ABRIDGED VERSION

Book One

[10:] Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the author of things, everything degenerates in the hands of man. He forces one soil to nourish the products of another, one tree to bear the fruits of another. He mixes and confuses the climates, the elements, the seasons. He mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave. He turns everything upside down, he disfigures everything, he loves deformities, monsters. He wants nothing as nature made it, not even man himself. For him man must be trained like a saddle- horse; he must be shaped according to the fashion, like trees in his garden.

[11:] Without this everything would be even worse; our species was not made to remain only half-finished. Under existing conditions a man left to himself from birth would be the most disfigured of all. Prejudice, authority, necessity, example -- all the social conditions in which we find ourselves submerged -- would stifle nature in him and put nothing in its place. Human nature would be like a seedling that chance had sown in the midst of the highway, bent this way and that and soon crushed by the passers-by.

[12:] It is you whom I address, tender, foresighted mother [note 1] -- you who know how to stay away from the busy highway and protect the growing seedling from the impact of human opinion! Cultivate and water the young plant before it dies; its fruit will one day be your delight. Early on, form an enclosure around your child's soul. Someone else can mark its circumference, but you alone must build the fence.[note 2]...

[14:] We are born weak, we need strength; we are born lacking everything, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgment. All that we lack at birth and that we need when we are grown is given by education.

[15:] This education comes to us from nature, from men, or from things. The inner growth of our organs and faculties is the education of nature, the use we learn to make of this growth is the education of men, and what we gain by our experience of our surroundings is the education of things.

[16:] Thus we are each taught by three masters. The pupil in whom their diverse lessons conflict is poorly raised and will never be in harmony with himself; he in whom they all agree on the same points and tend towards the same ends goes straight to his goal and lives consistently. The latter is well raised.

[17:] Now of these three factors in education, the education of nature is wholly beyond our control; that of things is only partly in our power; the education of men is the only one of which we are truly the master. And even here our power is largely illusory, for who can hope to direct every word and action of all those who surround a child?

[18:] As much therefore as education is an art, it is almost impossible that it succeed, since the coordination necessary to its success depends on no one person. All one can do by one's own efforts is to more or less approach the goal. One needs luck to attain it.

[19:] What is this goal? It is the goal of nature, that has just been proved. Since the coordination of the three educations is necessary to their perfection, the two that we can control must follow the lead of that which is beyond our control....

[21:] We are born sensitive and from our birth onwards we are affected in various ways by the objects that surround us. As soon as we have, so to speak, consciousness of our sensations, we are disposed to seek out or shun the things that cause them, at first because they are pleasant or unpleasant, then because they suit us or not, and finally because of judgments of them formed by means of the ideas of happiness and goodness which reason gives us. These tendencies gain strength and permanence as we become more sensitive and more enlightened. But once they are constrained by our habits, they become more or less corrupted by our opinions. Before this change they are what I call nature within us.

[22:] It is thus to these primitive dispositions that everything should be related, and that would be possible if our three modes of education merely differed from one another. But what can be done when they are opposed, when instead of raising a man for himself one wishes to raise him for others? Then harmony becomes impossible. Forced to combat either nature or social institutions, you must choose between making a man and making a citizen, for you cannot do both at the same time....

[24:] Natural man is everything for himself. He is the numerical unit, the absolute whole, accountable only to himself or to his own kind. Civil man is only a fractional unit dependent on the denominator, whose value is in his relationship with the whole, that is, the social body. Good social institutions are those that know best how to denature man, to take away his absolute existence in order to give him a relative one, and to transport the "me" into a common unity so that each individual no longer regards himself as one but as a part of the unity and is sensitive only to the whole...

[29:] From these necessarily opposite aims come two contrary forms of education -- one is public and common, the other individual and domestic.

[30:] Do you wish to get an idea of public education? Read Plato's Republic. Those who merely judge books by their titles take this for a treatise on politics, but it is the finest treatise on education ever written....

[32:] Public institutions do not and cannot exist, for where there is no longer a homeland there can no longer be citizens. These two words, homeland and citizen, ought to be erased from modern languages. I know very well the reason for this but I do not want to discuss it here; it has nothing to do with my subject.

[33:] I do not consider our ridiculous colleges[note 6] as public institutions. Nor do I count the education of society, for this education, facing two ways at once, achieves nothing. It is only fit to turn out double men, always seeming to relate everything to others while actually relating nothing to anyone but themselves. These forms of display are common to everybody and deceive no one. They are so much wasted effort.

[34:] From these contradictions arise the one which we experience ceaselessly within ourselves. Drawn this way by nature and that way by men, forced to divide ourselves between divergent impulses, we make a compromise and reach neither goal. Thus buffeted and floating throughout the course of our lives, we end it without having been able to be in harmony with ourselves -- and without having done anything good either for ourselves or for others.

[35:] There remains finally domestic education or the education of nature. But what will a man raised uniquely for himself become for others? If perhaps the proposed double aim could be resolved into one, then by removing man's contradictions we would remove a great obstacle to his happiness. To judge you must see this man full-grown; you must have observed his inclinations, watched his progress, followed his steps. In a word, natural man would have to be known. When you have read this work, I think you will have made some progress in this research....

[37:] In the social order where each has his own place a man must be educated for it. If an individual formed for a particular social position happens to leave that position, he is fit for nothing else. His education is only useful when fate agrees with his parents' choice. If not, education harms the student, if only by the prejudices it has given him. In Egypt, where the son was compelled to adopt his father's calling, education had at least a settled aim. But with us, where only the social ranks remain and the men who form them are constantly changing, no one knows if raising one's son for his own class may actually be working against him.

[38:] In the natural order since men are all equal their common vocation is that of man. And whoever is well-raised for that calling cannot badly fulfill anything that relates to it. Whether my pupil is destined for the army, the church, or the law, is of little import. Before his parents chose a vocation for him, nature called him to human life. Life is the trade I want to teach him. Leaving my hands I grant you he will be neither a magistrate, a soldier, nor a priest; he will be first of all a man. All that a man ought to be he will learn as quickly as another. In vain can fortune change his station; he will always be in his right place. " Ocupavi te, fortuna, atque cepi; omnes-que aditus tuos interclusi, ut ad me aspirare non posses."

[39:] Our true study is that of the human condition. Those who can best endure the good and evil of life are in my view the best educated. Hence it follows that true education consists less in precept than in practice. We begin to learn when we begin to live; our education begins with ourselves....

[41:] People think only of preserving their child's life; this is not enough. He must be taught to preserve himself as a man, to bear the blows of fate, to brave wealth and poverty, to live if necessary among the snows of Iceland or on the scorching rocks of Malta. In vain you guard against death: he will nevertheless have to die, and even if you do not kill him with your precautions, they are ill-conceived. It is less a question of keeping him from dying than of making him live. To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life. A man may be buried at a hundred who has been dead since his birth. He would have gained more by dying young: at least he would have lived up until that time....

[43:] It is said that many midwives profess to improve the shape of the infant's head by rubbing, and they are allowed to do this. Our heads are not good enough as God made them; they must be moulded outside by the nurse and inside by the philosophers. The Caribs are better off than we are.

[44:] "The child has hardly left the mother's womb, it has hardly begun to move and stretch its limbs, when it is given new bonds. It is wrapped in swaddling bands, laid down with its head fixed, its legs stretched out, and its arms by its sides; it is wound round with linen and bandages of all sorts so that it cannot move. The child is fortunate if it has room to breathe and if it is laid on its side so that any water which should flow from its mouth can escape; for it is not free to turn its head on one side for this purpose."

[45:] The new-born child needs to stir and stretch his limbs to free them from the stiffness resulting from being curled up so long. His limbs are stretched indeed, but he is not allowed to move them. Even the head is confined by a cap. One would think they were afraid the child should look as if he were alive.

[46:] As a result the internal impulses which should lead to growth find an insurmountable obstacle in the way of the necessary movements. The child exhausts his strength in vain struggles, or he gains strength very slowly. He was freer and less constrained in the womb; he has gained nothing by birth.

[47:] The inaction, the constraint to which the child's limbs are subjected, can only hinder the circulation of the blood and bodily fluids; it can only limit the child's growth in size and strength and injure its constitution. In places where such absurd precautions are unknown, the men are tall, strong, and well-made. The countries where children are swaddled swarm with hunch-backs, the lame, the bowlegged, the arthritic, and people with every kind of deformity. In our fear that the body should become deformed by free movement, we hasten to deform it by putting it in a press. We willfully make our children crippled by preventing them from disabling themselves.

[48:] Might not such a cruel constraint influence their humor as well as their temperament? Their first feeling is one of sadness and of pain. They are confronted by obstacles with each necessary movement. More miserable than a criminal in chains, they make vain efforts, they become angry, they cry. Their first words you say are tears. I believe it. You thwart them from birth. The first gifts they receive from you are chains, the first treatment they experience is torture. Having nothing that is free but their voice, why wouldn't they use it to complain? They cry from the pains that you give them. Thus fettered you would cry louder than they.

[49:] Whence comes this unreasonable custom? From an unnatural practice. Since mothers despise their primary duty and do not wish to nurse their own children, they have had to entrust them to mercenary women. These women thus become mothers to a stranger's children, who by nature mean so little to them that they seek only to spare themselves trouble. A child unswaddled would need constant watching; well swaddled it is cast into a corner and its cries are ignored. As long as the nurse's negligence escapes notice, as long as the nursling does not break its arms or legs, what matter if it dies or becomes a weakling for life? Its limbs are kept safe at the expense of its body, and if anything goes wrong it is not the nurse's fault.

[50:] These gentle mothers, having gotten rid of their babies, devote themselves gaily to the pleasures of the town. Do they know how their children are being treated in the villages? If the nurse is at all busy, the child is hung up on a nail like a bundle of clothes and is left crucified while the nurse goes leisurely about her business. All those who have been found in this position were purple in the face. Their tightly bandaged chest prevented the circulation of the blood, and it went to the head. The patient was considered very quiet because he had not strength to cry. How long a child might survive under such conditions I do not know, but it could not be long. That, I suppose, is one of the chief advantages of swaddling clothes....

[65:] Observe nature, follow the route that it traces for you. Nature exercises children continually, it hardens their temperament by all kinds of difficulties, it teaches them early the meaning of pain and sorrow. Teething gives them fevers, sharp colics bring on convulsions, long coughing suffocates them, worms torment them, plethora corrupts their blood, various leavens ferment it and cause dangerous eruptions. Almost all of the first age is sickness and danger: one half of the children who are born die before their eighth year. The tests passed, the infant has gained strength, and as soon as he can make use of his life its principle becomes more secure.

[66:] This is the law of nature. Why would you contradict it? Do you not see that in your efforts to improve upon its work you are destroying it, that you impede the effect of its aims? To do from without what she does within is according to you to increase the danger twofold. On the contrary, it is the way to avert it. Experience shows that children delicately raised are more likely to die. Provided we do not overdo it, there is less risk in using their strength than in sparing it. Accustom them therefore to the hardships they will have to face; train them to endure extremes of temperature, climate, and condition, hunger, thirst, and weariness. Dip them in the waters of Styx. Before bodily habits are acquired you may teach what habits you will without danger. But once habits are established any change becomes perilous. A child will bear changes which a man cannot bear. The muscles of the one are soft and flexible and take whatever direction you give them without any effort. The muscles of the grown man are harder and they only change their accustomed mode of action when subjected to violence. One can thus make a child robust without risking his life or health; and even if there were some risk, one should not hesitate. Since risks are inseperable from human life, can we do better than face them at a time when they can do the least harm?...

[71:] Do you wish, then, that he keep his original form? Watch over him from the moment he comes into the world. As soon as he is born take possession of him and do not leave him till he is a man; you will never succeed otherwise. Just as the real nurse is the mother, the real teacher is the father. Let them agree in the ordering of their functions as well as in their system; let the child pass from one to the other. He will be better educated by a sensible though limited father than by the cleverest teacher in the world. For zeal will make up for lack of knowledge better than knowledge for lack of zeal....

