on here is the sacred word, the determining word between him and me in all the actions of our life. This is the question which from my part infallibly follows all his questions; and it serves as a brake for the multitudes of silly and tiresome interrogations with which children weary those about them -- more in order to wield some power over them than to gain any real advantage. A person whose most important lesson is to want to know only what is useful interrogates like Socrates; he never asks a question without a reason for it, for he knows he will be required to give his reason before he gets an answer.

[¶616:] See what a powerful instrument I have put into your hands to use with your pupil. Since he does not know the reason for anything, you can reduce him to silence almost at will; and what advantages do your knowledge and experience give you to show him the usefulness of everything that you propose! For, make no mistake about it, when you put this question to him, you are teaching him to put it to you in turn, and you must expect that whatever you suggest to him in the future he will follow your own example and ask, "What is that good for?"

[¶617:] Here is perhaps the most difficult trap for a tutor to avoid. If with a child's question you you merely try to get yourself out of a pinch, and if you give him a single reason he is not able to understand, seeing that you reason according to your own ideas and not his, he will think that what you tell him is good for your age but not for his own. He will no longer have confidence in you and everything will be lost. But what master will stop short and confess his faults to his pupil? All of them make it a rule never to admit to the faults they really have. I would make it a rule to admit even to faults I do not have whenever I am unable make my reasons clear to him. Thus my conduct, always clear in his mind, will never be suspicious to him and I will save more credit by assuming some faults than those do who only hide theirs.

[¶618:] In the first place you must realize that it is rarely up to you to propose what he ought to learn. It is for him to desire it, to seek it, and to find it -- to you to put it within reach, to skillfully give birth to this desire, and to furnish him with the means of satisfying it. From this it follows that your questions should be infrequent but well-chosen. Since he will always have more questions to put to you than you to him, you will always be less exposed and more often able to ask him, "Why is it useful to know that which you are asking me?"

[¶619:] Moreover, since it matters little whether he learns this or that provided he knows it well and understands the use of what he learns, as soon as you cannot give him a explanation that is good for him, give him none at all. Do not hesitate to say, "I have no good answer to give you; I was wrong, let us drop the subject." If your teaching was really ill-chosen there is no harm in dropping it altogether; if it was not, with a little care you will soon find an opportunity of making its use apparent to him.

[¶620:] I do not like verbal explanations. Young people pay little attention to them and hardly retain them. Things! Things! I cannot repeat it enough that we give too much power to words. With our babbling educaton we only create babblers.

[¶621:] Suppose that while I am studying with my pupil the course of the sun and the way to find our bearings, all of a sudden he interrupts me to ask what the use of all of this is. What a fine speech I might give him! How many things I might take the opportunity to teach him in reply to his question, especially if there are any witnesses to our conversation. I might speak of the utility of travel, the advantages of commerce, the particular products of each climate, the customs of different peoples, the use of the calendar, the calculation of seasonal cycles for agriculture, the art of navigation, how to steer on the sea and to follow a course exactly without knowing where one is. Politics, natural history, astronomy, even morals and international law would enter into my explanation in such a way as to give my pupil a grand idea of all these sciences and a great desire to learn them. When I had finished I would have made a great display of my pedantry, but he would have not have understood a single idea. He would long to ask me as before, "What is the use of taking one's bearings?" but he would not dare for fear of making me angry. He finds it pays best to pretend to listen to what he is forced to hear. This is the way our fine education is practiced.

[¶622:] But Emile, who has been more simply raised and to whom we have taken pains to give a solid understanding, will hear nothing of all this. At the first word he does not understand he will run away; he will prance about the room and leave me to speechify by myself. Let us seek a more commonplace explanation; my scientific baggage is of no use to him.

[¶623:] We were observing the position of the forest to the north of Montmorency when he interrupted me with the usual question, "What is the use of that?" "You are right," I said. "Let us take time to think it over, and if we find that this work is not good for anything we will not take it up again, for we have plenty of useful games." We find something else to do and geography is put aside for the day.

[¶624:] The next morning I suggest a walk before lunch. There is nothing he would like better. Children are always ready to run, and this one has good legs. We climb up to the forest, we wander through its clearings, we get lost. We have no idea where we are, and when we want to retrace our steps we cannot find our path. Time passes. It gets hot; we get hungry and go faster; we wander vainly this way and that; we find nothing but woods, quarries, plains, with not a landmark to guide us. Very hot, very tired, very hungry, we only go further astray. We finally sit down to rest in order to deliberate. Emile, whom I assume has been raised like other children, does not deliberate, he cries. He does not know that we are at the gate of Montmorency and that a small thicket hides it from us. But a thicket is a forest to him; a man of his size is buried among bushes.

[¶625:] After a few moments of silence I say to him with a worried tone: my dear Emile, how are we going to get out of here?

EMILE, in a sweat and crying hot tears: I don't know. I'm tired, I'm hungry, I'm thirsty. I can't go any further.

JEAN-JAQUES: Do you suppose I am any better off? I would cry too if I could make a lunch out of my tears. Crying is no use, we must look around us. Let's see your watch; what time is it?

EMILE: It is noon and I haven't eaten yet!

JEAN-JACQUES: That's true; it is noon and I haven't eaten yet.

EMILE: Oh you must be very hungry!.

JEAN-JACQUES: Unluckily my dinner won't come to find me. It's noon? This is exactly the time yesterday that we were observing the position of the forest from Montmorency. If only we could see the position of Montmorency from the forest --

EMILE: But yesterday we could see the forest, and here we cannot see the town.

JEAN-JACQUES: That's the problem . . . If we could only find our position without seeing it.

EMILE: Oh! my dear friend!

JEAN-JACQUES: Didn't we say the forest was --

EMILE: North of Montmorency.

JEAN-JACQUES: Then Montmorency must be----

EMILE: South of the forest.

JEAN-JACQUES: We have a way of finding the north at noon.

EMILE: Yes, by the direction of the shadows.

JEAN-JACQUES: But the south?

EMILE: What can we do?

JEAN-JACQUES: The south is opposite the north.

EMILE: That is true; we only need to find the opposite of the shadows. Oh, there is the south! There is the south! Montmorency must be over there! Let's look for it over there!

JEAN-JACQUES: You could be right; let's follow this path through the woods.

EMILE, clapping his hands and letting out a cry of joy: Oh, I see Montmorency! There it is, right in front of us, in plain view! Let's go have lunch, let's eat, let's run fast! Astronomy is good for something.

[¶627:] Be sure that if he does not say this last phrase, he will think it -- it does not matter which so long as I do not say it myself. He will certainly never forget this day's lesson as long as he lives, whereas if I had made him imagine all this in his room, my speech would have been forgotten the next day. One must speak as much as one can by actions and say only those things that one cannot do.

[¶628:] The reader will not expect me to have such a poor opinion of him or her as to supply an example of every kind of study; but, whatever is taught, I cannot too strongly urge the tutor to adapt his practices to the capacity of his scholar. For once more I repeat the risk is not in what he does not know, but in what he thinks he knows.

[¶629:] I remember how I once tried to give a child a taste for chemistry. After showing him several metallic precipitates, I explained how ink was made. I told him how its blackness was merely the result of fine particles of iron separated from the vitriol and precipitated by an alkaline solution. In the midst of my learned explanation the little traitor stopped me abruptly with the question I myself had taught him. I was very embarrassed.

[¶630:] After thought for a while I decided what to do. I sent for some wine from the cellar of the master of the house, and some very cheap wine from a wine-merchant. I took a small flask of an alkaline solution, and placing two glasses before me filled with the two sorts of wine_ , I spoke to thim thus.

[¶631:] People falsify many products in order to make them appear better than they are. These falsifications fool the eye and the taste, but they are harmful and make the falsified thing worse with its fine appearance than it was before.

[¶632:] All sorts of drinks are falsified, especially wine; for the deception is more difficult to detect and makes more profit for the deceiver.

[¶633:] Sour wine is falsified with litharge; litharge is a preparation of lead. Lead in combination with acids forms a sweet salt which corrects the harsh taste of the sour wine, but it is poisonous to those who drink it. So before we drink wine of doubtful quality we should be able to tell if there is lead in it. This is how one can do that.

[¶634:] Wine contains not merely an inflammable spirit as you have seen from the brandy made from it; it also contains an acid, as you know from the vinegar made from it.

[¶635:] This acid has an affinity for metals. It combines with them and forms salts, such as iron-rust, which is only iron dissolved by the acid in air or water, or such as verdegris, which is only copper dissolved in vinegar.

[¶636:] But this same acid has a still greater affinity for alkalis than for metals, so that when we add alkalis to the above-mentioned salts, the acid sets free the metal with which it had combined and combines with the alkali.

[¶637:] Then the metal, set free by the acid which held it in solution, is precipitated and the liquid becomes opaque.

