the ordinary ways of society, hitting, wounding
and soiling himself against every hindrance on his way; at times
extravagant, mean and criminal, yet preserving up to the end a delicate
and profound sensibility, a humanity, pity, the gift of tears, the
faculty of living, the passion for justice, the sentiment of religion
and of enthusiasm, like so many vigorous roots in which generous sap is
always fermenting, whilst the stem and the branches prove abortive and
become deformed or wither under the inclemency of the atmosphere. How
explain such a contrast? How did Rousseau himself account for it? A
critic, a psychologist would merely regard him as a singular case, the
effect of an extraordinarily discordant mental formation, analogous to
that of Hamlet, Chatterton, Rene or Werther, adopted to poetic spheres,
but unsuitable for real life. Rousseau generalizes; occupied with
himself, even to infatuation, and, seeing only himself, he imagines
mankind to be like himself, and "describes it as the feels it inside
himself". His pride, moreover, finds this profitable; he is gratified at
considering himself the prototype of humanity; the statue he erects of
himself becomes more important; he rises in his own estimation when,
in confessing to himself, he thinks he is confessing the human species.
Rousseau convokes the assembly of generations with the trumpet of the
day of judgment, and boldly stands up in the eyes of all men and of the
Supreme Judge, exclaiming, "Let anyone say, if he dares: 'I was a better
man than Thou!'"[3329] All his blemishes must be the fault of society;
his vices and his baseness must be attributed to circumstances:

"If I had fallen into the hands of a better master....I should have been
a good Christian, a good father, a good friend, a good workman, a good
man in all things."

The wrong is thus all on the side of society.--In the same way, with Man
in general, his nature is good.

"His first impulses are always right..... The fundamental principle of
all moral questions which I have argued in all my writings, is that
Man is naturally good, and loving justice and order..... 'Emile,'
especially, is a treatise on the natural goodness of Man, intended to
show how vice and error, foreign to his constitution, gradually find
their way into it from without and insensibly change him.....Nature
created Man happy and good, while society has depraved him and made him
miserable."[3330]

Imagine him divested of his