Yet no works

have had a

wider influence upon society than

those of Rousseau.

persecution met him wherever he went in Switzerland, and in 1766 he fled to England at the invitation of the philosopher Hume. Here he soon imagined himself the victim of a plot, and returned to France, where for more than a decade he wandered about in the vicinity of Paris. In 1778 he died and was buried at Ermenonville. Fifteen years later, during the Reign of Terror, he was hailed as a liberator, and his mortal remains were borne in triumph back to Paris by the revolutionists. There they were laid to rest in the Pantheon, the temple dedicated by France to her greatest sons.

This recognition was late, but deserved. No other person, indeed, has ever approached Rousseau in pointing out the cares and distresses of the poor and oppressed, as they drag along their existence and produce the prosperity which is concentrated in the hands of a small but privileged group. No works besides his treatises have so graphically depicted the need for a change of front in society, or sounded such a clarion call to the downtrodden to arise in battle. His anarchic and unsocial individualism complemented the rationalism and intellectual skepticism of Voltaire, and there resulted a furious revolution and a blind reaction to the decadent order of society. Rousseau may not have caused the French Revolution, but, as Napoleon declared, it would have been impossible without him. His brilliant and emotional naturalism crystallized the

spirit of the times. It furnished the watchwords of the Jacobins and later of the Committee of Public Safety, and shook France from center to circumference. Similarly, America, although inheriting her love of liberty from Anglo-Saxon ancestry, expressed her convictions in formulas taken from the works of Rousseau. The American colonies seem to have assimilated the ideas, phrases, and even words of the Gallic revolutionists and echoed them in the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and in various documents and debates.

1

Rousseau has rectly

also indi

affected po

and litera

In many other ways the influence of Rousseau has been felt. While he has left no direct impress upon the tenets of political science, he has raised many inquiries litical science, in that subject that have since had to be answered. theology, He is largely responsible for the conception of socialism ture. and of philosophic anarchy, although his economic writings do not advocate either in specific terms. In religion, the modern tendency to emphasize the emotional element, and at the same time to reject doctrines, ritualism, and extreme organization received an impetus from Rousseau. To him is largely due the development of romanticism in the literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During that period sentimentality, heroicism, personal adventures, dominance of the emotions, analysis of the passions, and

1 For example, 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'

inner conflicts pervade the writings of France, Germany, England, and America. Likewise, the descriptions of scenery and natural environment, and of the charm of the country, mountains, and lakes in literature, and the love for the natural, picturesque, and rural in art and architecture, largely find their beginnings in Rousseau's naturalism.

But he has

especially in

cation in its

organization,

and content.

His Influence upon Educational Theory and Practice But the most complete revolution and the most fluenced edu- potent effects of Rousselianism appear in educational theory and practice. Few men have had as great an aim, method, influence upon the organization; method, and content of education. Although his mission was largely to destroy traditionalism, and most of the specific features of his naturalism have in time been modified or rejected, many of the important principles in modern pedagogy go back to him. His criticism caused men to rush to the defense of existing systems, and when they failed in their attempts to reinstate them, they undertook the construction of something better. In the first place, his attitude toward the artificial, superficial, and inhuman society of the times led him to oppose its arbitrary authority and guidance of education according to an unnatural and traditional organization. He advocated the virtues of the primitive man and a simpler

basis of social organization, and held that all members of society should be trained so as to contribute to their own support and to be sympathetic and benevolent toward their fellows. Through him education has thus been more closely related to human welfare. The present-day emphasis upon the moral aim of education, the cultivation of social virtues, and the development of industrial education alike find some of their roots in the Emile. On the side of method and content also, education is indebted to the naturalism of Rousseau. He first insisted upon the study of children as fundamental in education, and showed that the material or activities provided must be in keeping with the different stages of development. Rousseau may, therefore, be credited in part with the modern regard for the freedom of the child and the study of his psychological development. Through him we have come to abandon the conception of the child as only an adult on a small scale. We may thank the Emile to some extent, too, for the increasing tendency to cease from forcing upon children a fixed method of thinking, feeling, and acting, and for the gradual disappearance of the old ideas that a task is of educational value according as it is distasteful, and that real education consists in straining to overcome meaningless difficulties. It is likewise due to him primarily that we have recognized the need of physi1 See pp. 63 ff.

This is shown by the in

works on education since the Emile was published;

cal activities, especially in the earlier development of the child, as a foundation for its growth and learning. Further, it is the education of Emile that suggested familiarity with nature and natural phenomena as a means of counterbalancing the corrupt action of man, and, partly as a result of this, schools and colleges have come to include the study of physical forces, natural environment, plants, and animals.

The great influence of Rousseau upon education in all crease in the its aspects is shown by the library of books since written to contradict, correct, or disseminate his doctrines. During the quarter of a century following the publication of the Emile, probably more than twice as many books upon education were published as in the preceding three-quarters of a century. This epoch-making work created and forced a rich harvest of educational thinking for a century after its appearance, and it has affected our ideas upon pedagogical subjects from that day to this. But Rousseau's principles did not take immediate root in the schools themselves, although their influence is manifest there as the nineteenth century advanced. In France they were apparent in the complaints and recommendations concerning schools in many of the cahiers that were issued just prior to the Revolution,

and by the

French 'com

plaints' and legislation,

1 These were lists of grievances and desired reforms prepared by the various towns and villages throughout France at the request of the king (Louis XVI), in accordance with an old custom.