The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Book I.
by Jean Jacques Rousseau

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Title: The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Book I.

Author: Jean Jacques Rousseau

Release Date: December 6, 2004 [EBook #3901]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by David Widger

THE CONFESSIONS OF JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
(In 12 books)

Privately Printed for the Members of the Aldus Society

London, 1903

BOOK I.

CONTENTS:
Introduction--S.W. Orson
Book I.

INTRODUCTION.

Among the notable books of later times-we may say, without exaggeration,
of all time--must be reckoned The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau.
It deals with leading personages and transactions of a momentous epoch,
when absolutism and feudalism were rallying for their last struggle
against the modern spirit, chiefly represented by Voltaire, the
Encyclopedists, and Rousseau himself--a struggle to which, after many
fierce intestine quarrels and sanguinary wars throughout Europe and
America, has succeeded the prevalence of those more tolerant and rational
principles by which the statesmen of our own day are actuated.

On these matters, however, it is not our province to enlarge; nor is it
necessary to furnish any detailed account of our author's political,
religious, and philosophic axioms and systems, his paradoxes and his
errors in logic: these have been so long and so exhaustively disputed
over by contending factions that little is left for even the most
assiduous gleaner in the field. The inquirer will find, in Mr. John
Money's excellent work, the opinions of Rousseau reviewed succinctly and
impartially. The 'Contrat Social', the 'Lattres Ecrites de la Montagne',
and other treatises that once aroused fierce controversy, may therefore
be left in the repose to which they have long been consigned, so far as
the mass of mankind is concerned, though they must always form part of
the library of the politician and the historian. One prefers to turn to
the man Rousseau as he paints himself in the remarkable work before us.

That the task which he undertook in offering to sho