[¶638:] If then there is litharge in either of these glasses of wine. the acid holds the litharge in solution. When I pour into it an alkaline solution, the acid will be forced to set the lead free in order to combine with the alkali. The lead, no longer held in solution, will reappear, the liquor will become thick, and after a time the lead will be deposited at the bottom of the glass.

[¶639:] If there is no lead_ nor other metal in the wine the alkali will slowly_ combine with the acid, all will remain clear and there win be no precipitate.

[¶640:] Then I poured my alkaline solution first into one glass and then into the other. The wine from our own house remained clear and unclouded, the other at once became turbid, and an hour later the lead might be plainly seen, precipitated at the bottom of the glass.

[¶641:] "This," said I, "is a pure natural wine and fit to drink; the other is falsified and poisonous. This is discovered through the same kind of science as the one whose usefulness you asked me about. Someone who knows how to make ink can also know what wines are adulterated."

[¶642:] I was very well pleased with my illustration, but I found it made little impression on my pupil. When I had time to think about it I saw I had been a fool, for not only was it impossible for a child of twelve to follow my explanations, but the usefulness of the experiment did not appeal to him. He had tasted both glasses of wine and found them both good, so he attached no meaning to the word "falsified" which I thought I had explained so nicely. The other words, "unhealthy" and "poison," similarly had no meaning for him; he was in the same condition as the boy who told the story of Philip and his doctor. It is the case with all children.

[¶643:] The relation of effects to causes whose connection is unknown to us, the good things and bad things about which we have no idea, the needs we have never felt, are nothing for us. It is impossible to interest us in them sufficiently to make us do anything connected with them. At fifteen we can conceive of the happiness of a wise man no better than we can at thirty conceive of the glory of paradise. If we can not conceive of either we will do little to attain them, and even if we could conceive of them, we would still do little unless we desired them and unless we felt they were right for us. It is easy to convince a child that what you wish to teach him is useful, but it is useless to convince him if you cannot also persuade him. In vain may pure reason make us approve or blame; it is only passion that makes us act, and how can one become passionate about interests that one doesn't yet have?

[¶644:] Never show a child what he cannot see. Since mankind is almost unknown to him, and since you cannot make a man of him, bring the man down to the level of the child. While you are thinking of what will be useful to him at another age, speak to him only of things whose usefulness he can see in the present. Moreover, as soon as he begins to reason let there be no comparison with other children, no rivalry, no competition, not even in running races. I would far rather he did not learn anything than that he learn it through jealousy or self-conceit. However, each year I will mark the progress he has made; I will compare the results with those of the following year. I will say to him: You have grown so many inches; there is the ditch you jumped, the weight you carried, the distance you flung a pebble, the race you ran without stopping to take breath, etc.. Let us see what you can do now. Thus I stimulate him without making him jealous of anyone. He wants to surpass himself; he ought to. I see no reason why he should not emulate himself.

https://www.aplacetostudy.com/pictures/Hermes-carving-the-elements-of-science.png

"Hermes carving the elements of science on some columns." Facing p. 76, Tome II of Emile, Gallica.

[¶645:] I hate books. They only teach us to talk about things that we do not know. It is said that Hermes engraved the elements of science on pillars lest a deluge should destroy them. Had he imprinted them in men' s heads they would have been preserved by tradition. Well-prepared minds are the monuments on which human knowledge is most deeply engraved. Is there no way of correlating so many lessons scattered through so many books, no way of focussing them on some common object, easy to see, interesting to follow, and stimulating even at this age? If one could invent a situation in which all the natural needs of man were were shown in a way that was perceptible to the mind of a child, and where the means of providing for these needs developed successively and with the same facility, it would be the stirring and simple portrayal of this state that should form the earliest training of the child's imagination.

[¶646:] Eager philosopher, I see your own imagination light up. Spare yourself the trouble; this state is already known, it is described, with due respect to you, far better than you could describe it, at least with greater truth and simplicity. Since we must have books, there is one book which, to my thinking, supplies the best treatise of natural education. This is the first book Emile will read; for a long time it will form his whole library, and it will always retain an honoured place. It will be the text to which all our talks about natural science are but the commentary. As we progress it will serve as a test of the state of our judgment, and as long as our taste is not spoiled, to read it will always be a pleasure for us. What is this wonderful book? Is it Aristotle? Pliny? Buffon? No; it is Robinson Crusoe.

[¶647:] Robinson Crusoe on his island, alone, deprived of the help of his fellow-men and of the tools of every art, yet providing for his own subsistance, his own preservation, and even procuring for himself a kind of well-being -- here is an object interesting for every age and that one can find a thousand ways to make pleasing to children. Here is how we can make a reality of that desert island which formerly served as an illustration. This state, I admit, is not that of social man; probably it is not that of Emile; but it is on the basis of this same state that he should judge all the others. The surest way to raise oneself above prejudice and to base his judgments on the true relations of things is to put oneself in the place of a solitary man and to judge all things as they would be judged by such a man in relation to their own utility.

[¶648:] Stripped of all of its irrelevancies, this novel -- beginning with Robinson's shipwreck on his island and ending with the coming of the ship which takes him away -- will form both Emile's amusement and his instruction during the whole period we are considering. I want his head be full of it, and for him to be ceaselessly busy with his castle, his goats, his plantations. Let him figure out in detail, not from books but from things, all that is necessary in such a case. Let him think he is Robinson himself; let him see himself dressed in skins, wearing a tall cap, a great sword, all the grotesque get-up of Robinson Crusoe, even to the umbrella which he will scarcely need. I want him to anxiously consider what measures to take if this or that happens to be missing, to examine his hero's conduct, to search for things he might have omitted or that he might have done better. He should carefully note his mistakes so as not to fall into them in similar circumstances, for you may be sure he will plan out a similar establishment for himself. This is the genuine castle in the air of this happy age, when the child knows no other happiness but necessity and liberty.

[¶649:] What a resource will this infatuation supply in the hands of a skilful teacher who has aroused it for the purpose of using it. The child who wants to build a storehouse on his desert island will be more eager to learn than the master to teach. He will want to know everything that is useful and will want to know only that. You will not need to guide him; you will only need to hold him back. Nevertheless, hurry to establish him on his island while his happiness is limited to it. For the day is approaching when, if he still wants to live there, he will not want to live alone, and when even the companionship of Friday, who now hardly makes an impression on him, will not long suffice.

[¶650:] The practice of the natural arts which can suffice a man alone leads to research in the industrial arts which call for the cooperation of many hands. The former may be carried on by solitary people, by savages; but the latter can only arise in society and make it necessary. As long as only physical needs are recognised, each man is sufficient to himself; the introduction of superfluity makes indispensible the division and distribution of labor. For even though one man working alone only earns the subsistence of one man, a hundred men working together can earn enough subsistence for two hundred. As soon therefore as some men are idle, it is necessary that the coordination of those who do work supply the work of those who do nothing.

[¶651:] Your greatest care should be to keep out of your scholar's mind all notions of social relations that are not within his reach. But when the chain of knowledge forces you to show him the mutual dependence of mankind, instead of showing him its moral side, turn all his attention at first towards industry and the mechanical arts which make them useful to each other. While you take him from one workshop to another, do not let him see any work without trying it himself, and do not let him leave it without knowing perfectly the reason for everything that is done there or at least for everything that he has observed. With this aim you should do some work yourself and show him everything by example. To make him a master, be yourself an apprentice, and expect that one hour of work will teach him more things than he would retain in a whole day of explanations.

[¶652:] There is a public estime attached to the various arts which is in inverse ratio to their real utility. This estime is even measured directly according to their disutility, and that ought to be. The most useful arts are those which earn the least, for the number of workmen is proportional to men's need, and the work which everybody needs must remain at a price that the poor can pay. On the other hand, those influential people -- not those called artisans but artists -- who work only for the rich and idle, put an arbitrary price on their baubles; and since the worth of this vain labour is only based on opinion, the price itself becomes part of that worth and they are estimed in proportion to their cost. The rich think so much of these things not because they are useful but because they are beyond the reach of the poor. Nolo habere bona, nisi quibus populus inviderit.

[¶653:] What will become of your pupils if you let them acquire this insane prejudice, if you share it yourself, if, for instance, they see you enter into a jeweler's shop with more respect than you show in a locksmith's? What judgement will they form of the true worth of the arts and the true value of things when they see everywhere the price of fantasy in contradiction with the price based on real utility, and that the more a thing costs the less it is worth? The first moment you let these ideas enter their heads you may abandon the rest of their education. In spite of you they will be raised like everyone else -- you will have wasted fourteen years of effort.

[¶654:] Focused on furnishing his island, Emile will have other ways of seeing. Robinson would have given more importance to a toolmaker's shop than all of Saide's finery put together. He would have reckoned the toolmaker a very worthy man, and Saide little more than a charlatan.

