302. The Pedagogy of the Eighteenth Century.—The most striking of the general characteristics of French pedagogy in the eighteenth century, is that in it the lay spirit comes into mortal collision with the ecclesiastical spirit. What a contrast between the clerical preceptors of the seventeenth century and the philosophical educators of the eighteenth! The Jesuits, all-powerful under Louis XIV., are to be decried, condemned, and finally expelled in 1762. The first place in the theory and in the practice of education, will belong to laymen. Rousseau is to write the Émile. D’Alembert and Diderot will be the educational advisers of the Empress of Russia. The parliamentarians, La Chalotais and Rolland, will attempt to substitute for the action of the Jesuits the action of the State, or, at least, one of the powers of the State. Finally, with the Revolution, the lay spirit will succeed in triumphing.

Again, the pedagogy of the eighteenth century is distinguished by its critical and reformatory tendencies. The century of Louis XIV. is, in general, a century of content; the century of Voltaire, a century of discontent.

Besides, the philosophical spirit, which associates the theory of education with the laws of the human spirit, which is not content to modify routine by a few ameliorations of detail, which establishes general principles and aspires to an ideal perfection,—the philosophical spirit, with its excellencies and with its defects,—will come to the light in the Émile, and in some other writings of the same period.

Finally, and this last characteristic is but the consequence of the others, education tends to become national, and at the same time humane. Preparation for life replaces preparation for death. During the whole of the eighteenth century, a conception is in process of elaboration which the men of the Revolution will exhibit in its true light,—that of an education, public and national, which makes citizens, which works for country and for real life.

303. Precursors of Rousseau.—The greatest educational event of the eighteenth century, before the expulsion of the Jesuits and the events of the French Revolution, is the publication of the Émile. Rousseau is undeniably the first in rank among the founders of French pedagogy, and his influence will be felt abroad, especially in Germany. But whatever may be the originality of the author of the Émile, his system is not a stroke of genius for which no preparation had been made. He had his precursors, and he profited by their works. A Benedictine, who might have spent his strength to better advantage, has written a book on the Plagiarisms of J. J. Rousseau.[169]

We do not propose to treat Rousseau as a plagiarist, for he surely has inspiration of his own, and his own boldness in invention; but however much of an innovator he may be, he was inspired by Montaigne, by Locke, and without speaking of those great masters whom he often imitated, he had his immediate predecessors, whose ideas on certain points are in conformity with his own.

304. The AbbÉ de Saint Pierre (1658-1743).—Among the precursors of Rousseau, a place among the first must be assigned to the AbbÉ de Saint Pierre, a dreamy, fantastic spirit, fitted more to excite curiosity than to deserve admiration, whom Rousseau himself called “a man of great projects and petty views.” His projects in fact were great, at least in number. Between “a project to make sermons more useful, and a project to make roads more passable,” there came, in his incoherent and varied work, several projects for perfecting education in general, and the education of girls in particular.

The dominant idea of the AbbÉ de Saint Pierre is his anxiety in behalf of moral education. In proportion as we advance towards the era of liberty, we shall notice a growing interest in the development of the moral virtues.

The AbbÉ de Saint Pierre requires of man four essential qualities: justice, benevolence, the discernment of virtue or judgment, and, lastly, instruction, which holds but the lowest rank. Virtue is of more worth than the knowledge of Latin.

“It cannot be said that a great knowledge of Latin is not an excellent attainment; but in order to acquire this knowledge, it is necessary to give to it an amount of time that would be incomparably better employed in acquiring great skill in the observation of prudence. Those who direct education make a very great mistake in employing tenfold too much time in making us scholarly in the Latin tongue, and in employing tenfold too little of it in giving us a confirmed use of prudence.”[170]

But what are the means proposed by the AbbÉ de Saint Pierre? All that he has devised for organizing the teaching of the social virtues is reduced to the requirement of reading edifying narratives, of playing moral pieces, and of accustoming young people to do meritorious acts in the daily intercourse of the school. When the lessons have been recited and the written exercises corrected, the teacher will say to the pupil: “Do for me an act of prudence, or of justice, or of benevolence.” This is easier to say than to do. College life scarcely furnishes occasion for the application of the social virtues.

But the AbbÉ de Saint Pierre should be credited with his good intentions. He is the first in France to give his thought to this matter of professional instruction. The mechanic arts, the positive sciences, the apprenticeship to trades,—these things he places above the study of languages. Around his college, and even in his college, there are to be mills, printing offices, agricultural implements, garden tools, etc.

Was it not also an idea at once new and wise, to establish a continuous department of public instruction, a sort of permanent council, charged with the reformation of methods and with establishing, as far as possible, uniformity in all the colleges of the kingdom?

Finally, we shall commend the AbbÉ de Saint Pierre for having persistently urged the necessity of the education of women. From FÉnelon to the AbbÉ de Saint Pierre, from 1680 to 1730, great progress was made in this question. We seem already to hear Condorcet when we read the following passage:—

“The purpose should be to instruct girls in the elements of all the sciences and of all the arts which can enter into ordinary conversation, and even in several things which relate to the different employments of men, such as the history of their country, geography, police regulations, and the principal civil laws, to the end that they can listen with pleasure to what men shall say to them, ask relevant questions, and easily keep up a conversation with their husbands on the daily occurrences in their occupations.”

For the purpose of sooner attaining his end, the AbbÉ de Saint Pierre, anticipating the centuries, demanded for women national establishments, colleges of secondary instruction. He did not hesitate to cloister young girls in boarding-schools, and in boarding-schools without vacations; and he entreated the State to organize public courses for those who, he said, “constitute one-half of the families in society.”

