BOOK I

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EMILE

By Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Translated by Barbara Foxley

Author's Preface

This collection of scattered thoughts and observations has little

order or continuity; it was begun to give pleasure to a good mother

who thinks for herself. My first idea was to write a tract a few

pages long, but I was carried away by my subject, and before I knew

what I was doing my tract had become a kind of book, too large indeed

for the matter contained in it, but too small for the subject of

which it treats. For a long time I hesitated whether to publish

it or not, and I have often felt, when at work upon it, that it is

one thing to publish a few pamphlets and another to write a book.

After vain attempts to improve it, I have decided that it is my

duty to publish it as it stands. I consider that public attention

requires to be directed to this subject, and even if my own ideas

are mistaken, my time will not have been wasted if I stir up others

to form right ideas. A solitary who casts his writings before the

public without any one to advertise them, without any party ready

to defend them, one who does not even know what is thought and said

about those writings, is at least free from one anxiety--if he is

mistaken, no one will take his errors for gospel.

I shall say very little about the value of a good education, nor

shall I stop to prove that the customary method of education is bad;

this has been done again and again, and I do not wish to fill my

book with things which everyone knows. I will merely state that, go

as far back as you will, you will find a continual outcry against

the established method, but no attempt to suggest a better. The

literature and science of our day tend rather to destroy than to

build up. We find fault after the manner of a master; to suggest,

we must adopt another style, a style less in accordance with the

pride of the philosopher. In spite of all those books, whose only

aim, so they say, is public utility, the most useful of all arts,

the art of training men, is still neglected. Even after Locke's

book was written the subject remained almost untouched, and I fear

that my book will leave it pretty much as it found it.

We know nothing of childhood; and with our mistaken notions the

further we advance the further we go astray. The wisest writers

devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking what

a child is capable of learning. They are always looking for the

man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes

a man. It is to this study that I have chiefly devoted myself,

so that if my method is fanciful and unsound, my observations may

still be of service. I may be greatly mistaken as to what ought to

be done, but I think I have clearly perceived the material which

is to be worked upon. Begin thus by making a more careful study of

your scholars, for it is clear that you know nothing about them;

yet if you read this book with that end in view, I think you will

find that it is not entirely useless.

With regard to what will be called the systematic portion of the

book, which is nothing more than the course of nature, it is here

that the reader will probably go wrong, and no doubt I shall be

attacked on this side, and perhaps my critics may be right. You

will tell me, "This is not so much a treatise on education as the

visions of a dreamer with regard to education." What can I do? I have

not written about other people's ideas of education, but about my

own. My thoughts are not those of others; this reproach has been

brought against me again and again. But is it within my power

to furnish myself with other eyes, or to adopt other ideas? It is

within my power to refuse to be wedded to my own opinions and to

refuse to think myself wiser than others. I cannot change my mind;

I can distrust myself. This is all I can do, and this I have done.

If I sometimes adopt a confident tone, it is not to impress the

reader, it is to make my meaning plain to him. Why should I profess

to suggest as doubtful that which is not a matter of doubt to

myself? I say just what I think.

When I freely express my opinion, I have so little idea of claiming

authority that I always give my reasons, so that you may weigh

and judge them for yourselves; but though I would not obstinately

defend my ideas, I think it my duty to put them forward; for the

principles with regard to which I differ from other writers are

not matters of indifference; we must know whether they are true or

false, for on them depends the happiness or the misery of mankind.

People are always telling me to make PRACTICABLE suggestions. You

might as well tell me to suggest what people are doing already,

or at least to suggest improvements which may be incorporated with

the wrong methods at present in use. There are matters with regard

to which such a suggestion is far more chimerical than my own,

for in such a connection the good is corrupted and the bad is none

the better for it. I would rather follow exactly the established

method than adopt a better method by halves. There would be fewer

contradictions in the man; he cannot aim at one and the same time

at two different objects. Fathers and mothers, what you desire that

you can do. May I count on your goodwill?

There are two things to be considered with regard to any scheme.

In the first place, "Is it good in itself" In the second, "Can it

be easily put into practice?"

With regard to the first of these it is enough that the scheme

should be intelligible and feasible in itself, that what is good

in it should be adapted to the nature of things, in this case, for

example, that the proposed method of education should be suitable

to man and adapted to the human heart.

The second consideration depends upon certain given conditions in

particular cases; these conditions are accidental and therefore

variable; they may vary indefinitely. Thus one kind of education

would be possible in Switzerland and not in France; another would be

adapted to the middle classes but not to the nobility. The scheme

can be carried out, with more or less success, according to a

multitude of circumstances, and its results can only be determined

by its special application to one country or another, to this class

or that. Now all these particular applications are not essential

to my subject, and they form no part of my scheme. It is enough

for me that, wherever men are born into the world, my suggestions

with regard to them may be carried out, and when you have made them

what I would have them be, you have done what is best for them and

best for other people. If I fail to fulfil this promise, no doubt

I am to blame; but if I fulfil my promise, it is your own fault if

you ask anything more of me, for I have promised you nothing more.

BOOK I

God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become

evil. He forces one soil to yield the products of another, one tree

to bear another's fruit. He confuses and confounds time, place,

and natural conditions. He mutilates his dog, his horse, and his

slave. He destroys and defaces all things; he loves all that is

deformed and monstrous; he will have nothing as nature made it,

not even man himself, who must learn his paces like a saddle-horse,

and be shaped to his master's taste like the trees in his garden.

Yet things would be worse without this education, and mankind cannot

be made by halves. Under existing conditions a man left to himself

from birth would be more of a monster than the rest. Prejudice,

authority, necessity, example, all the social conditions into which

we are plunged, would stifle nature in him and put nothing in her

place. She would be like a sapling chance sown in the midst of the

highway, bent hither and thither and soon crushed by the passers-by.

Tender, anxious mother, [Footnote: The earliest education is

most important and it undoubtedly is woman's work. If the author

of nature had meant to assign it to men he would have given them

milk to feed the child. Address your treatises on education to the

women, for not only are they able to watch over it more closely than

men, not only is their influence always predominant in education,

its success concerns them more nearly, for most widows are at the

mercy of their children, who show them very plainly whether their

education was good or bad. The laws, always more concerned about

property than about people, since their object is not virtue but

peace, the laws give too little authority to the mother. Yet her

position is more certain than that of the father, her duties are

more trying; the right ordering of the family depends more upon

her, and she is usually fonder of her children. There are occasions

when a son may be excused for lack of respect for his father, but

if a child could be so unnatural as to fail in respect for the

mother who bore him and nursed him at her breast, who for so many

years devoted herself to his care, such a monstrous wretch should

be smothered at once as unworthy to live. You say mothers spoil

their children, and no doubt that is wrong, but it is worse to

deprave them as you do. The mother wants her child to be happy

now. She is right, and if her method is wrong, she must be taught

a better. Ambition, avarice, tyranny, the mistaken foresight of fathers,

their neglect, their harshness, are a hundredfold more harmful to

the child than the blind affection of the mother. Moreover, I must

explain what I mean by a mother and that explanation follows.] I

appeal to you. You can remove this young tree from the highway and

shield it from the crushing force of social conventions. Tend and

water it ere it dies. One day its fruit will reward your care.

From the outset raise a wall round your child's soul; another may

sketch the plan, you alone should carry it into execution.

Plants are fashioned by cultivation, man by education. If a man

were born tall and strong, his size and strength would be of no

good to him till he had learnt to use them; they would even harm

him by preventing others from coming to his aid; [Footnote: Like

them in externals, but without speech and without the ideas which

are expressed by speech, he would be unable to make his wants known,

while there would be nothing in his appearance to suggest that he

needed their help.] left to himself he would die of want before he

knew his needs. We lament the helplessness of infancy; we fail to

perceive that the race would have perished had not man begun by

being a child.

We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish,

we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when

we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.

This education comes to us from nature, from men, or from things.

The inner growth of our organs and faculties is the education of

nature, the use we learn to make of this growth is the education

of men, what we gain by our experience of our surroundings is the

education of things.

Thus we are each taught by three masters. If their teaching

conflicts, the scholar is ill-educated and will never be at peace

with himself; if their teaching agrees, he goes straight to his

goal, he lives at peace with himself, he is well-educated.

Now of these three factors in education nature is wholly beyond

our control, things are only partly in our power; the education of

men is the only one controlled by us; and even here our power is

largely illusory, for who can hope to direct every word and deed

of all with whom the child has to do.

Viewed as an art, the success of education is almost impossible,

since the essential conditions of success are beyond our control.

Our efforts may bring us within sight of the goal, but fortune must

favour us if we are to reach it.

What is this goal? As we have just shown, it is the goal of nature.

Since all three modes of education must work together, the two

that we can control must follow the lead of that which is beyond

our control. Perhaps this word Nature has too vague a meaning. Let

us try to define it.

Nature, we are told, is merely habit. What does that mean? Are there

not habits formed under compulsion, habits which never stifle nature?

Such, for example, are the habits of plants trained horizontally.

The plant keeps its artificial shape, but the sap has not changed

its course, and any new growth the plant may make will be vertical.

It is the same with a man's disposition; while the conditions remain

the same, habits, even the least natural of them, hold good; but

change the conditions, habits vanish, nature reasserts herself.

Education itself is but habit, for are there not people who forget

or lose their education and others who keep it? Whence comes

this difference? If the term nature is to be restricted to habits

conformable to nature we need say no more.

We are born sensitive and from our birth onwards we are affected

in various ways by our environment. As soon as we become conscious

of our sensations we tend to seek or shun the things that cause

them, at first because they are pleasant or unpleasant, then because

they suit us or not, and at last because of judgments formed by

means of the ideas of happiness and goodness which reason gives

us. These tendencies gain strength and permanence with the growth

of reason, but hindered by our habits they are more or less warped

by our prejudices. Before this change they are what I call Nature

within us.

Everything should therefore be brought into harmony with these

natural tendencies, and that might well be if our three modes of

education merely differed from one another; but what can be done

when they conflict, when instead of training man for himself you

try to train him for others? Harmony becomes impossible. Forced to

combat either nature or society, you must make your choice between

the man and the citizen, you cannot train both.

The smaller social group, firmly united in itself and dwelling

apart from others, tends to withdraw itself from the larger society.

Every patriot hates foreigners; they are only men, and nothing to

him.[Footnote: Thus the wars of republics are more cruel than those

of monarchies. But if the wars of kings are less cruel, their peace

is terrible; better be their foe than their subject.] This defect

is inevitable, but of little importance. The great thing is to be

kind to our neighbours. Among strangers the Spartan was selfish,

grasping, and unjust, but unselfishness, justice, and harmony ruled

his home life. Distrust those cosmopolitans who search out remote

duties in their books and neglect those that lie nearest. Such

philosophers will love the Tartars to avoid loving their neighbour.

The natural man lives for himself; he is the unit, the whole,

dependent only on himself and on his like. The citizen is but the

numerator of a fraction, whose value depends on its denominator;

his value depends upon the whole, that is, on the community. Good

social institutions are those best fitted to make a man unnatural,

to exchange his independence for dependence, to merge the unit

in the group, so that he no longer regards himself as one, but as

a part of the whole, and is only conscious of the common life. A

citizen of Rome was neither Caius nor Lucius, he was a Roman; he

ever loved his country better than his life. The captive Regulus

professed himself a Carthaginian; as a foreigner he refused to take

his seat in the Senate except at his master's bidding. He scorned

the attempt to save his life. He had his will, and returned in

triumph to a cruel death. There is no great likeness between Regulus

and the men of our own day.

