etic inner life of the individual which the Savoyard
Vicar restored to lawful recognition, and made once more the centre of
that imaginative and spiritual existence, without which we live in a
universe that has no sun by day nor any stars by night. A writer in
whom learning has not extinguished enthusiasm, compares this to the
advance made by Descartes, who had given certitude to the soul by
turning thought confidently upon itself; and he declares that the
Savoyard Vicar is for the emancipation of sentiment what the Discourse
upon Method was for the emancipation of the understanding.[341] There
is here a certain audacity of panegyric; still the fact that Rousseau
chose to link the highest forms of man's ideal life with a fading
projection of the lofty image which had been set up in older days,
ought not to blind us to the excellent energies which, notwithstanding
defect of association, such a vindication of the ideal was certain to
quicken. And at least the lines of that high image were nobly traced.

Yet who does not feel that it is a divinity for fair weather?
Rousseau, with his fine sense of a proper and artistic setting,
imagined the Savoyard Vicar as leading his youthful convert at break
of a summer day to the top of a high hill, at whose feet the Po flowed
between fertile banks; in the distance the immense chain of the Alps
crowned the landscape; the rays of the rising sun projected long level
shadows from the trees, the slopes, the houses, and accented with a
thousand lines of light the most magnificent of panoramas.[342] This
was the fitting suggestion, so serene, warm, pregnant with power and
hope, and half mysterious, of the idea of godhead which the man of
peace after an interval of silent contemplation proceeded to expound.
Rousseau's sentimental idea at least did not revolt moral sense; it
did not afflict the firmness of intelligence; nor did it silence the
diviner melodies of the soul. Yet, once more, the heavens in which
such a deity dwells are too high, his power is too impalpable, the
mysterious air which he has poured around his being is too awful and
impenetrable, for the rays from the sun of such majesty to reach more
than a few contemplative spirits, and these only in their hours of
tranquillity and expansion. The thought is too vague, too far, to
bring comfort and refreshment to the mass of travailing men, or to
invest duty with the stern ennobling quality of being done, "if I have
grace to use it