[¶655:] "My son is made to live in the world: he will not live with wise men but with fools. He must therefore know their follies, since it is by them that they want to be led. A real knowledge of things may be good, but the knowledge of men and their opinions is better, for in human society man's greatest tool is man himself, and the wisest man is he who uses this tool best. What is the good of giving children the idea of an imaginary order completely contrary to the one that they will find established and on the basis of which they will have to govern themselves? Give them first lessons on how to be wise, and then you will give them a way to judge how others are fools."

[¶656:] These are the specious maxims by which fathers in their false wisdom strive to make their children the slaves of the prejudices they feed them and themselves the puppets of a senseless crowd they hope to make subservient to their passions. In order to achieve a knowledge of man, we must know so many things before we know him! Man is the final subject studied by a sage, and you expect to make him the first subject studied by a child! Before teaching the child our sentiments, begin by teaching him to appreciate them. Do you perceive folly when you mistake it for wisdom? To be wise we must discern what is not wise. How can your child know men when he can neither judge of their judgments nor unravel their errors? It is wrong to know what they think when one ingnores whether what they think is true or false. First, therefore, teach him what things are in themselves. Afterwards you can teach him what they are in our eyes. It is thus that he will learn to compare opinion and truth and rise above the vulgar crowd. For no one recognizes prejudices when one has adopted them, and no one can lead a people when he ressembles it. But if you begin by teaching public opinion before he learns how to judge of its worth, you can be sure that whatever you may do it will become his own and that you will never destroy it. I conclude that to make a young man judicioius one must form his judgement instead of dictating yours to him.

[¶657:] You see that until now I have not spoken to my pupil about men. He would have too much sense to listen to me. His relations to his species are as yet not sufficiently apparent to him to enable him to judge others by himself. He knows no human being but himself, and he is far from really knowing even himself. But if he forms few judgements about himself, at least those he has are accurate. He knows nothing of another's place, but he knows his own and keeps to it. Instead of social laws that he cannot know we have used the chains of necessity to hold him. He is still hardly more than a physical being; let us continue to treat him that way.

[¶658:] It is by their perceptible relation to his utility, his safety, his conservation, his well-being that he must judge all the bodies of nature and all the works of men. Thus iron ought to have in his eyes a much greater price than gold, and glass than a diamond. In the same way, he will honor a shoemaker or a mason more than he does a Lempereur, a Le Blanc, or all the jewelers in Europe. In his eyes a confectioner is a really great man, and he would give the whole academy of sciences for the smallest pastrycook in the rue des Lombards. Goldsmiths, engravers, gilders, and embroiderers are in his view lazy people who play at utterly useless games. He does not even think much of a clockmaker. The happy child enjoys time without being its slave; he takes advantage of it but does not know its price. The calm of the passions which makes the passage of time equal to him makes any means of measuring time unnecessary. When I assumed that Emile had a watch,_ just as I assumed that he cried, it was a common Emile that I chose in order to serve my purpose and make myself understood. As for the real Emile, a child so different from others would not serve as an example for anything.

[¶659:] There is a no less natural and even more judicious order by which the arts are valued according to relations of necessity which tie them together. This order would place in the highest rank the most independent arts and in the lowest those which depend the most on others. This order, which furnishes important considerations on the order of society in general, is similar to the preceding one and is subject to the same inversions in the estime of men. Accordingly, the use of raw materials is the work of the least honorable trades, those practically without profit, whereas the more these same materials change hands, the more the manufactured good rises in price and in honor. I do not ask whether it is true that one's skill is really greater and merits more reward in the meticulous arts which give the final form to these materials than in the earliest labor which converted them to man's use. But I do say that in each case the art which is most generally useful and indispensible is incontestably that which merits most esteem; and that the art which requires the least help from others is more worthy of honour than those which are dependent on other arts, since it is freer and more nearly independent. These are the true laws of appreciation of the arts and of industry; all the rest is arbitrary and depends only on opinion.

[¶660:] The first and most respectable of all the arts is agriculture. I would put metal work in the second rank, carpentry in the third, and so on. The child who has not been seduced by vulgar prejudices will judge them precisely in this way. How many important reflections will our Emile draw from his Robinson on this subject! What will he think when he sees the arts only brought to perfection by sub-division, by the infinite multiplication of tools. He will say, "All those people are stupidly ingenious. You would think they were afraid that their arms and their fingers had no use, they invent so many tools instead. To practice only one art they become the slaves of a thousand others; every single workman needs a whole town. As for my companion and me, we put our genius in our own skill; we only make tools we can take about with us. All these people who are so proud of their talents in Paris could not do anything at all on our island; they would have become our apprentices."

[¶661:] Reader, do not stop to watch the bodily exercises and manual skill of our pupil, but consider the direction we are giving to his childish curiosity; consider his common-sense, his inventive spirit, his foresight; consider what a head he will have on his shoulders. In all that he sees and all that he does he will want to know everything, he will want to know the reason for everything. From tool to tool he will go back to the first beginning, he will admit nothing on supposition. He will refuse to learn anything requiring a previous knowledge that he himself has not acquired. If he sees a spring made he will want to know how they got the steel from the mine; if he sees the pieces of a chest put together, he will want to know how the tree was cut down. If he works himself with each tool that he uses he will not fail to say, "If I didn't have this tool, how could I make one like it, or how could I get along without it?"

[¶662:] It is, however, difficult to avoid another error. When the teacher is very fond of certain occupations, he is apt to assume that the child shares his tastes. Beware whenever you begin to get carried away by the fun of working that the child isn't becoming bored but does not dare to admit it. The child should be into what he is doing, but you should be completely into him -- observing him, watching him constantly, and without his knowing it anticipating all his feelings beforehand and preventing those that he should not have.. In short, keep him occupied in such a way that he not only feels useful but takes a pleasure in understanding the purpose which his work will serve.

[¶663:] The social dimension of the arts consists in the exchanges of industry, that of commerce in the exchange of things, that of banks in the exchange of symbols and of money. All these ideas hang together, and their elementary notions have already been grasped: we laid the foundations for all of that in early childhood with the help of Robert the gardener. It remains for us now to generalize these same ideas and to extend them to more examples in order to make the child understand the workings of trade -- both taken on its own terms and made concrete to him by means of particular instances of natural history with regard to the special products of each country, by particular instances of the arts and sciences which concern navigation and the difficulties of transport, greater or less in proportion to the distance between places, the position of land, seas, rivers, etc.

[¶664:] No society can exist without exchange, no exchange can exist without a common standard of measurement, and no common standard of measurement can exist without equality. Hence the first law of every society is some conventional equality either in men or in things.

[¶665:] Conventional equality between men, a very different thing from natural equality, makes necessary positive law, that is, government and laws. The political knowledge of a child should be clear and limited; he should know nothing of government in general beyond what concerns the rights of property, of which he has already some idea.

[¶666:] Conventional equality between things has led to the invention of money, for money is only a term of comparison for the value of different sorts of things; and in this sense money is the real bond of society. But anything may be money: in former days it was cattle. shells are still used among many peoples, iron was money in Sparta, leather in Sweden, while gold and silver are used among us.

[¶667:] Metals, being easier to carry, have generally been chosen as the means of every exchange, and these metals have been made into coin to save the trouble of continual weighing and measuring. For the stamp on the coin is merely evidence that the coin thus marked is of a certain weight; and only the ruler has the right to coin money given that he alone has the right to require that his testiony have authority for the whole nation.

[¶668:] Explained thus, the use of this invention can be understood by even the stupidest person. It is difficult to make a direct comparison between various things -- for instance, between cloth and corn. But when we find a common measure in money, it is easy for the manufacturer and the farmer to relate the value of the goods they wish to exchange to this common measure. If a given quantity of cloth is worth a given sum of money, and if a given quantity of corn is worth the same sum of money, then it follows that the seller, receiving the corn in exchange for his cloth, makes an equitable exchange. Thus by means of money it becomes possible to compare the values of goods of various kinds.

[¶669:] Do not go further than that and and do not enter into an explication of the moral effects of this institution. In everything it is important state clearly the use before showing the the abuse. If you attempt to teach children how the sign has led to the neglect of the actual thing, how money has given rise to all the illusions of public opinion, how countries rich in silver must be poor in everything else, you will be treating these children not only as philosophers but as wise men, and you will be attempting to make them understand something even few philosophers have been able to conceptualize.

[¶670:] What a wealth of interesting objects the curiosity of our pupil may be turned towards without ever leaving the real and material relations that are within his reach, and without arousing in his mind a single idea that he cannot conceive! The teacher's art consists in never burdening his pupil's observations with minutia that hold no significance but in ceaselessy leading him towards relations of importance which he will one day need to know in order to rightly judge between good and evil in civil society. The teacher must be able to adapt the conversation with which he amuses his pupil to the turn already given to his mind. A problem which another child would hardly touch upon will torment Emile half a year.

