Rousseau had launched his paradox; the frivolous and polite society which he attacked was amused at it without being troubled by it: it was a new field of battle opened for brilliant jousts of wit; he had his partisans and his admirers. In the discussion which ensued, Jean Jacques showed himself more sensible and moderate than he had been in the first exposition of his idea; he had wanted to strike, to astonish he soon modified the violence of his assertions. “Let us guard against concluding that we must now burn all libraries and pull down the universities and academies,” he wrote to King Stanislaus: “we should only plunge Europe once more into barbarism, and morals would gain nothing by it. The vices would remain with us, and we should have ignorance besides. In vain would you aspire to destroy the sources of the evil; in vain would you remove the elements of vanity, indolence, and luxury; in vain would you even bring men back to that primal equality, the preserver of innocence and the source of all virtue: their hearts once spoiled will be so forever. There is no remedy now save some great revolution, almost as much to be feared as the evil which it might cure, and one which it were blamable to desire and impossible to forecast. Let us, then, leave the sciences and arts to assuage, in some degree, the ferocity of the men they have corrupted. . .. The enlightenment of the wicked is at any rate less to be feared than his brutal stupidity.” Rousseau here showed the characteristic which invariably distinguished him from the philosophers, and which ended by establishing deep enmity between them and him. The eighteenth century espied certain evils, certain sores in the social and political condition, believed in a cure, and blindly relied on the power of its own theories. Rousseau, more earnest, often more sincere, made a better diagnosis of the complaint; he described its horrible character and the dangerousness of it, he saw no remedy and he pointed none out. Profound and grievous impotence, whose utmost hope is an impossible recurrence to the primitive state of savagery! “In the private opinion of our adversaries,” says M. Roy de Collard eloquently, “it was a thoughtless thing, on the great day of creation, to let man loose, a free and intelligent agent, into the midst of the universe; thence the mischief and the mistake. A higher wisdom comes forward to repair the error of Providence, to restrain His thoughtless liberality, and to render to prudently mutilated mankind the service of elevating it to the happy innocence of the brute.” Before Rousseau, and better than he, Christianity had recognized and proclaimed the evil; but it had at the same time announced to the world a remedy and a Saviour.