Rousseau and Revolution

by Will Durant

  II. ÉMILE

  1. Education

  We can forgive much to an author who could, within fifteen months, send forth La Nouvelle Héloïse (February, 1761), The Social Contract (April, 1762), and Émile (May, 1762). All three were published in Amsterdam, but Émile was published also in Paris, with governmental permission secured at great risk by the kindly Malesherbes. Marc-Michel Rey, the Amsterdam publisher, deserves a passing salute. Having made unexpected profits from Héloïse, he settled upon Thérèse a life annuity of three hundred livres; and foreseeing a greater sale for Émile than for Du Contrat social (which he had bought for a thousand livres), he paid Jean-Jacques six thousand livres for the new and longer manuscript.

  The book originated partly from discussions with Mme. d’Épinay on the education of her son, and took its first form as a minor essay written “to please a good mother who was able to think”—Mme. de Chenonceaux, daughter of Mme. Dupin. Rousseau thought of it as a sequel to La Nouvelle Héloïse: how should Julie’s children be brought up? For a moment he doubted whether a man who had sent all his children to a foundling asylum, and who had failed as a tutor in the Mably family, was fit to talk on parentage and education; but as usual he found it pleasant to give his imagination free rein, unhampered by experience. He studied Montaigne’s Essays, Fénelon’s Télémaque, Rollin’s Traité des études, and Locke’s Some Thoughts on Education. His own first Discourse was a challenge to him, for it had pictured man as good by nature but spoiled by civilization, including education. Could that natural goodness be preserved and developed by right education? Helvétius had just given an affirmative answer in De l’Esprit (1758), but he had presented an argument rather than a plan.

  Rousseau began by rejecting existing methods as teaching, usually by rote, worn-out and corrupt ideas; as trying to make the child an obedient automaton in a decaying society; as preventing the child from thinking and judging for himself; as deforming him into a mediocrity and brandishing platitudes and classic tags. Such schooling suppressed all natural impulses, and made education a torture which every child longed to avoid. But education should be a happy process of natural unfolding, of learning from nature and experience, of freely developing one’s capacities into full and zestful living. It should be the “art of training men”:41 the conscious guidance of the growing body to health, of the character to morality, of the mind to intelligence, of the feelings to self-control, sociability, and happiness.

  Rousseau would have wanted a system of public instruction by the state, but as public instruction was then directed by the Church, he prescribed a private instruction by an unmarried tutor who would be paid to devote many years of his life to his pupil. The tutor should withdraw the child as much as possible from its parents and relatives, lest it be infected with the accumulated vices of civilization. Rousseau humanized his treatise by imagining himself entrusted with almost full authority over the rearing of a very malleable youth called Émile. It is quite incredible, but Rousseau managed to make these 450 pages the most interesting book ever written on education. When Kant picked up Émile he became so absorbed that he forgot to take his daily walk.42

  If nature is to be the tutor’s guide, he will give the child as much freedom as safety will allow. He will begin by persuading the nurse to free the babe from swaddling clothes, for these impede its growth and the proper development of its limbs. Next, he will have the mother suckle her child instead of turning it over to a wet nurse; for the nurse may injure the child by harshness or neglect, or may earn from it, by conscientious care, the love that should naturally be directed to the mother as the first source and bond of family unity and moral order. Here Rousseau wrote lines that had an admirable effect upon the young mothers of the rising generation:

  Would you restore all men to their primal duties?—begin with the mother; the results will surprise you. Every evil follows in the train of this first sin. … The mother whose children are out of sight wins scanty esteem; there is no home life, the ties of nature are not strengthened by those of habit; fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters cease to exist. They are almost strangers; how should they love one another? Each thinks of himself.

