all earnest religions of faith, and included nothing higher than intellectual cleverness, moral respectability, and polished manners. It was not the idea of a civilization appropriative of all that is human, comprehensive of all that educates mental and spiritual life, and which, while it should refine and discipline nature, should likewise preserve its simplicity, respect its freedom, and favor individual and national originality; but rather that of a civilization of a special and artificial type, such as can only be local and temporary, and as was to be seen in all its glory in the fashionable salons and philosophic circles of Paris in the Voltairian period." 1

In regard to education in the schools the rationalistic movement had little direct influence, though it controlled the private education of the upper class. The character of this can be judged from the ideals of life and conduct elaborated by Lord Chesterfield for his son. An education of worldly wisdom, a perfection in forms of behavior, a lack of all that is most serious in life, an emphasis on the importance of polite conduct, a higher appreciation of manners and courtliness than of virtue and seriousness, an attention to outward form without regard to inward reality, a smattering of knowledge of all kinds, a purely materialistic judgment of affairs of life, a nature developed to decide all things in the cold light of reason, full command of the body, with opinions never fully revealed, these constitute the ideals of the education of the rationalistic-aristocratic period. It is but a further formulation of the social realism of Montaigne, in some respects a degenerate one, though in others an advance upon it. The connection so often made between Rousseau and Montaigne is because of their relationship to the intervening rationalistic period; the one contributed to its origin and the other made concrete and gave a new form to its great abstract principles. Yet compared with that advocated by the rationalists, the education of the naturalistic period is about as reactionary as could be constructed.

1 History of the Philosophy of History in France, p. 300.

It is not in the details of the "education according to nature" that we are here chiefly interested; nor in the fundamental distinctions it opposes to the education of the rationalistic period. The main point to notice is that just as the great doctrines of liberation of the common man find their origin in the teachings of Rousseau, so also do the great educational doctrines of the liberation of the child. As the Contrat Social contains the germs of the Declaration of Independence and of the American Constitution, so the Emile contains the germinal ideas of the kindergarten, of modern elementary school work, and of the entire modern conception of education.

The extravagant form in which the doctrines are stated, the wild emotional vagaries of the author, his offensive personality, his inconsistent career, his evil influence, — political, literary, moral, should not blind one to the fact that from him we obtain our idea that education starts from the child, that its process is determined by the child nature, and that its aim is summed up in the child's character and social relation; in other words, our idea of all that has since been elaborated as the details of the doctrines and processes of modern education.

JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU.- Essentially democratic, as the early phase of the Enlightenment had been essentially aristocratic, forming at once the culmination of the Enlightenment and the basis of nineteenth-century thought and life, the naturalistic movement finds both its origin and its most notable and influential exponent in Jean Jacques Rousseau. To estimate aright the ideas and purposes of this man, to understand the essential principles of the movement itself and its relation to the manifold institutional changes soon to be brought about, especially to gain any conception of its bearing on the development of educational thought, one must be prepared to lay aside all prejudices in the consideration of

a character in whom, probably beyond all others, is to be found the greatest mixture of strength and weakness, of truth and falsity, of that which is attractive and that which is detestable. A man governed wholly by his emotions, possessing the highest ideals with the greatest power of embodying them in words, but the slightest ability to realize them in action, with clear insight, unbounded sympathy, little accurate knowledge and less of disciplined power of mind, he gave an impetus to ideas held and expressed by many others that has made him one of the most powerful factors in all history. Napoleon said that without him the French Revolution would not have occurred; and, while it is impossible to say what would or would not have happened, he certainly caused a more complete revolution in educational thought and practice than any one man or group of men that we have to consider. He it was who first preached the political and social gospel of the common man and gave to him an education as a right by birth. To quote again from Morley: "It was in Rousseau that polite Europe first harkened to strange voices and faint reverberations from out of the vague and cavernous shadow in which the common people move."

Rousseau was born (1712) at Geneva, a city renowned for its great intellectual and moral vigor, and its influence in these respects on Europe exerted through the dominant Calvinism of the Protestant population of France, England, and Scotland. In Geneva prevailed an earnestness of moral life, purity of domestic relations, simplicity of social order, freedom of government, that were in sharp contrast with the luxury, the wealth, the artificiality, the immorality, the cynicism of Parisian life. It was the memory of these early associations, intensified by the contrast with his later Parisian associations, that undoubtedly furnished the elements of the ideal natural state pictured by Rousseau; for to the burgesses of his native city, who later reciprocated by ordering his books burned by public hangmen, Rousseau dedicated

the work in which this ideal is most clearly set forth, his Origin of Inequality among Men. His training in early years was one of indulgence; and, while he was early taught to read, he devoted his early years to the unrestricted devouring of romances, an experience which fixed in him a native tendency to sentimentality, even to sensuality. A few years of more formal education, very indifferently attended to, failed to make any radical change in his character thus early formed. At twelve we find him apprenticed to a trade, where, according to his own account, he learned more of deceit, idleness, and dishonesty than he did of craftsmanship. Four years later, still consulting only his emotions and the whims of sentiment, he became a common vagabond. But this life, continued for several years, had one merit, in that it strengthened both his love for and knowledge of nature. Converted one hungry day by a bottle of wine, a full meal, and the hospitality of a priest, whom he later makes famous as the Savoyard Vicar, he changed his religion and allowed this chance incident to shape his life for years. It is profitless from our point of view to follow his life in detail, except that one may see in the concrete Rousseau's ideal of education. Of an emotional rather than of a rational character, exalting natural instincts and desires above reason, holding that moral and religious ideas could not develop in early childhood, positing that more was to be derived from association with nature than from communion with books or from the intelligence of others, that proper development came from removing all restric tions and allowing natural tendencies to have full sway, -this conception of education was merely the outgrowth of his own life. The only permanent and elevating interest he seemed to possess throughout this period, as well as the only activity in which he possessed any ability, was music. As performer and as composer, if not as teacher, he possessed considerable talent, and contributed upon his specialty many of the treatises for the encyclopedic publications of his

day. When about forty, his aimless, meaningless existence became possessed of a great idea—an idea which gave point to his sentimental vaporings, to his emotional prejudices and beliefs; an idea that through him was to revolutionize the social structure of his adopted country as well as to modify profoundly that of many others; an idea which when applied to education was to create a new epoch therein as well. In brief, the main idea was simple, and now commonplace enough. Human happiness and human welfare are the natural rights of every individual, not the special possession of a favored class; legitimate social organization and education exist but to bring about the realization of this desideratum. To this he added as a main argument, - the fuse which was to explode the bomb, science, art, government as then constituted, prevented this realization and hence were objects for destruction.

DOCTRINE OF THE "NATURAL STATE."- In 1749, coming by chance across the theme for a prize essay propounded by the Dijon Academy, one of the institutions which during the eighteenth century did so much to make France famous in literature, art, and science, - Rousseau was seized with what he terms an inspiration. This indeed was one of those spontaneous convictions reached without any previous rational reflection, which were so influential in the life of this great exponent of the emotions and which were about as near an approach to definite rational processes as he ever reached. The theme was formulated in the question: "Has the restoration of the sciences contributed to purify or corrupt manners?" His answer was the negative one elaborated in the idea of the "natural state," — an idea much discussed during this period and by some even given the same form as that now propounded by Rousseau. But, unlike others, Rousseau furnished in defense of this thesis an emotional fervor and a literary style that carried conviction, and