{{{tool-map}}}

Lifeworlds

Error: Image is invalid or non-existent.

{{{tool-map}}}

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 Four. Source: Gallica

Book Four

[¶743:] How rapidly we pass through life on earth! The first quarter of life slips away before we know how to use it; the last quarter slips away after we have ceased to enjoy it. At first we do not know how to live; soon we are not able to live. In the interval between these two useless extremes three-quarters of the time left to us is consumed by sleep, work, pain, constraints, and every kind of suffering. Life is short, less because of the little time it lasts than because we have hardly any time to savor what little of it there is. In vain is the moment of death set apart from that of birth; life is always too short when this space is badly filled.

[¶744:] We are born, so to speak, two times: once to exist, the other to live; one time for our species and another for our sex. Those who regard woman as an imperfect man are wrong without doubt, but the analogy based on externals supports them. Up to the age of puberty children of both sexes have nothing to distinguish them in appearance. They both have the same face, the same figure, the same complexion, the same voice -- everything is equal. Girls are children and boys are children; the same name suffices for beings so similar. Males whose later sexual development has been impeded preserve this resemblance all their lives; they are always big children; and women who never lose this resemblance seem in many ways never to be anything else.

[¶745:] But man in general is not meant to remain always in childhood. He will leave it at the time prescribed by nature; and this moment of crisis, although very short, has long-term influences.

[¶746:] Like the rumbling of the sea that precedes a storm from afar, so the murmur of rising passions announces this tumultuous revolution. A bubbling undercurrent warns of the the approaching danger. Changes of temper, frequent outbreaks of anger, a continual agitation of the mind, make the child almost ungovernable. He becomes deaf to the voice that used to make him manageable; he is a lion in a fever. He disregards his guide; he wants no longer to be controlled.

[¶747:] Along with the moral symptoms of a changing temper come perceptible changes in appearance. His face develops and takes on the stamp of his character; the soft and sparse down at the base of his cheeks becomes darker and takes on consistency. His voice changes, or rather he loses it altogether; he is neither a child nor a man and cannot take the tone of either. His eyes, those organs of the soul which have said nothing until now, find their own language and expression. A growing fire animates them. Their livelier glances still have a sacred innocence, but they no long keep their earlier dumbness; he already feels that they can say too much. He begins to know how to lower them and blush. He is becoming sensitive before knowing that he feels; he is restless without reason. All this may come slowly and still give you time; but if his vivacity makes him too impatient, if outbursts change into fury, if he becomes angry then gentle from one moment to the next, if he weeps without cause, if in the presence of objects which are beginning to be a source of danger his pulse quickens and his eyes light up, if he trembles when a woman's hand touches his, if he is troubled or timid in her presence, 0 Ulysses, wise Ulysses! take care! The goatskin sacks you sealed with so much care are open; the winds are unloosed; do not leave the helm for a minute or all is lost.

[¶748:] This is the second birthI spoke of. It is now that man is truly born to life and that nothing human is foreign to him. Until now our efforts have been child's play; it is only now that they take on a true importance. This period when ordinary educations end is just the time when ours ought to begin. But to explain this new plan properly, let us review from a distance the state of things that relate to it.

[¶749:] Our passions are the principle means of our self-preservation; it is therefore an enterprise as vain as it is ridiculous to wish to destroy them. That would be to control nature, to wish to reform the work of God. If God told man to annihilate the passions he gives him, God would both will and not will; he would contradict himself. He has never given such an insane command; nothing like it is written on the human heart, and what God wants a man to do, he does not have it said by another man, he says it to him himself. He writes it in the botton of his heart.

[¶750:] Now I consider anyone who would prevent the birth of the passions almost as foolish as he who would like to annihilate them; and those who believe that this has been my project up until now have strongly misunderstood me.

[¶751:] But would we be reasoning correctly, if from the fact that passions are natural to man, we went on to conclude that all of the passions we feel in ourselves and that we see in others are natural? Their source is natural, it is true; but they have been swollen by a thousand other streams; they are a great river that is constantly growing and in which one can scarcely find a few drops of the original stream. Our natural passions are very limited; they are the instruments of our liberty, they tend to preserve us. All those which subjugate and destroy us come to us from elsewhere. Nature does not give them to us; we appropriate them at her expense.

[¶752:] The source of our passions, the origin and principle of all the others, the only one that is born with man and never leaves him as long as he lives, is amour de soi -- a passion that is primitive, innate, anterior to any other, and of which all the others are in a sense only modifications. In this sense, if you like, they are all natural. But most of these modifications have external causes without which they would never occur, and these same modifications, far from being advantageous to us, are harmful. They change the original purpose and work against their principle, Then it is that man finds himself outside nature and puts himself in contradiction with himself.

[¶753:] Amour de soi-même is always good and always in accordance with order. Each of us being charged especially with our own preservation, the first and the most important of our cares is and ought to be to ceaselessly watch over it; and how can we continually watch over it, if we do not take the greatest interest in it?

[¶754:] We must therefore love ourselves in order to preserve ourselves, and it follows directly from this same sentiment that we love that which preserves us. Every child clings to its nurse; Romulus must have clung to the she-wolf who suckled him. At first this attachment is purely mechanical. That which favors the well-being of an individual attracts him, that which harms him repells him; this is nothing but blind instinct. What transforms this instinct into feeling -- the the attachment into love, the aversion into hatred -- is the manifested intention to help us or to harm us. We do not become passionately attached to insensitive objects that only follow the direction given them. But those from which we expect either good or evil from their internal disposition, from their will, those we see acting freely for or against us, inspire us with feelings similar to those they show towards us. Something does us good, we seek it out; but we love the person who does us good. Something harms us, and we shrink from it; but we hate the person who tries to hurt us.

[¶755:] The child's first sentiment is to love himself, and the second, which derives from the first, is to love those around him. For in his present state of weakness he is aware of people only through the help and attention he receives from them. At first his affection for his nurse and his governess is mere habit. He seeks them because he needs them and because it feels good to have them; it is more like consciousness than benevolence. He needs a long time to understand that not only are they are useful to him but that they want to be useful to him. It is then that he begins to love them.

[¶756:] So a child is naturally disposed to kindly feeling because he sees that every one about him is inclined to help him, and he gets from this observation the habit of a sentiment favorable to his species. But as he expands his relations, his needs, his active or passive dependencies, the feeling of his relations to others awakens and produces a feeling of duties and preferences. Then the child becomes imperious, jealous, deceitful, and vindictive. When he is coerced to obey, if he does not see the usefulness of what he is told to do, he attributes it to caprice, to an intention of tormenting him, and he rebels. When, on the other hand, people obey him, then as soon as anything opposes him he regards it as rebellion, as an intention to resist him; he beats the chair or table for disobeying him. Amour de soi, which concerns only ourselves, is content when our true needs are satisfied; but amour-propre, which makes comparisons, is never satisfied and never can be. For this sentiment, which prefers ourselves to others, requires also that others prefer us to themselves, which is impossible. This is how the gentle and affectionate passions are born from amour de soi, and how the hateful and irrascible passions are born from amour propre. Thus what makes man essentially good is to have few needs and to compare himself little with others; what makes him essentially evil is to have many needs and to depend much on opinion. By this principle it is easy to see how one can direct to good or evil all the passions of children and of men. It is true that being unable to live always alone they will with difficulty always be good. This problem will by necessity even increase with their relations; and it is in this above all else that the dangers of society make art and care more indispensable in order to prevent in the human heart the depravity that is born with these new needs.

[¶757:] The proper study for man is that of his relations. As long as he only knows himself through his physical being, he should study himself in relation with things. This is the occupation of his childhood. When he begins to feel his moral being, he should study himself in relation with men. This is the occupation of his entire life, to be begun at the point where we have now arrived.

[¶758:] As soon as a man needs a companion he is no longer an isolated being; his heart is no longer alone. All his relations with his species, all the affections of his heart, come into being along with this. His first passion soon arouses the rest.

[¶759:] The direction of the instinct is uncertain. One sex is attracted by the other; that is movement of nature. Choice, preferences, personal attachments, are the work of enlightenment, prejudice, and habit. Time and knowledge are necessary to make us capable of love; we do not love until after having judged or prefer until after having compared. These judgments happen without anyone being aware of them, but they are for that not less real. True love, whatever one may say about it, will always be honored by man. For although its transports lead us astray, although it does not exclude from the heart certain detestable qualities and even can give rise to them, yet it always presupposes certain estimable characteristics without which we would be incapable of feeling that love. This choice that people put in opposition to reason really springs from reason. We say love is blind because its eyes are better than ours, and it sees relations that we cannot perceive. For a person who had no idea of merit or of beauty all women would be equally good, and the first comer would always be the most lovable. Far from coming from nature, love is the rule and the curb of nature's leanings. It is love that makes one sex indifferent to the other, the loved one alone excepted.

[¶760:] We wish to obtain the same preference that we grant; so love must be reciprocal. To be loved one must be lovable; to be preferred one must be more lovable than another -- more lovable than all the others, at least in the eyes of the beloved. Hence the first regards towards one's peers; hence the first comparisons with them; hence emulation, rivalry, and jealousy. A heart full of an overflowing sentiment loves to expand; from the need for a mistress there soon springs the need for a friend. He who feels how sweet it is to be loved desires to be loved by everyone; and there could be no preferences if there were not many disappointments. With love and friendship are born dissension, enmity, hatred. From the heart of so many passions I see opinion raising its unshakable throne, and foolish mortals, enslaved by its empire, base their very existence merely on what other people think.

[¶761:] Extend these ideas and you will see where we get the form of amour-propre that we imagine is natural, and how amour de soi, ceasing to be an absolute sentiment, becomes pride in great minds, vanity in small ones, and in both ceaselesly feeds itself at the expense of one's neighbor. Passions of this kind have no seed in a child's heart and cannot spring up in it by themselves; it is we who carry them there, and they would never take root except through our own fault. But it is not so with the heart of a young man. Whatever we do such passions will appear in spite of us. It is therefore time to change our method.

[¶762:] Let us begin with some important reflections on the critical stage under discussion. The passage from childhood to puberty is not so clearly determined by nature that it doesn't vary in individuals according temperament and in peoples according to climate. Everybody knows the differences which have been observed in this regard between hot and cold countries, and every one sees that ardent temperaments mature earlier than others. But we may be mistaken as to the causes, and we may often attribute to physical causes what is really due to moral: this is one of the commonest errors in the philosophy of our times. The teachings of nature come late and slow, those of men are almost always premature. In the first case, the senses awaken the imagination, in the second the imagination awakens the senses; it gives them a precocious activity which cannot fail to enervate, to weaken first the individual and, in the long run, the species. A more general and more sure observation than the one about the effect of the climates is that puberty and sexual power is always more precocious among educated and civilized peoples than among the ignorant and barbarous ones. Children have a singular capacity to discern immoral habits beneath the tricks of decency with which they are concealed. The purified speech dictated to them, the lessons in good behavior they are given, the veil of mystery people affect to hang before their eyes, are so many pricks to their curiosity. From the way you go about it, it is clear that they are meant to learn what you profess to conceal; and of all you teach them this is most quickly assimilated.

[¶763:] Consult experience and you will understand to what point this insane method accelerates the work of nature and ruins the temperament. This is one of the principle causes of the degeneration of the race in our cities. The young people, prematurely exhausted, remain small, feeble, misshapen; they grow old instead of growing up -- like the vine that is forced to bear fruit in spring fades and dies before autumn.

[¶764:] One must have lived among rude and simple people to know to what age a happy ignorance may prolong the innocence of children. It is a sight both touching and amusing to see both sexes, left to the protection of their own hearts, continuing the sports of childhood into the flower of youth and beauty and showing by their very familiarity the purity of their pleasures. When finally those lovable young people marry, they are mutually exchanging the first fruits of their person and thereby become all the more dear to each other. Multitudes of healthy robust children are the pledges of a union which nothing can alter and the products of the wisdom of their early years.

[¶765:] If the age at which a man becomes conscious of his sex differs as much by the effects of education as by the action of nature, it follows that one may accelerate or delay this age according to the way in which one raises one's children; and if the body gains or loses consistency in proportion as one delays or accelerates this progress, it also follows that the more we try to delay it the stronger and more vigorous will the young man be. I am still speaking of purely physical effects; we will soon see that we are not limited to them.

[¶766:] From these reflections I derive a solution to the question, so often discussed, of whether it is better to enlighten children early on as to the objects of their curiosity or to put them off with modest lies. I think that one need do neither. In the first place, this curiosity will not come to them unless one provides the occasion for it; we must therefore make sure not to provide the occasion for it. In the second place, questions one is not forced to answer do not require us to deceive those who ask them. It is better to impose silence than to answer by lying. He will not be greatly surprised by this law if you have already accustomed him to it in matters of no importance. Finally, if you decide to answer his questions, do it with the greatest simplicity -- without mystery, without embarrassment, without smiles. It is much less dangerous to satisfy a child's curiosity than to excite it.

[¶767:] Your answers should always be grave, brief, decided, and without seeming to hesitate. I need not add that they should be true. We cannot teach children the danger of telling lies to men without realizing, on the man's part, the greater danger of telling lies to children. A single lie on the part of the teacher will forever ruin the fruit of his education.

[¶768:] Complete ignorance with regard to certain matters is perhaps the best thing for children; but let them learn very early those things that are impossible to hide from them forever. Either their curiosity must never be aroused in any way, or it must be satisfied before the age when it becomes a source of danger. Your conduct towards your pupil in this respect depends greatly on his particular situation, the society which surrounds him, the circumstances you predict he may find himself in, etc. It is important here that nothing be left to chance; and if you are not sure of keeping him in ignorance about the difference between the sexes until he is sixteen, take care that he learns it before he is ten.

[¶769:] I do not like people to affect a purified language in speaking with children, nor to make long detours in order to avoid giving things their true name. They are always found out if they do. Good manners in these things have much simplicity; but an imagination soiled by vice makes the ear over-sensitive and compels us to be constantly refining our expressions. Gross terms are without consequence; it is lascivious ideas which must be avoided.

[¶770:] Although modesty is natural to man, children do not have it naturally. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil; and how should children who do not and should not have this knowledge have the sentiment which results from it? To give them lessons in modesty and good conduct is to teach them that there are things shameful and bad, and to give them a secret desire to know what these things are. Sooner or later they will find out, and the first spark which touches the imagination will certainly hasten the kindling of the senses. Anyone who blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

[¶771:] Children do not have the same desires as men; but subjected like them to the same improprieties which offend the senses, they may with regard to this one subjection receive the same lessons in decency. Follow the spirit of nature, which has located in the same place the organs of secret pleasures and those of disgusting needs. Nature teaches us the same precautions at different ages, sometimes by means of one idea and sometimes by another -- to the man through modesty, to the child through cleanliness.

[¶772:] I can only find one good way of preserving the child's innocence; that is have all those who surround him respect and love it. Without this all our efforts to keep him in ignorance fail sooner or later. A smile, a wink, a careless gesture tell him all we sought to hide; it is enough to let him know that there is something we want to hide from him. The delicate phrases and expressions used by polite people among each other assume a knowledge which children ought not to possess and are inappropriate for them. But when we truly honor the child's simplicity we easily find in talking to him the simple phrases which are suitable. There is a certain naiveté of language that is suitable and pleasing to innocence; this is the right tone to adopt in order to distract the child from a dangerous curiosity. By speaking simply to him about everything you do not let him suspect there is anything left unsaid. By connecting coarse words with the unpleasant ideas which belong to them, you quench the first spark of imagination. You do not forbid the child to say these words or to form these ideas; but without him thinking about it you make recalling them repugnant to him. And how much confusion is spared to those who speaking from the heart always say the right thing, and say it as they themselves have felt it!

[¶773:] "How are babies made?" -- an embarrassing question that occurs very naturally to children, and one which foolishly or wisely answered sometimes can determine their habits and their health for life. The quickest way for a mother to avoid it without deceiving her son is to impose silence on him. This would be fine if he has always been accustomed to it in matters of no importance and if he does not suspect some mystery from this new tone. But rarely does the mother stop there. "It is the married people's secret," she will say, "little boys should not be so curious." This is good for getting the mother out of an embarrassing situation, but she must know that the little boy, piqued by her scornful manner, will not have a moment's rest until he has found out the married people's secret, and he will not take long to learn it.

[¶774:] Permit me to recount a very different answer which I heard given to the same question, one which struck me all the more coming as it did from a woman as modest in speech as in her manners, but who, when the need arose, was able to throw aside the false fear of blame and the vain jests of the foolish for the welfare of her child and for the cause of virtue. Not long before the child had passed a small stone in his urine which had torn the urethra, but the trouble was over and forgotten. "Mamma," said the eager child, "how are children made?" "My child," replied his mother without hesitation, "women piss them out with pains that sometimes cost them their life." Let fools laugh and silly people be scandalized; but let the wise inquire if it is possible to find a more judicious answer and one which would better serve its purpose.

[¶775:] In the first place the thought of a natural and known need turns the child's thoughts away from the idea of a mysterious process. The accompanying ideas of pain and death cover it with a veil of sadness which deadens the imagination and suppresses curiosity; everything leads the mind to the results, not the causes, of child-birth. The infirmities of human nature, disgusting objects, images of suffering -- these are the elucidations that the response would lead to if the repugnance inspired by the answer allowed the child to inquire further. How could any agitation of the desires have the chance to develop in conversations directed in this way? And yet you see the truth has not been altered and that there is no need to deceive one's pupil in order to instruct him.

[¶776:] Your children read; in the course of their reading they get knowledge they would never have if they had not read. If they study, their imagination is fired up and sharpened in the silence of the library. If they move in the world of society, they hear a strange jargon, they see examples of things that shock them. They have been so well persuaded that they are men, that in everything men do in their presence they immediately try to find how that will suit themselves; the actions of others must indeed serve as a model when the opinions of others are their law. Servants who are made to depend on them, and consequently are anxious to please them, court them at the expense of their morals. Giggling governesses make propositions to the four-year-old child which the most shameless woman would not dare to make when he is fifteen. They soon forget what they said, but the child has not forgotten what he heard. Loose conversation prepares the way for licentious conduct; the child is debauched by the cunning lacquey, and the secret of the one guarantees the secret of the other.

[¶777:] The child brought up in accordance with his age is alone. He knows no attachment but that of habit. He loves his sister like his watch and his friend like his dog. He is unconscious of his sex and his species; men and women are alike unknown; he does not connect either what they say or what they do with himself; he neither sees nor hears, or he pays no attention to them. Their speeches do not interest him any more than their exmples; all that is not made for him. This is no artificial error induced by our method, it is the ignorance of nature. The time will come when even nature will take care to enlighten her pupil, and only then does she make him capable of profiting without danger from the lessons that she gives him. This is our principle. The details of its rules are not my subject, and the means I propose with regard to other matters will still serve to illustrate this one.

[¶778:] Do you wish to establish order and rule among the rising passions? Then prolong the period of their development, so that they may have time to find their proper place as they arise. Then it is not man who orders them but nature herself; your task is merely to leave it in her hands. If your pupil were alone, you would have nothing to do; but everything that surrounds him enflames his imagination. A flood of prejudices sweeps him along. In order to hold him back one must push him in the opposite direction. Feeling must enchain the imagination and reason must silence the opinion of men. The source of all the passions is sensibility; the imagination determines their course Every being that is aware of his relations must be affected when these relations change and when he imagines or believes he imagines others better adapted to his nature. It is the errors of the imagination which transform into vices the passions of all finite beings, even of angels, if indeed they have passions; for it would be necessary to know the nature of every creature to realize what relations are best adapted to oneself.

[¶779:] This is the sum of human wisdom with regard to the use of the passions: 1: to feel the true relations of man both in the species and the individual; 2: to order all the affections in accordance with these relations.

[¶780:] But can man master the ordering of his affections according to such and such relations? No doubt he can master the direction of his imagination on this or that object, or to form this or that habit. Moreover, it is less a question here what a man can do for himself than it is with what we can do for our pupil through our choice of the circumstances in which he shall be placed. To show the means by which he may be kept in the path of nature is to say enough about enough how one might stray from that path.

[¶781:] So long as his consciousness is confined to himself there is no morality in his actions. It is only when it begins to extend beyond himself that he forms first the sentiments and then the ideas of good and bad, which make him truly a man and an integral part of his species. To begin with we must therefore confine our observations to this point.

[¶782:] These observations are difficult to make, for we must reject the examples before our eyes, and seek out those in which the successive developments follow the order of nature.

[¶783:] A sophisticated, polished, and civilized child, who is only awaiting the power to put into practice the precocious instruction he has received, is never mistaken with regard to the moment when this power is acquired. Far from awaiting it, he accelerates it. He stirs his blood to a premature ferment; he knows what should be the object of his desires long before those desires are experienced. It is not nature which stimulates him; it is he who forces nature. She has nothing to teach him by making him a man; he was a man in thought long before he was a man in reality.

[¶784:] The true course of nature is slower and more gradual. Little by little the blood grows warmer, the faculties expand, the character is formed. The wise workman who directs the process is careful to perfect all these instruments before putting them to work. The first desires are preceded by a long period of unrest, they are deceived by a prolonged ignorance, they know not what they want. The blood ferments and becomes agitated; a superabundance of life seeks to extend itself outwards. The eye grows animated and surveys others; we begin to be interested in those around us; we begin to feel that we are not meant to live alone. Thus the heart opens itself to human affections and becomes capable of attachment.

[¶785:] The first sentiment that the well-raised young man is susceptible to is not love but friendship. The first action of his rising imagination is to teach him that he has fellow human beings and that the species affects him before the sex. Here is another advantage of prolonged innocence: you may take advantage of his dawning sensibility to sow the first seeds of humanity in the heart of the young adolescent. This advantage is all the the more precious because this is the only time in his life when such efforts may be truly successful.

[¶786:] I have always observed that young men corrupted early on and given over to women and debauchery are inhuman and cruel. Their passionate temperament makes them impatient, vindictive, and angry. Their imagination fixes on one object only, and refuses all the rest; they know neither pity nor mercy; they would have sacrificed father, mother, the whole world, to the least of their pleasures. A young man, on the other hand, who is brought up in happy simplicity is drawn by the first stirrings of nature to the tender and affectionate passions. His compassionate heart is touched by the sufferings of his fellow-creatures; he trembles with delight when he meets his friend. His arms know how to embrace tenderly, his eyes know how to shed tears of tenderness. He is sensitive to the shame of displeasing and to the the remorse of having offended. If the eager warmth of his blood makes him quick, hasty, and passionate, a moment later you see all his natural kindness of heart in the eagerness of his repentance; he weeps, he groans over the wound he has given, he wants to atone for the blood he has shed with his own. Faced with the sentiment of his wrong-doing, his anger dies away, his pride is humbled. Is he himself offended? In the height of his fury an excuse, a word, disarms him: he forgives the wrongs of others as wholeheartedly as he repairs his own. Adolescence is not the age of vengeance or of hate; it is the age of pity, forgiveness, and generosity. Yes, I maintain, and I am not afraid of the testimony of experience, that a youth of good birth, one who has preserved his innocence up to the age of twenty, is at this age the most generous, the best, the most loving and most lovable of men. You never heard such a thing; I can well believe it. Philosophers such as you, brought up among the corruption of the schools, are unaware of it.

[¶787:] It is man's weakness that makes him sociable. It is our common sufferings draw our hearts to humanity; we would owe nothing to mankind if we were not men. Every attachment is a sign of insufficiency. If each of us had no need of others, we should hardly think of associating with them. Thus from our very weakness is born our frail happiness. A truly happy being is a solitary being. God alone enjoys an absolute happiness; but which of us has any idea of it? If any imperfect being could be sufficient to itself, what according to us would he be able to enjoy? He would be alone, he would be miserable. I do not conceive how one who has no need of anything could love anything; I do not conceive how he who loves nothing could be happy.

[¶788:] It follows from this that we are drawn towards our fellow beings less by the sentiment of their pleasures than by that of their pains; for there we see much better the the identification of our nature and the guarantees of their affection for us. If our common needs unite us by interest, our common miseries unite us by affection. The sight of a happy man inspires in others less love than envy; one is ready to accuse him of usurping a right that he does not have, of creating for himself an exclusive happiness; and amour-propre suffers more by making us feel that this man has no need of us. But who does not feel sorry for the unhappy man who is seen suffering? Who would not wish to deliver him from his pains if it cost only a wish to do so? Imagination puts us into the place of the miserable man sooner than into the place of of the happy man; we sense that former condition touches us more nearly than the latter. Pity is sweet because by putting ourselves in the place of one who suffers we nevertheless feel the pleasure of not suffering like him. Envy is bitter in that the sight of a happy man, far from putting the envious in his place, inspires him with regret that he is not there. The one seems to exempt us from the pains he suffers, the other seems to deprive us of the good things he enjoys.

[¶789:] Do you wish to stimulate and nourish these first stirrings of awakening sensibility in the heart of a young man -- to turn his disposition towards beneficence and goodness? Then avoid planting the seeds of pride, vanity, and envy through the misleading picture of the happiness of men; do not show him to begin with the pomp of courts, the pride of palaces, the delights of spectacles; do not take him into society and into brilliant assemblies. Do not show him the externals of high society until after having put him in a condition to appreciate it on its own terms. To show him the world before he is knows men is not to form him but to corrupt him; not to instruct him but to deceive him.

[¶790:] By nature men are neither kings, nobles, courtiers, nor millionaires. All men are born naked and poor, all are subject to the miseries of life, its sorrows, its ills, its needs, its suffering of every kind; finally all are condemned to die. This is what man really is; this is what no mortal can escape. Begin then by studying that which is the most inseperable from human nature, that which best constitutes humanity

[¶791:] At sixteen the adolescent knows what it is to suffer, for he himself has suffered; but he hardly knows that others suffer too; to see it without feeling it is not to know it, and as I have said a hundred times the child who does not imagine what others feel knows no ills but his own. But when the first development of the senses lights the fire of imagination in him, he begins to feel himself in his fellows, to be touched by their cries and to suffer from their pains. It is then that the sorrowful picture of suffering humanity should bring to his heart the first feeling of tenderness he has ever experienced.

[¶792:] If this moment is not easy to notice in your children, whose fault is that? You taught them early on to play at feeling, you taught them its language so soon that speaking continually with the same tone they turn your lessons against you and give you no chance of discovering when they cease to lie and when they begin to feel what they say. But look at my Emile. At the age I have led him up to, he has neither felt nor lied. Before knowing what it is to love he has never said, "I love you very much." He has never been perscribed what expression to assume when he enters the room of his father, his mother, or his sick tutor; he has not been shown the art of affecting a sadness he does not feel. He has never pretended to weep for the death of any one, for he does not know what it is to die. There is the same insensibility in his heart as in his manners. Indifferent, like every child, to everything outside of himself, he takes no interest in any one; the only thing that distinguishes him is that he will not pretend to take such an interest and that he is not false like they are.

[¶793:] Having thought little about sensitive beings Emile will know late what suffering and dying are. Groans and cries will begin to stir his insides; the sight of blood flowing will make him turn away his eyes; the convulsions of a dying animal will cause him I know not what anguish, before he knows the source of these impulses. If he were still stupid and barbarous he would not have these sentiments; if he were more instructed he would recognize their source. He has compared ideas too frequently already to feel nothing but not enough to conceive of what he feels.

[¶794:] Thus pity is born, the first relative sentiment that touches the human heart according to the order of nature. To become sensitive and compassionate, the child must know that there are beings similar to him who suffer what he has suffered, who feel the pains he has felt; and others which he can form some idea of as being capable of feeling these things also. In effect, how can we let ourselves be stirred by pity unless we go beyond ourselves and identify ourselves with the suffering animal? By leaving, so to spunk, our own nature and taking his? We only suffer so far as we judge that he suffers; the suffering is not in us, it is in him that we suffer. So no one becomes sensitive till his imagination is aroused and begins to carry him outside himself.

[¶795:] To stimulate and nourish this growing sensibility, to guide it or to follow its natural bent, what should we do if not present to the young man objects on which the expansive force of his heart may take effect -- objects which dilate it, which extend it to other beings, which make him find himself outside of himself -- and carefully remove everything that narrows, concentrates, and strengthens the power of the human self? That is to say, in other words, to arouse in him goodness, humanity, compassion, beneficence -- all the engaging and gentle passions which are naturally pleasing to man -- and to prevent the the growth of envy, covetousness, hatred -- all the repulsive and cruel passions which make our sensibility not merely nul but a negative quantity and are the torment of those who experience them.

[¶796:] I think I can sum up all the preceding reflections in two or three definite, straightforward, and easy to understand maxims.

First Maxim. It is not in human heart to put ourselves in the place of those who are happier than ourselves, but only in the place of those who are the most to be pitied.

[¶797:] If you find exceptions to this rule, they are more apparent than real. Thus we do not put ourselves in the place of the rich or great when we become fond of them; even when our affection is real, we only appropriate to ourselves a part of their welfare. Sometimes we love the rich man in the midst of misfortunes; but so long as he prospers he has no real friend except the man who is not deceived by appearances and who pities rather than envies him in spite of his prosperity.

[¶798:] We are touched by the happiness of certain conditions of life -- for instance, pastoral or country life. The charm of seeing these good people happy is not poisoned by envy; we are genuinely interested in them. Why is this? Because we feel we are able to descend into this state of peace and innocence and enjoy the same happiness; it is an alternative which only gives us pleasant thoughts so long as the wish is as good as the deed. There is always pleasure in seeing one's own resources, in contemplating one's own wealth, even when we do not mean to spend it.

[¶799:] From this it follows that that to incline a young man to humanity, instead of making him admire the brilliant fate of others you must show him the sad sides of things and make him fear them. Thus it becomes clear that he must mark out a route to happiness that does not follow the traces of anyone else.

Second Maxim. We never pity another's woes unless we know we may suffer in like manner ourselves.. Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco. -- Virgil.

[¶800:] I know nothing so beautiful, so profound, so touching, so true as these lines.

[¶801:] Why have kings no pity for their subjects? Because they never expect to be men. Why are the rich so hard on the poor? Because they have no fear of becoming poor. Why do the nobles look down upon the people? Because a nobleman will never be a commoner. Why are the Turks generally kinder and more hospitable than ourselves? Because under their wholly arbitrary system of government, the rank and wealth of individuals are always precarious and vacillating, so that they do not regard poverty and degradation as conditions foreign to them; to-morrow, any one may himself be in the same position as the one he assists is in today. This reflection, which occurs again and again in eastern romances, lends them a certain tenderness which is not to be found in our pretentious and harsh morality.

[¶802:] So do not accustom your pupil to look down from the height of his glory upon the sufferings of the unfortunate, the labors of the wretched; and do not hope to teach him to pity them as long as he considers them to be foreign to him. Make him clearly understand that the fate of these unhappy persons may one day be his own, that all their ills are just below him, that a thousand unforeseen and inevitable events could make him fall to their level in a moment. Teach him to put no trust in birth, health, or riches; show him all the vicissitudes of fortune; find him examples all too frequent of poeple who from a condition much higher than his own have fallen below the condition of these unhappy creatures -- whether by their own fault or not is not our question now. Does he indeed know the meaning of the word fault? Never interfere with the order of knowledge and only enlighten him through the means within his reach. He needs to be no great scholar to perceive that all the prudence of mankind cannot make certain whether he will be alive or dead in an hour's time, whether before nightfall he will not be grinding his teeth in the pangs of nephritis, whether a month from now he will be rich or poor, whether in a year's time he may not be rowing an Algerian galley under the lash of the slave-driver. Above all do not teach him this coldly, like a catechism; let him see and feel human calamities. Shake up and startle his imagination with the perils that continually surrounded every man; let him see the abysses all about him, and when he hears you speak of them, let him cling more closely to you for fear lest he should fall. "You will make him timid and cowardly," you say. We will soon see; as for the present let us begin by making him human; above all that is what is important to us.

Third Maxim. The pity that we have for the pain of others is not measured by the quantity of this pain but by the sentiment we have for those who suffer it.

[¶803:] We only pity a miserable person in so far as we think they feel the need of pity. The physical sentiment of our pains is more limited than one would suppose; it is memory that prolongs the pain, imagination which projects it into the future, that make us really to be pitied. This is, I think, one of the causes that makes us more callous to the pains of animals than to those of men, although a common sensibility ought to make us identify ourselves equally with them. We hardly pity the cart-horse in his shed, for we do not suppose that while he is eating his hay he is thinking of the blows he has received and the labors that await him. Neither do we pity the sheep grazing in the field, though we know it is about to be slaughtered, for we believe it knows nothing of its fate. Accordingly we also become hardened to the fate of men, and the rich console themselves for the harm they do to the poor by supposing them to be too stupid to feel anything. In general I judge of the value any one puts on the happiness of his fellow-beings by what he seems to think of them. It is natural to cheapen the happiness of the people one scorns. So do not be surprised that politicians speak of the people with so much scorn and that philosophes affect to make man so wicked.

[¶804:] It is the people who compose the human race; those who are not of the people are so few in number that they are not worth counting. Man is the same in every condition of life. If that be so, the most numerous condition merits the most respect. For the thinking person, all civil distinctions disappear; he sees the same passions, the same sentiments, in both the vagrant and the celebrity. There is merely a slight difference in speech and more or less artificiality of tone; and if there is any essential difference that distinguishes them, it is to the detriment of the moset dissembling. The people show themselves as they are, and they are not attractive; but the fashionable world is compelled to adopt a disguise. We would be horrified if we saw it as it really is.

[¶805:] There is, so our sages tell us, the same amount of happiness and sorrow in every condition. This saying is as destructive as it is untenable; for if everyone were equally happy why would I need to trouble myself for anyone? Let every one stay where he is; let the slave be ill-treated, the sick man suffer, and the wretched perish; they have nothing to gain by any change in their condition. People enumerate the sorrows of the rich, and show the inanity of their vain pleasures. What gross sophistry! The rich man's sufferings do not come from his condition, but from himself who alone abuses it. Even if he is more unhappy than the poor man, he is not to be pitied, for his ills are of his own making, and it depends only on him to make himself happy. But the sufferings of the poor man come from external things, from the hardness of the fate that weighs upon him. There are no good habits that can relieve him of the physical ills of fatigue, exhaustion, and hunger. Neither a good mind nor wisdom can serve in any way to free him from the pains of his condition. What did Epictetus gain by predicting that his master would break his leg? Did he not do it anyway? Beyond the pain itself he had the pain of foresight. If the people were as sensible as we assume them to be stupid, what could they be other than what they are, what could they do other than what they do do? Study the people in this condition; you will see that, with a different way of speaking, they have as much intelligence and more common-sense than you. Have respect then for your species; remember that it consists essentially of the whole of the people, collectively; that if all the kings and all the philosophes were removed they would scarcely be missed, and things would go on none the worse. In a word, teach your pupil to love all men, even those who scorn them; act in such way that he does not put himself in any class, but finds himself in all. Speak to him of the human race with tenderness, and even with pity, but never with scorn. Man, do not dishonor man.

[¶806:] It is by these ways and others like them-- very different from the beaten paths -- that we must enter the heart of the young adolescent in order to stimulate in him the first impulses of nature, to develop it and extend it to his fellow beings. To this I add that it is important to involve as little self-interest as possible in these impulses; above all, no vanity, no emulation, no boasting -- none of those sentiments which force us to compare ourselves with others. For such comparisons are never made without arousing some impression of hatred against those who dispute our preference, were it only in our own estimation. Then we would become either blind or angry, a bad man or a fool. Let us try to avoid this alternative. Sooner or later these dangerous passions will appear, I am told, in spite of us. I do not deny it. Each thing has its time and its place. I am only saying that we should not help to arouse these passions.

[¶807:] This is the spirit of the method to be laid down. Here examples and illustrations are useless, for here we find the beginning of the nearly infinite differences of character, and every example I gave would possibly apply to only one case in a hundred thousand. This is the age also that the clever teacher begins his real business as an observer and as a philosopher who knows the art of probing the heart while working to reform it. Since it does not occur to the young man to disguise himself, and since he has not even learned its meaning, you can see by his manner, in his eyes, in his gestures, the impression he has received from any object presented to him. You read in his face every impulse of his heart. By watching his expression you learn to foresee his impulses and eventually to control them.

[¶808:] It has been commonly observed that blood, wounds, cries and groans, the preparations for painful operations, and everything which directs the senses towards things connected with suffering, are usually the first to make an impression on all men. The idea of destruction, being more complex, does not strike one the same. The image of death affects us later and more feebly, for no one has had for himself the experience of dying; you must have seen corpses to feel the agonies of the dying. But when once this idea is well formed in our mind, there is no spectacle more horrible to our eyes, whether because of the idea of complete destruction which it arouses through our senses, or because knowing that this moment is inevitable for all men we feel ourselves more intensely affected by a situation from which we know there is no escape.

[¶809:] These various impressions differ in manner and in degree according to the particular character of each individual and his former habits, but they are universal and no one is completely free from them. There are other later and less general impressions which are suited to more sensitive souls. These are those that we receive from moral pains, inward suffering, the afflictions of the mind, depression, and sadness. There are men who can be touched by nothing but groans and tears; the suppressed sobs of a heart laboring under sorrow would never draw a even a sigh from them; the sight of a down-cast visage, a pale and gloomy countenance, eyes which can weep no longer, would never make them weep themselves. The pains of the soul are nothing to them: they are analysed, but their own mind feels nothing. From such persons expect only inflexible severity, harshness, cruelty. They may be upright and just, but never merciful, generous, or pitying. I say they could be just, if a man can indeed be just without being merciful.

[¶810:] But do not be in a hurry to judge young people by this standard, above all those who, having been educated the way they should be, have no idea of the moral sufferings they have never had to experience. For once again they can only pity the ills they know, and this apparent insensibility, which only comes from ignorance, is soon transformed into pity when they begin to feel that there are in human life a thousand ills of which they know nothing As for Emile, if he had simplicity and good sense in childhood, I am sure that he will have soul and sensitivity in his youth. For the truth of the sentiments depends to a great extent on the accuracy of the ideas.

[¶811:] But why bring him to this? More than one reader will reproach me no doubt for forgetting my first resolutions and the lasting happiness I promised my pupil. The sorrowful, the dying, such sights of pain and misery -- what happiness, what delight is this for a young heart on the threshold of life? His gloomy tutor, who proposed to give him such a kindly education, only give him life so that he may suffer? This is what they will say, but what difference does it make to me? I promised to make him happy, not to make him seem happy. Is it my fault if, always deceived by appearances, you take them for the reality?

[¶812:] Let us take two young men at the end of their primary education and entering the world by opposite doors. One climbs right away up to Mount Olympus and makes his way into the smartest society. He is presented at court, introduced to nobles, rich men, pretty women. I assume that he is entertained everywhere, and I will not examine the effect of this reception on his reason; I assume it can resist it. Pleasures fly before him, every day new objects amuse him; he flings himself into everything with an eagerness which carries you away. You find him attentive, eager, and curious; his first wonder makes a great impression on you; you think him happy; but look at the state of his heart; you think he is rejoicing, I think he suffers.

[¶813:] What does he see when first he opens his eyes? Multitudes of so-called pleasures which he did not know before and most of which, beingwithin his reach for only a moment only seem to come to him in order to make him regret being deprived of them. Is he walking through a palace? You see by his uneasy curiosity that he is asking why his father's house is not like it. Every question shows you that he is constantly comparing himself with the master of this house. And all the mortification arising from this comparison sharpens his vanity by revolting it. If he meets a young man better dressed than himself, I find him secretly complaining of his parents' stinginess. If he is better dressed than another, he suffers because the latter is his superior in birth or in intellect, and all his gold lace is put to shame by a plain cloth coat. If he shines unrivalled in some assembly, stands on tiptoe so that they may see him better, who is there who does not secretly desire to humble the pride and vanity of the young fop? Everybody soon unites as if in concert: the disquieting glances of a solemn man, the biting phrases of some satirical person, do not fail to reach him, and even if it were only one man who despised him, the scorn of that one would poison in a moment the applause of the rest.

[¶814:] Let us grant him everything. Let us not grudge him charm and worth; let him be well-built, full of wit, and attractive. He will be sought after by women; but by pursuing him before he is in love with them, they will inspire rage rather than love. He will have successes, but neither rapture nor passion to enjoy them. Since his desires are always anticipated they never have time to grow; in the midst of pleasures he only feels the tedium of restraint. Even before he knows it he is disgusted and satiated with the sex formed to be his own delight ; if he continues to seek it is only through vanity, and even should he really become attached, he will not be the only young, brilliant, attractive young man, nor will he always find his mistresses to be prodigies of fidelity.

[¶815:] I say nothing of the vexations, deceptions, crimes, and remorse of all kinds that are inseparable from such a life. Experience of the world makes one feel disgusted with it, as everyone knows. And I am speaking only of the drawbacks belonging to youthful illusions.

