A third undertaking of a more substantial sort was to arrange and edit the papers and printed works of the Abbe de Saint Pierre (1658-1743), confided to him through the agency of Saint Lambert, and partly also of Madame Dupin, the warm friend of that singular and good man.[259] This task involved reading, considering, and picking extracts from twenty-three diffuse and chaotic volumes, full of prolixity and repetition.  Rousseau, dreamer as he was, yet had quite keenness of perception enough to discern the weakness of a dreamer of another sort; and he soon found out that the Abbe de Saint Pierre’s views were impracticable, in consequence of the author’s fixed idea that men are guided rather by their lights than by their passions.  In fact, Saint Pierre was penetrated with the eighteenth-century faith to a peculiar degree.  As with Condorcet afterwards, he was led by his admiration for the extent of modern knowledge to adopt the principle that perfected reason is capable of being made the base of all institutions, and would speedily terminate all the great abuses of the world.  “He went wrong,” says Rousseau, “not merely in having no other passion but that of reason, but by insisting on making all men like himself, instead of taking them as they are and as they will continue to be.”  The critic’s own error in later days was not very different from this, save that it applied to the medium in which men live, rather than to themselves, by refusing to take complex societies as they are, even as starting-points for higher attempts at organisation.  Rousseau had occasionally seen the old man, and he preserved the greatest veneration for his memory, speaking of him as the honour of his age and race, with a fulness of enthusiasm very unusual towards men, though common enough towards inanimate nature.  The sincerity of this respect, however, could not make the twenty-three volumes which the good man had written, either fewer in number or lighter in contents, and after dealing as well as he could with two important parts of Saint Pierre’s works, he threw up the task.[260] It must not be supposed that Rousseau would allow that fatigue or tedium had anything to do with a resolve which really needed no better justification.  As we have seen before, he had amazing skill in finding a certain ingeniously contrived largeness for his motives.  Saint Pierre’s writings were full of observations on the government of France, some of them remarkably bold in their criticism, but he had not been punished for them because the ministers always looked upon him as a kind of preacher rather than a genuine politician, and he was allowed to say what he pleased, because it was observed that no one listened to what he said.  Besides, he was a Frenchman, and Rousseau was not, and hence the latter, in publishing Saint Pierre’s strictures on French affairs, was exposing himself to a sharp question why he meddled with a country that did not concern him.  “It surprised me,” says Rousseau, “that the reflection had not occurred to me earlier,” but this coincidence of the discovery that the work was imprudent, with the discovery that he was weary of it, will surprise nobody versed in study of a man who lives in his sensations, and yet has vanity enough to dislike to admit it.