your troubled imagination, and their false art, instead of prolonging your days, only hinders you from enjoying them.  Suffer, die, or recover; but above all things live, live up to your last hour.”  It is foresight, constantly carrying us out of ourselves, that is the true source of our miseries.[293] O man, confine thy existence within thyself, and thou wilt cease to be miserable.  Thy liberty, thy power, reach exactly as far as thy natural forces, and no further; all the rest is slavery and illusion.  The only man who has his own will is he who does not need in order to have it the arms of another person at the end of his own.[294]

The training that follows from this is obvious.  The instructor has carefully to distinguish true or natural need from the need which is only fancied, or which only comes from superabundance of life.  Emilius, who is brought up in the country, has nothing in his room to distinguish it from that of a peasant.[295] If he is taken to a luxurious banquet, he is bidden, instead of heedlessly enjoying it, to reflect austerely how many hundreds or thousands of hands have been employed in preparing it.[296] His preference for gay colours in his clothes is to be consulted, because this is natural and becoming to his age, but the moment he prefers a stuff merely because it is rich, behold a sophisticated creature.[297] The curse of the world is inequality, and inequality springs from the multitude of wants, which cause us to be so much the more dependent.  What makes man essentially good is to have few wants, and to abstain from comparing himself with others; what makes him essentially bad, is to have many wants, and to cling much to opinion.[298] Hence, although Emilius happened to have both wealth and good birth, he is not brought up to be a gentleman, with the prejudices and helplessness and selfishness too naturally associated with that abused name.

This cardinal doctrine of limitation of desire, with its corollary of self-sufficience, contains in itself the great maxim that Emilius and every one else must learn some trade.  To work is an indispensable duty in the social man.  Rich or poor, powerful or weak, every idle citizen is a knave.  And every boy must learn a real trade, a trade with his hands.  It is not so much a matter of learning a craft for the sake of knowing one, as for the sake of conquering the prejudices which despise it.  Labour for glory, if you have not to labour from necessity.  Lower yourself to the condition of the artisan, so as to be above your own.  In order to reign in opinion, begin by reigning over it.  All things well considered, the trade most to be preferred is that of carpenter; it is clean, useful, and capable of being carried on in the house; it demands address and diligence in the workman, and though the form of the work is determined by utility, still elegance and taste are not excluded.[299] There are few prettier pictures than that where Sophie enters the workshop, and sees in amazement her young lover at the other end, in his white shirt-sleeves, his hair loosely fastened back, with a chisel in one hand and a mallet in the other, too intent upon his work to perceive even the approach of his mistress.[300]