peace and
self-contained comfort at a glow of easy warmth, assuredly the best
thing that can befall him is that he should perish, lest his example
should infect others with the same base contagion. Excessive
personality when militant is often wholesome, excessive personality
that only hugs itself is under all circumstances chief among unclean
things. Thus even Rousseau's finest monument of moral enthusiasm is
fatally tarnished by the cold damp breath of isolation, and the very
book which contained so many elements of new life for a state, was at
bottom the apotheosis of social despair.

IV.

The great agent in fostering the rise to vigour and uprightness of a
social conscience, apart from the yet more powerful instrument of a
strong and energetic public spirit at work around the growing
character, must be found in the study of history rightly directed with
a view to this end. It is here, in observing the long processes of
time and appreciating the slowly accumulating sum of endeavour, that
the mind gradually comes to read the great lessons how close is the
bond that links men together. It is here that he gradually begins to
acquire the habit of considering what are the conditions of wise
social activity, its limits, its objects, its rewards, what is the
capacity of collective achievement, and of what sort is the
significance and purport of the little span of time that cuts off the
yesterday of our society from its to-morrow.

Rousseau had very rightly forbidden the teaching of history to young
children, on the ground that the essence of history lies in the moral
relations between the bare facts which it recounts, and that the terms
and ideas of these relations are wholly beyond the intellectual grasp
of the very young.[312] He might have based his objections equally
well upon the impossibility of little children knowing the meaning of
the multitude of descriptive terms which make up a historical manual,
or realising the relations between events in bare point of time,
although childhood may perhaps be a convenient period for some
mechanical acquisition of dates. According to Rousseau, history was to
appear very late in the educational course, when the youth was almost
ready to enter the world. It was to be the finishing study, from which
he should learn not sociality either in its scientific or its higher
moral sense, but the composition of the heart of man, in a safer way
than through actual intercourse with soci