ought to be allowed to marry.  We who are not forced by conversational necessities to hurry to a judgment, may hesitate to take either taste for the country, or for frugal living, or even for democratic extravagances, as a mark of a disordered mind.[373] That Rousseau’s conduct towards Hume was inconsistent with perfect mental soundness is quite plain.  But to say this with crude trenchancy, teaches us nothing.  Instead of paying ourselves with phrases like monomania, it is more useful shortly to trace the conditions which prepared the way for mental derangement, because this is the only means of understanding either its nature, or the degree to which it extended.  These conditions in Rousseau’s case are perfectly simple and obvious to any one who recognises the principle, that the essential facts of such mental disorder as his must be sought not in the symptoms, but from the whole range of moral and intellectual constitution, acted on by physical states and acting on them in turn.

Rousseau was born with an organisation of extreme sensibility.  This predisposition was further deepened by the application in early youth of mental influences specially calculated to heighten juvenile sensibility.  Corrective discipline from circumstance and from formal instruction was wholly absent, and thus the particular excess in his temperament became ever more and more exaggerated, and encroached at a rate of geometrical progression upon all the rest of his impulses and faculties; these, if he had been happily placed under some of the many forms of wholesome social pressure, would then on the contrary have gradually reduced his sensibility to more normal proportion.  When the vicious excess had decisively rooted itself in his character, he came to Paris, where it was irritated into further activity by the uncongeniality of all that surrounded him.  Hence the growth of a marked unsociality, taking literary form in the Discourses, and practical form in his retirement from the town.  The slow depravation of the affective life was hastened by solitude, by sensuous expansion, by the long musings of literary composition.  Well does Goethe’s Princess warn the hapless Tasso:—­

                                   Dieser Pfad
    Verleitet uns, durch einsames Gebuesch,
    Durch stille Thaeler fortzuwandern; mehr
    Und mehr verwoehnt sich das Gemueth und strebt
    Die goldne Zeit, die ihm von aussen mangelt,
    In seinem Innern wieder herzustellen,
    So wenig der Versuch gelingen will.

Then came harsh and unjust treatment prolonged for many months, and this introduced a slight but genuinely misanthropic element of bitterness into what had hitherto been an excess of feeling about himself, rather than any positive feeling of hostility or suspicion about others.  Finally and perhaps above all else, he was the victim of tormenting bodily pain, and of sleeplessness which resulted from it.  The agitation and excitement