The Spartan Pedaretes presented himself for admission to the council

of the Three Hundred and was rejected; he went away rejoicing that

there were three hundred Spartans better than himself. I suppose he

was in earnest; there is no reason to doubt it. That was a citizen.

A Spartan mother had five sons with the army. A Helot arrived;

trembling she asked his news. "Your five sons are slain." "Vile

slave, was that what I asked thee?" "We have won the victory."

She hastened to the temple to render thanks to the gods. That was

a citizen.

He who would preserve the supremacy of natural feelings in social

life knows not what he asks. Ever at war with himself, hesitating

between his wishes and his duties, he will be neither a man nor

a citizen. He will be of no use to himself nor to others. He will

be a man of our day, a Frenchman, an Englishman, one of the great

middle class.

To be something, to be himself, and always at one with himself, a

man must act as he speaks, must know what course he ought to take,

and must follow that course with vigour and persistence. When I

meet this miracle it will be time enough to decide whether he is

a man or a citizen, or how he contrives to be both.

Two conflicting types of educational systems spring from these

conflicting aims. One is public and common to many, the other

private and domestic.

If you wish to know what is meant by public education, read Plato's

Republic. Those who merely judge books by their titles take this for

a treatise on politics, but it is the finest treatise on education

ever written.

In popular estimation the Platonic Institute stands for all that

is fanciful and unreal. For my own part I should have thought the

system of Lycurgus far more impracticable had he merely committed

it to writing. Plato only sought to purge man's heart; Lycurgus

turned it from its natural course.

The public institute does not and cannot exist, for there is neither

country nor patriot. The very words should be struck out of our

language. The reason does not concern us at present, so that though

I know it I refrain from stating it.

I do not consider our ridiculous colleges [Footnote: There are

teachers dear to me in many schools and especially in the University

of Paris, men for whom I have a great respect, men whom I believe

to be quite capable of instructing young people, if they were not

compelled to follow the established custom. I exhort one of them

to publish the scheme of reform which he has thought out. Perhaps

people would at length seek to cure the evil if they realised that

there was a remedy.] as public institutes, nor do I include under

this head a fashionable education, for this education facing two

ways at once achieves nothing. It is only fit to turn out hypocrites,

always professing to live for others, while thinking of themselves

alone. These professions, however, deceive no one, for every one

has his share in them; they are so much labour wasted.

Our inner conflicts are caused by these contradictions. Drawn

this way by nature and that way by man, compelled to yield to both

forces, we make a compromise and reach neither goal. We go through

life, struggling and hesitating, and die before we have found peace,

useless alike to ourselves and to others.

There remains the education of the home or of nature; but how will

a man live with others if he is educated for himself alone? If

the twofold aims could be resolved into one by removing the man's

self-contradictions, one great obstacle to his happiness would be

gone. To judge of this you must see the man full-grown; you must

have noted his inclinations, watched his progress, followed his

steps; in a word you must really know a natural man. When you have

read this work, I think you will have made some progress in this

inquiry.

What must be done to train this exceptional man! We can do much,

but the chief thing is to prevent anything being done. To sail

against the wind we merely follow one tack and another; to keep our

position in a stormy sea we must cast anchor. Beware, young pilot,

lest your boat slip its cable or drag its anchor before you know

it.

In the social order where each has his own place a man must be

educated for it. If such a one leave his own station he is fit for

nothing else. His education is only useful when fate agrees with

his parents' choice; if not, education harms the scholar, if only

by the prejudices it has created. In Egypt, where the son was

compelled to adopt his father's calling, education had at least

a settled aim; where social grades remain fixed, but the men who

form them are constantly changing, no one knows whether he is not

harming his son by educating him for his own class.

In the natural order men are all equal and their common calling

is that of manhood, so that a well-educated man cannot fail to do

well in that calling and those related to it. It matters little to

me whether my pupil is intended for the army, the church, or the

law. Before his parents chose a calling for him nature called him

to be a man. Life is the trade I would teach him. When he leaves

me, I grant you, he will be neither a magistrate, a soldier, nor a

priest; he will be a man. All that becomes a man he will learn as

quickly as another. In vain will fate change his station, he will

always be in his right place. "Occupavi te, fortuna, atque cepi;

omnes-que aditus tuos interclusi, ut ad me aspirare non posses."

The real object of our study is man and his environment. To my mind

those of us who can best endure the good and evil of life are the

best educated; hence it follows that true education consists less

in precept than in practice. We begin to learn when we begin to

live; our education begins with ourselves, our first teacher is

our nurse. The ancients used the word "Education" in a different

sense, it meant "Nurture." "Educit obstetrix," says Varro. "Educat

nutrix, instituit paedagogus, docet magister." Thus, education,

discipline, and instruction are three things as different in

their purpose as the dame, the usher, and the teacher. But these

distinctions are undesirable and the child should only follow one

guide.

We must therefore look at the general rather than the particular,

and consider our scholar as man in the abstract, man exposed to all

the changes and chances of mortal life. If men were born attached

to the soil of our country, if one season lasted all the year round,

if every man's fortune were so firmly grasped that he could never

lose it, then the established method of education would have

certain advantages; the child brought up to his own calling would

never leave it, he could never have to face the difficulties of

any other condition. But when we consider the fleeting nature of

human affairs, the restless and uneasy spirit of our times, when

every generation overturns the work of its predecessor, can we

conceive a more senseless plan than to educate a child as if he

would never leave his room, as if he would always have his servants

about him? If the wretched creature takes a single step up or down

he is lost. This is not teaching him to bear pain; it is training

him to feel it.

People think only of preserving their child's life; this is not

enough, he must be taught to preserve his own life when he is a

man, to bear the buffets of fortune, to brave wealth and poverty,

to live at need among the snows of Iceland or on the scorching rocks

of Malta. In vain you guard against death; he must needs die; and

even if you do not kill him with your precautions, they are mistaken.

Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath,

but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every

part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life

consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living.

A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all.

He would have fared better had he died young.

Our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control,

constraint, compulsion. Civilised man is born and dies a slave.

The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed

down in his coffin. All his life long man is imprisoned by our

institutions.

I am told that many midwives profess to improve the shape of the

infant's head by rubbing, and they are allowed to do it. Our heads

are not good enough as God made them, they must be moulded outside

by the nurse and inside by the philosopher. The Caribs are better

off than we are. The child has hardly left the mother's womb, it

has hardly begun to move and stretch its limbs, when it is deprived

of its freedom. It is wrapped in swaddling bands, laid down with

its head fixed, its legs stretched out, and its arms by its sides;

it is wound round with linen and bandages of all sorts so that it

cannot move. It is fortunate if it has room to breathe, and it is

laid on its side so that water which should flow from its mouth can

escape, for it is not free to turn its head on one side for this

purpose.

The new-born child requires to stir and stretch his limbs to free

them from the stiffness resulting from being curled up so long.

His limbs are stretched indeed, but he is not allowed to move them.

Even the head is confined by a cap. One would think they were afraid

the child should look as if it were alive.

Thus the internal impulses which should lead to growth find an

insurmountable obstacle in the way of the necessary movements. The

child exhausts his strength in vain struggles, or he gains strength

very slowly. He was freer and less constrained in the womb; he has

gained nothing by birth.

The inaction, the constraint to which the child's limbs are subjected

can only check the circulation of the blood and humours; it can

only hinder the child's growth in size and strength, and injure its

constitution. Where these absurd precautions are absent, all the

men are tall, strong, and well-made. Where children are swaddled,

the country swarms with the hump-backed, the lame, the bow-legged,

the rickety, and every kind of deformity. In our fear lest the

body should become deformed by free movement, we hasten to deform

it by putting it in a press. We make our children helpless lest

they should hurt themselves.

Is not such a cruel bondage certain to affect both health and temper?

Their first feeling is one of pain and suffering; they find every

necessary movement hampered; more miserable than a galley slave, in

vain they struggle, they become angry, they cry. Their first words

you say are tears. That is so. From birth you are always checking

them, your first gifts are fetters, your first treatment, torture.

Their voice alone is free; why should they not raise it in complaint?

They cry because you are hurting them; if you were swaddled you

would cry louder still.

What is the origin of this senseless and unnatural custom? Since

mothers have despised their first duty and refused to nurse their

own children, they have had to be entrusted to hired nurses. Finding

themselves the mothers of a stranger's children, without the ties

of nature, they have merely tried to save themselves trouble.

A child unswaddled would need constant watching; well swaddled it

is cast into a corner and its cries are unheeded. So long as the

nurse's negligence escapes notice, so long as the nursling does

not break its arms or legs, what matter if it dies or becomes a

weakling for life. Its limbs are kept safe at the expense of its

body, and if anything goes wrong it is not the nurse's fault.

These gentle mothers, having got rid of their babies, devote

themselves gaily to the pleasures of the town. Do they know how

their children are being treated in the villages? If the nurse is at

all busy, the child is hung up on a nail like a bundle of clothes

and is left crucified while the nurse goes leisurely about her

business. Children have been found in this position purple in the

face, their tightly bandaged chest forbade the circulation of the

blood, and it went to the head; so the sufferer was considered very

quiet because he had not strength to cry. How long a child might

survive under such conditions I do not know, but it could not be

long. That, I fancy, is one of the chief advantages of swaddling

clothes.

It is maintained that unswaddled infants would assume faulty positions

and make movements which might injure the proper development of

their limbs. That is one of the empty arguments of our false wisdom

which has never been confirmed by experience. Out of all the crowds

of children who grow up with the full use of their limbs among

nations wiser than ourselves, you never find one who hurts himself

or maims himself; their movements are too feeble to be dangerous,

and when they assume an injurious position, pain warns them to

change it.

We have not yet decided to swaddle our kittens and puppies; are

they any the worse for this neglect? Children are heavier, I admit,

but they are also weaker. They can scarcely move, how could they

hurt themselves! If you lay them on their backs, they will lie

there till they die, like the turtle, unable to turn itself over.

Not content with having ceased to suckle their children, women no

longer wish to do it; with the natural result motherhood becomes a

burden; means are found to avoid it. They will destroy their work

to begin it over again, and they thus turn to the injury of the race

the charm which was given them for its increase. This practice, with

other causes of depopulation, forbodes the coming fate of Europe.

Her arts and sciences, her philosophy and morals, will shortly

reduce her to a desert. She will be the home of wild beasts, and

her inhabitants will hardly have changed for the worse.

I have sometimes watched the tricks of young wives who pretend

that they wish to nurse their own children. They take care to be

dissuaded from this whim. They contrive that husbands, doctors,

and especially mothers should intervene. If a husband should let

his wife nurse her own baby it would be the ruin of him; they would

make him out a murderer who wanted to be rid of her. A prudent husband

must sacrifice paternal affection to domestic peace. Fortunately

for you there are women in the country districts more continent than

your wives. You are still more fortunate if the time thus gained

is not intended for another than yourself.

