he names Rousseau’s Emilius; no preceding work can be compared to his; in no previous work on education was the ideal so richly combined with the actual,” and so forth.[331] It was not merely a Goethe, a Schiller, a Herder, whom Rousseau fired with new thoughts.  The smaller men, such as Fr. Jacobi, Heinse, Klinger, shared the same inspiration.  The worship of Rousseau penetrated all classes, and touched every degree of intelligence.[332]

In our own country Emilius was translated as soon as it appeared, and must have been widely read, for a second version of the translation was called for in a very short time.  So far as a cursory survey gives one a right to speak, its influence here in the field of education is not very perceptible.  That subject did not yet, nor for some time to come, excite much active thought in England.  Rousseau’s speculations on society both in the Emilius and elsewhere seem to have attracted more attention.  Reference has already been made to Paley.[333] Adam Ferguson’s celebrated Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) has many allusions, direct and indirect, to Rousseau.[334] Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man (1774) abounds still more copiously in references to Emilius, sometimes to controvert its author, more often to cite him as an authority worthy of respect, and Rousseau’s crude notions about women are cited with special acceptance.[335] Cowper was probably thinking of the Savoyard Vicar when he wrote the energetic lines in the Task, beginning “Haste now, philosopher, and set him free,” scornfully defying the deist to rescue apostate man.[336] Nor should we omit what was counted so important a book in its day as Godwin’s Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793).  It is perhaps more French in its spirit than any other work of equal consequence in our literature of politics, and in its composition the author was avowedly a student of Rousseau, as well as of the members of the materialistic school.

In fine we may add that Emilius was the first expression of that democratic tendency in education, which political and other circumstances gradually made general alike in England, France, and Germany; a tendency, that is, to look on education as a process concerning others besides the rich and the well-born.  As has often been remarked, Ascham, Milton, Locke, Fenelon, busy themselves about the instruction of young gentlemen and gentlewomen.  The rest of the world are supposed to be sufficiently provided for by the education of circumstance.  Since the middle of the eighteenth century this monopolising conception has vanished, along with and through the same general agencies as the corresponding conception of social monopoly.  Rousseau enforced the production of a natural and self-sufficing man as the object of education, and showed, or did his best to show, the infinite capacity of the young for that simple and natural cultivation.  This easily and directly led people to reflect that such a capacity was not confined to the children of the rich, nor the hope of producing a natural and sufficing man narrowed to those who had every external motive placed around them for being neither natural nor self-sufficing.