§ 14. I have already said that as regards education I think his labours in destruction were of very great value. But what shall we say of his efforts at construction? There would not be the least difficulty in showing that most of his proposals are impracticable. It is no more “natural” to treat as a typical case a child brought up in solitude than it would be to write a treatise on the rearing of a bee cut off from the hive.[124] Rousseau requires impossibilities, _e.g._, he postulates that the child is never to be brought into contact with anyone who might set a bad example. Modern science has shown us that the young are liable to take diseases from impurities in the air they breathe: but as yet no one has proposed that all children should be kept at an elevation of 5,000 feet above the level of the sea. Yet the advice would be about as practicable as the advice of Rousseau. A method which always starts with paradox and not infrequently ends with platitude might seem to have little in its favour; and Rousseau has had far less influence since (in the words of Herman Merivale) “he was dethroned with the fall of his extravagant child, the [First] Republic.” No doubt the great exponent of English opinion was right in calling Rousseau “the most un-English stranger who ever landed on our shores” (_Times_, 29 Aug., 1873); and the torch of his eloquence will never cause a conflagration, still less an explosion, here. His disregard for “appearances”—or rather his evident purpose of making an impression by defying “appearances” and saying just the opposite of what is expected, is simply distressing to us. But there is no denying Rousseau’s genius. His was one of the original voices that go on sounding and awakening echoes in all lands. Willingly or unwillingly, at first hand or from imperfect echoes, everyone who studies education must study Rousseau. § 15. As specimens of Rousseau’s teaching I will give a few characteristic passages from the Émile. “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Creator: everything degenerates in the hands of man.”[125] These are the first words of the “Émile,” and the key-note of Rousseau’s philosophy. § 16. “We are born weak, we have need of strength; we are born destitute of everything, we have need of assistance; we are born stupid, we have need of understanding. All that we have not at our birth, and which we require when grown up, is bestowed on us by education. This education we receive from nature, from men, or from things. The internal development of our organs and faculties is the education of nature: the use we are taught to make of that development is the education given us by men; and in the acquisitions made by our own experience on the objects that surround us, consists our education from things.”[126] “Since the concurrence of these three kinds of education is necessary to their perfection, it is by that one which is entirely independent of us, we must regulate the two others.”[127]