324. Excellent Precepts on Method. ВЂ” At least in the

general method which he commends, Rousseau makes amends

for the errors in his plan of study : —

ROUSSEAU AND THE EMILE. 299

" Do not treat the child to discourses which he cannot

understand. No descriptions, no eloquence, no figures of

speech. Be content to present to him appropriate objects.

Let us transform our sensations into ideas. But let us not

jump at once from sensible objects to intellectual objects.

Let us always proceed slowly from one sensible notion to

another. In general, let us never substitute the sign for the

thing, except when it is impossible for us to show the

thing."

"I have no love whatever for explanations and talk.

Tilings ! things ! I shall never tire of saying that we ascribe

too much importance to words. With our babbling education

we make only babblers."

But the whole would bear quoting. Almost all of Rous-

seau's recommendations, in the way of method, contain an

element of truth, and need onby to be modified in order to

become excellent.

325. Exclusive Motives of Action. — A great question

in the education of children is to know to what motive we

shall address ourselves. Here again, Rousseau is exclusive

and absolute. Up to the age of twelve, Emile will have

been guided by necessity ; he will have been made depend-

ent on things, not on men. It is through the possible and

the impossible that he will have been conducted, by treating

him, not as a sensible and intelligent being, but as a force of

nature agaiust which other forces are made to act. Not till

the age of twelve must this system be changed. Emile has

now acquired some judgment ; and it is upon an intellectual

motive that one ought now to count in regulating his con-

duct. This motive is utility. The feeling of emulation can-

not be employed in a solitary education. Finally, at the

age of fifteen, it will be possible to appeal to the heart, to

300 The history of pedagogy.

feeling, and to recommend to the young man the acts we set

before him, no longer as necessary or useful, but as noble,

good, and generous. The error of Rousseau is in cutting

up the life of man to his twentieth year into three sharply

defined parts, into three moments, each subordinated to a

single governing principle. The truth is that at every age

an appeal must be made to all the motives that act on our

will, that at every age, necessity, interest, sentiment, and

finally, the idea of duty, an idea too often overlooked by

Rousseau, as all else that is derived from reason, — all these

motives can effectively intervene, in different degrees, in the

education of man.

^ 326. Emile learns a Trade. — At the age of fifteen,

Emile will know nothing of history, nothing of humanity,

nothing of art and literature, nothing of God ; but he will

know a trade, a manual trade. By this means, he will be

sheltered from need iu advance, in case a revolution should

strip him of his fortune.

"We are approaching," says Rousseau, with an astonish-

ing perspicacity, " a century of revolutions. Who can give

you assurance of what will then become of you ? I hold it

to be impossible for the great monarchies of Europe to last

much longer. They have all had their day of glory, and

every State that dazzles is in its decline."

We have previously noticed, in studying analogous ideas in

the case of Locke, for what other reasons Rousseau made of

Emile an apprentice to a cabinet-maker or a carpenter.

327. Emile at the Age of Fifteen. — Rousseau takes

comfort in the contemplation of his work, and he pauses

from time to time in his analyses and deductions, to trace

the portrait of his pupil. This is how he represents him at

the age of fifteen : —

EOUSSEAU AND THE EMILE. 301

" ^raile has but little knowledge, but that which he has is

really his own ; he knows nothing by halves. In the small

number of things that he knows, and knows well, the most

important is that there are many things which he does not

know, but which he can some day learn ; that there are many

more things which other men know, but which he will never

know ; and that there is an infinity of other things which no

man will ever know. He has a universal mind, not through

actual knowledge, but through the ability to acquire it. He

has a mind that is open, intelligent, prepared for everything,

and, as Montaigne says, if not instructed, at least capable

of beins; instructed. It is sufficient for me that he knows

how to find the of what good, is it? with reference to all that

he does, and the why? of all that he believes. Once more,

my object is not at all to give him knowledge, but to teach

him how to acquire it as he may need it, to make him esti-

mate it at its exact worth, and to make him love truth above

everything else. With this method, progress is slow ; but

there are no false steps, and no danger of being obliged to

retrace one's course."

All this is well ; but it is necessary to add that even Emile

has faults, great faults. To mention but one of them, but

one which dominates all the others, he sees things only from

the point of view of utility, and he would not hesitate, for

example, " to give the Academy of Sciences for the smallest

bit of pastry."

328. Education of the Sensibilities. — It is true that

Rousseau finally decides to make of Emile an affectionate

and reasonable being. " We have formed," he says, " his

body, his senses, his judgment; it remains to irive him a

heart." Rousseau, who proceeds like a magician, by wave of

wand and clever tricks, flatters himself that within a day's

302 THE HISTORY OF PEDAGOGY.

time Eniile is going to become the most affectionate, the

most moral, and the most religious of men.