[¶816:] What a contrast for the one who, sheltered up until now in the bosom of his family and friends and seeing himself the sole object of their care, suddenly enters an order of things where he counts for so little and finds himself drowning in an unknown sphere, he who has been so long the center of his own! What insults, what humiliation, must he endure, before he loses among strangers the ideas of his own importance -- ideas that were formed and nourished among his own people! As a child everything gave way to him, everyone flocked to him; as a young man he must give place to every one, or if he preserves his former airs even a little, what harsh lessons will bring him to himself! The habit of obtaining the objects of his desires easily leads him to desire many things and makes him feel continual privations. Everything that flatters him tempts him; everything that others have he wants to have. He covets everything, he envies every one, he wants to dominate everywhere. He is devoured by vanity. The heat of unbridled desires inflames his young heart, including jealousy and hatred. All these violent passions burst out at once. He carries their agitations with him into the busy world, they return with him at night, he comes home dissatisfied with himself and others, he falls asleep full of a thousand vain projects, troubled by a thousand fantasies. And even in his dreams his pride pictures those fleeting goods which torment his desire and which he will never in his life possess. There is your pupil; now let us see mine.

[¶817:] If the first sight that strikes him is something sorrowful, his first return to himself is a feeling of pleasure. When he sees how many evils he has escaped he thinks he is happier than he thought he was. He shares the suffering of his fellow beings, but this sharing is voluntary and sweet. He enjoys at once the pity he feels for their ills and the joy of being exempt from them. He feels in himself that state of vigor which projects us beyond ourselves, and makes us transfer to others the superfluous activity of our well-being. To pity the ills of others we must indeed know them, but we need not feel them. When we have suffered or are in fear of suffering, we pity those who suffer; but when we suffer ourselves, we pity none but ourselves. But if all of us, being subject ourselves to the ills of life, only accord to others the sensibility we do not actually require for ourselves, it follows that pity must be a very pleasant feeling, since it disposes one to favor us; and, on the contrary, a hard-hearted man is always unhappy, since the state of his heart leaves him no superfluous sensibility that he can accord to the sufferings of others.

[¶818:] We judge happiness too much by appearances. We assume it to be where it is least likely to be; we seek for it where it cannot possibly be. Cheerfulness is a very uncertain sign of its presence. A cheerful man is often an unhappy person who is trying to deceive others and distract himself. Those men who are so jovial, so open, so agreeable at their club, are almost all depressed and grumbling at home, and their servants have to pay for the entertainment they provide for the company. True contentment is neither cheerful nor frivolous. Jealous of so sweet a sentiment, while tasting it we savor it; we fear it will evaporate. A really happy man says little and laughs little; he hugs his happiness, so to speak, to his heart. Noisy games, wild joy, conceal aversion and boredom. But melancholy is the companion of sensuality: tenderness and tears accompany our sweetest joys, and excessive joy itself brings forth tears rather than laughter.

[¶819:] If at first the number and variety of our amusements seem to contribute to our happiness, if at first the uniformity of a balanced life seems tedious, when we look at it more closely we find on the contrary that the sweetest habit of the soul consists in a moderate enjoyment, one that leaves little scope for desire and aversion. The restlessness of desire causes curiosity and fickleness; the emptiness of noisy pleasures causes boredom. We are never bored with our situation when we have no knowledge of a more pleasurable one. Of all the men in the world savages are the least curious and the least bored. Everything is indifferent to them. They get their pleasures not from things but from each other; they spend their life doing nothing and are never bored.

[¶820:] The man of the world lives entirely inside a mask. Almost never being in himself he is always a stranger and ill at ease when he is forced to come back to himself. What he is is nothing; what he seems is everything for him.

[¶821:] In the face of the young man I have just spoken of I cannot help picturing something impertinent, slick, and affected that is repulsive to people in general; and in the face of my own pupil a simple and interesting expression which indicates contentment, a true serenity of soul which inspires estime and confidence and seems only to await an outreach of friendship to extend his own confidence in return. It is thought that physiognomy is only the simple development of certain features already marked out by nature. For my part I think that over and above this development a man's facial features are unconsciously formed by the frequent and habitual influence of certain affections of the soul. These affections appear on the face, there is nothing more certain; and when they become habitual, they must surely leave lasting impressions. This is why I think the expression shows the character, and that we can sometimes judge one another without seeking mysterious explanations in knowledge we do not possess.

[¶822:] A child has only two distinct feelings, joy and sorrow; he laughs or he cries; there is nothing in between, and he is constantly passing from one extreme to the other. On account of these perpetual changes there is no lasting impression on the face, and no expression. But when the child is older and more sensitive he is more intensely or more constantly affected, and these deeper impressions leave traces more difficult to erase; and the habitual state of the feelings has an effect on the features which time makes ineffaceable. Still it is not rare to see men whose expression changes at different ages. I have met with several, and I have always found that those whom I could observe and follow had also changed their habitual passions. This one observation thoroughly confirmed would seem to me decisive, and it is not out of place in a treatise on education, where it is a matter of importance that we should learn to judge the feelings of the soul by external signs.

[¶823:] I do not know whether my young man will be any the less lovable for not having learnt to copy conventional manners and to feign sentiments which are not his own; that does not concern me at present. I only know he will be more loving; and I find it difficult to believe that one who cares for nobody but himself can so far disguise his true feelings as to please others as readily as the one who finds in his affection for others a new feeling of happiness for himself. But with regard to this feeling of happiness, I think I have said enough already for the guidance of any sensible reader, and to show that I have not contradicted myself.

[¶824:] I return to my system, and I say: when the critical age approaches, present to young people spectacles which restrain rather than excite them. Put off their dawning imagination with objects which, far from inflaming their senses, repress their activity. Keep them away from great cities, where the flaunting attire and immodesty of the women hasten and anticipate the lessons of nature, where everything presents to their view pleasures which they should know nothing of until they can choose them for themselves. Bring them back to their early home, where rural simplicity allows the passions of their age to develop less rapidly. Or if their taste for the arts keeps them in the city, guard them by means of this very taste from a dangerous idleness. Choose carefully their company, their occupations, and their pleasures; show them only touching but modest pictures that move them without seducing them, that nourish their sensibility without stimulating their senses. Remember also, that the danger of excess is not confined to any one place, and that immoderate passions always do unavoidable harm. You need not make your pupil a sick-nurse or a brother of charity, or afflict his sight with continual objects of pain and suffering or take him from one hospital to another, from the gallows to the prison. He must be softened, not hardened, by the sight of human misery. Endlessly confronted by the same sights over and over again, we no longer feel their impressions; habit accustoms us to everything. What one has seen too much of one no longer imagines; and it is only through the imagination that we can feel the sorrows of others. It is by seeing so much death and suffering that priests and doctors become pitiless. Let your pupil therefore know something of the fate of man and the miseries of his fellow-beings, but let him not see them too often. A single thing, carefully selected and shown on the right day, will give him a month of tender feelings and reflection. It is not so much what he has seen as his reaction to what he has seen that will determine the judgment he makes of it; and the lasting impression that he could get from an object comes less even from the object itself than from the point of view with which he is drawn to recall it. Thus by a careful use of examples, lessons, and images, you may dull the prick of the senses and delay nature even while following her own directions.

[¶825:] As he acquires enlightenment, choose the ideas that relate to it. As his desires take fire, select scenes able to quench them. An old veteran, distinguished by his manners as well as for his courage, once told me that in early youth his father, a sensible but extremely pious man, seeing that his son's growing sensibility was attracting him to women, tried in every way to restrain him. But at last when in spite of all his care his son was about to escape from his control, the father decided to take him to a hospital for syphilis victims, and, without any warning, made him go into a ward where a number of wretched creatures were expiating with a terrible treatment the disorder which had brought them into this plight. His senses revolted by such a hideous sight, the young man almost became sick. " Miserable lech," said his father vehemently, "go follow your vile tastes; you will soon be only too glad to be admitted to this ward, and as a victim to the most shameful sufferings, you will compel your father to thank God when you are dead."

[¶826:] These few words, together with the moving picture that had struck the young man, made an impression on him that could never be erased. Compelled by his profession to pass his youth in army barracks, he preferred to face all the jests of his comrades rather than to share their debauchery. " I have been a man," he said to me, "I have had my weaknesses, but even to the present day the sight of a prostitute inspires me with horror." Teacher, few discourses; but learn to choose the places, times and people; then give all your lessons by examples, and be sure of their effect.

[¶827:] The way childhood is spent is no great matter. The evil which may slip in is not irremediable, and the good which may be done might come later. But it is not so in in the first age in which man really begins to live. This age never lasts long enough for what there is to be done, and its importance demands unceasing attention; this is why I insist on the art of prolonging it. One of the best rules of good farming is to hold things back as much as possible. Make your progress slow and sure; prevent the adolescent from becoming a man until the moment when nothing remains for him to do to become one. While the body is growing the spirits destined to give vigor to the blood and strength to the muscles are in process of formation and elaboration. If you make them take another course and permit the strength which should have gone to the perfecting of one person to go to the making of another, both of them will remain in a state of weakness, and the work of nature will be imperfect. The workings of the mind, in their turn, are affected by this alteration, and the soul, as sickly as the body, functions languidly and feebly. Length and strength of limbs are not the same thing as courage or genius, and I grant that strength of mind does not always accompany strength of body, when the means of connection between the two are poorly ordered. But however well ordered they may be, they will always work feebly if for motive power they depend upon an exhausted, impoverished supply of blood, deprived of the substance which gives strength and elasticity to all the springs of the machinery. There is generally more vigor of soul to be found among men whose early years have been preserved from premature corruption than among those whose disorderly life has begun at the earliest opportunity; and this is no doubt one of the reasons why nations who have pure morals are generally superior in sense and courage to those who do not. The latter shine only through I know not what small and unimportant qualities, which they call wit, sagacity, cunning. But those great and noble features of wisdom and reason that distinguish and honor men by fine actions, by virtues, by really useful efforts, are scarcely to be found except among the nations whose morals are pure.

[¶828:] Teachers complain that the energy of this age makes their pupils unruly. I see that it is so, but are not they themselves at fault? When once they have let this energy flow through the channel of the senses, do they not realize that they cannot change its course? Will the long cold sermons of the pedant erase from the mind of his pupil the image of the pleasures he has known? Will they banish from his heart the desires that torment him? Will they chill the heat of a passion whose use he now knows? Will not the pupil be angered by the obstacles which stand in the way of the only kind of happiness of which he has any idea? And in the harsh law imposed upon him before he can understand it, will he see anything but the caprice and hatred of a man who is trying to torment him? Is it strange that he rebels and hates you in turn?

[¶829:] I know very well that if one is easy-going one may be tolerated, and one may maintain an apparent authority. But I fail to see the use of an authority over the pupil which is only maintained by fomenting the vices it ought to repress; it is like attempting to soothe a high-spirited horse by making it leap over a precipice.

[¶830:] Far from being an obstacle to education, this fire of adolescence is the means of its consummation and achievement. It is what gives you a hold on the young man's heart when he is no longer weaker than you. His first affections are the reins with which you direct his movements, He was free, and now I see him in your power. So long as he loved nothing, he only depended on himself and his own needs; as soon as he loves, he is dependent on his affections. Thus are formed the first ties that unite him to his species. When you direct his growing sensibility in this way, do not expect that it will at first include all men, and that the word "humankind" will have any meaning for him. No, this sensibility will at first be limited to those like himself, and these will not be people unknown to him but those with whom he has connections, those whom habit has made dear to him or necessary to him, those whom he sees having evidently the same manner of thinking and feeling as he does, those whom he sees exposed to the pains he has suffered and sensible to the pleasures he has enjoyed -- in a word, those in whom the identity of a more fully manifested nature gives a greater disposition to love themselves. It will only be after having cultivated his natural bent in a thousand ways, after many reflections on his own sentiments and on those he has observed in others that he will be able to arrive at generalizing his individual notions under the abstract idea of humanity and join to his own particular affections those that can identify him with his species.

[¶831:] When he becomes capable of affection, he becomes aware of the affection of others, and he is on the lookout for the signs of that affection. Do you not see what a new hold you are going to acquire over him? What chains have you bound about his heart before he even sees them! What will he feel, when turning his eyes upon himself he sees what you have done for him; when he can compare himself with other young people of his age, and other tutors with you? I say, "When he sees it," but be careful not to tell him of it; if you tell him he will not see it. If you claim his obedience in return for the care you have given him, he will think that you have preempted him. He will see that while you profess to have cared for him without reward, you meant to saddle him with a debt and to bind him to a bargain which he never made. In vain you will add that what you demand is for his own good; still you are demand it, and you are demanding it by virtue of what you have done without his consent. When a man down on his luck accepts money from a stranger, and finds he has enlisted in the army without knowing it, you protest against the injustice. Is it not still more unjust to demand from your pupil the price of care which he has not even accepted?

[¶832:] Ingratitude would he rarer if kindness were less often the investment of a usurer. We love those who have done us a kindness; it is such a natural sentiment! Ingratitude is not to be found in the heart of man, but self-interest is there. There are fewer ungrateful beneficiaries than self-interested benefactors. If you sell me your gifts, I will haggle over the price; but if you pretend to give, in order to sell later on at your own price, you are guilty of fraud. It is the free gift which is beyond price. The heart is a law to itself; in wishing to bind it you lose it. By holding on to it one lets it free.

[¶833:] When the fisherman baits his line, the fish come round him without suspicion; but when they are caught on the hook concealed in the bait, they feel the line tighten and try to escape. Is the fisherman a benefactor? Is the fish ungrateful? Do we ever see a man forgotten by his benefactor forgetting him? On the contrary, he speaks about him with pleasure, he thinks of him only with tenderness. If he gets a chance of showing him by some unexpected service that he remembers what he did for him, how delighted he is to satisfy his gratitude! With what sweet joy he makes himself known to him! How delighted he is to say, "It is my turn now." This is truly the voice of nature; never did a true favor cause ingratitude.

[¶834:] If therefore recognition is a natural feeling, and you do not destroy its effects by your own fault, you may be sure that your pupil, as he begins to understand the value of your efforts, will be grateful for them provided you have not put a price upon them, and that they will give you an authority over his heart which nothing can overthrow. But before being assured of this advantage, be careful not to lose it by valuing yourself too much in front of him. Boast of your services and they will become intolerable; forget them and they will not be forgotten. Until the time comes to treat him as a man let it not be a question of what he owes you but what he owes to himself. To make him docile, let him have his liberty; hide yourself so that he may seek you; raise his soul to the noble sentiment of gratitude by on]y speaking of his own interest. I would not have him told that what was done was for his good before he was able to understand. In such a speech he would only see that your dependence on him and he would merely take you as his valet. But now that he is beginning to feel what it is to love, he also knows what a sweet tie may unite a man to what he loves; and in the zeal which keeps you constantly occupied with him, he now sees not the bonds of a slave but the affection of a friend. Indeed there is nothing which carries so much weight with the human heart as the voice of friendship recognized as such, for we know that it never speaks but for our good. We may think our friend is mistaken, but never that he wants to deceive us. Sometimes we may resist his advice, but we never scorn it.

[¶835:] We finally enter the moral order; we have just taken the second step towards manhood. If this were the place for it, I would try to show how from the first movements of the heart arise the first voices of conscience, and how from the sentiments of love and hatred spring the first notions of good and evil. I would show that justice and goodness are not merely abstract words, not pure moral beings formed by the understanding, but true affections of the heart enlightened by reason, and are only the natural outcome of our primitive affections; that by reason alone, independent of conscience, we cannot establish any natural law and that all of natural right is merely a dream if it is not founded on a natural need of the human heart. But at this point I believe there is no need to make treatises on metaphysics and morals, nor courses of study of any kind. It is enough to indicate the order and progress of our sentiments and of our knowledge in relation to our constitution. Others will perhaps work out what I have only indicated here.

[¶836:] Having until now only regarded himself, the first regard that my Emile will cast on his fellow beings will cause him to compare himself with them; and the first sentiment that this comparison will stimulate in him is the desire to be first. Here is the point when amour de soi changes into amour-propre, and when all the passions that derive from it begin to be born. But to determine whether the passions which dominate his character will be humane and gentle or cruel and malicious, whether they shall be the passions of benevolence and compassion or those of envy and covetousness, we must know what he believes his place among men to be, and what sort of obstacles he expects to have to overcome in order to arrive at the place he would like to occupy.

[¶837:] To guide him in this inquiry, after we have shown him men by means of the accidents common to the species, it is necessary now to show him them by means of their differences. Now comes the assessment of natural and civil inequality and a picture of the whole social order.

[¶838:] One must study society by men and men by society. Those who desire to treat politics and morals separately will never understand anything of either of them. By focusing first on one's earliest relations, we see how men should be influenced by them and what passions should spring from them. We see that it is in proportion to the development of these passions that a man's relations with others expand or contract. It is less the strength of arms as moderation of spirit that makes men free and independent. Whoever desires few things is dependent on few men; but confusing always our vain desires with our physical needs, those who have made these needs the basis of human society are continually mistaking effects for causes, and they have only become lost in their own reasoning.

[¶839:] There is in the state of nature a real and indestructible de facto equality because it is impossible in this state that any single difference between man and man would be great enough to make one person dependent on another. There is in the civil state a vain and imaginary de jure equality because the means aimed at maintaining it themselves serve to destroy it -- and because in order to oppress the weak the public force, together with the force of the strongest, breaks the kind of equilibrium that nature put between them. From this first contradiction flow all the others noticed in the civil order between appearance and reality. Always the many will be sacrificed to the few, the public interest to the particular interest. Always those specious words of justice and subordination will serve as instruments of violence and the weapons of inequity. Hence it follows that the upper classes which claim to be useful to the rest are really only useful to themselves at the expense of others. From this we should judge how much consideration is due to them according to justice and according to reason. It remains to be seen whether the rank that these people have given themselves is favorable to those who hold it or not for us to know what opinion each one of us should bring with regard to his own fate. This is the study with which we are now concerned; but to do it well we must begin by knowing the human heart.

[¶840:] If it were only a question of showing young people man with his mask on there would be no need of showing, since he would always be before their eyes. But because the mask is not the man, and because they must not he seduced by surface qualities, when you depict men for your pupil, depict them as they are -- not that he may hate them, but that he may pity them and have no wish to he like them. This is, in my opinion, the most reasonable sentiment a man can hold with regard to his species.

[¶841:] With this object in view we must take the opposite route from that followed up until now and instruct the youth through the experience of others rather than through his own. If men deceive him he will hate them; but if, while respected by him, he sees them deceiving each other, he will pity them. "The spectacle of the world," said Pythagoras, "is like the Olympic games. Some treat it as a boutique and think only of their profits; others pay with their body and seek out glory; others are happy to be watching the games, and this last category is not the worst."

[¶842:] I would have you so choose the company of a youth that he should think well of those who live with him, and I would have you so teach him to know the world that he should think ill of all that takes place in it. Let him know that man is naturally good; let him feel it, let him judge his neighbor by himself. But let him see how society corrupts and perverts men; let him find in their prejudices the source of all their vices; let him be moved to respect the individual, but to despise the multitude; let him see that all men wear nearly the same mask, but let him also know that there are faces more beautiful than the mask that conceals them.

[¶843:] This method, it must be admitted, has its inconveniences and is not easy to put into practice. For if he becomes observant too soon, if you accustom him to spying too closely on the actions of others, you will make him spiteful and satirical, assertive and quick to judge others. He will take an odious pleasure in seeking out all kinds of sinister interpretations and will fail to see the good even in that which is really good. He will at the very least get used to the spectacle of vice and to seeing bad people without horror, just as we get used to seeing the poor without pity. Soon general perversity will serve less as a lesson than as an example. He will say to himself that if man is thus, he himself does not want to be otherwise.

[¶844:] So if you wish to teach him by principles and make him know together with the nature of the human heart how external causes turn our inclinations into vices, by trying to lead him immediately from sense objects to intellectual objects you will be using a metaphysics that he is not in a position to understand. You will be falling back into the problem, so carefully avoided until now, of giving him lessons that ressemble lessons, of substituting in his mind the experience and the authority of the master for his own experience and the development of his own reason.

[¶845:] To remove these two obstacles at once and to bring the human heart within his reach without risk of spoiling his own, I would show him men from afar, in other times or in other places, so that he may see the scene without ever being able to act in it. This is the moment for history. With its help he will read the hearts of men without any lessons in philosophy; with its help he will view them as a mere spectator without self-interest and without passion, as their judge not as their accomplice or their accuser.

[¶846:] To know men you must see them act. In society we hear them talk; they show their discourse and hide their deeds. But in history these actions are unveiled, and they are judged by the facts. Their sayings even help us to understand them. For by comparing what they say and what they do, we see both what they are and what they would like to appear to be. The more they disguise themselves the better one knows them.

[¶847:] Unluckily this study has its dangers, its inconveniences of more than one kind. It is difficult to adopt a point of view that will enable one to judge one's fellow-beings with equity. One of the great vices of history is that it depicts many more men by their bad sides than by their good sides. Since it is only interesting because of revolutions and catastrophes, so long as a nation grows and prospers quietly in the tranquillity of a peaceful government, history says nothing. It only begins to take note when, no longer able to be self-sufficient, nations interfere with the affairs of their neighbors or allow their neighbors to interfere with them. History only makes them famous when they are on in decline. All our histories begin where they ought to end. We have very exact histories of nations that destroy themselves; what we lack is the history of those nations which are multiplying. They are so happy and so wise that history has nothing to tell us of them; and we see indeed in our own times that the governments that conduct themselves the best are least talked of. We thus only know what is bad; the good is scarcely mentioned. Only the wicked become famous, the good are forgotten or turned to ridicule; and thus history, like philosophy, is forever slandering mankind.

[¶848:] Moreover, it is inevitable that the facts described in history do not give an exact picture of the same facts such as they happened. They are transformed in the head of the historian; they are molded by his interests and colored by his prejudices. Who is it who can can place the reader exactly in a position to see the event as it really happened? Ignorance or partiality disguise everything. Without even altering an historical incident, by expanding or contracting the circumstances that relate to it, how many different faces one can give it! Put a single object in diverse points of view and it will hardly appear the same; and yet nothing will have changed but the eye of the spectator. Do you indeed do honour to truth when what you tell me is a genuine fact, but you make it appear something quite different? How many times has one tree more or less, a rock to the right or to the left, a cloud of dust raised by the wind, decided the outcome of a battle without any one knowing it? Does that prevent the historian from telling you the cause of defeat or victory with as much assurance as if he had been there? But of what importance are facts in themselves when the reason for them remains unknown to me, and what lessons can I draw from an event whose true cause is unknown to me? The historian gives me one, but he invents it; and criticism itself, of which we hear so much, is only the art of conjecture, the art of choosing from among several lies the one that best ressembles the truth.

[¶849:] Have you ever read Cleopatra or Cassandra or any books of the kind? The author selects a well-known event, then by adapting it to his own views, adorning it with details of his own invention, with people who never existed, and with with imaginary portraits, he piles fiction on fiction to make the reading fun. I see little difference between such romances and your histories unless it is that the novelist draws more on his own imagination while the historian slavishly makes use of that of others. To this I would add, if I may, that the novelist has some moral purpose good or bad, about which the historian scarcely concerns himself.

[¶850:] You will tell me that accuracy in history is of less interest than a true picture of men and manners. Provided the human heart is truly portrayed, it matters little that events should be accurately recorded. For after all, you say, what does it matter to us what happened two thousand years ago? You are right if the portraits are indeed truly rendered according to nature. But if most of them only have their model in the historian's imagination, are you not falling into the very problem you wanted to avoid, and surrendering to the authority of the historian what you would not yield to the authority of the teacher? If my pupil is merely to see fantasy pictures, I would rather draw them myself. They will, at least, be better suited to him.

[¶851:] The worst historians for a youth are those who make judgments. Let us have facts and let him judge for himself. This is how he will learn to know men. If the judgement of the author ceaselessly guides him, he will only be made to see with the eye of another, and when he lacks this eye he will no longer see anything.

[¶852:] I leave modern history on one side, not only because it has no character and all our men ressemble each other, but because our historians, wholly taken up with their own brilliance, think of nothing but highly colored portraits, which often represent nothing. The old historians generally give fewer portraits and bring more intelligence and common-sense to their judgments. But even among them there is a large choice to make, and you must not begin with the wisest but with the simplest. I would not put Polybius or Sallust into the hands of a youth. Tacitus is the author of old men, young men cannot understand him. You must learn to see in human actions the most primitive traits of the human heart before wanting to sound its depths. You must be able to read facts clearly before you begin to study maxims. Philosophy in the form of maxims is only fit for the experienced. Youth should never generalize anything; all its instruction should be in particular rules.

[¶853:] Thucydides is in my view the true model of historians. He reports facts without judging them; but he omits no circumstance that would enable us to judge for ourselves. He puts everything that he relates before his reader. Far from inserting himself between the facts and the readers, he conceals himself; we seem not to read but to see. Unfortunately he speaks always of war, and in his stories we only see the least instructive thing in the world, that is to say battles. The Retreat of the Ten Thousand and the Commentaries of Caesar have almost the same virtues and defects. The kindly Herodotus, without portraits, without maxims, yet flowing, simple, full of details calculated to delight and interest in the highest degree, would perhaps be the best historian if these very details did not often degenerate into childish simplicities, better adapted to spoil the taste of youth than to form it. We need discretion before we can read him. I say nothing of Livy; his turn will come, but he is a politician, a rhetorician, he is everything that is unsuitable for this age.

[¶854:] History in general is lacking in that it only registers striking and clearly marked facts that may be fixed by names, places, and dates. But the slow evolution of these facts, which cannot be definitely noted in this way, still remains unknown. We often find in some battle lost or won the reason for a revolution that was inevitable before this battle took place. War only makes manifest events already determined by moral causes that historians rarely know how to see.

[¶855:] The philosophic spirit has turned the thoughts of many of the writers of our times in this direction; but I doubt whether truth has profited from their labors. The rage for systems having takin hold of them all, no one seeks to see things as they are but only as they agree with his system.

[¶856:] Add to all these considerations the fact that history shows us many more actions than men because it only seizes men at certain chosen times in full dress; it only portrays public man who arranges himself in order to be seen. History does not follow him to his home, to his study, among his family and his friends; it only shows depicts him when he represents something; it is his clothes rather than himself that it describes.

[¶857:] I would prefer to begin the study of the human heart with reading the lives of individuals. For then even when the man tries to hide himself the historian follows him everywhere; he never leaves him a moment's relief nor any corner where he can escape the piercing eye of the spectator. And it is when he thinks he is concealing himself best that the writer makes him best known. "Those who write lives," says Montaigne, "in so far as they delight more in ideas than in events, more in that which comes from within than in that which comes from without, these are the writers I prefer; that is why Plutarch is the man for me."

[¶858:] It is true that the genius of men in groups or nations is very different from the character of the individual man, and that we have a very imperfect knowledge of the human heart if we do not also examine it in crowds. But it is none the less true that one must begin studying man in order to judge men, and that he who knew perfectly the inclinations of each individual could foresee all their combined effects in the body of the people.

[¶859:] We must go back again to the ancients for the reasons already stated, and also because all the details common and familiar, but true and characteristic, being banished by the modern style, men are dressed up by our modern authors as much in their private life as in the public world. Decency, no less strict in writing than in life, no longer permits us to say anything in public that we are not permitted to do in public; and since we can only show the man as representating something, we can know them no better from our books than we can from our theaters. The lives of kings may be written a hundred times in vain; we shall never have another Suetonius.

[¶860:] The excellence of Plutarch consists in those very details that we are no longer permitted to describe. With inimitable grace he paints the great man in little things; and he is so fortunate in the choice of his traits that a word, a smile, a gesture, will often suffice to characterize his hero. With a jest Hannibal cheers his frightened soldiers and leads them laughing to the battle which conquers Italy; Agesilaus riding on a stick makes me love the conqueror of the great king; Caesar passing through a poor village and chatting with his friends unconsciously betrays the traitor who professed that he only wished to be Pompey's equal. Alexander swallows his medecine without a word -- it is the finest moment in his life; Aristides writes his own name on the shell and so justifies his title; Philopoemen, his mantle laid aside, chops firewood in the kitchen of his host. This is the true art of portraiture. Physiognomy does not show itself in large traits, nor character in grand actions; it is the small things that reveal what is natural. Public events are either too common or too artificial, and yet it is almost exclusively on them that today's authors, out of pride, are focused.

[¶861:] M. de Turenne was undoubtedly one of the greatest men of the last century. They have had the courage to make his life interesting by the little details which make us know and love him; but how many details have they felt obliged to omit that might have made us know and love him even more? I will only quote one which I have on good authority, one which Plutarch would never have omitted, but one which Ramsai would not have taken care to write if he had known it.

[¶862:] On a hot summer's day Viscount Turenne was standing near the window of his antichamber in a little white vest and nightcap. One of his men came up and, misled by the dress, took him for one of the kitchen boys whom he knew. He crept up behind him and not at all lightly gave him a great smack on the behind. The man he struck turned around immediately. The valet saw it was his master and trembled at the sight of his face. He fell on his knees in desperation. "Sir, I thought it was George." "Well, even if it was George," exclaimed Turenne rubbing the injured part, "you need not have struck so hard." You do not dare to say this, you miserable writers! Remain for ever without humanity and without feeling; steel your hard hearts in your vile propriety, make yourselves contemptible through your high-mindedness. But as for you, dear youth, when you read this anecdote, when you are touched by all the kindliness displayed even on the impulse of the moment, read also the meanness of this great man when it was a question of his name and birth. Remember it was this very Turenne who always professed to yield precedence to his nephew so that all men might see that this child was the head of a royal house. Look on this picture and on that one; love nature, despise popular prejudice, and know the man as he was.

[¶863:] There are few people able to realize what an effect such reading, carefully directed, will have upon the unspoiled mind of a youth. Weighed down by books from our earliest childhood, accustomed to read without thinking, what we read strikes us even less because we already carry in ourselves the passions and prejudices with which history and the lives of men are filled. All that they do strikes us as only natural, for we ourselves are unnatural and we judge others by ourselves. But let us represent a young man raised according to my maxims. Imagine my Emile, who has been carefully guarded for eighteen years with the sole object of preserving a right judgment and a healthy heart; imagine him when the curtain goes up casting his eyes for the first time upon the world's stage; or rather picture him behind the scenes watching the actors don their costumes and counting the cords and pulleys whose gross prestige deceives the eyes of the spectators. His first surprise will soon give way to feelings of shame and scorn for his species; he will be indignant at the sight of the whole human race duping itself and stooping to this childish play. He will grieve to see his brothers tearing each other apart for a mere dream and transforming themselves into ferocious beasts because they could not be content to be men.

[¶864:] Given the natural disposition of the pupil, as little as the teacher may bring of prudence and of choice in his readings, as little as he puts the pupil on the path towards the reflections that he ought to draw from them, this exercise will be for him a course in practical philosophy, surely better and more clearly understood than all the vain speculations with which we muddle the minds of our young people in our schools. After hearing about the romantic plans of Pyrrhus, Cineas asks him what real good the conquest of the world would gain him that he couldn not enjoy in the present without such great sufferings. This only arouses in us a passing interest as a smart saying. But Emile will think it a very wise thought, one which had already occurred to himself, and one which he will never forget because there is no hostile prejudice in his mind to prevent it sinking in. When he reads more of the life of this madman, he will find that all his great plans resulted in his death at the hands of a woman, and instead of admiring this pretended heroism, what will he see in the exploits of this great captain and the schemes of this great statesman but so many steps towards that unlucky tile which was to bring life and schemes alike to a shameful death?

[¶865:] All conquerors have not been killed; all usurpers have not failed in their plans. To minds imbued with vulgar prejudices many of them will seem happy. But he who looks below the surface and reckons men's happiness by the condition of their hearts will perceive their wretchedness even in the midst of their successes. He will see them panting after advancement and never attaining their prize; he will find them like those inexperienced travelers among the Alps, who think that every height they see is the last, who reach its summit only to find to their disappointment there are loftier peaks beyond.

[¶866:] Augustus, when he had subdued his fellow-citizens and destroyed his rivals, reigned for forty years over the greatest empire that ever existed. But all this vast power could not hinder him from beating his head against the walls and filling his palace with his groans as he cried to Varus to restore his slaughtered legions. If he had conquered all his foes what good would his empty triumphs have done him, when troubles of every kind beset his path, when his life was threatened by his dearest friends, and when he had to mourn the disgrace or death of all near and dear to him? The wretched man desired to rule the world and failed to rule his own household. What was the result of this neglect? He beheld his nephew, his adopted child, his son-in-law, perish in the flower of youth and his grandson reduced to eat the stuffing of his mattress to prolong his wretched existence for a few hours. His daughter and his grand-daughter, after they had covered him with infamy, both died -- one of hunger and want on a desert island, the other in prison by the hand of a common archer. He himself, the last survivor of his unhappy house, found himself compelled by his own wife to acknowledge a monster as his heir. Such was the fate of the master of the world, so famous for his glory and his good fortune. I cannot believe that any one of those who admire his glory and fortune would accept them at the same price.

[¶867:] I have taken ambition as my example, but the play of every human passion offers similar lessons to any one who will study history to make himself wise and good at the expense of those who are now dead. The time is drawing near when the teaching of the life of Antony will appeal more forcibly to the youth than the life of Augustus. Emile will scarcely know where he is among the many strange sights in his new studies; but he will know beforehand how to avoid the illusion of passions before they arise, and seeing how in all ages they have blinded men's eyes, he will be forewarned of the way in which they may one day blind his own should he abandon himself to them. These lessons, I know, are difficult to adapt to him; perhaps when needed they may be too late and insufficient. But remember they are not the lessons I wished to draw from this study. By beginning it I had another aim; and surely, if this purpose is unfulfilled, the teacher is to blame.

[¶868:] Remember that as soon as amour-propre has developed the relative self is ceaselessly put into play, and the young man never observes others without coming back to himself and comparing himself with them. It is therefore a question of knowing what ranking he will give himself among his peers after having examined them. I see from the manner in which young men are taught to study history that they are transformed, so to speak, into the people they see, that you strive to make them become a Cicero, a Trajan, or an Alexander of them in order to dishearten them when they return to themselves, to make each of them regret that he is merely himself. There are certain advantages in this plan which I do not deny; but, so far as Emile is concerned, if it happens at any time when he is making these comparisons that he wishes to be any one but himself--were it Socrates or Cato -- all is lost. He who begins to regard himself as a stranger will soon forget himself altogether.

[¶869:] It is not philosophers who know most about men. They only view them through the prejudices of philosophy, and I know no one so prejudiced as philosophers. A savage would judge us more sanely than a philosopher. The philosopher is aware of his own vices, he is indignant at ours, and he says to himself, "We are all evil." The savage looks at us without being moved and says, "You are mad." He is right, for no one does evil for evil's sake. My pupil is that savage, with this difference: Emile has thought more, he has compared ideas, seen our errors from up close, he is more on his guard against himself, and only judges of what he knows.

[¶870:] It is our own passions that set us against the passions of others; it is our self-interest that makes us hate the wicked. If they did us no harm we would feel more pity for them than hate. The harm that they do to us makes us forget what they do to themselves. We would readily forgive their vices if we could perceive how their own heart punishes those vices. We feel the offence, but we do not see the punishment; the advantages are plain, the penalty is hidden. He who thinks he is enjoying the fruits of his vices is no less tormented by them than if they had not been successful; the object is different, the anxiety is the same. In vain he displays his good fortune and hides his heart. In spite of them his conduct betrays him. But to see this, our own heart must not ressemble his.

[¶871:] The passions that we share seduce us, those that challenge our self-interest revolt us, and with a lack of logic due to these very passions we blame in others what we would like to imitate. Aversion and illusion are inevitable when we are forced to endure at another's hands what we ourselves would do in his place.

[¶872:] What then is necessary in order to observe men well? A great interest in knowing them, a great impartiality of judging them, a heart sensitive enough to conceive of every human passion and calm enough not to experience them. If there is any time in our life a favorable moment for this study, it is this one that I have chosen for Emile. Before now men would have been strangers to him; later on he would have been like them. Opinion, the effects of which he already perceives, has not yet acquired an empire over him; the passions, whose consequences he realizes, have not yet agitated his heart. He is a man. He takes an interest in his brothers; he is equitable and he judges his peers. Now it is certain that if he judges them rightly he will not want to be in the position of any one of them. For the goal of all the torments they give themselves being based on prejudices that he does not share, such a goal seems to him a mere dream. For him, everything he wants is within his reach. How should he be dependent on any one when he is self-sufficent and free of prejudice? He has strong arms, good health, moderation, few needs, and the means to satisfy those needs. Brought up in the most absolute liberty, the greatest wrong he can conceive of is servitude. He pities those miserable kings who are the slaves of all who obey them; he pities those false prophets fettered by their empty fame; he pities those rich fools, martyrs to their own pomp; he pities those ostentatious voluptuaries, who spend their entire life in boredom so that they may appear to have its pleasures. He would pity the enemy who harmed him, for in his wrongdoing he would see his misery. He would say to himself, ""By giving himself the need to hurt me, this man has made his fate dependent on mine."

[¶873:] One step more and we reach our goal. Amour-propre is a useful tool though a dangerous one. It often wounds the hand that uses it, and it rarely does good without doing evil. When Emile considers his place among men, when he finds himself so fortunately situated, he will he tempted to give credit to his own reason for the work of yours, and to attribute to his own merits the effects of his happiness. He will say to himself, "I am wise and other men are fools." By pitying them he will despise them, by congratulating himself he will estime himself all the more, and by feeling himself happier than they, he will believe himself more worthy of being so. This is the fault we have most to fear, for it is the most difficult to eradicate. If he remained in this state of mind, he would have profited little by all our care; and if I had to choose, I hardly know whether I would not rather choose the illusions of prejudice than those of pride.

[¶874:] Great men are under no illusion with respect to their superiority. They see it and know it, but they are none the less modest. The more they have, the better they know what they lack. They are less vain about their superiority over us than ashamed by the consciousness of their weakness; and among the good things they really possess they are too wise to pride themselves on a gift which is none of their getting. The good man may be proud of his virtue for it is his own, but what cause for pride has the man of intellect? What has Racine done that he is not Pradon, and Boileau that he is not Cotin?

[¶875:] Here it is something very different. Let us remain in the common order. I assumed that my pupil had neither transcendent genius nor a limited understanding. I chose him of an ordinary mind to show what education could do for man. Exceptions defy all rules. If, therefore, as a result of my care, Emile prefers his way of living, seeing, and feeling to that of others, he is right; but if he thinks because of this that he is nobler and better born than they, he is wrong; he is deceiving himself. He must he undeceived, or rather let us prevent the mistake, lest it be too late to correct it

[¶876:] Provided a man is not mad, he can be cured of any folly but vanity. There is no cure for this but experience, if indeed there is any cure for it at all. When it first appears we can at least prevent its further growth. But do not therefore waste your breath on empty arguments to prove to the adolescent that he is like other men and subject to the same weaknesses. Make him feel it or he will never know it. This is another instance of an exception to my own rules. I must voluntarily expose my pupil to every accident which may convince him that he is no wiser than we. The adventure with the magician will he repeated again and again in different ways. I shall let flatterers take advantage of him; if some daredevils draw him into a perilous adventure, I will let him run the risk; if he falls into the hands of gamblers at a card-table, I will abandon him to them to make as their dupe. I will let them flatter him, pluck him, and rob him; and when having sucked him dry they turn and mock him, I will even thank them to his face for the lessons they have been good enough to give him. The only snares from which I will guard him with my utmost care are the wiles of courtesans. The only precaution I shall take will be to share all the dangers I let him run, and all the insults I let him receive. I will bear everything in silence, without a murmur or reproach, without a word to him, and be sure that if this wise conduct is faithful]y adhered to, what he sees me endure on his account will make more impression on his heart than what he suffers himself.

[¶877:] Here I cannot prevent myself from mentioning the false dignity of tutors who, in order to play at being wise, discourage their pupils by affecting to treat them as children and by emphasizing the difference between themselves and their scholars in everything they do. Far from damping their youthful spirits in this fashion, you should spare no effort to elevate their soul. Make them your equals so that they may become so, and if they cannot rise to your level, come down to theirs without shame or scruple. Remember that your honour is no longer in yourself but in your pupil. Share his faults in order to correct them, bear his shame in order to erase it. Imitate that brave Roman who seeing his army flee and being unable to rally them, placed himself at their head, exclaiming, " They do not flee, they follow their captain!" Did this dishonor him? Not so. By sacrificing his glory he increased it. The power of duty, the beauty of virtue, compel our respect in spite of all our foolish prejudices. If I received a blow while fulfilling my duties to Emile, far from avenging it I would boast of it; and I doubt whether there is in the world a man so vile as to not respect me more for it.

