h he had
lost the enthusiasm of his childhood for reading. Saint Evremond,
Puffendorff, the Henriade, and the Spectator happened to be in his room,
and he turned over their pages. The Spectator, he says, pleased him
greatly and did him much good.[93] Madame de Warens was what he calls
protestant in literary taste, and would talk for ever of the great
Bayle, while she thought more of Saint Evremond than she could ever
persuade Rousseau to think. Two or three years later than this he began
to use his own mind more freely, and opened his eyes for the first time
to the greatest question that ever dawns upon any human intelligence
that has the privilege of discerning it, the problem of a philosophy and
a body of doctrine.

His way of answering it did not promise the best results. He read an
introduction to the Sciences, then he took an Encyclopaedia and tried to
learn all things together, until he repented and resolved to study
subjects apart. This he found a better plan for one to whom long
application was so fatiguing, that he could not with any effect occupy
himself for half an hour on any one matter, especially if following the
ideas of another person.[94] He began his morning's work, after an hour
or two of dispersive chat, with the Port-Royal Logic, Locke's Essay on
the Human Understanding, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Descartes.[95] He found
these authors in a condition of such perpetual contradiction among
themselves, that he formed the chimerical design of reconciling them
with one another. This was tedious, so he took up another method, on
which he congratulated himself to the end of his life. It consisted in
simply adopting and following the ideas of each author, without
comparing them either with one another or with those of other writers,
and above all without any criticism of his own. Let me begin, he said,
by collecting a store of ideas, true or false, but at any rate clear,
until my head is well enough stocked to enable me to compare and choose.
At the end of some years passed "in never thinking exactly, except after
other people, without reflecting so to speak, and almost without
reasoning," he found himself in a state to think for himself. "In spite
of beginning late to exercise my judicial faculty, I never found that it
had lost its vigour, and when I came to publish my own ideas, I was
hardly accused of being a servile disciple."[96]

To that fairly credible account of the matter, one can only say that
this m