utually exclusive way of learning the thoughts of others, and
developing thoughts of your own, is for an adult probably the most
mischievous, where it is not the most impotent, fashion in which
intellectual exercise can well be taken. It is exactly the use of the
judicial faculty, criticising, comparing, and defining, which is
indispensable in order that a student should not only effectually
assimilate the ideas of a writer, but even know what those ideas come to
and how much they are worth. And so when he works at ideas of his own, a
judicial faculty which has been kept studiously slumbering for some
years, is not likely to revive in full strength without any preliminary
training. Rousseau was a man of singular genius, and he set an
extraordinary mark on Europe, but this mark would have been very
different if he had ever mastered any one system of thought, or if he
had ever fully grasped what systematic thinking means. Instead of this,
his debt to the men whom he read was a debt of piecemeal, and his
obligation an obligation for fragments; and this is perhaps the worst
way of acquiring an intellectual lineage, for it leaves out the vital
continuity of temper and method. It is a small thing to accept this or
that of Locke's notions upon education or the origin of ideas, if you do
not see the merit of his way of coming by his notions. In short,
Rousseau has distinctions in abundance, but the distinction of knowing
how to think, in the exact sense of that term, was hardly among them,
and neither now nor at any other time did he go through any of that
toilsome and vigorous intellectual preparation to which the ablest of
his contemporaries, Diderot, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Turgot, Condorcet,
Hume, all submitted themselves. His comfortable view was that "the
sensible and interesting conversations of a woman of merit are more
proper to form a young man than all the pedantical philosophy of
books."[97]

Style, however, in which he ultimately became such a proficient, and
which wrought such marvels as only style backed by passion can work,
already engaged his serious attention. We have already seen how Voltaire
implanted in him the first root idea, which so many of us never perceive
at all, that there is such a quality of writing as style. He evidently
took pains with the form of expression and thought about it, in
obedience to some inborn harmonious predisposition which is the source
of all veritable eloquence, though there is n