[¶671:] We go to dine in an opulent home There we find preparations for a feast -- many people, many servants, many dishes, and elegant fine china. All this apparatus of pleasure and feasting has something intoxicating about it that goes to the head when one is not accustomed to it. I foresee the effect of all this on my young pupil. While the meal goes on, while different courses come one after another, while a thousand noisy conversations are heard around the table, I lean towards him and whisper in his ear: "Through how many hands would you estimate that all of the things you see on this table have passed before coming here?" What a crowd of ideas I awaken in his brain by these few words! Immediately all the vapors of his delirium vanish. He thinks, he reflects, he calculates, he worries. While the philosophers, excited by wine or perhaps by the women next to them, are babbling like children, here he is philosophizing all alone in his corner. He asks questions; I decline to answer and put him off to another time. He becomes impatient, he forgets to eat and drink, he burns to get away from table and converse with me at his ease. What an object for his curiosity, what a text for instruction. With a healthy judgment that nothing has corrupted, what will he think of luxury when he finds that all the regions of the world have contributed, that twenty million hands perhaps have worked for a long time, that it has cost the lives, perhaps, of thousands of men, and all that to present him with pomp at noon that which he'll deposit in his chamber pot at night?

[¶672:] Watch with care what secret conclusions he draws in his heart from all his observations. If you have watched him less carefully than I suppose, his thoughts may be tempted in another direction; he may consider himself a person of great importance in the world when he sees so much labor concentrated on the preparation of his dinner. If you suspect this kind of reasoning, you can easily prevent it, or at any rate promptly erase the false impression. As of now he can only appropriate things by personal enjoyment, he can only judge of their fitness or unfitness for him by his sense perceptions of them. The comparison of a rustic meal, prepared by exercise, seasoned by hunger, liberty, and joy, with this magnificent but tedious repast will suffice to make him feel that he has gotten no real advantage from the splendour of the feast, and that his stomach being as well satisfied when he left the table of the peasant as when he left the table of the financier, he has gained nothing more from the one than from the other that he could truly call his own.

[¶673:] Imagine what a tutor might say to him on such an occasion. Consider the two dinners and decide for yourself which gave you most pleasure, which seemed the most joyful, at which did people eat with the greatest appetite, drink the most gaily, laugh the most heartily. Which was the least tedious and required least change of courses? Yet note the difference---this black bread you so enjoy is made from the peasant's own harvest; his wine is dark in colour and of a common kind, but wholesome and refreshing; it was made in his own vineyard. The cloth is made of his own hemp, spun and woven in the winter by his wife and daughters and the maid; no hands but theirs have touched the food. The closest mill and the neighboring market are the limits of the universe for them. In what way did you really enjoy all that the produce of faraway lands and the service of so many hands at the other table? If you did not get a better meal, what have you gained from this abundance? How much of it was made for you? If you had been the master of the house, the tutor might say, all of that would have been still foreign to you, for the anxiety of displaying your enjoyment before the eyes of others would have robbed you of it. The pains would be yours, the pleasure theirs.

[¶674:] This speech might be very fine, but it would worth nothing to Emile, for whom it would be beyond reach and whose ideas do not come by dictation. Speak to him more simply. After these two experiences, say to him some morning, "Where shall we have dinner today? Around that mountain of silver that covered three quarters of the table and those rows of paper flowers on mirrors that came with the dessert? Among those ladies with large headdresses who treat you like a little doll and want you to talk about what you do not know? Or in that village two miles from here, with those good people who welcome us so joyously and give us such good fresh cream?" Emile's choice will not be difficult, for he is neither a chatterbox nor a show off; he cannot stand constraint and all our fine dishes do not tempt him. But he is always ready for a run in the country and is very fond of good fruit and vegetables, sweet cream and kindly people._ On our way, the thought will occur to him, "All those people who laboured to prepare that grand feast were either wasting their time or they have no idea how to enjoy our pleasures."

[¶675:] My examples, good perhaps for one child, would be bad for a thousand others. If you understand its spirit you will be able to vary the examples as needed, depending on your study of the genius of each child, and this in turn depends on the occasions which happen to demonstrate it. You should not assume that in the three or four years we have to work with we could give even the most gifted child an idea of all the arts and sciences sufficient to enable him to study them for himself when he is older. But by bringing before him what he needs to know, we put him in a position to develop his own tastes, his own talents, to take the first step towards the object which touches his genius, and to show us the the path we must clear in order to promote nature.

[¶676:] Another advantage of this chain of limited but exact bits of knowledge is to show by their connection and interdependence how to rank them in one's own estimation and to be on one's guard against those prejudices, common to most men, which draw them towards the talents they themselves cultivate and away from those they have neglected. He who sees clearly the order of the whole sees the place where each piece ought to fit. He who sees one part well and who knows it deeply can be a a learned man, but the former is a wise man; and you remember it is wisdom rather than knowledge that we hope to acquire.

[¶677:] However that may be, my method does not depend on my examples. It depends on the amount of a man's powers at different ages and the choice of occupations adapted to those powers. I think it would be easy to find a method which appeared to give better results, but if it were less suited to the type, sex, and age of the scholar, I doubt whether the results would really be as good.

[¶678:] At the beginning of this second period we took advantage of the fact that our strength was more than enough for our needs in order to take us outside ourselves. We have ranged the heavens and measured the earth; we have sought out the laws of nature; we have explored the whole of our island. Now let us return to ourselves; let us unconsciously approach our own dwelling. We are happy indeed if we do not find it already occupied by the dreaded enemy who is preparing to seize it.

[¶679:] What remains to be done when we have observed all that lies around us? We must turn to our own use all that we can get; we must increase our comfort by means of our curiosity. Up until now we have provided ourselves with tools of all kinds, not knowing which we require. Perhaps those we do not want will be useful to others, and perhaps we may need theirs. Thus we discover the use of exchange; but for this we must know each other's needs, what tools other people use, what they can offer in exchange. Suppose we have ten men, each of whom has ten different requirements. To get what he needs for himself each must work at ten different kinds of work. But given the differences in genius and in talent, one will succeed at one kind of work, another at another. Each of them, suited for diverse jobs, will work at all of them and will be badly served. Let us form these ten men into a society, and let each apply himself to the to the kind of occupation that suits him best, and let him work at it for himself and for the rest. Each will profit from the talents of the others' talents just as if they were his own; each will perfect his own talent by by continual exercise; and thus all ten, perfectly well provided for, will still have a surplus for others. This is the plain foundation of all our institutions. It is not my aim to examine its consequences here; that is what I have done in another book.

[¶680:] According to this principle, any one who wanted to see himself as an isolated being, dependent on no one and self-sufficient, could only be miserable. He could not even continue to exist, for finding the whole earth covered with mine and thine while he had only himself, how could he get the means of subsistence? When we leave the state of nature we compel others to do the same: no one can remain in a state of nature in spite of his fellow-creatures. And to try to remain in it when it is no longer practicable would really be to leave it, for self-preservation is nature's first law.

[¶681:] Thus the idea of social relations is gradually developed in the child's mind, even before he can really be an active member of human society. Emile sees that in order to have tools for his own use other people must have theirs, and that he can get in exchange what he needs and they possess. I easily bring him to feel the need of such exchange and to take advantage of it.

[¶682:] "Sir, I must live," said a miserable writer of satires to the minister who reproved him for his infamous trade. "I do not see the necessity for that," replied the great man coldly. This answer, excellent from the minister, would have been barbarous and untrue in any other mouth. Every man must live. This argument, which appeals to every one with more or less force in proportion to his humanitarian tendencies, strikes me as unanswerable when applied to oneself. Since the strongest aversion that nature has implanted in us is our dislike of death, it follows that everything is permissible to the man who has no other means of living. The principles by which a good man is taught to scorn his life and to sacrifice it to duty are far removed from this primitive simplicity. Happy are those nations where one can be good without effort, and just without virtue! If in this world there is any state so miserable that one cannot live there without doing wrong, where the citizen is evil by necessity, it is not the criminal whom you should hang but he who forced him to become one.

[¶683:] As soon as Emile knows what life is, my first care will be to teach him to preserve it. Until now I have made no distinction of condition, rank, status, or fortune; nor shall I distinguish between them in what follows, because man is the same in every status. The rich man's stomach is no bigger than the poor man's, nor is his digestion any better. The master's arm is neither longer nor stronger than the slave's; a nobleman is no taller than a man of the people; and finally, since natural needs are the same to all, the means for satisfying them should be everywhere equal. Adapt the eduction of man to man, and not to that which is not him. Do you not see that in working to form him exclusively for one condition you are making him useless for anything else, and that if his fortune happens to change you will have worked only to make him unhappy? What could be more absurd than a great lord in rags who carries with him into his misery all the prejudices of his birth? What is more despicable than a rich man fallen into poverty, who, remembering the scorn with which he himself regarded the poor, feels that he has become the lowest of men? One of them has, as a last resort, the job of becoming a public nuisance, the other a cringing servant, with this fine saying, "I must live."