[144:] Children's first sensations are purely affective. They are only aware of pleasure and pain. Being unable to walk nor to grasp they need much time to form little by little the representative sensations that show them objects beyond themselves. But while waiting for these objects to become extended, become distanced, so to speak, from their eyes and take on for them dimension and shape, the recurrence of affective sensations begins to subject the child to the rule of habit. You see his eyes constantly follow the light, and if the light comes from the side the eyes turn towards it, so that one must be careful to turn his head towards the light lest he should squint. He must also be accustomed from the first to the dark, or he will cry if he misses the light. Food and sleep, too exactly measured, become necessary at regular intervals, and soon desire is no longer the effect of need, but of habit, or rather habit adds a fresh need to those of nature. This is what must be prevented.

[145:] The only habit the child should be allowed is that of contracting none. Let him be carried on either arm, let him be accustomed to offer either hand, to use one or other indifferently; let him not want to eat, sleep, or do anything at fixed hours, nor be unable to be left alone by day or night. Prepare from afar the reign of his liberty and the use of his own forces by letting his body keep its natural habit, by putting him in a condition of being always master of himself, of following his will in everything as soon as he has one....

[147:] Since the mere choice of things shown him may make the child timid or brave, why should not his education begin before he can speak or understand? I would have him accustomed to see fresh things, ugly, repulsive, and strange animals, but little by little, and at a distance, until he is used to them, and until having seen others handle them he handles them himself. If in childhood he sees toads, snakes, and crayfish, he will not be afraid of any animal when he is grown up. Those who are continually seeing terrible things think nothing of them.

[148:] All children are afraid of masks. I begin by showing Emile a mask with a pleasant face. Then some one puts this mask before his face; I begin to laugh, they all laugh too, and the child with them. By degrees I accustom him to less pleasing masks, and at last to hideous ones. If I have arranged my stages skilfully, far from being afraid of the last mask, he will laugh at it as he did at the first. After that I am not afraid of people frightening him with masks....

[152:] At the beginning of life, when memory and imagination have not begun to function, the child only attends to what affects its senses. His sense experiences are the raw material of thought. They should, therefore, be presented to him in fitting order, so that memory may at a future time present them in the same order to his understanding. But since he only attends to his sensations it is enough, at first, to show him clearly the connection between these sensations and the things which cause them. He wants to touch and handle everything. Do not oppose this restlessness; it suggests to him a very necessary learning. It is thus that he will learn to feel heat, cold, hardness, softness, weight, or lightness of bodies; to judge their size and shape and all their physical properties by looking, feeling,[note 16] listening, and, above all, by comparing sight and touch, by judging with the eye what sensation they would cause to his hand.

[153:] It is only by movement that we learn that there are things which are not us; it is only by our own movements that we gain the idea of extension. It is because the child does not have this idea that he indifferently reaches out to grasp the object that touches him or the object that is a hundred feet away. You take this as a sign of tyranny, an attempt to make the thing come near him or to make you bring him to it; but it is not that. It is merely that the object first seen in his brain, then before his eyes, now seems close to his arms, and he has no idea of space beyond his reach. Be careful, therefore, to take him about, to move him from place to place, and to let him perceive the change in his surroundings so as to teach him to judge of distances. When he begins to perceive distances then you must change your method, and only carry him when you please, not when he pleases. For as soon as he is no longer deceived by his senses, the cause of his effort changes. This change is important and calls for explanation....

[157:] As man's first state is one of misery and weakness, his first sounds are cries and tears. The child feels his needs and cannot satisfy them; he begs for help by his cries. If he is hungry or thirsty he cries; if is he is too cold or too hot he cries; if he needs movement and is kept quiet he cries; if he wants to sleep and is disturbed he cries. The less comfortable he is the more he demands change. He has only one language because he has, so to say, only one kind of discomfort. In the imperfect state of his sense organs he does not distinguish their several impressions; all ills produce one feeling of sorrow.

[158:] From these tears that we might think so little worthy of attention, arise man's first relation to all that surrounds him; here is forged the first link in the long chain that forms the social order....

[162:] Children's first tears are prayers; if you are not careful they soon become commands. They begin by asking for help, they end by making themselves served. Thus from his own weakness, the source of his first sentiment of dependence, springs the later idea of empire and domination. But this idea being less aroused by his needs than by our service, we begin to see moral results whose immediate cause is not in nature, and we see how important it is, even at the earliest age, to discern the secret meaning of the gesture or cry.

[163:] When the child tries to seize something without speaking, he thinks he can reach the object, for he does not rightly judge its distance. When he cries and stretches out his hands he no longer misjudges the distance; he bids the object approach, or orders you to bring it to him. In the first case bring it to him slowly; in the second do not even seem to hear his cries. The more he cries the less you should heed him. He must learn in good time not to give commands to men, for he is not their master, nor to things, for they cannot hear him. Thus when the child wants something you mean to give him, it is better to carry him to it rather than to bring the thing to him. From this he will draw a conclusion suited to his age, and there is no other way of suggesting it to him.

[164:] The Abbé de Saint-Pierre calls men big children; one might also call children little men. These statements contain truth as sentences; as principles they require explanation. But when Hobbes calls the wicked man a strong child, he says something absolutely contradictory. All wickedness comes from weakness. The child is only wicked because he is weak; make him strong and he will be good. He who could do everything would never do wrong. Of all the attributes of the allpowerful divinity, goodness is the one without which we could least conceive him. All peoples who have recognized two principles have always regarded the evil as inferior to the good; otherwise their opinion would have been absurd. See below the creed of the Savoyard Vicar.

[165:] Reason alone teaches us to know good and evil. Therefore conscience, which makes us love the one and hate the other, although independent of reason, cannot develop without it. Before the age of reason we do good and bad without knowing it, and there is no morality in our actions, although there sometimes is in the sentiment of others' actions which relate to us. A child wants to overturn everything he sees. He breaks and smashes everything he can reach; he seizes a bird as he seizes a stone, and strangles it without knowing what he is doing....

[167:] At the same time that the the Author of nature has given children this active principle, he takes care that it shall do little harm by giving them small power to use it. But as soon as they can think of people as instruments that depend on them to be set in action, they use them to carry out their wishes and to supplement their own weakness. This is how they become bothersome, tyranical, imperious, evil, and unmanageable -- a development which does not spring from a natural spirit of domination but which is given them. For one does not need much experience to realise how agreeable it is to act with the hands of others and to need only to move one's tongue in order to make the universe move.

[168:] As the child grows it gains strength and becomes less restless and unquiet and turns more towards oneself. Soul and body become better balanced and nature no longer asks for more movement than is required for self-preservation. But the desire to command is not extinguished with the need that aroused it; domination arouses and flatters amour-propre, and habit strengthens it. Thus whim succeeds need; thus prejudice and opinion take their first roots.

[169:] The principle once known we see clearly the point where one leaves the path of nature. Let us see what must be done to stay on it.

[170:] First maxim: Far from having superfluous strength, children do not have enough enough for all that nature demands of them. One must, therefore, let them have the use of all the strength that they are given and which they cannot abuse.

[171:] Second Maxim. One must help them and supplement what is lacking either in intelligence or in strength regarding everything that has to do with physical need.

[172:] Third Maxim. The help that one gives them should be limited to what is real utility, without granting anything to whim or to desire without reason; for whim will not torment them as long as it has not been aroused, since it is no part of nature.

[173:] Fourth Maxim. One must study carefully their language and their signs, so that at an age when they are incapable of deception one may discriminate between those desires which come immediately from nature and those which spring from opinion.

[174:] The spirit of these rules is to give children more real freedom and less imperiousness, to let them do more for themselves and demand less of others. Thus accustoming them from the first to limiting their desires to their stengths, they will scarcely feel the deprivation of whatever is not in their power.

[175:] This is another very important reason for leaving children's limbs and bodies perfectly free, the only precaution being to keep them away from the danger of falls and to keep out of their hands everything that could hurt them.

[176:] Certainly the child whose body and arms are free will cry much less than a child tied up in swaddling clothes. He who knows only bodily needs only cries when in pain; and this is a great advantage, for then we know exactly when he needs help, and if possible we should not delay our help for an instant. But if you cannot relieve his pain, stay where you are and do not flatter him by way of soothing him. Your caresses will not cure his colic, but he will remember what he must do to win them; and if he once finds out how to gain your attention at will, he is your master; everything is lost.

[177:] Less constrained in their movements, children will cry less; less wearied with their tears, people will not take so much trouble to keep them quiet. With fewer threats and promises, children will be less timid and less obstinate, and will remain more nearly in their natural state. It is less in letting them cry than in rushing to appease them that makes them get hernias, and my proof for this is that the most neglected children are less subject to them than others. I am very far from wishing that they should be neglected; on the contrary, it is of the utmost importance that their wants should be anticipated, so that one need not be warned of their needs by their cries. But neither would I have unwise care bestowed on them. Why should they think it wrong to cry when they find that their cries are good for so many things? When they have learned the value of their silence they take good care not to waste it. In the end they will so exaggerate its importance that no one will be able to pay its price; then worn out with crying they become exhausted, and are at length silent.

[178:] Prolonged crying on the part of a child neither swaddled nor out of health, a child who lacks nothing, is merely the result of habit or obstinacy. Such tears are no longer the work of nature, but the work of the child's caretaker, who could not resist its importunity and so has increased it, without considering that while she quiets the child to-day she is teaching him to cry louder to-morrow.

[179:] The only way to cure or prevent this habit is to pay it no attention. No one likes to take useless pains, not even infants. They are obstinate in their attempts; but if you have more constancy than they have hardheadedness, they will give up and not try again. Thus one spares them tears and accustoms them to shed them only when pain forces them to do so.

[180:] Moreover, when whim or obstinacy is the cause of their tears, there is a sure way of stopping them by distracting their attention by some pleasant or conspicuous object which makes them forget that they want to cry. Most nurses excel in this art, and rightly used it is very useful. But it is of the utmost importance that the child should not perceive that you mean to distract his attention, and that he should be amused without suspecting you are thinking about him; now this is what most nurses cannot do.

[181:] Most children are weaned too soon. The time to wean them is when they cut their teeth. This generally causes pain and suffering. At this time the child instinctively carries everything he gets hold of to his mouth to chew it. To help forward this process he is given as a plaything some hard object such as ivory or a wolf's tooth. I think this is a mistake. Hard bodies applied to the gums do not soften them; far from it, they make the process of cutting the teeth more difficult and painful. Let us always take instinct as our guide; we never see puppies practising their budding teeth on pebbles, iron, or bones, but on wood, leather, rags, soft materials which yield to their jaws, and on which the tooth leaves its mark.

[182:] We can do nothing simply, not even for our children. Toys of silver, gold, coral, cut crystal, rattles of every price and kind; what vain and useless appliances! Nothing of all that. No bells, no rattles. A small branch of a tree with its leaves and fruit, a little poppy flower in which one can hear the seeds shake, a stick of liquorice which he may suck and chew, will amuse him as well as all those magnificent knick-knacks, and they will not have the disadvantage of accustoming him to luxury from his birth....

Book Two

[203:] This is the second stage of life and the one in which infancy, strictly speaking, is over....

[204:] When children begin to talk they cry less. This progress is quite natural; one language is substituted for the other. As soon as they can say with words that something hurts, why should they cry, unless the pain is too sharp for words? If they still cry, those about them are to blame. When once Emile has said, "It hurts," it will take a very sharp pain to make him cry....

[206:] If he should fall or bump his head or make his nose bleed or cut his fingers, instead of rushing to him with an with an expression of alarm I will stay calm, at least at first. The harm is done; it is necessary that he endure it. All my fussing could only frighten him more and add to his sensibility. Basically it is not the blow but the fear of it which torments us when we are hurt. I will spare him this anquish at least, for he will certainly judge the injury as he sees me judge it. If he sees me running to him with worry to console him, to pity him, he will think himself dead. If he sees me keeping my cool he will soon recover his own and will think the wound is healed when it ceases to hurt. This is the time for his first lesson in courage, and by bearing slight ills without fear we gradually learn to bear greater ones....

[208:] Our didactic and pedantic mania is always to teach children what they could learn better by themselves and to neglect what we alone can teach them. Can anything be stupider than the trouble taken to teach them to walk, as if any child has been seen who, from the negligence of its caretaker, has not learned how to walk by the time it grew up? Yet how many, on the contrary, we see walking badly all their life because they were ill taught!