305. Other Inspirers of Rousseau.—With the eighteenth century there begins for modern thought, in education as in everything else, an era of international relations, of mutual imitation, of the action and reaction of people on people. The Frenchman of the seventeenth century had almost absolutely ignored Comenius. Rousseau knows Locke, and also the Hollander Crousaz,[171] whom, by the way, he treats rather shabbily, speaking of him as “the pedant Crousaz.”

Crousaz, however, had some good ideas. He criticised the old methods, which make “of the knowledge of Latin and Greek the principal part of education”; and he preached scientific instruction and moral education.

In the Spectacle of Nature, which was so popular in its day, the AbbÉ Pluche also demanded that the study of the dead languages should be abridged[172]:—

“Experience with the pitiable Latinity which reigns in the colleges of Germany, Flanders, Holland, and in all places where the habit of always speaking Latin is current, suffices to make us renounce this custom which prevents a young man from speaking his own tongue correctly.”

The AbbÉ Pluche demanded that the time saved from Latin be devoted to the living languages. On the other hand, he insisted on early education, and on this point he was the complement to his master, Rollin, who, he said, wrote rather “for the perfection of studies than for their beginning.”

Still other writers were able to suggest to Rousseau some of the ideas which he developed in the Émile. Before him, La Condamine declared that the Fables of La Fontaine are above the capacity of children.[173] Before him, Bonneval, much interested in physical education, violently criticised the use of long clothes, and claimed for children an education of the senses. He demanded, besides, that in early instruction, the effort of the teacher should be limited to the keeping of evil impressions from the childish imagination, and that instruction in the truths of religion should be held in abeyance.

We shall discover in the Émile all these ideas in outline revived and developed with the power and with the brilliancy of genius, sometimes transformed into boisterous paradoxes, but sometimes, also, transformed into solid and lasting truths.

306. Publication of the Émile (1762).—Rousseau has made striking statements of nearly all the problems of education, and he has sometimes resolved them with wisdom, and always with originality.

Appearing in 1762, at the moment when the Parliament was excluding the Jesuits from France, the Émile came at the right moment in that grand overthrow of routine and tradition to disclose new hopes to humanity, and to announce the advent of philosophic reason in the art of educating men. But Rousseau, in writing his book, did not think of the Jesuits, of whom he scarcely speaks; he wrote, not for the man of the present, but for the future of humanity; he composed a book endowed with endless vitality, half romance, half essay, the grandest monument of human thought on the subject of education. The Émile, in fact, is not a work of ephemeral polemics, nor simply a practical manual of pedagogy, but is a general system of education, a treatise on psychology and moral training, a profound analysis of human nature.

307. Was Rousseau prepared to become a Teacher?—Before entering upon the study of the Émile, it is well to inquire how the author had been prepared by his character and by his mode of life to become a teacher. The history of French literature offers nothing more extraordinary than the life of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Everything is strange in the destiny of that unfortunate great man. Rousseau committed great faults, especially in his youth; but at other moments of his life he is almost a sage, a hero of private virtues and civic courage. He traversed all adventures and all trades. Workman, servant, charlatan, preceptor, all in turn; he lodged in garrets at a sou, and experienced days when he complained that bread was too dear. Through all these miseries and these humiliations a soul was in process of formation made up, above all else, of sensibility and imagination.

Rousseau’s sensibility was extreme. The child who, unjustly treated, experienced one of those violent fits of passion which he has so well described in his Confessions, and who writhed a whole night in his bed, crying “Carnifex, carnifex!” was surely not an ordinary child. “I had no idea of things, but all varieties of feeling were already known to me. I had conceived nothing; I had felt everything.” Even a mediocre representation of Alzire made him beside himself, and he refused witnessing the play of tragedies for fear of becoming ill.

The sentiment of nature early inspired him with a passion which was not to be quenched. His philosophic optimism and his faith in providence were never forgotten. Other pure and generous emotions filled his soul. The study of Plutarch had inspired him with a taste for republican virtues and with an enthusiasm for liberty. Falsehood caused him a veritable horror. He had the feeling of equity in a high degree. Later, to the hatred of injustice there was joined in his heart an implacable resentment against the oppressors of the people. He had doubtless received the first germ of this hate when, making the journey afoot from Paris to Lyons, he entered the cabin of a poor peasant, and there found, as in a picture, the affecting summary of the miseries of the people.

At the same time he was an insatiable reader. He nourished himself on the poets, historians, and philosophers of antiquity, and he studied the mathematics and astronomy. As some one has said, “That life of reading and toil, interrupted by so many romantic incidents and adventurous undertakings, had vivified his imagination as a regular course of study in the College of Plessis could not possibly have done.”

It is in this way that his literary genius was formed, and, in due order, his genius for pedagogy. We need not seek in the life of Rousseau any direct preparation for the composition of the Émile. It is true that for a time he had been preceptor, in 1739, in the family of Mably, but he soon resigned duties in which he was not successful. A little essay which he composed in 1740[174] does not yet give proof of any great originality. On the other hand, if he loved to observe children, he observed, alas, only the children of others. There is nothing sadder than that page of the Confessions in which he relates how he often placed himself at the window to observe the dismission of school, in order to listen to the conversations of children as a furtive and unseen observer!

The Émile is thus less the result of a patient induction and of a real experience than a work of inspiration or a brilliant improvisation of genius.

308. General Principles of the Émile.—A certain number of general principles run through the entire work, and give it a systematic form and a positive character.

