Emile: or A Treatise on Education

Selections
by Jean Jacques Rousseau
Selections chosen by Catherine Elgin from Emile: or A Treatise on Education by Jean Jacques
Rousseau. The Literature Network. <www.online-literature.com/rousseau/emile>

Book I – Infancy – General Principles

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.
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; 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.

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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.
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. 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.
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

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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
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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

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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, 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.
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.

Book II From Age Five to Age Twelve

Although we know approximately the limits of human life and our chances of attaining those
limits, nothing is more uncertain than the length of the life of any one of us. Very few reach old
age. The chief risks occur at the beginning of life; the shorter our past life, the less we must hope
to live. Of all the children who are born scarcely one half reach adolescence, and it is very likely
your pupil will not live to be a man.
What is to be thought, therefore, of that cruel education which sacrifices the present to an
uncertain future, that burdens a child with all sorts of restrictions and begins by making him
miserable, in order to prepare him for some far-off happiness which he may never enjoy? Even
if I considered that education wise in its aims, how could I view without indignation those poor
wretches subjected to an intolerable slavery and condemned like galley-slaves to endless toil,
with no certainty that they will gain anything by it? The age of harmless mirth is spent in tears,
punishments, threats, and slavery. You torment the poor thing for his good; you fail to see that
you are calling Death to snatch him from these gloomy surroundings. Who can say how many
children fall victims to the excessive care of their fathers and mothers? They are happy to
escape from this cruelty; this is all that they gain from the ills they are forced to endure: they die
without regretting, having known nothing of life but its sorrows.
Men, be kind to your fellow-men; this is your first duty, kind to every age and station, kind to all
that is not foreign to humanity. What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness? Love
childhood, indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts. Who has not sometimes

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regretted that age when laughter was ever on the lips, and when the heart was ever at peace?
Why rob these innocents of the joys which pass so quickly, of that precious gift which they
cannot abuse? Why fill with bitterness the fleeting days of early childhood, days which will no
more return for them than for you? Fathers, can you tell when death will call your children to
him? Do not lay up sorrow for yourselves by robbing them of the short span which nature has
allotted to them. As soon as they are aware of the joy of life, let them rejoice in it, go that
whenever God calls them they may not die without having tasted the joy of life.
How people will cry out against me! I hear from afar the shouts of that false wisdom which is
ever dragging us onwards, counting the present as nothing, and pursuing without a pause a
future which flies as we pursue, that false wisdom which removes us from our place and never
brings us to any other.
Now is the time, you say, to correct his evil tendencies; we must increase suffering in childhood,
when it is less keenly felt, to lessen it in manhood. But how do you know that you can carry out
all these fine schemes; how do you know that all this fine teaching with which you overwhelm
the feeble mind of the child will not do him more harm than good in the future? How do you
know that you can spare him anything by the vexations you heap upon him now? Why
inflict on him more ills than befit his present condition unless you are quite sure that these
present ills will save him future ill? And what proof can you give me that those evil tendencies
you profess to cure are not the result of your foolish precautions rather than of nature? What a
poor sort of foresight, to make a child wretched in the present with the more or less doubtful
hope of making him happy at some future day. If such blundering thinkers fail to distinguish
between liberty and license, between a merry child and a spoilt darling, let them learn to
discriminate.
What then is human wisdom? Where is the path of true happiness? The mere limitation of our
desires is not enough, for if they were less than our powers, part of our faculties would be idle,
and we should not enjoy our whole being; neither is the mere extension of our powers enough,
for if our desires were also increased we should only be the more miserable. True happiness
consists in decreasing the difference between our desires and our powers, in establishing
a perfect equilibrium between the power and the will. Then only, when all its forces are
employed, will the soul be at rest and man will find himself in his true position.
In this condition, nature, who does everything for the best, has placed him from the first. To
begin with, she gives him only such desires as are necessary for self-preservation and such
powers as are sufficient for their satisfaction. All the rest she has stored in his mind as a sort of
reserve, to be drawn upon at need. It is only in this primitive condition that we find the
equilibrium between desire and power, and then alone man is not unhappy. As soon as his
potential powers of mind begin to function, imagination, more powerful than all the rest, awakes,
and precedes all the rest. It is imagination which enlarges the bounds of possibility for us,
whether for good or ill, and therefore stimulates and feeds desires by the hope of satisfying them.
But the object which seemed within our grasp flies quicker than we can follow; when we think
we have grasped it, it transforms itself and is again far ahead of us. We no longer perceive the
country we have traversed, and we think nothing of it; that which lies before us becomes vaster
and stretches still before us. Thus we exhaust our strength, yet never reach our
goal, and the nearer we are to pleasure, the further we are from happiness.
There is only one man who gets his own way--he who can get it single-handed; therefore
freedom, not power, is the greatest good. That man is truly free who desires what he is able to

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perform, and does what he desires. This is my fundamental maxim. Apply it to childhood, and all
the rules of education spring from it.
Society has enfeebled man, not merely by robbing him of the right to his own strength, but still
more by making his strength insufficient for his needs. This is why his desires increase in
proportion to his weakness; and this is why the child is weaker than the man. If a man is strong
and a child is weak it is not because the strength of the one is absolutely greater than the strength
of the other, but because the one can naturally provide for himself and the other cannot. Thus the
man will have more desires and the child more caprices, a word which means, I take it, desires
which are not true needs, desires which can only be satisfied with the help of others.
The wise man can keep his own place; but the child who does not know what his place is, is
unable to keep it. There are a thousand ways out of it, and it is the business of those who have
charge of the child to keep him in his place, and this is no easy task. He should be neither beast
nor man, but a child. He must feel his weakness, but not suffer through it; he must be dependent,
but he must not obey; he must ask, not command. He is only subject to others because of his
needs, and because they see better than he what he really needs, what may help or hinder his
existence. No one, not even his father, has the right to bid the child do what is of no use to him.
These are weighty considerations, and they provide a solution for all the conflicting problems of
our social system. There are two kinds of dependence: dependence on things, which is the work
of nature; and dependence on men, which is the work of society. Dependence on things, being
non-moral, does no injury to liberty and begets no vices; dependence on men, being out of order,
gives rise to every kind of vice, and through this master and slave become mutually depraved. If
there is any cure for this social evil, it is to be found in the substitution of law for the individual;
in arming the general will with a real strength beyond the power of any individual will. If the
laws of nations, like the laws of nature, could never be broken by any human power, dependence
on men would become dependence on things; all the advantages of a state of nature would be
combined with all the advantages of social life in the commonwealth. The liberty which
preserves a man from vice would be united with the morality which raises him to virtue.
Keep the child dependent on things only. By this course of education you will have followed the
order of nature. Let his unreasonable wishes meet with physical obstacles only, or the
punishment which results from his own actions, lessons which will be recalled when the same
circumstances occur again. It is enough to prevent him from wrong doing without forbidding him
to do wrong. Experience or lack of power should take the place of law. Give him, not what he
wants, but what he needs. Let there be no question of obedience for him or tyranny for you.
Supply the strength he lacks just so far as is required for freedom, not for power, so that he may
receive your services with a sort of shame, and look forward to the time when he may dispense
with them and may achieve the honour of self-help.
Nature provides for the child's growth in her own fashion, and this should never be thwarted. Do
not make him sit still when he wants to run about, nor run when he wants to be quiet. If we did
not spoil our children's wills by our blunders their desires would be free from caprice. Let them
run, jump, and shout to their heart's content. All their own activities are instincts of the body for
its growth in strength; but you should regard with suspicion those wishes which they cannot
carry out for themselves, those which others must carry out for them. Then you must distinguish
carefully between natural and artificial needs.
The liberty I give my pupil makes up for the slight hardships to which he is exposed. I see little
fellows playing in the snow, stiff and blue with cold, scarcely able to stir a finger. They could go