[209:] Emile will have no padded bonnets, no go-carts, no leading-strings; or at least as soon as he can put one foot before another he will be supported only along pavements, and those will be crossed very quickly._ Instead of keeping him cooped up in a stuffy room, take him out into a meadow every day. There let him run, let him frisk about. If he falls a hundred times, so much the better. He will learn all the sooner how to pick himself up. The well-being of liberty will make up for many wounds. My pupil will often have bruises; in return he will always be gay. Your pupils may have fewer bruises, but they are always constrained, always enchained, always sad. I doubt whether they are any better off.

[210:] Another progress which makes tears less necessary to children is the development of their strengths. Able to do more for themselves, they need the help of others less frequently. Along with their strength develops the understanding that puts them in a condition to direct it. It is with this second stage that the life of the individual properly begins; it is now that the child becomes conscious of himself. Memory extends the sentiment of identity to every moment of his existence. He becomes truly one and the same person, and consequently already capable of happiness or of misery. It is important therefore to begin to consider him here as a moral being....

[212:] What is to be thought, therefore, of that cruel education which sacrifices the present to an uncertain future, that burdens a child with all sorts of restrictions, and begins by making him miserable in order to prepare him for some far-off happiness he may never enjoy? Even if I considered such an education wise in its aims, how could I view without indignation those poor creatures subjected to an intolerable yoke and condemned like galley-slaves to endless tasks with no certainty of any rewards? The age of gaity is spent in tears, punishments, threats, and slavery. You torment the poor thing for his own good; you fail to see that you are calling Death to snatch him from these gloomy machinations. Who can say how many children fall victims to the excessive wisdom of their fathers or tutors? Lucky to escape from his cruelty, the only advantage they gain from the ills they are made to suffer is to die without regretting a life known only for its torments.

[213:] Men, be humane; that is your first duty. Be humane toward every condition, every age, toward all that is not foreign to humanity. What wisdom is there for you outside of humanity? Love childhood, promote its pleasures, its lovable instincts. Who among you has not sometimes missed that age when laughter was always on our lips, and when the soul was always at peace? Why take away from these innocent little people the joys of a time that will escape them so quickly and gifts that could never cause any harm? Why fill with bitterness the fleeting days of early childhood, days which will no more return for them than for you? Fathers, can you tell the moment when death awaits your children? Do not prepare yourself for regrets by robbing them of the few moments which nature has given them. As soon as they are aware of the pleasure of existence, let them rejoice in it; make it so that whenever God calls them they will not die without having tasted life....

[216:] To avoid pursuing fantasies, let us not forget what suits our condition. Humanity has its place in the order of things; childhood has its place in the order of human life. The man must be treated as a man and the child as a child. Assign each one to his place, and fix him there. Order human passions according to the constitution of man; that is all we can do for his well-being. The rest depends on external causes which are not in our power....

[218:] Every sentiment of pain is inseparable from the desire to get rid of it; every idea of pleasure is inseparable from the desire to enjoy it. All desire implies a deprivation, and all deprivations that one feels are painful. Our unhappiness thus consists in the disproportion between our desires and our faculties. A conscious being whose faculties were equal to his desires would be an absolutely happy being.

[219:] In what, therefore, consists human wisdom and the route to true happiness? It is not exactly in diminishing our desires; for if they were less than our powers, part of our faculties would remain idle, and we should not enjoy the whole of our being. Neither is it in extending our faculties, for if our desires were extended at the same time by a greater extent we would only become more unhappy. Rather, true happiness consists in decreasing the excess of desires over faculties and putting power and will into a perfect equilibrium. With all forces in action it is only then that the soul will nevertheless remain peaceful and that man will find himself well ordered.

[220:] It is thus that nature, which does everything for the best, originally constituted man. Nature first gave him only such desires that are necessary for self-preservation and such faculties as are sufficient for their satisfaction. All the others were put in reserve at the bottom of his soul for him to develop when needed. It is only in this primitive condition that we encounter the equilibrium between desire and power and where man is not unhappy. As soon as his potential faculties are put into action, imagination, the most active of all, awakes and precedes all the rest. It is imagination which extends for us the measure of what is possible either for good or for evil, and consequently which excites and nourishes our desires with the hope of satisfying them. But the object which seems at first within our grasp flies away quicker than we can follow; when we think we have grasped it, it transforms itself and is again far ahead of us. No longer perceiving the terrain we have already traversed, we count it as nothing; that which lies before us becomes vaster and stretches still before us. Thus we exhaust our strength without reaching our goal, and the closer we get to pleasure the further we are from happiness.

[221:] In contrast, the closer man stays to his natural condition, the smaller is the difference between his faculties and desires and the less far he consequently is from being happy. He is never less miserable than when he seems to be deprived of everything; for unhappiness consists not in the privation of things but in the need which is felt for them.

[222:] The real world has its limits, the imaginary world is infinite. Being unable to enlarge the one let us diminish the other, for it is from their difference alone that arise all the pains that make us truly unhappy. Except for health, strength, and self-estime, all the goods of this life are a matter of opinion; except for bodily suffering and remorse of conscience, all our ills are imaginary. You will tell me this is common knowledge. I admit it, but its practical application is not common knowledge, and it is with practice only that we are concerned here.

[223:] When we say that man is weak, what do we mean? This word weak implies a relation, a relation of the being to which it is applied. The one whose strength surpasses his needs, be it an insect or a worm, is a strong being. The one whose needs surpass its strength, be it an elephant, a lion, a conqueror, a hero, a God, is a weak being. The rebellious angel who fought against his own nature was weaker than the happy mortal who is living at peace according to nature. Man is very strong when he is content to be what he is; he is very weak when he wants to elevate himself above humanity. Do not imagine, therefore, that you can increase your strength by increasing your faculties. On the contrary, you diminish your strength if your pride increases even more. Let us measure the radius of our sphere and remain in its center, like the insect in the middle of its web. We will be sufficient to ourselves and will have no reason to complain of our weakness, for we will never feel it.

[224:] All animals possess exactly the faculties necessary for self-preservation. Man alone has superfluous ones. Is it not very strange that this superfluity should be the instrument of his unhappiness? In every land a man's labour yields more than his subsistence. If he were wise enough to disregard this surplus he would always have enough, for he would never have too much. "Great needs," said Favorinus, "spring from great wealth; and often the best way of getting what we want is to get rid of what we have." By striving to increase our happiness we change it into unhappiness. Every man who only wished to live would live happily; consequently he would be good, for what would be the advantage for him to be bad?...

[231:] Oh, man! Confine your existence inside of yourself and you will no longer be unhappy. Stay in the place that nature has assigned you in the chain of being; nothing should be able to make you leave it. Do not kick against the stern law of necessity, nor waste in vain resistance the strength that heaven gave you not to prolong or extend your existence but to preserve it so far and so long as heaven pleases. Your freedom and your power extend as far and no further than your natural strength; anything more is only slavery, illusion, reputation. Domination itself is servile when it depends upon opinion; for you are dependent on the prejudices of others when you rule them by means of those prejudices. To lead them as you please you must conduct yourself as they please. They have only to change their way of thinking and you are forced to change your course of action. Those who approach you need only contrive to sway the opinions of those you rule, or of the favourite by whom you are ruled, or those of your own family or theirs. Even if you had the genius of Themistocles,_ all these viziers, courtiers, priests, soldiers, servants, babblers, the very children themselves, would lead you like a child in the midst of your legions. Whatever you do, your actual authority can never extend beyond your own faculties. As soon as you are obliged to see with others' eyes, their wills must be your own. You may say with pride, "My people are my subjects." Granted, but what are you? The subject of your ministers. And your ministers, what are they? The subjects of their clerks, their mistresses, the servants of their servants. Grasp all, usurp all, and then pour out your silver with both hands; lay out your plans for war, raise the gallows and the wheel; make laws, issue proclamations, multiply your spies, your soldiers, your hangmen, your prisons, and your chains. Poor little men, what good does all of this do you? You will be no better served, you will not be less robbed or deceived, nor more absolute in your power. You will say continually, "We want," and you will continually do what others want.

[232:] The only man who follows his own will is he who has no need to put another man's arms at the end of his own. From this it follows that the the greatest good is not authority but freedom. The truly free man wants only what he can do and does what he pleases. This is my fundamental maxim. Apply it to childhood, and all the rules of education spring from it.

[233:] Society has weakened man not only by depriving him of the right to his own strength, but above all by making his strength insufficient for his needs. This is why his desires are multiplied with his weakness; and this is why the child is weaker than the man. If a man is strong and a child is weak it is not because the strength of the one is absolutely greater than the strength of the other, but because the one can naturally provide for himself and the other cannot. Thus the man will have more wishes and the child more whims, a word which I take to mean desires which are not true needs, desires which can only be satisfied with the help of others.

[234:] I have already given the reason for this state of weakness. Parental affection is nature's provision against it; but parental affection may have its excesses, its failings, its abuses. Parents who live in the civil state bring their child into it before the right age. By giving him more needs than he naturally has they do not relieve his weakness; they increase it. They further increase it by demanding of him what nature does not demand, by subjecting to their wills what little strength he has to serve his own, by making slaves of themselves or of him instead of recognising the mutual dependence which should result from his weakness and their affection.

[235:] The wise man knows how to stay in his place, but the child who does not know what his place is unable to keep it. There are a thousand ways out of it. It is the business of those who have charge of the child to keep him in his place, and this is no easy task. He should be neither beast nor man, but child. He must feel his weakness but not suffer from it. He must be dependent but he must not obey. He must ask, not command. He is only subject to others because of his needs and because they see better than he what is useful to him, what may help or hinder his existence. No one, not even his father, has the right to command the child do what is of no use to him.

[236:] Before our prejudices and human institutions have altered our natural inclinations, the happiness of children as well as of men consists in the use of their freedom. But children's freedom is limited by their weakness. He who does as he likes is happy provided he is self-sufficient; it is so with the man living in a state of nature. He who does what he likes is not happy if his desires exceed his strength; it is so with a child in similar conditions. Even in a state of nature children only enjoy an imperfect freedom, like that enjoyed by men in social life. Each of us, unable to dispense with the help of others, becomes in this way weak and unhappy. We were made to be men; laws and society plunge us back into infancy. The rich and great, even kings, are children who, when they see us hurry to sooth their miseries, draw from that a childish vanity and are full of pride for the attentions that they would never have gotten if they were grown men.

[237:] These considerations are important and serve to resolve all the contradictions of the social system. There are two kinds of dependence: dependence on things, which is from nature; and dependence on men, which is from society. Dependence on things, since it has no morality, does no harm to freedom and engenders no vices. Dependence on men, being without order,_ engenders all the vices, and through this master and slave become mutually corrupted. If there is any means of remedying this evil in society it is by substituting law for man, and by arming the general wills with a real force that is superior to the action of every individual will. If the laws of nations could have the inflexibility of the laws of nature that no human force could overcome, then the dependence of men would become once again a dependence on things. Thus one would reunite in the republic all the advantages of the natural state with those of the civil state; one could bring together the freedom that keeps man exempt from vice with the morality that raises him to virtue.

[238:] Keep the child dependent only on things. You will have followed the order of nature in the progress of his education. Never offer to his indiscrete will anything but physical obstacles or punishments that arise from the actions themselves and which he will recall at the proper occasion. Without forbidding him from doing wrong it suffices to prevent him from doing it. Experience or lack of strength alone ought take the place of law for him. Grant nothing to his desires because he demands it but only because he needs it. Let him not know what obedience is when he acts nor what domination is when someone acts for him. Let him feel his freedom equally in his actions and in yours. Supply the strength he lacks as precisely as he needs it in order to be free but not imperious; so that while receiving your services with a sort of humiliation he may look forward to the time when he will do without them and have the honor of serving himself.

[239:] To strengthen the body and make it grow, nature has means that should never be opposed. One must not force a child to stay when he wants to go, nor to go when he wants to stay. When we have not spoiled the wills of children by our own fault they want nothing arbitrarily. They must jump, run, shout when they wish. All their movements are from the needs of their constitution which seeks to strengthen itself. But one should be mistrustful of their wanting to do things that they cannot do themselves and that others are obliged to do for them. Then one must distinguish carefully between the true need, the natural need, and the needs of budding whim or those which come only from the overflowing life just described....

