I THE GIFT OF SILENCE HAVE often remarked, that the persons who passed for the most discreet were not the most happy in the choice of their confidants. There is a strength of mind, by no means common, in burying in silence what strongly affects us. Yet prudence imposes on us a law almost equal, to conceal the secrets of others and our own violent feelings; the passions mislead us to such a degree, that, blushing, after their crisis is over, at the blindness into which they have plunged us, we almost always regret our having communicated the opinions with which they inspired us. Besides, an excessive reserve, at least with friends, bespeaks a mistrust of ourselves, and a fear of examination, which are not very honorable to him who entertains them. Honest souls are unreserved; dissimulation, on the contrary, serves as a mask to bad intentions; it is the cloak of the courtier and the virtue of intrigue. In affairs, there must be inviolable secrecy; in the ordinary commerce of life, a prudent reserve; and in the connections of the heart, an unlimited confidence. The last part of my precept is not without inconvenience, I know; but for myself, I rather choose to run the risk of its observation, than to deprive myself of the pleasures that must thence result. Complete. VIRTUE AN INSPIRATION VIRTUE VIRTUE is not to be demonstrated, it is calculated to be felt; we must inspire it, and not preach it up; it is by far the best thing in the world, but it is for those who love it. Some one has said, with a deal of justness, that we attach ourselves still less to virtue from the charms that we find in it, than from the sacrifices that we make to it. I like this idea; it touches, flatters, and penetrates me. In a constitution of things where natural order is perverted, where consequence, esteem, distinctions,-exterior advantages, in short,—are the reward of factitious merit, it would be a very improper idea to wish to cause virtue to be adopted because it is useful; we must cause it to be cherished, because it is amiable; it belongs to those who possess it, to know all its utility, and to congratulate themselves on their choice. Our morals are such, that it amounts almost to audacity, to undertake to rear new citizens; we must hope for many circumstances, and rely still more on the example that we feel ourselves capable of affording. Complete. THE CHARACTER AND ASSOCIATION HE commerce of the world affords us the facility of expressing ourselves readily and gracefully concerning the objects which present themselves; but it cannot contribute to improve the judgment, except of those who have theirs already well formed. Men, in general, lose part of their natural character by being in continual company, and we are never less ourselves than in living much with others. It is hardly anywhere but in solitude that we learn to think strongly; there it is that the mind is improved and enlightened, that the ideas are extended and strengthened, that the feelings become refined and fortified, that the moral man acquires a consistency, and assumes those qualities which he afterwards exercises among his fellows. There are persons who cannot endure solitude; and it is so much the worse for them; I know some of these; I see only the more reason to pity them. We may cherish solitude without becoming misanthropes; none are less susceptible of attachment than dissipated people; feeling souls withdraw from the crowd. I am tired of those amphibious beings whom we cannot define, who do not know themselves, and whom we find everywhere dragging their incapacity; they make me impatient for retire ment. Complete. INTELLECT AND PROGRESS I' F WE understand by thinking, the action of the mind, inasmuch as it considers its own ideas, combines and rectifies them, I state it as a fact that the most contemplative man has not thought the quarter of his life. Our wants are so numerous, the necessity of satisfying them occurs so frequently, engages so much of our attention,- continued sensations occupying us in such a manner, by the mere images of objects, or tyrannizing over us so much by their presence, that it is still surprising that we can employ ourselves about so many things. What a considerable portion of time lost to the mind! In representing to ourselves the species as a great individual being, ought we to be astonished at the slowness of its progress in every way, and at the almost eternal infancy in which it seems to remain? I am frightened at the immensity of time that has been required to bring us only where we are. Enter into details: see every man, always confused by varied and successive impressions,—he acquires without enjoying, adopts without examining, and judges mechanically. Inattention and habit maintain and encourage ignorance and error; every thing counteracts the discovery of truth, and dilatory experience cannot cause it to be admitted but in the process of time. Complete. 3275 JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU (1712-1778) ERHAPS if an impartial jury were called upon to decide on the evidence what thousand words of modern prose have made the most history, the verdict would be for (or against!) the sixth chapter of Rousseau's first book on the "Social Contract." It is the most definite formulation made, prior to 1776, of the idea that "all men are created equal; that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." The problem of government, as Rousseau stated it, is "to find a form of association which may defend and protect with the whole force of the community the person and property of every associate, and by means of which each, coalescing with all, may, nevertheless, obey only himself and remain as free as before.» John Locke in England and Rousseau in France, gave the intellectual impulse to the movement which resulted in the two great revolutions of the eighteenth century. The Republic of America and the Republic of France might have come without them through evolution, had it been possible for evolution to do its work against the obstructive forces of eighteenth-century "Toryism." With the eighteenth century as it was, however, nothing might have been accomplished except through the power of great intellects moved to radicalism by such uncompromising analyses of fundamental principles as those in which Rousseau swept away the claim that one class of men can rightly assert a title from Heaven to rule. Since the "Social Contract" appeared, "Divine Right," as a title to govern, has been abandoned by all publicists who make any serious pretension to logic. When "Higher Civilization" is substituted for "Divine Right" in later times, Rousseau's definition is evaded rather than combated. Indeed, the corollary from his definition, "that governments are instituted to secure rights rather than to support privilege," and that "they derive their just powers from the governed," has not been met with any other logic than that of the status quo ante, in the presence of which it remains still to the minds of many practicalminded men what it was called by Rufus Choate,-"a glittering gen erality." It is one of those definitions, however, which, when once formulated, become to thousands who do not possess the power of analysis in their own intellectual right, as sacred as a religious creed. The American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution which followed it, and the American Civil War, alike testify the terrible power of a definition which first and first and finally reduces a great, worldmoving idea to its simplest terms. Had Rousseau not impregnated the mind of civilization with the idea that "just government" must be representative in order to be just, the plea that American slavery made the slave contented and happy might have been accepted by the public opinion of the world,-which, however, could not entertain it when Rousseau was represented in the nineteenth century by Garrison and Lincoln, as he had been in the eighteenth by Jefferson, Danton, and Wilberforce. It is singular that this remarkable man should not only dominate thus the politics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but that the theories of education which he formulated in his "Émile" should, at the opening of the twentieth century, still remain the governing impulse in all that is most distinctively modern in the training of youth for citizenship. He inspired Fröbel in Germany, as he did the founders of the public school system in America. It is hard to find in history any one who, by purely intellectual force, has exerted a power over the course of events which can be compared to that attributable with certainty to Rousseau. It is impossible to account for his possession of it on any other theory than that his genuine benevolence overcame weaknesses and vices which otherwise would have vitiated his influence and nullified his work. No life was ever more unequal to the demand of a great intellect than his. The highest benevolence seemed not incompatible in him with moral weakness verging close on depravity,as when, while writing on Virtue and Philosophy, he sent his own children one after another to the foundling asylum. Perhaps what often verges on "moral idiocy" in him may be accounted for to a very great extent by the circumstances of his birth and early education. At Geneva, where he was born (June 28th, 1712), his father was without social standing, and, as his mother died in giving him birth, he was left without the training which gives intellectual power its stimulus and complement of moral force. His father "mended watches and taught dancing" for a living, and Jean Jacques himself «< was successively an engraver's apprentice, a lackey, a student in a seminary, a clerk, a private tutor, and a music copyist," before he became a great author. Where the least said about his morals is the soonest mended, this, perhaps, is sufficient to suggest the lack of stability of character which seems to be the radical infirmity of his The astonishing versatility of his genius, the powerful analyt nature. |