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and warm themselves if they chose, but they do not choose; if you forced them to come in they
would feel the harshness of constraint a hundredfold more than the sharpness of the cold. Then
what becomes of your grievance? Shall I make your child miserable by exposing him to
hardships which he is perfectly ready to endure? I secure his present good by leaving him his
freedom, and his future good by arming him against the evils he will have to bear. If he had his
choice, would he hesitate for a moment between you and me?
Do you think any man can find true happiness elsewhere than in his natural state; and when you
try to spare him all suffering, are you not taking him out of his natural state? Indeed I maintain
that to enjoy great happiness he must experience slight ills; such is his nature. Too much bodily
prosperity corrupts the morals. A man who knew nothing of suffering would be incapable of
tenderness towards his fellow-creatures and ignorant of the joys of pity; he would be hard-
hearted, unsocial, a very monster among men.
I return to practical matters. I have already said your child must not get what he asks, but what he
needs; he must never act from obedience, but from necessity.
The very words OBEY and COMMAND will be excluded from his vocabulary, still more those
of DUTY and OBLIGATION; but the words strength, necessity, weakness, and constraint must
have a large place in it. Before the age of reason it is impossible to form any idea of moral beings
or social relations; so avoid, as far as may be, the use of words which express these ideas, lest the
child at an early age should attach wrong ideas to them, ideas which you cannot or will not
destroy when he is older. The first mistaken idea he gets into his head is the germ of error and
vice; it is the first step that needs watching. Act in such a way that while he only notices external
objects his ideas are confined to sensations; let him only see the physical world around him. If
not, you may be sure that either he will pay no heed to you at all, or he will form fantastic ideas
of the moral world of which you prate, ideas which you will never efface as long as he lives.
Nature would have them children before they are men. If we try to invert this order we shall
produce a forced fruit immature and flavourless, fruit which will be rotten before it is ripe; we
shall have young doctors and old children. Childhood has its own ways of seeing, thinking, and
feeling; nothing is more foolish than to try and substitute our ways; and I should no more expect
judgment in a ten-year-old child than I should expect him to be five feet high. Indeed, what use
would reason be to him at that age? It is the curb of strength, and the child does not need the
curb. Nature would have them children before they are men. If we try to invert this order we
shall produce a forced fruit immature and flavourless, fruit which will be rotten before it is ripe;
we shall have young doctors and old children. Childhood has its own ways of seeing, thinking,
and feeling; nothing is more foolish than to try and substitute our ways; and I should no more
expect judgment in a ten-year-old child than I should expect him to be five feet high. Indeed,
what use would reason be to him at that age? It is the curb of strength, and the child does not
need the curb.
When you try to persuade your scholars of the duty of obedience, you add to this so-called
persuasion compulsion and threats, or still worse, flattery and bribes. Attracted by selfishness or
constrained by force, they pretend to be convinced by reason. They see as soon as you do that
obedience is to their advantage and disobedience to their disadvantage. But as you only demand
disagreeable things of them, and as it is always disagreeable to do another's will, they hide
themselves so that they may do as they please, persuaded that they are doing no wrong so long as
they are not found out, but ready, if found out, to own themselves in the wrong for fear of worse
evils. The reason for duty is beyond their age, and there is not a man in the world who could

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make them really aware of it; but the fear of punishment, the hope of forgiveness, importunity,
the difficulty of answering, wrings from them as many confessions as you want; and you think
you have convinced them when you have only wearied or frightened them.
What does it all come to? In the first place, by imposing on them a duty which they fail to
recognise, you make them disinclined to submit to your tyranny, and you turn away their love;
you teach them deceit, falsehood, and lying as a way to gain rewards or escape punishment; then
by accustoming them to conceal a secret motive under the cloak of an apparent one, you yourself
put into their hands the means of deceiving you, of depriving you of a knowledge of their real
character, of answering you and others with empty words whenever they have the chance. Laws,
you say, though binding on conscience, exercise the same constraint over grown-up men. That is
so, but what are these men but children spoilt by education? This is just what you should avoid.
Use force with children and reasoning with men; this is the natural order; the wise man needs
no laws.
Treat your scholar according to his age. Put him in his place from the first, and keep him in it, so
that he no longer tries to leave it. Then before he knows what goodness is, he will be practising
its chief lesson. Give him no orders at all, absolutely none. Do not even let him think that you
claim any authority over him. Let him only know that he is weak and you are strong, that his
condition and yours puts him at your mercy; let this be perceived, learned, and felt. Let him early
find upon his proud neck, the heavy yoke which nature has imposed upon us, the heavy yoke of
necessity, under which every finite being must bow. Let him find this necessity in
things, not in the caprices of man; let the curb be force, not authority. If there is something he
should not do, do not forbid him, but prevent him without explanation or reasoning; what you
give him, give it at his first word without prayers or entreaties, above all without conditions.
Give willingly, refuse unwillingly, but let your refusal be irrevocable; let no entreaties move you;
let your "No," once uttered, be a wall of brass, against which the child may exhaust his strength
some five or six times, but in the end he will try no more to overthrow it.
Give your scholar no verbal lessons; he should be taught by experience alone; never punish him,
for he does not know what it is to do wrong; never make him say, "Forgive me," for he does not
know how to do you wrong. Wholly unmoral in his actions, he can do nothing morally wrong,
and he deserves neither punishment nor reproof.
Let us lay it down as an incontrovertible rule that the first impulses of nature are always right;
there is no original sin in the human heart, the how and why of the entrance of every vice can be
traced. The only natural passion is self-love or selfishness taken in a wider sense. This
selfishness is good in itself and in relation to ourselves; and as the child has no necessary
relations to other people he is naturally indifferent to them; his self-love only becomes good or
bad by the use made of it and the relations established by its means. Until the time is ripe for the
appearance of reason, that guide of selfishness, the main thing is that the child shall do nothing
because you are watching him or listening to him; in a word, nothing because of other people,
but only what nature asks of him; then he will never do wrong.
I do not mean to say that he will never do any mischief, never hurt himself, never break a costly
ornament if you leave it within his reach. He might do much damage without doing wrong, since
wrong-doing depends on the harmful intention which will never be his. If once he meant to do
harm, his whole education would be ruined; he would be almost hopelessly bad.
May I venture at this point to state the greatest, the most important, the most useful rule of

