Rousseau lived a wandering and adventurous life, full of hallucinations and self-created trouble. He made many friends, only to quarrel with them. He was half insane, and his career inspires both disgust and admiration. His numerous works fill twenty-two volumes, the most important ones being two prize essays published in 1750 and 1773, which represent the negative side of his doctrine; _Héloïse_, 1761; _Emile_, 1762; _Le Contrat Social_, 1762; and his _Confessions_, which contain his constructive thought. Rousseau was at first a contributor to the _Encyclopædia_, but at heart he cared nothing for the diffusion of knowledge and art. He did not understand the comprehensive intellectual ambition of Diderot; he resented the utilitarianism of Helvetius and the materialism of Holbach. When he wrote his prize essay in 1750, he suddenly perceived how absurd the intellectual Enlightenment was amid the distressing social state of France. He turned against both the existing order and the would-be intellectual reformers. The temporal order of things was to him awry. Study, knowledge, and cultivation were to him only a gloss over the deep-lying degradation. Society, as it is constructed, is artificial, and all organization is a tyranny. God exists, and He is good. Man was good until civilization and art invaded his simplicity, corrupted his virtues, and transformed him into a suffering and a sinful being. Rousseau’s call was that of anarchism. It was a condemnation of the entire past. Sweep all the so-called civilization away, and level inequalities. Go back to nature; and in the simplicity of that idyllic state let children grow up undirected except by their own uncorrupted instinct,――that “immortal and celestial voice.” In an age tired of oppression and corruption Rousseau struck a sympathetic chord which made the intellectual Enlightenment sound false. His contemporaries did not inquire into the motives of the mean lunatic. They did not then see that he was a doctrinaire holding up an unpractical ideal in contrast with their present state. He alone in all France was the one to appeal to man’s self-respect. He alone appealed to the only motives that will result in action,――the human emotions. His plea was for every Frenchman, and his words for the unfortunate were given with such eloquence that the fortunate were compelled to listen. They were a majestic language of wide compassion and sympathy. He saw in the French monarchy the greatest misery for the greatest number, and no one of its supporters appeared to the people so generous and true as he. His influence not only upon his own time but upon the nineteenth century was extraordinary, and some have said that he is the greatest modern. At all events he sounded the keynote of our own civilization, especially in art, literature, and education; for he showed the fundamental correlation between Nature and the passions. Rousseau taught a sentimental deism, in which sentiment is the essential part.