ns,
which are the material of clear ideas. He was no doubt right in his
avowal that objects generally made less impression on him than the
recollection of them; that he could see nothing of what was before his
eyes, and had only his intelligence in cases where memories were
concerned; and that of what was said or done in his presence, he felt
and penetrated nothing.[91] In other words, this is to say that his
material of thought was not fact but image. When he plunged into
reflection, he did not deal with the objects of reflection at first hand
and in themselves, but only with the reminiscences of objects, which he
had never approached in a spirit of deliberate and systematic
observation, and with those reminiscences, moreover, suffused and
saturated by the impalpable but most potent essences of a fermenting
imagination. Instead of urgently seeking truth with the patient energy,
the wariness, and the conscience, with the sharpened instruments, the
systematic apparatus, and the minute feelers and tentacles of the
genuine thinker and solid reasoner, he only floated languidly on a
summer tide of sensation, and captured premiss and conclusion in a
succession of swoons. It would be a mistake to contend that no work can
be done for the world by this method, or that truth only comes to those
who chase her with logical forceps. But one should always try to
discover how a teacher of men came by his ideas, whether by careful
toil, or by the easy bequest of generous phantasy.

To give a zest to rural delight, and partly perhaps to satisfy the
intellectual interest which must have been an instinct in one who became
so consummate a master in the great and noble art of composition,
Rousseau, during the time when he lived with Madame de Warens, tried as
well as he knew how to acquire a little knowledge of what fruit the
cultivation of the mind of man had hitherto brought forth. According to
his own account, it was Voltaire's Letters on the English which first
drew him seriously to study, and nothing which that illustrious man
wrote at this time escaped him. His taste for Voltaire inspired him with
the desire of writing with elegance, and of imitating "the fine and
enchanting colour of Voltaire's style"[92]--an object in which he cannot
be held to have in the least succeeded, though he achieved a superb
style of his own. On his return from Turin Madame de Warens had begun in
some small way to cultivate a taste for letters in him, thoug