as all wet with
my tears, though I was wholly unconscious of shedding them. Ah, if I
could ever have written the quarter of what I saw and felt under that
tree, with what clearness should I have brought out all the
contradictions of our social system; with what simplicity I should have
demonstrated that man is good naturally, and that by institutions only
is he made bad."[153] Diderot encouraged him to compete for the prize,
and to give full flight to the ideas which had come to him in this
singular way.[154]

People have held up their hands at the amazing originality of the idea
that perhaps sciences and arts have not purified manners. This sentiment
is surely exaggerated, if we reflect first that it occurred to the
academicians of Dijon as a question for discussion, and second that, if
you are asked whether a given result has or has not followed from
certain circumstances, the mere form of the question suggests No quite
as readily as Yes. The originality lay not in the central contention,
but in the fervour, sincerity, and conviction of a most unacademic sort
with which it was presented and enforced. There is less originality in
denouncing your generation as wicked and adulterous than there is in
believing it to be so, and in persuading the generation itself both that
you believe it and that you have good reasons to give. We have not to
suppose that there was any miracle wrought by agency celestial or
infernal in the sudden disclosure of his idea to Rousseau. Rousseau had
been thinking of politics ever since the working of the government of
Venice had first drawn his mind to the subject. What is the government,
he had kept asking himself, which is most proper to form a sage and
virtuous nation? What government by its nature keeps closest to the law?
What is this law? And whence?[155] This chain of problems had led him to
what he calls the historic study of morality, though we may doubt
whether history was so much his teacher as the rather meagrely nourished
handmaid of his imagination. Here was the irregular preparation, the
hidden process, which suddenly burst into light and manifested itself
with an exuberance of energy, that passed to the man himself for an
inward revolution with no precursive sign.

Rousseau's ecstatic vision on the road to Vincennes was the opening of a
life of thought and production which only lasted a dozen years, but
which in that brief space gave to Europe a new gospel. Emilius and the
Soci