evelopment, and
the unlimited faith in the goodness of human nature. Exercise the body, the
organs, the senses of the pupil, and keep his soul unemployed as long as
possible; for the first, take care only that his mind be kept free from
error and his heart from vice. In order to secure complete freedom from
disturbance in this development, it is advisable to isolate the child from
society, nay, even from the family, and to bring him up in retirement under
the guidance of a private tutor.

As the Swiss republican spoke in Rousseau's politics, so his religious
theories[1] betray the Genevan Calvinist. "The Savoyard Vicar's Profession
of Faith" (in _Emile_) proclaims deism as a religion of feeling. The
rational proofs brought forward for the existence of God--from the motion
of matter in itself at rest, and from the finality of the world--are only
designed, as he declares by letter, to confute the materialists, and derive
their impregnability entirely from the inner evidence of feeling, which
amid the vacillation of the reason _pro_ and _con_ gives the final
decision.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Ch. Borgeaud, _Rousseaus Religionsphilosophie_, Geneva and
Leipsic, 1883.]

If we limit our inquiry to that which is alone of importance for us, and
rely on the evidence of feeling, it cannot be doubted that I myself exist
and feel; that there exists an external world which affects me; that
thought, comparison or judgment concerning relations is different from
sensation or the perception of objects--for the latter is a passive,
but the former an active process; that I myself produce the activity of
attention or consideration; that, consequently, I am not merely a sensitive
or passive, but also an active or intelligent being. The freedom of my
thought and action guarantees to me the immateriality of my soul, and is
that which distinguishes me from the brute. The life of the soul after
the decay of the body is assured to me by the fact that in this world the
wicked triumphs, while the good are oppressed. The favored position which
man occupies in the scale of beings--he is able to look over the universe
and to reverence its author, to recognize order and beauty, to love the
good and to do it; and shall he, then, compare himself to the brute?--fills
me with emotion and gratitude to the benevolent Creator, who existed before
all things, and who will exist when they all shall have vanished away,
to whom all truths are one single idea, all place