conscience.  He sought tranquillity and valued life for its own sake, not as an arena and a theme for endless argument and debate:  he found friends who knew no higher pleasure than the futile polemics of mimic philosophy over dessert, who were as full of quibble as the wrong-headed interlocutors in a Platonic dialogue, and who babbled about God and state of nature, about virtue and the spirituality of the soul, much as Boswell may have done when Johnson complained of him for asking questions that would make a man hang himself.  The highest things were thus brought down to the level of the cheapest discourse, and subjects which the wise take care only to discuss with the wise, were here everyday topics for all comers.

The association with such high themes of those light qualities of tact, gaiety, complaisance, which are the life of the superficial commerce of men and women of the world, probably gave quite as much offence to Rousseau as the doctrines which some of his companions had the honest courage or the heedless fatuity to profess.  It was an outrage to all the serious side of him to find persons of quality introducing materialism as a new fashion, and atheism as the liveliest of condiments.  The perfume of good manners only made what he took for bad principles the worse, and heightened his impatience at the flippancy of pretensions to overthrow the beliefs of a world between two wines.

Doctrine and temperament united to set him angrily against the world around him.  The one was austere and the other was sensuous, and the sensuous temperament in its full strength is essentially solitary.  The play of social intercourse, its quick transitions, and incessant demands, are fatal to free and uninterrupted abandonment to the flow of soft internal emotions.  Rousseau, dreaming, moody, indolently, meditative, profoundly enwrapped in the brooding egoism of his own sensations, had to mix with men and women whose egoism took the contrary form of an eager desire to produce flashing effects on other people.  We may be sure that as the two sides of his character—­his notions of serious principle, and his notions of personal comfort—­both went in the same direction, the irritation and impatience with which they inspired him towards society did not lessen with increased communication, but naturally deepened with a more profoundly settled antipathy.

Rousseau lived in Paris for twelve years, from his return from Venice in 1744 until his departure in 1756 for the rustic lodge in a wood which the good-will of Madame d’Epinay provided for him.  We have already seen one very important side of his fortunes during these years, in the relations he formed with Theresa, and the relations which he repudiated with his children.  We have heard too the new words with which during these years he first began to make the hearts of his contemporaries wax hot within them.  It remains to examine the current of daily circumstance on which his life was embarked, and the shores to which it was bearing him.