k ever pervading the character of Rousseau. It happened
in later years that he repudiated his allegiance to her, but however
bitterly a man may quarrel with a parent, he cannot change blood, and
Rousseau ever remained a true son of the city of Calvin. We may perhaps
conjecture without excessive fancifulness that the constant spectacle
and memory of a community, free, energetic, and prosperous, whose
institutions had been shaped and whose political temper had been
inspired by one great lawgiver, contributed even more powerfully than
what he had picked up about Lycurgus and Lacedaemon, to give him a turn
for Utopian speculation, and a conviction of the artificiality and easy
modifiableness of the social structure. This, however, is less certain
than that he unconsciously received impressions in his youth from the
circumstances of Geneva, both as to government and religion, as to
freedom, order, citizenship, manners, which formed the deepest part of
him on the reflective side, and which made themselves visible whenever
he exchanged the life of beatified sense for moods of speculative
energy, "Never," he says, "did I see the walls of that happy city, I
never went into it, without feeling a certain faintness at my heart, due
to excess of tender emotion. At the same time that the noble image of
freedom elevated my soul, those of equality, of union, of gentle
manners, touched me even to tears."[203] His spirit never ceased to
haunt city and lake to the end, and he only paid the debt of an owed
acknowledgment in the dedication of his Discourse on Inequality to the
republic of Geneva.[204] It was there it had its root. The honour in
which industry was held in Geneva, the democratic phrases that
constituted the dialect of its government, the proud tradition of the
long battle which had won and kept its independence, the severity of its
manners, the simplicity of its pleasures,--all these things awoke in his
memory as soon as ever occasion drew him to serious thought. More than
that, he had in a peculiar manner drawn in with the breath of his
earliest days in this theocratically constituted city, the vital idea
that there are sacred things and objects of reverence among men. And
hence there came to him, though with many stains and much misdirection,
the most priceless excellence of a capacity for devout veneration.

There is certainly no real contradiction between the quality of
reverence and the more equivocal quality of a sensuou