[¶878:] It is not that the pupil should suppose his master to have as limited an understanding as his own or to be as liable to be seduced. This idea is all very well for a child who can neither see nor compare things, who thinks everything is within his reach, and only puts his confidence only in those who know how to come down to his level. But a young man of Emile's age and as sensible as he is is no longer so stupid as to make this mistake, and it would not be desirable that he should. The confidence he ought to have in his tutor is of another kind. It should rest on the authority of reason and on superior understanding, on the advantages that the young man is capable of appreciating while he perceives how useful they are to himself. Long experience has convinced him that he is loved by, that this tutor is a wise and good man who desires his happiness and knows how to procure it. He ought to know that it is to his own advantage to listen to his advice. But if the master lets himself be taken in like the disciple, he will lose his right to expect deference from him and to give him instruction. Still less should the pupil suppose that his master is purposely letting him fall into traps or preparing pitfalls for his inexperience. How can we avoid these two difficulties? Choose the best and most natural means; be simple and true like him; warn him of the perils to which he is exposed, show them to him clearly and sensibly but without exaggeration, without ill humor, without pedantic display, and above all without giving your opinions in the form of orders until they have become such and until this imperious tone is absolutely necessary. And if he is still obstinate after this, as he often will be? Then say nothing more to him, leave him in liberty, follow him, imitate him, cheerfully and frankly. Let yourself go, have as much fun as him if this is possible. If the consequences become too serious, you are always there to prevent them. And yet when this young man has witnessed your foresight and your kindliness, will he not be at once struck by the one and touched by the other? All his faults are but so many bands with which he himself provides you to restrain him when needed. Now what makes for the greatest art of the teacher consists in controlling circumstances and directing his exhortations so that he may know beforehand when the young man will give in and when he will refuse to do so, in order to surround him with the lessons of experience, and yet never expose him to to grade dangers.

[¶879:] Warn him of his faults before he commits them; do not blame him when once they are committed; you would only stir his self-love to mutiny. We learn nothing from a lesson we detest. I know nothing more foolish than the phrase, "I told you so." The best way to make him remember what you told him is to seem to have forgotten it. Go further than this, and when you find him ashamed of having refused to believe you, gently smooth away the humiliation with kind words. He will surely feel affection when he sees how you forget yourself for his sake and that in stead of putting him down you console him. But if to his chagrin you add your reproaches, he will hate you, and will make it a rule never to listen to you, as if to prove that he does not agree with you as to the value of your opinion.

[¶880:] The turn you give to your consolation may itself be a lesson to him, all the more useful because he does not suspect it. When you tell him, for example, that a thousand other people have made the same mistakes, this is not what he was expecting. You are correcting him by only seeming to pity him. For when one thinks oneself better than other people it is a very mortifying excuse to console oneself by their example. It means that we must realize that the most we can say is that they are no better than we.

[¶881:] The time of faults is the time for fables. When we blame the guilty under the cover of a story we instruct without offending him; and he then understands that the story is not untrue by means of the truth he finds in its application to himself. The child who has never been deceived by flattery understands nothing of the fable I recently examined; but the rash youth who has just become the dupe of a flatterer perceives only too readily that the crow was a fool. Thus he acquires a maxim from the fact, and the experience he would soon have forgotten is engraved on his mind by means of the fable. There is no knowledge of morals which cannot be acquired through our own experience or that of others. When there is danger, instead of letting him try the experiment himself, we have recourse to history. When the risk is comparatively slight, it is just as well that the young man should be exposed to it. Then by means of the apologue one can transpose into maxims the special cases with which the young man is now acquainted.

[¶882:] I do not mean, however, that these maxims should be explained, nor even formulated. Nothing is so foolish and unwise as the moral at the end of most of the fables -- as if the moral was not, or ought not to be so clear in the fable itself that the reader cannot fail to perceive it. Why then add the moral at the end, and so deprive him of the pleasure of discovering it for himself. The art of teaching consists in making the pupil enjoy learning. But in order to enjoy it, his mind must not remain so passive to everything you tell him that he has nothing for him to do in order to understand you. The teacher's amour-propre must always leave some space for the pupil's; he must be able to say, I understand, I see it, I am getting at it, I am instructing myself. One of the things which makes the Patontaloon in the Italian comedies so wearisome is the pains taken by him to explain to the audience the platitudes they understand only too well already. It is necessary to make oneself understood, but it is not always necessary to say everything. He who says all says little, for at the end no one will be listening to him. What is the sense of the four lines at the end of La Fontaine's fable of the frog who puffed herself up. Is he afraid we should not understand it? Does this great painter need to write the names beneath the things he has painted? His morals, far from generalizing, restrict the lesson to some extent to the examples given, and prevent our applying them to others. Before I put the fables of this inimitable author into the hands of a youth, I should like to cut out all the conclusions with which he strives to explain what he has just said so clearly and pleasantly. If your pupil does not under-stand the fable without the explanation, he will not understand it with it.

[¶883:] Moreover, the fables would require to be arranged in a more didactic order, one more in agreement with the feelings and knowledge of the young adolescent. Can you imagine anything so foolish as to follow the mere numerical order of the book without regard to our requirements or our opportunities? First the grasshopper, then the crow, then the frog, then the two mules, etc. I am sick of these two mules; I remember seeing a child who was being trained to be a financier (and whom they were dazzling with the role he was going to play) read this fable, learn it, say it, repeat it again and again without finding in it the slightest objection to the profession to which he was destined. Not only have I never found children make any real use of the fables they learn, but I have never found anybody who took the trouble to see that they made such a use of them. The pretext for this form of study is moral instruction; but the real aim of mother and child is nothing but to get all the company together to watch the child while he recites his fables. When he is too old to recite them and old enough to make use of them, they are altogether forgotten. Only men, I repeat, can learn from fables, and Emile is now old enough to begin.

[¶884:] I show you from afar -- for I do not want to tell you everything -- the paths which diverge from the right way so that you may learn how to avoid them. I believe that in following the road I have marked out your pupil will buy his knowledge of mankind and his knowledge of himself in the best possible market. You will bring him to the point of contemplating the tricks of fortune without envying the fate of her favorites and to be content with himself without thinking himself better than others. You have begun by making him an actor that he may learn to be a spectator. This task must be completed; for from the theatre's pit one sees objects the way they seem, but from the stage one sees them as they are. To embrace the whole you need perspective; you must come up close to see the details. But how can a young man take part in the business of life? What right has he to be initiated into its dark secrets? His interests are confined within the limits of his own pleasures, he has no power over others, it is as if he had no power at all. Man is the cheapest commodity on the market, and among all our important rights of property, the rights of the individual are always considered last of all.

[¶885:] When I see that in the years of their greatest activity young people are limited to purely speculative studies, while later on and without the slightest experience they are suddenly thrown into the world and into business, it strikes me as contrary both to reason and to nature, and I am no longer surprised that so few men know how to conduct themselves. By what strange turn of mind are we taught so many useless things, whereas the art of action counts for nothing! People profess to form us for society, and we are taught as if each of us were to spend his life thinking alone in a cell or discussing airy subjects with disinterested people. You think you are teaching your children how to live by teaching them certain bodily contortions and certain word-formulas that signify nothing. I, too, have taught Emile how to live, for I have taught him to live with himself and, more than that, to earn his own bread. But this is not enough. To live in the world one must know how to get along with other people, one must know the tools that can be used to influence them, one must calculate the action and re-action of self-interest in civil society and estimate the results so accurately that one is rarely mistaken in his undertakings, or at least will have tried in the best possible way. The law does not allow young people to manage their own affairs nor to dispose of their own property; but what would be the use of these precautions if they never gained any experience until they were of age? They would have gained nothing by the delay, and would be as naïve at twenty-five as at fifteen. No doubt one must prevent a young man blinded by ignorance or misled by passion from hurting himself. But at any age it is permitted to be benevolent; at any age under the guidance of a wise man one can protect the unfortunate who need some support.

[¶886:] Mothers and nurses have affection for children because of the care they give them. The exercise of social virtues carries the love of humanity to the bottom of the heart. It is in doing good that we become good; I know of no practice more sure. Keep your pupil busy with the good deeds that are within his reach. Let the cause of the poor always be his; let him help them not merely with his money but with his care; let him serve them, protect them, sacrifice his life and his time to them. Let him be their agent -- he will never in his life have a more noble employment. See how many of the oppressed, who never get a hearing, will obtain justice when he -- with an intrepid firmness that only the practice of virtue inspires -- demands it for them; when he forces open the doors of the rich and noble; when he goes, if necessary, to the feet of the king himself to make heard the voices of the poor -- whose misery closes all access for them and who are so afraid of being punished for their misfortunes that they do not dare to complain.

[¶887:] But are we making Emile into a knight in shining armor, a do-gooder, a defender of noblesse oblige? Will he thrust himself into public life, play the wise man and defender of the laws before the nobles, the magistrates, the king? Will he present petitions before the judges and plead in the law courts? That I cannot say. The nature of things is not changed by terms of mockery and scorn. He will do all that he knows to be useful and good. He will do nothing more, and he knows that nothing is useful and good for him which is unbefitting his age. He knows that his first duty is to himself; that young men should distrust themselves, be circumspect in their conduct, respectful before those older than themselves, reticent and discrete in talking without good reason, modest in marginal matters, but eager to do good and courageuos in speaking truth. Such were the natoable Romans who, before being admitted into the governance, speant their youth in countering crime and defending innocence with no interestbeyond that of instructing themselves in the service of justice and the protection of sound norms.

[¶888:] Emile did not like either commotion or quarrels, not only among men, bukt even among animals. He would never goad two dogs to ffight; never sic a dog upon a cat.This spirit of peace is an effect of his education, which at no point fomented amour-propre and a high opinion of himself. He suffers when he sees suffering; it is a natural sentiment. When a young mane hardens himself and takes pleasure in seeing a sensitive being tormented is when a recurrence of pride makes him think his wit or superiority exempts him from similar suffering. Those who have the protection of his cast of mind wouuld not fall into the vice that is the outcome. Emile therefore loves peace. The image of happiness pleases him, and when he can contribute to producing it this is one more way to share it. I refuse to assume that when he sees suffering he will feel the kind of sterile and cruel pity that is content to deplore only the ills it can heal. His active benevolence teaches him much that he would have learned much more slowly, or would never have learned at all, if his heart had been harder. If he sees discord arising among his friends he seeks to reconcile them. If he sees grieving he inquires as to the cause of the sufferings. If he meets two men who hate each other, he wants to know the reason for their enmity. If he finds oppressed people groaning from their mistreatment by the rich and powerful, he tries to find a way to counteract this oppression, and in the interest he takes with regard to all such miserable people, the means of removing their sufferings are never indifferent to him. What must we do to make use of these impulses in a manner suitable to his age? Regulate his efforts and his knowledge, and use his zeal to increase them.

[¶889:] I am never weary of repeating: Put all the lessons of young people in actions rather than in speeches. Let them learn nothing from books that experience can teach them. How absurd to attempt to give them practice in speaking when they have nothing to say, to expect to make them experience at their school desks the energy of the language of passion and all the force of the arts of persuasion when they have nothing and nobody to persuade! All the rules of rhetoric are a mere waste of words to those who do not know how to use them for their own purposes. What difference does it make to a schoolboy to know how Hannibal encouraged his soldiers to cross the Alps? If instead of these grand harangues you showed him how to make his prefect to give him a holiday, you may be sure he would pay more attention to your rules.

[¶890:] If I wanted to teach rhetoric to a youth whose passions were already developed, I would present him continually with things that would gratify these passions, and I would explore with him what language he should use with people so as to get them to regard his desires favorably. But Emile is not in a condition so favorable to the art of oratory. Limited almost solely to physical necessities, he has less need of others than they of him; and having nothing to ask of others for himself, what he wants to persuade them to do does not affect him sufficiently to motivate him very much. It follows from this that in general he will need a simple and unfigurative language. He usually speaks to the point and only to make himself understood. He is not sententious, for he has not learned to generalize his ideas. He uses little imagersy because he is rarely impassioned.

[¶891:] Yet this is not because he is completely phlegmatc and cold. Neither his age, nor his character, nor his tastes permit of this. In the fire of adolescence the life-giving spirits retained in the blood and distilled again and again inspire his young heart with a warmth which glows in his eye -- a warmth that one feels in his words and sees in his actions. His language has taken on accent and sometimes vehemence. The noble sentiment that inspires it gives it force and elevation. Fillrd with tender love for humanity his words convey the movements of his heart. His open generosity has more of a certain enchanting quality than than does the artificial eloquence of others; or rather he alone has the only true eloquence, for he has only to show what he feels in order to communicate to those who hear him.

[¶892:] The more I think of it the more convinced I am that by thus putting our benevolence into action and drawing from our success or lack of success some conclusions as to their cause, we shall find that there is little useful knowledge that cannot be cultivated in the mind of a young man; and that together with all the true learning that one may acquire in the colleges he will acquire a science of still more importance -- which is the application of what he has learned to the purposes of life. Taking such an interest in his fellow-beings, it is impossible that he should not learn early on how to weigh and appreciate their actions, their tastes, their pleasures, and to give in general a more accurate evaluation of what can raise or lessen the happiness of man than those who care for nobody and never do anything for any one. Those who are always occupied solely with their own concerns are too self-indulgent to judge wisely of things. Relating everything to themselves alone and basing their ideas of good and bad solely on their own experience, their minds are filled with a thousand absurd prejudices, and anything which affects their own advantage even slightly seems an upheaval of the universe.

[¶893:] Let us extend amour-propre to other beings and it is transformed into virtue, and there is no heart of man in which this virtue does not have its root. The less the object of our care is directly dependent on ourselves, the less we have to fear from the illusion of individual self-interest. The more we can generalize this interst, the more equitable it becomes, and love for the human race is nothing other in us than love of justice. Do we want Emile to be a lover of truth, do we want him to know the truth? In all his dealings keep him far from himself. The more care he devotes to the happiness of others the more that care will be enlightened and wise, and the fewer mistakes he will make between good and evil. But never allow him any blind preference founded merely on personal predilection or unfair prejudice. Why should he harm one person to serve another? It matters little to him who has the greater share of happiness, providing he promotes the happiness of all. Apart from self-interest this care for the general well-being is the first concern of the wise man, for each of us is part of the human species and not part of any individual.

[¶894:] To prevent pity from degenerating into weakness we must generalize it and extend it to all humankind. Then we will yield to it only when it is in accordance with justice, since justice is of all the virtues that which contributes most to the common good. Reason and love for ourselves compel us to have more pity for our own species thanfor the next one, and to pity the wicked is to be very cruel to other men.

[¶895:] Moreover, one must remember that all these means that I use to launch my pupil beyond himself have also a direct relation to himself. For they not only cause him inward delight; by making him benevolent towards others I am also working to instruct him.

[¶896:] First I showed the means and now I will show the effect. What grand vistas I see being arranged little by little in his heart! What sublime sentiments crowd out the seeds of lesser passions in his heart! What clearness of judgment, what accuracy in reasoning, do I see developing in him from the inclinations we have cultivated, from the experience which concentrates the desires of a great soul within the narrow limits of possibility, so that a man superior to others who cannot raise them up to his level can at least lower himself to theirs! The true principles of justice, true types of beauty, all moral relations between man and man, all ideas of order, are engraved on his understanding. He sees the right place for each thing and the causes which remove it from that place. He sees what may do good, and what hinders it. Without having felt the passions of mankind, he knows their illusions and their effects.

[¶897:] I proceed attracted by the force of things but without imposing myself on the judgments of my readers. Long ago they have made up their minds that I am wandering in the land of fantasies, while for my part I think they remain in the country of prejudice. When I wander so far from popular beliefs I do not cease to bear them in mind; I examine them, I consider them, not that I may follow them or shun them, but that I may weigh them in the balance of reason. Whenever reason compels me to abandon these popular beliefs, I know by experience that my readers will not imitate me; I know that they will persist in refusing to go beyond what they can see, and that they will take the youth I am describing for an imaginary and fantastical being, merely because he is unlike the youths with whom they compare him -- without remembering that he must be different since he has been raised differently, influenced by sentiments contrary to theirs, instructed in a wholly different manner from them. So it would be much more surprising if he were like your pupils than if he were the way I have supposed. He is not a man's man but nature's man. Assuredly he must seem very strange in their eyes.

[¶898:] When I began this work I took for granted only what could be observed as readily by others as by myself. For our starting-point, the birth of man, is the same for all. But while I am seeking to cultivate nature and you are seeking to deprave it, the further we go the further apart we find ourselves. At six years old my pupil was not so very unlike yours, whom you had not yet had time to disfigure. Now there is nothing in common between them; and when they reach the age of manhood, which is now approaching, they will show themselves utterly different from each other, unless all my pains have been thrown away. There may not be so very great a difference in the amount of knowledge they possess, but there is all the difference in the world in the kind of knowledge. You are amazed to find that the one has noble sentiments of which the others have not the smallest germ, but remember that the latter are already philosophers and theologians while Emile does not even know what is meant by a philosopher and has scarcely heard the name of God.

[¶899:] But if you come and tell me, "There are no such young men; young people are not made that way; they have this passion or that, they do this or that," it is as if you denied that a pear tree could ever be a tall tree because the pear trees in our gardens are all dwarfs.

[¶900:] I beg these critics who are so ready with their blame to consider that I am as well acquainted as they are with everything they say, that I have probably given more thought to it, and that, as I have no private end to serve in getting them to agree with me, I have a right to demand that they should at least take time to find out where I am mistaken. Let them thoroughly examine the constitution of man, let them follow the earliest growth of the heart in any given circumstances, so as to see what a difference education may make in the individual; then let them compare my method of education with the results I ascribe to it; and let them tell me where my reasoning is unsound, and I shall have no answer to give them.

[¶901:] It is this that makes me speak so strongly, and as I think with good excuse. I have not pledged myself to any system, I depend as little as possible on arguments, and I trust to what I myself have observed. I do not base my ideas on what I have imagined, but on what I have seen. It is true that I have not confined my observations within the walls of any one town, nor to a single class of people. But having compared men of every class and every nation which I have been able to observe in the course of a life spent in this pursuit, I have discarded as artificial what belonged to one nation and not to another, to one rank and not to another; and I have regarded as proper to mankind what was common to all, at any age. in any station, and in any nation whatsoever.

[¶902:] Now if in accordance with this method you follow from infancy the course of a youth who has not been shaped to any special mold, one who depends as little as possible on authority and the opinions of others, which will he most resemble, my pupil or yours? This is, it seems to me, the question you must answer if you would know if I am mistaken.

[¶903:] It is not easy for a man to begin to think; but when once he has begun he never stops. Once a thinker, always a thinker, and the understanding once practiced in reflection will never rest. You may therefore think that I do too much or too little; that the human mind is not by nature so quick to unfold; and that after having given it opportunities it has not got, I keep it too long confined within a circle of ideas which it ought to have out-grown.

[¶904:] But remember, in the first place, that when I want to train a natural man, I do not want to make him a savage and to send him back to the woods; rather, that while in the whirl of social life it is enough that he should not let himself be carried away by the passions and opinions of men. Let him see with his eyes and feel with his heart, let him be governed by no authority but that of his own reason. Under these conditions it is plain that a multitude things that strike him, the oft-recurring sentiments which affect him, the different ways of satisfying his real needs, must give him many ideas he would not otherwise have acquired or would only have acquired much later. The natural progress of the mind is quickened but not reversed. The same man who would remain stupid in the forests would become wise and reasonable in towns, even if he were merely a spectator. Nothing is better fitted to make us wise than the sight of follies we do not share, and even if we share them, we still learn, provided we are not the dupe of our follies and provided we do not bring to them the same mistakes as those who commit them.

[¶905:] Consider also that while our faculties are limited to the things that can be seen, we offer scarcely any hold to the abstractions of philosophy or to purely intellectual ideas. To attain to these we require either to free ourselves from the body to which we are so strongly bound, or to proceed from object to object in a gradual and slow process, or else to leap across the intervening space with a gigantic bound of which no child is capable, one for which grown men even require steps made especially for them; but I find it very difficult to see how you propose to construct such steps.

[¶906:] The incomprehensible being that embraces all, that gives its motion to the world and shapes the system of all creatures, is not visible to our eyes or palpable to our hands; it escapes all of our senses. The work is seen, but the workman is hidden . It is even no small matter to know that it exists, and when we have got so far, and when we ask. What is it? Where is it? our mind is overwhelmed and goes astray, and we no longer know what to think.

[¶907:] Locke would have us begin with the study of spirits and go on to that of bodies. This is the method of superstition, prejudice, and error; it is not the method of nature, nor even that of well-ordered reason; it is to learn to see by shutting our eyes. We must have studied bodies long enough before we can form any true idea of spirits, or even suspect that there are such beings. The contrary method serves only to establish materialism.

[¶908:] Since our senses are the first instruments to our learning, corporeal and sensible bodies are the only bodies we directly apprehend. The word "spirit" has no meaning for any one who has not philosophized. To the unlearned and to the child a spirit is merely a body. Do they not imagine spirits that groan, speak, fight, and make noises? Now one must admit that spirits with arms and voices are very like bodies. This is why every nation on the face of the earth, not even excepting the Jews, have made corporeal gods for themselves. We, ourselves, with our words, Spirit, Trinity, Persons, are for the most part quite anthropomorphic. I admit that we are taught that God is everywhere; but we also believe that there is air everywhere, at least in our atmosphere; and the word Spirit meant originally nothing more than breath and wind. Once you teach people to say what they do not understand, it is easy enough to get them to say anything you like.

[¶909:] The sentiment of our action upon other bodies must have first induced us to suppose that their action upon us was effected in like manner. Thus man began by thinking that all things whose action affected him were alive. Feeling himself less strong than most of these beings, he therefore supposed that they were limitless and he made them his gods as soon as he had supplied them with bodies. In the earliest times men were in terror of everything and everything in nature seemed alive. The idea of matter was developed as slowly as that of spirit, for the former is itself an abstraction. They thus filled the universe with gods that could be sensed. The stars, the winds and the mountains, rivers, trees, and towns, their very dwellings, each had its soul, its god, its life. The teraphim of Laban, the manitous of the indians, the fetishes of the Negroes, every work of nature and of man were the first gods of mortals; polytheism was their first religion and idolatry their earliest form of worship. The idea of one God was beyond their grasp, until by generalizing their ideas more and more they were in a position to get to the idea of a first cause and gave meaning to the word "substance," which is at bottom the greatest of abstractions. So every child who believes in God is of necessity an idolater or at least he regards the Deity as a man, and when once the imagination has perceived God, it is very seldom that the understanding conceives him. Locke's order leads us into this same mistake.

[¶910:] Having arrived, I know not how, at the abstract idea of substance, it is clear that to allow of a single substance it must be assumed that this substance is endowed with incompatible and mutually exclusive properties such as thought and size -- one of which is by its nature divisible and the other wholly incapable of division. Moreover it is assumed that thought or, if you prefer it, sentiment, is a primitive quality inseparable from the substance to which it belongs, that its relation to the substance is like the relation between substance and size. Hence it is inferred that beings who lose one of these attributes lose the substance to which it belongs, consequently that death is, therefore, but a separation of substances, and that those beings in whom the two attributes are found are composed of the two substances to which those two qualities belong.

[¶911:] But consider what a distance still remains between the idea of two substances and that of the divine nature, between the incomprehensible idea of the influence of our soul upon our body and the idea of the influence of God upon every living creature. The ideas of creation. destruction, ubiquity, eternity, almighty power, those of the divine attributes--these are all ideas so confused and obscure that few men succeed in grasping them. Yet there is nothing obscure about them to the common people, because they do not understand them in the least. How then should they present themselves in full force, that is to say in all their obscurity, to the young mind which is still occupied with the first working of the senses and can conceive only of that which he can touch? In vain do the abysses of the infinite open around us; a child does not know the enough to be awed by them; his weak eyes cannot gauge their depths. To children everything is infinite. They cannot put limits on anything; not that their measure is so large, but because their understanding is so small. I have even noticed that they place the infinite rather below than above the dimensions known to them. They judge a distance to be immense rather by their feet than by their eyes; infinity is bounded for them. not so much by what they can see, but how far they can go. If you talk to them of the power of God, they will think he is nearly as strong as their father. As their own knowledge is in everything the measure of what is possible, they always picture what is described to them as rather smaller than what they know. Such are the natural judgments of an ignorant and feeble mind. Ajax was afraid to measure his strength against Achilles and challenged Jupiter to combat, for he knew Achilles and did not know Jupiter. A Swiss peasant thought himself the richest man alive; when they tried to explain to him what a king was, he asked with pride, "Has the king got a hundred cows on the high pastures?"

[¶912:] I foressee that many of my readers will be surprised to find me following my pupil through his early years without speaking to him of religion. At fifteen he will not even know that he has a soul, and perhaps even at eighteen he may not be ready to learn about it. For if he learns about it too soon, there is the risk of his never really knowing it.

[¶913:] If I had to depict the most regrettable stupidity, I would show a pedant teaching children the catechism; if I wanted to drive a child crazy I would require him to explain what he learned in his catechism. You will object that since most of the Christian dogmas are mysteries, to wait until the human mind is capable of conceiving of them is to wait not merely until the child is a man, but until the man is dead. To that I reply, first that there are mysteries not only impossible for man to conceive of but to believe in; and I do not see what we gain by teaching them to children, unless you want to teach them how to lie at an early age. Moreover, I assert that to admit that there are mysteries, you must at least realize that they are incomprehensible, and children are not even capable of this conception! At an age when everything is mysterious, there are no mysteries properly so-called.

[¶914:] "We must believe in God if we would be saved." This doctrine wrongly understood is the root of sanguinary intolerance and the cause of all the futile teaching which strikes a deadly blow at human reason by accustoming it to rely on mere words. No doubt there is not a moment to lose in order to merit eternal salvation; but if the repetition of certain words suffices to obtain it, I do not see what prevents us from peopling heaven with starlings and magpies as well as with children.

[¶915:] The obligation to believe presupposes its possibility. The philosopher who does not believe is wrong, for he misuses the reason he has cultivated, and he is able to understand the truths he rejects. But the child who professes the Christian faith -- what does he believe? Just what he understands; and he understands so little of what he is made to say that if you tell him to say just the opposite he will agree to it just as willingly. The faith of children and the faith of many men is a matter of geography. Will they be rewarded for having been born in Rome rather than in Mecca? One of them is told that Mohammed is the prophet of God and so he says, "Mohammed is the prophet of God." The other is told that Mohammed is a fake and he says, "Mohammed is a fake." Each of them would have affirmed just the opposite had he found himself in a different place. Starting with such similar dispositions, should one be sent to paradise and the other to hell? When a child says he believes in God, it is not God he believes in, but Peter or James, who told him that there is something called God, and he believes it after the fashion of Euripides -- "O Jupiter, of whom I know nothing but thy name."

[¶916:] We maintain that no child who dies before the age of reason will be deprived of everlasting happiness. The Catholics believe the same of all children who have been baptized, even though they have never heard of God. There are, therefore, circumstances in which one can be saved without belief in God, and these circumstances occur in the case of children or madmen when the human mind is incapable of the operations necessary to recognize the divinity. The only difference I see between you and me is that you profess that children of seven years old have this capacity and I do not think them ready for it even at fifteen. Whether I am right or wrong depends not on an article of the faith but on a simple observation in natural history.

[¶917:] From the same principle it is plain that any man having reached old age without faith in God will not, therefore, be deprived of God's presence in another life if his blindness was not voluntary; and I maintain that it is not always voluntary. You admit that it is so in the case of lunatics deprived by disease of their spiritual faculties but not of their manhood and therefore still entitled to the goodness of their Creator. Why then should we not also admit it for those who have been sequestered from all society since childhood and have led an absolutely primitive life without the knowledge that comes from intercourse with other men? For it is clearly impossible that such a savage could ever raise his thoughts to the knowledge of the true God. Reason tells us that man should only be punished for his willful faults and that invincible ignorance can never be imputed to him as a crime. Hence it follows that in the sight of eternal justice every man who would believe if he had the necessary knowledge is counted a believer, and that there will be no unbelievers to be punished except those who have closed their hearts against the truth.

[¶918:] Let us beware of proclaiming the truth to those who are not in a condition to hear it, for to do so is to try to substitute error for truth. It would be better to have no idea at all of the divinity than to have ideas that are mean, grotesque, harmful, and unworthy. It is less of an evil to fail to perceive the divine than to insult it. The worthy Plutarch says, "I would rather men said, 'There is no such person as Plutarch,' than that they should say, 'Plutarch is unjust, envious, jealous, and such a tyrant that he demands more than can be performed.'"

[¶919:] The chief harm which results from the deformed ideas of the divinity that are traced on the minds of children is that they stay there all their life, and as men they conceive no more of God than they did as children. In Switzerland I once saw a good and pious mother who was so convinced of the truth of this maxim that she did not want to teach her son religion during his first years for fear lest he should be satisfied with this crude teaching and neglect a better teaching when he reached the age of reason. This child never heard God spoken of except with devotion and reverence , and as soon as he attempted to say the word he was silenced, as if the subject were too sublime and great for him. This reserve aroused his curiosity and his amour-propre; he looked forward to the time when he would know this mystery so carefully hidden from him. The less they spoke of God to him, the less he was himself permitted to speak of God, the more he thought about Him. This child saw God everywhere. What I should most fear from this indiscrete affectation of mystery is that by over-stimulating the youth's imagination you may turn his head and thus finally make a fanatic rather than a believer.

[¶920:] But we need fear nothing of the sort for Emile, who always declines to pay attention to what is beyond his reach and listens with profound indifference to things he does not understand. There are so many things of which he is accustomed to say, "That is no concern of mine," that one more will make little difference to him; and when he does begin to worry about these great questions, it is because the natural growth of his knowledge is turning his thoughts that way.

[¶921:] We have seen the road by which the cultivated human mind approaches these mysteries, and I am ready to admit that it would not attain to them naturally even in the midst of society until a much later age. But since there are in this same society inevitable causes which hasten the development of the passions, if we did not also hasten the development of the knowledge which controls these passions we should indeed depart from the order of nature and the equilibrium would be broken. When one can no longer succeed in moderating a too rapid development on one side, one must guide wih the same rapidity the development of others which correspond to it, so that the order of nature may not be inverted, and so that things that should progress together and not become separated, and so that the man who is whole at every moment of his life will never find himself at one stage in one of his faculties and at another stage in another faculty.

[¶922:] What a difficulty do I see before me! A difficulty all the greater because it depends less on things than on the cowardice of those who do not dare to resolve it. Let us begin at least by daring to state the problem. A child should always be brought up in his father's religion; he is always shown that this religion, whatever it may be, is the only true religion, that the others are nothing but extravagance and absurdity. The force of the argument depends entirely on the country in which it is put forward. Let a Turk, who thinks Christianity so absurd at Constantinople, come see what they think of Mohammedanism in Paris. It is above all in matters of religion that opinion triumphs. But we who profess to shake off its yoke entirely, we who do not with to yield anything to authority, we who do not want to teach Emile anything which he could not learn for himself in any country -- in what religion will we raise him? To what sect shall this man of nature be joined? The answer is quite simple, it seems to me. We will join him neither to this one nor that one but we will put him into a condition to choose for himself the one to which the best use of his reason leads him. [[Notes:Jjr_em_para922_note1|Incedo per ignes. Suppositos cineri doloso. -- Horace, lib. ii. ode .

[¶923:] No matter. Zeal and good faith have thus far taken the place of prudence. I hope that these guardians will not fail me now. Reader, do not fear lest I that I will take precautions unworthy of a lover of truth. I shall never forget my motto, but it is only too permissable to distrust my own judgment. Instead of telling you now what I think myself, I will tell you what a man who is more worthy than me thinks. I guarantee the truth of the facts that are about to be reported to you. They actually happened to the author of the paper I am about to transcribe. It is for you to see whether one can draw from them any useful reflections on the subject at hand. I do not offer my own or another's sentiment as your rule; I merely present them for your examination.

[¶924:] "Thirty years ago there was a young man in an Italian town; he was an exile from his native land and found himself reduced to the depths of poverty. He had been born a Calvinist, but the consequences of his own folly had made him a fugitive in a strange land; he had no money and he changed his religion for a morsel of bread. There was a hostel for proselytes in that town to which he gained admission. The study of controversy inspired doubts he had never felt before, and he made acquaintance with evil hitherto unsuspected by him; he heard strange doctrines and he met with morals still stranger to him; he beheld this evil conduct and nearly fell a victim to it. He longed to escape, but he was locked up; he complained, but his complaints were unheeded; at the mercy of his tyrants, he found himself treated as a criminal because he would not share their crimes. The anger kindled in a young and untried heart by the first experience of violence and injustice may be realized by those who have themselves experienced it. Tears of anger flowed from his eyes, he was wild with rage; he prayed to heaven and to man, and his prayers were unheard; he spoke to every one and no one listened to him. He saw no one but the vilest servants under the control of the wretch who insulted him, or accomplices in the same crime who laughed at his resistance and encouraged him to follow their example. He would have been ruined had not a worthy priest visited the hostel on some matter of business. He found an opportunity of consulting him secretly. The priest was poor and in need of help himself, but the victim had more need of his assistance, and he did not hesitate to help him to escape at the risk of making a dangerous enemy.

[¶925:] Having escaped from vice to return to poverty, the young man struggled vainly against fate: for a moment he thought he had gained the victory. At the first gleam of good fortune his woes and his protector were alike forgotten. He was soon punished for this ingratitude; all his hopes vanished; youth indeed was on his side, but his romantic ideas spoiled everything. He had neither talent nor skill to make his way easily, he could neither be common-place nor wicked, he expected so much that he got nothing. When he had sunk to his former poverty, when he was without food or shelter and ready to die of hunger, he remembered his benefactor.

[¶926:] He went back to him, found him, and was kindly welcomed; the sight of him reminded the priest of a good deed he had done; such a memory always rejoices the heart. This man was by nature humane and pitiful; he felt the sufferings of others through his own, and his heart had not been hardened by prosperity; in a word, the lessons of wisdom and an enlightened virtue had reinforced his natural kindness of heart. He welcomed the young man, found him a lodging, and recommended him; he shared with him his living which was barely enough for two. He did more, he instructed him, consoled him, and taught him the difficult art of bearing adversity in patience. You prejudiced people, would you have expected to find all this in a priest and in Italy?

[¶927:] This worthy priest was a poor [[Notes:Jjr_em_para927_note1|Savoyard clergyman who had offended his bishop by some youthful fault; he had crossed the Alps to find a position which he could not obtain in his own country. He lacked neither wit nor learning, and with his interesting countenance he had met with patrons who found him a place in the household of one of the ministers, as tutor to his son. He preferred poverty to dependence, and he did not know how to get on with the great. He did not stay long with this minister, and when he departed he took with him his good opinion; and as he lived a good life and gained the hearts of everybody, he was glad to be forgiven by his bishop and to obtain from him a small parish among the mountains, where he might pass the rest of his life. This was the limit of his ambition.

[¶928:] He was attracted by the young fugitive and he questioned him closely. He saw that ill-fortune had already seared his heart, that scorn and disgrace had overthrown his courage, and that his pride, transformed into bitterness and spite, led him to see nothing in the harshness and injustice of men but their evil disposition and the vanity of all virtue. He had seen that religion was but a mask for selfishness, and its holy services but a screen for hypocrisy; he had found in the subtleties of empty disputatious heaven and hell awarded as prizes for mere words; he had seen the sublime and primitive idea of Divinity disfigured by the vain fancies of men; an d when, as he thought, faith in God required him to renounce the reason God himself had given him, he held in equal scorn our foolish imaginings and the object with which they are concerned. With no knowledge of things as they are, without any idea of their origins, he was immersed in his stubborn ignorance and utterly despised those who thought they knew more than himself.

[¶929:] The neglect of all religion soon leads to the neglect of a man's duties. The heart of this young libertine was already far on this road. Yet his was not a bad nature, though incredulity and misery were gradually stifling his natural disposition and dragging him down to ruin; they were leading him into the conduct of a rascal and the morals of an atheist.

[¶930:] The almost inevitable evil was not actually consummated. The young man was not ignorant, his education had not been neglected. He was at that happy age when the pulse beats strongly and the heart is warm but is not yet enslaved by the madness of the senses. His heart had not lost its elasticity. A native modesty, a timid disposition restrained him, and prolonged for him that period during which you watch your pupil so carefully. The hateful example of brutal depravity, of vice without any charm, had not merely failed to quicken his imagination, it had deadened it. For a long time disgust rather than virtue preserved his innocence, which would only succumb to more seductive charms.

[¶931:] The priest saw the danger and the way of escape. He was not discouraged by difficulties, he took a pleasure in his task; he determined to complete it and to restore to virtue the victim he had snatched from vice. He set about it cautiously; the beauty of the motive gave him courage and inspired him with means worthy of his zeal. Whatever might be the result, his pains would not be wasted. We are always successful when our sole aim is to do good.

[¶932:] He began to win the confidence of the proselyte by not asking any price for his kindness, by not intruding himself upon him, by not preaching at him, by always coming down to his level, and treating him as an equal. It was, so I think, a touching sight to see a serious person becoming the comrade of a young scamp, and virtue putting up with the speech of license in order to triumph over it more completely. When the young fool came to him with his silly confidences and opened his heart to him, the priest listened and set him at his ease; without giving his approval to what was bad, he took an interest in everything; no tactless reproof checked his chatter or closed his heart; the pleasure which he thought was given by his conversation increased his pleasure in telling everything; thus he made his general confession without knowing he was confessing anything.

[¶933:] After he had made a thorough study of his feelings and disposition, the priest saw plainly that, although he was not ignorant for his age, he had forgotten everything that he most needed to know, and that the disgrace which fortune had brought upon him had stifled in him all real sense of good and evil. There is a stage of degradation which robs the soul of its life; and the inner voice cannot be heard by one whose whole mind is bent on getting food. To protect the unlucky youth from the moral death which threatened him, he began to revive his amour-propre and his good opinion of himself. He showed him a happier future in the right use of his talents; he revived the generous warmth of his heart by stories of the noble deeds of others; by rousing his admiration for the doers of these deeds he revived his desire to do like deeds himself. To draw him gradually from his idle and wandering life, he made him copy out extracts from well-chosen books; he pretended to want these extracts, and so nourished in him the noble feeling of gratitude. He taught him indirectly through these books, and thus he made him sufficiently regain his good opinion of himself so that he would no longer think himself good for nothing, and would not make himself despicable in his own eyes.

[¶934:] A trifling incident will show how this kindly man tried, unknown to him, to raise the heart of his disciple out of its degradation, without seeming to think of teaching. The priest was so well known for his uprightness and his discretion, that many people preferred to entrust their alms to him, rather than to the wealthy clergy of the town. One day someone had given him some money to distribute among the poor, and the young man was mean enough to ask for some of it on the score of poverty. "No," said he, "we are brothers, you belong to me and I must not touch the money entrusted to me." Then he gave him the sum he had asked for out of his own pocket. Lessons of this sort seldom fail to make an impression on the heart of young people who are not wholly corrupt.

[¶935:] I am weary of speaking in the third person, and the precaution is unnecessary; for you are well aware, my dear friend, that I myself was this unhappy fugitive; I think I am so far removed from the disorders of my youth that I may venture to confess them, and the hand which rescued me well deserves that I should at least do honor to its goodness at the cost of some slight shams.

[¶936:] What struck me most was to see in the private life of my worthy master, virtue without hypocrisy, humanity without weakness, speech always plain and straightforward, and conduct in accordance with this speech. I never saw him trouble himself whether those whom he assisted went to vespers or confession, whether they fasted at the appointed seasons and went without meat; nor did he impose upon them any other like conditions, without which you might die of hunger before you could hope for any help from the devout.

[¶937:] Far from displaying before him the zeal of a new convert, I was encouraged by these observations and I made no secret of my way of thinking, nor did he seem to be shocked by it. Sometimes I would say to myself, he overlooks my indifference to the religion I have adopted because he sees I am equally indifferent to the religion in which I was brought up; he knows that my scorn for religion is not confined to one sect. But what could I think when I sometimes heard him give his approval to doctrines contrary to those of the Roman Catholic Church, and apparently having but a poor opinion of its ceremonies. I should have thought him a Protestant in disguise if I had not beheld him so faithful to those very customs which he seemed to value so lightly; but I knew he fulfilled his priestly duties as carefully in private as in public, and I knew not what to think of these apparent contradictions. Except for the fault which had formerly brought about his disgrace, a fault which he had only partially overcome, his life was exemplary, his conduct beyond reproach, his conversation honest and discreet. While I lived on very friendly terms with him, I learnt day by day to respect him more; and when he had completely won my heart by such great kindness, I awaited with eager curiosity the time when I should learn what was the principle on which the uniformity of this strange life was based.

[¶938:] This opportunity was a long time coming. Before taking his disciple into his confidence, he tried to get the seeds of reason and kindness which he had sown in my heart to germinate. The most difficult fault to overcome in me was a certain haughty misanthropy, a certain bitterness against the rich and successful, as if their wealth and happiness had been gained at my own expense, and as if their supposed happiness had been unjustly taken from my own. The foolish vanity of youth, which kicks against the pricks of humiliation, made me only too much inclined to this angry temper; and the self-respect, which my mentor strove to revive, led to pride, which made men still more vile in my eyes, and only added scorn to my hatred.

