thout the least insincerity, though
with a vicious and disheartening inconsistency. Rousseau belonged to
this class, and loved man most when he saw men least. Bad as this was,
it does not justify us in denouncing his love of man as artificial; it
was one side of an ideal exaltation, which stirred the depths of his
spirit with a force as genuine as that which is kindled in natures of
another type by sympathy with the real and concrete, with the daily walk
and conversation and actual doings and sufferings of the men and women
whom we know. The fermentation which followed his arrival at the
Hermitage, in its first form produced a number of literary schemes. The
idea of the Political Institutions, first conceived at Venice, pressed
upon his meditations. He had been earnestly requested to compose a
treatise on education. Besides this, his thoughts wandered confusedly
round the notion of a treatise to be called Sensitive Morality, or the
Materialism of the Sage, the object of which was to examine the
influence of external agencies, such as light, darkness, sound, seasons,
food, noise, silence, motion, rest, on our corporeal machine, and thus
indirectly upon the soul also. By knowing these and acquiring the art of
modifying them according to our individual needs, we should become surer
of ourselves and fix a deeper constancy in our lives. An external system
of treatment would thus be established, which would place and keep the
soul in the condition most favourable to virtue.[258] Though the
treatise was never completed, and the sketch never saw the light, we
perceive at least that Rousseau would have made the means of access to
character wide enough, and the material influences that impress it and
produce its caprices, multitudinous enough, instead of limiting them
with the medical specialist to one or two organs, and one or two of the
conditions that affect them. Nor, on the other hand, do the words in
which he sketches his project in the least justify the attribution to
him of the doctrine of the absolute power of the physical constitution
over the moral habits, whether that doctrine would be a credit or a
discredit to his philosophical thoroughness of perception. No one denies
the influence of external conditions on the moral habits, and Rousseau
says no more than that he proposed to consider the extent and the
modifiableness of this influence. It was not then deemed essential for a
spiritualist thinker to ignore physical org