The first of these is the idea of the innocence and of the perfect goodness of the child. The Émile opens with this solemn declaration:—

“Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Author of nature; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” And in another place, “Let us assume as an incontestable maxim that the first movements of nature are always right; there is no original perversity in the human heart.”

Without doubt Rousseau was right in opposing the pessimism of those who see in the child a being thoroughly wicked and degraded before birth; he is deceived in turn when he affirms that there is no germ of evil in human nature.

Society is wicked and corrupt, he says, and it is from society that all the evil comes; it is from its pernicious influence that the soul of the child must be preserved! But, we reply, how did society itself happen to be spoiled and vitiated? It is nothing but a collection of men; and if the individuals are innocent, how can the aggregate of individuals be wicked and perverse? But let the contradictions of Rousseau pass; the important thing to note is that from his optimism are derived the essential characteristics of the education which he devises for Émile. This education will be at once natural and negative:—

“Émile,” says GrÉard, “is a child of nature, brought up by nature, according to the rules of nature, for the satisfaction of the needs of nature. This sophism is not merely inscribed at random on the frontispiece of the book, but is its very soul; and it is by reason of this sophistry that, separated from the body of reflections and maxims that give it so powerful an interest, Rousseau’s plan of education is but a dangerous chimera.”

Everything that society has established, Rousseau condemns in a lump as fictitious and artificial. Conventional usages he despises; and he places Émile at the school of nature, and brings him up almost like a savage.

On the other hand, the education of Émile is negative, at least till his twelfth year; that is, Rousseau lets nature have her way till then. For those who think nature evil, education ought to be a work of compression and of repression. But nature is good; and so education consists simply in letting her have free course. To guard the child from the shock of opinions, to form betimes a defence about his soul, to assure against every exterior influence the free development of his faculties—such is the end that he proposes to himself.

Another general principle of the Émile, another truth which Rousseau’s spirit of paradox quickly transforms into error, is the idea of the distinction of ages:—

“Each age, each state of life, has its proper perfection, and a sort of maturity which is its own. We have often heard of a man grown; but let us think of a child grown. That sight will be newer to us, and perhaps not less agreeable.”

“We do not know infancy. With the false ideas we have, the further we go, the more we are astray. The most learned give their attention to that which it is important for men to know without considering what children are in a condition to comprehend. They always look for the man in the child, without thinking of what he was before he became a man.”

“Everything is right so far, and from these observations there proceeds a progressive education, exactly conforming in its successive requirements to the progress of the faculties. But Rousseau does not stop in his course, and he goes beyond progressive education to recommend an education in fragments, so to speak, which isolates the faculties in order to develop them one after another, which establishes an absolute line of demarkation between the different ages, and which ends in distinguishing three stages of progress in the soul. Rousseau’s error on this point is in forgetting that the education of the child ought to prepare for the education of the young man. Instead of considering the different ages as the several rings of one and the same chain, he separates them sharply from one another. He does not admit that marvellous unity of the human soul, which seems so strong in man only because God has, so to speak, woven its bands into the child and there fastened them.” (GrÉard).

309. Romantic Character of the Émile.—A final observation is necessary before entering into an analysis of the Émile; it is that in this, as in his other works, Rousseau is not averse to affecting singularities, and with deliberation and effrontery to break with received opinions. Doubtless we should not go so far as to say with certain critics that the Émile is rather the feat of a wit than the serious expression of a grave and serious thought; but what it is impossible not to grant is that which Rousseau himself admits in his preface: “One will believe that he is reading, not so much a book on education as the reveries of a visionary.” Émile, in fact, is an imaginary being whom Rousseau places in strange conditions. He does not give him parents, but has him brought up by a preceptor in the country, far from all society. Émile is a character in a romance rather than a real man.

310. Division of the Work.—Without doubt, there are in the Émile long passages and digressions that make the reading of it more agreeable and its analysis more difficult. But, notwithstanding all this, the author confines himself to a methodical plan, at least to a chronological order. The different ages of Émile serve as a principle for the division of the work. The first two books treat especially of the infant and of the earliest period of life up to the age of twelve. The only question here discussed is the education of the body and the exercise of the senses. The third book corresponds to the period of intellectual education, from the twelfth to the fifteenth year. In the fourth book, Rousseau studies moral education, from the fifteenth to the twentieth year.

Finally, the fifth book, in which the romantic spirit is still rampant, is devoted to the education of woman.

311. The First Two Books of the Émile.—It would be useless to search this first part of the Émile for precepts relative to the education of the mind and the heart. Rousseau has purposely eliminated from the first twelve years of the child’s life everything which concerns instruction and moral discipline. At the age of twelve, Émile will know how to run, jump, and judge of distances; but he will be perfectly ignorant. The idea would be that he has studied nothing at all, and “that he has not learned to distinguish his right hand from his left.”

The exclusive characteristic of Émile’s education, during this first period, is, then, the preoccupation with physical development and with the training of the senses.

Out of many errors, we shall see displayed some admirable flashes of good sense, and grand truths inspired by the principle of nature.

312. Let Nature have her Way.—What does nature demand? She demands that the child have liberty of movement, and that nothing interfere with the nascent activities of his limbs. What do we do, on the contrary? We put him in swaddling clothes; we imprison him. He is deformed by his over-tight garments,—the first chains that are imposed on a being who is destined to have so many others to bear! On this subject, the bad humor of Rousseau does not tire. He is prodigal in outbreaks of spirit, often witty, and sometimes ridiculous.

