440 On Learning and the Arts. 
of mischief; it is to awake a temptation, and 
capacitate man to be the enemy of himself and 
his fellow man. With a splenetic turn of mind 
hie finds’ more to offend than please in the whole 
view around’ him; "with a passion for fame he 
courts reputation. by the singularity of his doc- 
trine, by the boldest contradiction to*the com- 
mon sense of mankind’; and with abilities won- 
derfully:fitted to give a-grace and a charm even 
to the°grossest absurdities, he ventures on an 
open hostility. to every thing which man conceives 
to be his highest ornament and praise. 
- Pohave‘observed that:this humour of deprecia- 
ting the présent state of man, and overrating that 
of the past, tinctures most of the writings of 
Rousseati ; but it is the:professed object of the 
celebrated essay to which the academy of Dijon 
adjudged the prize. He maintains that the pro- 
gress ‘of. ‘society ahd its boasted improvements 
have beetionly to make’ man progressively ac- 
quainted . with ‘misery.’ He ‘charges, this crime 
patticularly on the sciences and the arts. » “ An- 
tient days, le says, were more virtuous than our 
own, and the degeneracy of our own days owes 
its' origin to our knowledge.” In fine, know- 
ledge or sciénce appears to him to be Pandora’s 
box, replete with every evil. A poor prisoner 
in a house of lunatics, being asked the cause 
of his'confinement, replied, that he thought the | 