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education? It is: Do not save time, but lose it. I hope that every-day readers will excuse my
paradoxes; you cannot avoid paradox if you think for yourself, and whatever you may say I
would rather fall into paradox than into prejudice. The most dangerous period in human life lies
between birth and the age of twelve. It is the time when errors and vices spring up, while as yet
there is no means to destroy them; when the means of destruction are ready, the roots have gone
too deep to be pulled up. If the infant sprang at one bound from its mother's breast to the age of
reason, the present type of education would be quite suitable, but its natural growth calls for
quite a different training. The mind should be left undisturbed till its faculties have developed;
for while it is blind it cannot see the torch you offer it, nor can it follow through the vast expanse
of ideas a path so faintly traced by reason that the best eyes can scarcely follow it.
Therefore the education of the earliest years should be merely negative. It consists, not in
teaching virtue or truth, but in preserving the heart from vice and from the spirit of error. If only
you could let well alone, and get others to follow your example; if you could bring your scholar
to the age of twelve strong and healthy, but unable to tell his right hand from his left, the eyes of
his understanding would be open to reason as soon as you began to teach him. Free from
prejudices and free from habits, there would be nothing in him to counteract the effects of your
labours. In your hands he would soon become the wisest of men; by doing nothing to begin with,
you would end with a prodigy of education.
Our first duties are to ourselves; our first feelings are centred on self; all our instincts are at first
directed to our own preservation and our own welfare. Thus the first notion of justice springs not
from what we owe to others, but from what is due to us. Here is another error in popular methods
of education. If you talk to children of their duties, and not of their rights, you are beginning at
the wrong end, and telling them what they cannot understand, what cannot be of any interest to
them. If I had to train a child such as I have just described, I should say to myself, "A child never
attacks people, only things; and he soon learns by experience to respect those older and stronger
than himself. Things, however, do not defend themselves. Therefore the first idea he needs is not
that of liberty but of property, and that he may get this idea he must have something of his own."
It is useless to enumerate his clothes, furniture, and playthings; although he uses these he knows
not how or why he has come by them. To tell him they were given him is little better, for giving
implies having; so here is property before his own, and it is the principle of property that you
want to teach him; moreover, giving is a convention, and the child as yet has no idea of
conventions. I hope my reader will note, in this and many other cases, how people think they
have taught children thoroughly, when they have only thrust on them words which have no
intelligible meaning to them.
We must therefore go back to the origin of property, for that is where the first idea of it must
begin. The child, living in the country, will have got some idea of field work; eyes and leisure
suffice for that, and he will have both. In every age, and especially in childhood, we want to
create, to copy, to produce, to give all the signs of power and activity. He will hardly have
seen the gardener at work twice, sowing, planting, and growing vegetables, before he will want
to garden himself.
According to the principles I have already laid down, I shall not thwart him; on the contrary, I
shall approve of his plan, share his hobby, and work with him, not for his pleasure but my own;
at least, so he thinks; I shall be his under-gardener, and dig the ground for him till his arms are
strong enough to do it; he will take possession of it by planting a bean, and this is surely a more
sacred possession, and one more worthy of respect, than that of Nunes Balboa, who took

9
possession of South America in the name of the King of Spain, by planting his banner on the
coast of the Southern Sea.
We water the beans every day, we watch them coming up with the greatest delight. Day by day I
increase this delight by saying, "Those belong to you." To explain what that word "belong"
means, I show him how he has given his time, his labour, and his trouble, his very self to it; that
in this ground there is a part of himself which he can claim against all the world, as he could
withdraw his arm from the hand of another man who wanted to keep it against his will.
One fine day he hurries up with his watering-can in his hand. What a scene of woe! Alas! all the
beans are pulled up, the soil is dug over, you can scarcely find the place. Oh! what has become of
my labour, my work, the beloved fruits of my care and effort? Who has stolen my property! Who
has taken my beans? The young heart revolts; the first feeling of injustice brings its sorrow and
bitterness; tears come in torrents, the unhappy child fills the air with cries and groans, I share his
sorrow and anger; we look around us, we make inquiries. At last we discover that the gardener
did it. We send for him.
But we are greatly mistaken. The gardener, hearing our complaint, begins to complain louder
than we:
What, gentlemen, was it you who spoilt my work! I had sown some Maltese melons; the seed
was given me as something quite out of the common, and I meant to give you a treat when they
were ripe; but you have planted your miserable beans and destroyed my melons, which were
coming up so nicely, and I can never get any more. You have behaved very badly to me and you
have deprived yourselves of the pleasure of eating most delicious melons.
JEAN JACQUES. My poor Robert, you must forgive us. You had given your labour and your
pains to it. I see we were wrong to spoil your work, but we will send to Malta for some more
seed for you, and we will never dig the ground again without finding out if some one else has
been beforehand with us.
ROBERT. Well, gentlemen, you need not trouble yourselves, for there is no more waste ground. I
dig what my father tilled; every one does the same, and all the land you see has been occupied
time out of mind.
EMILE. Mr. Robert, do people often lose the seed of Maltese melons?
ROBERT. No indeed, sir; we do not often find such silly little gentlemen as you. No one meddles
with his neighbour's garden; every one respects other people's work so that his own may be safe.
EMILE. But I have not got a garden.
ROBERT. I don't care; if you spoil mine I won't let you walk in it, for you see I do not mean to
lose my labour.
JEAN JACQUES. Could not we suggest an arrangement with this kind Robert? Let him give my
young friend and myself a corner of his garden to cultivate, on condition that he has half the
crop.
ROBERT. You may have it free. But remember I shall dig up your beans if you touch my melons.
In this attempt to show how a child may be taught certain primitive ideas we see how the notion
of property goes back naturally to the right of the first occupier to the results of his work. That is
plain and simple, and quite within the child's grasp. From that to the rights of property and

10
exchange there is but a step, after which you must stop short.
Your ill-tempered child destroys everything he touches. Do not vex yourself; put anything he can
spoil out of his reach. He breaks the things he is using; do not be in a hurry to give him more; let
him feel the want of them. He breaks the windows of his room; let the wind blow upon him night
and day, and do not be afraid of his catching cold; it is better to catch cold than to be reckless.
Never complain of the inconvenience he causes you, but let him feel it first. At last you will have
the windows mended without saying anything. He breaks them again; then change your plan; tell
him dryly and without anger, "The windows are mine, I took pains to have them put in, and I
mean to keep them safe." Then you will shut him up in a dark place without a window. At this
unexpected proceeding he cries and howls; no one heeds. Soon he gets tired and changes his
tone; he laments and sighs; a servant appears, the rebel begs to be let out. Without seeking any
excuse for refusing, the servant merely says, "I, too, have windows to keep," and goes away. At
last, when the child has been there several hours, long enough to get very tired of it, long enough
to make an impression on his memory, some one suggests to him that he should offer to make
terms with you, so that you may set him free and he will never break windows again. That is just
what he wants. He will send and ask you to come and see him; you will come, he will suggest his
plan, and you will agree to it at once, saying, "That is a very good idea; it will suit us both; why
didn't you think of it sooner?" Then without asking for any affirmation or confirmation of his
promise, you will embrace him joyfully and take him back at once to his own room, considering
this agreement as sacred as if he had confirmed it by a formal oath. What idea do you think he
will form from these proceedings, as to the fulfilment of a promise and its usefulness? If I am not
greatly mistaken, there is not a child upon earth, unless he is utterly spoilt already, who could
resist this treatment, or one who would ever dream of breaking windows again on purpose.
Follow out the whole train of thought. The naughty little fellow hardly thought when he was
making a hole for his beans that he was hewing out a cell in which his own knowledge would
soon imprison him.
The apparent ease with which children learn is their ruin. You fail to see that this very facility
proves that they are not learning. Their shining, polished brain reflects, as in a mirror, the things
you show them, but nothing sinks in. The child remembers the words and the ideas are reflected
back; his hearers understand them, but to him they are meaningless.
Although memory and reason are wholly different faculties, the one does not really develop apart
from the other. Before the age of reason the child receives images, not ideas; and there is this
difference between them: images are merely the pictures of external objects, while ideas are
notions about those objects determined by their relations. An image when it is recalled may exist
by itself in the mind, but every idea implies other ideas. When we image we merely perceive,
when we reason we compare. Our sensations are merely passive, our notions or ideas spring
from an active principle which judges. The proof of this will be given later.
I maintain, therefore, that as children are incapable of judging, they have no true memory. They
retain sounds, form, sensation, but rarely ideas, and still more rarely relations. You tell me they
acquire some rudiments of geometry, and you think you prove your case; not so, it is mine you
prove; you show that far from being able to reason themselves, children are unable to retain the
reasoning of others; for if you follow the method of these little geometricians you will see they
only retain the exact impression of the figure and the terms of the demonstration. They cannot
meet the slightest new objection; if the figure is reversed they can do nothing. All their
knowledge is on the sensation-level, nothing has penetrated to their understanding. Their