“It seems,” he says, “as though we fear that the child may appear to be alive.” “Man is born, lives, and dies, in a state of slavery; at his birth he is stitched into swaddling-clothes; at his death he is nailed in his coffin; and as long as he preserves the human form he is held captive by our institutions.”

We shall not dwell on these extravagances of language which transforms a coffin and a child’s long-clothes into institutions. The protests of Rousseau have contributed towards a reformation of usages; but, even on this point, with his great principle that everything must be referred to nature, because whatever nature does she does well, the author of Émile is on the point of going astray. No more for the body than for the mind is nature sufficient in herself; she must have help and watchful assistance. Strong supports are needed to prevent too active movements and dangerous strains of the body; just as, later on, there will be needed a vigorous moral authority to moderate and curb the passions of the soul.

313. The Mother to nurse her own Children.—But there is another point where it has become trite to praise Rousseau, and where his teaching should be accepted without reserve. This is when he strongly protests against the use of hired nurses, and when he eloquently summons mothers to the duties of nursing their own children. Where there is no mother, there is no child, says Rousseau, and he adds, where there is no mother, there is no family! “Would you recall each one to his first duties? Begin with the mothers. You will be astonished at the changes you will produce!” It would be to fall into platitudes to set forth, after Rousseau, and after so many others, the reasons which recommend nursing by the mother. We merely observe that Rousseau insists on this, especially on moral grounds. It is not merely the health of the child; it is the virtue and the morality of the family; it is the dignity of the home, that he wishes to defend and preserve. And, in fact, how many other duties are provided for and made easier by the performance of a primal duty.

314. Hardening of the Body.—So far, the lessons of nature have instructed Rousseau. He is still right when he wishes Émile to grow hardy, to become inured to privations, to become accustomed at an early hour to pain, and to learn how to suffer; but from being a stoic, Rousseau soon becomes a cynic. Contempt for pain gives place to a contempt for proprieties. Émile shall be a barefoot, like Diogenes. Locke gives his pupil thin shoes; Rousseau, surpassing him, completely abolishes shoes. He would also like to suppress all the inventions of civilization. Thus Émile, accustomed to walk in the dark, will do without candles. “I would rather have Émile with eyes at the ends of his fingers than in the shop of a candle-maker.” All this tempts us to laugh; but here are graver errors. Rousseau objects to vaccination, and proscribes medicine. Émile is forehanded. He is in duty bound to be well. A physician will be summoned only when he is in danger of death. Again, Rousseau forbids the washing of the new-born child in wine, because wine is a fermented liquor, and nature produces nothing that is fermented. And so there must be no playthings made by the hand of man. A twig of a tree or a poppy-head will suffice. Rousseau, as we see, by reason of his wish to make of his pupil a man of nature, brings him into singular likeness with the wild man, and assimilates him almost to the brute.

315. Negative Education.—It is evident that the first period of life is that in which the use of negative education is both the least dangerous and the most acceptable. Ordinarily, Émile’s preceptor will be but the inactive witness, the passive spectator of the work done by nature. Had Rousseau gone to the full length of his system, he ought to have abolished the preceptor himself, in order to allow the child to make his way all alone. But if the preceptor is tolerated, it is not to act directly on Émile, it is not to perform the duties of a professor, in teaching him what it is important for a child to know; but it is simply to put him in the way of the discoveries which he ought to make for himself in the wide domain of nature, and to arrange and to combine, artificially and laboriously, those complicated scenes which are intended to replace the lessons of ordinary education. Such, for example, is the scene of the juggler, where Émile is to acquire at the same time notions on physics and on ethics. Such, again, is the conversation with the gardener, Robert, who reveals to him the idea of property. The preceptor is no longer a teacher, but a mechanic. The true educator is nature, but nature prepared and skillfully adjusted to serve the ends that we propose to attain. Rousseau admits only the teaching of things:—

“Do not give your pupil any kind of verbal lesson; he should receive none save from experience.” “The most important, the most useful rule in all education, is not to gain time, but to lose it.”

The preceptor will interfere at most only by a few timid and guarded words, to aid the child in interpreting the lessons of nature. “State questions within his comprehension, and leave him to resolve them for himself. Let him not know anything because you have told it to him, but because he has comprehended it for himself.”

“For the body as for the mind, the child must be left to himself.”

“Let him run, and frolic, and fall a hundred times a day. So much the better; for he will learn from this the sooner to help himself up. The welfare of liberty atones for many bruises.”

In his horror for what he calls “the teaching and pedantic mania,” Rousseau goes so far as to proscribe an education in habits:—

“The only habit that a child should be allowed to form is to contract no habit.”

316. The Child’s Right to Happiness.—Rousseau did not tire of demanding that we should respect the infancy that is in the child, and take into account his tastes and his aptitudes. With what eloquence he claims for him the right of being happy!

“Love childhood. Encourage its sports, its pleasures, and its instinct for happiness. Who of you has not sometimes regretted that period when a laugh was always on the lips, and the soul always in peace? Why will you deny those little innocents the enjoyment of that brief period which is so soon to escape them, and of that precious good which they cannot abuse? Why will you fill with bitterness and sorrow those first years so quickly passing which will no more return to them than they can return to you? Fathers, do you know the moment when death awaits your children? Do not lay up for yourselves regrets by depriving them of the few moments that nature gives them. As soon as they can feel the pleasure of existence, try to have them enjoy it, and act in such a way that at whatever hour God summons them they may not die without having tasted the sweetness of living.”

