traversed in equal times in the revolutions of the planets; what curves
have conjugate points, points of inflection and reflection; how man sees
all things in God; how the soul and body correspond without
communication, as two clocks would do; what stars maybe inhabited; what
insects reproduce their kind in extraordinary ways,--tell me, I say, you
to whom we owe so much sublime knowledge--if you had taught us none of
these things, should we be less numerous, less well-governed, less
redoubtable, less flourishing, or more perverse?"

This is the theme of the First Discourse, a theme most congenial to the
nature of Rousseau. His ill-health, his dreamy habit of mind, his
vanity, all made him long for a state of things as different as possible
from that about him.

"Among us," he says, "it is true that Socrates would not have drunk the
hemlock; but he would have drunk from a more bitter cup of insulting
mockery and of contempt a hundred times worse than death." Such
sensitiveness as this belongs to Rousseau himself. With what disdain
would the healthy-minded Socrates have laughed at the suggestion that he
was troubled by the contempt or the mockery of those about him. How
gayly would he have turned the weapons of the mockers on themselves.
Rousseau had neither the sense of humor nor the joy of living, which
added so much to the greatness of the Atheman. His theories are
especially pleasing to the disappointed and the weak, and therein lies
their danger; for they tend, not to manly effort, for the improvement of
individual circumstances or of mankind, but to vain dreaming of
impossible ideals. There is a luxury that softens, but there is also a
luxury that causes labor. A nation without astronomy, or geography, or
physics, is generally less numerous, less redoubtable, less flourishing,
and sometimes less well governed than a civilized nation. It is true