There can be no doubt about a wife's duty, but, considering the

contempt in which it is held, it is doubtful whether it is not

just as good for the child to be suckled by a stranger. This is

a question for the doctors to settle, and in my opinion they have

settled it according to the women's wishes, [Footnote: The league

between the women and the doctors has always struck me as one of

the oddest things in Paris. The doctors' reputation depends on the

women, and by means of the doctors the women get their own way.

It is easy to see what qualifications a doctor requires in Paris

if he is to become celebrated.] and for my own part I think it is

better that the child should suck the breast of a healthy nurse

rather than of a petted mother, if he has any further evil to fear

from her who has given him birth.

Ought the question, however, to be considered only from the

physiological point of view? Does not the child need a mother's

care as much as her milk? Other women, or even other animals, may

give him the milk she denies him, but there is no substitute for

a mother's love.

The woman who nurses another's child in place of her own is a bad

mother; how can she be a good nurse? She may become one in time;

use will overcome nature, but the child may perish a hundred times

before his nurse has developed a mother's affection for him.

And this affection when developed has its drawbacks, which should

make any feeling woman afraid to put her child out to nurse. Is

she prepared to divide her mother's rights, or rather to abdicate

them in favour of a stranger; to see her child loving another more

than herself; to feel that the affection he retains for his own

mother is a favour, while his love for his foster-mother is a duty;

for is not some affection due where there has been a mother's care?

To remove this difficulty, children are taught to look down on

their nurses, to treat them as mere servants. When their task is

completed the child is withdrawn or the nurse is dismissed. Her

visits to her foster-child are discouraged by a cold reception. After

a few years the child never sees her again. The mother expects to

take her place, and to repair by her cruelty the results of her own

neglect. But she is greatly mistaken; she is making an ungrateful

foster-child, not an affectionate son; she is teaching him ingratitude,

and she is preparing him to despise at a later day the mother who

bore him, as he now despises his nurse.

How emphatically would I speak if it were not so hopeless to keep

struggling in vain on behalf of a real reform. More depends on

this than you realise. Would you restore all men to their primal

duties, begin with the mothers; the results will surprise you.

Every evil follows in the train of this first sin; the whole moral

order is disturbed, nature is quenched in every breast, the home

becomes gloomy, the spectacle of a young family no longer stirs

the husband's love and the stranger's reverence. The mother whose

children are out of sight wins scanty esteem; there is no home

life, the ties of nature are not strengthened by those of habit;

fathers, mothers, children, brothers, and sisters cease to exist.

They are almost strangers; how should they love one another? Each

thinks of himself first. When the home is a gloomy solitude pleasure

will be sought elsewhere.

But when mothers deign to nurse their own children, then will be

a reform in morals; natural feeling will revive in every heart;

there will be no lack of citizens for the state; this first step

by itself will restore mutual affection. The charms of home are

the best antidote to vice. The noisy play of children, which we

thought so trying, becomes a delight; mother and father rely more

on each other and grow dearer to one another; the marriage tie is

strengthened. In the cheerful home life the mother finds her sweetest

duties and the father his pleasantest recreation. Thus the cure of

this one evil would work a wide-spread reformation; nature would

regain her rights. When women become good mothers, men will be good

husbands and fathers.

My words are vain! When we are sick of worldly pleasures we do

not return to the pleasures of the home. Women have ceased to be

mothers, they do not and will not return to their duty. Could they

do it if they would? The contrary custom is firmly established; each

would have to overcome the opposition of her neighbours, leagued

together against the example which some have never given and others

do not desire to follow.

Yet there are still a few young women of good natural disposition

who refuse to be the slaves of fashion and rebel against the

clamour of other women, who fulfil the sweet task imposed on them

by nature. Would that the reward in store for them might draw

others to follow their example. My conclusion is based upon plain

reason, and upon facts I have never seen disputed; and I venture

to promise these worthy mothers the firm and steadfast affection

of their husbands and the truly filial love of their children and

the respect of all the world. Child-birth will be easy and will

leave no ill-results, their health will be strong and vigorous, and

they will see their daughters follow their example, and find that

example quoted as a pattern to others.

No mother, no child; their duties are reciprocal, and when ill done

by the one they will be neglected by the other. The child should

love his mother before he knows what he owes her. If the voice of

instinct is not strengthened by habit it soon dies, the heart is

still-born. From the outset we have strayed from the path of nature.

There is another by-way which may tempt our feet from the path of

nature. The mother may lavish excessive care on her child instead

of neglecting him; she may make an idol of him; she may develop

and increase his weakness to prevent him feeling it; she wards

off every painful experience in the hope of withdrawing him from

the power of nature, and fails to realise that for every trifling

ill from which she preserves him the future holds in store many

accidents and dangers, and that it is a cruel kindness to prolong

the child's weakness when the grown man must bear fatigue.

Thetis, so the story goes, plunged her son in the waters of Styx to

make him invulnerable. The truth of this allegory is apparent. The

cruel mothers I speak of do otherwise; they plunge their children

into softness, and they are preparing suffering for them, they open

the way to every kind of ill, which their children will not fail

to experience after they grow up.

Fix your eyes on nature, follow the path traced by her. She keeps

children at work, she hardens them by all kinds of difficulties,

she soon teaches them the meaning of pain and grief. They cut their

teeth and are feverish, sharp colics bring on convulsions, they

are choked by fits of coughing and tormented by worms, evil humours

corrupt the blood, germs of various kinds ferment in it, causing

dangerous eruptions. Sickness and danger play the chief part in

infancy. One half of the children who are born die before their

eighth year. The child who has overcome hardships has gained strength,

and as soon as he can use his life he holds it more securely.

This is nature's law; why contradict it? Do you not see that in

your efforts to improve upon her handiwork you are destroying it;

her cares are wasted? To do from without what she does within is

according to you to increase the danger twofold. On the contrary,

it is the way to avert it; experience shows that children delicately

nurtured are more likely to die. Provided we do not overdo it, there

is less risk in using their strength than in sparing it. Accustom

them therefore to the hardships they will have to face; train them

to endure extremes of temperature, climate, and condition, hunger,

thirst, and weariness. Dip them in the waters of Styx. Before bodily

habits become fixed you may teach what habits you will without any

risk, but once habits are established any change is fraught with

peril. A child will bear changes which a man cannot bear, the muscles

of the one are soft and flexible, they take whatever direction

you give them without any effort; the muscles of the grown man are

harder and they only change their accustomed mode of action when

subjected to violence. So we can make a child strong without risking

his life or health, and even if there were some risk, it should not

be taken into consideration. Since human life is full of dangers,

can we do better than face them at a time when they can do the

least harm?

A child's worth increases with his years. To his personal value

must be added the cost of the care bestowed upon him. For himself

there is not only loss of life, but the consciousness of death.

We must therefore think most of his future in our efforts for his

preservation. He must be protected against the ills of youth before

he reaches them: for if the value of life increases until the child

reaches an age when he can be useful, what madness to spare some

suffering in infancy only to multiply his pain when he reaches the

age of reason. Is that what our master teaches us?

Man is born to suffer; pain is the means of his preservation.

His childhood is happy, knowing only pain of body. These bodily

sufferings are much less cruel, much less painful, than other forms

of suffering, and they rarely lead to self-destruction. It is not

the twinges of gout which make a man kill himself, it is mental

suffering that leads to despair. We pity the sufferings of childhood;

we should pity ourselves; our worst sorrows are of our own making.

The new-born infant cries, his early days are spent in crying. He

is alternately petted and shaken by way of soothing him; sometimes

he is threatened, sometimes beaten, to keep him quiet. We do what

he wants or we make him do what we want, we submit to his whims or

subject him to our own. There is no middle course; he must rule or

obey. Thus his earliest ideas are those of the tyrant or the slave.

He commands before he can speak, he obeys before he can act, and

sometimes he is punished for faults before he is aware of them, or

rather before they are committed. Thus early are the seeds of evil

passions sown in his young heart. At a later day these are attributed

to nature, and when we have taken pains to make him bad we lament

his badness.

In this way the child passes six or seven years in the hands of

women, the victim of his own caprices or theirs, and after they

have taught him all sorts of things, when they have burdened his

memory with words he cannot understand, or things which are of no

use to him, when nature has been stifled by the passions they have

implanted in him, this sham article is sent to a tutor. The tutor

completes the development of the germs of artificiality which he finds

already well grown, he teaches him everything except self-knowledge

and self-control, the arts of life and happiness. When at length

this infant slave and tyrant, crammed with knowledge but empty of

sense, feeble alike in mind and body, is flung upon the world, and

his helplessness, his pride, and his other vices are displayed,

we begin to lament the wretchedness and perversity of mankind. We

are wrong; this is the creature of our fantasy; the natural man is

cast in another mould.

Would you keep him as nature made him? Watch over him from his

birth. Take possession of him as soon as he comes into the world

and keep him till he is a man; you will never succeed otherwise.

The real nurse is the mother and the real teacher is the father.

Let them agree in the ordering of their duties as well as in their

method, let the child pass from one to the other. He will be better

educated by a sensible though ignorant father than by the cleverest

master in the world. For zeal will atone for lack of knowledge,

rather than knowledge for lack of zeal. But the duties of public

and private business! Duty indeed! Does a father's duty come last.

[Footnote: When we read in Plutarch that Cato the Censor, who ruled

Rome with such glory, brought up his own sons from the cradle,

and so carefully that he left everything to be present when their

nurse, that is to say their mother, bathed them; when we read

in Suetonius that Augustus, the master of the world which he had

conquered and which he himself governed, himself taught his grandsons

to write, to swim, to understand the beginnings of science, and that

he always had them with him, we cannot help smiling at the little

people of those days who amused themselves with such follies, and

who were too ignorant, no doubt, to attend to the great affairs

of the great people of our own time.] It is not surprising that

the man whose wife despises the duty of suckling her child should

despise its education. There is no more charming picture than

that of family life; but when one feature is wanting the whole is

marred. If the mother is too delicate to nurse her child, the father

will be too busy to teach him. Their children, scattered about

in schools, convents, and colleges, will find the home of their

affections elsewhere, or rather they will form the habit of caring

for nothing. Brothers and sisters will scarcely know each other;

when they are together in company they will behave as strangers.

When there is no confidence between relations, when the family

society ceases to give savour to life, its place is soon usurped

by vice. Is there any man so stupid that he cannot see how all this

hangs together?

A father has done but a third of his task when he begets children

and provides a living for them. He owes men to humanity, citizens

to the state. A man who can pay this threefold debt and neglect to

do so is guilty, more guilty, perhaps, if he pays it in part than

when he neglects it entirely. He has no right to be a father if

he cannot fulfil a father's duties. Poverty, pressure of business,

mistaken social prejudices, none of these can excuse a man from his

duty, which is to support and educate his own children. If a man

of any natural feeling neglects these sacred duties he will repent

it with bitter tears and will never be comforted.

But what does this rich man do, this father of a family, compelled,

so he says, to neglect his children? He pays another man to perform

those duties which are his alone. Mercenary man! do you expect to

purchase a second father for your child? Do not deceive yourself;

it is not even a master you have hired for him, it is a flunkey,

who will soon train such another as himself.

There is much discussion as to the characteristics of a good

tutor. My first requirement, and it implies a good many more, is

that he should not take up his task for reward. There are callings

so great that they cannot be undertaken for money without showing

our unfitness for them; such callings are those of the soldier and

the teacher.

