and tempered judgment hangs idle on the wall?  Surely it is thus by accumulation of instruction from generation to generation, that the area of right conduct in the world is extended.  Such instruction must with youth be conveyed by military word of command as often as by philosophical persuasion of its worth.  Nor is the atmosphere of command other than bracing, even to those who are commanded.  If education is to be mainly conducted by force of example, it is a dreadful thing that the child is ever to have before its eyes as living type and practical exemplar the pale figure of parents without passions, and without a will as to the conduct of those who are dependent on them.  Even a slight excess of anger, impatience, and the spirit of command, would be less demoralising to the impressionable character than the constant sight of a man artificially impassive.  Rousseau is perpetually calling upon men to try to lay aside their masks; yet the model instructor whom he has created for us is to be the most artfully and elaborately masked of all men; unless he happens to be naturally without blood and without physiognomy.

Rousseau, then, while he put away the old methods which imprisoned the young spirit in injunctions and over-solicitous monitions, yet did none the less in his own scheme imprison it in a kind of hothouse, which with its regulated temperature and artificially contrived access of light and air, was in many respects as little the method of nature, that is to say it gave as little play for the spontaneous working and growth of the forces of nature in the youth’s breast, as that regimen of the cloister which he so profoundly abhorred.  Partly this was the result of a ludicrously shallow psychology.  He repeats again and again that self-love is the one quality in the youthful embryo of character, from which you have to work.  From this, he says, springs the desire of possessing pleasure and avoiding pain, the great fulcrum on which the lever of experience rests.  Not only so, but from this same unslumbering quality of self-love you have to develop regard for others.  The child’s first affection for his nurse is a result of the fact that she serves his comfort, and so down to his passion in later years for his mistress.  Now this is not the place for a discussion as to the ultimate atom of the complex moral sentiments of men and women, nor for an examination of the question whether the faculty of sympathy has or has not an origin independent of self-love.  However that may be, no one will deny that sympathy appears in good natures extremely early, and is susceptible of rapid cultivation from the very first.  Here is the only adequate key to that education of the affections, from their rudimentary expansion in the nursery, until they include the complete range of all the objects proper to them.