of the journey to England, completed the sum of the conditions of disturbance, and as soon as ever he was settled at Wootton, and had leisure to brood over the incidents of the few weeks since his arrival in England, the disorder which had long been spreading through his impulses and affections, suddenly but by a most natural sequence extended to the faculties of his intelligence, and he became the prey of delusion, a delusion which was not yet fixed, but which ultimately became so.

“He has only felt during the whole course of his life,” wrote Hume sympathetically; “and in this respect his sensibility rises to a pitch beyond what I have seen any example of; but it still gives him a more acute feeling of pain than of pleasure.  He is like a man who was stripped not only of his clothes, but of his skin, and turned out in that situation to combat with the rude and boisterous elements."[374] A morbid affective state of this kind and of such a degree of intensity, was the sure antecedent of a morbid intellectual state, general or partial, depressed or exalted.  One who is the prey of unsound feelings, if they are only marked enough and persistent enough, naturally ends by a correspondingly unsound arrangement of all or some of his ideas to match.  The intelligence is seduced into finding supports in misconception of circumstances, for a misconception of human relation which had its root in disordered emotion.  This completes the breach of correspondence between the man’s nature and the external facts with which he has to deal, though the breach may not, and in Rousseau’s case certainly did not, extend along the whole line of feeling and judgment.  Rousseau’s delusion about Hume’s sinister feeling and designs, which was the first definite manifestation of positive unsoundness in the sphere of the intelligence, was a last result of the gradual development of an inherited predisposition to affective unsoundness, which unhappily for the man’s history had never been counteracted either by a strenuous education, or by the wholesome urgencies of life.

We have only to remember that with him, as with the rest of us, there was entire unity of nature, without cataclysm or marvel or inexplicable rupture of mental continuity.  All the facts came in an order that might have been foretold; they all lay together, with their foundations down in physical temperament; the facts which made Rousseau’s name renowned and his influence a great force, along with those which made his life a scandal to others and a misery to himself.  The deepest root of moral disorder lies in an immoderate expectation of happiness, and this immoderate unlawful expectation was the mark both of his character and his work.  The exaltation of emotion over intelligence was the secret of his most striking production; the same exaltation, by gaining increased mastery over his whole existence, at length passed the limit of sanity and wrecked him.  The tendency of the dominant