anisation.

A third undertaking of a more substantial sort was to arrange and edit
the papers and printed works of the Abbe de Saint Pierre (1658-1743),
confided to him through the agency of Saint Lambert, and partly also of
Madame Dupin, the warm friend of that singular and good man.[259] This
task involved reading, considering, and picking extracts from
twenty-three diffuse and chaotic volumes, full of prolixity and
repetition. Rousseau, dreamer as he was, yet had quite keenness of
perception enough to discern the weakness of a dreamer of another sort;
and he soon found out that the Abbe de Saint Pierre's views were
impracticable, in consequence of the author's fixed idea that men are
guided rather by their lights than by their passions. In fact, Saint
Pierre was penetrated with the eighteenth-century faith to a peculiar
degree. As with Condorcet afterwards, he was led by his admiration for
the extent of modern knowledge to adopt the principle that perfected
reason is capable of being made the base of all institutions, and would
speedily terminate all the great abuses of the world. "He went wrong,"
says Rousseau, "not merely in having no other passion but that of
reason, but by insisting on making all men like himself, instead of
taking them as they are and as they will continue to be." The critic's
own error in later days was not very different from this, save that it
applied to the medium in which men live, rather than to themselves, by
refusing to take complex societies as they are, even as starting-points
for higher attempts at organisation. Rousseau had occasionally seen the
old man, and he preserved the greatest veneration for his memory,
speaking of him as the honour of his age and race, with a fulness of
enthusiasm very unusual towards men, though common enough towards
inanimate nature. The sincerity of this respect, however, could not make
the twenty-three volumes which the good man had written, either fewer in
number or lighter in contents, and after dealing as well as he could
with two important parts of Saint Pierre's works, he threw up the
task.[260] It must not be supposed that Rousseau would allow that
fatigue or tedium had anything to do with a resolve which really needed
no better justification. As we have seen before, he had amazing skill in
finding a certain ingeniously contrived largeness for his motives. Saint
Pierre's writings were full of observations on the government of France,
some of them re