Here Rousseau insists upon giving a child some trade, no matter what his station in life may be; and in 1762 he uttered these prophetic words, remarkable indeed, when we call to mind the disorders at the close of that century:-- You trust to the present condition of society, without reflecting that it is subject to unavoidable revolutions, and that you can neither foresee nor prevent what is to affect the fate of your own children. The great are brought low, the poor are made rich, the king becomes a subject. Are the blows of fate so uncommon that you can expect to escape them? We are approaching a crisis, the age of revolutions. Who can tell what will become of you then? All that man has done man may destroy. No characters but those stamped by nature are ineffaceable; and nature did not make princes, or rich men, or nobles. This advice was followed. In the highest grades of society it became the fashion to learn some handicraft. It is well known that Louis XVI. was proud of his skill as a locksmith. Among the exiles of a later period, many owed their living to the trade they had thus learned. To return to Émile: Rousseau selects for him the trade of a joiner, and goes so far as to employ him and his tutor in that kind of labor for one or more days of every week under a master who pays them actual wages for their work. Judging from Appearances. The Broken Stick. If I have thus far made myself understood, you may see how, with regular physical exercise and manual labor, I am at the same time giving my pupil a taste for reflection and meditation. This will counterbalance the indolence which might result from his indifference to other men and from the dormant state of his passions. He must work like a peasant and think like a philosopher, or he will be as idle as a savage. The great secret of education is to make physical and mental exercises serve as relaxation for each other. At first our pupil had nothing but sensations, and now he has ideas. Then he only perceived, but now he judges. For from comparison of many successive or simultaneous sensations, with the judgments based on them, arises a kind of mixed or complex sensation which I call an idea. The different manner in which ideas are formed gives each mind its peculiar character. A mind is solid if it shape its ideas according to the true relations of things; superficial, if content with their apparent relations; accurate, if it behold things as they really are; unsound, if it understand them incorrectly; disordered, if it fabricate imaginary relations, neither apparent nor real; imbecile, if it do not compare ideas at all. Greater or less mental power in different men consists in their greater or less readiness in comparing ideas and discovering their relations.