11
memory is little better than their other powers, for they always have to learn over again, when
they are grown up, what they learnt as children.
I am far from thinking, however, that children have no sort of reason. On the contrary, I think
they reason very well with regard to things that affect their actual and sensible well-being.
But people are mistaken as to the extent of their information, and they attribute to them
knowledge they do not possess, and make them reason about things they cannot understand.
Another mistake is to try to turn their attention to matters which do not concern them in the least,
such as their future interest, their happiness when they are grown up, the opinion people will
have of them when they are men--terms which are absolutely meaningless when addressed to
creatures who are entirely without foresight. But all the forced studies of these poor little
wretches are directed towards matters utterly remote from their minds. You may judge how much
attention they can give to them.
When I thus get rid of children's lessons, I get rid of the chief cause of their sorrows, namely
their books. Reading is the curse of childhood, yet it is almost the only occupation you can find
for children. Emile, at twelve years old, will hardly know what a book is. "But," you say, "he
must, at least, know how to read."
When reading is of use to him, I admit he must learn to read, but till then he will only find it a
nuisance.
If children are not to be required to do anything as a matter of obedience, it follows that they will
only learn what they perceive to be of real and present value, either for use or enjoyment; what
other motive could they have for learning? The art of speaking to our absent friends, of hearing
their words; the art of letting them know at first hand our feelings, our desires, and our longings,
is an art whose usefulness can be made plain at any age. How is it that this art, so useful and
pleasant in itself, has become a terror to children? Because the child is compelled to acquire it
against his will, and to use it for purposes beyond his comprehension. A child has no great wish
to perfect himself in the use of an instrument of torture, but make it a means to his pleasure, and
soon you will not be able to keep him from it.
Present interest, that is the motive power, the only motive power that takes us far and safely.
Sometimes Emile receives notes of invitation from his father or mother, his relations or friends;
he is invited to a dinner, a walk, a boating expedition, to see some public entertainment. These
notes are short, clear, plain, and well written. Some one must read them to him, and he cannot
always find anybody when wanted; no more consideration is shown to him than he himself
showed to you yesterday. Time passes, the chance is lost. The note is read to him at last, but it is
too late. Oh! If only he had known how to read! He receives other notes, so short, so interesting,
he would like to try to read them. Sometimes he gets help, sometimes none. He does his best, and
at last he makes out half the note; it is something about going to-morrow to drink cream--Where?
With whom? He cannot tell--how hard he tries to make out the rest!
There is a mere natural and mechanical use of the senses which strengthens the body without
improving the judgment. It is all very well to swim, run, jump, whip a top, throw stones; but
have we nothing but arms and legs? Have we not eyes and ears as well; and are not these organs
necessary for the use of the rest? Do not merely exercise the strength, exercise all the senses by
which it is guided; make the best use of every one of them, and check the results of one by the
other. Measure, count, weigh, compare. Do not use force till you have estimated the resistance;
let the estimation of the effect always precede the application of the means. Get the child

12
interested in avoiding insufficient or superfluous efforts. If in this way you train him to calculate
the effects of all his movements, and to correct his mistakes by experience, is it not clear that the
more he does the wiser he will become?
Take the case of moving a heavy mass; if he takes too long a lever, he will waste his strength; if
it is too short, he will not have strength enough; experience will teach him to use the very stick
he needs. This knowledge is not beyond his years. Take, for example, a load to be carried; if he
wants to carry as much as he can, and not to take up more than he can carry, must he not
calculate the weight by the appearance? Does he know how to compare masses of like substance
and different size, or to choose between masses of the same size and different substances? He
must set to work to compare their specific weights. I have seen a young man, very highly
educated, who could not be convinced, till he had tried it, that a bucket full of blocks of oak
weighed less than the same bucket full of water.
We love to augur well of our children, and we are continually regretting the flood of folly which
overwhelms the hopes we would fain have rested on some chance phrase. If my scholar rarely
gives me cause for such prophecies, neither will he give me cause for such regrets, for he never
says a useless word, and does not exhaust himself by chattering when he knows there is no one
to listen to him. His ideas are few but precise, he knows nothing by rote but much by experience.
If he reads our books worse than other children, he reads far better in the book of nature; his
thoughts are not in his tongue but in his brain; he has less memory and more judgment;
he can only speak one language, but he understands what he is saying, and if his speech is not so
good as that of other children his deeds are better.
He does not know the meaning of habit, routine, and custom; what he did yesterday has no
control over what he is doing to-day; he follows no rule, submits to no authority, copies no
pattern, and only acts or speaks as he pleases. So do not expect set speeches or studied manners
from him, but just the faithful expression of his thoughts and the conduct that springs from his
inclinations.
You will find he has a few moral ideas concerning his present state and none concerning
manhood; what use could he make of them, for the child is not, as yet, an active member of
society. Speak to him of freedom, of property, or even of what is usually done; he may
understand you so far; he knows why his things are his own, and why other things are not his,
and nothing more. Speak to him of duty or obedience; he will not know what you are talking
about; bid him do something and he will pay no attention; but say to him, "If you will give me
this pleasure, I will repay it when required," and he will hasten to give you satisfaction, for he
asks nothing better than to extend his domain, to acquire rights over you, which will, he knows,
be respected. Maybe he is not sorry to have a place of his own, to be reckoned of some account;
but if he has formed this latter idea, he has already left the realms of nature, and you have failed
to bar the gates of vanity.
For his own part, should he need help, he will ask it readily of the first person he meets. He will
ask it of a king as readily as of his servant; all men are equals in his eyes. From his way of asking
you will see he knows you owe him nothing, that he is asking a favour. He knows too that
humanity moves you to grant this favour; his words are few and simple. His voice, his look, his
gesture are those of a being equally familiar with compliance and refusal. It is neither the
crawling, servile submission of the slave, nor the imperious tone of the master, it is a modest
confidence in mankind; it is the noble and touching gentleness of a creature, free, yet sensitive
and feeble, who asks aid of a being, free, but strong and kindly. If you grant his request he will

13
not thank you, but he will feel he has incurred a debt. If you refuse he will neither complain nor
insist; he knows it is useless; he will not say, "They refused to help me," but "It was impossible,"
and as I have already said, we do not rebel against necessity when once we have perceived it.
Leave him to himself and watch his actions without speaking, consider what he is doing and how
he sets about it. He does not require to convince himself that he is free, so he never acts
thoughtlessly and merely to show that he can do what he likes; does he not know that he is
always his own master? He is quick, alert, and ready; his movements are eager as befits his age,
but you will not find one which has no end in view. Whatever he wants, he will never attempt
what is beyond his powers, for he has learnt by experience what those powers are; his means will
always be adapted to the end in view, and he will rarely attempt anything without the certainty of
success; his eye is keen and true; he will not be so stupid as to go and ask other people about
what he sees; he will examine it on his own account, and before he asks he will try every means
at his disposal to discover what he wants to know for himself. If he lights upon some unexpected
difficulty, he will be less upset than others; if there is danger he will be less afraid. His
imagination is still asleep and nothing has been done to arouse it; he only sees what is really
there, and rates the danger at its true worth; so he never loses his head. He does not rebel against
necessity, her hand is too heavy upon him; he has borne her yoke all his life long, he is well used
to it; he is always ready for anything.
Work or play are all one to him, his games are his work; he knows no difference. He brings to
everything the cheerfulness of interest, the charm of freedom, and he shows the bent of his own
mind and the extent of his knowledge. Is there anything better worth seeing, anything more
touching or more delightful, than a pretty child, with merry, cheerful glance, easy contented
manner, open smiling countenance, playing at the most important things, or working at the
lightest amusements?
He has reached the perfection of childhood; he has lived the life of a child; his progress has not
been bought at the price of his happiness, he has gained both. While he has acquired all the
wisdom of a child, he has been as free and happy as his health permits. If the Reaper Death
should cut him off and rob us of our hopes,we need not bewail alike his life and death, we shall
not have the added grief of knowing that we caused him pain; we will say, "His childhood, at
least, was happy; we have robbed him of nothing that nature gave him."

