§ 11. We have now reached the climax (or shall we say the nadir?) in negation. Rousseau has given the _coup de grâce_ to the ideal of the Renascence. Comenius was the first to take a comprehensive view of the educator’s task and to connect it with man’s nature and destiny; but he could not get clear from an over-estimate of the importance of knowledge. According to his ideal, man should know all things; so in practice he thought too much of imparting knowledge. Then came Locke and treated the imparting of knowledge as of trifling importance when compared with the formation of character; but he too in practice hardly went so far as this principle might have led him. He was much under the influence of social distinctions, and could not help thinking of what it was necessary for a gentleman to know. So that Rousseau was the very first to shake himself entirely free from the notion which the Renascence had handed down that man was mainly a _learning_ animal. Rousseau has the courage to deny this in the most emphatic manner possible, and to say: “For the first 12 years the educator must teach the child _nothing_.” § 12. In this reaction against the Renascence Rousseau puts the truth in the form of such a violent paradox that we start back in terror. But it was perhaps necessary thus to sweep away the ordinary schoolroom rubbish before the true nature of the educator’s task could be fairly considered. The rubbish having been cleared away what was to take its place? No longer having his mind engrossed by the knowledge he wished to communicate, the educator had now an eye for something else not less worthy of his attention, viz., the child itself. Rousseau was the first to base education entirely on a study of the child to be educated; and by doing this he became, as I believe, one of the greatest of educational Reformers. § 13. It was, however, purely as a thinker, or rather as a _voice_ giving expression to the general discontent that Rousseau became such a tremendous force in Europe. He has indeed often been called the father of the first French Revolution which he did not live to see. But, as Macaulay has well said, a good deal besides eloquent writing is needed to cause such a convulsion; and we can no more attribute the French Revolution to the writings of Rousseau than we can attribute the shock of an explosion of gunpowder to the lucifer match without which it might never have happened (_v._ Macaulay’s _Barrère_). Rousseau did in the world of ideas what the French Revolutionists afterwards did in the world of politics; he made a clean sweep and endeavoured to start afresh.