317. Proscription of Intellectual Exercises.—Rousseau rejects from the education of Émile all the intellectual exercises ordinarily employed. He proscribes history on the pretext that Émile cannot comprehend the relations of events. He takes as an example the disgust of a child who had been told the anecdote of Alexander and his physician:—

“I found that he had an unusual admiration for the courage, so much lauded, of Alexander. But do you know in what he saw that courage? Simply in the fact that he swallowed a drink that had a bad taste.”

And from this Rousseau concludes that the child’s intelligence is not sufficiently open to comprehend history, and that he ought not to learn it. The paradox is evident. Because Émile is sometimes exposed to the danger of falling into errors of judgment, must he be denied the opportunity of judging? Similarly, Rousseau does not permit the study of the languages. Up to the age of twelve, Émile shall know but one language, because, till then, incapable of judging and comprehending, he cannot make the comparison between other languages and his own. Later, from twelve to fifteen, Rousseau will find still other reasons for excluding the study of the ancient languages. And it is not only history and the languages; it is literature in general from which Émile is excluded by Rousseau. No book shall be put into his hands, not even the Fables of La Fontaine. It is well known with what resolution Rousseau criticises The Crow and the Fox.

318. Education of the Senses.—The grand preoccupation of Rousseau is the exercise and development of the senses of his pupil. The whole theory of object lessons, and even all the exaggerations of what is now called the intuitive method, are contained in germ in the Émile:—

“The first faculties which are formed and perfected in us are the senses. These, then, are the first which should be cultivated; but these are the very ones that we forget or that we neglect the most.”

Rousseau does not consider the senses as wholly formed by nature; but he makes a special search for the means of forming them and of perfecting them through education.

“To call into exercise the senses, is, so to speak, to learn to feel; for we can neither touch, nor see, nor hear, except as we have been taught.”

Only, Rousseau is wrong in sacrificing everything to this education of the senses. He sharply criticises this favorite maxim of Locke, “We must reason with children.” Rousseau retards the education of the judgment and the reason, and declares that “he would as soon require that a child be five feet high as that he reason at the age of eight.”

319. The Third Book of the Émile.—From the twelfth to the fifteenth year is the length of time that Rousseau has devoted to study and to intellectual development proper. It is necessary that the robust animal, “the roe-buck,” as he calls Émile, after a negative and temporizing education of twelve years, become in three years an enlightened intelligence. As the period is short, Rousseau disposes of the time for instruction with a miser’s hand. Moreover, Émile is very poorly prepared for the rapid studies which are to be imposed on him. Not having acquired in his earlier years the habit of thinking, having lived a purely physical existence, he will have great difficulty in bringing to life, within a few months, his intellectual faculties.

But without dwelling on the unfavorable conditions of Émile’s intellectual education, let us see in what it will consist.

320. Choice in the Things to be taught.—The principle which guides Rousseau in the choice of Émile’s studies is no other than the principle of utility:—

“There is a choice in the things which ought to be taught as well as in the time fit for learning them. Of the knowledges within our reach, some are false, others are useless, and still others serve to nourish the pride of him who has them. Only the small number of those which really contribute to our good are worthy the care of a wise man, and consequently of a child whom we wish to render such. It is not a question of knowing what is, but only what is useful.”

321. Rousseau and the AbbÉ de Saint Pierre.—Among educators, some wish to teach everything, while others demand a choice, and would retain only what is necessary. The AbbÉ de Saint Pierre follows the first tendency. He would have the scholar learn everything at college; a little medicine towards the seventh or eighth year, and in the other classes, arithmetic and blazonry, jurisprudence, German, Italian, dancing, declamation, politics, ethics, astronomy, anatomy, chemistry, without counting drawing and the violin, and twenty other things besides. Rousseau is wiser. He is dismayed at such an accumulation, at such an obstruction of studies, and so yields too much to the opposite tendency, and restricts beyond measure the list of necessary studies.

322. Émile’s Studies.—These, in fact, are the studies to which Émile is limited: first, the physical sciences, and, at the head of the list, astronomy, then geography, geography taught without maps and by means of travel:—

“You are looking for globes, spheres, maps. What machines! Why all these representations? Why not begin by showing him the object itself?”

Here, as in other places, Rousseau prefers what would be best, but what is impossible, to that which is worth less, but which alone is practicable.

But Rousseau does not wish that his pupil, like the pupil of Rabelais, become an “abyss of knowledge.”

“When I see a man, enamored of knowledge, allow himself to yield to its charms, and run from one kind to another without knowing where to stop, I think I see a child on the sea-shore collecting shells, beginning by loading himself with them; then, tempted by those he still sees, throwing them aside, picking them up, until, weighed down by their number, and no longer knowing which to choose, he ends by rejecting everything, and returns empty-handed.”

No account is made of grammar and the ancient languages in the plan of Émile’s studies. Graver still, history is proscribed. This rejection of historical studies, moreover, is systematically done. Rousseau has placed Émile in the country, and has made him an orphan, the better to isolate him; to teach him history would be to throw him back into society that he abominates.

323. No Books save Robinson Crusoe.—One of the consequences of an education that is natural and negative is the suppression of books. Always going to extremes, Rousseau is not content to criticise the abuse of books. He determines that up to his fifth year Émile shall not know what a book is:—

“I hate books,” he exclaims; “they teach us merely to speak of things that we do not know.”

Besides the fact that this raving is rather ridiculous in the case of a man who is a writer by profession, it is evident that Rousseau is roving at random when he condemns the use of books in instruction.

One book, however, one single book, has found favor in his sight. Robinson Crusoe will constitute by itself for a long time the whole of Émile’s library. We understand without difficulty Rousseau’s kindly feeling for a work which, under the form of a romance, is, like the Émile, a treatise on natural education. Émile and Robinson strongly resemble each other, since they are self-sufficient and dispense with society.

