western temperament, but more often to the oriental after lonely sojourning in the wilderness, or in violent reactions on the road to Damascus and elsewhere.  Jean Jacques detected oriental quality in his own nature,[156] and so far as the union of ardour with mysticism, of intense passion with vague dream, is to be defined as oriental, he assuredly deserves the name.  The ideas stirred in his mind by the Dijon problem suddenly “opened his eyes, brought order into the chaos in his head, revealed to him another universe.  From the active effervescence which thus began in his soul, came sparks of genius which people saw glittering in his writings through ten years of fever and delirium, but of which no trace had been seen in him previously, and which would probably have ceased to shine henceforth, if he should have chanced to wish to continue writing after the access was over.  Inflamed by the contemplation of these lofty objects, he had them incessantly present to his mind.  His heart, made hot within him by the idea of the future happiness of the human race, and by the honour of contributing to it, dictated to him a language worthy of so high an enterprise ... and for a moment, he astonished Europe by productions in which vulgar souls saw only eloquence and brightness of understanding, but in which those who dwell in the ethereal regions recognised with joy one of their own."[157]

This was his own account of the matter quite at the end of his life, and this is the only point of view from which we are secure against the vulgarity of counting him a deliberate hypocrite and conscious charlatan.  He was possessed, as holier natures than his have been, by an enthusiastic vision, an intoxicated confidence, a mixture of sacred rage and prodigious love, an insensate but absolutely disinterested revolt against the stone and iron of a reality which he was bent on melting in a heavenly blaze of splendid aspiration and irresistibly persuasive expression.  The last word of this great expansion was Emilius, its first and more imperfectly articulated was the earlier of the two Discourses.

Rousseau’s often-repeated assertion that here was the instant of the ruin of his life, and that all his misfortunes flowed from that unhappy moment, has been constantly treated as the word of affectation and disguised pride.  Yet, vain as he was, it may well have represented his sincere feeling in those better moods when mental suffering was strong enough to silence vanity.  His visions mastered him for these thirteen years, grande mortalis oevi spatium.  They threw him on to that turbid sea of literature for which he had so keen an aversion, and from which, let it be remarked, he fled finally away, when his confidence in the ease of making men good and happy by words of monition had left him.  It was the torment of his own enthusiasm which rent that veil of placid living, that in his normal moments he would fain have interposed between his existence and the tumult of a generation with which he was profoundly out of sympathy.  In this way the first Discourse was the letting in of much evil upon him, as that and the next and the Social Contract were the letting in of much evil upon all Europe.