knows why.

'Des etres si singulierement constitues doivent necessairement
s'exprimer autrement que les hommes ordinaires. Il est impossible
qu'avec des ames si differemment modifies ils ne portent pas dans
l'expression de leurs sentiments et de leurs idees l'empreinte de
ces modifications. Si cette empreinte echappe a ceux qui n'ont
aucune notion de cette maniere d'etre, elle ne peut echapper a ceux
qui la connoissent, et qui en sont affectes eux-memes. C'est une
signe caracteristique auquel les inities se reconnoissent entre eux;
et ce qui donne un grand prix a ce signe, c'est qu'il ne peut se
contrefaire, que jamais il n'agit qu'au niveau de sa source, et que,
quand il ne part pas du coeur de ceux qui l'imitent, il n'arrive
pas non plus aux coeurs faits pour le distinguer; mais sitot qu'il y
parvient, on ne sauroit s'y meprendre; il est vrai des qu'il est
senti.'

At the end of his days he felt that the great labour of his life which
had been to express an intuitive certainty in words which would carry
intellectual conviction, had been in vain, and his last words are: 'It
is true so soon as it is felt.'

Three pages would tell as much of the essential truth of his 'religious
formation' as three volumes. At Les Charmettes with Mme de Warens, as a
boy and as a young man, he had known peace of soul. In Paris, amid the
intellectual exaltation and enthusiasms of the Encyclopaedists, the
memory of his lost peace haunted him like an uneasy conscience. His
boyish unquestioning faith disappeared beneath the destructive criticism
of the great pioneers of enlightenment and progress. Yet when all had
been destroyed the hunger in his heart was still unsatisfied. Underneath
his passionate admiration for Diderot smouldered a spark of resentment
that he was not understood. They had torn down the fabric of expression
into which he had poured the emotion of his immediate certainty as a
boy; sometimes with an uplifted, sometimes with a sinking heart he
surveyed the ruins. But the certainty that he had once been certain, the
memory and the desire of the past peace--this they could not destroy.
They could hardly even weaken this element within him, for they did not
know that it existed, they were unable to conceive that it could exist.
Jean-Jacques himself could give them no clue to its existence; he had
no words, and he was still under the spell of the intellectual dogma of
his