d nurtured upon Holy
Scripture in his pious childhood, he felt a sincere repugnance for the
elegant or cynical materialism which was every day more and more creeping
over the eighteenth century. "Sciences and arts have corrupted the
world," he said, and he put forward, as proof of it, the falsity of the
social code, the immorality of private life, the frivolity of the
drawing-rooms into which he had been admitted. "Suspicions,
heart-burnings, apprehensions, coldness, reserve, hatred, treason, lurk
incessantly beneath that uniform and perfidious veil of politeness, under
that so much vaunted urbanity which we owe to the enlightenment of our
age."

Rousseau had launched his paradox; the frivolous and polite society which
he attacked was amused at it without being troubled by it: it was a new
field of battle opened for brilliant jousts of wit; he had his partisans
and his admirers. In the discussion which ensued, Jean Jacques showed
himself more sensible and moderate than he had been in the first
exposition of his idea; he had wanted to strike, to astonish he soon
modified the violence of his assertions. "Let us guard against
concluding that we must now burn all libraries and pull down the
universities and academies," he wrote to King Stanislaus: "we should only
plunge Europe once more into barbarism, and morals would gain nothing by
it. The vices would remain with us, and we should have ignorance
besides. In vain would you aspire to destroy the sources of the evil;
in vain would you remove the elements of vanity, indolence, and luxury;
in vain would you even bring men back to that primal equality, the
preserver of innocence and the source of all virtue: their hearts once
spoiled will be so forever. There is no remedy now save some great
revolution, almost as much to be feared as the evil which it might cure,
and one which it were blamable to desire and impossible to forecast. Let
us, then, leave the sciences and arts to assuage, in some degree, the
ferocity of the men they have corrupted. . .. The enlightenment of the
wicked is at any rate less to be feared than his brutal stupidity."

Rousseau here showed the characteristic which invariably distinguished
him from the philosophers, and which ended by establishing deep enmity
between them and him. The eighteenth century espied certain evils,
certain sores in the social and political condition, believed in a cure,
and blindly relied on the power of its own theo