13 
ROUSSEAU. 
By Mr. J. H. HUDSON, M.A., H.M.I. 
January 14//?, 1908. 
The President, Mr. H. L. Joseland, M.A., in opening the 
Session, wished the members a happy and prosperous year 
and trusted they would find that the Club would continue 
to be to them a source of interest and profit. Besides wel- 
coming the new year they welcomed an old friend of the 
Club in Mr. Hudson. (Cheers.) 
If we estimate Rousseau by his influence on events he 
was one of the greatest of men ; if by his influence on political 
theory and on education, one of the wisest ; if by his private 
life, one of the meanest. In a short lecture we can examine 
briefly but a few of the many forms of his influence on his 
own and later generations. 
The details of his life are fully, but not altogether reliably 
set out in his remarkable “ Confessions,” written when he 
was an old man to justify himself to man and in which he 
lays bare his soul in all its meanness. In Rosseau’s early 
training were two grave faults. His infancy was passed 
in the care of his father who taught him when five years 
old to read from a collection of romances which gave an 
unhealthy stimulus to his mind and caused his imagination 
and his passions to run riot. He thereby acquired an extra- 
vagantly romantic notion of human life which was never 
eradicated. His feelings were violently and prematurely 
stimulated, and the emotional side of his nature was not 
kept in bounds by the reflective faculty. He developed 
into a creature who felt intensely but could never stop to 
inquire whether what he writes in his prophetic fervour is 
consonant with fact or consistent with what he has written 
elsewhere. This early training too was disastrous to Rousseau 
as a moral agent. Throughout his life he estimated people 
and events by their effects on his feelings. A series of pleasant 
emotions was virtue. To enjoy was to be virtuous. Of 
duty as something to be done whether he liked it or not 
he never had an idea. It would perhaps not be unfair to 
say he shirked duty at every critical testing time of his life. 