[¶939:] Without directly attacking this pride, he prevented it from developing into hardness of heart; and without depriving me of my self-esteem, he made me less scornful of my neighbors. By continually drawing my attention from the empty show, and directing it to the genuine sufferings concealed by it, he taught me to deplore the faults of my fellows and feel for their sufferings, to pity rather than envy them. Touched with compassion towards human weaknesses through the profound conviction of his own failings, he viewed all men as the victims of their own vices and those of others; he beheld the poor groaning under the tyranny of the rich, and the rich under the tyranny of their own prejudices. "Believe me," said he, "our illusions, far from concealing our woes, only increase them by giving value to what is in itself valueless, in making us aware of all sorts of fancied privations which we should not other-wise feel. Peace of heart consists in despising everything that might disturb that peace; the man who clings most closely to life is the man who can least enjoy it; and the man who most eagerly desires happiness is always most miserable."

[¶940:] "What gloomy ideas!" I exclaimed bitterly. "If we must deny ourselves everything, we might as well never have been born; and if we must despise even happiness itself who can be happy?" "I am," replied the priest one day, in a tone which made a great impression on me. "You happy ! So little favored by fortune, so poor, an exile and persecuted, you are happy! How have you contrived to be happy?" "My child," he answered, "I will gladly tell you"

[¶941:] Thereupon he explained that, having heard my confessions, he would confess to me. "I will open my whole heart to yours," he said, embracing me. "You will see me, if not as I am, at least as I seem to myself. When you have heard my whole profession of faith, when you really know the condition of my heart, you will know why I think myself happy, and if you think as I do, you will know how to be happy too. But these explanations are not the affair of a moment, it will take time to show you all my ideas about the lot of man and the true value of life; let us choose a fitting time and a place where we may continue this conversation without interruption."

[¶942:] I showed him how eager I was to hear him. The meeting was fixed for the very next morning. It was summer time; we rose at daybreak. He took me out of the town on to a high hill above the river Po, whose course we beheld as it flowed between its fertile banks; in the distance the landscape was crowned by the vast chain of the Alps; the beams of the rising sun already touched the plains and cast across the fields long shadows of trees, hillocks, and houses, and enriched with a thousand gleams of light the fairest picture which the human eye can see. You would have thought that nature was displaying all her splendor before our eyes to furnish a text for our conversation. After contemplating this scene for a space in silence, the man of peace spoke to me.

PROFESSION OF FAITH OF A SAVOYARD VICAR

[¶943:] My child, do not look to me for learned speeches or profound arguments. I am no great philosopher, nor do I desire to be one. I have, however, a certain amount of common-sense and a constant devotion to truth. I have no wish to argue with you nor even to convince you; it is enough for me to show you, in all simplicity of heart, what I really think. Consult your own heart while I speak; that is all I ask. If I am mistaken, I am honestly mistaken, and therefore my error will not be counted to me as a crime; if you, too, are honestly mistaken, there is no great harm done. If I am right, we are both endowed with reason, we have both the same motive for listening to the voice of reason. Why should not you think as I do?

[¶944:] By birth I was a peasant and poor; to till the ground was my portion; but my parents thought it a finer thing that I should learn to get my living as a priest and they found means to send me to college. I am quite sure that neither my parents nor I had any idea of seeking after what was good, useful, or true; we only sought what was wanted to get me ordained. I learned what was taught me, said what I was told to say, I promised all that was required, and I became a priest. But I soon discovered that when I promised not to be a man, I had promised more than I could perform.

[¶945:] Conscience, they tell us, is the creature of prejudice, but I know from experience that conscience persists in following the order of nature in spite of all the laws of man. In vain is this or that forbidden; remorse makes her voice heard but feebly when what we do is permitted by well-ordered nature, and still more when we are doing her bidding. My good youth, nature has not yet appealed to your senses; may you long remain in this happy state when her voice is the voice of innocence. Remember that to anticipate her teaching is to offend more deeply against her than to resist her teaching; you must first learn to resist, that you may know when to yield without wrong-doing.

[¶946:] From my youth up I had reverenced the married state as the first and most sacred institution of nature. Having renounced the right to marry, I was resolved not to profane the sanctity of marriage; for in spite of my education and reading I had always led a simple and regular life, and my mind had preserved the innocence of its natural instincts; these instincts had not been obscured by worldly wisdom, while my poverty kept me remote from the temptations dictated by the sophistry of vice.

[¶947:] This very resolution proved my ruin. My respect for marriage led to the discovery of my misconduct. The scandal must be expiated; I was arrested, suspended, and dismissed; I was the victim of my scruples rather than of my incontinence, and I had reason to believe, from the reproaches which accompanied my disgrace, that one can often escape punishment by being guilty of a worse fault.

[¶948:] A thoughtful mind soon learns from such experiences. I found my former ideas of justice, honesty, and every duty of man overturned by these painful events, and day by day I was losing my hold on one or another of the opinions I had accepted. What was left was not enough to form a body of ideas which could stand alone, and I felt that the evidence on which my principles rested was being weakened; at last I knew not what to think, and I came to the same conclusion as yourself, but with this difference: My lack of faith was the slow growth of manhood, attained with great difficulty, and all the harder to uproot.

[¶949:] I was in that state of doubt and uncertainty which Descartes considers essential to the search for truth. It is a state which cannot continue, it is disquieting and painful; only vicious tendencies and an idle heart can keep us in that state. My heart was not so corrupt as to delight in it, and there is nothing which so maintains the habit of thinking as being better pleased with oneself than with one's lot.

[¶950:] I pondered, therefore, on the sad fate of mortals, adrift upon this sea of human opinions, without compass or rudder, and abandoned to their stormy passions with no guide but an inexperienced pilot who does not know whence he comes or whither he is going. I said to myself, "I love truth, I seek her, and cannot find her. Show me truth and I will hold her fast; why does she hide her face from the eager heart that would fain worship her?"

[¶951:] Although I have often experienced worse sufferings, I have never led a life so uniformly distressing as this period of unrest and anxiety, when I wandered incessantly from one doubt to another, gaining nothing from my prolonged meditations but uncertainty, darkness, and contradiction with regard to the source of my being and the rule of my duties.

[¶952:] I cannot understand how any one can be a skeptic sincerely and on principle. Either such philosophers do not exist or they are the most miserable of men. Doubt with regard to what we ought to know is a condition too violent for the human mind; it cannot long be endured; in spite of itself the mind decides one way or another, and it prefers to be deceived rather than to believe nothing.

[¶953:] My perplexity was increased by the fact that I had been brought up m a church which decides everything and permits no doubts, so that having rejected one article of faith I was forced to reject the rest; since I could not accept absurd decisions, I was deprived of those which were not absurd. When I was told to believe everything, I could believe nothing, and I knew not where to stop.

[¶954:] I consulted the philosophers, I searched their books and examined their various theories; I found them all alike proud, assertive, dogmatic, professing, even in their so-called skepticism, to know everything, proving nothing, scoffing at each other. This last trait, which was common to all of them, struck me as the only point in which they were right. Braggarts in attack, they are weaklings in defense. Weigh their arguments, they are all destructive; count their voices, every one speaks for himself; they are only agreed in arguing with each other. I could find no way out of my uncertainty by listening to them.

[¶955:] I suppose this prodigious diversity of opinion is caused, in the first place, by the weakness of the human intellect; and, in the second, by pride. We have no means of measuring this vast machine, we are unable to calculate its workings; we know neither its guiding principles nor its final purpose; we do not know ourselves, we know neither our nature nor the spirit that moves us; we scarcely know whether man is one or many; we are surrounded by impenetrable mysteries. These mysteries are beyond the region of sense, we think we can penetrate them by the light of reason, but we fall back on our imagination. Through this imagined world each forces a way for himself which he holds to be right; none can tell whether his path will lead him to the goal. Yet we long to know and understand it all. The one thing we do not know is the limit of the knowable. We prefer to trust to chance and to believe what is not true, rather than to own that not one of us can see what really is. A fragment of some vast whole whose bounds are beyond our gaze, a fragment abandoned by its Creator to our foolish quarrels, we are vain enough to want to determine the nature of that whole and our own relations with regard to it.

[¶956:] If the philosophers were in a position to declare the truth, which of them would care to do so? Every one of them knows that his own system rests on no surer foundations than the rest, but he maintains it because it is his own. There is not one of them who, if he chanced to discover the difference between truth and falsehood, would not prefer his own lie to the truth which another had discovered. Where is the philosopher who would not deceive the whole world for his own glory? If he can rise above the crowd, if he can excel his rivals, what more does he want? Among believers he is an atheist; among atheists he would be a believer.

[¶957:] The first thing I learned from these considerations was to restrict my inquiries to what directly concerned myself, to rest in profound ignorance of everything else, and not even to trouble myself to doubt anything beyond what I required to know.

[¶958:] I also realized that the philosophers, far from ridding me of my vain doubts, only multiplied the doubts that tormented me and failed to remove any one of them. So I chose another guide and said, "Let me follow the inner light; it will not lead me so far astray as others have done, or if it does it will be my own fault, and I shall not go so far wrong if I follow my own illusions as if I trusted to their deceits."

[¶959:] I then went over in my mind the various opinions which I had held in the course of my life, and I saw that although no one of them was plain enough to gain immediate belief, some were more probable than others, and my inward consent was given or withheld in proportion to this improbability. Having discovered this, I made an unprejudiced comparison of all these different ideas, and I perceived that the first and most general of them was also the simplest and the most reasonable, and that it would have been accepted by every one if only it had been last instead of first. Imagine all your philosophers, ancient and modern, having exhausted their strange Systems of force, chance, fate, necessity, atoms, a living world, animated matter, and every variety of materialism. Then comes the illustrious Clarke who gives light to the world and proclaims the Being of beings and the Giver of things. What universal admiration, what unanimous applause would have greeted this new system -- a system so great, so illuminating, and so simple. Other systems are full of absurdities; this system seems to me to contain fewer things which are beyond the understanding of the human mind. I said to myself, "Every system has its insoluble problems, for the finite mind of man is too small to deal with them; these difficulties are therefore no final arguments, against any system. But what a difference there is between the direct evidence on which these systems are based! Should we not prefer that theory which alone explains all the facts, when it is no more difficult than the rest?

[¶960:] Bearing thus within my heart the love of truth as my only philosophy, and as my only method a clear and simple rule which dispensed with the need for vain and subtle arguments, I returned with the help of this rule to the examination of such knowledge as concerned myself; I was resolved to admit as self-evident all that I could not honestly refuse to believe, and to admit as true all that seemed to follow directly from this; all the rest I determined to leave undecided, neither accepting nor rejecting it, nor yet troubling myself to clear up difficulties which did not lead to any practical ends.

[¶961:] But who am I? What right have I to decide? What is it that determines my judgments? If they are inevitable, if they are the results of the impressions I receive, I am wasting my strength in such inquiries; they would be made or not without any interference of mine. I must therefore first turn my eyes upon myself to acquaint myself with the instrument I desire to use, and to discover how far it is reliable.

[¶962:] I exist, and I have senses through which I receive impressions. This is the first truth that strikes me and I am forced to accept it. Have 'I any independent knowledge of my existence, or am I only aware of it through my sensations? This is my first difficulty, and so far I cannot solve it. For I continually experience sensations, either directly or indirectly through memory, so how can I know if the feeling of self is something beyond these sensations or if it can exist independently of them?

[¶963:] My sensations take place in myself, for they make me aware of my own existence; but their cause is outside me, for they affect me whether I have any reason for them or not, and they are produced or destroyed independently of me. So I clearly perceive that my sensation, which is within me, and its cause or its object, which is outside me, are different things.

[¶964:] Thus, not only do I exist, but other entities exist also, that is to say, the objects of my sensations; and even if these objects are merely ideas, still these ideas are not me.

[¶965:] But everything outside myself; everything which acts upon my senses, I call matter, and all the particles of matter which I suppose to be united into separate entities I call bodies. Thus all the disputes of the idealists and the realists have no meaning for me; their distinctions between the appearance and the reality of bodies are wholly fanciful.

[¶966:] I am now as convinced of the existence of the universe as of my own. I next consider the objects of my sensations, and I find that I have the power of comparing them, so I perceive that I am endowed with an active force of which I was not previously aware.

[¶967:] To perceive is to feel; to compare is to judge; to judge and to feel are not the same. Through sensation objects present themselves to me separately and singly as they are in nature; by comparing them I rearrange them, I shift them so to speak, I place one upon another to decide whether they are alike or different, or more generally to find out their relations. To my mind, the distinctive faculty of an active or intelligent being is the power of understanding this word "is." I seek in vain in the merely sensitive entity that intelligent force which compares and judges; I can find no trace of it in its nature. This passive entity will be aware of each object separately, it will even be aware of the whole formed by the two together, but having no power to place them side by side it can never compare them, it can never form a judgment with regard to them.

[¶968:] To see two things at once is not to see their relations nor to judge of their differences; to perceive several objects, one beyond the other, is not to relate them. I may have at the same moment an idea of a big stick and a little stick without comparing them, without judging that one is less than the other, just as I can see my whole hand without counting my fingers. These comparative ideas, greater, smaller, together with number ideas of one, two, etc., are certainly not sensations, although my mind only produces them when my sensations occur.

[¶969:] We are told that a sensitive being distinguishes sensations from each other by the inherent differences in the sensations; this requires explanation. When the sensations are different, the sensitive being distinguishes them by their differences; when they are alike, he distinguishes them because he is aware of them one beyond the other. Otherwise, how could he distinguish between two equal objects simultaneously experienced? He would necessarily confound the two objects and take them for one object, especially under a system which professed that the representative sensations of space have no extension.

[¶970:] When we become aware of the two sensations to be compared, their impression is made, each object is perceived, both are perceived, but for all that their relation is not perceived. If the judgment of this relation were merely a sensation, and came to me solely from the object itself, my judgments would never be mistaken, for it is never untrue that I feel what I feel.

[¶971:] Why then am I mistaken as to the relation between these two sticks, especially when they are not parallel? Why, for example, do I say the small stick is a third of the large, when it is only a quarter? Why is the picture, which is the sensation, unlike its model which is the object? It is because I am active when I judge, because the operation of comparison is at fault; because my under-standing, which judges of relations, mingles its errors with the truth of sensations, which only reveal to me things.

[¶972:] Add to this a consideration which will, I feel sure, appeal to you when you 'have thought about it: it is this -- If we were purely passive in the use of our senses, there would be no communication between them; it would be impossible to know that the body we are touching and the thing we are looking at is the same. Either we should never perceive anything outside ourselves, or there would be for us five substances perceptible by the senses, whose identity we should have no means of perceiving.

[¶973:] This power of my mind which brings my sensations together and compares them may be called by any name; let it be called attention, meditation, reflection, or what you will; it is still true that it is in me and not in things, that it is I alone who produce it, though I only produce it when I receive an impression from things. Though I am compelled to feel or not to feel, I am free to examine more or less what I feel.

[¶974:] I am not therefore simply a sensitive, passive being, but an active and intelligent being, whatever philosophy says about it, I dare pretend to the honor of thinking. I know only that truth is in things and not in my spirit which judges them, and that the less I put of myself into the judgments that I make, the more I am certain to approach the truth: thus my rule of giving myself up to my sensations rather than to reasoning is confirmed by reason itself.

[¶975:] Being now, so to speak, sure of myself, I begin to look at things outside myself, and I behold myself with a sort of shudder flung at random into this vast universe, plunged as it were into the vast number of entities, knowing nothing of what they are in themselves or in relation to me. I study them, I observe them; and the first object which suggests itself for comparison with them is myself.

[¶976:] All that I perceive through the senses is matter, and I deduce all the essential properties of matter from the sensible qualities which make me perceive it, qualities which are inseparable from it. I see it sometimes in motion, sometimes at rest, hence I infer that neither motion nor rest is essential to it, but motion, being an action, is the result of a cause of which rest is only the absence. When, therefore, there is nothing acting upon matter it does not move, and for the very reason that rest and motion are indifferent to it, its natural state is a state of rest.

[¶977:] I perceive two sorts of motions of bodies, acquired motion and spontaneous or voluntary motion. In the first the cause is external to the body moved, in the second it is within. I shall not conclude from that that the motion, say of a watch, is spontaneous, for if no external cause operated upon the spring it would run down and the watch would cease to go. For the same reason I should not admit that the movements of fluids are spontaneous, neither should I attribute spontaneous motion to fire which causes their fluidity.

[¶978:] You ask me if the movements of animals are spontaneous; my answer is, "I cannot tell," but analogy points that way. You ask me again, how do I know that there are spontaneous movements? I tell you, "I know it because I feel them." I want to move my arm and I move it without any other immediate cause of the movement but my own will. In vain would any one try to argue me out of this feeling, it is stronger than any proofs; you might as well try to convince me that I do not exist.

[¶979:] If there were no spontaneity in men's actions, nor in anything that happens on this earth, it would be all the more difficult to imagine a first cause for all motion. For my own part, I feel myself so thoroughly convinced that the natural state of matter is a state of rest, and that it has no power of action in itself, that when I see a body in motion I at once assume that it is either a living body or that this motion has been imparted to it. My mind declines to accept in any way the idea of inorganic matter moving of its own accord, or giving rise to any action.

[¶980:] Yet this visible universe consists of matter, matter diffused and dead, matter which has none of the cohesion, the organization, the common feeling of the parts of a living body, for it is certain that we who are parts have no consciousness of the whole. This same universe is in motion, and in its movements, ordered, uniform, and subject to fixed laws, it has none of that freedom which appears in the spontaneous movements of men and animals. So the world is not some huge animal which moves of its own accord; its movements are therefore due to some external cause, a cause which I cannot perceive, but the inner voice makes this cause so apparent to me that I cannot watch the course of the sun without imagining a force which drives it, and when the earth revolves I think I see the hand that sets it in motion.

[¶981:] If I must accept general laws whose essential relation to matter is unperceived by me, how much further have I got? These laws, not being real things, not being substances, have therefore some other basis unknown to me. Experiment and observation have acquainted us with the laws of motion; these laws determine the results without showing their causes; they are quite inadequate to explain the system of the world and the course of the universe. With the help of dice Descartes made heaven and earth; but he could not set his dice in motion, nor start the action of his centrifugal force without the help of rotation. Newton discovered the law of gravitation; but gravitation alone would soon reduce the universe to a motionless mass; he was compelled to add a projectile force to account for the elliptical course of the celestial bodies; let Newton show us the hand that launched the planets in the tangent of their orbits.

[¶982:] The first causes of motion are not to be found in matter; matter receives and transmits motion, but does not produce it. The more I observe the action and reaction of the forces of nature playing on one another, the more I see that we must always go back from one effect to another, till we arrive at a first cause in some will; for to assume an infinite succession of causes is to assume that there is no first cause. In a word, no motion which is not caused by another motion can take place, except by a spontaneous, voluntary action; inanimate bodies have no action but motion, and there is no real action without will. This is my first principle. I believe, therefore, that there is a will which sets the universe in motion and gives life to nature. This is my first dogma, or the first article of my creed.

[¶983:] How does a will produce a physical and corporeal action? I cannot tell, but I perceive that it does so in myself; I will to do something and I do it; I will to move my body and it moves, but if an inanimate body, when at rest, should begin to move itself, the thing is incomprehensible and without precedent. The will is known to me in its action, not in Its nature. I know this will as a cause of motion, but to conceive of matter as producing motion is clearly to conceive of an effect without a cause, which is not to conceive at all.

[¶984:] It is no more possible for me to conceive how my will moves my body than to conceive how my sensations affect my mind. I do not even know why one of these mysteries has seemed less inexplicable than the other. For my own part, whether I am active or passive, the means of union of the two substances seem to me absolutely incomprehensible. It is very strange that people make this very incomprehensibility a step towards the compounding of the two substances, as if operations so different in kind were more easily explained in one case than in two.

[¶985:] The doctrine I have just laid down is indeed obscure; but at least it suggests a meaning and there is nothing in it repugnant to reason or experience; can we say as much of materialism? Is it not plain that if motion is essential to matter it would be inseparable from it, it would always be present in it in the same degree, always present in every particle of matter, always the same in each particle of matter, it would not be capable of transmission, it could neither increase nor diminish, nor could we ever conceive of matter at rest When you tell me that motion is not essential to matter but necessary to it, you try to cheat me with words which would be easier to refute if there was a little more sense in them. For either the motion of matter arises from the matter itself and is therefore essential to it; or it arises from an external cause and is not necessary to the matter, because the motive cause acts upon it; we have got back to our original difficulty.

[¶986:] The chief source of human error is to be found in general and abstract ideas; the jargon of metaphysics has never led to the discovery of any single truth, and it has filled philosophy with absurdities of which we are ashamed as soon as we strip them of their long words. Tell me, my friend, when they talk to you of a blind force diffused throughout nature, do they present any real idea to your mind? They think they are saying something by these vague expressions--universal force, essential motion--but they are saying nothing at all. The idea of motion is nothing more than the idea of transference from place to place; there is no motion without direction; for no individual can move all ways at once. In what direction then does matter move of necessity? Has the whole body of matter a uniform motion, or has each atom its own motion.1 According to the first idea the whole universe must form a solid and indivisible mass; according to the second it can only form a diffused and incoherent fluid, which would make the union of any two atoms impossible. What direction shall be taken by this motion common to all matter? Shall it be in a straight line, in a circle, or from above downwards, to the right or to the left? If each molecule has its own direction, what are the causes of all these directions and all these differences? If every molecule or atom only revolved on its own axis, nothing would ever leave its place and there would be no transmitted motion, and even then this circular movement would require to follow some direction. To set matter in motion by an abstraction is to utter words without meaning, and to attribute to matter a given direction is to assume a determining cause. The more examples I take, the more causes I have to explain, without ever finding a common agent which controls them. Far from being able to picture to myself an entire absence of order in the fortuitous concurrence of elements, I cannot even imagine such a strife, and the chaos of the universe is less conceivable to me than its harmony. I can understand that the mechanism of the universe may not be intelligible to the human mind, but when a man sets to work to explain it, he must say what men can understand.

[¶987:] If matter in motion points me to a will, matter in motion according to fixed laws points me to an intelligence; that is the second article of my creed. To act, to compare, to choose, are the operations of an active, thinking being; so this being exists. Where do you find him existing, you will say? Not merely in the revolving heavens, nor in the sun which gives us light, not in myself alone, but in the sheep that grazes, the bird that flies, the stone that falls, and the leaf blown by the wind.

[¶988:] I judge of the order of the world, although I know nothing of its purpose, for to judge of this order it is enough for me to compare the parts one with another, to study their co-operation, their relations, and to observe their united action. I know not why the universe exists, but I see continually how it is changed; I never fail to perceive the close connection by which the entities of which it consists lend their aid one to another. I am like a man who sees the works of a watch for the first time; be is never weary of admiring the mechanism, though he does not know the use of the instrument and has never seen its face. I do not know what this is for, says he, but I see that each part of it is fitted to the rest, I admire the workman in the details of his work, and I am quits certain that all these wheels only work together in this fashion for some common end which I cannot perceive.

[¶989:] Let us compare the special ends, the means, the ordered relations of every kind, then let us listen to the inner voice of feeling; what healthy mind can reject its evidence? Unless the eyes are blinded by prejudices, can they fail to see that the visible order of the universe proclaims a supreme intelligence? What sophisms must be brought together before we fail to understand the harmony of existence and the wonderful co-operation of every part for the maintenance of the rest? Say what you will of combinations and probabilities; what do you gain by reducing me to silence If you cannot gain my consent And how can you rob me of the spontaneous feeling which, in spite of myself, continually gives you the lie? If organized bodies had come together fortuitously in all sorts of ways before assuming settled forms, if stomachs are made without mouths, feet without heads, hands without arms, imperfect organs of every kind which died because they could not preserve their life, why do none of these imperfect attempts now meet our eyes; why has nature at length prescribed laws to herself which she did not at first recognize? I must not be surprised if that which is possible should happen, and if the improbability of the event is compensated for by the number of the attempts. I grant this; yet if any one told me that printed characters scattered broadcast had produced the Aeneid all complete, I would not condescend to take a single step to verify this falsehood. You will tell me I am forgetting the multitude of attempts. But how many such attempts must I assume to bring the combination within the bounds of probability? For my own part the only possible assumption is that the chances are infinity to one that the product is not the work of chance. In addition to this, chance combinations yield nothing but products of the same nature as the elements combined, so that life and organization will not be produced by a flow of atoms, and a chemist when making his compounds will never give them thought and feeling in his crucible.

[¶990:] I was surprised and almost shocked when I read Neuwentit. How could this man desire to make a book out of the wonders of nature, wonders which show the wisdom of the author of nature? His book would have been as large as the world itself before he had exhausted his subject, and as soon as we attempt to give details, that greatest wonder of all, the concord and harmony of the whole, escapes us. The mere generation of living organic bodies is the despair of the human mind; the insurmountable barrier raised by nature between the various species, so that they should not mix with one another, is the clearest proof of her intention. She is not content to have established order, she has taken adequate measures to prevent the disturbance of that order.

[¶991:] There is not a being in the universe which may not be regarded as in some respects the common center of all, around which they are grouped, so that they are all reciprocally end and means in relation to each other, The mind is confused and lost amid these innumerable relations, not one of which is itself confused or lost in the crowd. What absurd assumptions are required to deduce all this harmony from the blind mechanism of matter set in motion by chance! In vain do those who deny the unity of intention manifested in the relations of all the parts of this great whole, in vain do they conceal their nonsense under abstractions, coordinations, general principles, symbolic expressions; whatever they do I find it impossible to conceive of a system of entities so firmly ordered unless I believe in an intelligence that orders them. It is not in my power to believe that passive and dead matter can have brought forth living and feeling beings, that blind chance has brought forth intelligent beings, that that which does not think has brought forth thinking beings.

[¶992:] I believe, therefore, that the world is governed by a wise and powerful will; I see it or rather I feel it, and it is a great thing to know this. But has this same world always existed, or has it been created? Is there one source of all things? Are there two or many? What is their nature? I know not; and what concern is it of mine? When these things become of importance to me I will try to learn them; till then 1 abjure these idle speculations, which may trouble my peace, but cannot affect my conduct nor be comprehended by my reason.

[¶993:] Recollect that I am not preaching my own opinion bat explaining it. Whether matter is eternal or created' whether its origin is passive or not, it is still certain that the whole is one, and that it proclaims a single intelligence; for I see nothing that is not part of the same ordered system, nothing which does not co-operate to the same end, namely, the conservation of all within the established order. This being who wills and can perform his will' this being active through his own power, this being, whoever he may be, who moves the universe and orders all things, is what I call God. To this name I add the ideas of intelligence, power, will, which I have brought together, and that of kindness which is their necessary consequence; but for all this I know no more of the being to which I ascribe them. He hides himself alike from my senses and my understanding; the more I think of him, the more perplexed I am; I know full well that he exists, and that he exists of himself alone; I know that my existence depends on his, and that everything I know depends upon him also. I see God everywhere in his works; I feel him within myself; I behold him all around me; but if I try to ponder him himself, if I try to find out where he is, what he is, what is his substance, he escapes me and my troubled spirit finds nothing.

[¶994:] Convinced of my unfitness, I shall never argue about the nature of God unless I am driven to it by the feeling of his relations with myself. Such reasonings are always rash; a wise man should venture on them with trembling, he should be certain that he can never sound their abysses; for the most insolent attitude towards God is not to abstain from thinking of him, but to think evil of him.

[¶995:] After the discovery of such of his attributes as enable me to conceive of his existence, I return to myself, and I try to discover what is my place in the order of things which he governs, and I can myself examine. At once, and beyond possibility of doubt, I discover my species; for by my own will and the instruments I can control to carry out my will, I have more power to act upon all bodies about me, either to make use of or to avoid their action at my pleasure, than any of them has power to act upon me against my will by mere physical impulsion; and through my intelligence I am the only one who can examine all the rest. What being here below, except man, can observe others, measure, calculate, forecast their motions, their effects, and unite, so to speak, the feeling of a common existence with that of his individual existence? What is there so absurd in the thought that all things are made for me, when I alone can relate all things to myself?

[¶996:] It is true, therefore, that man is lord of the earth on which he dwells; for not only does he tame all the beasts, not only does he control its elements through his industry; but he alone knows how to control it; by contemplation he takes possession of the stars which he cannot approach. Show me any other creature on earth who can make a fire and who can behold with admiration the sun. What! can I observe and know all creatures and their relations; can I feel what is meant by order, beauty, and virtue; can I consider the universe and raise myself towards the hand that guides it; can I love good and perform it; and should I then liken myself to the beasts? Wretched soul, it is your gloomy philosophy which makes you like the beasts; or rather in vain do you seek to degrade your-self; your genius belies your principles, your kindly heart belies your doctrines, and even the abuse of your powers proves their excellence in your own despite.

[¶997:] For myself, I am not pledged to the support of any system. 1 am a plain and honest man, one who is not carried away by party spirit, one who has no ambition to be head of a sect; I am content with the place where God has set me; I see nothing, next to God himself, which is better than my species; and if I had to choose my place in the order of creation, what more could I choose than to be a man!

[¶998:] I am not puffed up by this thought, I am deeply moved by it; for this state was no choice of mine, it was not due to the deserts of a creature who as yet did not exist. Can I behold myself thus distinguished without congratulating myself on this post of honor, without blessing the hand which bestowed it? The first return to self has given birth to a feeling of gratitude and thankfulness to the author of my species, and this feeling calls forth my first homage to the beneficent Godhead. I worship his Almighty power and my heart acknowledges his mercies. Is it not a natural consequence of our amour de soi to honor our protector and to love our benefactor'.

[¶999:] But when, in my desire to discover my own place within my species, I consider its different ranks and the men who fill them, where am I now? What a sight meets my eyes! Where is now the order I perceived? Nature showed me a scene of harmony and proportion; the human race shows me nothing but confusion and disorder. The elements agree together; men are in a state of chaos. The beasts are happy; their king alone is wretched. O Wisdom, where are thy laws? O Providence, is this thy rule over the world? Merciful God, where is thy Power? I behold the earth, and there is evil upon it.

[¶1000:] Would you believe it, dear friend, from these gloomy thoughts and apparent contradictions, there was shaped in my mind the sublime idea of the soul, which all my seeking had hitherto failed to discover? While I meditated upon man's nature, I seemed to discover two distinct principles in it; one of them raised him to the study of the eternal truths, to the love of justice, and of true morality, to the regions of the world of thought, which the wise delight to contemplate; the other led him downwards to himself, made him the slave of his senses, of the passions which are their instruments, and thus opposed everything suggested to him by the former principle. When I felt myself carried away, distracted by these conflicting motives, I said, No; man is not one; I will and I will not; I feel myself at once a slave and a free man; I perceive what is right, I love it, and I do what is wrong; I am active when I listen to the voice of reason; I am passive when I am carried away by my passions; and when I yield, my worst suffering is the knowledge that I might have resisted.

[¶1001:] Young man, hear me with confidence. I will always be honest with yon. If conscience is the creature of prejudice, I am certainly wrong, and there is no such thing as a proof of morality; but if to put oneself first is an inclination natural to man, and if the first sentiment of justice is moreover inborn in the human heart, let those who say man is a simple creature remove these contradictions and I will grant that there is but one substance.

[¶1002:] You will note that by this term substance I understand generally the being endowed with some primitive quality, apart from all special and secondary modifications. If then all the primitive qualities which are known to us can be united in one and the same being, we should only acknowledge one substance; but if there are qualities which are mutually exclusive, there are as many different substances as there are such exclusions. You will think this over; for my own part, whatever Locke may say, it is enough for me to recognize matter as having merely extension and divisibility to convince myself that it cannot think, and if a philosopher tells me that trees feel and rocks think in vain will he perplex me with his cunning arguments; I merely regard him as a dishonest sophist, who prefers to say that stones have feeling rather than that men have souls.

[¶1003:] Suppose a deaf man denies the existence of sounds because he has never heard them. I put before his eyes a stringed instrument and cause it to sound in unison by means of another instrument concealed from him; the deaf man sees the chord vibrate. I tell him, "The sound makes it do that." "Not at all," says he, "the string itself is the cause of the vibration; to vibrate in that way is a quality common to all bodies." "Then show me this vibration in other bodies," I answer, "or at least show me its cause in this string." "I cannot," replies the deaf man; "but because I do not understand how that string vibrates why should I try to explain it by means of your sounds, of which I have not the least idea? It is explaining one obscure fact by means of a cause still more obscure. Make me perceive your sounds; or I say there are no such things."

[¶1004:] The more I consider thought and the nature of the human mind, the more likeness I find between the arguments of the materialists and those of 'the deaf man. Indeed, they are deaf to the inner voice which cries aloud to them, in a tone which can hardly be mistaken. A machine does not think, there is neither movement nor form which can produce reflection; something within thee tries to break the bands which confine it; space is not thy measure, the whole universe does not suffice to contain thee; thy sentiments, thy desires, thy anxiety, thy pride itself, have another origin than this small body in which thou art imprisoned.

[¶1005:] No material creature is in itself active, and I am active. In vain do you argue this point with me; I feel it, and it is this feeling which speaks to me more forcibly than the reason which disputes it. I have a body which is acted upon by other bodies, and it acts in turn upon them; there is no doubt about this reciprocal action; but my will is independent of my senses; I consent or I resist; I yield or I win the victory, and I know very well in myself when I have done what I wanted and when I have merely given way to my passions. I have always the power to will, but not always the strength to do what I will. When I yield to temptation I surrender myself to the action of external objects. When I blame myself for this weakness, I listen to my own will alone; I am a slave in my vices, a free man in my remorse; the feeling of freedom is never effaced in me but when I myself do wrong, and when I at length prevent the voice of the soul from protesting against the authority of the body.

[¶1006:] I am only aware of will through the consciousness of my own will, and intelligence is no better known to me. When you ask me what is the cause which determines my will, it is my turn to ask what cause determines my judgment; for it is plain that these two causes are but one; and if you understand clearly that man is active in his judgments, that his intelligence is only the power to compare and judge you will see that his freedom is only a similar power or one derived from this; he chooses between good and evil as he judges between truth and falsehood; if his judgment is at fault, he chooses amiss. What then is the cause that determines his will? It is his judgment. And what is the cause that deter-mines his judgment? It is his intelligence, his power of judging; the determining cause is in himself. Beyond that, I understand nothing.

[¶1007:] No doubt I am not free not to desire my own welfare, I am not free to desire my own hurt; but my freedom consists in this very thing, that I can will what is for my own good, or what I esteem as such, without any external compulsion. Does it follow that I am not my own master because I cannot be other than myself?

[¶1008:] The motive power of all action is In the will of a free creature; we can go no farther. It is not the word freedom that is meaning-less, but the word necessity. To suppose some action which is not the effect of an active motive power is indeed to suppose effects without cause, to reason in a vicious circle. Either there is no original impulse, or every original impulse has no antecedent cause, and there is no will properly so-called without freedom. Man is therefore free to act, and as such he is animated by an immaterial substance; that is the third article of my creed. From these three you will easily deduce the rest, so that I need not enumerate them.

[¶1009:] If man is at once active and free, he acts of his own accord; what he does freely is no part of the system marked out by Providence and it cannot be imputed to Providence. Providence does not will the evil that man does when he misuses the freedom given to him; neither does Providence prevent him doing it, either because the wrong done by so feeble a creature is as nothing in its eyes, or because it could not prevent it without doing a greater wrong and degrading his nature. Providence has made him free that he may choose the good and refuse the evil. It has made him capable of till. choice if he uses rightly the faculties bestowed upon him, but it has so strictly limited his powers that the misuse of his freedom cannot disturb the general order. The evil that man does reacts upon himself without affecting the system of the world, without preventing the preservation of the human species in spite of itself. To complain that God does not prevent us from doing wrong is to complain because he has made man of so excellent a nature, that he has endowed his actions with that morality by which they are ennobled, that he has made virtue man's birthright. Supreme happiness consists in self-content; that we may gain this self-content we are placed upon this earth and endowed with freedom, we are tempted by our passions and restrained by conscience. What more could divine power itself have done on our behalf? Could it have made our nature a contradiction, and have given the prize of well-doing to one who was incapable of evil? To prevent a man from wickedness, should Providence have restricted him to instinct and made him a fool? Not so, O God of my soul, I will never reproach thee that thou hast created me in thine own image, that I may be free and good and happy like my Maker!

[¶1010:] It is the abuse of our powers that makes us unhappy and wicked. Our cares, our sorrows, our sufferings are of our own making. Moral ills are undoubtedly the work of man, and physical ills would be nothing but for our vices which have made us liable to them. Has not nature made us feel our needs as a means to our preservation? Is not bodily suffering a sign that the machine is out of order and needs attention? Death. . .. Do not the wicked poison their own life and ours? Who would wish to live for ever? Death is the cure for the evils you bring upon yourself; nature would not have you suffer perpetually. How few sufferings are felt by man living in a state of primitive simplicity! His life is almost entirely free from suffering and from passion; he neither fears nor feels death; if he feels it, his sufferings make him desire it; henceforth it is no evil in his eyes. If we were but content to be ourselves we should have no cause to complain of our lot; but in the search for an imaginary good we find a thousand real ills. He who cannot bear a little Pam must expect to suffer greatly. If a man injures his constitution by dissipation, you try to cure him with medicine; the ill he fears is added to the ill he feels; the thought of death makes it horrible and hastens its approach; the more we seek to escape from it, the more we are aware of it; and we go through life in the fear of death, blaming nature for the evils we have inflicted on ourselves by our neglect of her laws.

[¶1011:] O Man! seek no further for the author of evil; thou art he. There is no evil but the evil you do or the evil you suffer, and both come from yourself. Evil in general can only spring from disorder, and in the order of the world I find a never-failing system. Evil in particular cases exists only in the mind of those who experience it; and this feeling is not the gift of nature, but the work of man himself. Pain has little power over those who, having thought little, look neither before nor after. Take away our fatal progress, take away our faults and our vices, take away man's handiwork, and all is well.

[¶1012:] Where all is well, there is no such thing as injustice. Justice and goodness are inseparable; now goodness is the necessary result of boundless power and of that self-love which is innate in all sentient beings. The omnipotent projects himself so to speak, into the being of his creatures. Creation and preservation are the everlasting work of power; it does not act on that which has no existence; God is not the God of the dead; he could not harm and destroy without injury to himself. The omnipotent can only will what is good. Therefore he who is supremely good, because he is supremely powerful, must also be supremely just,. otherwise he would contradict himself; for that love of order which creates order we call goodness and that love of order which preserves order we call justice.

[¶1013:] Men say God owes nothing to his creatures I think he owes them all he promised when he gave them their being. Now to give them the idea of something good and to make them feel the need of it, is to promise it to them. The more closely I study myself, the more carefully I consider, the more plainly do I read these words, "Be just and you will be happy." It is not so, however, in the present condition of things, the wicked prospers and the oppression of the righteous continues. Observe how angry we are when this expectation is disappointed. Conscience revolts and murmurs against her Creator; she exclaims with cries and groans, "Thou hast deceived me."

[¶1014:] "I have deceived thee, rash soul! Who told thee this? Is thy soul destroyed? Hast thou ceased to exist? O Brutus! O my son! let there be no stain upon the close of thy noble life; do not abandon thy hope and thy glory with thy corpse upon the plains of Philippi. Why dost thou say, 'Virtue is naught,' when thou art about to enjoy the reward of virtue? Thou art about to die I Nay, thou shalt live, and thus my promise is fulfilled."

[¶1015:] One might judge from the complaints of impatient men that God owes them the reward before they have deserved it, that he is bound to pay for virtue in advance. Oh! let us first be good and then we shall be happy. Let us not claim the prize before we have won it, nor demand our wages before we have finished our work "It is net in the lists that we crown the victors in the sacred games," says Plutarch, "it is when they have finished their course."

[¶1016:] If the soul is immaterial, it may survive the body; and if it so survives, Providence is justified. Had I no other proof of the immaterial nature of the soul, the triumph of the wicked and the oppression of the righteous in this world would be enough to convince me. I should seek to resolve so appalling a discord in the universal harmony. I should say to myself, "All is not over with life, everything finds its place at death." I should still have to answer the question, "What becomes of man when all we know of him through our senses has vanished?" This question no longer presents any difficulty to me when I admit the two substances. It is easy to understand that what is imperceptible to those senses escapes me, during my bodily life, when I perceive through my senses only. When the union of soul and body is destroyed, I think one may be dissolved and the other may be preserved. Why should the destruction of the one imply the destruction of the other? On the contrary, so unlike in their nature, they were during their union in a highly unstable condition, and when this union comes to an end they both return to their natural state; the active vital substance regains all the force which it expended to set in motion the passive dead substance. Alas! my vices make me only too well aware that man is but half alive during this life; the life of the soul only begins with the death of the body.

[¶1017:] But what is that life? Is the soul of man in its nature immortal? I know not. My finite understanding cannot hold the infinite; what is called eternity eludes my grasp. What can I assert or deny, how can I reason with regard to what I cannot conceive? I believe that the soul survives the body for the maintenance of order; who knows if this is enough to make it eternal? However, I know that the body is worn out and destroyed by the division of its parts, but I cannot conceive a similar destruction of the conscious nature, and as I cannot imagine how it can die, I presume that it does not die. As this assumption is consoling and in itself not unreasonable, why should I fear to accept it?

