Rousseau had very rightly forbidden the teaching of history to young children, on the ground that the essence of history lies in the moral relations between the bare facts which it recounts, and that the terms and ideas of these relations are wholly beyond the intellectual grasp of the very young.[312] He might have based his objections equally well upon the impossibility of little children knowing the meaning of the multitude of descriptive terms which make up a historical manual, or realising the relations between events in bare point of time, although childhood may perhaps be a convenient period for some mechanical acquisition of dates.  According to Rousseau, history was to appear very late in the educational course, when the youth was almost ready to enter the world.  It was to be the finishing study, from which he should learn not sociality either in its scientific or its higher moral sense, but the composition of the heart of man, in a safer way than through actual intercourse with society.  Society might make him either cynical or frivolous.  History would bring him the same information, without subjecting him to the same perils.  In society you only hear the words of men; to know man you must observe his actions, and actions are only unveiled in history.[313] This view is hardly worth discussing.  The subject of history is not the heart of man, but the movements of societies.  Moreover, the oracles of history are entirely dumb to one who seeks from them maxims for the shaping of daily conduct, or living instruction as to the motives, aims, caprices, capacities of self-restraint, self-sacrifice, of those with whom the occasions of life bring us into contact.

It is true that at the close of the other part of his education, Emilius was to travel and there find the comment upon the completed circle of his studies.[314] But excellent as travel is for some of the best of those who have the opportunity, still for many it is valueless for lack of the faculty of curiosity.  For the great majority it is impossible for lack of opportunity.  To trust so much as Rousseau did to the effect of travelling, is to leave a large chasm in education unbridged.

It is interesting, however, to notice some of Rousseau’s notions about history as an instrument for conveying moral instruction, a few of them are so good, others are so characteristically narrow.  “The worst historians for a young man,” he says, “are those who judge.  The facts, the facts; then let him judge for himself.  If the author’s judgment is for ever guiding him, he is only seeing with the eye of another, and as soon as this eye fails him, he sees nothing.”  Modern history is not fit for instruction, not only because it has no physiognomy, all our men being exactly like one another, but because our historians, intent on brilliance above all other things, think of nothing so much as painting highly coloured portraits, which for the most part represent nothing at all.[315] Of course such a judgment as this