remembered, colored by prejudice, or embellished by vanity. Some of them
may even be completely fictitious; the author caring little for facts
except as the ornaments and illustrations of ideas. But what he thought
in the abstract Rousseau was quite ready to write down, caring little
for the feelings or the opinions of any sect or party; or even of that
great public whose thought was as law to the Philosophers. He deserved
to profit by his sincerity, and he has done so. His many and great
faults were well known to his contemporaries; they are told in his
posthumous "Confessions" in a way to show them more dark than any
contemporary could have imagined; yet such is the evident frankness of
those evil and repugnant volumes that many decent men have got from them
a sneaking kindness for Rousseau, and an inclination to take him at his
own estimate, as one no worse than other people.

This estimate of himself is never to be forgotten in reading his books.
"You see what I am," he seems to say at every turn; "now, I am a good
man." In the belief in his own comparative goodness he was firmly fixed.
His theories of life were largely founded on it. For Rousseau was an
introspective thinker, and thus in seeming opposition to the
intellectual tendency of his age. Voltaire and Diderot were interested
chiefly in the world around them. Locke had viewed his own mind
objectively; he had attempted the feat of getting outside of it, in
order to take a good look at it; and in so doing he had missed seeing
some important parts of it, because they were internal. Rousseau studied
himself and the world within himself. Thus while he was as immoral in
his actions as any of the Philosophers, he was more religious than any
of them. Voltaire's theism was little more than a remnant of early
habit, strengthened by a notion that some sort of religion was necessary
for purposes of police. To Rousseau, a world without a God would have
been truly empty. But as his religion was theistic, and not orthodox;