ter wanderings hither and thither, took refuge in Paris, where,
living meanly, he completed his _Confessions_, wrote other eloquent
pieces of self-vindication, and relieved his morbid cerebral
excitement by music and botanising rambles. The hospitality of M.
de Girardin at Ermenonville was gladly accepted in May 1778; and there,
on July 2, he suddenly died; suicide was surmised; the seizure was
probably apoplectic.

Rousseau was essentially an idealist, but an idealist whose dreams
and visions were inspired by the play of his sensibility upon his
intellect and imagination, and therefore he was the least impersonal
of thinkers. Generous of heart, he was filled with bitter suspicions;
inordinately proud, he nursed his pride amid sordid realities;
cherishing ideals of purity and innocence, he sank deep in the mire
of imaginative sensuality; effeminate, he was also indomitable; an
uncompromising optimist, he saw the whole world lying in wickedness;
a passionate lover of freedom, he aimed at establishing the most
unqualified of tyrannies; among the devout he was a free-thinker,
among the philosophers he was the sentimentalist of theopathy. He
stands apart from his contemporaries: they did homage to the
understanding; he was the devotee of the heart: they belonged to a
brilliant society; he was elated, suffered, brooded, dreamed in
solitude: they were aristocratic, at least by virtue of the
intellectual culture which they represented; he was plebeian in his
origin, and popular in his sympathies.

He became a great writer comparatively late in life, under the
compulsion of a ruling idea which lies at the centre of all his more
important works, excepting such as are apologetic and autobiographical:
Nature has made man good and happy; society has made him evil and
miserable. Are we, then, to return to a state of primitive savagery?
No: society cannot retrograde. But in many ways we can ameliorate
human life by approximating to a natural condition.

In the _Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts_, the _Discours sur
l'Inegalite_, and the _Lettre a D'Alembert sur les Spectacles_,
Rousseau pleads against the vices, the artificiality, the
insincerities, the luxuries, the false refinements, the factitious
passions, the dishonest pleasures of modern society. "You make one
wish," wrote Voltaire, "to walk on all fours." By nature all men are
born free and equal; society has rendered them slaves, and impounded
them in classes of rich a