[245:] Do you know the surest way to make your child miserable? Let him have everything he wants; for as his wants increase in proportion to the ease with which they are satisfied, you will be compelled, sooner or later, to refuse his demands, and this unlooked-for refusal will hurt him more than the lack of what he wants. First he'll want the cane that you are holding, soon he'll want your watch, then the bird that flies, or the star that shines above him. He will want everything that he sees. Unless you were God himself, how could you satisfy him?...

[247:] How could I conceive that a child thus dominated by anger and devoured by the fiercest passions could ever be happy? Him happy? He is a despot, at once the vilest of slaves and the most miserable of creatures. I have known children raised in this way who expected you to knock the house down, to give them the weather-vane on the steeple, to stop a regiment on the march so that they might listen to the band, and who, without listening to anyone, would pierce the air with their cries as soon as they were not obeyed. Everyone strove vainly to please them. Since their desires were stimulated by the ease with which they got their own way, they set their hearts on impossibilities, and found themselves face to face with opposition and difficulty, pain and grief. Always whining, always rebellious, always in a rage, they spent their days crying and complaining. Were these beings so fortunate? Weakness combined with domination produces nothing but folly and misery. One spoiled child beats the table; another whips the sea. They may beat and whip in vain before they find contentment.

[248:] If these ideas of empire and tyranny make them miserable during childhood, what about when they grow up, when their relations with their fellow-men begin to expand and multiply? They are used to finding everything give way to them; what a painful surprise to enter society and meet with opposition on every side, to be crushed beneath the weight of a universe which they expected to move at will.

[249:] Their insolent manners, their childish vanity, only draw down upon them mortification, scorn, and mockery; they swallow insults like water. Sharp experience soon teaches them that they have realised neither their position nor their strength. Being unable to do everything, they think they can do nothing. They are daunted by unexpected obstacles, degraded by the scorn of men. They become base, cowardly, and deceitful, and fall as far below their true level as they formerly soared above it....

[252:] On the other hand, is it not clear that the weakness of the first age enchains children in so many ways that it is barbarous to add our own whims to this subjection by depriving them of the limited freedom that they do have -- a freedom which they can scarcely abuse and the loss of which will do so little good to them or us? If there is nothing more ridiculous than a haughty child, there is nothing that claims our pity like a timid child. Since civil servitude begins with the age of reason, then why anticipate this by private servitude? Allow one moment of life to be free from this yoke that nature has not imposed upon it. Leave to the child the exercise of his natural freedom, which, for a time at least, keeps him away from the vices contracted in slavery. Let harsh masters and those fathers who are the slaves of their children both come forward with their petty objections; and before they boast of their own methods, let them for once learn the method of nature....

[254:] To reason with children was Locke's chief maxim. It is even more in vogue today. Its success however does not seem to me strong enough to give it credit; for me I see nothing more stupid that these children with whom people reasoned so much. Of all man's faculties, reason, which is, so to speak, the one composed of all the others, is the one that develops with the most difficulty and the latest, and yet you want to use it to develop the earlier ones! The culmination of a good education is to make a man reasonable, and you claim to raise a child with reason! You begin at the wrong end; you make the end the means. If children understood reason they would not need education. But by talking to them from their earliest age in a language they do not understand you accustom them to manipulate with words, to control all that is said to them, to think themselves as wise as their teachers, to become argumentative and rebellious. And whatever you think you gain from motives of reason you really gain from the greediness, or fear, or vanity, which you are always forced to add to your reasoning.

[255:] Most of the moral lessons which are and can be given to children may be reduced to this formula:

[256:]

You must not do that.

Child.

Why not?

Master.

Because it is wrong.

Child.

Wrong ! What is wrong?

Master.

What is forbidden you.

Child.

Why is it wrong to do what is forbidden?

Master.

You will be punished for disobeying.

Child.

I will do it when no one is looking.

Master.

We will keep an eye on you.

Child.

I will hide.

Master.

We will ask you what you were doing.

Child.

I will tell a lie.

Master.

You must not tell lies.

Child.

Why must not I tell lies?

Master.

Because it is wrong, etc.

[257:] That is the inevitable circle. Go beyond it, and the child will not understand you. What sort of use is there in such teaching? I should greatly like to know what you would substitute for this dialogue. It would have puzzled Locke himself. It is no part of a child's business to know right and wrong, to perceive the reason for a man's duties.

[258:] Nature wants children to be children before they are men. If we try to pervert this order we shall produce a forced fruit that will have neither ripeness nor flavor and that will soon spoil. We will have young doctors and old children. Childhood has its ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling that are proper to it. Nothing is less sensible than to try and substitute our ways. I would like no more to require a young child be five feet tall than that he have judgement at the age of ten. Indeed, what use would reason be to him at that age? It is the curb of strength, and the child does not need this curb.

[259:] In trying to persuade your pupils of the duty of obedience you add to this so-called persuasion force and threats, or still worse, flattery and bribes. Thus attracted by self-interest or constrained by force, they pretend to be convinced by reason. They see very well that obedience is to their advantage and disobedience to their disadvantage as soon as you perceive one or the other. But since you only demand disagreeable things of them, and since it is always painful to do another's will, they hide themselves so that they may do as they please, persuaded that they are doing well if no one knows of their disobedience, but ready, if found out, to admit they are in the wrong for fear of worse evils. Since the rationale for duty is beyond their age, there is not a man in the world who could make them really aware of it. But the fear of punishment, the hope of forgiveness, importunity, the difficulty of answering, wrings from them as many confessions as you want; and you think you have convinced them when you have only wearied or frightened them....

[261:] Treat your pupil according to his age. Put him in his place from the first, and keep him there so well that he does not try to leave it. Then before he knows what wisdom is, he will be practising its most important lesson. Never command him to do anything, whatever in the world it may be. Do not let him even imagine that you claim to have any authority over him. He must know only that he is weak and you are strong, that his condition and yours put him at your mercy. Let him know this, let him learn it, let him feel it. At an early age let his haughty head feel the heavy yoke which nature imposes upon man, the heavy yoke of necessity under which every finite being must bow. Let him see this necessity in things, not in the whims_ of man. Let the curb that restrains him be force, not authority. If there is something he should not do, do not forbid him, but prevent him without explanation or reasoning. What you grant him, grant it at his first word without sollicitations or pleading, above all without conditions. Grant with pleasure, refuse only with repugnance; but let your refusal be irrevocable so that no entreaties move you. Let your "No," once uttered, be a wall of bronze against which the child may have to exhaust his strength five or six times in order not to be tempted again to overthrow it.

[262:] It is thus that you will make him patient, equable, resigned, peaceful, even when he does not get all he wants. For it is in man's nature to bear patiently with the necessity of things but not with the ill-will of others. A child never rebels against "There is none left," unless he thinks the reply is false. Moreover, there is no middle course; you must either make no demands on him at all, or else you must fashion him to perfect obedience. The worst education of all is to leave him hesitating between his own will and yours, constantly disputing whether you or he is master. I would rather a hundred times that he were master.

[263:] It is very strange that ever since people began to think about raising children they should have imagined no other way of guiding them other than emulation, jealousy, envy, vanity, greediness, cowardice -- all the most dangerous passions, the quickest to ferment, and the most likely to corrupt the soul even before the body is formed. With each precocious instruction which you try to force into children's minds you plant a vice in the depths of their hearts. Senseless teachers think they are doing wonders when they are making their pupils evil in order to teach them what goodness is. And then they tell us gravely, "Such is man." Yes, such is the man that you have made.

[264:] Every means has been tried except one. the one precisely that could succeed -- well-regulated freedom. One should not undertake to raise a child unless one knows how to guide him where one wants by the laws of the possible and the impossible alone. The limits of both being equally inknown, they can be extended or contracted around him at will. Without a murmur the child is restrained, urged on, held back, only by the bands of necessity. One can make him supple and docile solely by the force of things, without any chance for vice to spring up in him. For passions never become aroused so long as they have no effect.

[265:] Do not give your pupil any kind of verbal lessons; he should receive them only through experience. Do not inflict on him any kind of punishment, for he does not know what it is to do wrong. Never make him beg your pardon, for he does not know how to offend you. Deprived of all morality in his actions, he can do nothing that is morally wrong, and he deserves neither punishment nor reprimand....

[267:] Let us lay it down as an incontestible maxim that the first movements of nature are always right. There is no original perversity in the human heart. There is not a single vice about which one cannot say how and whence it came. The only passion natural to man is amour de soi or amour-propre taken in an extended sense. This amour-propre in itself or relative to ourselves is good and useful, and since it has no necessary rapport to others it is in this regard naturally indifferent: it only becomes good or evil by what it is applied to and by the relations it is given. Until the appearance of reason, which is the guide of amour-propre, the main thing is that the child should do nothing because you are watching him or listening to him; in a word, nothing because of other people, but only what nature asks of him. Then he will only do good.

[268:] I do not mean to say that he will never do any mischief, never hurt himself, never break an expensive item if you leave it within his reach. He might do much damage without doing wrong, since wrong-doing depends on the harmful intention which will never be his. If once he meant to do harm, his whole education would already be lost; he would be almost hopelessly bad.

[269:] Greed considers some things wrong which are not wrong in the eyes of reason. By leaving children in full liberty to exercise their playfulness , you must put anything that it could ruin out of their way, and leave nothing fragile or costly within their reach. Let the room be furnished with plain and solid furniture: no mirrors, china, or objects of luxury. As for Emile, who I will raise in the country, he will have a room just like a peasant's. What good is it to decorate it with so much care when he will spend so little time in it? But I am mistaken; he will decorate it himself, and we shall soon see how.

[270:] If, in spite of your precautions, the child happens to do some damage, if he breaks some useful article, do not punish him for your carelessness. Do not even scold him. Let him hear no word of reproach, do not even let him see that he has annoyed you. Behave just as if the thing had broken by itself. You may consider you have done great things if you have managed to say nothing.

[271:] Dare I express here the greatest, the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to gain time but to lose it. Common readers, excuse my paradoxes. Paradoxes are necessary when one reflects, and whatever you may say I would rather be a man of paradox than a man of prejudice. The most dangerous period in human life lies between birth and the age of twelve. It is the time when errors and vices spring up, without one yet having any instrument for destroying them; and when the instrument comes, the roots have gone too deep to be pulled up. If children sprang at one bound from their mother's breast to the age of reason, the present type of education would suit them. But natural growth calls for a completely different education. One must do nothing with their soul until it has all its faculties. For while it is blind it cannot see the torch you offer it, nor can it follow through the vast expanse of ideas a path so faintly traced by reason that the best eyes can scarcely follow it.

[272:] The first education ought thus to be purely negative. It consists not at all in teaching virtue or truth, but in preserving the heart from vice and the mind from error. If you could do nothing and let nothing be done, if you could bring your pupil healthy and robust to the age of twelve without knowing how to distinguish his right hand from his left, the eyes of his understanding would be open to reason as soon as you began to teach him. Without prejudice and without habits, there would be nothing in him to counteract the effects of your labours. In your hands he would soon become the wisest of men; by doing nothing to begin with, you would end with a prodigy of education.

[273:] Go in a different direction from the usual one and you will almost always do right. Since they want their child to be a doctor instead of a child, fathers and teachers think it never too soon to scold, correct, reprimand, flatter, threaten, promise, instruct, and reason. Do better than they; be reasonable and do not reason with your pupil. More especially do not try to make him approve of what he dislikes; for if reason is always connected with disagreeable matters, you make it distasteful to him, you discredit it at an early age in a mind not yet ready to understand it. Exercise his body, his limbs, his senses, his strength, but keep his mind idle as long as you can. Distrust all opinions which appear before the judgment to discriminate between them. Restrain and ward off strange impressions; and to prevent the birth of evil do not hasten to do good, for goodness is only possible when enlightened by reason. Regard all delays as so much time gained; it is to gain much to approach one's goal without a loss. Let childhood to ripen in children. Has some lesson finally become necesary? Beware of giving it to them today if it can be put off without danger until tomorrow.