"But who must train my child?" "I have just told you, you should

do it yourself." "I cannot." "You cannot! Then find a friend. I

see no other course."

A tutor! What a noble soul! Indeed for the training of a man one

must either be a father or more than man. It is this duty you would

calmly hand over to a hireling!

The more you think of it the harder you will find it. The tutor

must have been trained for his pupil, his servants must have been

trained for their master, so that all who come near him may have

received the impression which is to be transmitted to him. We must

pass from education to education, I know not how far. How can a

child be well educated by one who has not been well educated himself!

Can such a one be found? I know not. In this age of degradation who

knows the height of virtue to which man's soul may attain? But let

us assume that this prodigy has been discovered. We shall learn

what he should be from the consideration of his duties. I fancy the

father who realises the value of a good tutor will contrive to do

without one, for it will be harder to find one than to become such

a tutor himself; he need search no further, nature herself having

done half the work.

Some one whose rank alone is known to me suggested that I should

educate his son. He did me a great honour, no doubt, but far from

regretting my refusal, he ought to congratulate himself on my

prudence. Had the offer been accepted, and had I been mistaken in

my method, there would have been an education ruined; had I succeeded,

things would have been worse--his son would have renounced his

title and refused to be a prince.

I feel too deeply the importance of a tutor's duties and my own

unfitness, ever to accept such a post, whoever offered it, and

even the claims of friendship would be only an additional motive

for my refusal. Few, I think, will be tempted to make me such an

offer when they have read this book, and I beg any one who would

do so to spare his pains. I have had enough experience of the task

to convince myself of my own unfitness, and my circumstances would

make it impossible, even if my talents were such as to fit me for

it. I have thought it my duty to make this public declaration to

those who apparently refuse to do me the honour of believing in

the sincerity of my determination. If I am unable to undertake the

more useful task, I will at least venture to attempt the easier

one; I will follow the example of my predecessors and take up, not

the task, but my pen; and instead of doing the right thing I will

try to say it.

I know that in such an undertaking the author, who ranges at will

among theoretical systems, utters many fine precepts impossible

to practise, and even when he says what is practicable it remains

undone for want of details and examples as to its application.

I have therefore decided to take an imaginary pupil, to assume on

my own part the age, health, knowledge, and talents required for

the work of his education, to guide him from birth to manhood, when

he needs no guide but himself. This method seems to me useful for

an author who fears lest he may stray from the practical to the

visionary; for as soon as he departs from common practice he has

only to try his method on his pupil; he will soon know, or the

reader will know for him, whether he is following the development

of the child and the natural growth of the human heart.

This is what I have tried to do. Lest my book should be unduly

bulky, I have been content to state those principles the truth of

which is self-evident. But as to the rules which call for proof, I

have applied them to Emile or to others, and I have shown, in very

great detail, how my theories may be put into practice. Such at

least is my plan; the reader must decide whether I have succeeded.

At first I have said little about Emile, for my earliest maxims

of education, though very different from those generally accepted,

are so plain that it is hard for a man of sense to refuse to accept

them, but as I advance, my scholar, educated after another fashion

than yours, is no longer an ordinary child, he needs a special

system. Then he appears upon the scene more frequently, and towards

the end I never lose sight of him for a moment, until, whatever he

may say, he needs me no longer.

I pass over the qualities required in a good tutor; I take them for

granted, and assume that I am endowed with them. As you read this

book you will see how generous I have been to myself.

I will only remark that, contrary to the received opinion, a child's

tutor should be young, as young indeed as a man may well be who

is also wise. Were it possible, he should become a child himself,

that he may be the companion of his pupil and win his confidence

by sharing his games. Childhood and age have too little in common

for the formation of a really firm affection. Children sometimes

flatter old men; they never love them.

People seek a tutor who has already educated one pupil. This is

too much; one man can only educate one pupil; if two were essential

to success, what right would he have to undertake the first? With

more experience you may know better what to do, but you are less

capable of doing it; once this task has been well done, you will

know too much of its difficulties to attempt it a second time--if

ill done, the first attempt augurs badly for the second.

It is one thing to follow a young man about for four years, another

to be his guide for five-and-twenty. You find a tutor for your son

when he is already formed; I want one for him before he is born.

Your man may change his pupil every five years; mine will never have

but one pupil. You distinguish between the teacher and the tutor.

Another piece of folly! Do you make any distinction between the

pupil and the scholar? There is only one science for children to

learn--the duties of man. This science is one, and, whatever Xenophon

may say of the education of the Persians, it is indivisible. Besides,

I prefer to call the man who has this knowledge master rather than

teacher, since it is a question of guidance rather than instruction.

He must not give precepts, he must let the scholar find them out

for himself.

If the master is to be so carefully chosen, he may well choose

his pupil, above all when he proposes to set a pattern for others.

This choice cannot depend on the child's genius or character, as I

adopt him before he is born, and they are only known when my task

is finished. If I had my choice I would take a child of ordinary

mind, such as I assume in my pupil. It is ordinary people who have

to be educated, and their education alone can serve as a pattern

for the education of their fellows. The others find their way alone.

The birthplace is not a matter of indifference in the education

of man; it is only in temperate climes that he comes to his full

growth. The disadvantages of extremes are easily seen. A man is

not planted in one place like a tree, to stay there the rest of

his life, and to pass from one extreme to another you must travel

twice as far as he who starts half-way.

If the inhabitant of a temperate climate passes in turn through both

extremes his advantage is plain, for although he may be changed as

much as he who goes from one extreme to the other, he only removes

half-way from his natural condition. A Frenchman can live in

New Guinea or in Lapland, but a negro cannot live in Tornea nor a

Samoyed in Benin. It seems also as if the brain were less perfectly

organised in the two extremes. Neither the negroes nor the Laps

are as wise as Europeans. So if I want my pupil to be a citizen of

the world I will choose him in the temperate zone, in France for

example, rather than elsewhere.

In the north with its barren soil men devour much food, in the

fertile south they eat little. This produces another difference: the

one is industrious, the other contemplative. Society shows us, in

one and the same spot, a similar difference between rich and poor.

The one dwells in a fertile land, the other in a barren land.

The poor man has no need of education. The education of his

own station in life is forced upon him, he can have no other; the

education received by the rich man from his own station is least

fitted for himself and for society. Moreover, a natural education

should fit a man for any position. Now it is more unreasonable

to train a poor man for wealth than a rich man for poverty, for

in proportion to their numbers more rich men are ruined and fewer

poor men become rich. Let us choose our scholar among the rich; we

shall at least have made another man; the poor may come to manhood

without our help.

For the same reason I should not be sorry if Emile came of a good

family. He will be another victim snatched from prejudice.

Emile is an orphan. No matter whether he has father or mother,

having undertaken their duties I am invested with their rights.

He must honour his parents, but he must obey me. That is my first

and only condition.

I must add that there is just one other point arising out of this;

we must never be separated except by mutual consent. This clause is

essential, and I would have tutor and scholar so inseparable that

they should regard their fate as one. If once they perceive the

time of their separation drawing near, the time which must make

them strangers to one another, they become strangers then and

there; each makes his own little world, and both of them being

busy in thought with the time when they will no longer be together,

they remain together against their will. The disciple regards his

master as the badge and scourge of childhood, the master regards

his scholar as a heavy burden which he longs to be rid of. Both

are looking forward to the time when they will part, and as there

is never any real affection between them, there will be scant

vigilance on the one hand, and on the other scant obedience.

But when they consider they must always live together, they must

needs love one another, and in this way they really learn to love

one another. The pupil is not ashamed to follow as a child the

friend who will be with him in manhood; the tutor takes an interest

in the efforts whose fruits he will enjoy, and the virtues he is

cultivating in his pupil form a store laid up for his old age.

This agreement made beforehand assumes a normal birth, a strong,

well-made, healthy child. A father has no choice, and should have

no preference within the limits of the family God has given him; all

his children are his alike, the same care and affection is due to

all. Crippled or well-made, weak or strong, each of them is a trust

for which he is responsible to the Giver, and nature is a party to

the marriage contract along with husband and wife.

But if you undertake a duty not imposed upon you by nature, you

must secure beforehand the means for its fulfilment, unless you

would undertake duties you cannot fulfil. If you take the care of

a sickly, unhealthy child, you are a sick nurse, not a tutor. To

preserve a useless life you are wasting the time which should be

spent in increasing its value, you risk the sight of a despairing

mother reproaching you for the death of her child, who ought to

have died long ago.

I would not undertake the care of a feeble, sickly child, should

he live to four score years. I want no pupil who is useless alike

to himself and others, one whose sole business is to keep himself

alive, one whose body is always a hindrance to the training of his

mind. If I vainly lavish my care upon him, what can I do but double

the loss to society by robbing it of two men, instead of one? Let

another tend this weakling for me; I am quite willing, I approve

his charity, but I myself have no gift for such a task; I could

never teach the art of living to one who needs all his strength to

keep himself alive.

The body must be strong enough to obey the mind; a good servant

must be strong. I know that intemperance stimulates the passions;

in course of time it also destroys the body; fasting and penance

often produce the same results in an opposite way. The weaker

the body, the more imperious its demands; the stronger it is, the

better it obeys. All sensual passions find their home in effeminate

bodies; the less satisfaction they can get the keener their sting.

A feeble body makes a feeble mind. Hence the influence of physic,

an art which does more harm to man than all the evils it professes

to cure. I do not know what the doctors cure us of, but I know

this: they infect us with very deadly diseases, cowardice, timidity,

credulity, the fear of death. What matter if they make the dead

walk, we have no need of corpses; they fail to give us men, and it

is men we need.

Medicine is all the fashion in these days, and very naturally. It

is the amusement of the idle and unemployed, who do not know what

to do with their time, and so spend it in taking care of themselves.

If by ill-luck they had happened to be born immortal, they would

have been the most miserable of men; a life they could not lose

would be of no value to them. Such men must have doctors to threaten

and flatter them, to give them the only pleasure they can enjoy,

the pleasure of not being dead.

I will say no more at present as to the uselessness of medicine. My

aim is to consider its bearings on morals. Still I cannot refrain

from saying that men employ the same sophism about medicine as

they do about the search for truth. They assume that the patient

is cured and that the seeker after truth finds it. They fail to see

that against one life saved by the doctors you must set a hundred

slain, and against the value of one truth discovered the errors

which creep in with it. The science which instructs and the medicine

which heals are no doubt excellent, but the science which misleads

us and the medicine which kills us are evil. Teach us to know

them apart. That is the real difficulty. If we were content to be

ignorant of truth we should not be the dupes of falsehood; if we

did not want to be cured in spite of nature, we should not be killed

by the doctors. We should do well to steer clear of both, and we

should evidently be the gainers. I do not deny that medicine is

useful to some men; I assert that it is fatal to mankind.

You will tell me, as usual, that the doctors are to blame, that

medicine herself is infallible. Well and good, then give us the

medicine without the doctor, for when we have both, the blunders of

the artist are a hundredfold greater than our hopes from the art.

