of pity as one of the noblest of sentiments, he warns us against letting it degenerate into weakness, and insists that we should only surrender ourselves to it when it accords with justice.[308] But that is all.  What constitutes justice, what is its standard, what its source, what its sanction, whence the extraordinary holiness with which its name has come to be invested among the most highly civilised societies of men, we are never told, nor do we ever see that our teacher had seen the possibility of such questions being asked.  If they had been propounded to him, he would, it is most likely, have fallen back upon the convenient mystery of the natural law.  This was the current phrase of that time, and it was meant to embody a hypothetical experience of perfect human relations in an expression of the widest generality.  If so, this would have to be impressed upon the mind of Emilius in the same way as other mysteries.  As a matter of fact, Emilius was led through pity up to humanity, or sociality in an imperfect signification, and there he was left without a further guide to define the marks of truly social conduct.

This imperfection was a necessity, inseparable from Rousseau’s tenacity in keeping society in the background of the picture of life which he opened to his pupil.  He said, indeed, “We must study society by men, and men by society; those who would treat politics and morality apart will never understand anything about either one or the other."[309] This is profoundly true, but we hardly see in the morality which is designed for Emilius the traces of political elements.  Yet without some gradually unfolded presentation of society as a whole, it is scarcely possible to implant the idea of justice with any hope of large fertility.  You may begin at a very early time to develop, even from the primitive quality of self-love, a notion of equity and a respect for it, but the vast conception of social justice can only find room in a character that has been made spacious by habitual contemplation of the height and breadth and close compactedness of the fabric of the relations that bind man to man, and of the share, integral or infinitesimally fractional, that each has in the happiness or woe of other souls.  And this contemplation should begin when we prepare the foundation of all the other maturer habits.  Youth can hardly recognise too soon the enormous unresting machine which bears us ceaselessly along, because we can hardly learn too soon that its force and direction depend on the play of human motives, of which our own for good or evil form an inevitable part when the ripe years come.  To one reared with the narrow care devoted to Emilius, or with the capricious negligence in which the majority are left to grow to manhood, the society into which they are thrown is a mere moral wilderness.  They are to make such way through it as they can, with egotism for their only trusty instrument.  This egotism may either be a bludgeon, as with the most part, or it may be a delicately adjusted