Book III From Age Twelve to Age Fifteen

About twelve or thirteen the child's strength increases far more rapidly than his needs. The
strongest and fiercest of the passions is still unknown, his physical development is still imperfect
and seems to await the call of the will. He is scarcely aware of extremes of heat and cold and
braves them with impunity. He needs no coat, his blood is warm; no spices, hunger is his sauce,
no food comes amiss at this age; if he is sleepy he stretches himself on the ground and goes to
sleep; he finds all he needs within his reach; he is not tormented by any imaginary wants; he
cares nothing what others think; his desires are not beyond his grasp; not only is he self-
sufficing, but for the first and last time in his life he has more strength than he needs.
Let us transform our sensations into ideas, but do not let us jump all at once from the objects of
sense to objects of thought. The latter are attained by means of the former. Let the senses be the
only guide for the first workings of reason. No book but the world, no teaching but that of fact.
The child who reads ceases to think, he only reads. He is acquiring words not knowledge.

14
Teach your scholar to observe the phenomena of nature; you will soon rouse his curiosity, but if
you would have it grow, do not be in too great a hurry to satisfy this curiosity. Put the problems
before him and let him solve them himself. Let him know nothing because you have told him,
but because he has learnt it for himself. Let him not be taught science, let him discover it. If ever
you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other
people's thoughts.
You wish to teach this child geography and you provide him with globes, spheres, and maps.
What elaborate preparations! What is the use of all these symbols; why not begin by showing
him the real thing so that he may at least know what you are talking about?
One fine evening we are walking in a suitable place where the wide horizon gives us a full view
of the setting sun, and we note the objects which mark the place where it sets. Next morning we
return to the same place for a breath of fresh air before sun-rise. We see the rays of light which
announce the sun's approach; the glow increases, the east seems afire, and long before the sun
appears the light leads us to expect its return. Every moment you expect to see it. There it is at
last! A shining point appears like a flash of lightning and soon fills the whole space; the veil of
darkness rolls away, man perceives his dwelling place in fresh beauty. During the night the grass
has assumed a fresher green; in the light of early dawn, and gilded by the first rays of the sun, it
seems covered with a shining network of dew reflecting the light and colour. The birds raise their
chorus of praise to greet the Father of life, not one of them is mute; their gentle warbling is softer
than by day, it expresses the langour of a peaceful waking. All these produce an impression of
freshness which seems to reach the very soul. It is a brief hour of enchantment which no man can
resist; a sight so grand, so fair, so delicious, that none can behold it unmoved.
Fired with this enthusiasm, the master wishes to impart it to the child. He expects to rouse his
emotion by drawing attention to his own. Mere folly! The splendour of nature lives in man's
heart; to be seen, it must be felt. The child sees the objects themselves, but does not perceive
their relations, and cannot hear their harmony. It needs knowledge he has not yet acquired,
feelings he has not yet experienced, to receive the complex impression which results from all
these separate sensations. If he has not wandered over arid plains, if his feet have not been
scorched by the burning sands of the desert, if he has not breathed the hot and oppressive air
reflected from the glowing rocks, how shall he delight in the fresh air of a fine morning. The
scent of flowers, the beauty of foliage, the moistness of the dew, the soft turf beneath his feet,
how shall all these delight his senses. How shall the song of the birds arouse voluptuous emotion
if love and pleasure are still unknown to him? How shall he behold with rapture the birth of this
fair day, if his imagination cannot paint the joys it may bring in its track? How can he feel the
beauty of nature, while the hand that formed it is unknown?
Never tell the child what he cannot understand: no descriptions, no eloquence, no figures of
speech, no poetry. The time has not come for feeling or taste. Continue to be clear and cold; the
time will come only too soon when you must adopt another tone.
Brought up in the spirit of our maxims, accustomed to make his own tools and not to appeal to
others until he has tried and failed, he will examine everything he sees carefully and in silence.
He thinks rather than questions. Be content, therefore, to show him things at a fit season; then,
when you see that his curiosity is thoroughly aroused, put some brief question which will set him
trying to discover the answer.
On the present occasion when you and he have carefully observed the rising sun, when you have

15
called his attention to the mountains and other objects visible from the same spot, after he has
chattered freely about them, keep quiet for a few minutes as if lost in thought and then say, "I
think the sun set over there last night; it rose here this morning. How can that be?" Say no more;
if he asks questions, do not answer them; talk of something else. Let him alone, and be sure he
will think about it.
To train a child to be really attentive so that he may be really impressed by any truth of
experience, he must spend anxious days before he discovers that truth. If he does not learn
enough in this way, there is another way of drawing his attention to the matter. Turn the question
about. If he does not know how the sun gets from the place where it sets to where it rises, he
knows at least how it travels from sunrise to sunset, his eyes teach him that. Use the second
question to throw light on the first; either your pupil is a regular dunce or the analogy is too clear
to be missed. This is his first lesson in cosmography.
As we always advance slowly from one sensible idea to another, and as we give time enough to
each for him to become really familiar with it before we go on to another, and lastly as we never
force our scholar's attention, we are still a long way from a knowledge of the course of the sun or
the shape of the earth; but as all the apparent movements of the celestial bodies depend on the
same principle, and the first observation leads on to all the rest, less effort is needed, though
more time, to proceed from the diurnal revolution to the calculation of eclipses, than to get a
thorough understanding of day and night.
We saw the sun rise at midsummer, we shall see it rise at Christmas or some other fine winter's
day; for you know we are no lie-a-beds and we enjoy the cold. I take care to make this second
observation in the same place as the first, and if skilfully lead up to, one or other will certainly
exclaim, "What a funny thing! The sun is not rising in the same place; here are our landmarks,
but it is rising over there. So there is the summer east and the winter east, etc." Young teacher,
you are on the right track. These examples should show you how to teach the sphere without any
difficulty, taking the earth for the earth and the sun for the sun.
As a general rule--never substitute the symbol for the thing signified, unless it is impossible to
show the thing itself; for the child's attention is so taken up with the symbol that he will forget
what it signifies.
Remember that this is the essential point in my method--Do not teach the child many things, but
never to let him form inaccurate or confused ideas. I care not if he knows nothing provided he is
not mistaken, and I only acquaint him with truths to guard him against the errors he might put in
their place. Reason and judgment come slowly, prejudices flock to us in crowds, and from these
he must be protected. But if you make science itself your object, you embark on an unfathomable
and shoreless ocean, an ocean strewn with reefs from which you will never return. When I see a
man in love with knowledge, yielding to its charms and flitting from one branch to another
unable to stay his steps, he seems to me like a child gathering shells on the sea-shore, now
picking them up, then throwing them aside for others which he sees beyond them, then taking
them again, till overwhelmed by their number and unable to choose between them, he flings
them all away and returns empty handed.
Time was long during early childhood; we only tried to pass our time for fear of using it ill; now
it is the other way; we have not time enough for all that would be of use. The passions,
remember, are drawing near, and when they knock at the door your scholar will have no ear for
anything else. The peaceful age of intelligence is so short, it flies so swiftly, there is so much to