[¶1018:] I am aware of my soul; it is known to me in feeling and in thought; I know what it is without knowing its essence; I cannot reason about ideas which are unknown to me. What I do know is this, that my personal identity depends upon memory, and that to be indeed the same self I must remember that I have existed, Now after death I could not recall what I was when alive unless I also remembered what I felt and therefore what I did; and I have no doubt that this remembrance will one day form the happiness of the good and the torment of the bad. In this world our inner conscious-ness is absorbed by the crowd of eager passions which cheat remorse. The humiliation and disgrace involved in the practice of virtue do not permit us to realize its charm. But when, freed from the illusions of the bodily senses, we behold with joy the supreme Being and the eternal truths which flow from him; when all the powers of our soul are alive to the beauty of order and we are wholly occupied in comparing what we have done with what we ought to have done, then it is that the voice of conscience will regain its strength and sway; then it is that the pure delight which springs from self-content, and the sharp regret for our own degradation of that self, will decide by means of overpowering feeling what shall be the fate which each has prepared for himself. My good friend, do not ask me whether there are other sources of happiness or suffering; I cannot tell; that which my fancy pictures is enough to console me in this life and to bid me look for a life to come. I do not say the good will be rewarded, for what greater good can a truly good being expect than to exist in accordance with his nature? But I do assert that the good will be happy, because their maker, the author of all justice, who has made them capable of feeling, has not made them that they may suffer; moreover, they have not abused their freedom upon earth and they have not changed their fate through any fault of their own; yet they have suffered in this life and it will be made up to them in the life to come. This feeling relies not so much on man's deserts as on the idea of good which seems to me inseparable from the divine essence. I only assume that the laws of order are constant and that God is true to himself.

[¶1019:] Do not ask me whether the torments of the wicked will endure for ever, whether the goodness of their creator can condemn them to the eternal suffering; again, I cannot tell, and I have no empty curiosity for the investigation of useless problems. How does the fate of the wicked concern me? I take little interest in it All the same I find it hard to believe that they will be condemned to everlasting torments. If the supreme justice calls for vengeance, it claims it in this life. The nations of the world with their errors are its ministers. Justice uses self-inflicted ills to punish the crimes which have deserved them. It is in your own insatiable souls, devoured by envy, greed, and ambition, it is in the midst of your false prosperity, that the avenging passions find the due reward of your crimes. What need to seek a hell in the future life? It Is in the breast of the wicked.

[¶1020:] When our fleeting needs are over, and our mad desires are at rest' there should alto be an end of our passions and our crimes. Can pure spirits be capable of any perversity? Having need of nothing, why should they be wicked? If they are free from our gross senses, if their happiness consists in the contemplation of other beings, they can only desire what is good; and he who cease to be bad can never be miserable. This is what I am inclined to think though I have not been at the pains to come to any decision. 0 God, merciful and good, whatever thy decrees may be I adore them; if thou should t commit the wicked to everlasting punishment, I abandon my feeble reason to thy justice; but if the remorse of these wretched beings should in the course of time be extinguished, if their sufferings should come to an end. and if the same peace shall one day be the lot of all mankind, I give thanks to thee for this. Is not the wicked my brother? How often have I been tempted to be like him? let him be delivered from his misery and freed from the spirit of hatred that accompanied it; let him be as happy as I myself; his happiness, far from arousing my jealousy, will only increase my own.

[¶1021:] Thus it is that, in the contemplation of God in his works, and in the study of such of his attributes as it concerned me to know, I have slowly grasped and developed the idea, at first partial and imperfect, which I have formed of this Infinite Being. But if this idea has become nobler and greater it is also more suited to the human reason. As I approach in spirit the eternal light, I am confused and dazzled by its glory, and compelled to abandon all the earthly notions which helped me to picture it to myself. God is no longer corporeal and sensible; the supreme mind which rules the world is no longer the world itself; in vain do I strive to grasp his inconceivable essence. When I think that it is he that gives life and movement to the living and moving substance which controls all living bodies; when I hear it said that my soul is spiritual and that God is a spirit, I revolt against this abasement of the divine essence; as if God and my soul were of one and the same nature! is if God were not the one and only absolute being, the only really active, feeling, thinking, willing being, from whom we derive our thought, feeling, motion, will, our freedom and our very existence! We are free because he wills our freedom, and his inexplicable substance is to our souls what our souls are to our bodies. I know not whether he has created matter, body, soul, the world itself. The idea of creation confounds me and eludes my grasp; so far as I can conceive of it I believe it; but I know that he has formed the universe and all that is, that he has made and ordered all things. No doubt God is eternal; but can my mind grasp the idea of eternity? Why should I cheat myself with meaningless words? This is what I do understand; before things were -- God was; he will be when they are no more, and if all things come to an end he will still endure. That a being beyond my comprehension should give life to other beings, this is merely difficult and beyond my understanding; but that Being and Nothing should be convertible terms, this is indeed a palpable contradiction, an evident absurdity.

[¶1022:] God is intelligent, but how? Man is intelligent when he reasons, but the Supreme Intelligence does not need to reason; there is neither premise nor conclusion for him, there is not even a proposition. The Supreme Intelligence is wholly intuitive, it sees what is and what shall be; all truths are one for it, as all places are but one point and all time but one moment. Man's power makes use of means, the divine power is self-active. God can because he wills; his will is his power. God is good; this is certain; but man finds his happiness in the welfare of his kind, God's happiness consists in the love of order; for it is through order that he maintains what is, and unites each part in the whole. God is just; of this I am sure, it is a consequence of his goodness; man's injustice is not God's work, but his own; that moral justice which seems to the philosophers a presumption against Providence, is to me a proof of its existence. But man's justice consists in giving to each his due; God's justice consists in demanding from each of us an account of that which he has given us.

[¶1023:] If I have succeeded in discerning these attributes of which I have no absolute idea, it is m the form of unavoidable deductions, and by the right use of my reason; but I affirm them without understanding them, and at bottom that is no affirmation at all. In vain do I say, God is thus, I feel it, I experience it, none the more do I understand how God can be thus.

[¶1024:] In a word the more I strive to envisage his infinite essence the less do I comprehend it; but it is, and that is enough for me; the less I understand, the more I adore. I abase myself, saying, " Being of beings, I am because thou art; to fix my thoughts on thee is to ascend to the source of my being. The best use I can make of my reason is to resign it before thee; my mind delights, my weakness rejoices, to feel myself overwhelmed by thy greatness."

[¶1025:] Having thus deduced from the perception of objects of sense and from my inner consciousness, which leads me to judge of causes by my native reason, the principal truths which I require to know, I must now seek such principles of conduct as I can draw from them, and such rules as I must lay down for my guidance in the fulfillment of my destiny in this world, according to the purpose of my Maker. Still following the same method, I do not derive these rules from the principles of the higher philosophy, I find them in the depths of my heart, traced by nature in characters which nothing can efface. I need only consult myself with regard to what I wish to do; what I feel to be right is right, what I feel to be wrong is wrong; conscience is the best casuist; and it is only when we haggle with conscience that we have recourse to the subtleties of argument. Our first duty is towards ourself; yet how often does the voice of others tell us that in seeking our good at the expense of others we are doing ill? We think we are following the guidance of nature, and we are resisting it; we listen to what she says to our senses, and we neglect what she says to our heart; the active being obeys, the passive commands. Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. It is strange that these voices often contradict each other? And then to which should we give heed? Too often does reason deceive us; we have only too good a right to doubt her; but conscience never deceives us; she is the true guide of man; it is to the soul what instinct is to the body; he who obeys his conscience is following nature and he need not fear that he will go astray. This is a matter of great importance, continued my benefactor, seeing that I was about to interrupt him; let me atop awhile to explain it more fully.

[¶1026:] The morality of our actions consists entirely in the judgments we ourselves form with regard to them. If good is good, it must be good in the depth of our heart as well as in our actions; and the first reward of justice is the consciousness that we are acting justly. If moral goodness is in accordance with our nature, man can only be healthy in mind and body when he is good. If it is not so, and if man is by nature evil, he cannot cease to be evil without corrupting his nature, and goodness in him is a crime against nature. If he is made to do harm to his fellow-creatures, as the wolf is made to devour his prey, a humane man would be as depraved a creature as a pitiful wolf; and virtue alone would cause remorse.

[¶1027:] My young friend, let us look within, let us set aside all personal prejudices and see whither our inclinations lead us. Do we take more pleasure in the sight of the sufferings of others or their joys? Is it pleasanter to do a kind action or an unkind action, and which leaves the more delightful memory behind it? Why do you enjoy the theatre? Do you delight in the crimes you behold? Do you weep over the punishment which overtakes the criminal? They say we are indifferent to everything but self-interest; yet we find our consolation in our sufferings in the charms of friendship and humanity, and even in our pleasures we should be too lonely and miserable if we had no one to share them 'with us. If there is no such thing as morality in man's heart, what is the source of his rapturous admiration of noble deeds, his passionate devotion to great men? What connection is there between self-interest and this enthusiasm for virtue? Why should I choose to be Cato dying by his own hand, rather than Caesar in his triumphs? Take from our hearts this love of what is noble and you rob us of the joy of life. The mean-spirited man in whom these delicious feelings have been stifled among vile passions, who by thinking of no one but himself comes at last to love no one but himself, this man feels no raptures, his cold heart no longer throbs with joy, and his eyes no longer fill with the sweet tears of sympathy, he delights in nothing; the wretch has neither life nor feeling, he is already dead.

[¶1028:] There are many bad men in this world, but there are few of these dead souls, alive only to self-interest, and insensible to all that is right and good. We only delight in injustice so long as it is to our own advantage; in every other ease we wish the innocent to be protected. If we see some act of violence or injustice in town or country, our hearts are at once stirred to their depths by an instinctive anger and wrath, which bids us go to the help of the oppressed; but we are restrained by a stronger duty, and the law deprives us of our right to protect the innocent. On the other hand, if some deed of mercy or generosity meets our eye, what reverence and love does it inspire! Do we not say to ourselves, "I should like to have done that myself"? What does it matter to us that two thousand years ago a man was just or unjust? and yet we take the same interest in ancient history as if it happened yesterday. What a] e the crimes of Cataline to me? I shall not be his victim. Why then a have I the same horror of his crimes as if he were living now? We do not hate the wicked merely because of the harm they do to ourselves, but because they are wicked. Not only do we wish to be happy ourselves, we wish others to be happy too, and if this happiness does not interfere with our own happiness, it increases it. In conclusion, whether we will or not, we pity the unfortunate; when we see their suffering we suffer too. Even the most depraved are not wholly without this instinct, and it often leads them to self-contradiction. The highwayman who robs the traveler, clothes the nakedness of the poor; the fiercest murderer supports a fainting man.

[¶1029:] Men speak of the voice of remorse, the secret punishment of hidden crimes, by which such are often brought to light. Alas! who does not know its unwelcome voice? We speak from experience, and we would gladly stifle this imperious feeling which causes us such agony. Let us obey the call of nature; we shall see that her yoke is easy and that when we give heed to her voice we find a joy in the answer of a good conscience. The wicked fears and flees from her; he delights to escape from himself; his anxious eyes look around him for some object of diversion; without bitter satire and rude mockery he would always be sorrowful; the scornful laugh is his one pleasure. Not so the just man, who finds his peace within himself; there is joy not malice in his laughter, a joy which springs from his own heart; he is as cheerful alone as in company, his satisfaction does not depend on those who approach him; it includes them.

[¶1030:] Cast your eyes over every nation of the world; peruse every volume of its history: in the midst of all these strange and cruel forms of worship, among this amazing variety of manners and customs, you will everywhere find the same ideas of right and justice; everywhere the same principles of morality, the same ideas of good and evil. The old paganism gave birth to abominable gods who would have been punished as scoundrels here below, gods who merely offered, as a picture of supreme happiness, crimes to be committed and lust to be gratified. But in vain did vice descend from the abode of the gods armed with their sacred authority; the moral instinct refused to admit it into the heart of man. While the debaucheries of Jupiter were celebrated, the continence of Xenocrates was revered; the chaste Lucrece adored the shameless Venus; the bold Roman offered sacrifices to Fear; he invoked the god who mutilated his father, and he died without a murmur at the hand of his own father. The most unworthy gods were worshipped by the noblest men. The sacred voice of nature was stronger than the voice of the gods, and won reverence upon earth; it seemed to relegate guilt and the guilty alike to heaven.

[¶1031:] There is therefore at the bottom of our hearts an innate principle of justice and virtue, by which, in spite of our maxims, we judge our own actions or those of others to be good or evil; and it is this principle that I call conscience.

[¶1032:] But at this word I hear the murmurs of all the wise men so-called. Childish errors, prejudices of our upbringing, they exclaim in concert! There is nothing in the human mind but what it has gained by experience; and we judge everything solely by means of the ideas we have acquired. They go further; they even venture to reject the clear and universal agreement of all peoples, and to set against this striking unanimity in the judgment of mankind, they seek out some obscure exception known to themselves alone; as if the whole trend of nature were rendered null by the depravity of a single nation, and as if the existence of monstrosities made an end of species. But to what purpose does the skeptic Montaigne strive himself to unearth in some obscure corner of the world a custom which is contrary to the ideas of justice? To what purpose does he credit the most untrustworthy traveler, while he refuses to believe the greatest writers? A few strange and doubtful customs, based on local causes, unknown to us; shall these destroy a general inference based on the agreement of all the nations of the earth, differing from each other in all else, but agreed in this? O Montaigne, you pride yourself on your truth and honesty; be sincere and truthful, if a philosopher can be so, and tell me if there is any country upon earth where it is a crime to keep one's plighted word, to be merciful, helpful, and generous, where the good man is scorned, and the traitor is held in honor.

[¶1033:] Self-interest, so they say, induces each of us to agree for the common good. But how is it that the good man consents to this to his own hurt? Does a man go to death from self-interest? No doubt each man acts for his own good, but if there is no such thing as moral good to be taken into consideration, self-interest will only enable you to account for the deeds of the wicked; possibly you will not attempt to do more. A philosophy which could find no place for good deeds would be too detestable; you would find yourself compelled either to find some mean purpose, some wicked motive, or to abuse Socrates and slander Regulus. If such doctrines ever took root among us, the voice of nature, together with the voice of reason, would constantly protest against them, till no adherent of such teaching could plead an honest excuse for his partisanship.

[¶1034:] It is no part of my scheme to enter at present into metaphysical discussions which neither you nor I can understand, discussions which really lead nowhere. I have told you already that I do not wish to philosophize with you, but to help you to consult your own heart. If all the philosophers in the world should prove that I am wrong, and you feel that I am right, that is all I ask.

[¶1035:] For this purpose it is enough to lead you to distinguish between our acquired ideas and our natural feelings; for feeling precedes knowledge; and since we do not learn to seek what is good for us and avoid what is bad for us, but get this desire from nature, in the same way the love of good and the hatred of evil are as natural to us as our self-love. The decrees of conscience are not judgments but feelings. Although all our ideas come from without, the feelings by which they are weighed are within us, and it is by these feelings alone that we perceive fitness or unfitness of things in relation to ourselves, which leads us to seek or shun these things.

[¶1036:] To exist is to feel; our feeling is undoubtedly earlier than our intelligence, and we had feelings before we had ideas. Whatever may be the cause of our being, it has provided for our preservation by giving us feelings suited to our nature; and no one can deny that these at least are innate. These feelings, so far as the individual is concerned, are amour de soi, fear, pain, the dread of death, the desire for comfort. Again, if, as it is impossible to doubt, man is by nature sociable, or at least fitted to become sociable, he can only be so by means of other innate feelings, relative to his kind; for if only physical well-being were considered. men would certainly be scattered rather than brought together. But the motive power of conscience is derived from the moral system formed through this twofold relation to himself and to his fellow-men. To know good is not to love it; this knowledge is not innate in man; but as soon as his reason leads him to perceive it, his conscience impels him to love it; it is this feeling which is innate.

[¶1037:] So I do not think, my young friend, that it is impossible to explain the immediate force of conscience as a result of our own nature, independent of reason itself. And even should it be impossible, it is unnecessary; for those who deny this principle, admitted and received by everybody else in the world, do not prove that there is no such thing; they are content to affirm, and when we affirm its existence we have quite as good grounds as they, while we have moreover the witness within us, the voice of conscience, which speaks on its own behalf. If the first beams of judgment dazzle us and confuse the objects we behold, let us wait till our feeble sight grows clear and strong, and in the light of reason we shall soon behold these very objects as nature has already showed them to us. Or rather let us be simpler and less pretentious; let us be content with the first feelings we experience in ourselves, since science always brings us back to these, unless it has led us astray.

[¶1038:] Conscience! Conscience! Divine instinct, immortal voice from heaven; sure guide for a creature ignorant and finite indeed, yet intelligent and free; infallible judge of good and evil, making man like to God! In thee consists the excellence of man's nature and the morality of his actions; apart from thee, I find nothing in myself to raise me above the beasts--nothing but the sad privilege of wandering from one error to another, by the help of an unbridled understanding and a reason which knows no principle.

[¶1039:] Thank heaven we have now got rid of all that alarming show of philosophy; we may be men without being scholars; now that we need not spend our life in the study of morality, we have found a less costly and surer guide through this vast labyrinth of human thought. But it is not enough to be aware that there is such a guide; we must know her and follow her. If she speaks to all hearts, how is it that so few give heed to her voice? She speaks to us in the language of nature, and everything leads us to forget that tongue. Conscience is timid, she loves peace and retirement; she is startled by noise and numbers; the prejudices from which she is said to arise are her worst enemies. She flees before them or she is silent; their noisy voices drown her words, so that she cannot get a hearing; fanaticism dares to counterfeit her voice and to inspire crimes in her name. She is discouraged by ill-treatment; she no longer speaks to us, no longer answers to our call; when she has been scorned so long, it is as hard to recall her as it was to banish her.

[¶1040:] How often in the course of my inquiries have I grown weary of my own coldness of heart! How often have grief and weariness poured their poison into my first meditations and made them hateful to me! My barren heart yielded nothing but a feeble zeal and a lukewarm love of truth. I said to myself: Why should I strive to find what does not exist? Moral good is a dream, the pleasures of sense are the only real good. When once we have lost the taste for the pleasures of the soul, how hard it is to recover it I How much more difficult to acquire it if we have never possessed it! If there were any man so wretched as never to have done anything all his life long which he could remember with pleasure, and which would make him glad to have lived, that man would be incapable of self-knowledge, and for want of knowledge of goodness, of which his nature is capable, he would be constrained to remain in his wickedness and would be for ever miserable. But do you think there is any one man upon earth so depraved that he has never yielded to the temptation of well-doing? This temptation is so natural, so pleasant, that it is impossible always to resist it; and the thought of the pleasure it has once afforded is enough to recall it constantly to our memory. Unluckily it is hard at first to find satisfaction for it; we have any number of reasons for refusing to follow the inclinations of our heart; prudence, so celled, restricts the heart within the limits of the self; a thousand efforts are needed to break these bonds. The joy of well-doing is the prize of having done well, and we must deserve the prize before we win it. There is nothing sweeter than virtue; but we do not know this till we have tried it. Like Proteus in the fable, she first assumes a thousand terrible shapes when we would embrace her, and only shows her true self to those who refuse to let her go.

[¶1041:] Ever at strife between my natural feelings, which spoke of the common weal, and my reason, which spoke of self, I should have drifted through life in perpetual uncertainty, hating evil, '6ving good, and always at war with myself, if my heart had not received further light, if that truth which determined my opinions had not also settled my conduct, and set me at peace with myself. Reason alone is not a sufficient foundation for virtue; what solid ground can be found? Virtue we are told is love of order. But can this love prevail over my love for my own well-being, and ought it so to prevail? Let them give me clear and sufficient reason for this preference. Their so-called principle is in truth a mere p laying with words: for I also say that vice is love of order, differently understood. Wherever there is feeling and intelligence, there is some sort of moral order. The difference is this: the good man orders his life with regard to all men; the wicked orders it for self alone. The latter centers all things round himself; the other measures his radius and remains on the circumference. Thus his place depends on the common center, which is God, and on all the concentric circles which are His creatures. If there is no God, the wicked is right and the good man is nothing but a fool.

[¶1042:] My child! May you one day feel what a burden is removed when, having fathomed the vanity of human thoughts and tasted the bitterness of passion, you find at length near at hand the path of wisdom, the prize of this life's labors, the source of that happiness which you despaired of. Every duty of natural law, which man's injustice had almost effaced from my heart, is engraven there, for the second time in the name of that eternal justice which lays these duties upon me and beholds my fulfillment of them. I feel myself merely the instrument of the Omnipotent, who wills what is good, who performs it, who will bring about my own good through the so-operation of my will with his own, and by the right use of my liberty. I acquiesce in the order he establishes, certain that one day I shall enjoy that order and find my happiness in it; for what sweeter joy is there than this, to feel oneself a part of a system where all is good? A prey to pain, I bear it in patience, remembering that it will soon be over, and that it results from a body which is not mine. If I do a good deed in secret, I know that it Is seen, and my conduct in this life is a pledge of the life to come. When I suffer injustice, I say to myself, the Almighty who does all things well will reward me: my bodily needs, my poverty, make the idea of death less intolerable. There will be all the fewer bonds to be broken when my hour comes.

[¶1043:] Why is my soul subjected to my senses, and imprisoned in this body by which it is enslaved and thwarted? I know not; have I entered into the counsels of the Almighty? But I may, without rashness, venture on a modest conjecture. I say to myself: If man's soul had remained in a state of freedom and innocence, what merit would there have been in loving and obeying the order he found established, an order which it would not have been to his advantage to disturb? He would be happy, no doubt, but his happiness would not attain to the highest point, the pride of virtue, and the witness of a good conscience within him; he would be but as the angels are, and no doubt the good man will be more than they. Bound to a mortal body, by bonds as strange as they are powerful, his care for the preservation of this body tempts the soul to think only of self, and gives it an interest opposed to the general order of things, which it is still capable of knowing and loving; then it is that the right use of his freedom becomes at once the merit and the reward; then it is that it prepares for itself unending happiness, by resisting its earthly passions and following its original direction.

[¶1044:] If even in the lowly position in which we are placed during our present life our first impulses are always good, if all our vices are of our own making, why should we complain that they are our masters? Why should we blame the Creator for the ills we have ourselves created, and the enemies we ourselves have armed against us? Oh, let us leave man unspoilt; he will always find it easy to be good and he will always be happy without remorse. The guilty, 'who assert that they are driven to crime, are liars as well as evil-doers; how is it that they fail to perceive that the weakness they bewail is of their own making; that their earliest depravity was the result of their own will; that by dint of wishing to yield to temptations, they at length yield to them whether they will or no and make them irresistible? No doubt they can no longer avoid being weak and wicked, but they need not have become weak and wicked. Oh, how easy would it be to preserve control of ourselves and of our passions, even in this life, if with habits still unformed, with a mind beginning to expand, we were able to keep to such things as we ought to know, in order to value rightly what is unknown; if we really wished to learn, not that we might shine before the eyes of others, but that we might be wise and good in accordance with our nature, that we might be happy in the performance of our duty. This study seems tedious and painful to us, for we do not attempt it till we are already corrupted by vice and enslaved by our passions. Our judgments and our standards of worth are determined before we have the knowledge of good and evil; and then we measure all things by this false standard, and give nothing its true worth.

[¶1045:] There is an age when the heart is still free, but eager, unquiet, greedy of a happiness which is still unknown, a happiness which it seeks in curiosity and doubt; deceived by the senses it settles at length upon the empty show of happiness and thinks it has found it where it is not. In my own case these illusions endured for a long time. Alas! too late did I become aware of them, and I have not succeeded in overcoming them altogether; they will last as long as this mortal body from which they arise. If they lead me astray, I am at least no longer deceived by them; I know them for what they are, and even when I give way to them, I despise myself; far from regarding them as the goal of my happiness, I behold in them an obstacle to it. I long for the time when, freed from the fetters of the body, I shall be myself, at one with myself, no longer torn in two, when I myself shall suffice for my own happiness. Meanwhile I am happy even in this life, for I make small account of all its evils, in which I regard myself as having little or no part, while all the real good that I can get out of this life depends on myself alone.

[¶1046:] To raise myself so far as may be even now to this state of happiness, strength, and freedom, I exercise myself in lofty contemplation. I consider the order of the universe, not to explain it by any futile system, but to revere it without ceasing, to adore the wise Author who reveals himself in it. I hold intercourse with him; I immerse all my powers in his divine essence; I am overwhelmed by his kindness, I bless him and his gifts, but I do not pray to him. What should I ask of him--to change the order of nature, to work miracles on my behalf? Should I, who am bound no love above all things the order which he has established in his wisdom and maintained by his providence, should I desire the disturbance of that order on my own account? No, that rash prayer would deserve to be punished rather than to be granted. Neither do I ask of him the power to do right; why should I ask what he has given me already. Has he not given me conscience that I may love the right, reason that I may perceive it, and freedom that I may choose it? If I do evil, I have no excuse; I do it of my own free will; to ask him to change my will is to ask him to do what he asks of me; it is to want him to do the work while I get the wages; to be dissatisfied with my lot is to wish to be no longer a man, to wish to be other than what I am, to wish for disorder and evil. Thou source of justice and truth, merciful and gracious God, in thee do I trust, and the desire of my heart is -- Thy will be done. When I unite my will with thine, I do what thou doest; I have a share in thy goodness; I believe that I enjoy beforehand the supreme happiness which is the reward of goodness.

[¶1047:] In my well-founded self-distrust the only thing that I ask of God, or rather expect from his justice, is to correct my error if I go astray, if that error is dangerous to me. To be honest I need not think myself infallible; my opinions, which seem to me true, may be so many lies; for what man is there who does not cling to his own beliefs; and how many men are agreed in everything? The illusion which deceives me may indeed have its source in myself, but it is God alone who can remove it. I have done all I can to attain to truth; but its source is beyond my reach; is it my fault if my strength fails me and I can go no further; it is for Truth to draw near to me.

https://www.aplacetostudy.com/pictures/Orpheus-teaching-the-cult-of-the-gods.png

"Orpheus teaching men the cult of the gods." Facing p. 128, Tome III of Emile, Gallica.

[¶1048:] The good priest had spoken with passion; he and I were overcome with emotion. It seemed to me as if I were listening to the divine Orpheus when he sang the earliest hymns and taught men the worship of the gods. I saw any number of objections which might be raised; yet I raised none, for I perceived that they were more perplexing than serious, and that my inclination took his part. When he spoke to me according to his conscience, my own seemed to confirm what he said.

[¶1049:] "The novelty of the sentiments you have made known to me," said I, "strikes me all the more because of what you confess you do not know, than because of what you say you believe. They seem to be very like that theism or natural religion, which Christians profess to confound with atheism or irreligion which is their exact opposite. But in the present state of my faith I should have to ascend rather than descend to accept your views, and I find it difficult to remain just where you are unless I were as wise as you. That I may be at least as honest, I want time to take counsel with myself. By your own showing, the inner voice must be my guide, and you have yourself told me that when it has long been silenced it cannot be recalled in a moment. I take what you have said to heart, and I must consider it. If after I have thought things out, I am as convinced as you are, you will be my final teacher, and I will be your disciple till death. Continue your teaching however; you have only told me half what I must know. Speak to me of revelation, of the Scriptures, of those difficult doctrines among which I have strayed ever since I was a child, incapable either of understanding or believing them, unable to adopt or reject them."

[¶1050:] "Yes, my child," said he, embracing me, "I will tell you all I think; I will not open my heart to you by halves; but the desire you express was necessary before I could cast aside all reserve. So far I have told you nothing but what I thought would be of service to you, nothing but what I was quite convinced of. The inquiry which remains to be made is very difficult. It seems to me full of perplexity, mystery, and darkness; I bring to it only doubt and distrust. I make up my mind with trembling, and I tell you my doubts rather than my convictions. If your own opinions were more settled I should hesitate to show you mine; but in your present condition, to think like me would be gain. Moreover, give to my words only the authority of reason; I know not whether I am mistaken. It is difficult in discussion to avoid assuming sometimes a dogmatic tone; but remember in this respect that all my assertions are but reasons to doubt me. Seek truth for yourself, for my own part I only promise you sincerity.

[¶1051:] "In my exposition you find nothing but natural religion; strange that we should need more! How shall I become aware of this need? What guilt can be mine so long as I serve God according to the knowledge he has given to my mind, and the feelings he has put into my heart? What purity of morals, what dogma useful to man and worthy of its author, can I derive from a positive doctrine which cannot be derived without the aid of this doctrine by the right use of my faculties? Show me what you can add to the duties of the natural law, for the glory of God, for the good of mankind, and for my own welfare; and what virtue you will get from the new form of religion which does not result from mine. The grandest ideas of the Divine nature come to us from reason only. Behold the spectacle of nature; listen to the inner voice. Has not God spoken it all to our eyes, to our conscience, to our reason? What more can man tell us? Their revelations do but degrade God, by investing him with passions like our own. Far from throwing light upon the ideas of the Supreme Being, special doctrines seem to me to confuse these ideas; far from ennobling them, they degrade them; to the inconceivable mysteries which surround the Almighty. they add absurd contradictions, they make man proud, intolerant, and cruel; instead of bringing peace upon earth, they bring fire and sword. I ask myself what is the use of it all, and I find no answer. I see nothing but the crimes of men and the misery of mankind.

[¶1052:] "They tell me a revelation was required to teach men how God would be served; as a proof of this they point to the many strange rites which men have instituted, and they do not perceive that this very diversity springs from the fanciful nature of the revelation. As soon as the nations took to making God speak, every one made him speak in his own fashion, and made him say what he himself wanted. Had they listened only to what God says in the heart of man, there would have been but one religion upon earth.

[¶1053:] "One form of worship was required; just so, but was this a matter of such importance as to require all the power of the Godhead to establish it? Do not let us confuse the outward forms of religion with religion itself. The service God requires is of the heart; and when the heart is sincere that is ever the same. It is a strange sort of conceit which fancies that God takes such an interest in the shape of the priest's vestments, the form of words he utters, the gestures he makes before the altar and all his genuflections. Oh, my friend, stand upright, you will still be too near the earth. God desires to be worshipped in spirit and in truth; this duty belongs to every religion, every country, every individual. As to the form of worship, if order demands uniformity, that is only a matter of discipline and needs no revelation.

[¶1054:] "These thoughts did not come to me to begin with. Carried away by the prejudices of my education, and by that dangerous vanity which always strives to lift man out of his proper sphere, when I could not raise my feeble thoughts up to the great Being, I tried to bring him down to my own level. I tried to reduce the distance he has placed between his nature and mine. I desired more immediate relations, more individual instruction; not content to make God in the image of man that I might be favored above my fellows, I desired supernatural knowledge; I required a special form of worship; I wanted God to tell me what he had not told others, or what others had not understood like myself.

[¶1055:] "Considering the point 1 had now reached as the common center from which all believers set out on the quest for a more enlightened form of religion, I merely found in natural religion the elements of all religion. I beheld the multitude of diverse sects which hold sway upon earth, each of which accuses the other of falsehood and error; which of these, I asked, is the right? Every one replied, 'My own;' every one said, 'I alone and those who agree with me think rightly, all the others are mistaken.' And how do you know that your sect is in the right? Because God said so. And how do you know God said so? And who told you that God said it? My pastor, who knows all about it. My pastor tells me what to believe and I believe it; he assures me that any one who says anything else is mistaken, and I give no heed to them.

[¶1056:] "What! thought I, is not truth one; can that which is true for me be false for you? If those who follow the right path and those who go astray have the same method, what merit or what blame can be assigned to one more than to the other? Their choice is the result of chance; it is unjust to hold them responsible for it, to reward or punish them for being born in one country or another. To dare to say that God judges us in this manner is an outrage on his justice.

[¶1057:] "Either all religions are good and pleasing to God, or if there is one which he prescribes for men, if they will be punished for despising it, he will have distinguished it by plain and certain signs by which it can be known as the only true religion; these signs are alike in every time and place, equally plain to all men, great or small, learned or unlearned, Europeans, Indians, Africans,- savages. If there were but one religion upon earth, and if all beyond its pale were condemned to eternal punishment, and if there were in any corner of the world one single honest man who was not convinced by this evidence, the God of that religion would be the most unjust and cruel of tyrants.

[¶1058:] "Let us therefore seek honestly after truth; let us yield nothing to the claims of birth, to the authority of parents and pastors, but let us summon to the bar of conscience and of reason all that they have taught us from our childhood. In vain do they exclaim, 'Submit your reason;' a deceiver might say as much; I must have reasons for submitting my reason.

[¶1059:] "All the theology I can get for myself by observation of the universe and by the use of my faculties is contained in what I have already told you. To know more one must have recourse to strange means. These means cannot be the authority of men, for every man is of the same species as myself, and all that a man knows by nature I am capable of knowing, and another may be deceived as much as I; when I believe what he says, it is not because he says it but because he proves its truth. The witness of man is therefore nothing more than the witness of my own reason, and it adds nothing to the natural means which God has given me for the knowledge of truth.

[¶1060:] "Apostle of truth, what have you to tell me of which I am not the sole judge? God himself has spoken; give heed to his revelation. That is another matter. God has spoken, these are indeed words which demand attention. To whom has he spoken? He has spoken to men. Why then have I heard nothing? He has instructed others to make known his words to you. I understand; it is men who come and tell me what God has said. I would rather have heard the words of God himself; it would have been as easy for him and I should have been secure from fraud. He protects you from fraud by showing that his envoys come from him. How does he show this? By miracles. Where are these miracles? In the books. And who wrote the books? Men. And who saw the miracles? The men who bear witness to them. What! Nothing but human testimony! Nothing but men who tell me what others told them! How many men between God and me! Let us see, however, let us examine, compare, and verify. Oh! if God had but deigned to free me from all this labor, I would have served him with all my heart.

[¶1061:] "Consider, my friend, the terrible controversy in which I am now engaged; what vast learning is required to go back to the remotest antiquity, to examine, weigh, confront prophecies, revelations, facts, all the monuments of faith set forth throughout the world, to assign their date, place, authorship, and occasion. What exactness of critical judgment is needed to distinguish genuine documents from forgeries, to compare objections with their answers, translations with their originals; to decide as to the impartiality of witnesses, their common-sense, their knowledge; to make sure that nothing has been omitted, nothing added, nothing transposed, altered. or falsified; to point out any remaining contradictions, to determine what weight should be given to the silence of our adversaries with regard to the charges brought against them; how far were they aware of those charges; did they think them sufficiently serious to require an answer; were books sufficiently well known for our books to reach them; have we been honest enough to allow their books to circulate among ourselves and to leave their strongest objections unaltered?

[¶1062:] "When the authenticity of all these documents Is accepted, we must now pass to the evidence of their authors' mission; we must know the laws of chance, and probability, to decide which prophecy cannot be fulfilled without a miracle; we must know the spirit of the original languages, to distinguish between prophecy and figures of speech; we must know what facts are in accordance with nature and what facts are not, so that we may say how far a clever man may deceive the eyes of the simple and may even astonish the learned; we must discover what are the characteristics of a prodigy and how its authenticity may be established, not only so far as to gain credence, hut so that doubt may be deserving of punishment; we must compare the evidence for true and false miracles, and find sure tests to distinguish between them; lastly we must say why God chose as a witness to his words means which themselves require so much evidence on their behalf, as if he were playing with human credulity, and avoiding of set purpose the true means of persuasion.

[¶1063:] "Assuming that the divine majesty condescends so far as to make a man the channel of his sacred will, is it reasonable, is it fair, to demand that the whole of mankind should obey the voice of this minister without making him known as such? Is it just to give him as his sole credentials certain private signs, performed in the presence of a few obscure persons, signs which everybody else can only know by hearsay? If one were to believe all the miracles that the uneducated and credulous profess to have seen in every country upon earth, every sect would be in the right; there would be more miracles than ordinary events; and it would be the greatest miracle if there were no miracles wherever there were persecuted fanatics. The unchangeable order of nature is the chief witness to the wise hand that guides it; if there were many exceptions, I should hardly know what to think; for my own part I have too great a faith in God to believe in so many miracles which are so little worthy of him.

[¶1064:] "Let a man come and say to us: Mortals, I proclaim to you the will of the Most Highest; accept my words as those of him who has sent me; I bid the sun to change his course, the stars to range themselves in a fresh order, the high places to become smooth, the floods to rise up, the earth to change her face. By these miracles who will not recognize the master of nature? She does not obey impostors, their miracles are wrought in holes and corners, in deserts, within closed doors, where they find easy dupes among a small company of spectators already disposed to believe them. Who will venture to tell me how many eye-witnesses are required to make a miracle credible? What use are your miracles, performed if proof of your doctrine, if they themselves require so much proof? You might as well have let them alone.

[¶1065:] "There still remains the most important inquiry of all with regard to the doctrine proclaimed; for since those who tell us God works miracles in this world, profess that the devil sometimes imitates them, when we have found the best attested miracles we have got very little further; and since the magicians of Pharaoh dared m the presence of Moses to counterfeit the very signs he wrought at God's command, why should they not, behind his back, claim a like authority? So when we have proved our doctrine by means of miracles, we must prove our miracles by means of doctrine, for fear lest we should take the devil's doings for the handiwork of God. What think you of this dilemma?

[¶1066:] "This doctrine, if it comes from God, should bear the sacred stamp of the godhead; not only should it illumine the troubled thoughts which reason imprints on our minds, but it should also offer us a form of worship, a morality, and rules of conduct in accordance with the attributes by means of which we alone conceive of God's essence. If then it teaches us what is absurd and unreasonable, if it inspires us with feelings of aversion for our fellows and terror for ourselves, if it paints us & God, angry, jealous, revengeful, partial, hating men, a God of war and battles, ever ready to strike and to destroy, ever speaking of punishment and torment, boasting even of the punishment of the innocent, my heart would not be drawn towards this terrible God, I would take good care not to quit the realm of natural religion to embrace such a religion as that; for you see plainly I must choose between them. Your God is not ours. He who begins by selecting & chosen people, and proscribing the rest of mankind, is not our common father; he who consigns to eternal punishment the greater part of his creatures, is not the merciful and gracious God revealed to me by my reason.

[¶1067:] "Reason tells me that dogmas should be plain, clear, and striking in their simplicity. If there is something lacking in natural religion, it is with respect to the obscurity in which it leaves the great truths it teaches; revelation should teach 'is these truths in a way which the mind of man can understand; it should bring them within his reach, make him comprehend them, so that he may believe them. Faith is confirmed and strengthened by understanding; the best religion is of necessity the simplest. He who hides beneath mysteries and contradictions the religion that he preaches to me, teaches me at the same time to distrust that religion. The God whom I adore is not the God of darkness, he has not given me understanding in order to forbid me to use it; to tell me to submit my reason is to insult the giver of reason. The minister of truth does not tyrannize over my reason, he enlightens it.

[¶1068:] "We have set aside all human authority, and without it I do not see how any man can convince another by preaching a doctrine contrary to reason. Let them fight it out, and let us see what they have to say with that harshness of speech which is common to both.

[¶1069:] "Inspiration. Reason tells you that the whole is greater than the part; but I tell you, in God's name, that the part is greater than the whole.

"Reason. And who are you to dare to tell me that God contradicts himself? And which shall I choose to believe, God who teaches me, through my reason, the eternal truth, or you who, in his name, proclaim an absurdity?

"Inspiration. Believe me, for my teaching is more positive; and I will prove to you beyond all manner of doubt that he has sent me.

"Reason. What! you will convince me that God has sent you to bear witness against himself l What sort of proofs will you adduce to convince me that God speaks more surely by your mouth than through the understanding he has given me?

"Inspiration. The understanding he has given you! Petty, conceited creature! As if you were the first impious person who had been led astray through his reason corrupted by sin.

"Reason. Man of God, you would not be the first scoundrel who asserts his arrogance as a proof of his mission.

"Inspiration. What! do even philosophers call names?

"Reason. Sometimes, when the saints set them the example.

"Inspiration. Oh, but I have a right to do it, for I am speaking on God's behalf.

"Reason. You would do well to show your credentials before you make use of your privileges.

"Inspiration. My credentials are authentic, earth and heaven will bear witness on my beh&1L Follow my arguments carefully, if you please.

"Reason. Your arguments! You forget what you are saying. When you teach me that my reason this leads me, do you not refute what it might have said on your behalf? He who denies the right of reason, must convince me without recourse to her aid. For suppose you have convinced me by reason, how am I to know that it is not my reason, corrupted by sin, which makes me accept what you say? Besides, what proof, what demonstration. can you advance, more self-evident than the axiom it is to destroy? It is more credible that a good syllogism is a lie, than that the part is greater than the whole.

"Inspiration. What a difference! There is no answer to my evidence; it is of a supernatural kind.

"Reason. Supernatural! What do you mean by the word? I do not understand it.

