with the real beings who surround us.  And to this let us add that there are natures in which all deep emotion is so entirely associated with the ideal, that real and particular manifestations of it are repugnant to them as something alien; and this without the least insincerity, though with a vicious and disheartening inconsistency.  Rousseau belonged to this class, and loved man most when he saw men least.  Bad as this was, it does not justify us in denouncing his love of man as artificial; it was one side of an ideal exaltation, which stirred the depths of his spirit with a force as genuine as that which is kindled in natures of another type by sympathy with the real and concrete, with the daily walk and conversation and actual doings and sufferings of the men and women whom we know.  The fermentation which followed his arrival at the Hermitage, in its first form produced a number of literary schemes.  The idea of the Political Institutions, first conceived at Venice, pressed upon his meditations.  He had been earnestly requested to compose a treatise on education.  Besides this, his thoughts wandered confusedly round the notion of a treatise to be called Sensitive Morality, or the Materialism of the Sage, the object of which was to examine the influence of external agencies, such as light, darkness, sound, seasons, food, noise, silence, motion, rest, on our corporeal machine, and thus indirectly upon the soul also.  By knowing these and acquiring the art of modifying them according to our individual needs, we should become surer of ourselves and fix a deeper constancy in our lives.  An external system of treatment would thus be established, which would place and keep the soul in the condition most favourable to virtue.[258] Though the treatise was never completed, and the sketch never saw the light, we perceive at least that Rousseau would have made the means of access to character wide enough, and the material influences that impress it and produce its caprices, multitudinous enough, instead of limiting them with the medical specialist to one or two organs, and one or two of the conditions that affect them.  Nor, on the other hand, do the words in which he sketches his project in the least justify the attribution to him of the doctrine of the absolute power of the physical constitution over the moral habits, whether that doctrine would be a credit or a discredit to his philosophical thoroughness of perception.  No one denies the influence of external conditions on the moral habits, and Rousseau says no more than that he proposed to consider the extent and the modifiableness of this influence.  It was not then deemed essential for a spiritualist thinker to ignore physical organisation.