16
be done, that it is madness to try to make your child learned. It is not your business to teach him
the various sciences, but to give him a taste for them and methods of learning them when this
taste is more mature. That is assuredly a fundamental principle of all good education.
This is also the time to train him gradually to prolonged attention to a given object; but this
attention should never be the result of constraint, but of interest or desire; you must be very
careful that it is not too much for his strength, and that it is not carried to the point of tedium.
Watch him, therefore, and whatever happens, stop before he is tired, for it matters little what he
learns; it does matter that he should do nothing against his will.
If he asks questions let your answers be enough to whet his curiosity but not enough to satisfy it;
above all, when you find him talking at random and overwhelming you with silly questions
instead of asking for information, at once refuse to answer; for it is clear that he no longer cares
about the matter in hand, but wants to make you a slave to his questions. Consider his motives
rather than his words. This warning, which was scarcely needed before, becomes of supreme
importance when the child begins to reason.
Let the child do nothing because he is told; nothing is good for him but what he recognises as
good. When you are always urging him beyond his present understanding, you think you are
exercising a foresight which you really lack. To provide him with useless tools which he may
never require, you deprive him of man's most useful tool--common-sense. You would have him
docile as a child; he will be a credulous dupe when he grows up. You are always saying, "What
I ask is for your good, though you cannot understand it. What does it matter to me whether you
do it or not; my efforts are entirely on your account." All these fine speeches with which you
hope to make him good, are preparing the way, so that the visionary, the tempter, the charlatan,
the rascal, and every kind of fool may catch him in his snare or draw him into his folly.
A man must know many things which seem useless to a child, but need the child learn, or can he
indeed learn, all that the man must know? Try to teach the child what is of use to a child and you
will find that it takes all his time. Why urge him to the studies of an age he may never reach, to
the neglect of those studies which meet his present needs? "But," you ask, "will it not be too late
to learn what he ought to know when the time comes to use it?" I cannot tell; but this I do know,
it is impossible to teach it sooner, for our real teachers are experience and emotion, and man will
never learn what befits a man except under its own conditions. A child knows he must become a
man; all the ideas he may have as to man's estate are so many opportunities for his instruction,
but he should remain in complete ignorance of those ideas which are beyond his grasp. My
whole book is one continued argument in support of this fundamental principle of education.
As soon as we have contrived to give our pupil an idea of the word "Useful," we have got an
additional means of controlling him, for this word makes a great impression on him, provided
that its meaning for him is a meaning relative to his own age, and provided he clearly sees its
relation to his own well-being. This word makes no impression on your scholars because you
have taken no pains to give it a meaning they can understand, and because other people always
undertake to supply their needs so that they never require to think for themselves, and do not
know what utility is.
"What is the use of that?" In the future this is the sacred formula, the formula by which he and I
test every action of our lives. This is the question with which I invariably answer all his
questions; it serves to check the stream of foolish and tiresome questions with which children
weary those about them. These incessant questions produce no result, and their object is rather to

17
get a hold over you than to gain any real advantage. A pupil, who has been really taught only to
want to know what is useful, questions like Socrates; he never asks a question without a reason
for it, for he knows he will be required to give his reason before he gets an answer.
See what a powerful instrument I have put into your hands for use with your pupil. As he does
not know the reason for anything you can reduce him to silence almost at will; and what
advantages do your knowledge and experience give you to show him the usefulness of what you
suggest. For, make no mistake about it, when you put this question to him, you are teaching him
to put it to you, and you must expect that whatever you suggest to him in the future he will
follow your own example and ask, "What is the use of this?"
In the first place do not forget that it is rarely your business to suggest what he ought to learn; it
is for him to want to learn, to seek and to find it. You should put it within his reach, you should
skilfully awaken the desire and supply him with means for its satisfaction. So your questions
should be few and well-chosen, and as he will always have more questions to put to you than you
to him, you will always have the advantage and will be able to ask all the oftener, "What is the
use of that question?" Moreover, as it matters little what he learns provided he understands it and
knows how to use it, as soon as you cannot give him a suitable explanation give him none at all.
Do not hesitate to say, "I have no good answer to give you; I was wrong, let us drop the subject."
If your teaching was really ill-chosen there is no harm in dropping it altogether; if it was not,
with a little care you will soon find an opportunity of making its use apparent to him.
Suppose we are studying the course of the sun and the way to find our bearings, when all at once
Emile interrupts me with the question, "What is the use of that?" what a fine lecture I might give,
how many things I might take occasion to teach him in reply to his question, especially if there is
any one there. I might speak of the advantages of travel, the value of commerce, the special
products of different lands and the peculiar customs of different nations, the use of the calendar,
the way to reckon the seasons for agriculture, the art of navigation, how to steer our course at
sea, how to find our way without knowing exactly where we are. Politics, natural history,
astronomy, even morals and international law are involved in my explanation, so as to give my
pupil some idea of all these sciences and a great wish to learn them. When I have finished I shall
have shown myself a regular pedant, I shall have made a great display of learning, and not one
single idea has he understood. He is longing to ask me again, "What is the use of taking one's
bearings?" but he dare not for fear of vexing me. He finds it pays best to pretend to listen to what
he is forced to hear. This is the practical result of our fine systems of education.
But Emile is educated in a simpler fashion. We take so much pains to teach him a difficult idea
that he will have heard nothing of all this. At the first word he does not understand, he will run
away, he will prance about the room, and leave me to speechify by myself. Let us seek a more
commonplace explanation; my scientific learning is of no use to him.
We were observing the position of the forest to the north of Montmorency when he interrupted
me with the usual question, "What is the use of that?" "You are right," I said. "Let us take time to
think it over, and if we find it is no use we will drop it, for we only want useful games." We find
something else to do and geography is put aside for the day.
Next morning I suggest a walk before breakfast; there is nothing he would like better; children
are always ready to run about, and he is a good walker. We climb up to the forest, we wander
through its clearings and lose ourselves; we have no idea where we are, and when we want to
retrace our steps we cannot find the way. Time passes, we are hot and hungry; hurrying vainly

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this way and that we find nothing but woods, quarries, plains, not a landmark to guide us. Very
hot, very tired, very hungry, we only get further astray. At last we sit down to rest and to consider
our position. I assume that Emile has been educated like an ordinary child. He does not think, he
begins to cry; he has no idea we are close to Montmorency, which is hidden from our view by a
mere thicket; but this thicket is a forest to him, a man of his size is buried among bushes. After a
few minutes' silence I begin anxiously----
JEAN JACQUES. My dear Emile, what shall we do get out?
EMILE. I am sure I do not know. I am tired, I am hungry, I am thirsty. I cannot go any further.
JEAN JACQUES. Do you suppose I am any better off? I would cry too if I could make my
breakfast off tears. Crying is no use, we must look about us. Let us see your watch; what time is
it?
EMILE. It is noon and I am so hungry!
JEAN JACQUES. Just so; it is noon and I am so hungry too.
EMILE. You must be very hungry indeed.
JEAN JACQUES. Unluckily my dinner won't come to find me. It is twelve o'clock. This time
yesterday we were observing the position of the forest from Montmorency. If only we could see
the position of Montmorency from the forest.

