This unremitting endeavour to express an intuitive certainty in intellectual terms lies at the root of the many superficial contradictions in his work, and of the deeper contradiction which forms, as it were, the inward rhythm of his three great books.  He seems to surge upwards on a passionate wave of revolutionary ideas, only to sink back into the calm of conservative or quietist conclusions.  M. Masson has certainly observed it well.

’Le premier Discours anathematise les sciences et les arts, et ne voit le salut que dans les academies; le Discours sur l’Inegalite parait detruire tout autorite, et recommande pourtant “l’obeissance scrupuleuse aux lois et aux hommes qui en sont les auteurs”:  la Nouvelle Heloise preche d’abord l’emancipation sentimentale, et proclame la suprematie des droits de la passion, mais elle aboutit a exalter la fidelite conjugale, a consolider les grands devoirs familiaux et sociaux.  Le Vicaire Savoyard nous reserve la meme surprise.’

To the revolutionaries of his age he was a renegade and a reactionary; to the Conservatives, a subversive charlatan.  Yet he was in truth only a man stricken by the demon of ‘la bonne foi,’ and, like many men devoured by the passion of spiritual honesty, in his secret heart he believed in his similitude to Christ.  ‘Je ne puis pas souffrir les tiedes,’ he wrote to Madame Latour in 1762, ’quiconque ne se passionne pas pour moi n’est pas digne de moi.’  There is no mistaking the accent, and it sounds more plainly still in the Dialogues.  He, too, was persecuted for righteousness’ sake, because he, too, proclaimed that the kingdom of heaven was within men.

And what, indeed, have material things to do with the purification and the peace of the soul?  World-shattering arguments and world-preserving conclusions—­this is the inevitable paradox which attends the attempt to record truth seen by the eye of the soul in the language of the market-place.  The eloquence and the inspiration may descend upon the man so that he writes believing that all men will understand.  He wakes in the morning and he is afraid, not of his own words whose deeper truth he does not doubt, but of the incapacity of mankind to understand him.  They will read in the letter what was written in the spirit; their eyes will see the words, but their ears will be stopped to the music.  The mystique as Peguy would have said, will be degraded into politique.  To guard himself against this unhallowed destiny, at the last Rousseau turns with decision and in the language of his day rewrites the hard saying, that the things which are Caesar’s shall be rendered unto Caesar.