[¶684:] You count on the present order of society without considering that this order is itself subject to inevitable revolutions and that that it is impossible to foresee or prevent the one which may affect your children. The great become small, the rich become poor, the king becomes a commoner. Are the blows of fate so rare that you can count on being exempt from them? We are approaching the state of crisis and the century of revolutions._ Who can answer to what you may then become? Everything that man has made, man can destroy. Nature's characters alone are ineradicable, and nature makes neither princes, nor rich men, nor noblemen. This satrap whom you have educated for greatness, what will become of him when he is brought down? This financier who can only live on gold, what will he do in poverty? This haughty fool who cannot use his own hands, who prides himself on what is not really his -- what will he do when it is all taken away? Happy is the man who can leave the estate that leavs him and remain a man despite his fate! Let men praise as they will that conquered monarch who wanted in his fury to be buried beneath the fragments of his throne. As for me, I look at him with scorn. To me he only exists with his crown, and when that is gone he is no longer king. But he who loses his crown and lives without it is therefore above it. From the rank of a king, which may be held by a coward, a villain, or a madman, he rises to the rank of a man, a position few can fill. Thus he triumphs over Fortune, he braves it. He owes nothing except to himself alone, and when he has nothing left to show but himself he is not nothing, he is something. Yes, I prefer a hundred times the King of Corinth who was a schoolmaster at Syracuse and the King of Macedonia who was a court recorder at Rome to the wretched Tarquin who does not know what to do if he is not ruling, or the heir and son of a king of kings -- the plaything of anyone who dared insult his poverty -- wandering from court to court in search of help and finding nothing but reproach for lack of knowing any trade but one that is no longer in his power.

[¶685:] Man and citizen, whatever he may be, has nothing to invest in society but himself. All his other goods belong to society in spite of him, and when a man is rich, either he does not enjoy his wealth, or the public enjoys it too. In the first case he robs others as well as himself; in the second he gives them nothing. Thus his debt to society is still unpaid as long as he only pays with his goods. "But my father was serving society while he was acquiring his wealth." That may be. So he paid his own debt, not yours. You owe more to others than if you had been born with nothing, since you were born privileged. It is not fair that what one man has done for society should discharge another from what he owes it, for since every man owes all that he is, he can only pay his own debt; and no father can transmit to his son any right to be useless to his fellows. Now, according to you this is what he has done by transmitting his riches, which are the proof and the price of his work. The man who eats in idleness what he has not himself earned steals it; and the stockholder whom the state pays differs little from a robber who lives at the expense of the passers-by. Outside of society, the isolated man owes nothing to anyone; he has a right to live as he pleases. But in society, where he necessarily lives at the expense of others, he owes them in work the price of his maintenance; this is without exception. To work is therefore an indispensable duty for social man. Rich or poor, powerful or feeble, any idle citizen is a thief.

[¶686:] Now of all the occupations which can fournish subsistence to man, the nearest to a state of nature is manual labor; of all conditions the most independent of fortune and of men is that of the artisan. The artisan depends on his work alone. He is as free as the laborer is inslaved, for the latter depends on his field whose harvest is at the discretion of others. An enemy, a prince, a powerful neighbour, or a law-suit may take away this field; through this field he may be harassed in all sorts of ways. But if the artisan is ill-treated his goods are quickly packed: he folds up his arms and leaves. Nevertheless, agriculture is still the first occupation of man; it is the most honest, most useful, and consequently the most noble one he can practice. I do not say to Emile, "Learn agriculture"; he already knows it. All rural work is familiar to him. It was his first occupation, and he returns to it continually. So I say to him, "Cultivate your father's lands, but if you lose this inheritance, or if you have none to lose, what will you do? So learn a trade."

[¶687:] A trade for my son! My son a working man! Sir, what are you thinking of? Madame, my thoughts are wiser than yours; you want to make him fit for nothing but a lord, a marquis, or a prince; and some day he may be less than nothing. I want to give him a rank that he cannot lose, a rank that will always do him honor; and, whatever you may say, he will have fewer equals with this one title than with all those you want to give him.

[¶688:] The letter kills, the spirit gives life. To know a trade it is less a question of learning it than of overcoming the prejudices that scorn it. You will never be reduced to earning your livelihood; Ah, too bad, too bad for you! No matter; do not work for necessity but for glory. Lower yourself to the condition of an artisan in order to rise above your own. In order to conquer fortune and things, begin by making yourself independent of them. To rule through public opinion, begin by ruling over it.

[¶689:] Remember I demand no talent, only a trade, a genuine trade, a purely mechanical art in which the hands work harder than the head, a trade which does not lead to fortune but makes one able to get along without it. In households well beyond the danger of lacking bread I have known fathers carry foresight to such a point as to provide their children not only with ordinary teaching but with knowledge from which they could get a living if anything happened. These farsighted parents thought they were doing a great thing. They did nothing, for the resources they imagine they have secured depend on that very fortune of which they would make their children independent; so that unless they found themselves in circumstances fitted for the display of their talents, they would die of hunger as if they had none.

[¶690:] As soon as it is a question of influence and intrigue you may just as well use these means to keep yourself affluent as to acquire, in the depths of poverty, the means of returning to your former position. If you cultivate the arts which depend on the artist's reputation, if you fit yourself for jobs which are only obtained by favor, how will that help you when, rightly disgusted with the world, you scorn the steps by which you must climb? You have studied politics and the self-interest of rulers -- that is fine. But how will you use this knowledge if you cannot get through to the ministers, the women at court, or the bureau chiefs? if you do not have the secret of pleasing them, if they fail to find in you the kind of fool that suits them? You are an architect or a painter; well and good. But your talents must be made known. Do you suppose you can all of a sudden start exhibiting your work in the Salon? Unfortunately that is not the way it works! You have to go to the Academy; even there you need a sponsor in order to obtain a quiet place in the corner of a wall. Instead, leave your ruler and pencil with me, take a cab and drive from door to door; that is how one gains celebrity. Now, you must know that the doors of the great are guarded by swiss guards or porters who only understand one language, and their ears are in their palms. Would you like to teach what you have learned and become an instructor of geography, mathematics, languages, music, drawing? Even for that one must find pupils and consequently find friends who will sing your praises. Understand that it will be more important to be pretentious than skillful, and with no trade but your own you will always be considered ignorant.

[¶691:] See, therefore, how little you can depend on these fine resources, and how many other resources are necessary before you can use what you have got. And what will become of you from such base humiliation? Reverses will make you worse rather than better. More than ever the plaything of public opinion, how will you rise above the arbitrary prejudices on which your fate depends? How can you despise the vices and the lowness which you need to earn your living? You used to be dependent only on wealth; now you are dependent on the wealthy. You have only worsened your slavery and added to your misery. Now you are poor without being free. It is the worst state man can fall into.

[¶692:] But if, instead of rushing into into the higher forms of learning that can only feed the mind and not the body, you have recourse, whenever needed, to your hands and what your hands can do for you, all these difficulties disappear, all these strategems become useless. Your trade is ready when required. Uprightness and honor are no longer an obstacle to life. You have no need to become base and deceptive before the great, submissive and cringing before fools, a despicable flatterer of both, a borrower or a thief -- for there is little difference between them when one has nothing. Other people's opinions are no concern of yours; you need not pay court to any one; there is no imbecile to flatter, no flunkey to bribe, no woman to pay, or worse , to flatter. Let rogues conduct the affairs of state. In your lowly rank you can still be an honest man and yet get a living. You walk into the first workshop of your trade. "Master, I want work." "Friend, put yourself over there and get started." Before dinner-time you have earned your dinner. If you are diligent and sober, before the week is out you will have earned your keep for another week. You will have lived in freedom, health, truth, industry, and righteousness. Time is not wasted when it brings these returns.

[¶693:] I want absolutely that Emile learn a trade. "An honest trade, at least," you say. What do you mean by honest ? Is not every useful trade honest ? I would not want him to be an embroiderer, a gilder, or a varnisher like Locke's young gentleman. Neither would I make him a musician, an actor, or an author._ With the exception of these and others like them, let him choose his own trade; I do not mean to thwart him in anything. I would rather have him be a shoemaker than a poet; I would rather he paved streets than make porcelaine flowers. But, you will say, policemen, spies, and hangmen are useful people. I say that it all depends on the government. But let that pass. I was wrong; it is not enough to choose an honest trade, it must be a trade which does not develop detestable qualities in the mind, qualities incompatible with humanity. To return to our original expression, let us choose an honest trade, but let us remember there can be no honesty without usefulness.

