Let us give Emile his Sophy; let us restore this sweet girl to life and provide her with a less vivid imagination and a happier fate.  I desired to paint an ordinary woman, but by endowing her with a great soul, I have disturbed her reason.  I have gone astray.  Let us retrace our steps.  Sophy has only a good disposition and an ordinary heart; her education is responsible for everything in which she excels other women.

In this book I intended to describe all that might be done and to leave every one free to choose what he could out of all the good things I described.  I meant to train a helpmeet for Emile, from the very first, and to educate them for each other and with each other.  But on consideration I thought all these premature arrangements undesirable, for it was absurd to plan the marriage of two children before I could tell whether this union was in accordance with nature and whether they were really suited to each other.  We must not confuse what is suitable in a state of savagery with what is suitable in civilised life.  In the former, any woman will suit any man, for both are still in their primitive and undifferentiated condition; in the latter, all their characteristics have been developed by social institutions, and each mind, having taken its own settled form, not from education alone, but by the co-operation, more or less well-regulated, of natural disposition and education, we can only make a match by introducing them to each other to see if they suit each other in every respect, or at least we can let them make that choice which gives the most promise of mutual suitability.

The difficulty is this:  while social life develops character it differentiates classes, and these two classifications do not correspond, so that the greater the social distinctions, the greater the difficulty of finding the corresponding character.  Hence we have ill-assorted marriages and all their accompanying evils; and we find that it follows logically that the further we get from equality, the greater the change in our natural feelings; the wider the distance between great and small, the looser the marriage tie; the deeper the gulf between rich and poor the fewer husbands and fathers.  Neither master nor slave belongs to a family, but only to a class.

If you would guard against these abuses, and secure happy marriages, you must stifle your prejudices, forget human institutions, and consult nature.  Do not join together those who are only alike in one given condition, those who will not suit one another if that condition is changed; but those who are adapted to one another in every situation, in every country, and in every rank in which they may be placed.  I do not say that conventional considerations are of no importance in marriage, but I do say that the influence of natural relations is so much more important, that our fate in life is decided by them alone, and that there is such an agreement of taste, temper,