EMILE. But yesterday we could see the forest, and here we cannot see the town.
JEAN JACQUES. That is just it. If we could only find it without seeing it.
EMILE. Oh! my dear friend!
JEAN JACQUES. Did not we say the forest was...
EMILE. North of Montmorency.
JEAN JACQUES. Then Montmorency must lie...
EMILE. South of the forest.
JEAN JACQUES. We know how to find the north at midday.
EMILE. Yes, by the direction of the shadows.
JEAN JACQUES. But the south?
EMILE. What shall we do?
JEAN JACQUES. The south is opposite the north.
EMILE. That is true; we need only find the opposite of the shadows. That is the south! That is
the south! Montmorency must be over there! Let us look for it there!
JEAN JACQUES. Perhaps you are right; let us follow this path through the wood.
EMILE. (Clapping his hands.) Oh, I can see Montmorency! there it is, quite plain, just in front of
us! Come to luncheon, come to dinner, make haste! Astronomy is some use after all.
Be sure that he thinks this if he does not say it; no matter which, provided I do not say it myself.
He will certainly never forget this day's lesson as long as he lives, while if I had only led him to

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think of all this at home, my lecture would have been forgotten the next day. Teach by doing
whenever you can, and only fall back upon words when doing is out of the question.
I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about. Hermes, they say,
engraved the elements of science on pillars lest a deluge should destroy them. Had he imprinted
them on men's hearts they would have been preserved by tradition. Well-trained minds are the
pillars on which human knowledge is most deeply engraved.
Is there no way of correlating so many lessons scattered through so many books, no way of
focussing them on some common object, easy to see, interesting to follow, and stimulating even
to a child? Could we but discover a state in which all man's needs appear in such a way as to
appeal to the child's mind, a state in which the ways of providing for these needs are as easily
developed, the simple and stirring portrayal of this state should form the earliest training of the
child's imagination.
Eager philosopher, I see your own imagination at work. Spare yourself the trouble; this state is
already known, it is described, with due respect to you, far better than you could describe it, at
least with greater truth and simplicity. Since we must have books, there is one book which, to my
thinking, supplies the best treatise on an education according to nature. This is the first book
Emile will read; for a long time it will form his whole library, and it will always retain an
honoured place. It will be the text to which all our talks about natural science are but the
commentary. It will serve to test our progress towards a right judgment, and it will always be
read with delight, so long as our taste is unspoilt. What is this wonderful book? Is it Aristotle?
Pliny? Buffon? No; it is Robinson Crusoe.
Robinson Crusoe on his island, deprived of the help of his fellow-men, without the means of
carrying on the various arts, yet finding food, preserving his life, and procuring a certain amount
of comfort; this is the thing to interest people of all ages, and it can be made attractive to children
in all sorts of ways. We shall thus make a reality of that desert island which formerly served as
an illustration. The condition, I confess, is not that of a social being, nor is it in all probability
Emile's own condition, but he should use it as a standard of comparison for all other conditions.
The surest way to raise him above prejudice and to base his judgments on the true relations of
things, is to put him in the place of a solitary man, and to judge all things as they would be
judged by such a man in relation to their own utility.
This novel, stripped of irrelevant matter, begins with Robinson's shipwreck on his island, and
ends with the coming of the ship which bears him from it, and it will furnish Emile with material,
both for work and play, during the whole period we are considering. His head should be full of it,
he should always be busy with his castle, his goats, his plantations. Let him learn in detail, not
from books but from things, all that is necessary in such a case. Let him think he is Robinson
himself; let him see himself clad in skins, wearing a tall cap, a great cutlass, all the grotesque
get-up of Robinson Crusoe, even to the umbrella which he will scarcely need. He should
anxiously consider what steps to take; will this or that be wanting. He should examine his hero's
conduct; has he omitted nothing; is there nothing he could have done better? He should carefully
note his mistakes, so as not to fall into them himself in similar circumstances, for you may be
sure he will plan out just such a settlement for himself. This is the genuine castle in the air of this
happy age, when the child knows no other happiness but food and freedom.
What a motive will this infatuation supply in the hands of a skilful teacher who has aroused it for
the purpose of using it. The child who wants to build a storehouse on his desert island will be

20
more eager to learn than the master to teach. He will want to know all sorts of useful things and
nothing else; you will need the curb as well as the spur. Make haste, therefore, to establish him
on his island while this is all he needs to make him happy; for the day is at hand, when, if he
must still live on his island, he will not be content to live alone, when even the companionship of
Man Friday, who is almost disregarded now, will not long suffice.
The exercise of the natural arts, which may be carried on by one man alone, leads on to the
industrial arts which call for the cooperation of many hands. The former may be carried on by
hermits, by savages, but the others can only arise in a society, and they make society necessary.
So long as only bodily needs are recognised man is self-sufficing; with superfluity comes the
need for division and distribution of labour, for though one man working alone can earn a man's
living, one hundred men working together can earn the living of two hundred. As soon as some
men are idle, others must work to make up for their idleness.
Your main object should be to keep out of your scholar's way all idea of such social relations as
he cannot understand, but when the development of knowledge compels you to show him the
mutual dependence of mankind, instead of showing him its moral side, turn all his attention at
first towards industry and the mechanical arts which make men useful to one another. While you
take him from one workshop to another, let him try his hand at every trade you show him, and do
not let him leave it till he has thoroughly learnt why everything is done, or at least everything
that has attracted his attention. With this aim you should take a share in his work and set him an
example. Be yourself the apprentice that he may become a master; you may expect him to learn
more in one hour's work than he would retain after a whole day's explanation.
Thus the idea of social relations is gradually developed in the child's mind, before he can really
be an active member of human society. Emile sees that to get tools for his own use, other people
must have theirs, and that he can get in exchange what he needs and they possess. I easily bring
him to feel the need of such exchange and to take advantage of it.

In the midst of so many new relations and dependent on them, he must reason whether he wants
to or no. Let us therefore teach him to reason correctly.The best way of learning to reason aright
is that which tends to simplify our experiences, or to enable us to dispense with them altogether
without falling into error. Hence it follows that we must learn to confirm the experiences of each
sense by itself, without recourse to any other, though we have been in the habit of verifying the
experience of one sense by that of another. Then each of our sensations will become an idea, and
this idea will always correspond to the truth. This is the sort of knowledge I have tried to
accumulate during this third phase of man's life.
This method of procedure demands a patience and circumspection which few teachers possess;
without them the scholar will never learn to reason. For example, if you hasten to take the stick
out of the water when the child is deceived by its appearance, you may perhaps undeceive him,
but what have you taught him? Nothing more than he would soon have learnt for himself. That is
not the right thing to do. You have not got to teach him truths so much as to show him how to set
about discovering them for himself. To teach him better you must not be in such a hurry to
correct his mistakes. Let us take Emile and myself as an illustration.
To begin with, any child educated in the usual way could not fail to answer the second of my
imaginary questions in the affirmative. He will say, "That is certainly a broken stick." I very
much doubt whether Emile will give the same reply. He sees no reason for knowing everything

21
or pretending to know it; he is never in a hurry to draw conclusions. He only reasons from
evidence and on this occasion he has not got the evidence. He knows how appearances deceive
us, if only through perspective.
Moreover, he knows by experience that there is always a reason for my slightest questions,
though he may not see it at once; so he has not got into the habit of giving silly answers; on the
contrary, he is on his guard, he considers things carefully and attentively before answering. He
never gives me an answer unless he is satisfied with it himself, and he is hard to please. Lastly
we neither of us take any pride in merely knowing a thing, but only in avoiding mistakes. We
should be more ashamed to deceive ourselves with bad reasoning, than to find no explanation at
all. There is no phrase so appropriate to us, or so often on our lips, as, "I do not know;" neither of
us are ashamed to use it. But whether he gives the silly answer or whether he avoids it by our
convenient phrase "I do not know," my answer is the same. "Let us examine it."
This stick immersed half way in the water is fixed in an upright position. To know if it is broken,
how many things must be done before we take it out of the water or even touch it.
1. First we walk round it, and we see that the broken part follows us. So it is only our eye that
changes it; looks do not make things move.
2. We look straight down on that end of the stick which is above the water, the stick is no longer
bent, the end near our eye exactly hides the other end. Has our eye set the stick straight?

