Rousseau, in spite of the belief which henceforth possessed him that he was the victim of a dark unfathomable plot, and in spite of passing outbreaks of gloomy rage, was incapable of steady glowing and active resentments. The world was not real enough to him for this. A throng of phantoms pressed noiselessly before his sight, and dulled all sense of more actual impression. "It is amazing," he wrote, "with what ease I forget past ill, however fresh it may be. In proportion as the anticipation of it alarms and confuses me when I see it coming, so the memory of it returns feebly to my mind and dies out the moment after it has arrived. My cruel imagination, which torments itself incessantly in anticipating woes that are still unborn, makes a diversion for my memory, and hinders me from recalling those which have gone. I exhaust disaster beforehand. The more I have suffered in foreseeing it, the more easily do I forget it; while on the contrary, being incessantly busy with my past happiness, I recall it and brood and ruminate over it, so as to enjoy it over again whenever I wish."[97] The same turn of humour saved him from vindictiveness. "I concern myself too little with the offence, to feel much concern about the offender. I only think of the hurt that I have received from him, on account of the hurt that he may still do me; and if I were sure he would do me no more, what he had already done would be forgotten straightway." Though he does not carry the analysis any further, we may easily perceive that the same explanation covers what he called his natural ingratitude. Kindness was not much more vividly understood by him than malice. It was only one form of the troublesome interposition of an outer world in his life; he was fain to hurry back from it to the real world of his dreams. If any man called practical is tempted to despise this dreaming creature, as he fares in his chaise from stage to stage, let him remember that one making that journey through France less than thirty years later might have seen the castles of the great flaring in the destruction of a most righteous vengeance, the great themselves fleeing ignobly from the land to which their selfishness, and heedlessness, and hatred of improvement, and inhuman pride had been a curse, while the legion of toilers with eyes blinded by the oppression of ages were groping with passionate uncertain hand for that divine something which they thought of as justice and right. And this was what Rousseau both partially foresaw and helped to prepare,[98] while the common politicians, like Choiseul or D'Aiguillon, played their poor game--the elemental forces rising unseen into tempest around them.