It was amid this brilliant intimacy, humiliating and pleasant at the same time, that Rousseau published his _Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts_. It has been disputed whether the inspiration was such as he claimed for this production, the first great work which he had ever undertaken and which was to determine the direction of his thoughts. “I was going to see Diderot at Vincennes,” he says, “and, as I walked, I was turning over the leaves of the _Mercure de France,_ when I stumbled upon this question proposed by the Academy of Dijon: Whether the advance of sciences and arts has contributed to the corruption or purification of morals. All at once I felt my mind dazzled by a thousand lights, crowds of ideas presented themselves at once with a force and a confusion which threw me into indescribable bewilderment; I felt my head seized with a giddiness like intoxication, a violent palpitation came over me, my bosom began to heave. Unable to breathe any longer as I walked, I flung myself down under one of the trees in the avenue, and there spent half an hour in such agitation that, on rising up, I found all the front of my waistcoat wet with tears without my having had an idea that I had shed any.” Whether it were by natural intuition or the advice of Diderot, Jean Jacques had found his weapons; poor and obscure as he was, he attacked openly the brilliant and corrupt society which had welcomed him for its amusement. Spiritualistic at heart and nurtured upon Holy Scripture in his pious childhood, he felt a sincere repugnance for the elegant or cynical materialism which was every day more and more creeping over the eighteenth century. “Sciences and arts have corrupted the world,” he said, and he put forward, as proof of it, the falsity of the social code, the immorality of private life, the frivolity of the drawing-rooms into which he had been admitted. “Suspicions, heart-burnings, apprehensions, coldness, reserve, hatred, treason, lurk incessantly beneath that uniform and perfidious veil of politeness, under that so much vaunted urbanity which we owe to the enlightenment of our age.”