my schoolboy had spent his time in a tennis-court; at least his body
would be more active.' I know that children must be kept busy, and that
idleness is the danger most to be feared for them. What, then, should
they learn? A fine question surely! Let them learn what they must do
when they are men, and not what they must forget."[Footnote: Compare
Montaigne, i. 135 (liv. i. chap. xxv.).]

The First Discourse not only took the prize at Dijon, but attracted a
great deal of notice in Paris, and immediately gave Rousseau a
distinguished place among men of letters. Controversy was excited,
refutations attempted. In 1753 the Academy of Dijon again offered a
prize for an essay on a subject evidently connected with the former one:
"What is the Origin of Inequality among Men, and whether it is
authorized by Natural Law." Again Rousseau competed, and this time the
prize was given to some one else, but Rousseau's essay was published,
and takes rank among the important writings of its author and of its
time. In the Second Discourse we see the development of the ideas of the
First. Rousseau composed an imaginary history of mankind, starting from
that being of his own creation, the happy savage. He thinks that man in
the primitive condition, having no moral relations nor known duties,
could be neither good nor bad; unless these words are taken in a purely
physical sense, and those things are called vices in the individual
which may interfere with his own preservation, and those are called
virtues which may contribute to it. In this case, Rousseau believes that
he must be called the most virtuous who least resists the simple
impulses of nature; a mistake surely, for what natural impulses are more
simple than those which turn a man aside from all sustained exertion,
and what impulses tend more than these to the destruction of the
individual and of the species?