This lying art, invented rather for the ills of the mind than

of the body, is useless to both alike; it does less to cure us of

our diseases than to fill us with alarm. It does less to ward off

death than to make us dread its approach. It exhausts life rather

than prolongs it; should it even prolong life it would only be to

the prejudice of the race, since it makes us set its precautions

before society and our fears before our duties. It is the knowledge

of danger that makes us afraid. If we thought ourselves invulnerable

we should know no fear. The poet armed Achilles against danger and

so robbed him of the merit of courage; on such terms any man would

be an Achilles.

Would you find a really brave man? Seek him where there are no

doctors, where the results of disease are unknown, and where death

is little thought of. By nature a man bears pain bravely and dies

in peace. It is the doctors with their rules, the philosophers with

their precepts, the priests with their exhortations, who debase

the heart and make us afraid to die.

Give me a pupil who has no need of these, or I will have nothing

to do with him. No one else shall spoil my work, I will educate him

myself or not at all. That wise man, Locke, who had devoted part

of his life to the study of medicine, advises us to give no drugs

to the child, whether as a precaution, or on account of slight

ailments. I will go farther, and will declare that, as I never

call in a doctor for myself, I will never send for one for Emile,

unless his life is clearly in danger, when the doctor can but kill

him.

I know the doctor will make capital out of my delay. If the child

dies, he was called in too late; if he recovers, it is his doing.

So be it; let the doctor boast, but do not call him in except in

extremity.

As the child does not know how to be cured, he knows how to be

ill. The one art takes the place of the other and is often more

successful; it is the art of nature. When a beast is ill, it keeps

quiet and suffers in silence; but we see fewer sickly animals than

sick men. How many men have been slain by impatience, fear, anxiety,

and above all by medicine, men whom disease would have spared,

and time alone have cured. I shall be told that animals, who live

according to nature, are less liable to disease than ourselves.

Well, that way of living is just what I mean to teach my pupil; he

should profit by it in the same way.

Hygiene is the only useful part of medicine, and hygiene is rather

a virtue than a science. Temperance and industry are man's true

remedies; work sharpens his appetite and temperance teaches him to

control it.

To learn what system is most beneficial you have only to study

those races remarkable for health, strength, and length of days. If

common observation shows us that medicine neither increases health

nor prolongs life, it follows that this useless art is worse than

useless, since it wastes time, men, and things on what is pure

loss. Not only must we deduct the time spent, not in using life,

but preserving it, but if this time is spent in tormenting ourselves

it is worse than wasted, it is so much to the bad, and to reckon

fairly a corresponding share must be deducted from what remains to

us. A man who lives ten years for himself and others without the

help of doctors lives more for himself and others than one who

spends thirty years as their victim. I have tried both, so I think

I have a better right than most to draw my own conclusions.

For these reasons I decline to take any but a strong and healthy

pupil, and these are my principles for keeping him in health. I will

not stop to prove at length the value of manual labour and bodily

exercise for strengthening the health and constitution; no one

denies it. Nearly all the instances of long life are to be found

among the men who have taken most exercise, who have endured fatigue

and labour. [Footnote: I cannot help quoting the following passage

from an English newspaper, as it throws much light on my opinions:

"A certain Patrick O'Neil, born in 1647, has just married his seventh

wife in 1760. In the seventeenth year of Charles II. he served in

the dragoons and in other regiments up to 1740, when he took his

discharge. He served in all the campaigns of William III. and

Marlborough. This man has never drunk anything but small beer; he

has always lived on vegetables, and has never eaten meat except on

few occasions when he made a feast for his relations. He has always

been accustomed to rise with the sun and go to bed at sunset unless

prevented by his military duties. He is now in his 130th year;

he is healthy, his hearing is good, and he walks with the help

of a stick. In spite of his great age he is never idle, and every

Sunday he goes to his parish church accompanied by his children,

grandchildren, and great grandchildren."] Neither will I enter

into details as to the care I shall take for this alone. It will

be clear that it forms such an essential part of my practice that

it is enough to get hold of the idea without further explanation.

When our life begins our needs begin too. The new-born infant must

have a nurse. If his mother will do her duty, so much the better;

her instructions will be given her in writing, but this advantage

has its drawbacks, it removes the tutor from his charge. But it

is to be hoped that the child's own interests, and her respect for

the person to whom she is about to confide so precious a treasure,

will induce the mother to follow the master's wishes, and whatever

she does you may be sure she will do better than another. If we

must have a strange nurse, make a good choice to begin with.

It is one of the misfortunes of the rich to be cheated on all sides;

what wonder they think ill of mankind! It is riches that corrupt

men, and the rich are rightly the first to feel the defects of the

only tool they know. Everything is ill-done for them, except what

they do themselves, and they do next to nothing. When a nurse must

be selected the choice is left to the doctor. What happens? The

best nurse is the one who offers the highest bribe. I shall not

consult the doctor about Emile's nurse, I shall take care to choose

her myself. I may not argue about it so elegantly as the surgeon,

but I shall be more reliable, I shall be less deceived by my zeal

than the doctor by his greed.

There is no mystery about this choice; its rules are well known,

but I think we ought probably to pay more attention to the age of

the milk as well as its quality. The first milk is watery, it must

be almost an aperient, to purge the remains of the meconium curdled

in the bowels of the new-born child. Little by little the milk

thickens and supplies more solid food as the child is able to

digest it. It is surely not without cause that nature changes the

milk in the female of every species according to the age of the

offspring.

Thus a new-born child requires a nurse who has recently become mother.

There is, I know, a difficulty here, but as soon as we leave the

path of nature there are difficulties in the way of all well-doing.

The wrong course is the only right one under the circumstances, so

we take it.

The nurse must be healthy alike in disposition and in body. The

violence of the passions as well as the humours may spoil her milk.

Moreover, to consider the body only is to keep only half our aim

in view. The milk may be good and the nurse bad; a good character

is as necessary as a good constitution. If you choose a vicious

person, I do not say her foster-child will acquire her vices, but

he will suffer for them. Ought she not to bestow on him day by

day, along with her milk, a care which calls for zeal, patience,

gentleness, and cleanliness. If she is intemperate and greedy her

milk will soon be spoilt; if she is careless and hasty what will

become of a poor little wretch left to her mercy, and unable either

to protect himself or to complain. The wicked are never good for

anything.

The choice is all the more important because her foster-child should

have no other guardian, just as he should have no teacher but his

tutor. This was the custom of the ancients, who talked less but

acted more wisely than we. The nurse never left her foster-daughter;

this is why the nurse is the confidante in most of their plays.

A child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well

brought up.

At every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually

tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and with

it their authority over him. If once he thinks there are grown-up

people with no more sense than children the authority of age

is destroyed and his education is ruined. A child should know no

betters but its father and mother, or failing them its foster-mother

and its tutor, and even this is one too many, but this division is

inevitable, and the best that can be done in the way of remedy is

that the man and woman who control him shall be so well agreed with

regard to him that they seem like one.

The nurse must live rather more comfortably, she must have rather

more substantial food, but her whole way of living must not

be altered, for a sudden change, even a change for the better, is

dangerous to health, and since her usual way of life has made her

healthy and strong, why change it?

Country women eat less meat and more vegetables than towns-women,

and this vegetarian diet seems favourable rather than otherwise to

themselves and their children. When they take nurslings from the

upper classes they eat meat and broth with the idea that they will

form better chyle and supply more milk. I do not hold with this

at all, and experience is on my side, for we do not find children

fed in this way less liable to colic and worms.

That need not surprise us, for decaying animal matter swarms with

worms, but this is not the case with vegetable matter. [Footnote:

Women eat bread, vegetables, and dairy produce; female dogs and

cats do the same; the she-wolves eat grass. This supplies vegetable

juices to their milk. There are still those species which are

unable to eat anything but flesh, if such there are, which I very

much doubt.] Milk, although manufactured in the body of an animal,

is a vegetable substance; this is shown by analysis; it readily

turns acid, and far from showing traces of any volatile alkali like

animal matter, it gives a neutral salt like plants.

The milk of herbivorous creatures is sweeter and more wholesome than

the milk of the carnivorous; formed of a substance similar to its

own, it keeps its goodness and becomes less liable to putrifaction.

If quantity is considered, it is well known that farinaceous foods

produce more blood than meat, so they ought to yield more milk. If

a child were not weaned too soon, and if it were fed on vegetarian

food, and its foster-mother were a vegetarian, I do not think it

would be troubled with worms.

Milk derived from vegetable foods may perhaps be more liable to go

sour, but I am far from considering sour milk an unwholesome food;

whole nations have no other food and are none the worse, and all the

array of absorbents seems to me mere humbug. There are constitutions

which do not thrive on milk, others can take it without absorbents.

People are afraid of the milk separating or curdling; that is

absurd, for we know that milk always curdles in the stomach. This

is how it becomes sufficiently solid to nourish children and young

animals; if it did not curdle it would merely pass away without

feeding them. [Footnote: Although the juices which nourish us are

liquid, they must be extracted from solids. A hard-working man who

ate nothing but soup would soon waste away. He would be far better

fed on milk, just because it curdles.] In vain you dilute milk and

use absorbents; whoever swallows milk digests cheese, this rule is

without exception; rennet is made from a calf's stomach.

Instead of changing the nurse's usual diet, I think it would be

enough to give food in larger quantities and better of its kind.

It is not the nature of the food that makes a vegetable diet

indigestible, but the flavouring that makes it unwholesome. Reform

your cookery, use neither butter nor oil for frying. Butter, salt,

and milk should never be cooked. Let your vegetables be cooked

in water and only seasoned when they come to table. The vegetable

diet, far from disturbing the nurse, will give her a plentiful

supply of milk. [Footnote: Those who wish to study a full account

of the advantages and disadvantages of the Pythagorean regime, may

consult the works of Dr. Cocchi and his opponent Dr. Bianchi on

this important subject.] If a vegetable diet is best for the child,

how can meat food be best for his nurse? The things are contradictory.

Fresh air affects children's constitutions, particularly in early

years. It enters every pore of a soft and tender skin, it has

a powerful effect on their young bodies. Its effects can never

be destroyed. So I should not agree with those who take a country

woman from her village and shut her up in one room in a town and

her nursling with her. I would rather send him to breathe the fresh

air of the country than the foul air of the town. He will take his

new mother's position, will live in her cottage, where his tutor

will follow him. The reader will bear in mind that this tutor is

not a paid servant, but the father's friend. But if this friend

cannot be found, if this transfer is not easy, if none of my advice

can be followed, you will say to me, "What shall I do instead?" I

have told you already--"Do what you are doing;" no advice is needed

there.

Men are not made to be crowded together in ant-hills, but scattered

over the earth to till it. The more they are massed together, the

more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of

over-crowded cities. Of all creatures man is least fitted to live

in herds. Huddled together like sheep, men would very soon die.

Man's breath is fatal to his fellows. This is literally as well as

figuratively true.

Men are devoured by our towns. In a few generations the race dies

out or becomes degenerate; it needs renewal, and it is always

renewed from the country. Send your children to renew themselves,

so to speak, send them to regain in the open fields the strength

lost in the foul air of our crowded cities. Women hurry home that

their children may be born in the town; they ought to do just the

opposite, especially those who mean to nurse their own children. They

would lose less than they think, and in more natural surroundings

the pleasures associated by nature with maternal duties would soon

destroy the taste for other delights.

The new-born infant is first bathed in warm water to which a little

wine is usually added. I think the wine might be dispensed with.

