Like such movements in the breast of the individual, those which stir an epoch have their principle in the same craving for disentanglement of life.
This impulse to shake off intricacies is the mark of revolutionary generations, and it was the starting-point of all Rousseau's mental habits, and of the work in which they expressed themselves.

His mind moved outwards from this centre, and hence the fact that he dealt principally with government and education, the two great agencies which, in an old civilisation with a thousand roots and feelers, surround external life and internal character with complexity.

Simplification of religion by clearing away the overgrowth of errors, simplification of social relations by equality, of literature and art by constant return to nature, of manners by industrious homeliness and thrift,--this is the revolutionary process and ideal, and this is the secret of Rousseau's hold over a generation that was lost amid the broken maze of fallen systems.
* * * * * The personality of Rousseau has most equivocal and repulsive sides.

It has deservedly fared ill in the esteem of the saner and more rational of those who have judged him, and there is none in the history of famous men and our spiritual fathers that begat us, who make more constant demands on the patience or pity of those who study his life.

Yet in no other instance is the common eagerness to condense all predication about a character into a single unqualified proposition so fatally inadequate.
If it is indispensable that we should be for ever describing, naming, classifying, at least it is well, in speaking of such a nature as his, to enlarge the vocabulary beyond the pedantic formulas of unreal ethics, and to be as sure as we know how to make ourselves, that each of the sympathies and faculties which together compose our power of spiritual observation, is in a condition of free and patient energy.