The Puritan prophet counted Rousseau among his heroes in spite of his constitutional hate of the man, granting to him this one virtue--the heroism of intense sincerity. I would add to this another characteristic which makes him a genius, the intrinsic beauty and wealth of his emotional nature. He was a Frenchman in whose veins ran the blood of a Swiss mountaineer. In short, he was a bold incarnation of the artistic spirit. Absolute independence, freedom, and satisfaction of all that is instinctive and spontaneous, this was the claim of his personality. But this, we know, is too beautiful a dream to be realized in the actual world of ours. Thus his early life of idyllic intoxication in the beauty of Nature and human sentiments was soon shattered by the cruel hand of social conventions and prosaic actuality: seeing the sacredness of instinctive nature everywhere trampled down by corrupted passions and vanities on the one hand, and by sophisticated refinement and cold ratiocination on the other, he raised the voice of protest against what they called culture and civilization, and made a plea for the entire reorganization of human society and of the race itself. Freedom from pedantry of superficial learning and accomplishment, from the hypocrisy of conventional morality, manners, and religion, from slavery to all artificialities and externalities, the restoration of man from his accessory life to his fundamental being, this is the center of his whole philosophy, which began in his negative answer to the question presented by the French Academy, “whether the progress of sciences and arts has contributed to the corruption or the purification of morality,” and culminates in his greatest work, “Émile,” in which he sets forth what he conceives as the only salvation of the corrupted race. “Émile” is the boldest assertion of this boldest child of Nature, and in the influence it has exercised upon the course of human thoughts and events we see the wonder of genius, and thus it will remain one of the rarest treasures in the educational literature of mankind. This book is, in the words of Niemeyer, like “a meteor which may blind and mislead a man, but at the same time can illumine regions into which the ordinary eye can only seldom penetrate.” Even Thomas Davidson, who shows little sympathy and poor appreciation of Rousseau, is obliged to acknowledge that “it has been given to few men to exert, with their thought, an influence so deep and pervasive as that of Rousseau,” and he traces the way in which this influence extended to “all departments of human activity, philosophy, science, religion, ethics, art, politics, economics, and pedagogy” (3: p. 224). Especially in regard to the last department, with which we are now concerned, we could truly say with Oscar Browning: “He stands astride across the field of education. Nothing comes after him which is not affected by him” (1: p. 153). So I might well add here that every one of us who is actually drinking