[¶694:] A famous writer of this century whose books are full of great schemes and narrow views was under a vow, like the other priests of his communion, not to take a wife. Finding himself more scrupulous than others with regard to his neighbour's wife, they say that he decided to employ pretty servants instead, and so did his best to repair the wrong done to the race by his rash promise. He thought it the duty of a citizen to breed children for the state, and so he made his children into artisans. As soon as they were old enough they were taught whatever trade they chose. Only idle or useless trades were excluded, such as that of the wigmaker -- who is never necessary and may any day now cease to be required since nature does not seem to get tired of providing us with hair.

[¶695:] This is the spirit that shall guide our choice of trade for Emile, or rather, not our choice but his. For the maxims he has imbibed make him despise useless things, and he will never be content to waste his time on labors that have no value; and he only knows the value of things from their real utility. He must have a trade that would be of use to Robinson on his island.

[¶696:] When we review with the child the productions of nature and of art, when we stimulate his curiosity and follow its lead, we have great opportunities of studying his tastes, his inclinations, his tendencies, and perceiving the first spark of genius, if he has one that is clearly marked. You must, however, be on your guard against the common error which mistakes the effects of circumstances for the ardour of genius, or imagines there is a decided inclination towards any one of the arts when there is nothing more than a spirit of emulation, common to men and monkeys, which impels them mechanically to do what they see others doing without knowing what it is good for. The world is full of artisans, and even more of artists, who have no natural talent for the art which they practice but into which they were driven in early childhood either through the conventional ideas of other people or because those around them were fooled by an apparent zeal that could have led them in a similar way to any other art they saw practised. This one hears a drum and fancies himself a general; that one sees a building and wants to be an architect. Every one is drawn towards the trade he sees others doing when he thinks it is highly estimed.

[¶697:] I once knew a footman who watched his master drawing and painting and took it into his head to become a designer and artist. From the moment he made this resolve he took up a pencil and then a brush which he never put down for the rest of his life. Without teaching or rules of art he began to draw everything he saw. Three whole years were devoted to these scribblings from which nothing but his duties could stir him, nor was he discouraged by the small progress resulting from his very mediocre talents. I have seen him spend the whole of a broiling summer in a little anteroom facing south, a room that felt suffocating even just to pass through. There he was seated, or rather nailed, all day to his chair, drawing a globe that was before him again and again and yet again with invincible obstinacy till he had reproduced the rounded surface to his own satisfaction. At last with his master's help and under the guidance of an artist he got so far as to abandon his livery and live by his brush. Perseverance substitutes for talent up to a certain point. He got so far, but no further. This honest boy's perseverance and ambition are praiseworthy; he will always be respected for his industry and steadfastness of purpose, but he will never get beyong painting panel friezes. Who would not have been deceived by his zeal and taken it for real talent? There is all the difference in the world between a liking and an aptitude. To make sure of real genius or real taste in a child calls for more accurate observations than is generally suspected, for the child displays his wishes not his capacity, and we judge by the former instead of considering the latter. I wish some judicious person would give us a treatise on the art of observing children. This art would be very important to know, but neither parents nor teachers have mastered its elements.

[¶698:] Perhaps we are laying too much stress on the choice of a trade. Because it is a question of manual work, this choice means little, and his apprenticeship is more than half accomplished already through the exercises which have up until now occupied him. What would you like him to do? He is ready for anything. He can handle the spade and hoe, he can use the lathe, hammer, plane, or file; he is already familiar with these tools which are common to many trades. He only needs to acquire sufficient skill in the use of any one of them to rival the speed, the familiarity, and the diligence of good workmen, and he will have a great advantage over them in suppleness of body and limb, so he can easily take any position and can continue any kind of movements without effort. Moreover his senses are acute and well-practised. He knows the principles of the various trades; to work like a master of his craft he only needs experience, and experience comes with practice. To which of those trades open to us will he give sufficient time to make himself a master of it? That is the whole question.

[¶699:] Give a man a trade that suits his sex, give a young man a trade that suits his age. Sedentary indoor employments that make the body tender and effeminate are neither pleasing nor suitable. No young boy ever aspired on his own to be a tailor; it is only through others' efforts that this feminine work attracts the sex for which it was not made._ The needle and the sword can not be wielded by the same hand. If I were sovereign I would only allow needlework and dressmaking to be done by women and by cripples who are obliged to work at such trades. Assuming eunuchs to be necessary, I think the orientals were very foolish to make them on purpose. Why not be contented with those provided by nature, with those crowds of low people whose hearts nature has mutilated? There would be plenty to spare. Every weak, delicate, fearful man is condemned by nature to a sedentary life; he is fit to live among women or in their manner. Let him practice one of the trades that is right for them; and if there must be true eunuchs let those men who dishonour their sex by adopting trades unworthy of it be reduced to that state. Their choice proclaims an error of nature; correct it one way or other, you will have only done well.

[¶700:]I forbid to my pupil the unhealthy trades, but not a difficult or dangerous one. He will exercise himself in strength and courage. Such trades are for men not women, who claim no share in them. Are not men ashamed to encroach upon the women's trades?

Luctantur paucae, comedunt coliphia paucae.
Vos lanam trahitis, calathisque peracta refertis
Vellera."-- Juven. Sat. II. V. 55.

[¶701:] In Italy women are not seen in shops, and to persons accustomed to the streets of England and France nothing could look gloomier. When I saw drapers selling ladies ribbons, pompons, net, and chenille, I thought these delicate ornaments very absurd in the coarse hands fit to blow the bellows and strike the anvil. I said to myself, "In this country women should set up as steel-polishers and armourers." Let each make and sell the weapons of his or her own sex; knowledge is acquired through use.

[¶702:] Young man, impress on your work the hand of man. Learn to wield with a vigorous arm the ax and the plane, to square a beam, climb up to the rooftops, position the pinacle, firm it up with rafters and tie-beams. Then call to your sister to come help you with your work just as she tells you to help her with her needlepoint.

[¶703:] I have said too much for my agreeable contemporaries, I know. But I sometimes let myself be carried away by my argument. If any man is ashamed to work in public armed with an adze or wearing a leather apron, I think him a mere slave of public opinion, ready to blush for having done well as soon as he is laughed at by others. But let us yield to parents' prejudices so long as they do not hurt the children. To honour trades we are not obliged to practise every one of them, so long as we do not think them beneath us. When the choice is ours and we are under no compulsion, why not judge the pleasantness, attractiveness, and suitability of the different professions within the same rank? Choose the pleasanter, more attractive and more suitable trade. Metal work is useful, more useful, perhaps, than the rest, but unless a some special reason draws me to it, I would not make your child into a blacksmith, a locksmith nor an ironworker. I do not want to see him a Cyclops at the forge. Neither would I have him be a mason, still less a shoemaker. All trades must be carried on, but when the choice is ours, cleanliness should be taken into account. This is not a matter of mere opinion; our senses are our guides. Finally, I do not like those stupid trades in which the workmen mechanically perform the same action without pause and almost without mental effort. Weaving, stocking-knitting, stone-cutting; why employ intelligent men on such work? It is merely one machine leading another.

[¶704:] All things considered, the trade I should choose for my pupil, among the trades he likes, is that of a carpenter. It is clean and useful; it may be carried on at home; it gives enough exercise; it calls for skill and industry, and while fashioning articles for everyday use, there is scope for elegance and taste.

[¶705:] If by chance the genius of your pupil was clearly directed toward the speculative sciences, then I would not blame you for giving him a trade consistent with his inclinations. He might learn, for example, the make mathematical instruments, eyeglasses, telescopes, etc.

[¶706:] When Emile learns his trade I want to learn it with him, for I am convinced he will never learn anything thoroughly unless we learn it together. So we shall both serve our apprenticeship, and we do not mean to be treated as gentlemen but as real apprentices who are not there for fun. Why should we not actually be apprenticed? Peter the Great was a ship's carpenter and drummer to his own troops; was not that prince at least your equal in birth and merit? You understand this is addressed not to Emile but to you, whoever you may be.

[¶707:] Unfortunately we cannot spend the whole of our time in the workshop. We are not only apprentice carpenters but apprentice men , and the apprenticeship of this last trade is more painful and longer than the other. How will we thus manage? Shall we take a master to teach us the use of the plane and engage him by the hour like a dancing-master? No, that would make us not apprentices but students, and our ambition is not merely to learn carpentry but to be carpenters. I am thus of the view that once or twice a week we should spend the whole day at our master's; we should get up early, be at our work before him, take our meals with him, work under his orders, and after having had the honour of supper with his family we may if we please return to sleep upon our own hard beds. This is the way to learn several trades at once, to learn to do manual work without neglecting our other apprenticeship .