[274:] Another consideration confirms the utility of this method. One must be familiar with the particular genius of the child in order to know what moral regime is best for him. Every mind has its own form in accordance with which it must be governed; and the success of the pains taken depends largely on the fact that he is controlled in this way and no other. Wise man, take time to observe nature. Watch your pupil well before you say a word to him; first leave the germ of his character free to show itself. Do not constrain him in anything, the better to see him as he really is. Do you think this time of liberty is wasted for him? On the contrary, your pupil will be the better employed, for this is the way you yourself will learn not to lose a single moment when time is of more value. If, however, you begin to act before you know what to do, you act randomly. You may make mistakes, and must retrace your steps; you will be further from your goal than if you had been less pressed to reach it. Do not be like the miser who loses much out of fear of losing a little. Sacrifice the time in early childhood that you regain with interest at a more advanced age. The wise physician does not hastily give prescriptions at first sight but studies the temperament of the sick man before he prescribes anything. The treatment is begun later, but the patient is cured, whereas the hasty doctor kills him.

[275:] But where will we find a place for our child so as to bring him up as a senseless being, an automaton? Will we keep him on the moon, or on a desert island? Will we remove him from all humans? In society will he not always be faced with the spectacle and the example of the passions of other people? Will he never see children of his own age? Will he not see his parents, his neighbours, his nurse, his governess, his lackey, his tutor himself, who after all will not be an angel?

[276:] This objection is solid and real. But did I tell you that an education according to nature would be an easy task? Oh, men ! Is it my fault that you have made difficult everything that is good? I sense these difficulties, I accept them; perhaps they are insurmountable. But it is always certain that by trying to avoid them one does avoid them up to a certain point. I show the end that must be proposed. I do not say we can attain it, but I do say that whoever comes nearest to it will have succeeded the best....

[314:] Examine your rules of education; you will find them all misconceived, especially in all that concerns virtue and morals. The only moral lesson which is suited to childhood and the most important at any age is never to harm anyone. The very rule of doing good, if not subordinated to this rule, is dangerous, false and contradictory. Who is there who does no good? Everyone does some good, the wicked as well as the righteous; he makes one happy at the cost of the misery of a hundred, and hence spring all our misfortunes. The most sublime virtues are negative. They are also the most difficult, for they are without ostentation and even beyond that pleasure so dear to the heart of man, the thought that some one is pleased with us. If there be a man who does no harm to his neighbours, what good must he have accomplished! What a bold heart, what a strong character he needs! It is not in talking about this maxim, but in trying to practise it, that we discover both its greatness and its difficulty....

[372:] People make a great fuss about discovering the best way to teach children to read. They invent "bureaux"_ and cards, they turn the nursery into a printer's shop. Locke would have them taught to read by means of dice. Is not that a well-found invention. What a pity! A means more sure than all of those and which one will never forget is simply the desire to learn. Give the child this desire, and you can forget your "bureaux" and your dice -- any method will will be good for him.

[373:] Present interest, that is the great motive, the only one that leads us safely and far. Sometimes Emile receives notes of invitation from his father or mother, his relations or friends; he is invited to a dinner, a walk, a boating expedition, to see some public festival. These notes are short, clear, plain, and well written. Some one must read them to him, and he cannot always find someone when he wants; no more consideration is shown to him than he himself showed to you yesterday. Time passes, the chance is lost. The note is read to him at last, but it is too late. Oh! if only he had known how to read! He receives other notes; they are so short! The subject is so interesting! He would like to try to read them. Sometimes he gets help, sometimes none. He does his best, and at last he makes out half the note; it is something about going tomorrow to have some cream. He doesn't know where or with whom . . . what efforts he makes to read the rest! I do not think Emile will need a "bureau." Shall I proceed to the teaching of writing? No, I am ashamed to toy with these trifles in a treatise on education.

[374:] I will just add a few words which contain a principle of great importance. It is this--What we are in no hurry to get is usually obtained with speed and certainty. I am almost certain Emile will learn to read and write before he is ten, just because I care very little whether he can do so before he is fifteen. But I would rather he never learnt to read at all than that this science should be acquired at the price of all that makes reading useful. What is the use of reading to him if he always hates it?...

[375:] The more I urge my method of letting well alone, the more objections I perceive against it. If your pupil learns nothing from you, he will learn from others. If you do not prevent error with truth he will learn lies; the prejudices you fear to teach him he will acquire from those about him, they will find their way through every one of his senses; they will either corrupt his reason before it is fully formed or his mind will become torpid through inaction and will become engrossed in material things. If we do not form the habit of thinking as children we shall lose the power of thinking for the rest of our life.

[376:] It seems to me that I could easily answer to all of that; but why should I answer every objection? If my method itself answers your objections, it is good; if not, it is worth nothing. I continue.

[377:] If, in accordance with the plan I have sketched, you follow rules which are just the opposite of the established ones; if instead of taking the spirit of your pupil far away; if, instead of wandering with him in other places, in other climates, in other centuries, to the ends of the earth and to the very heavens themselves, you try to keep him always in himself and attentive to what touches him immediately; then you will find him capable of perception, of memory, and even of reasoning. That is the order of nature. As the sentient being becomes active he acquires a discernment proportional to his strength. It is only when his strength exceeds that which he has need of for his own preservation that he will develop the speculative faculty that enables him to use this superfluous strength for other purposes. If you want to cultivate your pupil's intelligence, cultivate the strength it is meant to control. Give his body constant exercise, make it strong and healthy, in order to make him wise and reasonable; let him work, let him do things, let him run and shout, let him be always on the go; make a man of him in strength, and he will soon be a man in reason....

Book Three

[550:] Although the whole course of man's life up to adolescence is a time of weakness, there comes a point during this first age when his strength progresses faster than his needs, and the growing creature who is still weak in an absolute sense becomes relatively strong. Since his needs are not fully developed his present strength is more than enough for them. As a man he would be very weak, but as a child he is very strong.

[551:] Where does the weakness of man come from? From the inequality between his strength and his desires. It is our passions that make us weak, for to satisfy them requires more strength than nature gives us. Diminish desires, therefore, and it is as if you had increased strength. He who can do more than he desires has strength left over. He is certainly a very strong being. Here we are in the third stage of childhood, the one that I will be speaking of now. I continue to call it childhood for lack of the proper term with which to describe it, for this age approaches adolescence without being yet the age of puberty.

[552:] At about twelve or thirteen the child's strength develops far more rapidly than his needs. The strongest and fiercest of the passions is still unknown. Its very organ remains in a state of imperfection and in order to emerge from that state seems to be waiting for the force of the child's will. Largely insensitive to the assaults of air and the seasons, the child's growing warmth takes the place of a coat; his appetite substitutes for seasoning. Everything that can nourish is good at this age. If he is sleepy he stretches himself on the ground and goes to sleep. He sees himself surrounded by everything that is necessary to him. No imaginary need torments him; public opinion means nothing to him; his desires extend no further than his arms. Not only can he be sufficient to himself, but he has strength beyond what is necessary to him. This is the only time in his life that this will be the case....

[555:] What will he thus do with this surplus of faculties and strengths that he has too much of at present and that will be lacking to him at another age? He will try to use it in tasks which will profit him when needed. He will project, so to speak, the surplus of his present being into the future. The robust child will make provision for the feeble man. But he will store his goods neither in banks that can be robbed nor in barns that are unfamiliar to him. To truly appropriate his acquisitions it will be in his arms, in his head, in himself that he will store them. Now is the time for work, instruction, and study. And note that it is not I who makes this choice arbitrarily; it is nature itself that has pointed the way.

[556:] Human intelligence has its limits, and not only can a man not know everything, but he cannot even know in its entirety the little that other men know. Since the contrary of every false proposition is a truth, the number of truths is as unfathomable as the number of errors. We must, therefore, choose what to teach as well as when to teach it. Of the knowledge within our reach some is false, some is useless, some merely serves to feed the pride of him who has it. Only the small amount of knowledge which really contributes to our well-being merits the research of a wise man and therefore of a child whom one would like to make wise. It is not a question of knowing what is, but only of what is useful....

[564:] Make your child attentive to the phenomena of nature; soon you will make him curious. But to nurture his curiosity, never hasten to satisfy it. Put questions within his reach and let him solve them himself. Let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself. Let him not be taught science, let him invent it. If ever you substitute in his mind authority for reason, he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other people's opinion....

[582:] Time was long during early childhood; we only tried to pass our time for fear of using it badly. Now it is the other way; we do not have time enough for everything that would be useful. The passions, remember, are drawing near, and when they knock at the door your pupil will be attentive only to them. The peaceful age of intelligence is so short, it passes so rapidly, there are so many necessary uses for it, that it is insane to want to limit it to making the child into a scholar. It is not a question of teaching him the sciences, but to give him a taste for loving them and methods of learning them when this taste is more mature. That is very certainly a fundamental principle of all good education.

[583:] This is also the time to accustom him little by little to giving his sustained attention to a single object. But it should never be by constraint; rather, it should be pleasure or desire which produces this attention. One must take care not to overwhelm him or push him to boredom. Keep a careful eye on him therefore, and whatever happens, stop before he gets bored. For it is never as important that he learn than that he do nothing against his will....

[606:] I have said already that purely theoretical knowledge is hardly suitable for children, even for those approaching adolescence. But without going far into theoretical physics, be sure that all their experiments are connected together by some sort of deduction, so that with the help of this chain of reasoning they can put them in order in their mind and recall them when needed. For it is very difficult for isolated facts and even isolated reasons to stay long in the memory when one lacks a handle for retrieving them.

[607:] In your inquiry into the laws of nature, always begin with the commonest and most conspicuous phenomena and train your scholar not to accept these phenomena as reasons but as facts. I take a stone; I pretend to place it in the air; I open my hand; the stone falls. I see Emile attentive to what I am doing and I say to him: "Why did this stone fall?"

[608:] What child will hesitate over this question? None, not even Emile, unless I have taken great pains to teach him not to answer. All of them will say that the stone falls because it is heavy. And what is heavy? That which falls. So the stone falls because it falls? Here my little philosopher is stopped short. This is his first lesson in systematic physics, and whether he takes advantage of it or not in this way, it is a good lesson in common-sense.

[609:] As the child develops in intelligence, other important considerations require us to be still more careful in our choice of his occupations. As soon as he has sufficient self-knowledge to understand what constitutes his well-being, as soon as he can grasp such far-reaching relations as to judge what is good for him and what is not, from then on he is able to discern the difference between work and play and to consider the latter merely as a relaxation from the former. Then the objects of real usefulness may enter into his studies and compel him to give them a more constant application than he gave to his simple games. The ever-recurring law of necessity soon teaches a man to do what he does not like in order to prevent an evil which he would dislike still more. Such is the use of foresight, and from this foresight, well or ill used, arises all of human wisdom or misery.

[610:] Every man wants to be happy, but in order to become happy he must begin by knowing what happiness is. The happiness of natural man is as simple as his life: it consists in the absence of pain. Health, freedom, the necessaries of life are its elements. The happiness of moral man is something else, but that is not the question here. I cannot repeat too often that it is only physical objects that can interest children, especially children whose vanity has not been aroused and whose minds have not been corrupted beforehand by the poison of public opinion.

[611:] As soon as they foresee their needs before they feel them, their intelligence has made a great step forward; they are beginning to know the value of time. It is important therefore to accustom them to direct its use towards useful objects, but this usefulness should be easily perceptible and within the reach of their enlightenment. All that concerns the moral order and the customs of society should not yet be presented to them them, for they are not in a condition to understand it. It is wrongheaded to expect them to apply themselves to things vaguely described as good for them when they do not know what this good is. They are assured these things will be to their advantage when they are grown up, but they can take no interest in a so-called advantage that they cannot understand.

[612:] Let the child do nothing on anyone's word. Nothing is good for him but what he recognises as good. By always pushing him beyond his present enlightenment, you believe you are exercising a foresight which you really lack. To arm him with a few vain tools which he may never use, you deprive him of man's most universal tool -- common-sense. You accustom him to being always led, of never being anything but a machine in the hands of others. You wish him to be docile when he is little; that is to wish that he will be will be gullible and easily duped when he grows up. You ceaselessly tell him, "What I ask is for your good, though you cannot understand it. What does it matter to me whether you do what I'm asking or not? It is for you alone that I am making this effort." With all these fine speeches you give him now to make him wise, you are paving the way for a fortune-teller, pied-piper, quack, imposter, or some kind of crazy person to catch him in his snare or draw him into his folly....