324. Excellent Precepts on Method.—At least in the general method which he commends, Rousseau makes amends for the errors in his plan of study:—

“Do not treat the child to discourses which he cannot understand. No descriptions, no eloquence, no figures of speech. Be content to present to him appropriate objects. Let us transform our sensations into ideas. But let us not jump at once from sensible objects to intellectual objects. Let us always proceed slowly from one sensible notion to another. In general, let us never substitute the sign for the thing, except when it is impossible for us to show the thing.”

“I have no love whatever for explanations and talk. Things! things! I shall never tire of saying that we ascribe too much importance to words. With our babbling education we make only babblers.”

But the whole would bear quoting. Almost all of Rousseau’s recommendations, in the way of method, contain an element of truth, and need only to be modified in order to become excellent.

325. Exclusive Motives of Action.—A great question in the education of children is to know to what motive we shall address ourselves. Here again, Rousseau is exclusive and absolute. Up to the age of twelve, Émile will have been guided by necessity; he will have been made dependent on things, not on men. It is through the possible and the impossible that he will have been conducted, by treating him, not as a sensible and intelligent being, but as a force of nature against which other forces are made to act. Not till the age of twelve must this system be changed. Émile has now acquired some judgment; and it is upon an intellectual motive that one ought now to count in regulating his conduct. This motive is utility. The feeling of emulation cannot be employed in a solitary education. Finally, at the age of fifteen, it will be possible to appeal to the heart, to feeling, and to recommend to the young man the acts we set before him, no longer as necessary or useful, but as noble, good, and generous. The error of Rousseau is in cutting up the life of man to his twentieth year into three sharply defined parts, into three moments, each subordinated to a single governing principle. The truth is that at every age an appeal must be made to all the motives that act on our will, that at every age, necessity, interest, sentiment, and finally, the idea of duty, an idea too often overlooked by Rousseau, as all else that is derived from reason,—all these motives can effectively intervene, in different degrees, in the education of man.

326. Émile learns a Trade.—At the age of fifteen, Émile will know nothing of history, nothing of humanity, nothing of art and literature, nothing of God; but he will know a trade, a manual trade. By this means, he will be sheltered from need in advance, in case a revolution should strip him of his fortune.

“We are approaching,” says Rousseau, with an astonishing perspicacity, “a century of revolutions. Who can give you assurance of what will then become of you? I hold it to be impossible for the great monarchies of Europe to last much longer. They have all had their day of glory, and every State that dazzles is in its decline.”

We have previously noticed, in studying analogous ideas in the case of Locke, for what other reasons Rousseau made of Émile an apprentice to a cabinet-maker or a carpenter.

327. Émile at the Age of Fifteen.—Rousseau takes comfort in the contemplation of his work, and he pauses from time to time in his analyses and deductions, to trace the portrait of his pupil. This is how he represents him at the age of fifteen:—

“Émile has but little knowledge, but that which he has is really his own; he knows nothing by halves. In the small number of things that he knows, and knows well, the most important is that there are many things which he does not know, but which he can some day learn; that there are many more things which other men know, but which he will never know; and that there is an infinity of other things which no man will ever know. He has a universal mind, not through actual knowledge, but through the ability to acquire it. He has a mind that is open, intelligent, prepared for everything, and, as Montaigne says, if not instructed, at least capable of being instructed. It is sufficient for me that he knows how to find the of what good is it? with reference to all that he does, and the why? of all that he believes. Once more, my object is not at all to give him knowledge, but to teach him how to acquire it as he may need it, to make him estimate it at its exact worth, and to make him love truth above everything else. With this method, progress is slow; but there are no false steps, and no danger of being obliged to retrace one’s course.”

All this is well; but it is necessary to add that even Émile has faults, great faults. To mention but one of them, but one which dominates all the others, he sees things only from the point of view of utility, and he would not hesitate, for example, “to give the Academy of Sciences for the smallest bit of pastry.”

328. Education of the Sensibilities.—It is true that Rousseau finally decides to make of Émile an affectionate and reasonable being. “We have formed,” he says, “his body, his senses, his judgment; it remains to give him a heart.” Rousseau, who proceeds like a magician, by wave of wand and clever tricks, flatters himself that within a day’s time Émile is going to become the most affectionate, the most moral, and the most religious of men.

329. The Fourth Book of the Émile.—The development of the affectionate sentiments, the culture of the moral sentiment, and that of the religious sentiment, such is the triple subject of the fourth book,—vast and exalted questions that lend themselves to eloquence in such a way that the fourth book of the Émile is perhaps the most brilliant of the whole work.

330. Genesis of the Affectionate Sentiments.—Here Rousseau is wholly in the land of chimeras. Émile, who lives in isolation, who has neither family, friends, nor companions, is necessarily condemned to selfishness, and everything Rousseau can do to warm his heart will be useless. Do we wish to develop the feelings of tenderness and affection? Let us begin by placing the child under family or social influences which alone can furnish his affections the occasion for development. For fifteen years Rousseau leaves the heart of Émile unoccupied. What an illusion to think he will be able to fill it all at once! When we suppress the mother in the education of a child, all the means that we can invent to excite in his soul emotions of gentleness and affection are but palliatives. Rousseau made the mistake of thinking that a child can be taught to love as he is taught to read and write, and that lessons could be given to Émile in feeling just as lessons are given to him in geometry.

331. Moral Education.—Rousseau is more worthy of being followed when he demands that the moral notions of right and wrong have their first source in the feelings of sympathy and social benevolence, on the supposition that according to his system he can inspire Émile with such feelings.

