I sank under one of the trees of the avenue, and passed half an hour there in such a condition of excitement, that when I arose I saw that the front of my waistcoat was all wet with my tears, though I was wholly unconscious of shedding them.  Ah, if I could ever have written the quarter of what I saw and felt under that tree, with what clearness should I have brought out all the contradictions of our social system; with what simplicity I should have demonstrated that man is good naturally, and that by institutions only is he made bad."[153] Diderot encouraged him to compete for the prize, and to give full flight to the ideas which had come to him in this singular way.[154]

People have held up their hands at the amazing originality of the idea that perhaps sciences and arts have not purified manners.  This sentiment is surely exaggerated, if we reflect first that it occurred to the academicians of Dijon as a question for discussion, and second that, if you are asked whether a given result has or has not followed from certain circumstances, the mere form of the question suggests No quite as readily as Yes.  The originality lay not in the central contention, but in the fervour, sincerity, and conviction of a most unacademic sort with which it was presented and enforced.  There is less originality in denouncing your generation as wicked and adulterous than there is in believing it to be so, and in persuading the generation itself both that you believe it and that you have good reasons to give.  We have not to suppose that there was any miracle wrought by agency celestial or infernal in the sudden disclosure of his idea to Rousseau.  Rousseau had been thinking of politics ever since the working of the government of Venice had first drawn his mind to the subject.  What is the government, he had kept asking himself, which is most proper to form a sage and virtuous nation?  What government by its nature keeps closest to the law?  What is this law?  And whence?[155] This chain of problems had led him to what he calls the historic study of morality, though we may doubt whether history was so much his teacher as the rather meagrely nourished handmaid of his imagination.  Here was the irregular preparation, the hidden process, which suddenly burst into light and manifested itself with an exuberance of energy, that passed to the man himself for an inward revolution with no precursive sign.

Rousseau’s ecstatic vision on the road to Vincennes was the opening of a life of thought and production which only lasted a dozen years, but which in that brief space gave to Europe a new gospel.  Emilius and the Social Contract were completed in 1761, and they crowned a work which if you consider its origin, influence, and meaning with due and proper breadth, is marked by signal unity of purpose and conception.  The key to it is given to us in the astonishing transport at the foot of the wide-spreading oak.  Such a transport does not come to us of cool and rational