  But when mothers deign to nurse their own children, there will be a reform in morals; natural feeling will revive in every heart; there will be no lack of citizens for the state; this first step will by itself restore mutual affection. The charms of home are the best antidote of vice. The noisy play of children, which we thought so trying, becomes a delight; mother and father … grow dearer to each other; the marriage tie is strengthened. … Thus the cure of this one evil would work a widespread reformation; nature would regain her rights. When women become good mothers men will become good husbands and fathers.43

  These famous paragraphs made breast feeding by mothers part of the change in manners that began in the final decade of Louis XV’s reign. Buffon had issued a similar appeal a decade before, but it had not reached the women of France. Now the fairest breasts in Paris made their debut as organs of maternity as well as bewitchments of sex.

  Rousseau divided the educational career of his pupil into three periods: twelve years of childhood, eight of youth, and an indeterminate age of preparation for marriage and parentage, for economic and social life. In the first period education is to be almost entirely physical and moral; books and book learning, even religion, must await the development of the mind; till he is twelve Émile will not know a word of history, and will hardly have heard any mention of God.44 Education of the body must come first. So Émile is brought up in the country, as the only place where life can be healthy and natural.

  Men are not made to be crowded together in anthills, but scattered over the earth to till it. The more they are massed together, the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of overcrowded cities. … Man’s breath is fatal to his fellows. … Man is devoured by our towns. In a few generations the race dies out or becomes degenerate; it needs renewal, and is always renewed from the country. Send your children out to renew themselves; send them to regain in the open field the strength lost in the foul air of our crowded cities.45

  Encourage the boy to love nature and the outdoors, to develop habits of simplicity, to live on natural foods. Is there any food more delectable than that which has been grown in one’s own garden? A vegetarian diet is the most wholesome, and leads to the least ailments.46

  The indifference of children toward meat is one proof that the taste for meat is unnatural. Their preference is for vegetable foods, milk, pastry, fruit, etc. Beware of changing this natural taste and making your children flesh-eaters. Do this, if not for their health, then for the sake of their character. How can we explain away the fact that great meat-eaters are usually fiercer and more cruel than other men?47

  After proper food, good habits. Émile is to be taught to rise early. “We saw the sun rise in midsummer, we shall see it rise at Christmas; … we are no lie-abeds, we enjoy the cold.”48 Émile washes often, and as he grows stronger he reduces the warmth of the water, till “at last he bathes winter and summer in cold, even in ice water. To avoid risk, this change is slow, gradual, imperceptible.”49 He rarely uses any headgear, and he goes barefoot all the year round except when leaving his house and garden. “Children should be accustomed to cold rather than heat; great cold never does them any harm if they are exposed to it soon enough.”50 Encourage the child’s natural liking for activity. “Don’t make him sit still when he wants to run about, nor run when he wants to be quiet. … Let him run, jump, and shout to his heart’s content.”51 Keep doctors away from him as long as you can.52 Let him learn by action rather than by books or even by teaching; let him do things himself; just give him materials and tools. The clever teacher will arrange problems and tasks, and will let his pupil learn by hitting a thumb and stubbing a toe; he will guard him from serious injury but not from educative pains.

  Nature is the best guide, and should be followed this side of such injury:

  Let u
s lay it down as an incontrovertible rule that the first impulses of nature are always right. There is no original sin in the human heart. … Never punish your pupil, for he does not know what it means to do wrong. Never make him say, “Forgive me.” … Wholly unmoral in his actions, he can do nothing morally wrong, and he deserves neither punishment nor reproof. … First leave the germ of his character free to show itself; do not constrain him in anything; so you will better see him as he really is.53

  However, he will need moral education; without it he will be dangerous and miserable. But don’t preach. If you want your pupil to learn justice and kindness, be yourself just and kind, and he will imitate you. “Example! Example! Without it you will never succeed in teaching children anything.”54 Here too you can find a natural basis. Both goodness and wickedness (from the viewpoint of society) are innate in man; education must encourage the good and discourage the bad. Self-love is universal, but it can be modified until it sends a man into mortal peril to preserve his family, his country, or his honor. There are social instincts that preserve the family and the group as well as egoistic instincts that preserve the individual.55 Sympathy (pitié) may be derived from self-love (as when we love the parents who nourish and protect us), but it can flower into many forms of social behavior and mutual aid. Hence some kind of conscience seems universal and innate.

