ered his
quarrel with importunate friends at the Hermitage. Voltaire called him
mad for saying that if there were perfect harmony of taste and
temperament between the king's daughter and the executioner's son, the
pair ought to be allowed to marry. We who are not forced by
conversational necessities to hurry to a judgment, may hesitate to
take either taste for the country, or for frugal living, or even for
democratic extravagances, as a mark of a disordered mind.[373] That
Rousseau's conduct towards Hume was inconsistent with perfect mental
soundness is quite plain. But to say this with crude trenchancy,
teaches us nothing. Instead of paying ourselves with phrases like
monomania, it is more useful shortly to trace the conditions which
prepared the way for mental derangement, because this is the only
means of understanding either its nature, or the degree to which it
extended. These conditions in Rousseau's case are perfectly simple and
obvious to any one who recognises the principle, that the essential
facts of such mental disorder as his must be sought not in the
symptoms, but from the whole range of moral and intellectual
constitution, acted on by physical states and acting on them in turn.

Rousseau was born with an organisation of extreme sensibility. This
predisposition was further deepened by the application in early youth
of mental influences specially calculated to heighten juvenile
sensibility. Corrective discipline from circumstance and from formal
instruction was wholly absent, and thus the particular excess in his
temperament became ever more and more exaggerated, and encroached at a
rate of geometrical progression upon all the rest of his impulses and
faculties; these, if he had been happily placed under some of the many
forms of wholesome social pressure, would then on the contrary have
gradually reduced his sensibility to more normal proportion. When the
vicious excess had decisively rooted itself in his character, he came
to Paris, where it was irritated into further activity by the
uncongeniality of all that surrounded him. Hence the growth of a
marked unsociality, taking literary form in the Discourses, and
practical form in his retirement from the town. The slow depravation
of the affective life was hastened by solitude, by sensuous expansion,
by the long musings of literary composition. Well does Goethe's
Princess warn the hapless Tasso:--

Dieser Pfad
Verlei