[¶708:] Let us do things simply while doing them well. Let us not reproduce vanity by our efforts to combat it. To pride ourselves on having conquered prejudice is to succumb to prejudice. It is said that in accordance with an old custom of the Ottomans, the sultan is obliged to work with his hands, and, as every one knows, the handiwork of a king is a masterpiece. So he royally distributes his masterpieces among the great lords of the Porte and the price paid is in accordance with the rank of the workman. What I see wrong with this is not the so-called inconvenience it causes; on the contrary, that is an advantage. By compelling the lords to share with him the spoils of the people it is much the less necessary for the prince to plunder the people directly. Despotism needs some such relaxation, and without it that horrible government could not last.

[¶709:] The real evil in such a custom is the idea it gives this poor man of his own worth. Like King <a href="../rousseau/notes/para709_note1.html" target="Text_Notebox" class=translator>Midas he sees all things turn to gold at his touch, but he does not see whose ears start growing as a result. Let us keep Emile's own ears short, let us preserve Emile's hands from such lucrative talent. The price of what he himself makes will be based not on the worker but on the work. Never let his work be judged by any standard but that of the work of a master. Let it be judged by the work itself, not because it is his. If anything is well done, I say, "There is something that is well made," but do not ask who made it. If he himself says with a proud and self-satisfied air, "I made it," answer indifferently, "You or someone else, it doesn't matter. It's still a well-made work."

[¶710:] Good mother, be on your guard against the deceptions prepared for you. If your son knows many things, distrust his knowledge; if he is unlucky enough to be educated in Paris and to be rich, he is ruined. As long as there are clever artists he will have all their talents, but apart from his masters he will have none. In Paris a rich man knows everything; it is the poor who are ignorant. Our capital is full of amateurs, especially women, who do their work as M. Gillaume invents his colours. Among the men I know of three striking exceptions; among the women I know no exceptions, and I doubt if there are any. In general a man acquires a name in the arts just like he acquires official robes; he becomes an artist and a judge of art just like he becomes a lawyer and a magistrate.

[¶711:] Thus if it were once admitted that it is a fine thing to have a trade, your children would soon have one without learning it. They would become postmasters like the councillors of Zurich. Let us have no such ceremonies for Emile; no appearances, only reality. Let us not say what he knows, let him learn in silence. Let him make his masterpiece, but not be hailed as master. Let him prove himself to be a worker not by his title but by his work.

[¶712:] If up until now I have made myself understood, you ought to realise how through habits of bodily exercise and manual work I unconsciously give my pupil the taste for reflection and meditation in order to counteract in him the indolence which could result from his indifference to men's judgments and his freedom from passion. He must work like a peasant and think like a philosopher if he is not to be as idle as a savage. The great secret of education is to use the exercises of the body and those of the mind as relaxations of each other.

[¶713:] But beware of anticipating instructions which demand more maturity of mind. Emile will not be a workman for long before he feels for himself those <a href="../rousseau/notes/para713_note1.html" target="Text_Notebox" class=translator>social inequalities that he had at first only observed. He will want to question me in turn on the maxims I have given him, maxims he is able to understand. By receiving everything from me alone, in seeing himself so close to the condition of poor people, he will want to know why I am so far removed from it. Out of the blue he may ask me some scathing questions. "You are rich. You have told me so and I see it. A rich man owes his work to society because he is a man. But what are you doing for society?" What would a fine tutor say to that? I do not know. He would perhaps be foolish enough to talk to the child of the care he bestows upon him. As for me, the workshop will get me out of the difficulty. "My dear Emile that is a very good question; I will undertake to answer for myself at the time when you can yourself give an answer that satisfies you. Meanwhile I will take care to give what I can spare to you and to the poor, and to make a table or a bench every week so as not to be completely useless to everyone."

[¶714:] We have come back to ourselves. Here our child is ready to cease being a child and to return to his own individuality. Here he is feeling more than ever the necessity that attaches him to things. After having begun by exercising his body and his senses we have exercised his mind and his judgment. Finally we have joined together the use of his limbs and his faculties. We have made him an active and thinking being. In order to make him a man, it remains for us to make him a lovable and sensitive being, that is to perfect reason by sentiment. But before entering into that new order of thinge, let us glance back on the one we have just left and see as precisely as possible how far we have come.

[¶715:] At first our pupil had merely <a href="../rousseau/notes/para715_note1.html" target="Text_Notebox" class=translator>sensations, now he has ideas. He could only feel, now he judges. For from the comparison of many successive or simultaneous sensations and the judgment arrived at with regard to them, there springs a sort of mixed or complex sensation which I call an idea.

[¶716:] The way in which ideas are formed gives a character to the human mind. The mind which forms its ideas from real relations is a solid mind; the mind which contents itself with apparent relations is superficial. He who sees relations as they are has an exact mind; he who estimate them poorly has an inaccurate mind; he who concocts imaginary relations which have neither reality nor appearance is a madman; he who does not perceive any relation at all is an imbecile. The greater or lesser aptitude for comparing ideas and finding connections between them is that which gives to men more or less intelligence, etc.

[¶717:] Simple ideas consist merely of compared sensations. Simple sensations involve judgments, as do the complex sensations that I call simple ideas. In sensation, judgment is purely passive; it affirms that one feels what one feels. In perception or idea, judgment is active; it connects, compares, it determines relations not determined by the senses. That is the main difference, but it is great . Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.

[¶718:] I see some one giving an ice-cream to an eight-year-old child. He brings the spoon to his mouth without knowing what it is and, struck by the cold, cries out, "Ah, it burns!" He experiences a sharp sensation; he knows no sensation sharper than the heat of fire and believes that that is what he feels. However, he is mistaken. Cold hurts, but it does not burn; and these two sensations are not the same, for those who have experienced both do not confuse them. So it is not the sensation that deceives him but the judgment he forms with regard to it.

[¶719:] It is just the same with those who see a mirror or some optical instrument for the first time, or enter a deep cellar in the depths of winter or at midsummer, or dip a very hot or cold hand into tepid water, or roll a little ball between two crossed fingers. If they are content to say what they really feel, their judgment, being purely passive, cannot go wrong; but when they judge according to appearances, their judgment is active; by induction it compares and establishes relations that are not really perceived. Then such people are deceived or can be deceived. In order to correct or prevent the error one needs experience.

[¶720:] Show your pupil the clouds at night passing between himself and the moon; he will think the moon is moving in the opposite direction and that the clouds are stationary. He will think this through a hasty induction because he generally sees small objects moving in relation to larger ones, and the clouds seems larger than the moon whose distance is beyond his reckoning. When he watches the shore from a moving boat he falls into the opposite mistake and thinks the earth is moving because he does not feel the motion of the boat and considers it along with the sea or river as one motionless whole, of which the shore, which appears to move, forms no part.

[¶721:] The first time a child sees a stick half immersed in water he thinks he sees a <a href="../rousseau/notes/para721_note1.html" target="Text_Notebox" class=translator>broken stick; the sensation is true and would not cease to be true even if he knew the reason of this appearance. So if you ask him what he sees, he replies, "A broken stick," for he is quite sure he is experiencing this sensation. But when deceived by his judgment he goes further and, after saying he sees a broken stick, he affirms that it really is broken he says what is not true. Why? Because he becomes active and judges no longer by observation but by induction; he affirms what he does not perceive, i.e., that the judgment he receives through one of his senses would be confirmed by another.

[¶722:] Since all our errors arise in our judgment, it is clear that if we had no need for judgment we should not need to learn. We should never be liable to mistakes; we would be happier in our ignorance than we can be in our knowledge. Who can deny that those who are learned know a thousand true things that ignorant people will never know? Are the learned for thus any nearer truth? On the contrary, the further they progress the further away from it they get. Since the vanity of their judgment outpaces their enlightenment, each truth that they learn comes at the expense of a hundred false judgments. Every one knows that the learned societies of Europe are nothing but public schools for lying; and there are assuredly more errors in the Academy of Sciences than in a whole tribe of Huron Indians.

[¶723:] Because the more men know the more they are mistaken, the only means of avoiding error is ignorance. Form no judgments and you will never be wrong. This is the lesson of nature as well as of reason. Outside of the small number of immediate and clearly perceptible things related to us, we naturally have a profound indifference to all the rest. A savage will not turn his head to watch the working of the finest machinery or all the wonders of electricity. "What does that matter to me?" is the saying most common to the ignorant and most convenient to the wise.

[¶724:] But unluckily this phrase will no longer suit us. Everything matters to us since we are dependent on everything, and our curiosity naturally increases with our needs. This is why I attribute much curiosity to the philosophe and none to the savage. The latter needs no help from anyone; the former needs every one, especially admirers.

