be able to appreciate at once its temporary and its lasting value, to see how it served his contemporaries, and at the same time to disentangle from it what may be serviceable to us and for all time.
Rousseau’s Emile , is the greatest of all works on education. This volume contains the most important of his political works. The Social Contract , by far the most significant, represents the maturity of his thought, while other works only illustrate his development. Born in 1712, he issued no work of importance till 1750; but he tells us, in the Confessions , that in 1743, when he was attached to the Embassy at Venice, he had already conceived the idea of a great work on “Political Institutions,” “which was to put the seal on his reputation.” He seems, however, to have made little progress with this work, until in 1749 he happened to light on the announcement of a prize offered by the Academy of Dijon for an answer to the question, “Has the progress of the arts and sciences tended to the purification or to the corruption of morality?” His old ideas came thronging back, and sick at heart of the life he had been leading among the Paris lumières , he composed a violent and rhetorical diatribe against civilisation generally. In the following year, this work, having been awarded the prize by the Academy, was published by its author. His success was instantaneous; he became at once a famous man, the “lion” of Parisian literary circles. Refutations of his work were issued by professors, scribblers, outraged theologians and even by the King of Poland. Rousseau endeavoured to answer them all, and in the course of argument his thought developed. From 1750 to the publication of the Social Contract and Emile in 1762 he gradually evolved his views: in those twelve years he made his unique contribution to political thought.
The “ Discourse on the Arts and Sciences ” is not in itself of very great importance. Rousseau has given his opinion of it in the Confessions . “Full of warmth and force, it is wholly without logic or order; of all my works it is the weakest in argument and the least harmonious. But whatever gifts a man may be born with, he cannot learn the art of writing