  Cast your eyes over every nation of the world, peruse every volume of its history; amid all these strange and cruel forms of worship, in this amazing variety of manners and customs, you will everywhere find the same [basic] ideas of good and evil. … There is, at the bottom of our hearts, an inborn principle of justice and virtue by which, despite our maxims, we judge our own actions, or those of others, to be good or evil; and it is this principle that we call conscience.56

  Whereupon Rousseau breaks out into an apostrophe which we shall find almost literally echoed in Kant:

  Conscience! Conscience! Divine instinct, immortal voice from heaven; sure guide of a creature ignorant and finite indeed, yet intelligent and free, infallible, judge of good and evil, making man like to God! In thee consists the excellence of man’s nature and the morality of his actions; apart from thee I find nothing in myself to raise me above the beasts—nothing but the sad privilege of wandering from one error to another by the help of an unbridled intellect and reason which knows no principle.57

  So intellectual education must come only after the formation of moral character. Rousseau laughs at Locke’s advice to reason with children:

  Those children who have been constantly reasoned with strike me as exceptionally silly. Of all human faculties reason … is the last and choicest growth—and you would use this for the child’s early training? To make a man reasonable is the coping stone of a good education, and yet you profess to train a child through his reason. You begin at the wrong end.58

  No; we must, rather, retard mental education. “Keep the child’s mind [intellect] idle as long as you can .”59 If he has opinions before he is twelve you may be sure they will be absurd. And don’t bother him yet with science; this is an endless chase, in which everything that we discover merely adds to our ignorance and our foolish pride.60 Let your pupil learn by experience the life and workings of nature; let him enjoy the stars without pretending to trace their history.

  At the age of twelve intellectual education may begin, and Émile may read a few books. He may make a transition from nature to literature by reading Robinson Crusoe, for that is the story of a man who, on his island, went through the various stages through which men passed from savagery to civilization. But by the age of twenty Émile will not have read many books. He will quite ignore the salons and the philosophes. He will not bother with the arts, for the only true beauty is in nature.61 He will never be “a musician, an actor, or an author.”62 Rather, he will have acquired sufficient skill in some trade to earn his living with his hands if that should ever be necessary. (Many a tradeless émigré, thirty years later, would regret having laughed, as Voltaire did, at Rousseau’s “gentilhomme menuisier”— gentleman carpenter.63) In any case Émile (though he is heir to a modest fortune) must serve society either manually or mentally. “The man who eats in idleness what he has not earned is a thief.”64

  2. Religion

  Finally, when Émile is about eighteen, we may talk to him about God.

  I am aware that many of my readers will be surprised to find me tracing the course of my scholar through his early years without speaking to him of religion. At fifteen he will not even know that he has a soul; at eighteen he may not yet be ready to learn about it.... If I had to depict the most heartbreaking stupidity I would paint a pedant teaching children the catechism; if I wanted to drive a child crazy I would set him to explain what he learned in his catechism.... No doubt there is not a moment to be lost if we must deserve eternal salvation; but if the repetition of certain words suffices to obtain it, I do not see why we should not people heaven with starlings and magpies as well as with children.65

  Despite this proclamation, which infuriated the Archbishop of Paris, Rousseau now aimed his sharpest shafts at the philosophes. Picture Voltaire or Diderot reading this:

  I consulted the philosophes. … I found them all alike proud, assertive, dogmatic; professing—even in their so-called skepticism—to know everything; proving nothing, scoffing at one another. This last trait … struck me as the only point in which they were right. Braggarts in attack, they are weaklings in defense. Weigh their arguments, they are all destructive; count their voices, each speaks for himself alone. … There is not one of them who, if he chanced to discover the difference between falsehood and truth, would not prefer his own lie to the truth which another had discovered. Where is the philosophe who would not deceive the whole world for his own glory?66

  While he continued to condemn intolerance, Rousseau, reversing Bayle, denounced atheism as more dangerous than fanaticism. He offered to his readers a “profession of faith” by which he hoped to turn the tide from the atheism of d’Holbach, Helvétius, and Diderot back to belief in God, free will, and immortality. He remembered the two abbés—Gaime and Gatier—whom he had met in his youth; he welded them into an imaginary vicar in Savoy; and he put into the mouth of this village curé the feelings and arguments that justified (in Rousseau’s view) a return to religion.

