L'imagination dispose de tout. PASCAL Le bon sens est le maître de la vie humaine. BOSSUET L'homme est un être immense, en quelque sorte, qui peut exister partiellement, mais dont l'existence est d'autant plus délicieuse qu'elle est plus entière et plus pleine. JOUBERT INTRODUCTION 1 MANY readers will no doubt be tempted to exclaim on seeing my title: "Rousseau and no end!" The outpour of books on Rousseau had indeed in the period immediately preceding the war become somewhat portentous. This preoccupation with Rousseau is after all easy to explain. It is his somewhat formidable privilege to represent more fully than any other one person a great international movement. To attack Rousseau or to defend him is most often only a way of attacking or defending this movement. It is from this point of view at all events that the present work is conceived. I have not undertaken a systematic study of Rousseau's life and doctrines. The appearance of his name in my title is justified, if at all, simply because he comes at a fairly early stage in the international movement the rise and growth of which I am tracing, and has on the whole supplied me with the most significant illustrations of it. I have already put forth certain views regarding this movement in three previous volumes. Though each one of these volumes attempts to do justice to a particular topic, it is at the same time intended to be a link in a continuous argument. I hope that I may be allowed to speak here with some frankness of the main trend of this argument both on its negative and on its positive, or constructive, side. Perhaps the best key to both sides of my argument is found 1 See, for example, in vol. Ix of the Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau the bibliography (pp. 87-276) for 1912- the year of the bicentenary. 2 Literature and the American College (1908); The New Laokoon (1910); The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912)., |