There is certainly no real contradiction between the quality of reverence and the more equivocal quality of a sensuous temperament, though a man may well seem on the surface, as the first succeeds the second in rule over him, to be the contradiction to his other self.  The objects of veneration and the objects of sensuous delight are externally so unlike and so incongruous, that he who follows both in their turns is as one playing the part of an ironical chorus in the tragi-comic drama of his own life.  You may perceive these two to be mere imperfect or illusory opposites, when you confront a man like Rousseau with the true opposite of his own type; with those who are from their birth analysts and critics, keen, restless, urgent, inexorably questioning.  That energetic type, though not often dead or dull on the side of sense, yet is incapable of steeping itself in the manifold delights of eye and ear, of nostril and touch, with the peculiar intensity of passive absorption that seeks nothing further nor deeper than unending continuance of this profound repose of all filled sensation, just as it is incapable of the kindred mood of elevated humility and joyful unasking devoutness in the presence of emotions and dim thoughts that are beyond the compass of words.

The citizen of Geneva with this unseen fibre of Calvinistic veneration and austerity strong and vigorous within him, found a world that had nothing sacred and took nothing for granted; that held the past in contempt, and ever like old Athenians asked for some new thing; that counted simplicity of life an antique barbarism, and literary curiousness the master virtue.  There were giants in this world, like the panurgic Diderot.  There were industrious, worthy, disinterested men, who used their minds honestly and actively with sincere care for truth, like D’Holbach.  There was poured around the whole, like a high stimulating atmosphere to the stronger, and like some evil mental aphrodisiac to the weaker, the influence of Voltaire, the great indomitable chieftain of them all.  Intellectual size half redeems want of perfect direction by its generous power and fulness.  It was not the strong men, atheists and philosophisers as they were, who first irritated Rousseau into revolt against their whole system of thought in all its principles.  The dissent between him and them was fundamental and enormous, and in time it flamed out into open war.  Conflict of theory, however, was brought home to him first by slow-growing exasperation at the follies in practice of the minor disciples of the gospel of knowing and acting, as distinguished from his own gospel of placid being.  He craved beliefs that should uphold men in living their lives, substantial helps on which they might lean without examination and without mistrust:  his life in Paris was thrown among people who lived in the midst of open questions, and revelled in a reflective and didactic morality, which had no root in the heart and so made things easy for the practical