Inborn tendencies, as we perceive on every side, are far from having unlimited irresistible mastery, if they meet early encounter from some wise and patient external will.  The father of Rousseau was unfortunately cast in the same mould as his mother, and the child’s own morbid sensibility was stimulated and deepened by the excessive sensibility of his first companion.  Isaac Rousseau, in many of his traits, was a reversion to an old French type.  In all the Genevese there was an underlying tendency of this kind.  “Under a phlegmatic and cool air,” wrote Rousseau, when warning his countrymen against the inflammatory effects of the drama, “the Genevese hide an ardent and sensitive character, that is more easily moved than controlled."[4] And some of the episodes in their history during the eighteenth century might be taken for scenes from the turbulent dramas of Paris.  But Isaac Rousseau’s restlessness, his eager emotion, his quick and punctilious sense of personal dignity, his heedlessness of ordered affairs, were not common in Geneva, fortunately for the stability of her society and the prosperity of her citizens.  This disorder of spirit descended in modified form to the son; it was inevitable that he should be indirectly affected by it.  Before he was seven years old he had learnt from his father to indulge a passion for the reading of romances.  The child and the man passed whole nights in a fictitious world, reading to one another in turn, absorbed by vivid interest in imaginary situations, until the morning note of the birds recalled them to a sense of the conditions of more actual life, and made the elder cry out in confusion that he was the more childish of the two.

The effect of this was to raise passion to a premature exaltation in the young brain.  “I had no idea of real things,” he said, “though all the sentiments were already familiar to me.  Nothing had come to me by conception, everything by sensation.  These confused emotions, striking me one after another, did not warp a reason that I did not yet possess, but they gradually shaped in me a reason of another cast and temper, and gave me bizarre and romantic ideas of human life, of which neither reflection nor experience has ever been able wholly to cure me."[5] Thus these first lessons, which have such tremendous influence over all that follow, had the direct and fatal effect in Rousseau’s case of deadening that sense of the actual relations of things to one another in the objective world, which is the master-key and prime law of sanity.

In time the library of romances came to an end (1719), and Jean Jacques and his father fell back on the more solid and moderated fiction of history and biography.  The romances had been the possession of the mother; the more serious books were inherited from the old minister, her father.  Such books as Nani’s History of Venice, and Le Sueur’s History of the Church and the Empire, made less impression on the young Rousseau than the admirable Plutarch; and