regions of night, whence the depth of human misery and the obscuration of human intelligence had once permitted its escape, to hang evilly over the western world for a season.  So vital a change in the point of view quickly touched the theory and art of the upbringing of the young.  Education began to figure less as the suppression of the natural man, than his strengthening and development; less as a process of rooting out tares, more as the grateful tending of shoots abounding in promise of richness.  What had been the most drearily mechanical of duties, was transformed into a task that surpassed all others in interest and hope.  If man be born not bad but good, under no curse, but rather the bestower and receiver of many blessings, then the entire atmosphere of young life, in spite of the toil and the peril, is made cheerful with the sunshine and warmth of the great folded possibilities of excellence, happiness, and well-doing.

I.

Locke in education, as in metaphysics and in politics, was the pioneer of French thought.  In education there is less room for scientific originality.  The sage of a parish, provided only she began her trade with an open and energetic mind, may here pass philosophers.  Locke was nearly as sage, as homely, as real, as one of these strenuous women.  The honest plainness of certain of his prescriptions for the preservation of physical health perhaps keeps us somewhat too near the earth.  His manner throughout is marked by the stout wisdom of the practical teacher, who is content to assume good sense in his hearers, and feels no necessity for kindling a blaze or raising a tempest.  He gives us a practical manual for producing a healthy, instructed, upright, well-mannered young English squire, who shall be rightly fitted to take his own life sensibly in hand, and procure from it a fair amount of wholesome satisfaction both for himself and the people with whom he is concerned.  Locke’s treatise is one of the most admirable protests in the world against effeminacy and pedantry, and parents already moved by grave desire to do their duty prudently to their sons, will hardly find another book better suited to their ends.  Besides Locke, we must also count Charron, and the amazing educator of Gargantua, and Montaigne before either, among the writers whom Rousseau had read, with that profit and increase which attends the dropping of the good ideas of other men into fertile minds.

There is an immense class of natures, and those not the lowest, which the connection of duty with mere prudence does not carry far enough.  They only stir when something has moved their feeling for the ideal, and raised the mechanical offices of the narrow day into association with the spaciousness and height of spiritual things.  To these Rousseau came.  For both the tenour and the wording of the most striking precepts of the Emilius, he owes much to Locke.  But what was so realistic in him becomes blended in Rousseau with all the power and richness and beauty of an ideal that can move the most generous parts of human character.  The child is treated as the miniature of humanity; it thus touches the whole sphere of our sympathies, warms our curiosity as to the composition of man’s nature, and becomes the very eye and centre of moral and social aspirations.