ROUSSEAU'S CONTRIBUTIONS 3 3* 



EOUSSEAU'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO PSYCHOLOGY, 

 PHILOSOPHY AND EDUCATION 



By Professor W. B. PILLSBURY 



UNIVERSITY OP MICHIGAN 



AS is often the case with a great man viewed two centuries after 

 his time, one is tempted to wonder what the source of Eousseau' s 

 repute may have been. Few men have so greatly influenced the course 

 of thought in many different directions as Eousseau and few great men 

 have been as little worthy of influence, judged by their characters or 

 their attainments. It seems incredible that a vagabond, a psychopath, 

 a man without serious training, should produce a system of philosophy, 

 a system of education, a political philosophy, that was to modify the 

 political systems as well as the course of thought of civilized nations for 

 generations. To repeat a few cant phrases, Eousseau offers a paradox 

 in each of his capacities between his theories and his actions. He 

 preached social cooperation and the acceptance of social responsibilities, 

 but was himself a hermit and recognized a duty only to avoid it; he 

 praised social equality and the advantages of limiting one's desires 

 rather than seeking means of satisfying them, but he spent his life 

 fawning upon the great and the wealthy, and was always a parasite 

 upon some one more fortunate than himself ; in his system of education 

 he gives much space to arguing the advantages of personal parental care 

 for children, while he sent his own five children as soon as born to a 

 foundling asylum, and with so little care that no one was able to trace 

 them. Apparently the father was never sufficiently interested in their 

 fate to make the attempt. The list might be expanded indefinitely, but 

 this will amply suffice to show the inconsistencies of the man. 



•The key to his inconsistencies as to much of his power as a writer is 

 to be found in his mental abnormalities. He was undoubtedly a psy- 

 chasthenic all his life, and in his last years this probably passed over 

 into insanity. The symptoms of psychasthenia are clear throughout 

 his confessions. He was tortured always by the delirium of doubt, he 

 was often aboulic, the sexual life that he portrays so fully gives much 

 evidence of a Freudian neurasthenia; in his later life he was never 

 without delusions of persecution. Nothing is lacking to complete the 

 clinical picture. As one result of his mental disease he was never in 

 complete control of either thought or action. He never could definitely 

 and sharply pass upon the truth or falsity of his ideas. He lived all 

 his life in a half-dream state, incapable of saying whether any one of 

 the trains of ideas that presented itself was quite real, or was consistent 

 with any other. To change the metaphor, his was a play life, through- 



