If we turn to the man himself, we might imagine at the first glance that none could have been less fitted for the position of a leader of thought, a founder of systems and schools, the apostle of a new era.  The career for which Nature seemed to have destined him, and which, in truth, he may almost be said to have followed, was that of a vagabond, or at the best a recluse.  Of all the advantages we desire and anxiously seek for our children, Rousseau enjoyed none.  Poverty, degradation and neglect weighed upon him from his birth.  The evil in him was unchecked, the good unfostered, by any training hand.  The opportunity and the faculty of acquiring any substantial nutriment from books seemed alike denied him.  His intercourse with mankind through all his earlier and the greater part of his later life was confined to the ignorant, and with these alone was he ever able to hold any harmonious relations or any grateful interchange of sentiment.  Physically, mentally and morally diseased, weak yet stern, sensitive but unpliant, equally devoid of courage and of tact, he could not come in contact with the world without suffering a shock and swift recoil that drove him back to the refuge of solitude—­to the mute companionship of external Nature or the brooding contemplation of himself.  Even the ideals which, despite his practical aberrations from them, he yet intensely worshiped, had, in his conception of them, little connection with the activities of life:  truth, simplicity, order, purity and peace were ideas that occupied his soul only to fill it with a horror of reality, with yearnings for an idyllic repose, with dreams of a state which he persuaded himself had been the original condition of the race, in which virtue and right must prevail through the mere absence of occasion for wrong or temptation to evil.

Yet it is not in some radiance breaking through this cloudy environment, it is not in this or that faculty overcoming all obstacles, it is in the entirety of his nature as originally formed, and as moulded or marred by circumstance and fate, that we shall find the secret of that spell which he exercised over men of all classes and characters.  The culture which might have sweetened and perhaps ennobled his life would have unfitted him for his mission.  It would have brought him more or less into harmony with his age; and it was by his utter and vehement opposition to its habits and opinions that he turned the stream into a different channel.  Not only his finer intuitions and purer tastes, but his unsatisfied desires, his errors, his remorse, urged him to make war upon it, as the step-mother that had sought to enervate or brutalize his mind while defrauding him of his inheritance.  He held up the image of its corruption, shallowness and false refinement, and that of a life of simple manners and unperverted instincts.  That he depicted this as the real life of a primitive epoch only gave greater pungency to the contrast.  The eighteenth century, aroused to the consciousness