A return to nature, meaning by this the abolition of society, is the war-cry of the whole encyclopedic battalion. The same shout is heard in another quarter, coming the battalion of Rousseau and the socialists who, in their turn, march up to the assault of the established régime. The mining and the sapping of the walls practiced by the latter seems less extensive, but are nevertheless more effective, and the destructive machinery it employs consists of a new conception of human nature. This Rousseau has drawn exclusively from the spectacle in his own heart: [3328] Rousseau, a strange, original and superior man, who, from his infancy, harbored within him a germ of insanity, and who finally became wholly insane; a wonderful, ill-balanced mind in which sensations, emotions and images are too powerful: at once blind and perspicacious, a veritable poet and a morbid poet, who, instead of things and events beheld reveries, living in a romance and dying in a nightmare of his own creation; incapable of controlling and of behaving himself, confounding resolution with action, vague desire with resolution, and the role he assumed with the character he thought he possessed; wholly disproportionate to the ordinary ways of society, hitting, wounding and soiling himself against every hindrance on his way; at times extravagant, mean and criminal, yet preserving up to the end a delicate and profound sensibility, a humanity, pity, the gift of tears, the faculty of living, the passion for justice, the sentiment of religion and of enthusiasm, like so many vigorous roots in which generous sap is always fermenting, whilst the stem and the branches prove abortive and become deformed or wither under the inclemency of the atmosphere. How explain such a contrast? How did Rousseau himself account for it? A critic, a psychologist would merely regard him as a singular case, the effect of an extraordinarily discordant mental formation, analogous to that of Hamlet, Chatterton, René or Werther, adopted to poetic spheres, but unsuitable for real life. Rousseau generalizes; occupied with himself, even to infatuation, and, seeing only himself, he imagines mankind to be like himself, and "describes it as the feels it inside himself". His pride, moreover, finds this profitable; he is gratified at considering himself the prototype of humanity; the statue he erects of himself becomes more important; he rises in his own estimation when, in confessing to himself, he thinks he is confessing the human species. Rousseau convokes the assembly of generations with the trumpet of the day of judgment, and boldly stands up in the eyes of all men and of the Supreme Judge, exclaiming, "Let anyone say, if he dares: 'I was a better man than Thou!'"[3329] All his blemishes must be the fault of society; his vices and his baseness must be attributed to circumstances: