This is the spirit of my whole method at this stage.  If the child rolls a little ball between two crossed fingers and thinks he feels two balls, I shall not let him look until he is convinced there is only one.

This explanation will suffice, I hope, to show plainly the progress made by my pupil hitherto and the route followed by him.  But perhaps the number of things I have brought to his notice alarms you.  I shall crush his mind beneath this weight of knowledge.  Not so, I am rather teaching him to be ignorant of things than to know them.  I am showing him the path of science, easy indeed, but long, far-reaching and slow to follow.  I am taking him a few steps along this path, but I do not allow him to go far.

Compelled to learn for himself, he uses his own reason not that of others, for there must be no submission to authority if you would have no submission to convention.  Most of our errors are due to others more than ourselves.  This continual exercise should develop a vigour of mind like that acquired by the body through labour and weariness.  Another advantage is that his progress is in proportion to his strength, neither mind nor body carries more than it can bear.  When the understanding lays hold of things before they are stored in the memory, what is drawn from that store is his own; while we are in danger of never finding anything of our own in a memory over-burdened with undigested knowledge.

Emile knows little, but what he knows is really his own; he has no half-knowledge.  Among the few things he knows and knows thoroughly this is the most valuable, that there are many things he does not know now but may know some day, many more that other men know but he will never know, and an infinite number which nobody will ever know.  He is large-minded, not through knowledge, but through the power of acquiring it; he is open-minded, intelligent, ready for anything, and, as Montaigne says, capable of learning if not learned.  I am content if he knows the “Wherefore” of his actions and the “Why” of his beliefs.  For once more my object is not to supply him with exact knowledge, but the means of getting it when required, to teach him to value it at its true worth, and to love truth above all things.  By this method progress is slow but sure, and we never need to retrace our steps.

Emile’s knowledge is confined to nature and things.  The very name of history is unknown to him, along with metaphysics and morals.  He knows the essential relations between men and things, but nothing of the moral relations between man and man.  He has little power of generalisation, he has no skill in abstraction.  He perceives that certain qualities are common to certain things, without reasoning about these qualities themselves.  He is acquainted with the abstract idea of space by the help of his geometrical figures; he is acquainted with the abstract idea of quantity by the help of his algebraical symbols.  These figures and signs are the supports on which