[617:] Here is perhaps the most difficult trap for a tutor to avoid. If with a child's question you you merely try to get yourself out of a pinch, and if you give him a single reason he is not able to understand, seeing that you reason according to your own ideas and not his, he will think that what you tell him is good for your age but not for his own. He will no longer have confidence in you and everything will be lost. But what master will stop short and confess his faults to his pupil? All of them make it a rule never to admit to the faults they really have. I would make it a rule to admit even to faults I do not have whenever I am unable make my reasons clear to him. Thus my conduct, always clear in his mind, will never be suspicious to him and I will save more credit by assuming some faults than those do who only hide theirs.

[618:] In the first place you must realize that it is rarely up to you to propose what he ought to learn. It is for him to desire it, to seek it, and to find it -- to you to put it within reach, to skillfully give birth to this desire, and to furnish him with the means of satisfying it. From this it follows that your questions should be infrequent but well-chosen. Since he will always have more questions to put to you than you to him, you will always be less exposed and more often able to ask him, "Why is it useful to know that which you are asking me?"

[619:] Moreover, since it matters little whether he learns this or that provided he knows it well and understands the use of what he learns, as soon as you cannot give him a explanation that is good for him, give him none at all. Do not hesitate to say, "I have no good answer to give you; I was wrong, let us drop the subject." If your teaching was really ill-chosen there is no harm in dropping it altogether; if it was not, with a little care you will soon find an opportunity of making its use apparent to him.

[620:] I do not like verbal explanations. Young people pay little attention to them and hardly retain them. Things! Things! I cannot repeat it enough that we give too much power to words. With our babbling educaton we only create babblers.

[621:] Suppose that while I am studying with my pupil the course of the sun and the way to find our bearings, all of a sudden he interrupts me to ask what the use of all of this is. What a fine speech I might give him! How many things I might take the opportunity to teach him in reply to his question, especially if there are any witnesses to our conversation. I might speak of the utility of travel, the advantages of commerce, the particular products of each climate, the customs of different peoples, the use of the calendar, the calculation of seasonal cycles for agriculture, the art of navigation, how to steer on the sea and to follow a course exactly without knowing where one is. Politics, natural history, astronomy, even morals and international law would enter into my explanation in such a way as to give my pupil a grand idea of all these sciences and a great desire to learn them. When I had finished I would have made a great display of my pedantry, but he would have not have understood a single idea. He would long to ask me as before, "What is the use of taking one's bearings?" but he would not dare for fear of making me angry. He finds it pays best to pretend to listen to what he is forced to hear. This is the way our fine education is practiced.

[622:] But Emile, who has been more simply raised and to whom we have taken pains to give a solid understanding, will hear nothing of all this. At the first word he does not understand he will run away; he will prance about the room and leave me to speechify by myself. Let us seek a more commonplace explanation; my scientific baggage is of no use to him.

[623:] We were observing the position of the forest to the north of Montmorency when he interrupted me with the usual question, "What is the use of that?" "You are right," I said. "Let us take time to think it over, and if we find that this work is not good for anything we will not take it up again, for we have plenty of useful games." We find something else to do and geography is put aside for the day.

[624:] The next morning I suggest a walk before lunch. There is nothing he would like better. Children are always ready to run, and this one has good legs. We climb up to the forest, we wander through its clearings, we get lost. We have no idea where we are, and when we want to retrace our steps we cannot find our path. Time passes. It gets hot; we get hungry and go faster; we wander vainly this way and that; we find nothing but woods, quarries, plains, with not a landmark to guide us. Very hot, very tired, very hungry, we only go further astray. We finally sit down to rest in order to deliberate. Emile, whom I assume has been raised like other children, does not deliberate, he cries. He does not know that we are at the gate of Montmorency and that a small thicket hides it from us. But a thicket is a forest to him; a man of his size is buried among bushes.

[625:] After a few moments of silence I say to him with a worried tone: my dear Emile, how are we going to get out of here?

[626:]

ÉMILE, clapping his hands and letting out a cry of joy:

[627:] Be sure that if he does not say this last phrase, he will think it -- it does not matter which so long as I do not say it myself. He will certainly never forget this day's lesson as long as he lives, whereas if I had made him imagine all this in his room, my speech would have been forgotten the next day. One must speak as much as one can by actions and say only those things that one cannot do.

[628:] The reader will not expect me to have such a poor opinion of him or her as to supply an example of every kind of study; but, whatever is taught, I cannot too strongly urge the tutor to adapt his practices to the capacity of his scholar. For once more I repeat the risk is not in what he does not know, but in what he thinks he knows....

[650:] The practice of the natural arts which can suffice a man alone leads to research in the industrial arts which call for the cooperation of many hands. The former may be carried on by solitary people, by savages; but the latter can only arise in society and make it necessary. As long as only physical needs are recognised, each man is sufficient to himself; the introduction of superfluity makes indispensible the division and distribution of labor. For even though one man working alone only earns the subsistence of one man, a hundred men working together can earn enough subsistence for two hundred. As soon therefore as some men are idle, it is necessary that the coordination of those who do work supply the work of those who do nothing.

[651:] Your greatest care should be to keep out of your scholar's mind all notions of social relations that are not within his reach. But when the chain of knowledge forces you to show him the mutual dependence of mankind, instead of showing him its moral side, turn all his attention at first towards industry and the mechanical arts which make them useful to each other. While you take him from one workshop to another, do not let him see any work without trying it himself, and do not let him leave it without knowing perfectly the reason for everything that is done there or at least for everything that he has observed. With this aim you should do some work yourself and show him everything by example. To make him a master, be yourself an apprentice, and expect that one hour of work will teach him more things than he would retain in a whole day of explanations....

[657:] You see that until now I have not spoken to my pupil about men. He would have too much sense to listen to me. His relations to his species are as yet not sufficiently apparent to him to enable him to judge others by himself. He knows no human being but himself, and he is far from really knowing even himself. But if he forms few judgements about himself, at least those he has are accurate. He knows nothing of another's place, but he knows his own and keeps to it. Instead of social laws that he cannot know we have used the chains of necessity to hold him. He is still hardly more than a physical being; let us continue to treat him that way....

[670:] What a wealth of interesting objects the curiosity of our pupil may be turned towards without ever leaving the real and material relations that are within his reach, and without arousing in his mind a single idea that he cannot conceive! The teacher's art consists in never burdening his pupil's observations with minutia that hold no significance but in ceaselessy leading him towards relations of importance which he will one day need to know in order to rightly judge between good and evil in civil society. The teacher must be able to adapt the conversation with which he amuses his pupil to the turn already given to his mind. A problem which another child would hardly touch upon will torment Emile half a year.

[671:] We go to dine in an opulent home. There we find preparations for a feast -- many people, many servants, many dishes, and elegant fine china. All this apparatus of pleasure and feasting has something intoxicating about it that goes to the head when one is not accustomed to it. I foresee the effect of all this on my young pupil. While the meal goes on, while different courses come one after another, while a thousand noisy conversations are heard around the table, I lean towards him and whisper in his ear: "Through how many hands would you estimate that all of the things you see on this table have passed before coming here?" What a crowd of ideas I awaken in his brain by these few words! Immediately all the vapors of his delirium vanish. He thinks, he reflects, he calculates, he worries. While the philosophers, excited by wine or perhaps by the women next to them, are babbling like children, here he is philosophizing all alone in his corner. He asks questions; I decline to answer and put him off to another time. He becomes impatient, he forgets to eat and drink, he burns to get away from table and converse with me at his ease. What an object for his curiosity, what a text for instruction. With a healthy judgment that nothing has corrupted, what will he think of luxury when he finds that all the regions of the world have contributed, that twenty million hands perhaps have worked for a long time, that it has cost the lives, perhaps, of thousands of men, and all that to present him with pomp at noon that which he'll deposit in his chamber pot at night?

[672:] Watch with care what secret conclusions he draws in his heart from all his observations. If you have watched him less carefully than I suppose, his thoughts may be tempted in another direction; he may consider himself a person of great importance in the world when he sees so much labor concentrated on the preparation of his dinner. If you suspect this kind of reasoning, you can easily prevent it, or at any rate promptly erase the false impression. As of now he can only appropriate things by personal enjoyment, he can only judge of their fitness or unfitness for him by his sense perceptions of them. The comparison of a rustic meal, prepared by exercise, seasoned by hunger, liberty, and joy, with this magnificent but tedious repast will suffice to make him feel that he has gotten no real advantage from the splendour of the feast, and that his stomach being as well satisfied when he left the table of the peasant as when he left the table of the financier, he has gained nothing more from the one than from the other that he could truly call his own....

[683:] As soon as Emile knows what life is, my first care will be to teach him to preserve it. Until now I have made no distinction of condition, rank, status, or fortune; nor shall I distinguish between them in what follows, because man is the same in every status. The rich man's stomach is no bigger than the poor man's, nor is his digestion any better. The master's arm is neither longer nor stronger than the slave's; a nobleman is no taller than a man of the people; and finally, since natural needs are the same to all, the means for satisfying them should be everywhere equal. Adapt the eduction of man to man, and not to that which is not him. Do you not see that in working to form him exclusively for one condition you are making him useless for anything else, and that if his fortune happens to change you will have worked only to make him unhappy? What could be more absurd than a great lord in rags who carries with him into his misery all the prejudices of his birth? What is more despicable than a rich man fallen into poverty, who, remembering the scorn with which he himself regarded the poor, feels that he has become the lowest of men?...

[684:] You count on the present order of society without considering that this order is itself subject to inevitable revolutions and that that it is impossible to foresee or prevent the one which may affect your children. The great become small, the rich become poor, the king becomes a commoner. Are the blows of fate so rare that you can count on being exempt from them? We are approaching the state of crisis and the century of revolutions._ Who can answer to what you may then become? Everything that man has made, man can destroy. Nature's characters alone are ineradicable, and nature makes neither princes, nor rich men, nor noblemen. This satrap whom you have educated for greatness, what will become of him when he is brought down? This financier who can only live on gold, what will he do in poverty? This haughty fool who cannot use his own hands, who prides himself on what is not really his -- what will he do when it is all taken away? Happy is the man who can leave the estate that leavs him and remain a man despite his fate!...

[685:] Man and citizen, whatever he may be, has nothing to invest in society but himself. All his other goods belong to society in spite of him, and when a man is rich, either he does not enjoy his wealth, or the public enjoys it too. In the first case he robs others as well as himself; in the second he gives them nothing. Thus his debt to society is still unpaid as long as he only pays with his goods. "But my father was serving society while he was acquiring his wealth." That may be. So he paid his own debt, not yours. You owe more to others than if you had been born with nothing, since you were born privileged. It is not fair that what one man has done for society should discharge another from what he owes it, for since every man owes all that he is, he can only pay his own debt; and no father can transmit to his son any right to be useless to his fellows. Now, according to you this is what he has done by transmitting his riches, which are the proof and the price of his work. The man who eats in idleness what he has not himself earned steals it; and the stockholder whom the state pays differs little from a robber who lives at the expense of the passers-by. Outside of society, the isolated man owes nothing to anyone; he has a right to live as he pleases. But in society, where he necessarily lives at the expense of others, he owes them in work the price of his maintenance; this is without exception. To work is therefore an indispensable duty for social man. Rich or poor, powerful or feeble, any idle citizen is a thief....

[742:] He considers himself without regard to others and finds it good that others hardly think of him. He demands nothing from anyone and and believes that he owes nothing to anyone. He is alone in human society and he depends only on himself. He has more right than another to count on himself, for he is all that a boy can be at his age. He has no errors, or at least only has those that are inevitable. He has no vices, or only those from which no man can escape. He has a healthy body, supple limbs, a mind that is accurate and without prejudice, a heart is free and untroubled by passions. Amour-propre, the earliest and the most natural of passions, has scarcely shown itself. Without disturbing the peace of anyone, he has lived as contented, happy, and free as nature permits. Do you think that a child who has reached his fifteenth year in this condition has wasted the preceding ones?