“We enter, finally, the domain of morals,” he says. “If this were the place for it, I would show how from the first emotions of the heart arise the first utterances of the conscience, and how, from the first feelings of love and hate arise the first notions of good and evil. I would make it appear that justice and goodness are not merely abstract terms, conceived by the understanding, but real affections of the soul enlightened by the reason.”

Yes; let the child be made to make his way gradually towards a severe morality, sanctioned by the reason, in having him pass through the gentle emotions of the heart. Nothing can be better. But this is to be done on one condition: this is, that we shall not stop on the way, and that the vague inspirations of the sensibilities shall be succeeded by the exact prescriptions of the reason. Now Rousseau, as we know, was never willing to admit that virtue was anything else than an affair of the heart. His ethics is wholly an ethics of sentiment.

332. Religious Education.—We know the reasons which determined Rousseau to delay till the sixteenth or eighteenth year the revelation of religion. It is that the child, with his sensitive imagination, is necessarily an idolater. If we speak to him of God, he can form but a superstitious idea of him. “Now,” says Rousseau, pithily, “when the imagination has once seen God, it is very rare that the understanding conceives him.” In other terms, once plunged in superstition, the mind of the child can never extricate itself from it. We must then wait, in the interest of religion itself, till the child have sufficient maturity of reason and sufficient power of thought to seize in its truth, divested of every veil of sense, the idea of God, whose existence is announced to him for the first time.

It is difficult to justify Rousseau. First, is it not to be feared that the child, if he has reached his eighteenth year in ignorance of God, may find it wholly natural to be ignorant of him still, and that he reason and dispute at random with his teacher, and that he doubt instead of believe? And if he allows himself to be convinced, is it not at least evident that the religious idea, tardily inculcated, will have no profound hold on his mind? On the other hand, will the child, with his instinctive curiosity, wait till his eighteenth year to inquire the cause of the universe? Will he not form the notion of a God in his own way?

“One might have read, a few years ago,” says Villemain, “the account, or rather the psychological confession, of a writer (Sentenis), a German philosopher, whom his father had submitted to the experiment advised by the author of Émile. Left alone by the loss of a tenderly loved wife, this father, a learned and thoughtful man, had taken his infant son to a retired place in the country; and not allowing him communication with any one, he had cultivated the child’s intelligence through the sight of the natural objects placed near him, and by the study of the languages, almost without books, and in carefully concealing from him all idea of God. The child had reached his tenth year without having either read or heard that great name. But then his mind found what had been denied it. The sun which he saw rise each morning seemed the all-powerful benefactor of whom he felt the need. He soon formed the habit of going at dawn to the garden to pay homage to that god that he had made for himself. His father surprised him one day, and showed him his error by teaching him that all the fixed stars are so many suns distributed in space. But such was then the disappointment and the grief of the child deprived of his worship, that the father, overcome, acknowledged to him that there was a God, the Creator of the heavens and the earth.”[175]

333. The Savoyard Vicar’s Profession of Faith.—Rousseau has at least attempted to retrieve, by stately language and an impassioned demonstration of the existence of God, the delay which he has spontaneously imposed on his pupil.

The Savoyard Vicar’s Profession of Faith is an eloquent catechism on natural religion, and the honest expression of a sincere and profound deism. The religion of nature is evidently the only one which, in Rousseau’s system, can be taught, and ought to be taught, to the child, since the child is exactly the pupil of nature. If Émile wishes to go beyond this, if he needs a positive religion, this shall be for himself to choose.

334. Sophie and the Education of Women.—The weakest part of the Émile is that which treats of the education of woman. This is not merely because Rousseau, with his decided leaning towards the romantic, leads Émile and his companion into odd and extraordinary adventures, but it is especially because he misconceives the proper dignity of woman. Sophie, the perfect woman, has been educated only to complete the happiness of Émile. Her education is wholly relative to her destiny as a wife.

“The whole education of women should be relative to men; to please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves honored and loved by them, to educate the young, to care for the older, to advise them, to console them, to make life agreeable and sweet to them,—these are the duties of women in every age.”

“Sophie,” says GrÉard, “has but virtues of the second order, virtues of conjugal education.” It has been said that marriage is a second birth for man, that he rises or falls according to the choice which he makes. For woman, according to the theory of Rousseau, it is the true advent into life. According to the expressive formula of Michelet, who, in a sentence, has given a marvellous summary of the doctrine, but in attaching to it a sense which poetizes it, “the husband creates the wife.” Sophie, up to the day of her marriage, did not exist. She had learned nothing and read nothing “except a BarÊme and a TÉlÉmaque which have chanced to fall into her hands.” She has been definitely admonished, “that were men sensible, every lettered girl will remain a girl.” It is Émile alone who is to instruct her, and he will instruct her and mould her into his own ideal, and in conformity to his individual interest.

While it was only in his youth that he received the first principles of the religious feeling, Sophie must be penetrated with it from infancy, in order that she may early form the habit of submission. He commands and she obeys, the first duty of the wife being meekness. If, during her youth, she has freely attended banquets, amusements, balls, the theatre, it is not so much to be initiated into the vain pleasures of the world, under the tutelage of a vigilant mother, as to belong, once married, more fully to her home and to her husband. She is nothing except as she is by his side, or as dependent on him, or as acting through him. Strange and brutal paradox, which Rousseau, it is true, corrects and repairs in detail, at every moment by the most happy and charming inconsistencies.

Sophie, briefly, is an incomplete person whom Rousseau is not careful enough to educate for herself.

