1768
Paris _June_, 1770
Death _July 2_, 1778

PRINCIPAL WRITINGS.

Discourse on the Influence of Learning and
Art PUBLISHED 1750
Discourse on Inequality " 1754
Letter to D'Alembert " 1758
New Heloisa (began 1757, finished in winter
of 1759-60) " 1761
Social Contract " 1762
Emilius " 1762
Letters from the Mountain " 1764
Confessions (written 1766-70) { Pt. I 1781
{ Pt. II 1788
Reveries (written 1777-78).

_Comme dans les etangs assoupis sous les bois,
Dans plus d'une ame on voit deux choses a la fois:
Le ciel, qui teint les eaux a peine remuees
Avec tous ses rayons et toutes ses nuees;
Et la vase, fond morne, affreux, sombre et dormant,
Ou des reptiles noirs fourmillent vaguement._
HUGO.

ROUSSEAU.

CHAPTER I.

PRELIMINARY.

Christianity is the name for a great variety of changes which took place
during the first centuries of our era, in men's ways of thinking and
feeling about their spiritual relations to unseen powers, about their
moral relations to one another, about the basis and type of social
union. So the Revolution is now the accepted name for a set of changes
which began faintly to take a definite practical shape first in America,
and then in France, towards the end of the eighteenth century; they had
been directly prepared by a small number of energetic thinkers, whose
speculations represented, as always, the prolongation of some old lines
of thought in obedience to the impulse of new social and intellectual
conditions. While one movement supplied the energy and the principles
which extricated civilisation from the ruins of the Roman empire, the
other supplies the energy and the principles which already once, between
the Seven Years' War and the assembly of the States General, saved
human progress in face of the political fatuity of England and the
political nullity of France; and they are now, amid the distraction of
the various representatives of an obsolete ordering, the only fo