329. The Fourth Book of the Emile. — The develop-

ment of the affectionate sentiments, the culture of the moral

sentiment, and that of the religious sentiment, such is the

triple subject of the fourth book, — vast and exalted questions

that lend themselves to eloquence in such a way that the

fourth book of the Emile is perhaps the most brilliant of the

whole work.

330. Genesis of the Affectionate Sentiments. — Here

Rousseau is wholly in the land of chimeras. Emile, who

lives in isolation, who has neither family, friends, nor com-

panions, is necessarily condemned to selfishness, and every-

thing Rousseau can do to warm his heart will be useless.

Do we wish to develop the feelings of tenderness and affec-

tion? Let us begin by placing the child under family or

social influences which alone can furnish his affections the

occasion for development. For fifteen years Rousseau leaves

the heart of Emile unoccupied. What an illusion to think

he will be able to fill it all at once ! When we suppress the

mother in the education of a child, all the means that we can

invent to excite in his soul emotions of gentleness and

affection are but palliatives. Rousseau made the mistake of

thinking that a child can be taught to love as he is taught to

read and write, aud that lessons could be given to Emile in

feeling just as lessons are given to him in geometiy.

331. Moral Education. — Rousseau is more worthy of

being followed when he demands that the moral notions of

right and wrong have their first source in the feelings of sym-

pathy and social benevolence, on the supposition that accord-

ing to his system he can inspire Emile with such feelings.

ROUSSEAU AND THE EMILE. 303

" We enter, finally, the domain of morals," lie says. " If

this were the place for it, I would show how from the first

emotions of the heart arise the first utterances of the con-

science, and how, from the first feelings of love and hate

arise the first notions of good and evil. I would make it

appear that justice and goodness are not merely abstract

terms, conceived by the understanding, but real affections

of the soul enlightened by the reason."

Yes ; let the child be made to make his way gradually

towards a severe morality, sanctioned by the reason, in

having him pass through the gentle emotions of the heart.

Nothing can be better. But this is to be done on one condi-

tion : this is, that we shall not stop on the way, and that the

vague inspirations of the sensibilities shall be succeeded by

the exact prescriptions of the reason. Now Rousseau, as

we know, was never willing to admit that virtue was anything

else than an affair of the heart. His ethics is wholly an

ethics of sentiment.

332. Religious Education. — We know the reasons which

determined Rousseau to delay till the sixteenth or eighteenth

year the revelation of religion. It is that the child, with his

sensitive imagination, is necessarily an idolater. If we

speak to him of God, he can form but a superstitious idea of

him. "Now," says Rousseau, pithily, "when the imagina-

tion has once seen God, it is very rare that the understanding]

conceives him." In other terms, once plunged in supersti-

tion, the mind of the child can never extricate itself from it.

We must then wait, in the interest of religion itself, till the

child have sufficient maturity of reason and sufficient power

of thought to seize in its truth, divested of every veil of

sense, the idea of God, whose existence is announced to him

for the first time.

304 THE HISTORY OF PEDAGOGY.

It is difficult to justify Rousseau. First, is it not to be

feared that the child, if he has reached his eighteenth year in

ignorance of God, ma}' find it wholly natural to be ignorant

of him still, and that he reason and dispute at random with

his teacher, and that he doubt instead of believe? And if

he allows himself to be convinced, is it not at least evident

that the religious idea, tardily inculcated, will have no pro-

found hold on his mind? On the other hand, will the child,

with his instinctive curiosity, wait till his eighteenth year to

inquire the cause of the universe? Will he not form the

notion of a God in his own way ?

" One might have read, a few years ago," says Villemain,

k 'the account, or rather the psychological confession, of a

writer (Sentenis) , a German philosopher, whom his father

had submitted to the experiment advised by the author of

Emile. Left alone by the loss of a tenderly loved wife, this

father, a learned and thoughtful man, had taken his infant

son to a retired place in the country ; and not allowing him

communication with any one, he had cultivated the child's

intelligence through the sight of the natural objects placed

near him, and by the study of the languages, almost without

books, and in carefully concealing from him all idea of God.

The child had reached his tenth year without having either

read or heard that great name. But then his mind found

what had been denied it. The sun which he saw rise each

morning seemed the all-powerful benefactor of whom he felt

the need. He soon formed the habit of going at dawn to the

garden to pay homage to that god that he had made for

himself. His father surprised him one day, and showed him

his error by teaching him that all the fixed stars are so many

suns distributed in space. But such was then the disap-

pointment and the grief of the child deprived of his worsh'o,

ROUSSEAU AND THE EMLLE. 305

that the father, overcome, acknowledged to him that there

was a God, the Creator of the heavens and the earth." 1