As nature does not produce fermented liquors, it is not likely that

they are of much value to her creatures.

In the same way it is unnecessary to take the precaution of heating

the water; in fact among many races the new-born infants are bathed

with no more ado in rivers or in the sea. Our children, made tender

before birth by the softness of their parents, come into the world

with a constitution already enfeebled, which cannot be at once

exposed to all the trials required to restore it to health. Little

by little they must be restored to their natural vigour. Begin then

by following this custom, and leave it off gradually. Wash your

children often, their dirty ways show the need of this. If they

are only wiped their skin is injured; but as they grow stronger

gradually reduce the heat of the water, till at last you bathe them

winter and summer in cold, even in ice-cold water. To avoid risk

this change must be slow, gradual, and imperceptible, so you may

use the thermometer for exact measurements.

This habit of the bath, once established, should never be broken

off, it must be kept up all through life. I value it not only on

grounds of cleanliness and present health, but also as a wholesome

means of making the muscles supple, and accustoming them to bear

without risk or effort extremes of heat and cold. As he gets older

I would have the child trained to bathe occasionally in hot water

of every bearable degree, and often in every degree of cold water.

Now water being a denser fluid touches us at more points than air,

so that, having learnt to bear all the variations of temperature in

water, we shall scarcely feel this of the air. [Footnote: Children

in towns are stifled by being kept indoors and too much wrapped

up. Those who control them have still to learn that fresh air,

far from doing them harm, will make them strong, while hot air will

make them weak, will give rise to fevers, and will eventually kill

them.]

When the child draws its first breath do not confine it in tight

wrappings. No cap, no bandages, nor swaddling clothes. Loose and

flowing flannel wrappers, which leave its limbs free and are not too

heavy to check his movements, not too warm to prevent his feeling

the air. [Footnote: I say "cradle" using the common word for want

of a better, though I am convinced that it is never necessary

and often harmful to rock children in the cradle.] Put him in a

big cradle, well padded, where he can move easily and safely. As

he begins to grow stronger, let him crawl about the room; let him

develop and stretch his tiny limbs; you will see him gain strength

from day to day. Compare him with a well swaddled child of the same

age and you will be surprised at their different rates of progress.

[Footnote: The ancient Peruvians wrapped their children in loose

swaddling bands, leaving the arms quite free. Later they placed

them unswaddled in a hole in the ground, lined with cloths, so that

the lower part of the body was in the hole, and their arms were

free and they could move the head and bend the body at will without

falling or hurting themselves. When they began to walk they were

enticed to come to the breast. The little negroes are often in a

position much more difficult for sucking. They cling to the mother's

hip, and cling so tightly that the mother's arm is often not needed

to support them. They clasp the breast with their hand and continue

sucking while their mother goes on with her ordinary work. These

children begin to walk at two months, or rather to crawl. Later on

they can run on all fours almost as well as on their feet.--Buffon.

M. Buffon might also have quoted the example of England, where

the senseless and barbarous swaddling clothes have become almost

obsolete. Cf. La Longue Voyage de Siam, Le Beau Voyage de Canada,

etc.]

You must expect great opposition from the nurses, who find a half

strangled baby needs much less watching. Besides his dirtyness is

more perceptible in an open garment; he must be attended to more

frequently. Indeed, custom is an unanswerable argument in some

lands and among all classes of people.

Do not argue with the nurses; give your orders, see them carried

out, and spare no pains to make the attention you prescribe easy in

practice. Why not take your share in it? With ordinary nurslings,

where the body alone is thought of, nothing matters so long as the

child lives and does not actually die, but with us, when education

begins with life, the new-born child is already a disciple, not

of his tutor, but of nature. The tutor merely studies under this

master, and sees that his orders are not evaded. He watches over

the infant, he observes it, he looks for the first feeble glimmering

of intelligence, as the Moslem looks for the moment of the moon's

rising in her first quarter.

We are born capable of learning, but knowing nothing, perceiving

nothing. The mind, bound up within imperfect and half grown organs,

is not even aware of its own existence. The movements and cries of

the new-born child are purely reflex, without knowledge or will.

Suppose a child born with the size and strength of manhood, entering

upon life full grown like Pallas from the brain of Jupiter; such a

child-man would be a perfect idiot, an automaton, a statue without

motion and almost without feeling; he would see and hear nothing,

he would recognise no one, he could not turn his eyes towards what

he wanted to see; not only would he perceive no external object,

he would not even be aware of sensation through the several

sense-organs. His eye would not perceive colour, his ear sounds,

his body would be unaware of contact with neighbouring bodies, he

would not even know he had a body, what his hands handled would

be in his brain alone; all his sensations would be united in one

place, they would exist only in the common "sensorium," he would

have only one idea, that of self, to which he would refer all his

sensations; and this idea, or rather this feeling, would be the

only thing in which he excelled an ordinary child.

This man, full grown at birth, would also be unable to stand on his

feet, he would need a long time to learn how to keep his balance;

perhaps he would not even be able to try to do it, and you would

see the big strong body left in one place like a stone, or creeping

and crawling like a young puppy.

He would feel the discomfort of bodily needs without knowing what

was the matter and without knowing how to provide for these needs.

There is no immediate connection between the muscles of the stomach

and those of the arms and legs to make him take a step towards

food, or stretch a hand to seize it, even were he surrounded with

it; and as his body would be full grown and his limbs well developed

he would be without the perpetual restlessness and movement

of childhood, so that he might die of hunger without stirring

to seek food. However little you may have thought about the order

and development of our knowledge, you cannot deny that such a one

would be in the state of almost primitive ignorance and stupidity

natural to man before he has learnt anything from experience or

from his fellows.

We know then, or we may know, the point of departure from which

we each start towards the usual level of understanding; but who

knows the other extreme? Each progresses more or less according to

his genius, his taste, his needs, his talents, his zeal, and his

opportunities for using them. No philosopher, so far as I know,

has dared to say to man, "Thus far shalt thou go and no further."

We know not what nature allows us to be, none of us has measured

the possible difference between man and man. Is there a mind so

dead that this thought has never kindled it, that has never said

in his pride, "How much have I already done, how much more may I

achieve? Why should I lag behind my fellows?"

As I said before, man's education begins at birth; before he can

speak or understand he is learning. Experience precedes instruction;

when he recognises his nurse he has learnt much. The knowledge

of the most ignorant man would surprise us if we had followed his

course from birth to the present time. If all human knowledge were

divided into two parts, one common to all, the other peculiar to

the learned, the latter would seem very small compared with the

former. But we scarcely heed this general experience, because

it is acquired before the age of reason. Moreover, knowledge only

attracts attention by its rarity, as in algebraic equations common

factors count for nothing. Even animals learn much. They have

senses and must learn to use them; they have needs, they must learn

to satisfy them; they must learn to eat, walk, or fly. Quadrupeds

which can stand on their feet from the first cannot walk for all

that; from their first attempts it is clear that they lack confidence.

Canaries who escape from their cage are unable to fly, having never

used their wings. Living and feeling creatures are always learning.

If plants could walk they would need senses and knowledge, else

their species would die out. The child's first mental experiences are

purely affective, he is only aware of pleasure and pain; it takes

him a long time to acquire the definite sensations which show

him things outside himself, but before these things present and

withdraw themselves, so to speak, from his sight, taking size and

shape for him, the recurrence of emotional experiences is beginning to

subject the child to the rule of habit. You see his eyes constantly

follow the light, and if the light comes from the side the eyes turn

towards it, so that one must be careful to turn his head towards

the light lest he should squint. He must also be accustomed from the

first to the dark, or he will cry if he misses the light. Food and

sleep, too, exactly measured, become necessary at regular intervals,

and soon desire is no longer the effect of need, but of habit, or

rather habit adds a fresh need to those of nature. You must be on

your guard against this.

The only habit the child should be allowed to contract is that

of having no habits; let him be carried on either arm, let him be

accustomed to offer either hand, to use one or other indifferently;

let him not want to eat, sleep, or do anything at fixed hours, nor

be unable to be left alone by day or night. Prepare the way for

his control of his liberty and the use of his strength by leaving

his body its natural habit, by making him capable of lasting

self-control, of doing all that he wills when his will is formed.

As soon as the child begins to take notice, what is shown him

must be carefully chosen. The natural man is interested in all new

things. He feels so feeble that he fears the unknown: the habit of

seeing fresh things without ill effects destroys this fear. Children

brought up in clean houses where there are no spiders are afraid

of spiders, and this fear often lasts through life. I never saw

peasants, man, woman, or child, afraid of spiders.

Since the mere choice of things shown him may make the child timid

or brave, why should not his education begin before he can speak

or understand? I would have him accustomed to see fresh things,

ugly, repulsive, and strange beasts, but little by little, and far

off till he is used to them, and till having seen others handle

them he handles them himself. If in childhood he sees toads, snakes,

and crayfish, he will not be afraid of any animal when he is grown

up. Those who are continually seeing terrible things think nothing

of them.

All children are afraid of masks. I begin by showing Emile a mask

with a pleasant face, then some one puts this mask before his face;

I begin to laugh, they all laugh too, and the child with them. By

degrees I accustom him to less pleasing masks, and at last hideous

ones. If I have arranged my stages skilfully, far from being afraid

of the last mask, he will laugh at it as he did at the first. After

that I am not afraid of people frightening him with masks.

When Hector bids farewell to Andromache, the young Astyanax, startled

by the nodding plumes on the helmet, does not know his father; he

flings himself weeping upon his nurse's bosom and wins from his

mother a smile mingled with tears. What must be done to stay this

terror? Just what Hector did; put the helmet on the ground and

caress the child. In a calmer moment one would do more; one would

go up to the helmet, play with the plumes, let the child feel them;

at last the nurse would take the helmet and place it laughingly

on her own head, if indeed a woman's hand dare touch the armour of

Hector.

If Emile must get used to the sound of a gun, I first fire a pistol

with a small charge. He is delighted with this sudden flash, this

sort of lightning; I repeat the process with more powder; gradually

I add a small charge without a wad, then a larger; in the end I

accustom him to the sound of a gun, to fireworks, cannon, and the

most terrible explosions.

I have observed that children are rarely afraid of thunder unless

the peals are really terrible and actually hurt the ear, otherwise

this fear only comes to them when they know that thunder sometimes

hurts or kills. When reason begins to cause fear, let us reassure

them. By slow and careful stages man and child learn to fear nothing.

In the dawn of life, when memory and imagination have not begun to

function, the child only attends to what affects its senses. His

sense experiences are the raw material of thought; they should,

therefore, be presented to him in fitting order, so that memory may

at a future time present them in the same order to his understanding;

but as he only attends to his sensations it is enough, at first,

to show him clearly the connection between these sensations and the

things which cause them. He wants to touch and handle everything;

do not check these movements which teach him invaluable lessons.

Thus he learns to perceive the heat, cold, hardness, softness,

weight, or lightness of bodies, to judge their size and shape and

all their physical properties, by looking, feeling, [Footnote: Of

all the senses that of smell is the latest to develop in children

up to two or three years of age they appear to be insensible of

pleasant or unpleasant odours; in this respect they are as indifferent

or rather as insensible as many animals.] listening, and, above

all, by comparing sight and touch, by judging with the eye what

sensation they would cause to his hand.

