him than their memories; and as all his ideas were images, the first engraved were the deepest, and the later rather blended with them than effaced them. To explain Rousseau's power over his generation, and even his strongest interest for us, we should require to add other considerations. Rousseau's dreams, in fact, were not those of the mystic or of the poetical philosopher. If he cared, in one sense, very little for facts, it was because the past and the present overpowered the future. He could not cut himself apart from the world, as some meditative minds have done who live by choice in the region of abstract speculation. His temperament was too sensuous, his sympathies with those around him too keen, to permit him to find a permanent refuge in the gorgeous but unsubstantial world of poetic imagery. His senses bound him fast to realities as upon a rock on which he was always struggling impatiently and spasmodically. It is in the vicissitudes of this struggle that the interest of his personal story consists. For it leads him to find that solution which has been preached in one form or other by so many moralists in all ages, and which had a special meaning for the society of his day. Ancient philosophers said that the great secret of life is in placing your happiness in things which depend upon ourselves, and not in things which are at the mercy of circumstance. Happiness, says a modern prophet, is to be found by lessening your denominator, not by increasing your numerator; by restricting your wants, not by multiplying your enjoyments. The great illusion of life is the childish fancy that you can get the moon by crying for it, instead of learning that the moon is beyond your reach. You must learn the great secret of renunciation. Rousseau's version of this doctrine was given with an intensity of conviction which moved the hearts of his contemporaries; and the 'Confessions' are a kind of continuous comment upon the text. Are we, it may be asked, to take the ascetic view—to admit that happiness is impossible in this life, and to seek future blessedness by mortifying the affections which seek for present gratification? No, Rousseau would say; happiness is everything; to get as much enjoyment out of life as we possibly can is the one conceivable end of a human being. Nobody could be a more thorough hedonist. Then, should we seek for happiness in active life devoted to some absorbing ambition, or rather in courting those lofty emotions or those intellectual tastes which are the fruit of a thorough cultivation of our faculties? No, again; for active life means weariness and disappointment, and exchange of substance for vain shadows; and the more men are cultivated, the more sophisticated and unreal become their lives, and the less their real powers of enjoyment. Then, should we be Epicureans of the vulgar type, and give ourselves up to the indulgence of animal appetites? That, again,