potent essences of a fermenting imagination.  Instead of urgently seeking truth with the patient energy, the wariness, and the conscience, with the sharpened instruments, the systematic apparatus, and the minute feelers and tentacles of the genuine thinker and solid reasoner, he only floated languidly on a summer tide of sensation, and captured premiss and conclusion in a succession of swoons.  It would be a mistake to contend that no work can be done for the world by this method, or that truth only comes to those who chase her with logical forceps.  But one should always try to discover how a teacher of men came by his ideas, whether by careful toil, or by the easy bequest of generous phantasy.

To give a zest to rural delight, and partly perhaps to satisfy the intellectual interest which must have been an instinct in one who became so consummate a master in the great and noble art of composition, Rousseau, during the time when he lived with Madame de Warens, tried as well as he knew how to acquire a little knowledge of what fruit the cultivation of the mind of man had hitherto brought forth.  According to his own account, it was Voltaire’s Letters on the English which first drew him seriously to study, and nothing which that illustrious man wrote at this time escaped him.  His taste for Voltaire inspired him with the desire of writing with elegance, and of imitating “the fine and enchanting colour of Voltaire’s style"[92]—­an object in which he cannot be held to have in the least succeeded, though he achieved a superb style of his own.  On his return from Turin Madame de Warens had begun in some small way to cultivate a taste for letters in him, though he had lost the enthusiasm of his childhood for reading.  Saint Evremond, Puffendorff, the Henriade, and the Spectator happened to be in his room, and he turned over their pages.  The Spectator, he says, pleased him greatly and did him much good.[93] Madame de Warens was what he calls protestant in literary taste, and would talk for ever of the great Bayle, while she thought more of Saint Evremond than she could ever persuade Rousseau to think.  Two or three years later than this he began to use his own mind more freely, and opened his eyes for the first time to the greatest question that ever dawns upon any human intelligence that has the privilege of discerning it, the problem of a philosophy and a body of doctrine.

His way of answering it did not promise the best results.  He read an introduction to the Sciences, then he took an Encyclopaedia and tried to learn all things together, until he repented and resolved to study subjects apart.  This he found a better plan for one to whom long application was so fatiguing, that he could not with any effect occupy himself for half an hour on any one matter, especially if following the ideas of another person.[94] He began his morning’s work, after an hour or two of dispersive chat, with the Port-Royal Logic, Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding, Malebranche,