In her subordinate and inferior position, the cares of the household occupy the largest place. She cuts and makes her own dresses:—

“What Sophie knows best, and what was taught her with most care, is the work of her sex. There is no needle-work which she does not know how to make.”

It is not forbidden her, but is even recommended that she introduce a certain coquetry into her employments:—

“The work she loves the best is lace-making, because there is no other that gives her a more agreeable attitude, and in which the fingers are used with more grace and deftness.”

She carries daintiness a little too far:—

“She does not love cooking; its details have some disgust for her. She would sooner let the whole dinner go into the fire than to soil her cuffs.”

Truly this is fine housewifery! We feel that we have here to do with a character in a romance who has no need to dine. Sophie would not have been well received at Saint Cyr, where Madame de Maintenon so severely scolded the girls who were too fastidious, “fearing smoke, dust, and disagreeable odors, even to making complaints and grimaces on their account as though all were lost.”

335. General Conclusion.—In order to form a just estimate of the Émile, it is necessary to put aside the impressions left by the reading of the last pages. We must consider as a whole, and without taking details into account, that work, which, notwithstanding all, is very admirable and profound. It is injured by analysis. To esteem the Émile at its real worth, it must be read entire. In reading it, in fact, we are warmed by contact with the passion which Rousseau puts into whatever he writes. We pardon his errors and chimeras by reason of the grand sentiments and the grand truths which we meet at every step. We must also take into account the time when Rousseau lived, and the conditions under which he wrote. We have not a doubt that had it been written thirty years later, in the dawn of the Revolution, for a people who were free, or who desired to be free, the Émile would have been wholly different from what it is. Had he been working for a republican society, or for a society that wished to become such, Rousseau would not have thrown himself, out of hatred for the reality, into the absurdities of an over-specialized and exceptional education. We can judge of what he would have done as legislator of public instruction in the time of the Revolution, by what he wrote in his Considerations on the Government of Poland:—

“National education belongs only to people who are free.... It is education which is to give to men the national mould, and so to direct their opinions and their tastes that they will become patriots by inclination, by passion, and by necessity” (we would only add, by duty). “A child, in opening his eyes, ought to see his country and nothing but his country. Every true republican, along with his mother’s milk, will imbibe love of country, that is, of law and liberty. This love constitutes his whole existence. He sees but his country, he lives but for her. So soon as he is alone, he is nothing; so soon as there is no more of country, he is no more.... While learning to read, I would have a child of Poland read what relates to his country; at the age of ten, I would have him know all its productions; at twelve, all its provinces, all its roads, all its cities; at fifteen, the whole of its history; and at sixteen, all its laws; and there should not be in all Poland a notable deed or an illustrious man, of which his memory and his heart were not full.”

336. Influence of the Émile.—That which proves better than any commentary can the high standing of the Émile, is the success which it has obtained, the influence which it has exerted, both in France and abroad, and the durable renown attested by so many works designed, either to contradict it, to correct it, or to approve it and to disseminate its doctrines. During the twenty-five years that followed the publication of the Émile, there appeared in the French language twice as many books on education as during the first sixty years of the century. Rousseau, besides all that he said personally which was just and new, had the merit of stimulating minds and of preparing through his impulsion the rich educational harvest of this last one hundred years.

To be convinced of this, it suffices to read this judgment of Kant:—

“The first impression which a reader who does not read for vanity or for killing time derives from the writings of Rousseau, is that this writer unites to an admirable penetration of genius a noble inspiration and a soul full of sensibility, such as has never been met with in any other writer, in any other time, or in any other country. The impression which immediately follows this, is that of astonishment caused by the extraordinary and paradoxical thoughts which he develops.... I ought to read and re-read Rousseau, till the beauty of his style no more affects me. It is only then that I can adjust my reason to judge of him.”

[337. Analytical Summary.—1. The study of the Émile exhibits, in a very striking manner, the contrast between the respective agencies of art and nature in the work of education, and also the power of sentiment as a motor to ideas.

2. What Monsieur CompayrÉ has happily called Rousseau’s “misuse of the principle of nature” marks a recoil against the artificial and fictitious state of society and opinion in France in the eighteenth century. In politics, in religion, and in philosophy, there was the domination of authority, and but a small margin was left for the exercise of freedom, versatility, and individual initiative; while education was administered rather as a process of manufacture, than of regulated growth.

3. The conception that the child, by his very constitution, is predetermined, like plants and animals, to a progressive development quite independent of artificial aid, easily degenerates into the hypothesis that the typical education is a process of spontaneous growth.

4. The error in this hypothesis is that of exaggeration or of disproportion. Education is neither a work of nature alone, nor of art alone, but is a natural process, supplemented, controlled, and perfected by human art. What education would become when abandoned wholly to “nature” may be seen in the state of a perfected fruit which has been allowed to revert to its primitive or natural condition.

5. Man is distinguished from all other creatures by the fact that he is not the victim of his environment, but is endowed with the power to control his environment, almost to re-create it, and so to rise superior to it. This ability gives rise to human art, which is a coÖrdinate factor with nature in the work of education.

6. This convenient fiction of “Nature,” conceived as an infallible and incomparable guide in education, has introduced countless errors into educational theory; and Miss E. R. Sill is amply justified in saying that “probably nine-tenths of the popular sophistries on the subject of education, would be cleared away by clarifying the word Nature.”[176]

7. In spite of its paradoxes, its exaggerations, its overwrought sentiment, and florid declamation, the Émile, in its general spirit, is a work of incomparable power and of perennial value.]