It is only by movement that we learn the difference between self

and not self; it is only by our own movements that we gain the idea

of space. The child has not this idea, so he stretches out his hand

to seize the object within his reach or that which is a hundred

paces from him. You take this as a sign of tyranny, an attempt to

bid the thing draw near, or to bid you bring it. Nothing of the

kind, it is merely that the object first seen in his brain, then

before his eyes, now seems close to his arms, and he has no idea of

space beyond his reach. Be careful, therefore, to take him about,

to move him from place to place, and to let him perceive the change

in his surroundings, so as to teach him to judge of distances.

When he begins to perceive distances then you must change your

plan, and only carry him when you please, not when he pleases; for

as soon as he is no longer deceived by his senses, there is another

motive for his effort. This change is remarkable and calls for

explanation.

The discomfort caused by real needs is shown by signs, when the

help of others is required. Hence the cries of children; they often

cry; it must be so. Since they are only conscious of feelings, when

those feelings are pleasant they enjoy them in silence; when they

are painful they say so in their own way and demand relief. Now

when they are awake they can scarcely be in a state of indifference,

either they are asleep or else they are feeling something.

All our languages are the result of art. It has long been a subject

of inquiry whether there ever was a natural language common to all;

no doubt there is, and it is the language of children before they

begin to speak. This language is inarticulate, but it has tone,

stress, and meaning. The use of our own language has led us to

neglect it so far as to forget it altogether. Let us study children

and we shall soon learn it afresh from them. Nurses can teach us

this language; they understand all their nurslings say to them, they

answer them, and keep up long conversations with them; and though

they use words, these words are quite useless. It is not the hearing

of the word, but its accompanying intonation that is understood.

To the language of intonation is added the no less forcible language

of gesture. The child uses, not its weak hands, but its face. The

amount of expression in these undeveloped faces is extraordinary;

their features change from one moment to another with incredible

speed. You see smiles, desires, terror, come and go like lightning;

every time the face seems different. The muscles of the face are

undoubtedly more mobile than our own. On the other hand the eyes

are almost expressionless. Such must be the sort of signs they use

at an age when their only needs are those of the body. Grimaces

are the sign of sensation, the glance expresses sentiment.

As man's first state is one of want and weakness, his first sounds

are cries and tears. The child feels his needs and cannot satisfy

them, he begs for help by his cries. Is he hungry or thirsty? there

are tears; is he too cold or too hot? more tears; he needs movement

and is kept quiet, more tears; he wants to sleep and is disturbed,

he weeps. The less comfortable he is, the more he demands change.

He has only one language because he has, so to say, only one kind

of discomfort. In the imperfect state of his sense organs he does

not distinguish their several impressions; all ills produce one

feeling of sorrow.

These tears, which you think so little worthy of your attention,

give rise to the first relation between man and his environment;

here is forged the first link in the long chain of social order.

When the child cries he is uneasy, he feels some need which he

cannot satisfy; you watch him, seek this need, find it, and satisfy

it. If you can neither find it nor satisfy it, the tears continue

and become tiresome. The child is petted to quiet him, he is rocked

or sung to sleep; if he is obstinate, the nurse becomes impatient

and threatens him; cruel nurses sometimes strike him. What strange

lessons for him at his first entrance into life!

I shall never forget seeing one of these troublesome crying children

thus beaten by his nurse. He was silent at once. I thought he was

frightened, and said to myself, "This will be a servile being from

whom nothing can be got but by harshness." I was wrong, the poor

wretch was choking with rage, he could not breathe, he was black

in the face. A moment later there were bitter cries, every sign

of the anger, rage, and despair of this age was in his tones.

I thought he would die. Had I doubted the innate sense of justice

and injustice in man's heart, this one instance would have convinced

me. I am sure that a drop of boiling liquid falling by chance on

that child's hand would have hurt him less than that blow, slight

in itself, but clearly given with the intention of hurting him.

This tendency to anger, vexation, and rage needs great care.

Boerhaave thinks that most of the diseases of children are of the

nature of convulsions, because the head being larger in proportion

and the nervous system more extensive than in adults, they are

more liable to nervous irritation. Take the greatest care to remove

from them any servants who tease, annoy, or vex them. They are a

hundredfold more dangerous and more fatal than fresh air and changing

seasons. When children only experience resistance in things and never

in the will of man, they do not become rebellious or passionate,

and their health is better. This is one reason why the children of

the poor, who are freer and more independent, are generally less

frail and weakly, more vigorous than those who are supposed to be

better brought up by being constantly thwarted; but you must always

remember that it is one thing to refrain from thwarting them, but

quite another to obey them. The child's first tears are prayers,

beware lest they become commands; he begins by asking for aid, he

ends by demanding service. Thus from his own weakness, the source

of his first consciousness of dependence, springs the later idea of

rule and tyranny; but as this idea is aroused rather by his needs

than by our services, we begin to see moral results whose causes

are not in nature; thus we see how important it is, even at the

earliest age, to discern the secret meaning of the gesture or cry.

When the child tries to seize something without speaking, he

thinks he can reach the object, for he does not rightly judge its

distance; when he cries and stretches out his hands he no longer

misjudges the distance, he bids the object approach, or orders you

to bring it to him. In the first case bring it to him slowly; in

the second do not even seem to hear his cries. The more he cries

the less you should heed him. He must learn in good time not to

give commands to men, for he is not their master, nor to things,

for they cannot hear him. Thus when the child wants something you

mean to give him, it is better to carry him to it rather than to

bring the thing to him. From this he will draw a conclusion suited

to his age, and there is no other way of suggesting it to him.

The Abbe Saint-Pierre calls men big children; one might also call

children little men. These statements are true, but they require

explanation. But when Hobbes calls the wicked a strong child,

his statement is contradicted by facts. All wickedness comes from

weakness. The child is only naughty because he is weak; make him

strong and he will be good; if we could do everything we should

never do wrong. Of all the attributes of the Almighty, goodness is

that which it would be hardest to dissociate from our conception

of Him. All nations who have acknowledged a good and an evil power,

have always regarded the evil as inferior to the good; otherwise

their opinion would have been absurd. Compare this with the creed

of the Savoyard clergyman later on in this book.

Reason alone teaches us to know good and evil. Therefore conscience,

which makes us love the one and hate the other, though it is

independent of reason, cannot develop without it. Before the age

of reason we do good or ill without knowing it, and there is no

morality in our actions, although there is sometimes in our feeling

with regard to other people's actions in relation to ourselves. A

child wants to overturn everything he sees. He breaks and smashes

everything he can reach; he seizes a bird as he seizes a stone,

and strangles it without knowing what he is about.

Why so? In the first place philosophy will account for this by

inbred sin, man's pride, love of power, selfishness, spite; perhaps

it will say in addition to this that the child's consciousness of

his own weakness makes him eager to use his strength, to convince

himself of it. But watch that broken down old man reduced in the

downward course of life to the weakness of a child; not only is he

quiet and peaceful, he would have all about him quiet and peaceful

too; the least change disturbs and troubles him, he would like to

see universal calm. How is it possible that similar feebleness and

similar passions should produce such different effects in age and

in infancy, if the original cause were not different? And where can

we find this difference in cause except in the bodily condition of

the two. The active principle, common to both, is growing in one

case and declining in the other; it is being formed in the one

and destroyed in the other; one is moving towards life, the other

towards death. The failing activity of the old man is centred in his

heart, the child's overflowing activity spreads abroad. He feels,

if we may say so, strong enough to give life to all about him. To

make or to destroy, it is all one to him; change is what he seeks,

and all change involves action. If he seems to enjoy destructive

activity it is only that it takes time to make things and very

little time to break them, so that the work of destruction accords

better with his eagerness.

While the Author of nature has given children this activity, He

takes care that it shall do little harm by giving them small power

to use it. But as soon as they can think of people as tools to be

used, they use them to carry out their wishes and to supplement

their own weakness. This is how they become tiresome, masterful,

imperious, naughty, and unmanageable; a development which does not

spring from a natural love of power, but one which has been taught

them, for it does not need much experience to realise how pleasant

it is to set others to work and to move the world by a word.

As the child grows it gains strength and becomes less restless and

unquiet and more independent. Soul and body become better balanced

and nature no longer asks for more movement than is required for

self-preservation. But the love of power does not die with the need

that aroused it; power arouses and flatters self-love, and habit

strengthens it; thus caprice follows upon need, and the first seeds

of prejudice and obstinacy are sown.

FIRST MAXIM.--Far from being too strong, children are not strong

enough for all the claims of nature. Give them full use of such

strength as they have; they will not abuse it.

SECOND MAXIM.--Help them and supply the experience and strength

they lack whenever the need is of the body.

THIRD MAXIM.--In the help you give them confine yourself to what is

really needful, without granting anything to caprice or unreason;

for they will not be tormented by caprice if you do not call it

into existence, seeing it is no part of nature.

FOURTH MAXIM--Study carefully their speech and gestures, so that

at an age when they are incapable of deceit you may discriminate

between those desires which come from nature and those which spring

from perversity.

The spirit of these rules is to give children more real liberty and

less power, to let them do more for themselves and demand less of

others; so that by teaching them from the first to confine their

wishes within the limits of their powers they will scarcely feel

the want of whatever is not in their power.

This is another very important reason for leaving children's limbs

and bodies perfectly free, only taking care that they do not fall,

and keeping anything that might hurt them out of their way.

The child whose body and arms are free will certainly cry much

less than a child tied up in swaddling clothes. He who knows only

bodily needs, only cries when in pain; and this is a great advantage,

for then we know exactly when he needs help, and if possible we

should not delay our help for an instant. But if you cannot relieve

his pain, stay where you are and do not flatter him by way of

soothing him; your caresses will not cure his colic, but he will

remember what he must do to win them; and if he once finds out

how to gain your attention at will, he is your master; the whole

education is spoilt.

Their movements being less constrained, children will cry less;

less wearied with their tears, people will not take so much trouble

to check them. With fewer threats and promises, they will be less

timid and less obstinate, and will remain more nearly in their

natural state. Ruptures are produced less by letting children cry

than by the means taken to stop them, and my evidence for this is

the fact that the most neglected children are less liable to them

than others. I am very far from wishing that they should be neglected;

on the contrary, it is of the utmost importance that their wants

should be anticipated, so that they need not proclaim their wants

by crying. But neither would I have unwise care bestowed on them.

Why should they think it wrong to cry when they find they can get

so much by it? When they have learned the value of their silence they

take good care not to waste it. In the end they will so exaggerate

its importance that no one will be able to pay its price; then worn

out with crying they become exhausted, and are at length silent.

Prolonged crying on the part of a child neither swaddled nor out

of health, a child who lacks nothing, is merely the result of habit

or obstinacy. Such tears are no longer the work of nature, but the

work of the child's nurse, who could not resist its importunity

and so has increased it, without considering that while she quiets

the child to-day she is teaching him to cry louder to-morrow.

Moreover, when caprice or obstinacy is the cause of their tears,

there is a sure way of stopping them by distracting their attention

by some pleasant or conspicuous object which makes them forget that

they want to cry. Most nurses excel in this art, and rightly used

it is very useful; but it is of the utmost importance that the

child should not perceive that you mean to distract his attention,

and that he should be amused without suspecting you are thinking

about him; now this is what most nurses cannot do.