"Inspiration. I mean changes in the order of nature, prophecies, signs, and wonders of every kind.

"Reason. Signs and wonders! I have never seen anything of the kind.

"Inspiration. Others have seen them for you. Clouds of witnesses -- the witness of whole nations. - -

"Reason. Is the witness of nations supernatural?

"Inspiration. No; but when it is unanimous, it is incontestable.

"Reason. There is nothing so incontestable as the principles of reason. and one cannot accept an absurdity on human evidence. Once more, let us see your supernatural evidence, for the consent of mankind is not supernatural.

"Inspiration. Oh, hardened heart, grace does not speak to you.

"Reason. That is not my fault; for by your own showing, one must have already received grace before one is able to ask for it. Begin by speaking to me in its stead.

"Inspiration. But that is just what I am doing, and you will not listen. But what do you say to prophecy?

"Reason. In the first place, I say I have no more heard a prophet than I have seen a miracle. In the next, I say that no prophet could claim authority over me.

"Inspiration.. Follower of the devil! Why should not the words of the prophets have authority over you?

"Reason. Because three things are required, three things which will never happen: firstly, I must have heard the prophecy; secondly, I must have seen its fulfillment; and thirdly, it must be clearly proved that the fulfillment of the prophecy could not by any possibility have been a mere coincidence; for even if it was as precise, as plain, and clear as an axiom of geometry, since the clear-ness of a chance prediction does not make its fulfillment impossible, this fulfillment when it does take place does not, strictly speaking, prove what was foretold.

[¶1070:] "See what your so-called supernatural proofs, your miracles, your prophecies come to: believe all this upon the word of another, submit to the authority of men the authority of God which speaks to my reason. If the eternal truths which my mind conceives of could suffer any shock. there would be no sort of certainty for me; and far from being sure that you speak to me on God's behalf, I should not even be sure that there is a God.

[¶1071:] "My child, here are difficulties enough, but these are not all. Among so many religions, mutually excluding and proscribing each other, one only is true. if indeed any one of them is true. To recognize the true religion we must inquire into, not one, but all; and in any question whatsoever we have no right to condemn unheard. The objections must be compared with the evidence; we must know what accusation each brings against the other, and what answers they receive. The plainer any feeling appears to us, the more we must try to discover why so many other people refuse to accept it. We should be simple, indeed, if we thought it enough to hear the doctors on our own side, in order to acquaint ourselves with the arguments of the other. Where can you find theologians who pride themselves on their honesty? Where are those who, to refute the arguments of their opponents, do not begin by making out that they are of little importance? A man may make a good show among his own friends, and be very proud of his arguments, who would cut & very poor figure with those same arguments among those who are on the other side. Would you find out for yourself from books? What learning you will need! What languages you must learn; what libraries you must ransack; what an amount of reading must be got through! Who will guide me in such a choice? It will be hard to find the best books on the opposite side in any one country, and all the harder to find those on all sides; when found they would be easily answered. The absent are always in the wrong, and bad arguments boldly asserted easily efface good arguments put forward with scorn. Besides books are often very misleading, and scarcely express the opinions of their authors. If you think you can judge the Catholic faith from the writings of Bossuet, you will find yourself greatly mistaken when you have lived among us. You will see that the doctrines with which Protestants are answered are quite different from those of the pulpit. To judge a religion rightly, you must not study it in the books of its partisans, you must learn it in their lives; this is quite another matter. Each religion has its own traditions, meaning, customs, prejudices, which form the spirit of its creed, and must be taken in connection with it.

[¶1072:] "How many great nations neither print books of their own nor read ours! How shall they judge of our opinions, or we of theirs? We laugh at them, they despise us; and if our travelers turn them into ridicule, they need only travel among us to pay us back in our own coin. Are there not, in every country, men of common-sense, honesty, and good faith, lovers of truth, who only seek to know what truth is that they may profess it? Yet every one finds truth in his own religion, and thinks the religion of other nations absurd; no all these foreign religions are not so absurd as they seem to us, or else the reason we find for our own proves nothing.

[¶1073:] "We have three principal forms of religion in Europe. One accepts one revelation, another two, and another three. Each hates the others, showers curses on them, accuses them of blindness, obstinacy, hardness of heart, and falsehood. What fair-minded man will dare to decide between them without first carefully weighing their evidence, without listening attentively to their arguments? That which accepts only one revelation is the oldest and seems the best established; that which accepts three is the newest and seems the most consistent; that which accepts two revelations and rejects the third may perhaps be the best, but prejudice is certainly against it. its inconsistency is glaring.

[¶1074:] "In all three revelations the sacred books are written in languages unknown to the people who believe in them. The Jews no longer understand 'Hebrew, the Christians understand neither Hebrew nor Greek; the Turks and Persians do not understand Arabic, and the Arabs of our time do not speak the language of Mohammed. Is not it a very foolish way of teaching, to teach people in an unknown tongue? These books are translated, you say. What an answer! How am I to know that the translations are correct, or how am I to make sure that such a thing as a correct translation is possible? If God has gone so far as to speak to men, why should he require an interpreter?

[¶1075:] "I can never believe that every man is obliged to know what is contained in books, and that he who is out of reach of these books, and of those who understand them, will be punished for an ignorance which is no fault of his. Books upon books! What madness! As all Europe is full of books, Europeans regard them as necessary, forgetting that they are unknown throughout three-quarters of the globe. Were not all these books written by men? Why then should a man need them to teach him his duty, and how did he learn his duty before these books were in existence? Either he must have learnt his duties for himself, or his ignorance must have been excused.

[¶1076:] "Our Catholics talk loudly of the authority of the Church; but what is the use of it all, if they also need just as great an array of proofs to establish that authority as the other seeks to establish their doctrine? The Church decides that the Church has a right to decide. What a well-founded authority! Go beyond it, and you are back again in our discussions.

[¶1077:] "Do you know many Christians who have taken the trouble to inquire what the Jews allege against them? If any one knows anything at all about it, it is from the writings of Christians. What a way of ascertaining the arguments of our adversaries! But what is to be done? If any one dared to publish in our day books which were openly in favor of the Jewish religion. We should punish the author, publisher, and bookseller. This regulation is a sure and certain plan for always being in the right. It is easy to refute those who dare not venture to speak.

[¶1078:] "Those among us who have the opportunity of talking with Jews are little better off. These unhappy people feel that they are in our power; the tyranny they have suffered makes them timid; they know that Christian charity thinks nothing of injustice and cruelty; will they dare to run the risk of an outcry against blasphemy? Our greed inspires us with zeal, and they are so rich that they must be in the wrong. The more learned, the more enlightened they are, the more cautious. You may convert some poor wretch whom you have paid to slander his religion; you get some wretched old-clothes-man to speak, and he says what you want; you may triumph over their ignorance and cowardice, while all the time their men of learning are laughing at your stupidity. But do you think you would get off so easily in any place where they knew they were safe? At the Sorbonne it is plain that the Messianic prophecies refer to Jesus Christ. Among the rabbis of Amsterdam it is just as clear that they have nothing to do with him. I do not think I have ever heard the arguments of the Jews as to why they should not have a free state, schools and universities, where they can speak and argue without danger. Then alone can we know what they have to say.

[¶1079:] "At Constantinople the Turks state their arguments, but we dare not give ours; then it is our turn to cringe. Con we blame the Turks if they require us to show the same respect for Mohammed, in whom we do not believe, as we demand from the Jews with regard to Jesus Christ in whom they do not believe? Are we right? On what grounds of justice can we answer this question?

[¶1080:] "Two-thirds of mankind are neither Jews, Mahommedans, nor Christians; and how many millions of men have never heard the name of Moses, Jesus Christ, or Mohammed? They deny it; they maintain that our missionaries go everywhere. That is easily said. But do they go into the heart of Africa, still undiscovered, where as yet no European has ever ventured? Do they go to Eastern Tartary to follow on horseback the wandering tribes, whom no stranger approaches, who not only know nothing of the pope, but have scarcely heard tell of the Grand Lama? Do they penetrate into the vast continents of America, where there are still whole nations unaware that the people of another world have set foot on their shores' Do they go to Japan. where their intrigues have led to their perpetual banishment, where their predecessors are only known to the rising generation as skilful plotters who came with feigned zeal to take possession in secret of the empire? Do they reach the harems of the Asiatic princes to preach the gospel to those thousands of poor slaves? What have the women of those countries done that no missionary may preach the faith to them? Will they all go to hell because of their Reclusion?

[¶1081:] "If it were true that the gospel is preached throughout the world, what advantage would there be? The day before the first missionary set foot in any country, no doubt somebody died who could not hear him. Now tell me what we shall do with him? If there were a single soul in the whole world, to whom Jesus Christ had never been preached, this objection would be as strong for that man as for a quarter of the human race.

[¶1082:] "If the ministers of the gospel have made themselves heard among far-off nations, what have they told them which might reasonably be accepted on their word, without further and more exact verification? You preach to me God, born and dying, two thousand years ago, at the other end of the world, in some small town I know not where; and you tell me that all who have not believed this mystery are damned. These are strange things to be believed so quickly on the authority of an unknown person. Why did your God make these things happen so far off, if he would compel me to know about them? Is it a crime to be unaware of what is happening half a world away? Could I guess that in another hemisphere there was a Hebrew nation and a town called Jerusalem? You might as well expect me to know what was happening in the moon. You say you have come to teach me; but why did you not come and teach my father, or why do you consign that good old man to damnation because he knew nothing of all this? Must he be punished everlastingly for your laziness, he who was so kind and helpful, he who sought only for truth? Be honest; put yourself in my place; see if I ought to believe, on your word alone, all these incredible thing, which you have told me, and reconcile all this injustice with the just God you proclaim to me. At least allow me to go and see this distant land where such wonders, unheard of in my own country, took place; let me go and see why the inhabitants of Jerusalem put their God to death as a robber. You tell me they did not know he was God. What then shall I do, I who have only heard of him from your You say they have been punished, dispersed, oppressed, enslaved; that none of them dare approach that town. Indeed they richly deserved it; but what do its present inhabitants say of their crime in slaying their God? They deny him; they too refuse to recognize God as God. They are no better than the children of the original inhabitants.

[¶1083:] "What! In the very town where God was put to death, neither the former nor the latter inhabitants knew him, and you expect that I should know him, I who was born two thousand years after his time, and two thousand leagues away? Do you not see that before I can believe this book which you call sacred, but which I do not in the least understand, I must know from others than yourself when and by whom it was written, how it has been preserved, how it came into your possession, what they say about it in those lands where it is rejected, and what are their reasons for rejecting it, though they know as well as you what you are telling me? You perceive I must go to Europe, Asia, Palestine, to examine these things for myself; it would be madness to listen to you before that.

[¶1084:] "Not only does this seem reasonable to me, but I maintain that it is what every wise man ought to say in similar circumstances; that he ought to banish to a great distance the missionary who wants to instruct and baptize him all of a sudden before the evidence is verified. Now I maintain that there is no revelation against which these or similar objections cannot be made, and with more force than against Christianity. Hence it follows that if there is but one true religion and if every man is bound to follow it under pain of damnation, he must spend his whole life in studying, testing, comparing all these religions, in travelling through the countries in which they are established. No man is free from a man's first duty; no one has a right to depend on another's judgment. The artisan who earns his bread by his daily toil, the ploughboy who cannot read, the delicate and timid maiden, the invalid who can scarcely leave his hod, all without exception must study, consider, argue, travel over the whole world; there will be no more fixed and settled nations; the whole earth will swarm with pilgrims on their way, at great cost of time and trouble, to verify, compare, and examine for themselves the various religions to be found. Then farewell to the trades, the arts, the sciences of mankind, farewell to all peaceful occupations; there can be no study but that of religion, even the strongest, the most industrious the most intelligent, the oldest, will hardly be able in his last years to know where he is; and it will be a wonder if he manages to find out what religion he ought to live by, before the hour of his death.

[¶1085:] Do you want to compromise this method and give at least some weight to the authority of men? Immediately you will give in to it completely. If the son of a Christian does well to follow the religion of his father without any profound and impartial reflection, then why would the son of a Turk do wrong to follow his father's religion? I defy all the intolerant people of the world to answer this in a way that would satisfy a sensible man.

[¶1086:] "Hard pressed by these arguments, some prefer to make God unjust and to punish the innocent for the sins of their fathers, rather than to renounce their barbarous dogmas. Others get out of the difficulty by kindly sending an angel to instruct all those who in invincible ignorance have lived a righteous life. A good idea, that angel! Not content to be the slaves of their own inventions they expect God to make use of them also!

[¶1087:] "Behold, my son, the absurdities to which pride and intolerance bring us, when everybody wants others to think as he does, and everybody fancies that he has an exclusive claim upon the rest of mankind. I call to witness the God of Peace whom I adore. and whom I proclaim to you, that my inquires were honestly made; but when I discovered that they were and always would be unsuccessful, and that I was embarked upon a boundless ocean, I turned back, and restricted my faith within the limits of my primitive ideas. I could never convince myself that God would require such learning of me under pain of hell. So I closed all my books. There is one book which is open to every one--the book of nature. In this good and great volume I learn to serve and adore its Author. There is no excuse for not reading this book, for it speaks to all in a language they can understand. Suppose I had been born in a desert island, suppose I had never seen any man but myself, suppose I had never heard what took place in olden days in a remote corner of the world; yet if I use my reason, if I cultivate it, if I employ rightly the innate faculties which God bestows upon me, I shall learn by myself to know and love him, to love his works, to will what he wills, and to fulfil all my duties upon earth, that I may do his pleasure. What more can all human learning teach me?

[¶1088:] "With regard to revelation, if I were a more accomplished disputant, or a more learned person, perhaps I should feel its truth, its usefulness for those who are happy enough to perceive it; but if I find evidence for it which I cannot combat, I also find objections against it which I cannot overcome. There are so many weighty reasons for and against that I do not know what to decide, so that I neither accept nor reject it I only reject all obligation to be convinced of its truth; for this so-called obligation is incompatible with God's justice, and far from removing objections in this way it would multiply them, and would make them insurmountable for the greater part of mankind. In this respect I maintain an attitude of reverent doubt. I do not presume to think myself infallible; other men may have been able to make up their minds though the matter seems doubtful to myself; I am speaking for myself, not for them; I neither blame them nor follow in their steps; their judgment may be superior to mine, but it is no fault of mine that my judgment does not agree with it.

[¶1089:] "I own also that the holiness of the gospel speaks to my heart, and that this is an argument which I should be sorry to refute. Consider the books of the philosophers with all their outward show; how petty they are in comparison! Can a book at once so grand and so simple be the work of men? Is it possible that he whose history is contained in this book is no more than man? Is the tone of this book, the tone of the enthusiast or the ambitious sectary? What gentleness and purity in his actions, what a touching grace in his teaching, how lofty are his sayings, how profoundly wise are his sermons, how ready, how discriminating, and how just are his answers! What man, what sage, can live, suffer, and die without weakness or ostentation? When Plato describes his imaginary good man, overwhelmed with the disgrace of crime, and deserving of all the rewards of virtue, every feature of the portrait is that of Christ; the resemblance is so striking that it has been noticed by all the Fathers, and there can be no doubt about it. What prejudices and blindness must there be before we dare to compare the son of Sophronisca with the son of Mary. How far apart they are! Socrates dies a painless death, he is not put to open shame, and he plays his part easily to the last; and if this easy death had not done honor to his life, we might have doubted whether Socrates, with all his intellect, was more than a mere sophist. He invented morality, so they say; others before him had practiced it; he only said what they had done, and made use of their example in his teaching. Aristides was just before Socrates defined justice; Leonidas died for his country before Socrates declared that patriotism was a virtue; Sparta was sober before Socrates extolled sobriety; there were plenty of virtuous men in Greece before he defined virtue But among the men of his own time where did Jesus find that pure and lofty morality of which he is both the teacher and pattern? The voice of loftiest wisdom arose among the fiercest fanaticism, the simplicity of the most heroic virtues did honor to the most degraded of nations One could wish no easier death than that of Socrates, calmly discussing philosophy with his friends; one could fear nothing worse than that of Jesus, dying in torment, among the insults, the mockery, the curses of the whole nation. In the midst of these terrible sufferings, Jesus prays for his cruel murderers. Yes, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a philosopher, the life and death of Christ are those of a God. Shall we say that the gospel story is the work of the imagination? My friend, such things are not imagined; and the doings of Socrates, which no one doubts, are less well attested than those of Jesus Christ. At best, you only put the difficulty from you; it would be still more incredible that several persons should have agreed together to invent such a book, than that there was one man who supplied its subject matter. The ton6 and morality of this story are not those of any Jewish authors, and the gospel indeed contains characters so great, so striking, so entirely inimitable, that their invention would be more astonishing than their hero. With all this the same gospel is full of incredible things, things repugnant to reason, things which no natural man can understand or accept. What can you do among so many contradictions? You can be modest and wary, my child; respect in silence what you can neither reject nor understand, and humble yourself in the sight of the Divine Being who alone knows the truth.

[¶1090:] "This is the unwilling skepticism in which I rest; but this skepticism is in no way painful to me, for it does not extend to matters of practice, and I am well assured as to the principles underlying all my duties. I serve God in the simplicity of my heart; I only seek to know what affects my conduct. As to those dogmas which have no effect upon action or morality, dogmas about which so many men torment themselves, I give no heed to them. I regard all individual religions as so many wholesome institutions which prescribe a uniform method by which each country may do honor to God in public worship; institutions which may each have its reason m the country, the government, the genius of the people, or in other local causes which make one preferable to another In a given time or place. I think them all good alike, when God is served in a fitting manner. True worship is of the heart. God rejects no homage, however offered, provided it is sincere. Called to the service of the Church in my own religion, I fulfil as scrupulously as I can all the duties prescribed to me, and my conscience would reproach me if I were knowingly wanting with regard to any point. You are aware that after being suspended for a long time, have, through the influence of M. Mellarede, obtained permission to resume my priestly duties, as a means of livelihood. I used to say Mass with the levity that comes from long experience even of the most serious matters when they are too familiar to us; with my new principles I now celebrate it with more reverence; I dwell upon the majesty of the Supreme Being, his presence, the insufficiency of the human mind, which so little realizes what concerns its Creator. When I consider how I present before him the prayers of all the people in a form laid down for me, I carry out the whole ritual exactly; I give heed to what I say, I am careful not to omit the least word, the least ceremony; when the moment of the consecration approaches, I collect my powers, that I may do all things as required by the Church and by the greatness of this sacrament; I strive to annihilate my own reason before the Supreme Mind; I say to myself, Who art thou to measure infinite power? I reverently pronounce the sacramental words, and I give to their effect all the faith I can bestow. Whatever may be this mystery which passes. understanding, I am not afraid that at the day of judgment I shall be punished for having profaned it in my heart.

[¶1091:] Honored with the sacred ministry, though in its lowest ranks. I will never do or say anything which may make me unworthy to fulfil these sublime duties. I will always preach virtue and exhort men to well-doing; and so far as I can I will set them a good example. It will be my business to make religion attractive.; it will be my business to strengthen their faith in those doctrines which are really useful, those which every man must believe; but, please God, I shall never teach them to hate their neighbor, to say to other men, You will be damned; to say, No salvation outside the Church. If I were in a more conspicuous position, this reticence might get me into trouble; but I am too obscure to have much to fear, and I could hardly sink lower than I am. Come what may, I will never blaspheme the justice of God, nor lie against the Holy Ghost.

[¶1092:] "I have long desired to have a parish of my own; it is still my ambition, but I no longer hope to attain it. My dear friend, I think there is nothing so delightful as to be a parish priest. A good clergyman is a minister of mercy, as a good magistrate is a minister of justice. A clergyman is never called upon to do evil; if he cannot always do good himself, it is never out of place for him to beg for others, and he often gets what he asks If he knows how to gain respect Oh! if I should ever have some poor mountain parish where I might minister to kindly folk, I should be happy indeed; for it seems to me that I should make my parishioners happy. I should not bring them riches, but I should share their poverty; I should remove from them the scorn and opprobrium which are harder to bear than poverty. I should make them love peace and equality, which often remove poverty, and always make it tolerable. When they saw that I was in no way better off than themselves, and that yet I was content with my lot, they would learn to put up with their fate and to be content like me. In my sermons I would lay more stress on the spirit of the gospel than on the spirit of the church; its teaching is simple, its morality sublime; there is little in it about the practices of religion, but much about works of charity. Before I teach them what they ought to do, I would try to practice it myself, that they might see that at least I think what I say. If there were Protestants in the neighborhood or in my parish, I would make no difference between them and my own congregation so far as concerns Christian charity; I would get them to love one another, to consider themselves brethren, to respect all religions, and each to live peaceably in his own religion. To ask any one to abandon the religion in which he was born is, I consider, to ask him to do wrong, and therefore to do wrong oneself. While we await further knowledge, let us respect public order; in every country let us respect the laws, let us not disturb the form of worship prescribed by law; let us not lead its citizens into disobedience; for we have no certain knowledge that it is good for them to abandon their own opinions for others, and on the other hand we are quite certain that it is a bad thing to disobey the law.

[¶1093:] "My young friend, I have now repeated to you my creed as God reads it in my heart; you are the first to whom I have told it; perhaps you will be the last. As long as there is any true faith left among men, we must not trouble quiet souls, nor scare the faith of the ignorant with problems they cannot solve, with difficulties which cause them uneasiness, but do not give them any guidance. But when once everything is shaken, the trunk must be preserved at the cost of the branches. Consciences, restless, uncertain, and almost quenched like yours, require to be strengthened and aroused; to set the feet again upon the foundation of eternal truth, we must remove the trembling supports on which they think they rest.

[¶1094:] "You are at that critical age when the mind is open to conviction, when the heart receives its form and character, when we decide our own fate for life, either for good or evil. At a later date, the material has hardened and fresh impressions leave no trace. Young man, take the stamp of truth upon your heart which is not yet hardened. If I were more certain of myself, I should have adopted a more decided and dogmatic tone; but I am a man ignorant and liable to error; what could I do? I have opened my heart fully to you; and I have told what I myself hold for certain and sure; I have told you my doubts as doubts, my opinions as opinions; I have given you my reasons both for faith and doubt. It is now your turn to judge; you have asked for time; that is a wise precaution and it makes me think well of you. Begin by bringing your conscience into that state in which it desires to see clearly; be honest with yourself. Take to yourself such of my opinions as convince you, reject the rest. You are not yet so depraved by vice as to run the risk of choosing amiss. I would offer to argue with you, but as soon as men dispute they lose their temper; pride and obstinacy come in, and there is an end of honesty My friend, never argue; for by arguing we gain no light for ourselves or for others. So far as I myself am concerned, I have only made up my mind after many years of meditation; here I rest, my conscience is at peace, my heart is satisfied. If I wanted to begin afresh the examination of my feelings, I should not bring to the task a purer love of truth; and my mind, which is already less active, would be less able to perceive the truth. Here I shall rest, lest the love of contemplation, developing step by step into an idle passion, should make me lukewarm in the performance of my duties, lest I should fall into my former skepticism without strength to 8truggle out of it. More than half my life is spent; I have barely time to make good use of what is left, to blot out my faults by my virtues. If I am mistaken, it is against my will. He who reads my inmost heart knows that I have no love for my blindness. As my own knowledge is powerless to free me from this blindness, my only way out of it is by a good life; and if God from the very stones can raise up children to Abraham, every man has a right to hope that he may be taught the truth, if he makes himself worthy of it.

[¶1095:] "If my reflections lead you to think as I do, if you share my feelings, if we have the same creed, I give you this advice: Do not continue to expose your life to the temptations of poverty and despair. nor waste it in degradation and at the mercy of strangers; no longer eat the shameful bread of charity. Return to your own country, go back to the religion of your fathers, and follow it in sincerity of heart, and never forsake it; it is very simple and very holy; I think there is no other religion upon earth whose morality is purer, no other more satisfying to the reason. Do not trouble about the cost of the journey, that will be provided for you. Neither do you fear the false shame of & humiliating return; we should blush to commit a fault, not to repair it. You are still at an age when all is forgiven, but when we cannot go on sinning with impunity. If you desire to listen to your conscience, a thousand empty objections will disappear at her voice. You will feel that, in our present state of uncertainty, it is an inexcusable presumption to profess any faith but that we were born into, while it is treachery not to practice honestly the faith we profess. If we go astray, we deprive ourselves of a great excuse before the tribunal of the sovereign judge. Will he not pardon the errors in which we were brought up, rather than those of our own choosing?

[¶1096:] "My son, keep your soul in such a state that you always desire that there should be a God and you will never doubt it. Moreover, whatever decision you come to, remember that the real duties of religion are independent of human institutions; that a righteous heart is the true temple of the Godhead; that in every land, in every sect, to love God above all things and to love our neighbor as ourself is the whole law; remember there is no religion which absolves us from our moral duties; that these alone are really essential, that the service of the heart is the first of these duties, and that without faith there is no such thing as true virtue.

[¶1097:] "Shun those who, under the pretence of explaining nature, sow destructive doctrines in the heart of men, those whose apparent skepticism is a hundredfold more self-assertive and dogmatic than the firm tone of their opponents. Under the arrogant claim, that they alone are enlightened, true, honest, they subject us imperiously to their far-reaching decisions, and profess to give us, as the true principles of all things, the unintelligible systems framed by their imagination. Moreover, they overthrow, destroy, and trample under foot all that men reverence; they rob the afflicted of their last consolation in their misery; they deprive the rich and powerful of the sole bridle of their passions; they tear from the very depths of man's heart all remorse for crime, and all hope of virtue; and they boast, moreover, that they are the benefactors of the human race. Truth, they say, can never do a man harm. I think so too, and to my mind that is strong evidence that what they teach is not true.

[¶1098:] "My good youth, be honest and humble; learn how to be ignorant, then you will never deceive yourself or others. If ever your talents are so far cultivated as to enable you to speak to other men, always speak according to your conscience, without caring for their applause. The abuse of knowledge causes incredulity. The learned always despise the opinions of the crowd; each of them must have his own opinion. A haughty philosophy leads to atheism just as blind devotion leads to fanaticism. Avoid these extremes; keep steadfastly to the path of truth, or what seems to you truth, in simplicity of heart, and never let yourself be turned aside by pride or weakness. Dare to confess God before the philosophers; dare to preach humanity to the intolerant. It may be you will stand alone, but you will bear within you a witness which will make the witness of men of no account with you. Let them love or hate, let them read your writings or despise them; no matter. Speak the truth and do the right; the one thing that really matters is to do one's duty in this world; and when we forget ourselves we are really working for ourselves. My chill, self-interest misleads us; the hope of the just is the only sure guide."

[¶1099:] I have transcribed this document not as a rule for the sentiments we should adopt in matters of religion, but as an example of the way in which we may reason with our pupil without diverging from the method I have tried to establish. So long as we yield nothing to human authority, nor to the prejudices of one's country, the light of reason alone, in a natural institution, can lead us no further than to natural religion; and this is as far as I should go with Emile. If he must have any other religion, I have no right to be his guide; he must choose for himself.

[¶1100:] We are working in agreement with nature, and while it is shaping the physical man, we are striving to shape the moral man. But we do not make the same progress. The body is already as strong and vigorous as the soul is frail and delicate, and whatever can be done by human art, the body is always ahead of the mind. Until now all our care has been devoted to restraining the one and stimulating the other, so that the man might as far as possible be at one with himself. By developing what is natural, we have kept his growing sensibilities in check; we have controlled it by cultivating his reason. Objects of thought moderate the influence of objects of sense. By going back to the causes of things, we have drawn him away from the domination of the senses. It was simple to raise him from the study of nature to the search for the author of nature

[¶1101:] When we have reached this point, what a new hold we have over our pupil; what new ways of speaking to his heart! Then alone does he find a true interest in being good, in doing what is right when he is far from every human eye, and when he is not driven to it by law -- to be just before himself and God, to do his duty, even at the cost of his life, and to bear in his heart virtue, not only for the love of order which we all subordinate to the love of self, but for the love of the author of his being, a love which mingles with that same amour de soi -- so that he may finally enjoy the lasting happiness which the peace of a good conscience and the contemplation of that supreme being promise him in another life after he has used this life well. Go beyond this, and I see nothing but injustice, hypocrisy, and falsehood among men. Private interest, which in competition necessarily prevails over everything else, teaches all things to adorn vice with the mask of virtue. Let all other men do what is good for me at the cost of what is good for themselves; let everything relate to me alone; let the whole human race perish, if necessary, in suffering and want, to spare me a moment's pain or hunger. Such is the interior language of every non-believer who reasons. Yes, I shall always maintain that whoever says in his heart, "There is no God" but says otherwise out loud, is either a liar or a madman.

[¶1102:] Reader, it is all in vain; I perceive that you and I shall never see Emile with the same eyes. You will always picture him like your own young people -- hasty, petulent, flighty, wandering from feast to feast, from entertainment, never able to focus on anything. You smile when I expect to make a thinker, a philosopher, a young theologian, of an ardent, lively, eager, and fiery young man at the most impulsive period of youth. This dreamer, you say, is always in pursuing his dreams; when he gives us a pupil of his own making, he does not merely form him, he creates him, he makes him up out of his own head; and while believing he is following the steps of nature, he is getting further and further from her. But for me, when I compare my pupil with yours, I can scarcely find anything in common between them. Nurtured so differently, it is almost a miracle if they are alike in any way. Since his childhood was passed in the freedom they assume in youth, in his youth he begins to bear the rule they bore as children. This rule becomes hateful to them, they are sick of it, and they see in it nothing but their masters' tyranny; when they escape from childhood, they think they must shake off all constraint, they then make up for the prolonged restraint imposed upon them, as a prisoner, freed from his fetters, moves and stretches and flexeshis limbs.

[¶1103:] Emile, in contrast, is proud to be a man and to submit to the constraints of his growing reason. His body, already well formed, no longer needs so much action, and begins to control itself, while his half-fledged mind tries its wings on every occasion. Thus the age of reason becomes for the one the age of license; for the other, the age of reasoning.

[¶1104:] Would you know which of the two is nearer to the order of nature? Consider the differences between those who are more or less removed from it. Observe young villagers and see if they are as undisciplined as yours. "Savages in their childhood," says the Sr. Le Beau," are seen always, and ever busy with sports that keep the body in motion; but scarcely do they reach adolescence than they become quiet and dreamy; they no longer devote themselves to games of skill or chance." Having been brought up in full freedom like young peasants and savages, Emile should behave like them and change as he grows up. The whole difference is that instead of merely being active in play or to secure food, he has in his work and in his games learned to think. Having reached this stage, and by this route, he is quite ready to enter upon the next stage to which I introduce him. The subjects I suggest arouse his curiosity -- because they are beautiful in themselves, because they are completely new to him, and because he is in a condition to understand them. Your young people, on the other hand, are weary and overdone with your stale lessons, your long sermons, and your eternal catechisms. Why should they not refuse to devote their minds to what has made them sad, to the heavy precepts that have been continually piled upon them, to meditations on the author of their being who has been shown as the enemy of their pleasures? All this has only inspired in them aversion, disgust; constraint has set them against it. What means will they use then they begin to choose for themselves? they need something new to please them; you must not repeat what they were told as children. It is the same thing with my pupil: when he is a man I speak to him as a man, and only tell him what is new to him. It is precisely because they are tedious to your pupils that he will find them to his taste.

[¶1105:] This is how I doubly gain time for him by retarding nature to the advantage of reason. But have I indeed retarded the progress of nature? No, I have only prevented the imagination from hastening it. I have employed another sort of teaching to counterbalance the precocious instruction which the young man receives from elsewhere. While the torrent of our institutions carries him along, to draw him towards the opposite direction by different institutions is not to remove him from his proper place but to keep him in it.

[¶1106:] Nature's true time comes at last, as come it must. Since man must die, he must reproduce himself, so that the species may endure and the order of the world continue. When by the signs I have spoken of you anticipate this critical moment, immediately abandon for ever your former tone. He is still your disciple, but not your pupil. He is your friend, he is a man; treat him as such from now on.

[¶1107:] What! Must I abdicate my authority when most I need it? Must I abandon the adult to himself at the moment when he least knows how to conduct himself, when he may fall into the greatest errors? Must I renounce my rights when it it is most important to him that I should exercise them? Your rights. Who tells you to renounce them? It is only now that they begin for him. Until now all you have gained has been won by force or guile; authority, the law of duty, were unknown to him. You had to constrain or deceive him to make him obey. But now with how many new chains you surround his heart. Reason, friendship, recognition, gratitude, a thousand bonds of affection, speak to him in a voice he cannot misunderstand. His ears are not yet dulled by vice, he is still sensitive only to the passions of nature. The first of these, which is amour de soi, delivers him to you; habit confirms it. If a momentary transport tears him from you, regret leads him back to you in an instant. The sentiment which attaches him to you is the only permanent sentiment; all the others pass and cancel each other out. Do not let him become corrupt, and he will always be docile; he will not begin to rebel till he is already perverted.

[¶1108:] I certainly admit that if by confronting head-on his growing desires you go and stupidly treat as crimes the new needs that are beginning to make themselves felt in him, you will not be listened to for long. But as soon as you abandon my method I cannot be answerable for the consequences. Remember that you are nature's minister; you will never be her enemy.

[¶1109:] But what shall we decide to do? You see no alternative but either to favor his inclinations or to combat them, to be his tyrant or his accomplice; and both of these may have such dangerous consequences that one must indeed hesitate between them.

[¶1110:] The first way to resolve this difficulty is to marry him off quickly. This is undoubtedly the safest and most natural expedient. I doubt, however, that it is either the best or the most useful. I will give my reasons later; meanwhile I admit that young people should marry when they reach a marriageable age. But this age comes before the proper time for them. It is we who have made them precocious; marriage should be postponed to maturity.

[¶1111:] If it were merely a case of listening to their wishes and following their lead it would be an easy matter. But there are so many contradictions between the rights of nature and the laws of society that to conciliate them we must continually make mistakes and equivocate. It requires much art to prevent social man from becoming totally artificial.

[¶1112:] For the reasons just stated, I consider that by the means I have indicated and others like them the ignorance of the desires and purity of the senses can be extended at least until the age of twenty. This is so true that among the Germans a young man who lost his virginity before that age was considered dishonored; and the writers justly attribute the vigor of constitution and the number of children among the Germans to the continence of these peoples during youth.

[¶1113:] This period may be prolonged still further, and a few centuries ago nothing was more common even in France. Among other well-known examples, Montaigne's father, a man no less scrupulous and true than strong and healthy, swore that he was still a virgin when he married at thirty three after having served served for a long time in the Italian wars. We may see in the writings of his son what vigor and gaity were shown by the father when he was over sixty. Certainly the contrary opinion depends rather on our own morals and our own prejudices than on the experience of the species as a whole.

[¶1114:] I may, therefore, leave to one side the experience of our youth; it proves nothing for those who have been educated in another fashion. Considering that nature has fixed no exact limits which cannot be advanced or postponed, I think one can, without going outside of its law, assume that under my care Emile has so far remained in his first innocence, and I see that this happy epoch is about to end. Surrounded by ever-increasing perils, he will escape me whatever I do. At the first chance, and this chance will not be slow to arrive, he is going to follow the blind instinct of his senses; one could bet a thousand to one that he will be lost. I have reflected on the morals of mankind too much not to be aware of the invincible influence of this first moment on the rest of his life. If I dissimulate and pretend to see nothing, he will take advantage of my weakness; believing he can fool me, he will despise me and I become an accomplice to his fall. If I try to get him back, the time is past; he no longer hears me; I become bothersome, hateful. intolerable to him; it will take him long to get rid of me. There is therefore only one reasonable course to take -- that is to make him accountable for his own actions to himself, to guarantee him at least from the surprises of error and to show him plainly the dangers that surround him. I have restrained him so far through his ignorance; now his restraint must be his own knowledge.

[¶1115:] This new instruction is important, and it will be useful to take up things where we left them. This is the time to present my accounts so to speak, to show him how his time and mine have been spent, to make known to him what he is and what I am; what I have done, and what he has done; what we owe to each other, all his moral relation, all the engagements that he has contracted, all those to which others have contracted with him; the stage he has reached in the development of his faculties, the road that remains to he traveled, the difficulties he will meet, and the way to overcome them; how I can still help him and how he must henceforward help himself; finally, the critical point where he now is, the new dangers that surround him, and all the solid reasons which should induce him to keep a close watch upon himself before listening to his growing desires.

[¶1116:] Remember that to guide a grown man you must take the counterpoint of all that you did to guide the child. Do not hesitate to speak to him of those dangerous mysteries which you have so carefully hidden from him up until now. Since he must become aware of them, it is important that he not learn them from another, nor from himself, but from you alone. Since he must from now on fight against them, let him know his enemy so that he may not be taken unawares.

[¶1117:] Young people who are found to be knowledgeable these matters without our knowing how they obtained their knowledge, have not obtained it with impunity. This indiscrete teaching, which can have no honorable object, at least stains the imagination of those who receive it and disposes them to the vices of their instructors. This is not all. Servants, by this means, insinuate themselves into the mind of the child, win his confidence, make him envision his tutor as a gloomy and stern person; and one of the favorite subjects of their secret colloquies is to slander him. When the pupil has got to this point, the tutor should retire; he has nothing good left to do.

[¶1118:] But why does the child choose special confidants? Because of the tyranny of those who control him. Why should he hide himself from them if he were not driven to it? Why should he complain if he had nothing to complain of? Naturally those who control him are his first confidants; you can see from his eagerness to tell them what he thinks that he feels he has only half thought till he has told his thoughts to them. You may be sure that when the child fears neither neither sermons nor reprimands from you, he will always tell you everything; and that no one will dare to tell him anything he must conceal from you, for they will know very well that he will tell you everything.

[¶1119:] What makes me most confident in my method is that when I follow its consequences as rigorously as possible, I find no situation in the life of my pupil that does not leave me some pleasing memory of him. Even when he is carried away by his ardent temperament or when he revolts against the hand that guides him, when he struggles and is on the point of escaping from me, I still find his original simplicity in his agitation and his anger. His heart as pure as his body. He has no more knowledge of pretence than of vice. Reproach and scorn have not made a coward of him; base fears have never taught him the art of concealment. He has all the indiscretion of innocence: he is absolutely out-spoken; he does not even know the use of deceit. Every impulse of his heart is betrayed either by word or look, and I often know what he is feeling before he is aware of it himself.

[¶1120:] So long as his heart is thus freely opened to me, so long as he delights to tell me what he feels, I have nothing to fear; the danger is not yet at hand. But if he becomes more timid, more reserved, if I perceive in his conversation the first signs of confusion and shame, then his instincts are beginning to develop; he is beginning to connect the idea of evil with these instincts. There is not a moment to lose, and if I do not hasten to instruct him, he will learn in spite of me.

[¶1121:] Some of my readers, even of those who agree with me, will think that it is only a question of a conversation with the young man at any time. Oh, but this is not the way the human heart is governed! What we say has no meaning unless we have prepared the moment for saying it. Before we sow we must till the ground. The seed of virtue is hard to grow, and a long period of preparation is required before it will take root. One reason why sermons have so little effect is that they are offered to everybody alike, without discrimination or choice. How can anyone imagine that the same sermon could be suitable for so many hearers, with their different dispositions, so unlike in mind, temper, age, sex, station, and opinion. There are perhaps not even two of them to whom what is addressed to everyone is really suitable; and all our affections are so transitory that perhaps there are not even two occasions in the life of any man when the same speech would have the same effect on him. Judge for yourself whether the time when the eager senses disturb the understanding and tyrannize over the will is the time to listen to the solemn lessons of wisdom. Therefore never reason with young men, even when they have reached the age of reason, unless you have first prepared the way. Most lectures miss their mark more through the master's fault than the disciple's. The pedant and the teacher say much the same; but the former says it at random, and the latter only when he is sure of its effect.

[¶1122:] As a somnambulist, wandering in his sleep, walks along the edge of a precipice, over which be would fall if he were awake, so my Emile, in the sleep of ignorance, escapes the perils which he does not see. Were I to wake him with a start, he might fall. Let us first try to withdraw him from the edge of the precipice, and then we will awake him to show him it from a distance.

[¶1123:] Reading, solitude, idleness. a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger. I divert his senses by other objects of sense. I trace another course for his spirits by which I distract them from the course they would have taken. It is by bodily exercise and hard work that I check the activity of the imagination, which was leading him astray. When the arms are hard at work, the imagination is quiet; when the body is very weary, the passions are not easily inflamed. The quickest and easiest precaution is to remove him from immediate danger. I first take him away from towns, away from things which might lead him into temptation. But that is not enough. In what desert, in what wilds, shall he escape from the thoughts which pursue him? It is not enough to remove dangerous objects; if I fail to remove the memory of them, if I fail to find a way to detach him from everything, if I fail to distract him from himself, I might as well have left him where he was.

