followed
me everywhere; it shed indifference or disgust over all that might have
been within my reach, leading to fortune and honours. Uncertain in the
disquiet of my desires, I hoped for little, I obtained less, and I felt
even amid gleams of prosperity that if I obtained all that I supposed
myself to be seeking, I should still not have found the happiness for
which my heart was greedily athirst, though without distinctly knowing
its object. Thus everything served to detach my affections from society,
even before the misfortunes which were to make me wholly a stranger to
it. I reached the age of forty, floating between indigence and fortune,
between wisdom and disorder, full of vices of habit without any evil
tendency at heart, living by hazard, distracted as to my duties without
despising them, but often without much clear knowledge what they
were."[211]

A brooding nature gives to character a connectedness and unity that is
in strong contrast with the dispersion and multiformity of the active
type. The attractions of fame never cheated Rousseau into forgetfulness
of the commanding principle that a man's life ought to be steadily
composed to oneness with itself in all its parts, as by mastery of an
art of moral counterpoint, and not crowded with a wild mixture of aim
and emotion like distracted masks in high carnival. He complains of the
philosophers with whom he came into contact, that their philosophy was
something foreign to them and outside of their own lives. They studied
human nature for the sake of talking learnedly about it, not for the
sake of self-knowledge; they laboured to instruct others, not to
enlighten themselves within. When they published a book, its contents
only interested them to the extent of making the world accept it,
without seriously troubling themselves whether it were true or false,
provided only that it was not refuted. "For my own part, when I desired
to learn, it was to know things myself, and not at all to teach others.
I always believed that before instructing others it was proper to begin
by knowing enough for one's self; and of all the studies that I have
tried to follow in my life in the midst of men, there is hardly one that
I should not have followed equally if I had been alone, and shut up in a
desert island for the rest of my days."[212]

When we think of Turgot, whom Rousseau occasionally met among the
society which he denounces, such a denunciation sounds a little
outrageou