[¶725:] You will tell me I am going beyond nature. I think not. She chooses her instruments and orders them, not according to opinion but to need. Now a man's needs change according to his circumstances. There is a great difference between a natural man living in a state of nature and a natural man living in society. Emile is no savage to be banished to the desert; he is a savage made to live in cities. He must know how to make his living there, how to make the best of its inhabitants, and <a href="../rousseau/notes/para725_note1.html" target="Text_Notebox" class=translator>how to live if not like them at least with them.

[¶726:] Because in the midst of so many new relations that he will have to depend on it will be necessary inspite of himself for him to judge, teach him therefore how to judge well.

[¶727:] The best way of learning to judge well is is the way that tends to simplify our experiences and even enable us to dispense with them altogether without falling into error. Hence it follows that after having for a long time verified the experience of one sense by that of another, we must still learn to verify each sense experience by itself. Then each of our sensations will become an idea, and this idea will always correspond to the truth. This is the sort of accomplishment with which I have tried to fill this third age of human life.

[¶728:] This method of procedure demands a patience and circumspection of which few teachers are capable and without which the pupil will never learn to judge. If for example, when your pupil is mistaken by the appearance of the broken stick you rush to take the stick out of the water in order to show him his error, you may perhaps undeceive him; but what have you taught him? Nothing more than he would soon have learnt for himself. That is not what one must do!. It is less a question of teaching him a truth than of showing him how to set about discovering it for himself. To teach him better you must not be in such a hurry to correct his mistakes. Let us take Emile and myself as an illustration.

[¶729:] To begin with, any child educated in the usual way could not fail to answer the second of my imaginary questions in the affirmative. He will say, "That is certainly a broken stick." I very much doubt whether Emile will give the same reply. Seeing no necessity for being a scholar or pretending to be one, he is never in a hurry to draw conclusions. He only judges on the basis of evidence and he is far from having it on this occasion. For he knows how much our judgements of appearances are subject to illusion, even if it is only a simple question of perspective.

[¶730:] Moreover, since he knows by experience that my most frivolous questions always have some purpose that is not at first obvious, he has not developed the habit of answering blindly. On the contrary, he is on his guard. He pays attention; he examines things with great care before answering. He never gives me an answer unless he is satisfied with it himself, and he is hard to satisfy. Finally neither of us take any pride in merely knowing the truth of things but only in avoiding mistakes. We should be more ashamed to deceive ourselves with bad reasoning than to find no explanation at all. "I do not know" is a phrase that suits us both fine and that we repeat so often that it costs neither one of us anything to use it. But whether he gives the silly answer or whether he avoids it by our convenient phrase "I do not know," my answer is the same. Let us see, let us examine it.

[¶731:] This stick immersed half way in the water is fixed in an upright position. To know if it is broken as it seems to be, how many things must be done before we take it out of the water or even touch it?

1 First we walk round it, and we see that the broken part follows us. So it is only our eye that changes it; looks do not make things move.

2 We look straight down on that end of the stick which is above the water. Then the stick is no longer bent,_ the end near our eye exactly hides the other end. Has our eye set the stick straight?

3 We stir the surface of the water; we see the stick break into several pieces, move in zigzags and follow the ripples of the water. Can the motion we gave the water suffice to break, soften. or melt the stick like this?

4 We make the water recede, and little by little we see the stick straightening itself as the water sinks. Is not this more than enough to enlighten us as to the fact and reveal refraction? So it is not true that our eyes deceive us, for nothing more has been required to correct the mistakes attributed to it.

[¶732:] Suppose the child were stupid enough not to perceive the result of these experiments, then you must call touch to the help of sight. Instead of taking the stick out of the water, leave it where it is and let the child pass his hand along it from end to end; he will feel no angle, therefore the stick is not broken.

[¶733:] You will tell me this is not mere judgment but formal reasoning. That is true; but do you not see that as soon as the mind has got any ideas at all, every judgment is a process of reasoning? The consciousness of all every sensation is a proposition, a judgement. Thus as soon as we compare one sensation with another, we are beginning to reason. The art of judging and the art of reasoning are exactly the same.

[¶734:] Emile will never learn <a href="../rousseau/notes/para734_note1.html" target="Text_Notebox" class=translator>dioptrics unless he learns with this stick. He will not have dissected insects nor counted the spots on the sun; he will not know what you mean by a microscope or a telescope. Your doctrinaire pupils will laugh at his ignorance and will not be wrong, for before using these instruments I intend that he invent them, and you suspect that that will not happen very soon.

[¶735:] This is the spirit of my whole method at this stage. If the child rolls a little ball between two crossed fingers and thinks he feels two balls, I shall not let him look until he is convinced there is only one.

[¶736:] These explanation will suffice, I hope, to mark clearly the progress that the mind of my pupil has made up until now and the route followed by him. But perhaps you are astounded by the quantity of things that I have brought before him. You fear that I will overwhelm his mind with this multitude of knowledge. On the contrary, I am rather teaching him to be ignorant of things than to know them. I am showing him the path of science, easy indeed, but long, far-reaching and slow to follow. I am making him take the first steps so that he will recognize the entrance, but I do not allow him to go far.

[¶737:] Forced to learn for himself, he uses his own reason not that of others. For in order for there to be nothing given to opinion there must be nothing given to authority, and most of our errors come much less from ourselves than from others. From this continual exercise should result a vigour of mind similar to that acquired by the body through work and fatique. Another advantage is that one only advances in proportion to one's strength. Neither mind nor body carries more than it can bear. When the understanding appropriates things before depositing them in the memory, what is drawn from that store later on is his own. Otherwise one overcharges the memory without knowing it and is liable to drawing nothing suitable from it.

[¶738:] Emile knows little, but what he knows is really his own. He knows nothing half-way. Among the small number things he knows and knows well the most important is that there is much that he is ignorant of and that he can some day know, even more that other men know and that he will never in his life know, and an infinite number of other things that no man will ever know. He has a universal mind not through knowledge but through the power of acquiring it. He is open-minded, intelligent, ready for anything, and, as Montaigne says, if not learned, capable of learning I am content if he knows the "Wherefore" of everything he does and the "Why" of everything he believes. Once more my object is not to give him science, but teach him to acquire it when needed, to make him to estimate exactly what it is worth, and to make him love <a href="../rousseau/notes/para738_note1.html" target="Text_Notebox" class=translator>truth above all. By this method progress is slow but we never make a useless step and we are never forced to go backwards.

[¶739:] Emile's knowledge is confined to nature and things. He doesn't even know the name of history, nor what metaphysics and morals are. He knows the essential relations between men and things, but nothing of the moral relations between man and man. He knows little about how to generalize ideas, little about how to make abstractions. He perceives that certain qualities are common to certain things without reasoning about these qualities themselves. He is acquainted with the abstract idea of space by the help of his geometrical figures; he is acquainted with the abstract idea of quantity by the help of his algebraical symbols. These figures and signs are the supports on which these ideas may be said to rest, the supports on which his senses repose. He does not attempt to know things by their nature, but only by the relations that interest him. He only judges what is foreign to himself in relation to himself, but this estimation is exact and certain. Fantasy and conventions have no part in it. He values most the things which are of use to himself, and as he never departs from this standard of values, he owes nothing to opinion.

[¶740:] Emile is hard-working, temperate, patient, steady, and full of courage. His unlit imagination never exaggerates danger; he feels few pains and knows how to suffer with firmness because he has not learnt to rebel against fate. As to death, he doesn't even know what it is; but accustomed to submit without resistance to the law of necessity, when it is necessary for him to die he will die without a groan and without a struggle. That is as much as we can demand of nature in that hour which we all abhor. To live freely and to give little weight to human things is the best way to learn how to die.

[¶741:] In a word Emile has virtue in all that which relates to himself. To also have the social virtues he only needs to know the relations which make those virtues necessary. He only lacks a knowledge which he is quite ready to receive.

[¶742:] He considers himself without regard to others and finds it good that others hardly think of him. He demands nothing from anyone and and believes that he owes nothing to anyone. He is alone in human society and he depends only on himself. He has more right than another to count on himself, for he is all that a boy can be at his age. He has no errors, or at least only has those that are inevitable. He has no vices, or only those from which no man can escape. He has a healthy body, supple limbs, a mind that is accurate and without prejudice, a heart is free and untroubled by passions. <a href="../rousseau/notes/para742_note1.html" target="Text_Notebox" class=translator>Amour-propre, the earliest and the most natural of passions, has scarcely shown itself. Without disturbing the peace of anyone, he has lived as contented, happy, and free as nature permits. Do you think that a child who has reached his fifteenth year in this condition has wasted the preceding ones?

Project:Rousseau/Emile-en/b3

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

BOOK THREE

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