[¶1124:] Emile has learned a trade, but this trade is not our main resource. He is fond of farming and understands it, but farming is not enough. The occupations he is acquainted with degenerate into routine; when he is engaged in them he is not really occupied; he is thinking of other things; head and hand are at work on different subjects. He must have some new occupation that has the interest of novelty -- an occupation that keeps him breathless, that pleases him, that provides exercise and hard work, an occupation that he may become passionate about, one to which he will devote himself entirely. Now the only one which seems to possess all these characteristics is hunting. If hunting is ever an innocent pleasure, if it is ever worthy of a man, it is now that one should have recourse to it. Emile is well-fitted to succeed in it. He is strong, skilful, patient, indefatigable. He is sure to acquire a taste for this sport. He will bring to it all the ardor of youth; in it he will lose, at least for a time, the dangerous inclinations which spring from softness. The hunt hardens the heart as well as the body; it accustoms one to the eight of blood and to cruelty. Diana is represented as the enemy of love, and the allegory is right. The languors of love are born of soft repose, and tender feelings are stifled by violent exercise. In the woods and fields, the lover and the sportsman are so diversely affected that they receive very different impressions from the same objects. The fresh shade, the green groves, the pleasant resting-places of the one are to the other but feeding grounds, or places where the quarry will hide or turn to bay. Where the lover hears the flute and the nightingale, the hunter hears the horn and the hounds. One pictures to himself the nymphs and dryads, the other sees the horses, the huntsman, and the pack. Take a country walk with one or other of these men; their different conversation will soon show you that the earth doesn't have a similar appeal for them, and that the turn of their ideas is as diverse as the choice of their pleasures.

[¶1125:] I understand how these tastes may be combined, and that at last men find time for both. But the passions of youth cannot be divided in this way. Give the youth a single occupation which he loves, and the rest will soon be forgotten. Varied desires come with varied knowledge, and the first pleasures we know are the only ones we desire for long enough. I would not want the Emile's whole youth spent killing animals, and I do not even profess to justify this ferociouos passion; it is enough for me that it serves to delay a more dangerous passion, so that he may listen to me calmly when I speak of it and give me time to describe it without stimulating it.

[¶1126:] There are moments in human life which can never be forgotten. Such is the time when Emile receives the instruction of which I am about to speak; it should influence him for the rest of his days. Let us try to engrave it on his memory so that it may never be erased. One of the faults of our age is to rely too much on bare reason, as if men were made of nothing but mind. By neglecting the language of signs which speak to the imagination we have lost the most energetic of languages. The influence of the spoken word is always weak, and we communicate to the heart through the eyes much more than through the ears. In wanting to give everything over to reason we have reduced our precepts to words; we have put nothing into actions. Reason alone is not active. Occasionally it restrains, more rarely it stimulates, and never has it done anything great. To always be reasoning is the mania of small minds. Strong souls have a very different language, and it is by this language that one cn persuade them and make them act.

[¶1127:] I observe that in modem times men only get a hold over others by force or self-interest, while the ancients did more by persuasion, by the affections of the soul, because they did not neglect the language of signs. All agreements were drawn up with solemnity in order to make them more inviolable. Before the reign of force, the gods were the magistrates of mankind. In their presence individuals made their treaties and alliances and pledged themselves to perform their promises. The book in which their archives were preserved consisted of the whole face of the earth. The pages of this book were the rocks, trees, piles of stones made sacred by these transactions and regarded with reverence by barbarous men and forever open to all their eyes. The well of the oath, the well of the living and seeing one; the ancient oak of Mamre, the stones of witness -- such were the simple but stately monuments of the sanctity of contracts. None dared to lay a sacrilegious hand on these monuments, and man's faith was more secure under the warrant of these dumb witnesses than it is to-day upon all the rigor of the laws.

[¶1128:] In government the august apparatus of royal power overawed its subjects. The symbols of dignity -- a throne, a scepter, a purple robe, a crown, a headdress -- these were sacred in the peoples sight. These respected signs made venerable to them the man whom they saw adorned with them. Without soldiers and without threats, he spoke and was obeyed. Now that we affect to abolish these signs, what will the consequences of this contempt be? That the royal majesty is erased from all hearts, that kings can only gain obedience by the force of troops, and that the respect of their subjects is based only on the fear of punishment. Kings are spared the trouble of wearing their crowns, and our nobles escape from the outward signs of their status, but they must have a hundred thousand men at their command if their orders are to be obeyed. Though this may seem a finer thing, it is easy to see that in the long run they will gain nothing.

[¶1129:] What the ancients accomplished by means of eloquence is prodigious. But this eloquence did not merely consist in fine speeches carefully arranged; and it was most effective when the orator said least. The most startling speeches were expressed not in words but in signs; they were not uttered but shown. A thing beheld by the eyes kindles the imagination, stirs the curiosity, and keeps the mind on the alert for what we are about to say, and often enough the thing tells the whole story. Thrasybulus and Tarquin cutting off the heads of the poppies, Alexander placing his seal on the lips of his favorite, Diogenes marching before Zeno -- do not these speak more plainly than if they had uttered long orations? What flow of words could have expressed the ideas as clearly? Darius, in the course of the Scythian war, received from the king of the Scythians a bird, a frog, a mouse, and five arrows. The ambassador deposited this gift and retired without a word. In our days he would have been taken for a madman. This terrible speech was understood, and Darius withdrew to his own country with what speed he could. Substitute a letter for these symbols and the more threatening it was the less terror it would inspire; it would have been merely a piece of bluff, to which Darius would have paid no attention.

[¶1130:] What close attention the Romans gave to the language of signs! Different ages and different ranks had their appropriate garments, toga, tunic, patrician robes, fringes and borders, seats of honor, lictors, rods and axes, crowns of gold, crowns of leaves, crowns of flowers, ovations, triumphs. Everything had its pomp, its observances, its ceremonial, and all these spoke to the heart of the citizens. The state regarded it as a matter of importance that the populace should assemble in one place rather than another, that they should or should not behold the Capitol, that they should or should not turn towards the Senate, that this day or that should be chosen for their deliberations. The accused wore a special dress, so did the candidates for election. Warriors did not boast of their exploits; they showed their scars. I can imagine one of our orators at the death of Caesar exhausting all the commonplaces of rhetoric to give a pathetic description of his wounds, his blood, his dead body. Anthony was an orator, but he said none of this; he showed the murdered Caesar. What rhetoric that was!

[¶1131:] But this digression, like many others, is drawing me unawares away from my subject; and my digressions are too frequent to be borne with patience. I therefore return to the point.

[¶1132:] Do not reason drily with youth. Clothe your reason with a body, if you want to make it felt. Make the language of the mind pass through the language of the heart so that it may be understood. I say again: cold arguments can influence our opinions but not our actions. They set us thinking, not doing. They show us what we ought to think, not what we ought to do. If this is true of men, it is all the truer of young people who are still enwrapped in their senses and cannot think otherwise than they imagine.

[¶1133:] Even after the preparations of which I have spoken, I shall take good care not to go all of a sudden to Emile's room and preach a long and heavy sermon on the subject in which he is to be instructed. I shall begin by rousing his imagination. I shall choose the time, place. and surroundings most favorable to the impression I wish to make. I shall, so to speak, summon all nature as witness to our conversations. I shall call upon the eternal Being, the Creator of nature, to bear witness to the truth of my discourse. I will put him as a judge between Emile and myself. I will make the rocks, the woods, the mountains round about us, the monuments of his promises and mine. I will put into my eyes, voice, and gesture the enthusiasm and the ardor I wish to inspire in him. Then I will speak and he will listen, and I will be tender towards him and he will be moved. By concentrating on the sanctity of my dities I will make his more respectable. I will animate the force of reason with images and figures. I will not be long-winded and discursive with speeches or cold precepts but will be abundant with feelings. My reason shall be grave and serious, but my heart will never have said enough. It is then in showing him everything I have done for him that I will show him what he has done for me; he will see in my tender affection the reason of all my care. What a surprise and what agitation am I going to give him by changing so suddenly my language! Instead of shriveling up his soul by always talking of his own interests, I will from now on speak of my own and he will be all the more more touched by this. I will kindle in his young heart all the sentiments of friendship, generosity, and gratitude which I have already called into being and that are so sweet to cultivate. I will press him to my breast and let fall on him tears of tenderness. I will say to him: "You are my treasure, my child, my work. My happiness depends on yours. If you frustrate my hopes you rob me of twenty years of my life and you become the sorrow of my old age." This is the way to make oneself heard and to engrave in the depths of his heart the memory of what one tells him.

[¶1134:] Until now I have tried to give examples of the way in which a tutor should instruct his pupil in cases of difficulty. I have tried to do so in this case; but after many attempts I have abandoned the task, convinced that the French language is too precious to permit in print the plainness of speech required for the first lessons in certain subjects.

[¶1135:] They say that the French language is the most pure of languages. For my own part I think it the most obscene. For it seems to me that the purity of a language does not consist in carefully avoiding indecent expressions but m having none. Indeed, if we are to avoid them, they must be in our thoughts, and there is no language in which it is so difficult to speak with purity on every subject than French. The reader is always quicker to detect than the author to avoid a gross meaning, and he is shocked and startled by everything. How can what is heard by impure ears avoid coarseness? On the other hand, a nation whose morals are pure has fit terms for everything, and these terms are always right because they are rightly used. One could not imagine more modest language than that of the Bible, just because of its plainness of speech. The same things translated into French would become immodest. What I ought to say to Emile will sound pure and honorable to him; but to make the same impression in print would demand a like purity of heart in the reader.

[¶1136:] I should even think that reflections on true purity of discourse and the false delicacy of vice might find a useful place in the conversations about morality that this subject brings us to. For by learning the language of plain-spoken goodness he must also learn the language of decency, and he must know why the two are so different. However this may be, I maintain that if instead of the empty precepts which are prematurely dinned into the ears of children, only to be scoffed at when the time comes when they might prove useful, if instead of this we wait, if we prepare the moment to make oneself heard, if we then expose him to the laws of nature in all their truth, if we show him the sanction of these same laws in the physical and moral ills that their infraction brings down upon the guilty, if while we speak to him of this inconceivable mystery of generation, we join to the idea of the pleasure which the Author of nature has given to this act the idea of the exclusive affection which makes it delicious, the idea of the duties of faithfulness, of the modesty which surrounds it and redoubles its charm while fulfilling its purpose; if we paint to him marriage, not only as the sweetest form of society but also as the most inviolable and sacred of contracts; if we tell him forcefully all the reasons which make such a sacred tie respectable to all men and cover with hatred and curses upon him who ever dares to dishonor it; if we give him a striking and true picture of the horrors of debauch, of its stupid brutality, of the gradual decline by which a first act of disorder leads to all the rest and at last drags to his ruin anyone who falls into it; if, I say, we give him proofs that on a desire for chastity depends health, strength, courage, the virtues, even love itself and all that is truly good for man -- I maintain that this chastity will be so dear and so desirable in his eyes that his mind will be ready to receive our teaching as to the way to preserve it. For so long as we are chaste we respect chastity; it is only when we have lost it that we scorn it.

[¶1137:] It is not true that the inclination to evil is beyond our control, and that we cannot overcome it until we have acquired the habit of yielding to it. Aurelius Victor says that many men were mad enough to purchase a night with Cleopatra at the price of their life, and this is not incredible in the madness of passion. But let us suppose the maddest of men, the man who has his senses least under control. Let him see the preparations for his death, let him realize that he will certainly die in torment a quarter of an hour later; not only would that man, from that time forward, become able to resist temptation, he would even find it easy to do so. The terrible picture with which they are associated will soon distract his attention from these temptations, and when they are continually put aside they will cease to recur. It is only our lukewarm will that causes our weakness, and we always have strength to perform what we strongly desire. "Volenti nihil difficile!" Oh! if only we hated vice as much as we love life, we would abstain as easily from a pleasant crime as from a deadly poison in a delicious dish.

[¶1138:] How is it that you fail to perceive that if all the lessons given to a young man on this subject have no effect, it is because they are not adapted to his age, and that it is important at every age to dress reason in forms that make him love it? Speak to him seriously if necessary, but make sure that what you say to him always have an attraction that forces him to listen. Do not oppose his wishes drily; do not stifle his imagination but guide it so as to avoid creating perversities. Speak to him of love, of women, of pleasure; let him find in your conversation a charm that flatters his young heart; spare nothing in order to become his confidant. Under this name alone will you really be his master. Then you need not fear he will find your conversation boring; he will make you talk more than you want.

[¶1139:] If I have managed to take all the requisite precautions in accordance with these maxims and have said the right things to Emile at the age he has now reached, I am quite convinced that he will come of his own accord to the point to which I would lead him and will eagerly confide himself to my care. When he sees the dangers by which he is surrounded, he will say to me with all the ardor of youth, "Oh, my friend, my protector, my master! Take back the authority you would like to lay aside at the very time when I most need it. Until now you had this power because of my weakness. Now you have it by my own will, and it will be all the more sacred to me. Protect me from the enemies that beseige me, and above all from those that I carry within me and which can betray me, Watch over your work, that it may still be worthy of you. I wish to obey your laws -- I wish to always; that is my constant will. If I ever disobey you, it will be in spite of myself. Make me free by protecting me against the passions which do me violence. Prevent me from being their slave and force me to be my own master by obeying not my senses but my reason."

[¶1140:] When you have led your pupil this point (and if you do not get this far it will be your own fault), beware of taking him too readily at his word, in case your rule should seem too strict to him and in case he should think he has a right to escape from it by accusing you of taking him by surprise. This is the time for reserve and seriousness; and this attitude will have all the more effect upon him seeing that it is the first time you have adopted it towards him.

[¶1141:] Accordingly you may say to him: "Young man, you take painful engagements lightly; you must understand what they mean before you have a right to make them. You do not know with what furor the senses drag those like you into the abyss of vice masquerading as pleasure. You do not have a base soul, that I know; and you will never break your faith. But how often will you repent of having given it! How often will you curse your friend, when, in order to guard you from the ills which threaten you, he finds himself forced to tear your heart! Like Ulysses who, hearing the song of the Sirens, cried aloud to his rowers to unchain him, when you are seduced by the attractions of pleasure you will want to break the chains that bind you; you will trouble me with your complaints, you will reproach me as a tyrant when I have your welfare most at heart. When I am trying to make you happy, I shall incur your hatred. Oh my Emile, I can never bear to be hateful to you; this is too heavy a price to pay even for your happiness. My good young man, do you not see that when you oblige to obey me, you oblige me to be your guide, to forget myself in my devotion to you, to refuse to listen to your murmurs and complaints, to combat unceasingly your wishes and my own? You impose a heavier burden on me than on yourself. Before either of us undertakes such a task, let us count our resources. Take your time, give me time to consider, and be sure that the slower we are to promise, the more faithfully will our promises be kept."

[¶1142:] You may be sure that the more difficulty he finds in getting your promise the easier you will find it to carry it out. It is important that the young man feel that he is promising much, and that you are promising still more. When the moment has come, when he has, so to say, signed the contract, then change your tone, and make your rule as gentle as you said it would be severe. Say to him, "My young friend, it is experience that you lack; but I have taken care that you do not lack reason. You are ready to see the motives of my conduct in every respect; to do this you need only wait till you are free from excitement. Always obey me first, and then ask the reasons for my commands. I am always ready to give my reasons so soon as you are ready to listen to them, and I shall never be afraid to make you the judge between us. You promise to be docile, and I promise only to use this docility only to make you the happiest of men. For proof of this I have the life you have lived until now. Find me any one of your age who has led as sweet a life as yours, and I promise you nothing more."

[¶1143:] When my authority is firmly established, my first care will be to avoid the necessity of using it. I will spare no pains to become more and more firmly established in his confidence, to make myself the confidant of his heart and the arbiter of his pleasures. Far from combating the inclinations of his age, I will consult them that I may be their master. I will look at things from his point of view in order to direct him. I will not seek a remote distant good at the cost of his present happiness. I do not want him to be happy just once but always, if that is possible.

[¶1144:] Those who desire to guide young people rightly and to preserve them from the snares of sense give them a disgust for love and would willingly make the very thought of it a crime, as if love were made for old people. All these mistaken lessons that the heart gives the lie to will fail to have the desired effect. The young man, guided by a surer instinct, secretely laughs to himself over the gloomy maxims that he pretends to accept and only awaits the chance of disregarding them. All of that goes against nature. By following the opposite route I reach more surely at the same goal. I will not be afraid to flatter the sweet sentiment for which he is so eager. I will paint it as the supreme joy of life, because in effect it is. When I picture it to him, I desire that he shall give himself up to it. By making him feel the charm which the union of hearts adds to the delights of sense, I will inspire him with a disgust for libertinism; I will make him wise by making him amorous.

[¶1145:] How narrow-minded to see nothing in the rising desires of a young heart but obstacles to the teaching of reason! I see in them the right means to make him obedient to that very teaching. One can gain a hold on the passions only through passion. It is by taking them over that one can combat their tyranny, and it is always from nature itself that one can draw the right instruments for regulating nature.

[¶1146:] Emile is not made to remain always solitary. As a member of society he must fulfil his duties as such. Made to live with men he must get to know them. He knows mankind in general; it remains for him to know individuals. He knows what goes on in the world; he has now to learn how men live in the world. It is time to show him the front of that vast stage of which he already knows the hidden workings. He will not bring to it the foolish admiration of a thoughtless youth but the discernment of an upright and exact mind. His passions could mislead him no doubt; when do they not mislead those who give into them? But at least he will not be deceived by the passions of others. If he sees them, he will regard them with the eye of a wise man without being led away by their example nor seduced by their prejudices.

[¶1147:] As there is a fitting age for the study of the sciences, so there is a fitting age for the study of social skills. Whoever learns these too soon follows them throughout life, without choice, without reflection, and although they follow them competently, they never really know what they are about. But he who studies them and sees the reason for them, follows them with more insight and therefore more exactly and gracefully. Give me a child of twelve who knows nothing at all; at fifteen I will give him back to you as knowledgeable as those whom you have instructed from infancy -- with the difference that your student's knowledge will only be in his memory while mine will be in his judgment. In the same way introduce a young man of twenty into society; under good guidance in a year's time he will be more likeable and more judiciously polished than one brought up in society from childhood. For the former is able to perceive the reasons for all the proceedings relating to age, position, and sex, on which social skills depend and can reduce them to general principles and apply them to unforeseen circumstances; while the latter, who has only habit to guide him, is embarrassed as soon as he departs from it..

[¶1148:] Young French ladies are all brought up in convents till they are married. Do they seem to find any difficulty in acquiring the manners which are so new to them, and is it possible to accuse the ladies of Paris of awkward and embarrassed manners or of ignorance of the ways of society, because they have not acquired them in infancy? This prejudice comes from the men of the world, who know nothing of more importance than this petty science, and wrongly imagine that you cannot begin to acquire it too soon.

[¶1149:] It is quite true, however, that we must not wait too long. Any one who has spent the whole of his youth far from high society is all his life long awkward, constrained, out of place; his manners will be heavy and clumsy, no amount of practice will get rid of this, and he will only make himself more ridiculous by trying to do so. There is a time for every kind of teaching and we ought to recognize it, and each has its own dangers to be avoided. At this age there are more dangers than at any other; but neither do I expose my pupil to them without safeguards.

[¶1150:] When my method succeeds completely in attaining one object, and when in avoiding one difficulty it also provides against another, I then consider that it is a good method and that I am on the true path. This seems to be the case with regard to the expedient suggested by me in the present case. If I wish to be austere and dry with my pupil, I will lose his confidence, and he will soon conceal himself from me. If I wish to be easy and complaisant, to shut my eyes, what good does it do him to be under my care? I would only authorise his disorderly life and relieve his conscience at the expense of my own. If I introduce him into society with no object but to teach him, he will learn more than I want. If I keep him apart from society, what will he have learnt from me? Everything perhaps, except the one art absolutely necessary to man and to citizen, which is to know how to live with one's fellow human beings. If these efforts are seen to have only a distant utility, they will be like nothing for him. He is only concerned with the present. If I am content to provide him with entertainment, what good will that do? He will get soft and will learn nothing.

[¶1151:] We will have none of this. My plan provides for everything. Your heart, I say to the young man, needs a companion. Let us go in search of one who suits you. We will not find her easily perhaps; true merit is always rare. But we will be in no hurry, nor will we be easily discouraged. No doubt there is such a one, and we will in the end find her, or at least one who ressembles her the most. With a project so flattering to himself I introduce him into society. What more need I say? Do not you see that I have done everything?

[¶1152:] By describing to him the mistress who is destined for him, you may imagine whether I will make myself heard, whether I will succeed in making the qualities he ought to love pleasing and dear to him, whether I will sway his feelings to seek or shun what is good or bad for him. I would be the stupidest of men if I fail to make him in love before knowing whom he is in love with. It does not matter that the person I describe is imaginary; it is enough to disgust him with those who could tempt him. It is enough if he is continually finding comparisons that make him prefer his fantasy to the real objects he sees; and is not true love itself a fantasy, a falsehood, an illusion? We are far more in love with the image that we make than with the object it is applied to. If we saw what one loves exactly as it is, there would be no such thing as love on earth. When we cease to love, the person we used to love remains the same as before, but we no longer see with the same eyes. The magic veil falls and love disappears. But when I supply the imaginary object I have control over comparisons, and I can easily to prevent illusion with regard to realities.

[¶1153:] For all that, I would not want to mislead a young man by describing a model of perfection that could never exist. But I would so choose the faults of his mistress that they will suit him, that he will be pleased by them, and they may serve to correct his own. Neither would I lie to him and affirm that there really is such a person. But if he is pleased with the image, he will soon desire to find the original. From wish to supposition the trajectory is easy; it is a matter of a few skilful descriptions, which under more perceptible features will give to this imaginary object an air of greater verity. I would go so far as to give her a name. I would say, laughing, Let us call your future mistress Sophy. Sophy is a name of good omen. If she whom you choose does not have that name, at least she will be worthy of it; we may honor her with it meanwhile. If after all these details, without affirming or denying, we excuse ourselves from more evasions, his suspicions will become certainty. He will think that his destined spouse is purposely concealed from him, and that he will see her when it is the right time. If once he has arrived at this conclusion and if the characteristics to be shown to him have been well chosen, the rest is easy; there will be little risk in exposing him to the world. Protect him from his senses, and his heart is safe.

[¶1154:] But whether or not he personifies the model I have contrived to make so likeable to him, this model, if well done, will attach him none the less to everything that resembles it and will distance him from all that is unlike it as much as if it had a real object. What a means to preserve his heart from the dangers to which his appearance would expose him, to repress his senses by means of his imagination, to rescue him from the hands of those women who profess to educate young men, and make them pay so high a price for their teaching, and only teach a young man manners by making him utterly shameless. Sophy is so modest! With what eyes will he see their advances? Sophy is so simple! How will he like their affectations? They are too far from his thoughts and his observations to be dangerous.

[¶1155:] All those who speak of the governance of children follow the name prejudices and the same maxims, for their observation is at fault, and their reflection still more so. A young man is led astray in the first place neither by temperament nor by the senses but by popular opinion. If we were dealing with boys brought up in boarding schools or girls in convents, I would show that this is true even to them. For the first lessons they learn from each other, the only lessons that bear fruit, are those of vice; and it is not nature that corrupts them but example. But let us leave the boarders in schools and convents to their bad morals; they will always be without cure. I am speaking only of domestic education. Take a young man raised wisely in his father's country house, and examine him when he reaches Paris or makes his entrance into society. You will find him thinking clearly about honest matters and possessing a will as wholesome as his reason. You will find scorn for vice and horror for debauchery; at the very mention of a prostitute you will see in his eyes his innocence being scandalized. I maintain that there isn't one of them could make up his mind to enter the depressing houses of these unfortunates by himself, even if he were aware of their purpose and felt their necessity.

[¶1156:] Six months later consider this same young man once again. You will not recognize him. From his free-wheeling conversation, his haughty assertions, his superior airs, you would take him for another man, if his jokes about his former simplicity and his shame when any one recalls it did not show that it is he indeed and that he is ashamed of himself. How transformed he is in so short a time! What has brought about so sudden and complete a change? A change in his constitution? Would not that have taken place in his father's house? And certainly he would not have acquired these maxims and this tone at home. The first pleasures of the sense? On the contrary; those who are beginning to abandon themselves to these pleasures are timid and anxious, they shun the light and noise. The first pleasures are always mysterious; modesty gives them their savor and hides them; the first mistress does not make a man bold but timid. Wholly absorbed in a situation so novel to him, the young man retires into himself to enjoy it, and trembles for fear it should escape him. If he is noisy he is neither voluptuous nor tender; however he may boast, he has not enjoyed.

[¶1157:] Other ways of thinking alone have produced these differences. His heart is the same, but his opinions have changed. His feelings, which change more slowly, will finally be changed by his opinions, and it is then that he will be indeed corrupted. He has scarcely made his entrance into society before he receives a second education completely opposed the first, which teaches him to despise what he esteemed and esteem what he despised. He learns to consider the teaching of his parents and masters as the jargon of pedants, and the duties they have instilled into him as a childish morality, to be scorned now that he is grown up. He thinks he is bound in honor to change his conduct; he becomes forward without desire, and he talks foolishly from false shame. He rails against morality before he has any taste for vice, and prides himself on debauchery without knowing how to set about it. I shall never forget the confession of a young officer in the Swiss Guards, who was utterly sick of the noisy pleasures of his comrades but dared not refuse to take part in them lest he should be laughed at. "I am getting used to it," he said, "as I am getting used to tobacco. The taste will come with practice; it will not do to be a child for ever."

[¶1158:] Thus it is far less from sensuality than from vanity that one must preserve a young man as he enters society. He succumbs more to the tastes of others than to his own, and amour-propre is responsible for more libertines than love is.

[¶1159:] This being granted, I ask you, is there any one on earth better armed than my pupil against all that may attack his morals, his sentiments, his principles? Is there any one more able to resist the flood? What seduction is there against which he is not forearmed? If his desires attract him towards women, he fails to find what he seeks, and his heart, already occupied, holds him back. If he is disturbed and urged onward by his senses, where will he find satisfaction? His horror of adultery and debauchery keeps him at a distance from prostitutes and married women, and the disorders of youth may always be traced to one or other of these. A young woman of marriagable age may be a coquette, but she will not be shameless, she will not fling herself at the head of a young man who would marry her if he found her wise; besides she is always under supervision. Emile, too, will not be left entirely to himself; both of them will be under the guardianship of fear and shame, the constant companions of a first passion. They will not proceed at once to ultimate intimacies, and they will not have time to come to them gradually without hindrance. If he behaves otherwise, he must have taken lessons from his friends; he must have learned from them to despise his self-control and to imitate their boldness. But there is no one in the whole world so little given to imitation as Emile. What man is there who is so little influenced by mockery as one who has no prejudices himself and yields nothing to the prejudices of others? I have worked twenty years to arm him against mockery; they will not make him their dupe in a day. For in his eyes ridicule is the argument of fools, and nothing makes one less susceptible to raillery than to be beyond the influence of prejudice. Instead of jests he must have arguments, and while he is in this frame of mind, I am not afraid that he will be carried away by young fools. Conscience and truth are on my side. If prejudice is to enter into the matter at all, an affection of twenty years' standing counts for something. No one will ever convince him that I have wearied him with vain lessons; and in a heart so upright and so sensitive the voice of a tried and trusted friend will soon erase the shouts of twenty libertines. As it is therefore merely a question of showing him that he is deceived, that while they pretend to treat him as a man they are really treating him as a child, I shall choose to be always simple but serious and plain in my arguments, so that he may feel that I do indeed treat him as a man. I will say to him, "You will see that your welfare, in which my own is bound up, compels me to speak; I can do nothing else. But why do these young men want to persuade you? Because they desire to seduce you; they do not care for you, they take no real interest in you; their only motive is a secret spite because they see you are better than they; they want to drag you down to their own level, and they only reproach you with submitting to control that they may themselves control you. Do you think you have anything to gain by this? Are they so much wiser than I, is the affection of a day stronger than mine? To give any weight to their jests they must give weight to their authority; and by what experience do they support their maxims above ours? They have only followed the example of other silly young men, as they would have you follow theirs. To escape from the so-called prejudices of their fathers, they yield to those of their comrades. I cannot see that they are any the better off; but I see that they lose two things of value -- the affection of their parents, whose advice is that of tenderness and truth, and the wisdom of experience which teaches us to judge by what we know. For their fathers have once been young, but the young men have never been fathers.

[¶1160:] "But you think they are at least sincere in their foolish precepts? Not even that, dear Emile. They deceive themselves in order to deceive you. They are not in agreement with themselves; their heart continually revolts, and their very words often contradict themselves. This man who mocks at everything good would be in despair if his wife held the same views. Another extends his indifference to good morals even to his future wife, or he sinks to such depths of infamy as to be indifferent to his wife's conduct; but go a step further; speak to him of his mother. Is he willing to be treated as the child of an adulteress and the son of a woman of bad character, is he ready to assume the name of a family, to steal the patrimony of the true heir, in a word will he bear being treated as a bastard? Which of them will permit his daughter to be dishonored as he dishonors the daughter of another? There is not one of them who would not kill you if you adopted in your conduct towards him all the principles he tries to teach you. Thus they prove their inconsistency, and we know they do not believe what they say. Here are reasons, dear Emile; weigh their arguments if they have any, and compare them with mine. If I wished to have recourse like them to scorn and mockery, you would see that they lend themselves to ridicule as much or more than myself. But I am not afraid of serious inquiry. The triumph of mockers is soon over; truth endures, and their foolish laughter dies away."

[¶1161:] You do not think that Emile, at twenty, can possibly be docile? How differently we think! I cannot understand how he could be docile at ten, for what hold have I on him at that age? It took me fifteen years of careful preparation to secure that hold. I was not educating him, but preparing him for education. He is now sufficiently educated to be docile; he recognizes the voice of friendship and he knows how to obey reason. I let him have, it is true, the appearance of independence, but never was he more subjected to me, for he is because he wants to be. So long as I could not get the mastery over his will, I had it through his person; l never left him for a moment. Now I sometimes leave him to himself because I govern him always. When I leave him I embrace him and I say with confidence: Emile, I trust you to my friend, I leave you to his honest heart; it is hewho will take my place for you.

[¶1162:] To corrupt healthy affections which have not been previously depraved, to efface principles which are directly derived from our own reasoning, is not the work of a moment. If any change takes place during my absence, that absence will not be long, he will never be able to conceal himself from me, so that I shall perceive the danger before any harm comes of it, and I shall be in time to provide a remedy. Since we do not become depraved all at once, neither do we learn to deceive all at once; and if ever there was a man unskilled in the art of deception it is Emile, who has never had any occasion for deceit.

[¶1163:] By means of these precautions and others like them, I expect to guard him so completely against strange sights and vulgar precepts that I would rather see him in the worst company in Paris than alone in his room or in a park left to all the restlessness of his age. Whatever we may do, a young man's worst enemy is himself, and this is an enemy we cannot avoid. Yet this is an enemy of our own making, for, as I have said again and again, it is the imagination which stirs the senses. Their needs are not actually physical needs; it is not true that it is a true need at all. If no lascivious object had met our eye, if no unclean thought had entered our mind, this so-called need might never have made itself felt in us, and we should have remained chaste, without temptation, effort, or merit. We do not know how the blood of youth is stirred by certain situations and certain sights, while the youth himself does not understand the cause of his uneasiness -- an uneasiness difficult to subdue and certain to recur. For my own part, the more I consider this serious crisis and its causes, immediate and remote, the more convinced I am that a solitary being brought up in some desert, apart from books, teaching, and women, would die a virgin, however long he lived.

[¶1164:] But we are not concerned with a savage of this sort. When we educate a man among his fellow men and for social life, we cannot, and indeed we ought not to, bring him up in this wholesome ignorance, and half knowledge is worse than none. The memory of things we have observed, the ideas we have acquired, follow us into retirement and people it, against our will, with images more seductive than the things themselves, and these make solitude as fatal to those who bring such ideas with them as it is wholesome for those who have never left it.

[¶1165:] Therefore, watch carefully over the young man; he can protect himself from all other foes, but it is for you to protect him against himself. Never leave him night or day, or at least share his room; never let him go to bed till he is sleepy, and let him rise as soon as he wakes. Distrust instinct as soon as you cease to rely altogether upon it. Instinct was good while he acted under its guidance only; now that he is in the midst of human institutions, instinct is not to be trusted. It must not be destroyed, it must be controlled, which is perhaps a more difficult matter. It would be very dangerous if instinct taught your pupil to divert these senses and to supplement the occasions for satisfying them. If once he acquires this dangerous supplement he is lost. From then on, body and soul will be enervated; he will carry to the grave the sad effects of this habit, the most fatal habit which a young man can be subjected to. Without doubt it would be better still . . . If the furors of an ardent temperament become invinciple, my dear Emile, I pity you; but I shall not hesitate for a moment. I will not permit the purposes of nature to be evaded. If a tyrant must subjugate you, I prefer to surrender you to a tyrant from whom I may deliver you. Whatever happens, I can free you more easily from the slavery of women than from yourself.

[¶1166:] Up to the age of twenty, the body is still growing and requires all its strength. Until that age continence is the law of nature, and this law is rarely violated without injury to the constitution. After twenty, continence is a moral duty; it is an important duty, for it teaches us to control ourselves, to be masters of our own appetites. But moral duties have their modifications, their exceptions, their rules. When human weakness makes an alternative inevitable, of two evils choose the least; in any case it is better to commit a misdeed than to contract a vicious habit.

[¶1167:] Remember, I am not talking of my pupil now, but of yours. His passions, to which you have given way, are your master; yield to them openly and without concealing his victory. If you are able to show him it in its true light, he will be ashamed rather than proud of it, and you will secure the right to guide him in his wanderings, at least so as to avoid precipices. The disciple must do nothing, not even evil, without the knowledge and consent of his master. It is a hundredfold better that the tutor should approve of a misdeed than that he should deceive himself or be deceived by his pupil, and the wrong should be done without his knowledge. He who thinks he must shut his eyes to one thing, must soon shut them altogether. The first abuse which is permitted leads to others, and this chain of consequences only ends in the complete overthrow of all order and contempt for every law.

[¶1168:] There is another mistake which I have already dealt with, a mistake continually made by narrow-minded persons; they constantly affect the dignity of a master,and wish to be regarded by their disciples as perfect. This method is just the contrary of what should be done. How is it that they fail to perceive that when they try to strengthen their authority they are really destroying it; that to gain a hearing one must put oneself in the place of our hearers, and that to speak to the human heart, one must be a man. All these perfect people neither touch nor persuade. People always say, "It is easy for them to fight against passions they do not feel." Show your pupil your own weaknesses if you want to cure his; let him see in you struggles like his own; let him learn by your example to master himself and let him not say like other young men, "These old people, who are vexed because they are no longer young, want to treat all young people as if they were old; and they make a crime of our passions because their own passions are dead."

[¶1169:] Montaigne tells us that he once asked Seigneur de Langey how often, in his negotiations with Germany, he had got drunk in his king's service. I would willingly ask the tutor of a certain young man how often he has entered a house of ill-fame for his pupil's sake. How often? I am wrong. If the first time has not cured the young libertine of all desire to go there again, if he does not return penitent and ashamed, if he does not shed torrents of tears upon your bosom, leave him on the spot; either he is a monster or you are a fool; you will never do him any good. But let us have done with these last expedients, which are as distressing as they are dangerous. Our kind of education has no need of them.

[¶1170:] What precautions we must take with a well-born young man before exposing him to the scandalous manners of our age! These precautions are painful but necessary; negligence in this matter is the ruin of all our young men; degeneracy is the result of youthful excesses, and it is these excesses which make men what they are. Old and base in their vices, their hearts are shriveled because their worn-out bodies were corrupted at an early age. They have scarcely strength to stir. The subtlety of their thoughts betrays a mind lacking in substance; they are incapable of any great or noble feeling, they have neither simplicity nor vigor; altogether abject and meanly wicked, they are merely frivolous, deceitful, and false; they have not even courage enough to be distinguished criminals. Such are the despicable men produced by early debauchery. If there were but one among them who knew how to be sober and temperate, to guard his heart, his body, his morals from the contagion of bad example, at the age of thirty he would crush all these insects, and would become their master with far less trouble than it cost him to become master of himself.

[¶1171:] However little Emile owes to birth and fortune, he might be this man if he chose. But he despises such people too much to condescend to make them his slaves. Let us now watch him in their midst as he enters into society, not to claim the first place, but to acquaint himself with it and to seek a companion worthy of himself.

[¶1172:] Whatever his rank or birth, whatever the society into which he is introduced, his entrance into that society will be simple and unaffected. God forbit that he be unlucky enough to shine in society. The qualities which make a good impression at the first glance are not his; he neither possesses them, nor desires to possess them. He cares too little for the opinions of other people to value their prejudices, and he is indifferent whether people esteem him or not until they know him. His manner of presenting himself is neither shy nor conceited but natural and sincere. He knows nothing of constraint or concealment. and he is just the same among a group of people as he is when he is alone. Will this make him rude, scornful, and careless of others? On the contrary; if he were not heedless of others when he lived alone, why should he be heedless of them now that he is living among them? He does not prefer them to himself in his manners, because he does not prefer them to himself in his heart; but neither does he show them an indifference which he is far from feeling. If he is unacquainted with the forms of politeness, he is not unacquainted with the attentions dictated by humanity. He cannot bear to see any one suffer; he will not give up his place to another from mere external politeness, but he will willingly yield it to him out of kindness if he sees that he is being neglected and that this neglect hurts him. For it will be less disagreeable to Emile to remain standing of his own accord than to see another compelled to stand.

[¶1173:] Although Emile has no very high opinion of people in general, he does not show any scorn of them because he pities them and is sorry for them. Since he cannot give them a taste for what is truly good, he leaves them the imaginary good with which they are satisfied, lest by robbing them of this he should leave them worse off than before. So he neither argues nor contradicts; neither does he flatter nor agree. He states his opinion without arguing with others because he loves liberty above all things, and freedom is one of the fairest gifts of liberty.

[¶1174:] He says little, for he is not anxious to attract attention. For the same reason he only says what is to the point; who could induce him to speak otherwise? Emile is too well informed to be a chatter-box. A great flow of words comes either from a pretentious spirit, of which I shall speak presently, or from the value laid upon trivial things that we foolishly think to be as important in the eyes of others as in our own. He who knows enough of things to value them at their true worth never says too much; for he can also judge of the attention paid to him and the interest aroused by what he says. People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little. It is plain that an ignorant person thinks everything he does know important, and he tells it to everybody. But a well educated man is not so ready to display his learning. He would have too much to say, and he sees that there is much more to be said, so he holds his peace.

[¶1175:] Far from confronting the manners of others, Emile conforms to them fairly willingly; not that he may appear to know all about them, nor yet to affect the airs of a man of fashion, but on the contrary for fear that he might attract attention, and in order to pass unnoticed. He is most at his ease when no one pays any attention to him.

[¶1176:] Although when he makes his entrance into society he knows nothing of its customs, this does not make him shy or timid. If he keeps in the background, it is not because he is embarrassed but because if you want to see, you must not be seen. For he scarcely troubles himself at all about what people think of him, and he is not the least afraid of ridicule. Hence he is always quiet and self-possessed and is not troubled with shyness. All he has to do is done as well as he knows how to do it, whether people are looking at him or not. And as he is always on the alert to observe other people, he acquires their ways with an ease impossible to the slaves of other people's opinions. We might say that he acquires the ways of society precisely because he cares so little about them.

[¶1177:] But do not make any mistake as to his bearing; it is not to be compared with that of your agreeable young men. He is firm and self-sufficient; his manners are free and not arrogant. An insolent look is the mark of a slave; there is nothing affected about independence. I never saw a man who had pride in his soul show it in his bearing. This affectation is more suited to vile and vain souls who have no other means of asserting themselves. I read somewhere that a foreigner appeared one day in the presence of the famous Marcel, who asked him what country he came from. "I am an Englishman," replied the, stranger. "You are an Englishman?" replied the dancer, "You come from that island where the citizens have a share in the government, and form part of the sovereign power? No, sir, your lowered brow, your timid glance, your hesitating manner, announce only a slave who has the title of an elector."

[¶1178:] I cannot say whether this saying shows much knowledge of the true relation between a man's character and his appearance. I have not the honor of being a dancing master, and I should have thought just the opposite. I should have said, "This Englishman is no courtier; I never heard that courtiers have a timid bearing and a hesitating manner. A man whose appearance is timid in the presence of a dancer might not be timid in the House of Commons." Surely this M. Marcel must take his fellow-countrymen for so many Romans.

[¶1179:] When one loves one wants to be loved. Emile loves men; he wants therefore to please them. Even more does he wish to please the women. His age, his character, the object he has in view, all increase this desire. I say his character, for this has a great effect. Men of good character are those who really adore women. They do not have the mocking jargon of gallantry like the rest, but their eagerness is more genuinely tender because it comes from the heart. In the presence of a young woman, I could pick out a young man of character and self-control from among a hundred thousand libertines. Consider what Emile must be, with all the eagerness of early youth and so many reasons for resistance! For in the presence of women I think he will sometimes be shy and timid; but this shyness will certainly not be displeasing, and the least foolish of them will only too often find a way to enjoy it and augment it. Moreover, his eagerness will take a different shape according to those he has to do with. He will be more modest and respectful to married women, more eager and tender towards young girls. He never loses sight of his purpose, and it is always those who most recall it to him who receive the greater share of his attentions.

