enthusiasm for an imaginary human creature effectually shut out the dogma of his fatal depravation.  “How difficult a thing it is,” Madame d’Epinay once said to him, “to bring up a child.”  “Assuredly it is,” answered Rousseau; “because the father and mother are not made by nature to bring it up, nor the child to be brought up."[273] This cynical speech can only have been an accidental outbreak of spleen.  It was a contradiction to his one constant opinion that nature is all good and bounteous, and that the inborn capacity of man for reaching true happiness knows no stint.

In writing Emilius, he sat down to consider what man is, and what can be made of him.  Here, as in all the rest of his work, he only obeyed the tendencies of his time in choosing a theme.  An age touched by the spirit of hope inevitably turns to the young; for with the young lies fulfilment.  Such epochs are ever pressing with the question, how is the future to be shaped?  Our answer depends on the theory of human disposition, and in these epochs the theory is always optimistic.  Rousseau was saved, as so many thousands of men have been alike in conduct and speculation, by inconsistency, and not shrinking from two mutually contradictory trains of thought.  Society is corrupt, and society is the work of man.  Yet man, who has engendered this corrupted birth, is good and whole.  The strain in the argument may be pardoned for the hopefulness of the conclusion.  It brought Rousseau into harmony with the eager effort of the time to pour young character into finer mould, and made him the most powerful agent in giving to such efforts both fervour and elevation.  While others were content with the mere enunciation of maxims and precepts, he breathed into them the spirit of life, and enforced them with a vividness of faith that clothed education with the augustness and unction of religion.  The training of the young soul to virtue was surrounded with something of the awful holiness of a sacrament; and those who laboured in this sanctified field were exhorted to a constancy of devotion, and were promised a fulness of recompense, that raised them from the rank of drudges to a place of highest honour among the ministers of nature.

Everybody at this time was thinking about education, partly perhaps on account of the suppression of the Jesuits, the chief instructors of the time, and a great many people were writing about it.  The Abbe de Saint Pierre had had new ideas on education, as on all the greater departments of human interest.  Madame d’Epinay wrote considerations upon the bringing up of the young.[274] Madame de Grafigny did the same in a less grave shape.[275] She received letters from the precociously sage Turgot, abounding in the same natural and sensible precepts which ten years later were commended with more glowing eloquence in the pages of Emilius.[276] Grimm had an elaborate scheme for a treatise on education.[277] Helvetius followed his exploration of the composition of the