iniquity. The
ostentatious orders who pretend to be useful to the others, are in
truth only useful to themselves at the expense of the others.[306]

This was carrying on the work which had already been begun in the New
Heloisa, as we have seen, but in the Emilius it is pushed with a
gravity and a directness, that could not be imparted to the picture of
a fanciful and arbitrarily chosen situation. The only writer who has
approached Rousseau, so far as I know, in fulness and depth of
expression in proclaiming the sorrows and wrongs of the poor blind
crowd, who painfully drag along the car of triumphant civilisation
with its handful of occupants, is the author of the Book of the
People. Lamennais even surpasses Rousseau in the profundity of his
pathos; his pictures of the life of hut and hovel are as sincere and
as touching; and there is in them, instead of the anger and bitterness
of the older author, righteous as that was, a certain heroism of pity
and devoted sublimity of complaint, which lift the soul up from
resentment into divine moods of compassion and resolve, and stir us
like a tale of noble action.[307] It was Rousseau, however, who first
sounded the note of which the religion that had once been the champion
and consoler of the common people, seemed long to have lost even the
tradition. Yet the teaching was not constructive, because the ideal
man was not made truly social. Emilius is brought up in something of
the isolation of the imaginary savage of the state of nature. He
marries, and then he and his wife seem only fitted to lead a life of
detachment from the interests of the world in which they are placed.
Social or political education, that is the training which character
receives from the medium in which it grows, is left out of account,
and so is the correlative process of preparation for the various
conditions and exigencies which belong to that medium, until it is too
late to take its natural place in character. Nothing can be clumsier
than the way in which Rousseau proposes to teach Emilius the existence
and nature of his relations with his fellows. And the reason of this
was that he had never himself in the course of his ruminations,
willingly thought of Emilius as being in a condition of active social
relation, the citizen of a state.

III.

There appear to be three dominant states of mind, with groups of
faculties associated with each of them, which it is the business of
the instructor firmly t