[¶1180:] No one could be more attentive to every consideration based upon the laws of nature, and even on the laws of good society. But the former are always preferred before the latter, and Emile will show more respect to an elderly person in private life than to a young magistrate of his own age. As he is generally one of the youngest in the company, he will always be one of the most modest, not from the vanity which apes humility, but from a natural feeling founded upon reason. He will not have the effrontery of the young snob who speaks louder than the wise and interrupts the old in order to amuse the company. He will never give any cause for the reply given to Louis XV by an old gentleman who was asked whether he preferred this century or the last: "Sire, I spent my youth in reverence towards the old; I find myself compelled to spend my old age in reverence towards the young."

[¶1181:] Having a heart that is tender and sensitive but caring nothing for the weight of popular opinion, although he loves to give pleasure to others he will care little about being considered a person of importance. Hence he will be affectionate rather than polite, he will never be pompous or affected,. and he will be always more touched by a caress than by much praise. For the same reasons he will never be careless of his manners or his clothes; perhaps he will be rather particular about his dress, not that he may show himself a man of taste, but to make his appearance more pleasing. He will never require a gilt frame, and he will never spoil his style by a display of wealth.

[¶1182:] It is clear that all this does not require extensive precepts from me; it is all the result of his early education. People make a great mystery of the ways of society, as if, at the age when these ways are acquired, we did not take to them quite naturally, and as if the first laws of politeness were not to be found in a kindly heart. True politeness consists in showing our goodwill towards men; when one has it it reveals itself without any difficulty. Only those who lack this goodwill are compelled to reduce the outward signs of it to an art.

[¶1183:] "The worst effect of artificial politeness is that it teaches us how to dispense with the virtues it imitates. If our education were to teach us kindness and humanity, we would be polite, or we would have no need of politeness.

[¶1184:] "If we do not have those qualities that manifest themselves through the social graces, we will have those that proclaim the honest man and the citizen; we will have no need for falsehood.

[¶1185:] "Instead of seeking to please by artificiality, it will suffice that we are good; instead of flattering the weaknesses of others by falsehood, it will suffice to tolerate them.

[¶1186:] "Those whom we relate to will neither be puffed up nor corrupted by such intercourse; they will only be grateful and will be informed by it."

[¶1187:] It seems to me that if any education is calculated to produce the sort of politeness required by M. Duclos in this passage, it is the education I have already described.

[¶1188:] Yet I admit that with such different teaching Emile will not be just like everybody else, and God preserve him from ever being so. But where he is unlike other people, he will be neither irritating nor absurd; the difference will be perceptible but not unpleasant. Emile will be, if you like, an agreeable foreigner. At first his peculiarities will be excused with the phrase, "He will learn." After a time people will get used to his ways, and seeing that he does not change they will still make excuses for him and say, "He is made that way."

[¶1189:] He will not be fêted as a charming man, but every one will like him without knowing why. No one will praise his intellect, but every one will be ready to make him the judge between men of intellect. His own intelligence will be clear and limited, his mind will be accurate, and his judgment sane. Since he never runs after new ideas, he cannot pride himself on his wit. I have convinced him that all wholesome ideas, ideas which are really useful to mankind, were among the earliest known, that in all times they have formed the true bonds of society, and that there is nothing left for ambitious minds but to seek distinction for themselves by means of ideas which are injurious and fatal to mankind. This way of winning admiration scarcely appeals to him; he knows how he ought to seek his own happiness in life, and how he can contribute to the happiness of others. The sphere of his knowledge is restricted to what is profitable. His path is narrow and clearly defined; as he has no temptation to leave it, he is lost in the crowd; he will neither distinguish himself nor will he lose his way. Emile is a man of common sense and he has no desire to be anything more. You may try in vain to insult him by applying this phrase to him; he will always consider it a title of honor.

[¶1190:] Although from his wish to please he is no longer wholly indifferent to the opinion of others, he only considers that opinion so far as he himself is directly concerned, without troubling himself about arbitrary values, which are subject to no law but that of fashion or conventionality He will have pride enough to wish to do well in everything that he undertakes, and even to wish to do it better than others; he will want to be the swiftest runner, the strongest wrestler, the cleverest workman, the readiest in games of skill. But he will not seek advantages which are not in themselves clear gain, that need to be supported by the opinion of others, such as to be thought wittier than another, a better speaker, more learned, etc.. Still less will he trouble himself with those which have nothing to do with the man himself, such as higher birth, a greater reputation for wealth, credit, or public estimation, or the impression created by a showy exterior.

[¶1191:] Since he loves men because they are like himself, he will prefer those who are the most like himself, because he will feel himself good. And judging this resemblance by similarity of taste in morals, by all that belongs to a good character, he will be delighted to win approval. He will not say to himself in so many words, "I am delighted to gain approval," but "I am delighted because they say I have done right; I am delighted because the men who honor me are worthy of honor. While they judge so wisely, it is a fine thing to win their respect."

[¶1192:] As he studies men in their conduct in society, just as he formerly studied them through their passions in history, he will often have occasion to consider what it is that pleases or offends the human heart. He is now busy with the philosophy of the principles of taste, and this is the most suitable subject for his present study.

[¶1193:] The further we seek our definitions of taste, the further we go astray. Taste is merely the power of judging what is pleasing or displeasing to most people. Go beyond this, and you cannot say what taste is. It does not follow that the men of taste are in the majority; for though the majority judges wisely with regard to each individual thing, there are few men who follow the judgment of the majority in everything; and though the most general agreement in taste constitutes good taste, there are few men of good taste just as there are few beautiful people, although beauty consists in the sum of the most usual features.

[¶1194:] It must be observed that we are not here concerned with what we like because it is serviceable, or hate because it is harmful to us. Taste deals only with things that are indifferent to us, or that affect at most our amusements, not those which relate to our needs. Taste is not required to judge of these; appetite alone is sufficient. It is this which makes mere decisions of taste so difficult and as it seems so arbitrary. For beyond the instinct they follow there appears to be no reason whatever for them. We must also make a distinction between the laws of good taste in morals and its laws in physical matters. In the latter the laws of taste appear to be absolutely inexplicable. But it must be observed that there is a moral element in everything which involves imitation. This is the explanation of forms of beauty that seem to be physical, but are not so in reality. I may add that taste has local rules which make it dependent in many respects on the country we are in, its manners, government, institutions; it has other rules which depend upon age, sex, and character, and it is in this sense that we must not dispute over matters of taste.

[¶1195:] Taste is natural to men; but all do not possess it in the same degree. It is not developed to the same extent in every one; and in every one it is liable to be modified by a variety of causes. Such taste as we may possess depends on our native sensibility; its cultivation and its form depend upon the society in which we have lived. In the first place we must live in societies of many different kinds so as to compare much. In the next place, there must be societies for amusement and idleness, for in business relations, interest, not pleasure, is our rule. Lastly, there must be societies in which people are fairly equal, where the tyranny of public opinion may be moderate, where pleasure rather than vanity is queen. Where this is not so, fashion stifles taste, and we seek what gives distinction rather than delight.

[¶1196:] In the latter case it is no longer true that good taste is the taste of the majority. Why is this? Because the purpose is different. Then the crowd has no longer any opinion of its own, it only follows the judgment of those who are supposed to know more about it. Its approval is bestowed not on what is good, but on what they have already approved. At any time let every man have his own opinion, and what is most pleasing in itself will always secure most votes.

[¶1197:] Every beauty that is to be found in the works of man is imitated. All the true models of taste are to be found in nature. The further we get from the master, the worse are our pictures. Then it is that we find our models in what we ourselves like, and the beauty of fancy, subject to caprice and to authority, is nothing but what is pleasing to our leaders.

[¶1198:] Those leaders are the artists, the wealthy, and the great, and they themselves follow the lead of self-interest or pride. Some to display their wealth, others to profit by it, they seek eagerly for new ways of spending it. This is how luxury acquires its power and makes us love what is rare and costly; this so-called beauty consists, not in following nature, but in disobeying her. Hence luxury and bad taste are inseparable. Wherever taste is lavish, it is bad.

[¶1199:] Taste, good or bad, takes its shape especially in the intercourse between the two sexes. The cultivation of taste is a necessary consequence of this form of society. But when enjoyment is easily obtained, and the desire to please becomes lukewarm, taste must degenerate; and this is, in my opinion, one of the best reasons why good taste implies good morals.

[¶1200:] Consult the women's opinions in bodily matters, in all that concerns the senses. Consult the men in matters of morality and all that concerns the understanding. When women are what they ought to be, they will limit themselves to things within their competence and will always judge well. But since they have set themselves up as arbiters of literature, since they have begun to criticize books and to put their forces into making them, they are no longer good judges of anything. Authors who take the advice of lady scholars will always be ill advised; suitors who consult them about their clothes will always be absurdly dressed. I will soon have an opportunity of speaking of the real talents of the female sex, the way to cultivate these talents, and the matters in regard to which their decisions should receive attention.

[¶1201:] These are the elementary considerations which I shall lay down as principles when I discuss with Emile this matter which is by no means indifferent to him in his present inquiries. And to whom should it be a matter of indifference? To know what people may find pleasant or unpleasant is not only necessary to any one who requires their help, it is still more necessary to any one who would help them. You must please them if you would do them service; and the art of writing is no idle pursuit if it is used to make men hear the truth.

[¶1202:] If in order to cultivate my pupil's taste I were compelled to choose between a country where this form of culture has not yet arisen and those in which it has already degenerated, I would progress backwards. I would begin his survey with the latter and end with the former. My reason for this choice is that taste becomes corrupted through excessive delicacy, which makes it sensitive to things which most men do not perceive. This delicacy leads to a spirit of discussion, for the more subtle is our discrimination of things the more things there are for us. This subtlety increases the delicacy and decreases the uniformity of our touch. So there are as many tastes as there are people. In disputes as to our preferences, philosophy and knowledge are enlarged, and thus we learn to think. It is only men accustomed to plenty of society who are capable of very delicate observations, for these observations do not occur to us till the last, and people who are unused to all sorts of society exhaust their attention in the consideration of the more conspicuous features . There is perhaps no civilized place upon earth where the common taste is so bad as in Paris. Yet it is in this capital that good taste is cultivated, and it seems that few books make any impression in Europe whose authors have not studied in Paris. Those who think it is enough to read our books are mistaken; there is more to be learnt from the conversation of authors than from their books; and it is not from the authors that we learn most It is the spirit of social life which develops a thinking mind and carries the eye as far as it can reach. If you have a spark of genius, go and spend a year in Paris. You will soon be all that you are capable of becoming, or you will never be good for anything at all.

[¶1203:] One may learn to think in places where bad taste rules supreme. But we must not think like those whose taste is bad, and it is very difficult to avoid this if we spend much time among them. We must use their efforts to perfect the machinery of judgment, but we must be careful not to make the same use of it. I will take care not to polish Emile's judgment so far as to transform it, and when he has acquired discernment enough to feel and compare the varied tastes of men, I will lead him to fix his own taste upon simpler matters.

[¶1204:] I will go still further in order to keep his taste pure and wholesome. In the tumult of dissipation I shall find opportunities for useful conversation with him. And while these conversations are always about things in which he takes a delight, I will take care to make them as amusing as they are instructive. Now is the time to read pleasant books; now is the time to teach him to analyze speech and to appreciate all the beauties of eloquence and diction. It is a small matter to learn languages; they are less useful than people think, but the study of languages leads us on to that of grammar in general. We must learn Latin if we would have a thorough knowledge of French. These two languages must be studied and compared if we would understand the rules of the art of speaking.

[¶1205:] There is, moreover. a certain simplicity of taste which goes straight to the heart; and this is only to be found in the classics. In oratory, poetry, and every kind of literature, Emile will find the classical authors as he found them in history, full of matter and sober in their judgment. The authors of our own time, on the contrary, say little and talk much. To take their judgment as our constant law is not the way to form our own judgment. These differences of taste make themselves felt in all that is left of classical times and even on their tombs. Our monuments are covered with praises, theirs recorded facts. "Sta, viator; heroem calcas."

[¶1206:] If I had found this epitaph on an ancient monument, I should at once have guessed it was modern. For there is nothing so common among us as heroes, but among the ancients they were rare. Instead of saying a man was a hero, they would have said what he had done to gain that name. With the epitaph of this hero compare that of the effeminate Sardanapalus: "Tarsus and Anchiales I built in a day, and now I am dead."

[¶1207:] Which do you think says most? Our inflated monumental style is only fit to trumpet forth the praises of pygmies. The ancients showed men as they were, and it was plain that they were men indeed. Xenophon did honor to the memory of some warriors who were slain by treason during the retreat of the Ten Thousand. "They died," said he, "without stain in war and in love." That is all, but think how full was the heart of the author of this short and simple elegy. Woe to him who fails to perceive its charm.

[¶1208:] The following words were engraved on a tomb at Thermopylae: "Go, Traveler, tell Sparta that here we fell in obedience to her laws."

[¶1209:] It is pretty clear that this was not the work of the Academy of Inscriptions.

[¶1210:] If I am not mistaken, the attention of my pupil, who sets so small a value upon words, will be directed in the first place to these differences, and they will affect his choice in his reading. He will be carried away by the manly eloquence of Demosthenes, and will say, "This is an orator;" but when he reads Cicero, he will say, "This is a lawyer."

[¶1211:] In general Emile will have more taste for the books of the ancients than for our own, just because they were the first, and therefore the ancients are nearer to nature and their genius is more distinct. Whatever La Motte and the Abbé Terrasson may say, there is no real advance in human reason, for what we gain in one direction we lose in another. For all minds start from the same point, and as the time spent in learning what others have thought is so much time lost in learning to think for ourselves, we have more acquired knowledge and less vigor of mind. Our minds like our arms are accustomed to use tools for everything and to do nothing for themselves. Fontenelle used to say that all these disputes as to the ancients and the moderns could be reduced to whether the trees in former times were taller than they are now. If agriculture had changed, it would be worth our while to ask this question.

[¶1212:] After I have led Emile to the sources of pure literature, I will also show him the channels into the reservoirs of modern compilers -- journals, translations, dictionaries. He will cast a glance at them all, and then leave them for ever. To amuse him he will hear the chatter of the academies. I will draw his attention to the fact that every member of them is worth more by himself than he is as a member of the society; he will then draw his own conclusions as to the utility of these fine institutions.

[¶1213:] I take him to the theatre to study taste, not morals; for in the theatre above all taste is revealed to those who can think. Lay aside precepts and morality, I should say; this is not the place to study them. The stage is not made for truth; its object is to flatter and amuse. There is no place where one can learn so completely the art of pleasing and of interesting the human heart. The study of plays leads to the study of poetry; both have the same end in view. If he has the least glimmering of taste for poetry, how eagerly will he study the languages of the poets, Greek, Latin, and Italian! These studies will afford him unlimited amusement and will be none the less valuable. They will be a delight to him at an age and in circumstances when the heart finds so great a charm in every kind of beauty which affects it. Picture to yourself on the one hand Emile, on the other some young rascal from college, reading the fourth book of the aeneid or Tibullus, or the Banquet of Plato: what a difference between them! What stirs the heart of Emile to its depths, makes not the least impression on the other! Oh, good youth, stay, make a pause in your reading, you are too deeply moved. I want you to find pleasure in the language of love, but I do not wnt you to be carried away by it. Be a wise man, but be a good man too. If you are only one of these, you are nothing. After this let him win fame or not in dead languages, in literature, in poetry, I care little. He will be none the worse if he knows nothing of them, and his education is not concerned with these mere words.

[¶1214:] My main object in teaching him to feel and love beauty of every kind is to fix his affections and his taste on these, to prevent the corruption of his natural appetites, in case he should have to seek some day in the midst of his wealth for the means of happiness which should be found close at hand. I have said elsewhere that taste is only the art of being a connoisseur in matters of little importance, and this is quite true. But since the charm of life depends on a tissue of these matters of little importance, such efforts are no small thing; through their means we learn how to fill our life with the good things within our reach, with as much truth as they may hold for us. I do not refer to the morally good which depends on a good disposition of the heart, but only to that which depends on the body, on real delight, apart from the prejudices of public opinion.

[¶1215:] The better to unfold my idea, allow me for a moment to leave Emile, whose pure and wholesome heart cannot be taken as a rule for others, and to seek in my own memory for an illustration better suited to the reader and more in accordance with his own manners.

[¶1216:] There are professions which seem to change a man's nature, to recast, either for better or worse, the men who adopt them. A coward becomes a brave man in the regiment of Navarre. It is not only in the army that esprit de corps is acquired, and its effects are not always for good. I have thought again and again with terror that if I had the misfortune to fill a certain post I am thinking of in a certain country, before to-morrow I should certainly be a tyrant, an extortioner, a destroyer of the people, harmful to my king, and a professed enemy of mankind, a foe to justice and every kind of virtue.

[¶1217:] In the same way, if I were rich, I should have done all that is required to gain riches; I should therefore be insolent and degraded, sensitive and feeling only on my own behalf, harsh and pitiless to all besides, a scornful spectator of the sufferings of the masses -- for that is what I would call the poor -- to make people forget that I was once poor myself. Lastly I would make my fortune a means to my own pleasures with which I should be wholly occupied; and so far I should be just like other people.

[¶1218:] But in one respect I would be very unlike them; I would be sensual and voluptuous rather than proud and vain, and I should give myself up to the luxury of comfort rather than to that of ostentation. I would even be somewhat ashamed to make too great a show of my wealth, and if I overwhelmed the envious with my pomp I would always fancy I heard him saying, "Here is a rascal who is greatly afraid that we should take him for anything but what he is."

[¶1219:] In the vast profusion of good things upon this earth I would seek what I like best, and what I can best appropriate to myself. To this end, the first use I should make of my wealth would be to purchase leisure and freedom, to which I would add health, if it were to be purchased; but health can only be bought by temperance, and as there is no real pleasure without health, I would be temperate from sensual motives.

[¶1220:] I would also keep as close as possible to nature, to gratify the senses given me by nature, being quite convinced that, the greater her share in my pleasures the more real I will find them. In the choice of models for imitation I will always choose nature as my pattern; in my appetites I will give her the preference; in my tastes she will always be consulted; in my food I will always choose what most owes its charm to her, and what has passed through the fewest possible hands on its way to table. I will be on my guard against fraudulent shams; I will go out to meet pleasure. No cook will grow rich on my gross and foolish greediness; he will not poison me with fish which cost its weight in gold, my table will not be decked with fetid splendor or putrid flesh from far-off lands. I will take any amount of trouble to gratify my sensibility, since this trouble has a pleasure of its own, a pleasure more than we expect. If I wished to taste a food from the ends of the earth, I would go, like Apicius, in search of it, rather than send for it; for the daintiest dishes always lack a charm which cannot be brought along with them, a flavor which no cook can give them-the air of the country where they are produced.

[¶1221:] For the same reason I would not follow the example of those who are never well off where they are, but are always contradicting the seasons and confusing countries and their seasons; those who seek winter in summer and summer in winter, and go to Italy to be cold and to the north to be warm without considering that when they think they are escaping from the severity of the seasons, they are going to meet that severity in places where people are not prepared for it. I will stay in one place, or I will adopt just the opposite course; I should like to get all possible enjoyment out of one season to discover what is peculiar to any given country. I would have a variety of pleasures, and habits quite unlike one another, but each according to nature; I would spend the summer at Naples and the winter in St. Petersburg. Sometimes I would breathe the soft zephyr lying in the cool grottoes of Tarentum, and again I would enjoy the illuminations of an ice palace, breathless and wearied with the pleasures of the dance.

[¶1222:] In the service of my table and the adornment of my dwelling I would imitate in the simplest ornaments the variety of the seasons and draw from each its charm without anticipating its successor. There is no taste but only difficulty to be found in thus disturbing the order of nature. To snatch from her unwilling gifts, which she yields regretfully, with her curse upon them; gifts which have neither strength nor flavor, which can neither nourish the body nor tickle the palate. Nothing is more insipid than forced fruits. A wealthy man in Paris, with all his stoves and hot-houses, only succeeds in getting all the year round poor fruit and poor vegetables for his table at a very high price. If I had cherries in frost, and golden melons in the depths of winter, what pleasure should I find in them when my palate did not need moisture or refreshment? Would the heavy chestnut be very pleasant in the heat of the dog-days; would I prefer to have it hot from the stove, rather than the gooseberry, the strawberry, the refreshing fruits which the earth takes care to provide for me? A mantelpiece covered in January with forced vegetation, with pale and scentless flowers, is not winter adorned, but spring robbed of its beauty. we deprive ourselves of the pleasure of seeking the first violet in the woods, of noting the earliest buds, and exclaiming in a rapture of delight, "Mortals, you are not forsaken, nature is living still."

[¶1223:] To be well served I would have few servants; this has been said before, but it is worth saying again. A tradesman gets more real service from his one man than a duke from the ten gentlemen round about him. It has often struck me when I am sitting at table with my glass beside me that I can drink whenever I please; whereas, if I were dining in state, twenty men would have to call for "Wine" before I could quench my thirst. You may be sure that whatever is done for you by other people is ill done. I would not send to the shops, I would go myself; I would go so that my servants should not make their own terms with the shopkeepers, and to get a better choice and cheaper prices; I would go for the sake of pleasant exercise and to get a glimpse of what was going on out of doors. This is amusing and sometimes instructive. Lastly I would go for the sake of the walk; there is always something in that. A sedentary life is the source of tedium; when we walk a good deal we are never dull. A porter and footmen are poor interpreters; I should never wish to have such people between the world and myself, nor would I travel with all the fuss of a coach, as if I were afraid people would speak to me. The horses of a man who uses his legs are always ready; if they are tired or ill, their owner is the first to know it; he need not be afraid of being kept at home while his coachman is on the spree; on the road he will not have to submit to all sorts of delays, nor will he be consumed with impatience, nor compelled to stay in one place a moment longer than he chooses. Lastly, since no one serves us so well as we serve ourselves, had we the power of Alexander and the wealth of Crsus we should accept no services from others, except those we cannot perform for ourselves.

[¶1224:] I would not live in a palace; for even in a palace I whould only occupy one room. Every room which is common property belongs to nobody, and the rooms of each of my servants would be as strange to me as my neighbor's. The Orientals, although very voluptuous, are lodged in plain and simply furnished dwellings. They consider life as a journey, and their house as an inn. This reason scarcely appeals to us rich people who propose to live for ever; but I should find another reason which would have the same effect. It would seem to me that if I settled myself in one place in the midst of such splendor, I should banish myself from every other place, and imprison myself, so to speak, in my palace. The world is a palace fair enough for any one; and is not everything at the disposal of the rich man when he seeks enjoyment? "Ubi bene, ibi patria," that is his motto; his home is anywhere where money will carry him, his country is anywhere where there is room for his strong-box, as Philip considered as his own any place where a mule laden with silver could enter. Why then should we shut ourselves up within walls and gates as if we never meant to leave them? If pestilence, war, or rebellion drive me from one place, I go to another, and I find my hotel there before me. Why should I build a mansion for myself when the world is already at my disposal? Why should I be in such a hurry to live, to bring from afar delights which I can find on the spot? It is impossible to make a pleasant life for oneself when one is always at war with oneself. Thus Empodocles reproached the men of Agrigentum with heaping up pleasures as if they had but one day to live, and building as if they would live forever.

[¶1225:] And what use have I for so large a dwelling, as I have so few people to live in it, and still fewer goods to fill it? My furniture would be as simple as my tastes; I would have neither picture-gallery nor library, especially if I was fond of reading and knew something about pictures. I should then know that such collections are never complete, and that the lack of that which is wanting causes more annoyance than if one had nothing at all. In. this respect abundance is the cause of want, as every collector knows to his cost. If you are an expert, do not make a collection; if you know how to use your cabinets, you will not have any to show.

[¶1226:] Gambling is no sport for the rich, it is the resource of those who have nothing to do. I shall be so busy with my pleasures that I shall have no time to waste. I am poor and lonely and I never play, unless it is a game of chess now and then, and that is more than enough. If I were rich I would play even less,, and for very low stakes, so that I should not be disappointed myself, nor see the disappointment of others. The wealthy man has no motive for play, and the love of play will not degenerate into the passion for gambling unless the disposition is evil. The rich man is always more keenly aware of his losses than his gains, and as in games where the stakes are not high the winnings are generally exhausted in the long run, he will usually lose more than he gains, so that if we reason rightly we shall scarcely take a great fancy to games where the odds are against us. He who flatters his vanity so far as to believe that Fortune favors him can seek her favor in more exciting ways; and her favors are just as clearly shown when the stakes are low as when they are high. The taste for play, the result of greed and dullness, only lays hold of empty hearts and heads; and I think I should have enough feeling and knowledge to dispense with its help. Thinkers are seldom gamblers; gambling interrupts the habit of thought and turns it towards barren combinations; thus one good result, perhaps the only good result of the taste for science, is that it deadens to some extent this vulgar passion. People will prefer to try to discover the uses of play rather than to devote themselves to it. I should argue with the gamblers against gambling, and I should find more delight in scoffing at their losses than in winning their money.

[¶1227:] I should be the same in private life as in my social intercourse. I should wish my fortune to bring comfort in its train, and never to make people conscious of inequalities of wealth. Showy dress is inconvenient in many ways. To preserve as much freedom as possible among other men, I should like to be dressed in such a way that 1 should not seem out of place among all classes, and should not attract attention in any; so that without affectation or change I might mingle with the crowd at the inn or with the nobility at the Palais Royal. In this way I should be more than ever my own master, and should be free to enjoy the pleasures of all sorts and conditions of men. There are women, so they say, whose doors are closed to embroidered cuffs, women who will only receive guests who wear lace ruffles. I should spend my days elsewhere; though if these women were young and pretty I might sometimes put on lace ruffles to spend an evening or so in their company.

[¶1228:] Mutual affection, similarity of tastes, suitability of character -- these are the only bonds between my companions and myself. Among them I would be a man, not a person of wealth; the charm of their society should never be embittered by self-seeking. If my wealth had not robbed me of all humanity, I would scatter my benefits and my services broadcast, but I should want companions about me, not courtiers, friends, not protégés. I should wish my friends to regard me as their host, not their patron. Independence and equality would leave to my relations with my friends the sincerity of goodwill; while duty and self-seeking would have no place among us. and we should know no law but that of pleasure and friendship.

[¶1229:] Neither a friend nor a mistress can be bought. Women may be got for money, but that road will never lead to love. Love is not only not for sale; money strikes it dead. If a man pays, were he indeed the most lovable of men, the mere fact of payment would prevent any lasting affection. He will soon be paying for some one else, or rather some one else will get his money; and in this double connection based on self-seeking and debauchery, without love, honour, or true pleasure, the woman is grasping, faithless, and unhappy, and she is treated by the wretch to whom she gives her money as she treats the fool who gives his money to her; she has no love for either. It would be sweet to be generous towards one we love, if that did not make a bargain of love. I know only one way of gratifying this desire with the woman one loves without embittering love; it is to bestow our all upon her and to live at her expense. It remains to be seen whether there is any woman with regard to whom such conduct would not be unwise.

[¶1230:] He who said, "Laïs is mine, but I am not hers," was talking nonsense. Possession which is not mutual is nothing at all; at most it is the possession of the sex not of the individual. But where there is no morality in love, why make such ado about the rest? Nothing is so easy to find. A muleteer is in this respect as near to happiness as a millionaire.

[¶1231:] Oh, if we could thus trace out the unreasonableness of vice, how often should we find that when it has attained its object, it discovers it is not what it seemed! Why is there this cruel haste to corrupt innocence, to make a victim of a young creature whom we ought to protect, one who is dragged by this first false step into a gulf of misery from which only death can release her? Brutality, vanity, folly, error, and nothing more. This pleasure itself is unnatural; it rests on popular opinion, and popular opinion at its worst, since it depends on scorn of self. He who knows he is the basest of men fears comparison with others, and would be the first that he may be less hateful. See if those who are most greedy in pursuit of such fancied pleasures are ever attractive young men -- men worthy of pleasing, men who might have some excuse if they were hard to please. Not so; any one with good looks, merit, and feeling has little fear of his mistress' experience; with well-placed confidence he says to her, "You know what pleasure is, what is that to me? my heart assures me that this is not so."

[¶1232:] But an aged satyr, worn out with debauchery, with no charm, no consideration, no thought for any but himself, with no shred of honour, incapable and unworthy of finding favor in the eyes of any woman who knows anything of men deserving of love, expects to make up for all this with an innocent girl by trading on her inexperience and stirring her emotions for the first time. His last hope is to find favor as a novelty; no doubt this is the secret motive of this desire; but he is mistaken. The horror he excites is just as natural as the desires he wishes to arouse. He is also mistaken in his foolish attempt; that very nature takes care to assert her rights. Every girl who sells herself is no longer a maid; she has given herself to the man of her choice, and she is making the very comparison he dreads. The pleasure purchased is imaginary, but none the less hateful.

[¶1233:] For my own part, however riches may change me, there is one matter in which I shall never change. If I have neither morals nor virtue, I shall not be wholly without taste, without sense, without delicacy; and this will prevent me from spending my fortune in the pursuit of empty dreams, from wasting my money and my strength in teaching children to betray me and mock me. If I were young, I would seek the pleasures of youth; and since I would have them at their best I would not seek them in the guise of a rich man. If I were at my present age, it would be another matter; I would wisely confine myself to the pleasures of my age; I would form tastes that I could enjoy, and I would stifle those which could only cause suffering. I would not go and offer my gray beard to the scornful jests of young girls; I could never bear to sicken them with my disgusting caresses, to furnish them at my expense with the most absurd stories, to imagine them describing the vile pleasures of the old monkey so as to avenge. themselves for what they had endured. But if unresisted habits had changed my former desires into needs, I would perhaps satisfy those needs, but only with shame and blushes. I would distinguish between passion and necessity; I would find a suitable mistress and would stick to her. I would not make a business of my weakness, and above all I would only have one person aware of it. Life has other pleasures when these fail us; by hastening in vain after those that fly from us we deprive ourselves of those that remain. Let our tastes change with our years, let us no more meddle with age than with the seasons. We should be ourselves at all times instead of struggling against nature; such vain attempts exhaust our strength and prevent the right use of life.

[¶1234:] The lower classes are seldom dull, their life is full of activity. If there is little variety in their amusements they do not recur frequently; many days of labor teach them to enjoy their rare holidays. Short intervals of leisure between long periods of labor give a spice to the pleasures of their station. The chief curse of the rich is dullness; in the midst of costly amusements, among so many men striving to give them pleasure, they are devoured and slain by dullness; their life is spent in fleeing from it and in being overtaken by it. They are overwhelmed by the intolerable burden. Women more especially, who do not know how to work or play, are a prey to tedium under the name of the vapors. With them it takes the shape of a dreadful disease that robs them of their reason and even of their life. For my own part I know no more terrible fate than that of a pretty woman in Paris, unless it is that of the pretty dandy who devotes himself to her, who becomes idle and effeminate like her, and so deprives himself twice over of his manhood while he prides himself on his successes, and for their sake endures the longest and dullest days which human being ever put up with.

[¶1235:] Proprieties, fashions, customs which depend on luxury and breeding, confine the course of life within the limits of the most miserable uniformity. The pleasure we desire in display to others is a pleasure lost; we neither enjoy it ourselves, nor do others enjoy it. Ridicule, which public opinion dreads more than anything, is always at hand to tyrannize and punish. It is only ceremony that makes us ridiculous; if we can vary our place and our pleasures, to-day's impressions can efface those of yesterday; in the mind of men they are as if they had never been. But we enjoy ourselves for we throw ourselves into every hour and everything. My only set rule would be this: wherever I was I would pay no heed to anything else. I would take each day as it came, as if there were neither yesterday nor to-morrow. As I would be a man of the people, with the populace, I would be a countryman in the fields; and if I spoke of farming, the peasant should not laugh at my expense. I would not go and build a town in the country nor erect the Tuileries at the door of my lodgings. On some pleasant shady hill-side I would have a little cottage, a white house with green shutters, and though a thatched roof is the best all the year round, I would be grand enough to have, not those gloomy slates, but tiles, because they look brighter and more cheerful than thatch, and the houses in my own country are always roofed with them, and so they would recall to me something of the happy days of my youth. For my courtyard I would have a poultry-yard, and for my stables a cowshed for the sake of the milk which I love. My garden would be a kitchen-garden, and my park an orchard, like the one described further on. The fruit would be free to those who walked in the orchard, my gardener would neither count it nor gather it; I would not, with greedy show, display before your eyes superb espaliers which one scarcely dare touch. But this small extravagance would not be costly, for I would choose my abode in some remote province where silver is scarce and food plentiful, where plenty and poverty have their seat.

[¶1236:] There I would gather round me a company, select rather than numerous, a band of friends who know what pleasure is, and how to enjoy it, women who can leave their arm-chairs and betake themselves to outdoor sports, women who can exchange the shuttle or the cards for the fishing line or the bird-trap, the gleaner's rake or grape-gatherer's basket. There all the pretensions of the town will be forgotten, and we will be villagers in a village; we wall find all sorts of different sports and we will hardly know how to choose the morrow's occupation. Exercise and an active life will improve our digestion and modify our tastes. Every meal will be a feast, where plenty will be more pleasing than any delicacies. There are no such cooks in the world as mirth, rural pursuits, and merry games; and the finest made dishes are quite ridiculous in the eyes of people who have been on foot since early dawn. Our meals will be served without regard to order or elegance; we will make our dining-room anywhere, in the garden, on a boat, beneath a tree; sometimes at a distance from the house on the banks of a running stream, on the fresh green grass, among the clumps of willow and hazel; a long procession of guests will carry the material for the feast with laughter and singing; the turf will be our chairs and table, the banks of the stream our side-board, and our dessert is hanging on the trees. The dishes will be served in any order; appetite needs no ceremony. Each one of us, openly putting himself first, would gladly see every one else do the same. From this warmhearted and temperate familiarity there would arise, without coarseness, pretence, or constraint, a laughing conflict a hundredfold more delightful than politeness, and more likely to cement our friend-ship. No tedious flunkeys to listen to our words, to whisper criticisms on our behavior, to count every mouthful with greedy eyes, to amuse themselves by keeping us waiting for our wine, to complain of the length of our dinner. We will be our own servants in order to be our own masters. Time will fly unheeded, our meal will be an interval of rest during the heat of the day. If some peasant comes our way, returning from his work with his tools over his shoulder, I will cheer his heart with kindly words and a glass or two of good wine, which will help him to bear his poverty more cheerfully; and I too will have the joy of feeling my heart stirred within me, and I would say to myself -- I too am a man.

[¶1237:] If the inhabitants of the district assembled for some rustic feast, I and my friends would be there among the first; if there were marriages, more blessed than those of towns, celebrated near my home, every one would know how I love to see people happy, and I should be invited. I would take these good folks some gift as simple as themselves, a gift which would be my share of the feast; and in exchange I would obtain gifts beyond price, gifts so little known among my equals, the gifts of freedom and true pleasure. I would sup gaily at the head of their long table; I would join in the chorus of some rustic song and I would dance in the barn more merrily than at a ball in the Opera House.

[¶1238:] "This is all very well so far," you will say, "but what about the shooting? One must have some sport in the country." Just so; I only wanted a farm, but I was wrong. I assume I am rich, I must keep my pleasures to myself, I must be free to kill something. This is quite another matter. I must have estates, woods, keepers, rents, seignorial rights, particularly incense and holy water.

[¶1239:] Well and good. But such an estate would have neighbors who are jealous of their rights and anxious to encroach on those of others; our keepers will quarrel, and possibly their masters will quarrel too. This means altercations, disputes, ill-will, or law-suits at the least; this in itself is not very pleasant. My tenants will not enjoy finding my hares at work upon their corn, or my wild boars among their beans. Since they dare not kill the enemy, every one of them will try to drive him from their fields; when the day has been spent in cultivating the ground, they will be compelled to sit up all night to watch it; they will have watch-dogs, drums, horns, and bells; my sleep will be disturbed by their racket. Do what I will, I cannot help thinking of the misery of these poor people, and I cannot help blaming myself for it. If I had the honour of being a prince, this would make little impression on me; but as I am a self-made man who has only just come into his property, I am still rather vulgar at heart.

[¶1240:] That is not all; abundance of game attracts trespassers. I would soon have poachers to punish; I would require prisons, gaolers, guards, and galleys; all this strikes me as cruel. The wives of those miserable creatures will besiege my door and disturb me with their crying; they must either be driven away or roughly handled. The poor people who are not poachers, whose harvest has been destroyed by my game, will come next with their complaints. Some people will be put to death for killing the game, the rest will be punished for having spared it; what a choice of evils! On every side I shall find nothing but misery and hear nothing but groans. So far as I can see this must greatly disturb the pleasure of massacring at one's ease flocks of partridges and hares which are tame enough to run about one's feet.

[¶1241:] Would you like to separate out the pleasures from thesw pains? Get rid of all exclusion; the more you leave it free to everybody, the purer will be your own enjoyment. Therefore I would not do what I have just described, but without change of tastes I would follow those which seem likely to cause me least pain. I would fix my rustic abode in a district where game is not preserved, and where I can have my sport without hindrance. Game will be less plentiful, but there will be more skill in finding it, and more pleasure in securing it. I remember the start of delight with which my father watched the rise of his first partridge and the rapture with which he found the hare he had sought all day long. Yes, I assure you that alone with his dog, carrying his own gun, cartridges, and game bag together with his hare, he came home at nightfall, worn out with fatigue and torn to pieces by brambles, but better pleased with his day's sport than all your ordinary sportsmen, who on a good horse, with twenty guns ready for them, merely take one gun after another, and shoot and kill everything that comes their way, without skill, without glory, and almost without exercise. The pleasure is noy less, and the difficulties are removed; there is no estate to be preserved, no poacher to be punished, and no wretches to be tormented. Here are solid grounds for preference. Whatever you do, you cannot torment men for ever without experiencing some amount of discomfort; and sooner or later the muttered curses of the people will spoil the flavor of your game.

[¶1242:] Again, monopoly destroys pleasure. Real pleasures are those which we share with the crowd; we lose what we try to keep to ourselves alone. If the walls I build round my park transform it into a gloomy prison, I have only deprived myself, at great expense, of the pleasure of a walk; I must now seek that pleasure at a distance. The demon of property spoils everything he lays hands upon. A rich man wants to be master everywhere, and he is never happy where he is; he is continually driven to flee from himself. I shall therefore continue to do in my prosperity what I did in my poverty. Henceforward, richer in the wealth of others than I ever shall be in my own wealth, I will take possession of everything in my neighborhood that takes my fancy; no conqueror is so determined as I. I even usurp the rights of princes; I take possession of every open place that pleases me, I give them names; this is my park, that is my terrace, and I am their owner. Henceforward I wander among them at will. I often return to maintain my proprietary rights; I make what use I choose of the ground to walk upon, and you will never convince me that the nominal owner of the property which I have appropriated gets better value out of the money it yields him than I do out of his land. No matter if I am interrupted by hedges and ditches; I take my park on my back, and I carry it elsewhere. There will be space enough for it near at hand, and I may plunder my neighbors long enough before I outstay my welcome.

[¶1243:] This is an attempt to show what is meant by good taste in the choice of pleasant occupations for our leisure hours. This is the spirit of enjoyment. All else is illusion, fancy, and foolish pride. He who disobeys these rules, however rich he may be, will devour his gold on a dung-hill, and will never know what it is to live.

[¶1244:] You will say, no doubt, that such amusements lie within the reach of all, that we need not be rich to enjoy them. That is the very point I was coming to. Pleasure is ours when we want it; it is only social prejudice which makes everything hard to obtain, and drives pleasure before us. To be happy is a hundredfold easier than it seems. If he really desires to enjoy himself the man of taste has no need of riches; all he wants is to be free and to be his own master. With health and daily bread we are rich enough, if we will but get rid of our prejudices; this is the "Golden Mean" of Horace. You folks with your strong-boxes may find some other use for your wealth, for it cannot buy you pleasure. Emile knows this as well as I, but his heart is purer and more healthy, so he will feel it more strongly, and all that he has beheld in society will only serve to confirm him in this opinion.

[¶1245:] While our time is thus employed, we are ever on the lookout for Sophy, and we have not yet found her. It was not desirable that she should be found too easily, and I have taken care to look for her where I knew we should not find her.

[¶1246:] The time is come; we must now seek her in earnest, in case Emile should mistake some one else for Sophy and only discover his error when it is too late. Then farewell Paris, far-famed Paris, with all your noise and smoke and dirt, where the women have ceased to believe in honour and the men in virtue. We are in search of love, happiness, innocence; the further we go from Paris the better.

Project:Rousseau/Emile-en/b4

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

Book Four

PROFESSION OF FAITH OF A SAVOYARD VICAR

Navigation menu

Search