15 
his diseased imagination, his suspicious jealousy and graver 
faults. The couple had five children, which Rousseau sent 
to the Foundling Hospital despite the protests of the mother. 
It may be mentioned that on a visit to Geneva in 1754 Rousseau 
met his former benefactress of Annecy, in wretched poverty. 
He made no attempt to help her beyond giving her a little 
money for her immediate wants, and she lived eight years 
of abject poverty and died in destitution. 
In considering Rousseau and his writings we must bear 
in mind the state of France in the middle and end of the 
eighteenth century, where were all the conditions that 
could lead to revolution. The country was exhausted by 
war and the great mass of the peasantry existed in hopeless 
poverty. Rousseau came into close contact with this in 
his early wanderings on foot. He was easily carried out of 
himself by emotion and when stirred possessed a power of 
expression which carries his readers away. His emergence 
as a writer was apparently due to accident. He happened 
to see that the Dijon Academy offered a prize for the best 
discussion on the question whether the progress of the sciences 
had tended to purify or corrupt morals. The moment he 
had read this he says he seemed to behold another world. 
Full of enthusiasm he wrote a discourse which gained the 
prize and when published made him famous. He competed 
the following year with a discourse on the question of the 
origin of the inequality of mankind. This did not gain a 
prize, but it was widely read and gave him a European repu- 
tation. The discourses, as he admits himself, though full 
of force and fire, absolutely want logic and order. His main 
points were that nature never intended man to exhibit ex- 
tremes of poverty and wealth. He drew a picture of man 
as nature turned him out and intended him to remain. 
Rousseau was more concerned for effect than for exact truth. 
Comparison with such facts as were even then known of 
savage tribes who were nearest to the original state of nature 
would have shown him the falsity of his picture. 
In social life as in education Rousseau set forth conditions 
as he saw them as a City of Destruction and their imagined 
opposite as the ideal and goal. 
Valueless as statements of fact, Rousseau’s dreams involved 
an ideal which worked with dynamic effect in his own day 
and is still operative in ours. But his extreme doctrine 
of the liberty of the individual led not to progressive reform 
but to anarchy ending in military despotism. 