Most children are weaned too soon. The time to wean them is when

they cut their teeth. This generally causes pain and suffering. At

this time the child instinctively carries everything he gets hold

of to his mouth to chew it. To help forward this process he is given

as a plaything some hard object such as ivory or a wolf's tooth.

I think this is a mistake. Hard bodies applied to the gums do not

soften them; far from it, they make the process of cutting the

teeth more difficult and painful. Let us always take instinct as

our guide; we never see puppies practising their budding teeth on

pebbles, iron, or bones, but on wood, leather, rags, soft materials

which yield to their jaws, and on which the tooth leaves its mark.

We can do nothing simply, not even for our children. Toys of

silver, gold, coral, cut crystal, rattles of every price and kind;

what vain and useless appliances. Away with them all! Let us have

no corals or rattles; a small branch of a tree with its leaves and

fruit, a stick of liquorice which he may suck and chew, will amuse

him as well as these splendid trifles, and they will have this

advantage at least, he will not be brought up to luxury from his

birth.

It is admitted that pap is not a very wholesome food. Boiled milk

and uncooked flour cause gravel and do not suit the stomach. In

pap the flour is less thoroughly cooked than in bread and it has

not fermented. I think bread and milk or rice-cream are better. If

you will have pap, the flour should be lightly cooked beforehand.

In my own country they make a very pleasant and wholesome soup from

flour thus heated. Meat-broth or soup is not a very suitable food

and should be used as little as possible. The child must first get

used to chewing his food; this is the right way to bring the teeth

through, and when the child begins to swallow, the saliva mixed

with the food helps digestion.

I would have them first chew dried fruit or crusts. I should give

them as playthings little bits of dry bread or biscuits, like

the Piedmont bread, known in the country as "grisses." By dint of

softening this bread in the mouth some of it is eventually swallowed

the teeth come through of themselves, and the child is weaned

almost imperceptibly. Peasants have usually very good digestions,

and they are weaned with no more ado.

From the very first children hear spoken language; we speak to

them before they can understand or even imitate spoken sounds. The

vocal organs are still stiff, and only gradually lend themselves to

the reproduction of the sounds heard; it is even doubtful whether

these sounds are heard distinctly as we hear them. The nurse may

amuse the child with songs and with very merry and varied intonation,

but I object to her bewildering the child with a multitude of

vain words of which it understands nothing but her tone of voice.

I would have the first words he hears few in number, distinctly

and often repeated, while the words themselves should be related to

things which can first be shown to the child. That fatal facility

in the use of words we do not understand begins earlier than we

think. In the schoolroom the scholar listens to the verbiage of his

master as he listened in the cradle to the babble of his nurse. I

think it would be a very useful education to leave him in ignorance

of both.

All sorts of ideas crowd in upon us when we try to consider the

development of speech and the child's first words. Whatever we

do they all learn to talk in the same way, and all philosophical

speculations are utterly useless.

To begin with, they have, so to say, a grammar of their own, whose

rules and syntax are more general than our own; if you attend

carefully you will be surprised to find how exactly they follow

certain analogies, very much mistaken if you like, but very regular;

these forms are only objectionable because of their harshness or

because they are not recognised by custom. I have just heard a child

severely scolded by his father for saying, "Mon pere, irai-je-t-y?"

Now we see that this child was following the analogy more closely

than our grammarians, for as they say to him, "Vas-y," why should

he not say, "Irai-je-t-y?" Notice too the skilful way in which he

avoids the hiatus in irai-je-y or y-irai-je? Is it the poor child's

fault that we have so unskilfully deprived the phrase of this

determinative adverb "y," because we did not know what to do with

it? It is an intolerable piece of pedantry and most superfluous

attention to detail to make a point of correcting all children's

little sins against the customary expression, for they always

cure themselves with time. Always speak correctly before them, let

them never be so happy with any one as with you, and be sure that

their speech will be imperceptibly modelled upon yours without any

correction on your part.

But a much greater evil, and one far less easy to guard against,

is that they are urged to speak too much, as if people were afraid

they would not learn to talk of themselves. This indiscreet zeal

produces an effect directly opposite to what is meant. They speak

later and more confusedly; the extreme attention paid to everything

they say makes it unnecessary for them to speak distinctly, and

as they will scarcely open their mouths, many of them contract a

vicious pronunciation and a confused speech, which last all their

life and make them almost unintelligible.

I have lived much among peasants, and I never knew one of them lisp,

man or woman, boy or girl. Why is this? Are their speech organs

differently made from our own? No, but they are differently used.

There is a hillock facing my window on which the children of the

place assemble for their games. Although they are far enough away,

I can distinguish perfectly what they say, and often get good notes

for this book. Every day my ear deceives me as to their age. I hear

the voices of children of ten; I look and see the height and features

of children of three or four. This experience is not confined to

me; the townspeople who come to see me, and whom I consult on this

point, all fall into the same mistake.

This results from the fact that, up to five or six, children in

town, brought up in a room and under the care of a nursery governess,

do not need to speak above a whisper to make themselves heard. As

soon as their lips move people take pains to make out what they

mean; they are taught words which they repeat inaccurately, and by

paying great attention to them the people who are always with them

rather guess what they meant to say than what they said.

It is quite a different matter in the country. A peasant woman is

not always with her child; he is obliged to learn to say very clearly

and loudly what he wants, if he is to make himself understood.

Children scattered about the fields at a distance from their fathers,

mothers and other children, gain practice in making themselves

heard at a distance, and in adapting the loudness of the voice to

the distance which separates them from those to whom they want to

speak. This is the real way to learn pronunciation, not by stammering

out a few vowels into the ear of an attentive governess. So when

you question a peasant child, he may be too shy to answer, but what

he says he says distinctly, while the nurse must serve as interpreter

for the town child; without her one can understand nothing of what

he is muttering between his teeth. [Footnote: There are exceptions

to this; and often those children who at first are most difficult

to hear, become the noisiest when they begin to raise their voices.

But if I were to enter into all these details I should never make

an end; every sensible reader ought to see that defect and excess,

caused by the same abuse, are both corrected by my method. I regard

the two maxims as inseparable--always enough--never too much. When

the first is well established, the latter necessarily follows on

it.]

As they grow older, the boys are supposed to be cured of this fault

at college, the girls in the convent schools; and indeed both usually

speak more clearly than children brought up entirely at home. But

they are prevented from acquiring as clear a pronunciation as the

peasants in this way--they are required to learn all sorts of things

by heart, and to repeat aloud what they have learnt; for when they

are studying they get into the way of gabbling and pronouncing

carelessly and ill; it is still worse when they repeat their lessons;

they cannot find the right words, they drag out their syllables.

This is only possible when the memory hesitates, the tongue does

not stammer of itself. Thus they acquire or continue habits of bad

pronunciation. Later on you will see that Emile does not acquire

such habits or at least not from this cause.

I grant you uneducated people and villagers often fall into the opposite

extreme. They almost always speak too loud; their pronunciation is

too exact, and leads to rough and coarse articulation; their accent

is too pronounced, they choose their expressions badly, etc.

But, to begin with, this extreme strikes me as much less dangerous

than the other, for the first law of speech is to make oneself

understood, and the chief fault is to fail to be understood. To pride

ourselves on having no accent is to pride ourselves on ridding our

phrases of strength and elegance. Emphasis is the soul of speech,

it gives it its feeling and truth. Emphasis deceives less than

words; perhaps that is why well-educated people are so afraid of

it. From the custom of saying everything in the same tone has arisen

that of poking fun at people without their knowing it. When emphasis

is proscribed, its place is taken by all sorts of ridiculous, affected,

and ephemeral pronunciations, such as one observes especially among

the young people about court. It is this affectation of speech and

manner which makes Frenchmen disagreeable and repulsive to other

nations on first acquaintance. Emphasis is found, not in their

speech, but in their bearing. That is not the way to make themselves

attractive.

All these little faults of speech, which you are so afraid the

children will acquire, are mere trifles; they may be prevented or

corrected with the greatest ease, but the faults which are taught

them when you make them speak in a low, indistinct, and timid voice,

when you are always criticising their tone and finding fault with

their words, are never cured. A man who has only learnt to speak

in society of fine ladies could not make himself heard at the head

of his troops, and would make little impression on the rabble in

a riot. First teach the child to speak to men; he will be able to

speak to the women when required.

Brought up in all the rustic simplicity of the country, your

children will gain a more sonorous voice; they will not acquire

the hesitating stammer of town children, neither will they acquire

the expressions nor the tone of the villagers, or if they do they

will easily lose them; their master being with them from their

earliest years, and more and more in their society the older they

grow, will be able to prevent or efface by speaking correctly himself

the impression of the peasants' talk. Emile will speak the purest

French I know, but he will speak it more distinctly and with a

better articulation than myself.

The child who is trying to speak should hear nothing but words he

can understand, nor should he say words he cannot articulate; his

efforts lead him to repeat the same syllable as if he were practising

its clear pronunciation. When he begins to stammer, do not try to

understand him. To expect to be always listened to is a form of

tyranny which is not good for the child. See carefully to his real

needs, and let him try to make you understand the rest. Still

less should you hurry him into speech; he will learn to talk when

he feels the want of it.

It has indeed been remarked that those who begin to speak very late

never speak so distinctly as others; but it is not because they

talked late that they are hesitating; on the contrary, they began

to talk late because they hesitate; if not, why did they begin to

talk so late? Have they less need of speech, have they been less

urged to it? On the contrary, the anxiety aroused with the first

suspicion of this backwardness leads people to tease them much

more to begin to talk than those who articulated earlier; and this

mistaken zeal may do much to make their speech confused, when with

less haste they might have had time to bring it to greater perfection.

Children who are forced to speak too soon have no time to learn

either to pronounce correctly or to understand what they are made

to say; while left to themselves they first practise the easiest

syllables, and then, adding to them little by little some meaning

which their gestures explain, they teach you their own words before

they learn yours. By this means they do not acquire your words

till they have understood them. Being in no hurry to use them, they

begin by carefully observing the sense in which you use them, and

when they are sure of them they adopt them.

The worst evil resulting from the precocious use of speech by young

children is that we not only fail to understand the first words

they use, we misunderstand them without knowing it; so that while

they seem to answer us correctly, they fail to understand us and we

them. This is the most frequent cause of our surprise at children's

sayings; we attribute to them ideas which they did not attach to

their words. This lack of attention on our part to the real meaning

which words have for children seems to me the cause of their earliest

misconceptions; and these misconceptions, even when corrected,

colour their whole course of thought for the rest of their life. I

shall have several opportunities of illustrating these by examples

later on.

Let the child's vocabulary, therefore, be limited; it is very

undesirable that he should have more words than ideas, that he

should be able to say more than he thinks. One of the reasons why

peasants are generally shrewder than townsfolk is, I think, that

their vocabulary is smaller. They have few ideas, but those few

are thoroughly grasped.

The infant is progressing in several ways at once; he is learning

to talk, eat, and walk about the same time. This is really the

first phase of his life. Up till now, he was little more than he

was before birth; he had neither feeling nor thought, he was barely

capable of sensation; he was unconscious of his own existence.

"Vivit, et est vitae nescius ipse suae."--Ovid.