There is peril in all such leaders of souls, inasmuch as they incline men to substitute warmth for light, and to be content with aspiration where they need direction.

Yet no movement goes far which does not count one of them in the number of its chiefs.

Rousseau took this place among those who prepared the first act of that revolutionary drama, whose fifth act is still dark to us.
At the heart of the Revolution, like a torrid stream flowing undiscernible amid the waters of a tumbling sea, is a new way of understanding life.

The social changes desired by the various assailants of the old order are only the expression of a deeper change in moral idea, and the drift of the new moral idea is to make life simpler.

This in a sense is at the bottom of all great religious and moral movements, and the Revolution emphatically belongs to the latter class.