Book Four

[743:] How rapidly we pass through life on earth! The first quarter of life slips away before we know how to use it; the last quarter slips away after we have ceased to enjoy it. At first we do not know how to live; soon we are not able to live. In the interval between these two useless extremes three-quarters of the time left to us is consumed by sleep, work, pain, constraints, and every kind of suffering. Life is short, less because of the little time it lasts than because we have hardly any time to savor what little of it there is. In vain is the moment of death set apart from that of birth; life is always too short when this space is badly filled.

[744:] We are born, so to speak, twice: once to exist, the other to live; one time for our species and another for our sex. Those who regard woman as an imperfect man are wrong without doubt, but the analogy based on externals supports them. Up to the age of puberty children of both sexes have nothing to distinguish them in appearance. They both have the same face, the same figure, the same complexion, the same voice -- everything is equal. Girls are children and boys are children; the same name suffices for beings so similar. Males whose later sexual development has been impeded preserve this resemblance all their lives; they are always big children; and women who never lose this resemblance seem in many ways never to be anything else.

[745:] But man in general is not meant to remain always in childhood. He will leave it at the time prescribed by nature; and this moment of crisis, although very short, has long-term influences.

[746:] Like the rumbling of the sea that precedes a storm from afar, so the murmur of rising passions announces this tumultuous revolution. A bubbling undercurrent warns of the the approaching danger. Changes of temper, frequent outbreaks of anger, a continual agitation of the mind, make the child almost ungovernable. He becomes deaf to the voice that used to make him manageable; he is a lion in a fever. He disregards his guide; he wants no longer to be controlled.

[747:] Along with the moral symptoms of a changing temper come perceptible changes in appearance. His face develops and takes on the stamp of his character; the soft and sparse down at the base of his cheeks becomes darker and takes on consistency. His voice changes, or rather he loses it altogether; he is neither a child nor a man and cannot take the tone of either. His eyes, those organs of the soul which have said nothing until now, find their own language and expression. A growing fire animates them. Their livelier glances still have a sacred innocence, but they no long keep their earlier dumbness; he already feels that they can say too much. He begins to know how to lower them and blush. He is becoming sensitive before knowing that he feels; he is restless without reason. All this may come slowly and still give you time; but if his vivacity makes him too impatient, if outbursts change into fury, if he becomes angry then gentle from one moment to the next, if he weeps without cause, if in the presence of objects which are beginning to be a source of danger his pulse quickens and his eyes light up, if he trembles when a woman's hand touches his, if he is troubled or timid in her presence, 0 Ulysses, wise Ulysses! take care! The goatskin sacks you sealed with so much care are open; the winds are unloosed; do not leave the helm for a minute or all is lost.

[748:] This is the second birth I spoke of. It is now that man is truly born to life and that nothing human is foreign to him. Until now our efforts have been child's play; it is only now that they take on a true importance. This period when ordinary educations end is just the time when ours ought to begin. But to explain this new plan properly, let us review from a distance the state of things that relate to it.

[749:] Our passions are the principle means of our self-preservation; it is therefore an enterprise as vain as it is ridiculous to wish to destroy them. That would be to control nature, to wish to reform the work of God. If God told man to annihilate the passions he gives him, God would both will and not will; he would contradict himself. He has never given such an insane command; nothing like it is written on the human heart, and what God wants a man to do, he does not have it said by another man, he says it to him himself. He writes it in the botton of his heart.

[750:] Now I consider anyone who would prevent the birth of the passions almost as foolish as he who would like to annihilate them; and those who believe that this has been my project up until now have strongly misunderstood me.

[751:] But would we be reasoning correctly, if from the fact that passions are natural to man, we went on to conclude that all of the passions we feel in ourselves and that we see in others are natural? Their source is natural, it is true; but they have been swollen by a thousand other streams; they are a great river that is constantly growing and in which one can scarcely find a few drops of the original stream. Our natural passions are very limited; they are the instruments of our liberty, they tend to preserve us. All those which subjugate and destroy us come to us from elsewhere. Nature does not give them to us; we appropriate them at her expense.

[752:] The source of our passions, the origin and principle of all the others, the only one that is born with man and never leaves him as long as he lives, is amour de soi -- a passion that is primitive, innate, anterior to any other, and of which all the others are in a sense only modifications. In this sense, if you like, they are all natural. But most of these modifications have external causes without which they would never occur, and these same modifications, far from being advantageous to us, are harmful. They change the original purpose and work against their principle, Then it is that man finds himself outside nature and puts himself in contradiction with himself.

[753:] Amour de soi-même is always good and always in accordance with order. Each of us being charged especially with our own preservation, the first and the most important of our cares is and ought to be to ceaselessly watch over it; and how can we continually watch over it, if we do not take the greatest interest in it?

[754:] We must therefore love ourselves in order to preserve ourselves, and it follows directly from this same sentiment that we love that which preserves us. Every child clings to its nurse; Romulus must have clung to the she-wolf who suckled him. At first this attachment is purely mechanical. That which favors the well-being of an individual attracts him, that which harms him repells him; this is nothing but blind instinct. What transforms this instinct into feeling -- the the attachment into love, the aversion into hatred -- is the manifested intention to help us or to harm us. We do not become passionately attached to insensitive objects that only follow the direction given them. But those from which we expect either good or evil from their internal disposition, from their will, those we see acting freely for or against us, inspire us with feelings similar to those they show towards us. Something does us good, we seek it out; but we love the person who does us good. Something harms us, and we shrink from it; but we hate the person who tries to hurt us.

[755:] The child's first sentiment is to love himself, and the second, which derives from the first, is to love those around him. For in his present state of weakness he is aware of people only through the help and attention he receives from them. At first his affection for his nurse and his governess is mere habit. He seeks them because he needs them and because it feels good to have them; it is more like consciousness than benevolence. He needs a long time to understand that not only are they are useful to him but that they want to be useful to him. It is then that he begins to love them.

[756:] So a child is naturally disposed to kindly feeling because he sees that every one about him is inclined to help him, and he gets from this observation the habit of a sentiment favorable to his species. But as he expands his relations, his needs, his active or passive dependencies, the feeling of his relations to others awakens and produces a feeling of duties and preferences. Then the child becomes imperious, jealous, deceitful, and vindictive. When he is coerced to obey, if he does not see the usefulness of what he is told to do, he attributes it to caprice, to an intention of tormenting him, and he rebels. When, on the other hand, people obey him, then as soon as anything opposes him he regards it as rebellion, as an intention to resist him; he beats the chair or table for disobeying him. Amour de soi, which concerns only ourselves, is content when our true needs are satisfied; but amour-propre, which makes comparisons, is never satisfied and never can be. For this sentiment, which prefers ourselves to others, requires also that others prefer us to themselves, which is impossible. This is how the gentle and affectionate passions are born from amour de soi, and how the hateful and irrascible passions are born from amour propre. Thus what makes man essentially good is to have few needs and to compare himself little with others; what makes him essentially evil is to have many needs and to depend much on opinion. By this principle it is easy to see how one can direct to good or evil all the passions of children and of men. It is true that being unable to live always alone they will with difficulty always be good. This problem will by necessity even increase with their relations; and it is in this above all else that the dangers of society make art and care more indispensable in order to prevent in the human heart the depravity that is born with these new needs.

[757:] The proper study for man is that of his relations. As long as he only knows himself through his physical being, he should study himself in relation with things. This is the occupation of his childhood. When he begins to feel his moral being, he should study himself in relation with men. This is the occupation of his entire life, to be begun at the point where we have now arrived.

[758:] As soon as a man needs a companion he is no longer an isolated being; his heart is no longer alone. All his relations with his species, all the affections of his heart, come into being along with this. His first passion soon arouses the rest.

[759:] The direction of the instinct is uncertain. One sex is attracted by the other; that is movement of nature. Choice, preferences, personal attachments, are the work of enlightenment, prejudice, and habit. Time and knowledge are necessary to make us capable of love; we do not love until after having judged or prefer until after having compared. These judgments happen without anyone being aware of them, but they are for that not less real. True love, whatever one may say about it, will always be honored by man. For although its transports lead us astray, although it does not exclude from the heart certain detestable qualities and even can give rise to them, yet it always presupposes certain estimable characteristics without which we would be incapable of feeling that love. This choice that people put in opposition to reason really springs from reason. We say love is blind because its eyes are better than ours, and it sees relations that we cannot perceive. For a person who had no idea of merit or of beauty all women would be equally good, and the first comer would always be the most lovable. Far from coming from nature, love is the rule and the curb of nature's leanings. It is love that makes one sex indifferent to the other, the loved one alone excepted.

[760:] We wish to obtain the same preference that we grant; so love must be reciprocal. To be loved one must be lovable; to be preferred one must be more lovable than another -- more lovable than all the others, at least in the eyes of the beloved. Hence the first regards towards one's peers; hence the first comparisons with them; hence emulation, rivalry, and jealousy. A heart full of an overflowing sentiment loves to expand; from the need for a mistress there soon springs the need for a friend. He who feels how sweet it is to be loved desires to be loved by everyone; and there could be no preferences if there were not many disappointments. With love and friendship are born dissension, enmity, hatred. From the heart of so many passions I see opinion raising its unshakable throne, and foolish mortals, enslaved by its empire, base their very existence merely on what other people think.

[761:] Extend these ideas and you will see where we get the form of amour-propre that we imagine is natural, and how amour de soi, ceasing to be an absolute sentiment, becomes pride in great minds, vanity in small ones, and in both ceaselesly feeds itself at the expense of one's neighbor. Passions of this kind have no seed in a child's heart and cannot spring up in it by themselves; it is we who carry them there, and they would never take root except through our own fault. But it is not so with the heart of a young man. Whatever we do such passions will appear in spite of us. It is therefore time to change our method.

[762:] Let us begin with some important reflections on the critical stage under discussion. The passage from childhood to puberty is not so clearly determined by nature that it doesn't vary in individuals according temperament and in peoples according to climate. Everybody knows the differences which have been observed in this regard between hot and cold countries, and every one sees that ardent temperaments mature earlier than others. But we may be mistaken as to the causes, and we may often attribute to physical causes what is really due to moral: this is one of the commonest errors in the philosophy of our times. The teachings of nature come late and slow, those of men are almost always premature. In the first case, the senses awaken the imagination, in the second the imagination awakens the senses; it gives them a precocious activity which cannot fail to enervate, to weaken first the individual and, in the long run, the species...

[765:] If the age at which a man becomes conscious of his sex differs as much by the effects of education as by the action of nature, it follows that one may accelerate or delay this age according to the way in which one raises one's children; and if the body gains or loses consistency in proportion as one delays or accelerates this progress, it also follows that the more we try to delay it the stronger and more vigorous will the young man be. I am still speaking of purely physical effects; we will soon see that we are not limited to them....

[778:] Do you wish to establish order and rule among the rising passions? Then prolong the period of their development, so that they may have time to find their proper place as they arise. Then it is not man who orders them but nature herself; your task is merely to leave it in her hands. If your pupil were alone, you would have nothing to do; but everything that surrounds him enflames his imagination. A flood of prejudices sweeps him along. In order to hold him back one must push him in the opposite direction. Feeling must enchain the imagination and reason must silence the opinion of men. The source of all the passions is sensibility; the imagination determines their course Every being that is aware of his relations must be affected when these relations change and when he imagines or believes he imagines others better adapted to his nature. It is the errors of the imagination which transform into vices the passions of all finite beings, even of angels, if indeed they have passions; for it would be necessary to know the nature of every creature to realize what relations are best adapted to oneself....

[785:] The first sentiment that the well-raised young man is susceptible to is not love but friendship. The first action of his rising imagination is to teach him that he has fellow human beings and that the species affects him before the sex. Here is another advantage of prolonged innocence: you may take advantage of his dawning sensibility to sow the first seeds of humanity in the heart of the young adolescent. This advantage is all the the more precious because this is the only time in his life when such efforts may be truly successful....

[789:] Do you wish to stimulate and nourish these first stirrings of awakening sensibility in the heart of a young man -- to turn his disposition towards beneficence and goodness? Then avoid planting the seeds of pride, vanity, and envy through the misleading picture of the happiness of men; do not show him to begin with the pomp of courts, the pride of palaces, the delights of spectacles; do not take him into society and into brilliant assemblies. Do not show him the externals of high society until after having put him in a condition to appreciate it on its own terms. To show him the world before he is knows men is not to form him but to corrupt him; not to instruct him but to deceive him.

[790:] By nature men are neither kings, nobles, courtiers, nor millionaires. All men are born naked and poor, all are subject to the miseries of life, its sorrows, its ills, its needs, its suffering of every kind; finally all are condemned to die. This is what man really is; this is what no mortal can escape. Begin then by studying that which is the most inseperable from human nature, that which best constitutes humanity

[791:] At sixteen the adolescent knows what it is to suffer, for he himself has suffered; but he hardly knows that others suffer too; to see it without feeling it is not to know it, and as I have said a hundred times the child who does not imagine what others feel knows no ills but his own. But when the first development of the senses lights the fire of imagination in him, he begins to feel himself in his fellows, to be touched by their cries and to suffer from their pains. It is then that the sorrowful picture of suffering humanity should bring to his heart the first feeling of tenderness he has ever experienced....

[794:] Thus pity is born, the first relative sentiment that touches the human heart according to the order of nature. To become sensitive and compassionate, the child must know that there are beings similar to him who suffer what he has suffered, who feel the pains he has felt; and others which he can form some idea of as being capable of feeling these things also. In effect, how can we let ourselves be stirred by pity unless we go beyond ourselves and identify ourselves with the suffering animal? By leaving, so to spunk, our own nature and taking his? We only suffer so far as we judge that he suffers; the suffering is not in us, it is in him that we suffer. So no one becomes sensitive till his imagination is aroused and begins to carry him outside himself.

[795:] To stimulate and nourish this growing sensibility, to guide it or to follow its natural bent, what should we do if not present to the young man objects on which the expansive force of his heart may take effect -- objects which dilate it, which extend it to other beings, which make him find himself outside of himself -- and carefully remove everything that narrows, concentrates, and strengthens the power of the human self? That is to say, in other words, to arouse in him goodness, humanity, compassion, beneficence -- all the engaging and gentle passions which are naturally pleasing to man -- and to prevent the the growth of envy, covetousness, hatred -- all the repulsive and cruel passions which make our sensibility not merely nul but a negative quantity and are the torment of those who experience them....

[824:] I return to my system, and I say: when the critical age approaches, present to young people spectacles which restrain rather than excite them. Put off their dawning imagination with objects which, far from inflaming their senses, repress their activity. Keep them away from great cities, where the flaunting attire and immodesty of the women hasten and anticipate the lessons of nature, where everything presents to their view pleasures which they should know nothing of until they can choose them for themselves. Bring them back to their early home, where rural simplicity allows the passions of their age to develop less rapidly. Or if their taste for the arts keeps them in the city, guard them by means of this very taste from a dangerous idleness. Choose carefully their company, their occupations, and their pleasures; show them only touching but modest pictures that move them without seducing them, that nourish their sensibility without stimulating their senses. Remember also, that the danger of excess is not confined to any one place, and that immoderate passions always do unavoidable harm. You need not make your pupil a sick-nurse or a brother of charity, or afflict his sight with continual objects of pain and suffering or take him from one hospital to another, from the gallows to the prison. He must be softened, not hardened, by the sight of human misery. Endlessly confronted by the same sights over and over again, we no longer feel their impressions; habit accustoms us to everything. What one has seen too much of one no longer imagines; and it is only through the imagination that we can feel the sorrows of others. It is by seeing so much death and suffering that priests and doctors become pitiless. Let your pupil therefore know something of the fate of man and the miseries of his fellow-beings, but let him not see them too often. A single thing, carefully selected and shown on the right day, will give him a month of tender feelings and reflection. It is not so much what he has seen as his reaction to what he has seen that will determine the judgment he makes of it; and the lasting impression that he could get from an object comes less even from the object itself than from the point of view with which he is drawn to recall it. Thus by a careful use of examples, lessons, and images, you may dull the prick of the senses and delay nature even while following her own directions....

[830:] Far from being an obstacle to education, this fire of adolescence is the means of its consummation and achievement. It is what gives you a hold on the young man's heart when he is no longer weaker than you. His first affections are the reins with which you direct his movements, He was free, and now I see him in your power. So long as he loved nothing, he only depended on himself and his own needs; as soon as he loves, he is dependent on his affections. Thus are formed the first ties that unite him to his species. When you direct his growing sensibility in this way, do not expect that it will at first include all men, and that the word "humankind" will have any meaning for him. No, this sensibility will at first be limited to those like himself, and these will not be people unknown to him but those with whom he has connections, those whom habit has made dear to him or necessary to him, those whom he sees having evidently the same manner of thinking and feeling as he does, those whom he sees exposed to the pains he has suffered and sensible to the pleasures he has enjoyed -- in a word, those in whom the identity of a more fully manifested nature gives a greater disposition to love themselves. It will only be after having cultivated his natural bent in a thousand ways, after many reflections on his own sentiments and on those he has observed in others that he will be able to arrive at generalizing his individual notions under the abstract idea of humanity and join to his own particular affections those that can identify him with his species.

[831:] When he becomes capable of affection, he becomes aware of the affection of others, and he is on the lookout for the signs of that affection. Do you not see what a new hold you are going to acquire over him? What chains have you bound about his heart before he even sees them! What will he feel, when turning his eyes upon himself he sees what you have done for him; when he can compare himself with other young people of his age, and other tutors with you? I say, "When he sees it," but be careful not to tell him of it; if you tell him he will not see it. If you claim his obedience in return for the care you have given him, he will think that you have preempted him. He will see that while you profess to have cared for him without reward, you meant to saddle him with a debt and to bind him to a bargain which he never made. In vain you will add that what you demand is for his own good; still you are demand it, and you are demanding it by virtue of what you have done without his consent. When a man down on his luck accepts money from a stranger, and finds he has enlisted in the army without knowing it, you protest against the injustice. Is it not still more unjust to demand from your pupil the price of care which he has not even accepted?...

[879:] Warn him of his faults before he commits them; do not blame him when once they are committed; you would only stir his self-love to mutiny. We learn nothing from a lesson we detest. I know nothing more foolish than the phrase, "I told you so." The best way to make him remember what you told him is to seem to have forgotten it. Go further than this, and when you find him ashamed of having refused to believe you, gently smooth away the humiliation with kind words. He will surely feel affection when he sees how you forget yourself for his sake and that in stead of putting him down you console him. But if to his chagrin you add your reproaches, he will hate you, and will make it a rule never to listen to you, as if to prove that he does not agree with you as to the value of your opinion....

[885:] When I see that in the years of their greatest activity young people are limited to purely speculative studies, while later on and without the slightest experience they are suddenly thrown into the world and into business, it strikes me as contrary both to reason and to nature, and I am no longer surprised that so few men know how to conduct themselves. By what strange turn of mind are we taught so many useless things, whereas the art of action counts for nothing! People profess to form us for society, and we are taught as if each of us were to spend his life thinking alone in a cell or discussing airy subjects with disinterested people. You think you are teaching your children how to live by teaching them certain bodily contortions and certain word-formulas that signify nothing. I, too, have taught Emile how to live, for I have taught him to live with himself and, more than that, to earn his own bread. But this is not enough. To live in the world one must know how to get along with other people, one must know the tools that can be used to influence them, one must calculate the action and re-action of self-interest in civil society and estimate the results so accurately that one is rarely mistaken in his undertakings, or at least will have tried in the best possible way. The law does not allow young people to manage their own affairs nor to dispose of their own property; but what would be the use of these precautions if they never gained any experience until they were of age? They would have gained nothing by the delay, and would be as naïve at twenty-five as at fifteen. No doubt one must prevent a young man blinded by ignorance or misled by passion from hurting himself. But at any age it is permitted to be benevolent; at any age under the guidance of a wise man one can protect the unfortunate who need some support.

[886:] Mothers and nurses have affection for children because of the care they give them. The exercise of social virtues carries the love of humanity to the bottom of the heart. It is in doing good that we become good; I know of no practice more sure. Keep your pupil busy with the good deeds that are within his reach. Let the cause of the poor always be his; let him help them not merely with his money but with his care; let him serve them, protect them, sacrifice his life and his time to them. Let him be their agent -- he will never in his life have a more noble employment. See how many of the oppressed, who never get a hearing, will obtain justice when he -- with an intrepid firmness that only the practice of virtue inspires -- demands it for them; when he forces open the doors of the rich and noble; when he goes, if necessary, to the feet of the king himself to make heard the voices of the poor -- whose misery closes all access for them and who are so afraid of being punished for their misfortunes that they do not dare to complain.

[887:] But are we making Emile into a knight in shining armor, a do-gooder, a defender of noblesse oblige? Will he thrust himself into public life, play the wise man and defender of the laws before the nobles, the magistrates, the king? Will he present petitions before the judges and plead in the law courts? That I cannot say. The nature of things is not changed by terms of mockery and scorn. He will do all that he knows to be useful and good. He will do nothing more, and he knows that nothing is useful and good for him which is unbefitting his age. He knows that his first duty is to himself; that young men should distrust themselves, be circumspect in their conduct, respectful before those older than themselves, reticent and discrete in talking without good reason, modest a href="../rousseau/notes/para888_note1.html" target="Text_Notebox" class=translator>Emile therefore loves peace. The image of happiness pleases him, and when he can contribute to producing it this is one more way to share it. I refuse to assume that when he sees suffering he will feel the kind of sterile and cruel pity that is content to deplore only the ills it can heal. His active benevolence teaches him much that he would have learned much more slowly, or would never have learned at all, if his heart had been harder. If he sees discord arising among his friends he seeks to reconcile them. If he sees grieving he inquires as to the cause of the sufferings. If he meets two men who hate each other, he wants to know the reason for their enmity. If he finds oppressed people groaning from their mistreatment by the rich and powerful, he tries to find a way to counteract this oppression, and in the interest he takes with regard to all such miserable people, the means of removing their sufferings are never indifferent to him. What must we do to make use of these impulses in a manner suitable to his age? Regulate his efforts and his knowledge, and use his zeal to increase them.

[889:] I am never weary of repeating: Put all the lessons of young people in actions rather than in speeches. Let them learn nothing from books that experience can teach them....

[900:] I beg these critics who are so ready with their blame to consider that I am as well acquainted as they are with everything they say, that I have probably given more thought to it, and that, as I have no private end to serve in getting them to agree with me, I have a right to demand that they should at least take time to find out where I am mistaken. Let them thoroughly examine the constitution of man, let them follow the earliest growth of the heart in any given circumstances, so as to see what a difference education may make in the individual; then let them compare my method of education with the results I ascribe to it; and let them tell me where my reasoning is unsound, and I shall have no answer to give them.

[901:] It is this that makes me speak so strongly, and as I think with good excuse. I have not pledged myself to any system, I depend as little as possible on arguments, and I trust to what I myself have observed. I do not base my ideas on what I have imagined, but on what I have seen. It is true that I have not confined my observations within the walls of any one town, nor to a single class of people. But having compared men of every class and every nation which I have been able to observe in the course of a life spent in this pursuit, I have discarded as artificial what belonged to one nation and not to another, to one rank and not to another; and I have regarded as proper to mankind what was common to all, at any age. in any station, and in any nation whatsoever.

[902:] Now if in accordance with this method you follow from infancy the course of a youth who has not been shaped to any special mold, one who depends as little as possible on authority and the opinions of others, which will he most resemble, my pupil or yours? This is, it seems to me, the question you must answer if you would know if I am mistaken.

[903:] It is not easy for a man to begin to think; but when once he has begun he never stops. Once a thinker, always a thinker, and the understanding once practiced in reflection will never rest. You may therefore think that I do too much or too little; that the human mind is not by nature so quick to unfold; and that after having given it opportunities it has not got, I keep it too long confined within a circle of ideas which it ought to have out-grown.

[904:] But remember, in the first place, that when I want to train a natural man, I do not want to make him a savage and to send him back to the woods; rather, that while in the whirl of social life it is enough that he should not let himself be carried away by the passions and opinions of men. Let him see with his eyes and feel with his heart, let him be governed by no authority but that of his own reason. Under these conditions it is plain that a multitude things that strike him, the oft-recurring sentiments which affect him, the different ways of satisfying his real needs, must give him many ideas he would not otherwise have acquired or would only have acquired much later....