time, men sought a quiet refuge from the warring subtleties of a theology and a philosophy which had lost contact with life, and left it devoid of interest. And though, for a time, they misunderstood Nature, and committed many enormities in their devotion to her, yet it proved in the end that "Nature never did betray the heart that loved her." Whatever view we may take of Revelation and Reason, it is certain that it is through the study of Nature, taken in its widest sense, that the truth of them becomes significant and fruitful for us.

It was while these ideas were fermenting in men's minds that Rousseau came upon the scene.

GOETHE, Faust, Pt. II., Act IV., lines 5640, 5647.

HUMAN beings may, roughly speaking, be divided into two classes, the dalliers and the willers, into those who live for passive enjoyment, and those who live for active mastery. The former, endowed with keen sensibility and strong appetite (Plato's TOνμηTIкóv), which tend to direct attention upon themselves and upon immediate objects, and usually destitute of ambition, seek to enjoy each moment, as it passes, pursuing no definite path, but wandering up and down the field of time, like children, plucking the flowers of delight that successively attract them. As they are going nowhere in particular, they, of course, arrive nowhere. The latter, distinguished by courage and the spirit of enterprise (Ovuós), which give their interests an outward direction, and by the stern quality of ambition, live mainly in the future, half ignoring the blandishments of the present, and finding their satisfaction in planning and carrying out great enterprises, which, when successful, give

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them position and fame-often a permanent place in the world's history. Of the two chief literary inspirers of the French Revolution and of the individualistic tendencies of the present century, the one, Rousseau, belonged to the former class, the other, Voltaire, to the latter. How, then, it may be asked, did Rousseau come to be an important factor in a great historic movement? The answer is, For two reasons, (1) because, like other men of his type, he was thrown into circumstances which wounded his sensibility, and thus driven to imagine others in which it would find free play, and (2) because the movement in question was toward the very things which he represented, sensibility, subjectivism, and dalliance. Over most of the men of his class, however, he had the rare advantage of being able to express his imaginings in literary form and in a style which, for simplicity, clearness, effectiveness, and almost every other excellence, looks almost in vain for an equal. Keen sensibility, uttered with confident and touching eloquence, is the receipt for making fanatics, and Rousseau made them. Meanwhile his ambitious rival, Voltaire, was making sceptics.

In treating of the life of Rousseau, it will be sufficient for the present purpose to consider only those events and experiences which, in a marked degree, contributed to form his character, and, through it, to make his writings what they are. Persons desirous

1 Literary examples of the former class are Hamlet and Wilhelm Meister; of the latter, Julius Cæsar and Faust. In Mark Antony the characteristics of the two contend with fatal result. Cf. Ten

nyson's poem Will.

of knowing more will find ample details in his Confessions, perhaps the most recklessly impartial biography that ever was written, his Rêveries, letters, etc.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the second son of Isaac Rousseau and of his wife Suzanne, née Bernard, was born at Geneva on the 28th of June, 1712. Both parents belonged to the citoyen class, the highest of the five classes into which the inhabitants of Geneva were divided; both were Protestants. The father, a watchmaker by trade, was descended from an old Parisian family, his great-great-grandfather having emigrated from Paris and settled in Geneva in the early days of the Reformation (1529) — and retained all the characteristics of his French origin,- sensibility, liveliness, gallantry, romanticism, and love of pleasure. The mother, daughter of a clergyman, was a person of great beauty and refinement, but endowed with an almost morbid sensibility, which she had heightened by extensive reading of sentimental, highly colored romances, such as were current at the time. She died in giving birth to Jean-Jacques, who was thus left to the care of a father such as we have described. It will be necessary to linger for a moment on the first years of our hero's life, because in them his character was formed to a degree that is very unusual. He was, in fact, a very precocious child, quick, vivacious, responsive, a very thunder-cloud stored with lightning feelings, ready to flash forth at any moment. At his birth he was taken charge of by an aunt, a sister of his mother's, a quiet, kindly person, much

1 The elder son, seven years older than Jean-Jacques, ran away from home to Germany quite young, and was lost sight of.

given to embroidery and song-singing. She treated him with exemplary gentleness, not to say indulgence, allowing him to follow the bent of his own disposition, which, though free from any trace of malignity, continually drew him toward incontinence—to pilfering and devouring eatables—and to romancing; in plain terms, to lying. His sympathetic and winning nature, by saving him from correction, also prevented him from becoming aware of any moral principle, so that he passed his whole childhood without ever impinging upon any disagreeable ought, without any other guides than his own feelings. And this condition of things lasted during his entire life. He was always completely at the mercy of his feelings, acknowledging duty only for purposes of rhetoric.

As he was never allowed to go out and mix with other children in the street, he learnt very early to read and write; so that, by the time he was six years old, he was feeding his emotions and his vivid imagination upon the romances which had formed his mother's library. For over a year, his father and he used frequently to sit up whole nights together, reading aloud, in turn, the most sensational and sentimental stories, forgetting sleep in the nervous excitement and tearful rapture caused by pathetic love-scenes, heroic adventures, and hairbreadth escapes. Before he was seven years old (1719), his mother's library was exhausted, and then father and son were obliged to turn for nocturnal entertainment to the library of her father, which consisted of such works as Plutarch's Lives, Le Sueur's History of Church and Empire, Bossuet's Lectures on Universal