s temperament,
though a man may well seem on the surface, as the first succeeds the
second in rule over him, to be the contradiction to his other self. The
objects of veneration and the objects of sensuous delight are externally
so unlike and so incongruous, that he who follows both in their turns is
as one playing the part of an ironical chorus in the tragi-comic drama
of his own life. You may perceive these two to be mere imperfect or
illusory opposites, when you confront a man like Rousseau with the true
opposite of his own type; with those who are from their birth analysts
and critics, keen, restless, urgent, inexorably questioning. That
energetic type, though not often dead or dull on the side of sense, yet
is incapable of steeping itself in the manifold delights of eye and ear,
of nostril and touch, with the peculiar intensity of passive absorption
that seeks nothing further nor deeper than unending continuance of this
profound repose of all filled sensation, just as it is incapable of the
kindred mood of elevated humility and joyful unasking devoutness in the
presence of emotions and dim thoughts that are beyond the compass
of words.

The citizen of Geneva with this unseen fibre of Calvinistic veneration
and austerity strong and vigorous within him, found a world that had
nothing sacred and took nothing for granted; that held the past in
contempt, and ever like old Athenians asked for some new thing; that
counted simplicity of life an antique barbarism, and literary
curiousness the master virtue. There were giants in this world, like the
panurgic Diderot. There were industrious, worthy, disinterested men, who
used their minds honestly and actively with sincere care for truth, like
D'Holbach. There was poured around the whole, like a high stimulating
atmosphere to the stronger, and like some evil mental aphrodisiac to the
weaker, the influence of Voltaire, the great indomitable chieftain of
them all. Intellectual size half redeems want of perfect direction by
its generous power and fulness. It was not the strong men, atheists and
philosophisers as they were, who first irritated Rousseau into revolt
against their whole system of thought in all its principles. The dissent
between him and them was fundamental and enormous, and in time it flamed
out into open war. Conflict of theory, however, was brought home to him
first by slow-growing exasperation at the follies in practice of the
minor disciples of the gospel of k