186 ROUSSEAU. 



so much weakness. The fruits of an education ex- 

 ceedingly neglected, nay, in his earlier years very ill 

 directed, were gathered from his youth upwards at 

 each stage of his progress ; but many men have been 

 as much neglected, and many more spoilt in their 

 childhood and boyhood, without ever becoming what 

 he was. We are to add, therefore, to the causes of his 

 misery, perhaps of his misconduct, an hereditary dis- 

 position to melancholy, to brooding sadly over realities, 

 and to indulging in the sad miseries of the imagination. 

 Nor was this all : he formed a kind of system or 

 principle for himself of the most unsound nature and 

 dangerous consequences. He seems to have thought 

 that the free indulgence of the feelings was a duty as 

 well as a privilege, and never to have doubted that 

 those feelings which naturally arise in the breast are 

 therefore innocent and right. The only evil which 

 he could perceive was in their restraint ; and as even 

 to regulate them is to restrain, he not only regarded 

 such self-government as superfluous, but as hurtful. 

 The current was in his view pure and harmless ; the 

 obstacles which broke its course, the dykes which con- 

 fined it, tbe canals which guided it, were the only ob- 

 jects of aversion and of blame. It is obvious to ask if 

 he who had undertaken to write upon education a work 

 of much leno-th and elaboration, had ever observed the 



O 



workings of our nature in infants, in very young chil- 

 dren. It is a branch of the subject which he seems 

 never to have studied ; else he must have seen how 

 the mere animal predominates at that age. At first 

 pure selfishness prevails, and indulgence of every ap- 

 petite is the rule. Next succeeds, with nearly equal 



