At twenty-nine Rousseau settled down in Paris, but his days of vagabondage had left an ineffaceable stamp upon him. His sensitiveness, impulsiveness, love of nature, and sympathy for the poor were ever afterward in evidence. These characteristics blended well with a body of inchoate sentiments and vague longings of this period. It was the day of Louis XV and royal absolutism, when affairs in the kingdom were controlled by a small clique of idle and extravagant courtiers. A most artificial system of conduct had grown up in society. Under this veneer the degraded peasants were ground down by taxation and forced to minister to the pleasure of a vicious leisure class. But against this oppression there had gradually arisen an undefined spirit of protest and a desire to return to the original beneficent state of nature from which it was felt that man had departed. Hence it happened that Rousseau, emotional, uncontrolled, and half-trained, was destined to bring into consciousness and give voice to the revolutionary and naturalistic ideas and tendencies of the century. [Sidenote: His discourses,] [Sidenote: _New Heloise_,] [Sidenote: _Social Contract_,] [Sidenote: and _Emile_.] =Rousseau’s Works.=--In 1750 he first crystallized this spirit of the age and resultant of his own experience in a discourse on _The Progress of the Arts and Sciences_. In this he declared with much fervor and conviction, though rather illogically, that the existing oppression and corruption of society were due to the advancement of civilization. Three years later he wrote his discourse on _The Origin of Inequality among Men_. Here again he held that the physical and intellectual inequalities of nature which existed in primitive society were scarcely noticeable, but that, with the growth of civilization, most oppressive distinctions arose. This point of view in a somewhat modified form he continued in his remarkable romance, _The New Heloise_, published in 1759, and three years afterward in his influential essay on political ethics, known as the _Social Contract_, and in that most revolutionary treatise on education, the _Emile_. The _New Heloise_ commends as much of primitive conditions as the crystallized institutions of society will permit. In the _Social Contract_, Rousseau also finds the ideal state, not in that of nature, but in a society managed by the people, where simplicity and natural wants control, and aristocracy and artificiality do not exist. But the work that has made the name of Rousseau famous is the _Emile_. This, while an outgrowth of his naturalism, assumes the modified position of the later works, and undertakes to show how education might minimize the drawbacks of civilization and bring man as near to nature as possible. But the educational influence of the _Emile_ has been so far-reaching that we must turn to another chapter to study the positions of Rousseau and the effects of naturalism in education. SUPPLEMENTARY READING