nowing and acting, as distinguished
from his own gospel of placid being. He craved beliefs that should
uphold men in living their lives, substantial helps on which they might
lean without examination and without mistrust: his life in Paris was
thrown among people who lived in the midst of open questions, and
revelled in a reflective and didactic morality, which had no root in the
heart and so made things easy for the practical conscience. He sought
tranquillity and valued life for its own sake, not as an arena and a
theme for endless argument and debate: he found friends who knew no
higher pleasure than the futile polemics of mimic philosophy over
dessert, who were as full of quibble as the wrong-headed interlocutors
in a Platonic dialogue, and who babbled about God and state of nature,
about virtue and the spirituality of the soul, much as Boswell may have
done when Johnson complained of him for asking questions that would make
a man hang himself. The highest things were thus brought down to the
level of the cheapest discourse, and subjects which the wise take care
only to discuss with the wise, were here everyday topics for all comers.

The association with such high themes of those light qualities of tact,
gaiety, complaisance, which are the life of the superficial commerce of
men and women of the world, probably gave quite as much offence to
Rousseau as the doctrines which some of his companions had the honest
courage or the heedless fatuity to profess. It was an outrage to all the
serious side of him to find persons of quality introducing materialism
as a new fashion, and atheism as the liveliest of condiments. The
perfume of good manners only made what he took for bad principles the
worse, and heightened his impatience at the flippancy of pretensions to
overthrow the beliefs of a world between two wines.

Doctrine and temperament united to set him angrily against the world
around him. The one was austere and the other was sensuous, and the
sensuous temperament in its full strength is essentially solitary. The
play of social intercourse, its quick transitions, and incessant
demands, are fatal to free and uninterrupted abandonment to the flow of
soft internal emotions. Rousseau, dreaming, moody, indolently,
meditative, profoundly enwrapped in the brooding egoism of his own
sensations, had to mix with men and women whose egoism took the contrary
form of an eager desire to produce flashing effects on other people. We