  The vicaire savoyard is pictured as the priest of a small parish in the Italian Alps. He privately admits to some skepticism: he doubts the divine inspiration of the Prophets, the miracles of the Apostles and the saints, and the authenticity of the Gospels;67 and, like Hume, he asks, “Who will venture to tell me how many eyewitnesses are required to make a miracle credible?”68 He rejects petitional prayer; our prayers should be hymns to the glory of God, and expressions of submission to His will.69 Many items in the Catholic creed seem to him to be superstition or mythology.70 Nevertheless he feels that he can best serve his people by saying nothing of his doubts, and practicing kindness and charity to all (believers and unbelievers alike), and performing faithfully all the ritual of the Roman Church. Virtue is necessary to happiness; belief in God, free will, heaven, and hell is necessary to virtue; religions, despite their crimes, have made men and women more virtuous, at least less cruel and villainous, than they might otherwise have been. When these religions preach doctrines that seem unreasonable, or weary us with ceremony, we should silence our doubts for the sake of the group.

  Even from the standpoint of philosophy religion is essentially right. The Vicar begins like Descartes: “I exist, and I have senses through which I receive impressions; this is the first truth that strikes me, and I am forced to accept it.”71 He makes short work of Berkeley: “The cause of my sensations is outside of me, for they affect me whether I have any reason for them or not; they are produced and destroyed independently of me. … Thus other entities exist besides myself.” A third step answers Hume and anticipates Kant: “I find that I have the power of comparing my sensations, so I am endowed with an active force” for dea
ling with experience.72 This mind cannot be interpreted as a form of matter; there is no sign of a material or mechanical process in the act of thought. How an immaterial mind can act upon a material body is beyond our understanding; but it is a fact immediately perceived, and not to be denied for the sake of some abstract reasoning. Philosophers must learn to recognize that something may be true even if they cannot understand it—and especially when it is of all truths the one most immediately perceived.

  The next step (the Vicar admits) is mere reasoning. I do not perceive God, but I reason that just as in my voluntary actions there is a mind as the perceived cause of motion, so there is probably a cosmic mind behind the motions of the universe. God is unknowable, but I feel that He is there and everywhere. I see design in a thousand instances, from the structure of my eyes to the movements of the stars; I should no more think of attributing to chance (however often multiplied [à la Diderot]) the adjustment of means to ends in living organisms and the system of the world, than I would ascribe to chance the delectable assemblage of letters in printing the Aeneid. 73

  If there is an intelligent deity behind the marvels of the universe, it is incredible that He will allow justice to be permanently defeated. If only to avoid the desolating belief in the victory of evil, I must believe in a good God assuring the triumph of good. Therefore I must believe in an afterlife, in a heaven of reward for virtue; and though I am revolted by the idea of hell, and would rather believe that the wicked suffer hell in their own hearts, yet I will accept even that awful doctrine if it is necessary for controlling the evil impulses of mankind. In that case I would implore God not to make the pains of hell everlasting.74 Hence the doctrine of purgatory, as a place of abbreviable punishment for all but the most persistent and unrepentant sinners, is more humane than the division of all the dead between the forever blessed and the eternally damned. Granted that we cannot prove the existence of heaven, how cruel it is to take from the people this hope that solaces them in their grief and sustains them in their defeats!75 Without belief in God and an afterlife morality is imperiled and life is meaningless, for in an atheistic philosophy life is a mechanical accident passing through a thousand sufferings to an agonizing and eternal death.