§ 15. As specimens of Rousseau’s teaching I will give a few characteristic passages from the Émile.
“Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Creator: everything degenerates in the hands of man.”[125] These are the first words of the “Émile,” and the key-note of Rousseau’s philosophy.
§ 16. “We are born weak, we have need of strength; we are born destitute of everything, we have need of assistance; we are born stupid, we have need of understanding. All that we have not at our birth, and which we require when grown up, is bestowed on us by education. This education we receive from nature, from men, or from things. The internal development of our organs and faculties is the education of nature: the use we are taught to make of that development is the education given us by men; and in the acquisitions made by our own experience on the objects that surround us, consists our education from things.”[126] “Since the concurrence of these three kinds of education is necessary to their perfection, it is by that one which is entirely independent of us, we must regulate the two others.”[127]
§ 17. Now “to live is not merely to breathe; it is to act, it is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, and of all those parts of ourselves which give us the feeling of our existence. The man who has lived most, is not he who has counted the greatest number of years, but he who has most thoroughly felt life.”[128]
§ 18. The aim of education, then, must be complete living.
But ordinary education, instead of seeking to develop the life of the child, sacrifices childhood to the acquirement of knowledge, or rather the semblance of knowledge, which it is thought will prove useful to the youth or the man. Rousseau’s great merit lies in his having exposed this fundamental error. He says, very truly, “We do not understand childhood, and pursuing false ideas of it our every step takes us further astray. The wisest among us fix upon what it concerns men to know without ever considering what children are capable of learning. They always expect to find the man in the child without thinking of what the child is before it is a man. And this is the study to which I have especially devoted myself, in order that should my entire method be false and visionary, my observations might always turn to account. I may not have seen aright what ought to be done: but I believe I have seen aright the subject on which we have to act. Begin then by studying your pupils better, for most certainly you do not understand them.”[129] “Nature wills that children should be _children_ before they are _men_. If we seek to pervert this order we shall produce forward fruits without ripeness or flavour, and tho’ not ripe, soon rotten: we shall have young _savans_ and old children. Childhood has ways of seeing, thinking, feeling peculiar to itself; nothing is more absurd than to wish to substitute ours in their place.”[130] “We never know how to put ourselves in the place of children; we do not enter into their ideas, we attribute to them our own; and following always our own train of thought, even with syllogisms we manage to fill their heads with nothing but extravagance and error.”[131] “I wish some discreet person would give us a treatise on the art of observing children—an art which would be of immense value to us, but of which fathers and schoolmasters have not as yet learnt the very first rudiments.”[132]