John Lord - Beacon Lights of History, Volume 13 - Great Writers

This treatise is both full and original. The author supposes an imaginary pupil, named Émile, and he himself, intrusted with the care of the boy's education, attends him from his cradle to his manhood, assists him with the necessary directions for his general improvement, and finally introduces him to an amiable and unsophisticated girl, whose love he wins by his virtues and whom he honorably marries; so that, although a treatise, the work is invested with the fascination of a novel.

In reading this book, which made so great a noise in Europe, with so much that is admirable I find but little to criticise, except three things, which mar its beauty and make it both dangerous and false, in which the unsoundness of Rousseau's mind and character–the strange paradoxes of his life in mixing up good with evil–are brought out, and that so forcibly that the author was hunted and persecuted from one part of Europe to another on account of it.

The first is that he makes all natural impulses generous and virtuous, and man, therefore, naturally good instead of perverse,–thus throwing not only Christianity but experience entirely aside, and laying down maxims which, logically carried out, would make society perfect if only Nature were always consulted. This doctrine indirectly makes all the treasures of human experience useless, and untutored impulse the guide of life. It would break the restraints which civilization and a knowledge of life impose, and reduce man to a primitive state. In the advocacy of this subtle falsehood, Rousseau pours contempt on all the teachings of mankind,–on all schools and colleges, on all conventionalities and social laws, yea, on learning itself. He always stigmatizes scholars as pedants.

Secondly, he would reduce woman to insignificance, having her rule by arts and small devices; making her the inferior of man, on whom she is dependent and to whose caprice she is bound to submit,–a sort of toy or slave, engrossed only with domestic duties, like the woman of antiquity. He would give new rights and liberties to man, but none to woman as man's equal,–thus keeping her in a dependence utterly irreconcilable with the bold freedom which he otherwise advocates. The dangerous tendency of his writings is somewhat checked, however, by the everlasting hostility with which women of character and force of will–such as they call "strong-minded"–will ever pursue him. He will be no oracle to them.

But a still more marked defect weakens "Émile" as one of the guide-books of the world, great as are its varied excellencies. The author undermines all faith in Christianity as a revelation, or as a means of man's communion with the Divine, for guidance, consolation, or inspiration. Nor does he support one of his moral or religious doctrines by an appeal to the Sacred Scriptures, which have been so deep a well of moral and spiritual wisdom for so many races of men. Practically, he is infidel and pagan, although he professes to admire some of the moral truths which he never applies to his system. He is a pure Theist or Deist, recognizing, like the old Greeks, no religion but that of Nature, and valuing no attainments but such as are suggested by Nature and Reason, which are the gods he worships from first to last in all his writings. The Confession of Faith by the Savoyard Vicar introduced into the fourth of the six "Books" of this work, which, having nothing to do with his main object, he unnecessarily drags in, is an artful and specious onslaught on all doctrines and facts revealed in the Bible,–on all miracles, all prophecies, and all supernatural revelation,–thus attacking Christianity in its most vital points, and making it of no more authority than Buddhism or Mohammedanism. Faith is utterly extinguished. A cold reason is all that he would leave to man,–no consolation but what the mind can arrive at unaided, no knowledge but what can be reached by original scientific investigation. He destroys not only all faith but all authority, by a low appeal to prejudices, and by vulgar wit such as the infidels of a former age used in their heartless and flippant controversies. I am not surprised at the hostility displayed even in France against him by both Catholics and Protestants. When he advocated his rights of man, from which Thomas Paine and Jefferson himself drew their maxims, he appealed to the self-love of the great mass of men ground down by feudal injustices and inequalities,–to the sense of justice, sophistically it is true, but in a way which commanded the respect of the intellect. When he assailed Christianity in its innermost fortresses, while professing to be a Christian, he incurred the indignation of all Christians and the contempt of all infidels,–for he added hypocrisy to scepticism, which they did not. Diderot, D'Alembert, and others were bold unbelievers, and did not veil their hostilities under a weak disguise. I have never read a writer who in spirit was more essentially pagan than Rousseau, or who wrote maxims more entirely antagonistic to Christianity.

Aside from these great falsities,–the perfection of natural impulse, the inferiority of woman, and the worthlessness of Christianity,–as inculcated in this book, "Émile" must certainly be ranked among the great classics of educational literature. With these expurgated it confirms the admirable methods inspired by its unmethodical suggestions. Noting the oppressiveness of the usual order of education through books and apparatus, he scorns all tradition, and cries, "Let the child learn direct from Nature!" Himself sensitive and humane, having suffered as a child from the tyranny of adults, he demands the tenderest care and sympathy for children, a patient study of their characteristics, a gentle, progressive leading of them to discover for themselves rather than a cramming of them with facts. The first moral education should be negative,–no preaching of virtue and truth, but shielding from vice and error. He says: "Take the very reverse of the current practice, and you will almost always do right." This spirit, indeed, is the key to his entire plan. His ideas were those of the nineteenth, not the eighteenth century. Free play to childish vitality; punishment the natural inconvenience consequent on wrong-doing; the incitement of the desire to learn; the training of sense-activity rather than reflection, in early years; the acquirement of the power to learn rather than the acquisition of learning,–in short, the natural and scientifically progressive rather than the bookish and analytically literary method was the end and aim of "Émile."

Actually, this book accomplished little in its own time, chiefly because of its attack on established religion. Influentially, it reappeared in Pestalozzi, the first practical reformer of methods; in Froebel, the inventor of the Kindergarten; in Spencer, the great systematizer of the philosophy of development; and through these its spirit pervades the whole world of education at the present time.

In Rousseau's "New Héloïse" there are the same contradictions, the same paradoxes, the same unsoundness as in his other works, but it is more eloquent than any. It is a novel in which he paints all the aspirations of the soul, all its unrest, all its indefinite longings, its raptures, and its despair; in which he unfetters the imagination and sanctifies every impulse, not only of affection, but of passion. This novel was the pioneer of the sentimental romances which rapidly followed in France and England and Germany,–worse than our sensational literature, since the author veiled his immoralities by painting the transports of passion under the guise of love, which ever has its seat in the affections and is sustained only by respect. Here Rousseau was a disguised seducer, a poisoner of the moral sentiments, a foe to what is most sacred; and he was the more dangerous from his irresistible eloquence. His sophistries in regard to political and social rights may be met by reason, but not his attacks on the heart, with his imaginary sorrows and joys, his painting of raptures which can never be found. Here he undermines virtue as he had undermined truth and law. Here reprobation must become unqualified, and he appears one of the very worst men who ever exercised a commanding influence on a wicked and perverse generation.