3. We stir the surface of the water; we see the stick break into several pieces, it moves in zigzags
and follows the ripples of the water. Can the motion we gave the water suffice to break, soften, or
melt the stick like this?
4. We draw the water off, and little by little we see the stick straightening itself as the water
sinks. Is not this more than enough to clear up the business and to discover refraction? So it is
not true that our eyes deceive us, for nothing more has been required to correct the mistakes
attributed to it.
Suppose the child were stupid enough not to perceive the result of these experiments, then you
must call touch to the help of sight. Instead of taking the stick out of the water, leave it where it
is and let the child pass his hand along it from end to end; he will feel no angle, therefore the
stick is not broken.
You will tell me this is not mere judgment but formal reasoning. Just so; but do not you see that
as soon as the mind has got any ideas at all, every judgment is a process of reasoning? So that as
soon as we compare one sensation with another, we are beginning to reason. The art of judging
and the art of reasoning are one and the same.
Compelled to learn for himself, he uses his own reason not that of others, for there must be no
submission to authority if you would have no submission to convention. Most of our errors are
due to others more than ourselves. This continual exercise should develop a vigour of mind like
that acquired by the body through labour and weariness. Another advantage is that his progress is
in proportion to his strength, neither mind nor body carries more than it can bear. When the
understanding lays hold of things before they are stored in the memory, what is drawn from that
store is his own; while we are in danger of never finding anything of our own in a memory over-
burdened with undigested knowledge.
Emile knows little, but what he knows is really his own; he has no half-knowledge. Among the

22
few things he knows and knows thoroughly this is the most valuable, that there are many things
he does not know now but may know some day, many more that other men know but he will
never know, and an infinite number which nobody will ever know. He is large-minded, not
through knowledge, but through the power of acquiring it; he is open-minded, intelligent, ready
for anything, and, as Montaigne says, capable of learning if not learned. I am content if he knows
the "Wherefore" of his actions and the "Why" of his beliefs. For once more my object is not to
supply him with exact knowledge, but the means of getting it when required, to teach him to
value it at its true worth, and to love truth above all things. By this method progress is slow but
sure, and we never need to retrace our steps.
Emile's knowledge is confined to nature and things. The very name of history is unknown to him,
along with metaphysics and morals. He knows the essential relations between men and things,
but nothing of the moral relations between man and man. He has little power of generalisation,
he has no skill in abstraction. He perceives that certain qualities are common to certain things,
without reasoning about these qualities themselves. He is acquainted with the abstract idea of
space by the help of his geometrical figures; he is acquainted with the abstract idea of quantity
by the help of his algebraical symbols. These figures and signs are the supports on which these
ideas may be said to rest, the supports on which his senses repose. He does not attempt to know
the nature of things, but only to know things in so far as they affect himself. He only judges what
is outside himself in relation to himself, and his judgment is exact and certain. Caprice and
prejudice have no part in it. He values most the things which are of use to himself, and as he
never departs from this standard of values, he owes nothing to prejudice.
Emile is industrious, temperate, patient, steadfast, and full of courage. His imagination is still
asleep, so he has no exaggerated ideas of danger; the few ills he feels he knows how to endure in
patience, because he has not learnt to rebel against fate. As to death, he knows not what it means;
but accustomed as he is to submit without resistance to the law of necessity, he will die, if die he
must, without a groan and without a struggle; that is as much as we can demand of nature, in that
hour which we all abhor. To live in freedom, and to be independent of human affairs, is the best
way to learn how to die.
In a word Emile is possessed of all that portion of virtue which concerns himself. To acquire the
social virtues he only needs a knowledge of the relations which make those virtues necessary; he
only lacks knowledge which he is quite ready to receive. He thinks not of others but of himself,
and prefers that others should do the same. He makes no claim upon them, and acknowledges no
debt to them. He is alone in the midst of human society, he depends on himself alone, for he is all
that a boy can be at his age. He has no errors, or at least only such as are inevitable; he has no
vices, or only those from which no man can escape. His body is healthy, his limbs are supple, his
mind is accurate and unprejudiced, his heart is free and untroubled by passion. Pride, the earliest
and the most natural of passions, has scarcely shown itself. Without disturbing the peace of
others, he has passed his life contented, happy, and free, so far as nature allows. Do you think
that the earlier years of a child, who has reached his fifteenth year in this condition, have been
wasted?
You will find he has a few moral ideas concerning his present state and none concerning
manhood; what use could he make of them, for the child is not, as yet, an active member of
society. Speak to him of freedom, of property, or even of what is usually done; he may
understand you so far; he knows why his things are his own, and why other things are not his,
and nothing more. Speak to him of duty or obedience; he will not know what you are talking

23
about; bid him do something and he will pay no attention; but say to him, "If you will give me
this pleasure, I will repay it when required," and he will hasten to give you satisfaction, for he
asks nothing better than to extend his domain, to acquire rights over you, which will, he knows,
be respected. Maybe he is not sorry to have a place of his own, to be reckoned of some account;
but if he has formed this latter idea, he has already left the realms of nature, and you have failed
to bar the gates of vanity.
For his own part, should he need help, he will ask it readily of the first person he meets. He will
ask it of a king as readily as of his servant; all men are equals in his eyes. From his way of asking
you will see he knows you owe him nothing, that he is asking a favour. He knows too that
humanity moves you to grant this favour; his words are few and simple. His voice, his look, his
gesture are those of a being equally familiar with compliance and refusal. It is neither the
crawling, servile submission of the slave, nor the imperious tone of the master, it is a modest
confidence in mankind; it is the noble and touching gentleness of a creature, free, yet sensitive
and feeble, who asks aid of a being, free, but strong and kindly. If you grant his request he will
not thank you, but he will feel he has incurred a debt. If you refuse he will neither complain nor
insist; he knows it is useless; he will not say, "They refused to help me," but "It was impossible,"
and as I have already said, we do not rebel against necessity when once we have perceived it.
Leave him to himself and watch his actions without speaking, consider what he is doing and how
he sets about it. He does not require to convince himself that he is free, so he never acts
thoughtlessly and merely to show that he can do what he likes; does he not know that he is
always his own master? He is quick, alert, and ready; his movements are eager as befits his age,
but you will not find one which has no end in view. Whatever he wants, he will never attempt
what is beyond his powers, for he has learnt by experience what those powers are; his means will
always be adapted to the end in view, and he will rarely attempt anything without the certainty of
success; his eye is keen and true; he will not be so stupid as to go and ask other people about
what he sees; he will examine it on his own account, and before he asks he will try every means
at his disposal to discover what he wants to know for himself. If he lights upon some unexpected
difficulty, he will be less upset than others; if there is danger he will be less afraid. His
imagination is still asleep and nothing has been done to arouse it; he only sees what is really
there, and rates the danger at its true worth; so he never loses his head. He does not rebel against
necessity, her hand is too heavy upon him; he has borne her yoke all his life long, he is well used
to it; he is always ready for anything.
Work or play are all one to him, his games are his work; he knows no difference. He brings to
everything the cheerfulness of interest, the charm of freedom, and he snows the bent of his own
mind and the extent of his knowledge. Is there anything better worth seeing, anything more
touching or more delightful, than a pretty child, with merry, cheerful glance, easy contented
manner, open smiling countenance, playing at the most important things, or working at the
lightest amusements?
Would you now judge him by comparison? Set him among other children and leave him to
himself. You will soon see which has made most progress, which comes nearer to the perfection
of childhood. Among all the children in the town there is none more skilful and none so strong.
Among young peasants he is their equal in strength and their superior in skill. In everything
within a child's grasp he judges, reasons, and shows a forethought beyond the rest. Is it a matter
of action, running, jumping, or shifting things, raising weights or estimating distance, inventing
games, carrying off prizes; you might say, "Nature obeys his word," so easily does he bend all

24
things to his will. He is made to lead, to rule his fellows; talent and experience take the place of
right and authority. In any garb, under any name, he will still be first; everywhere he will rule the
rest, they will always feel his superiority, he will be master without knowing it, and they will
serve him unawares.
He has reached the perfection of childhood; he has lived the life of a child; his progress has not
been bought at the price of his happiness, he has gained both. While he has acquired all the
wisdom of a child, he has been as free and happy as his health permits. If the Reaper Death
should cut him off and rob us of our hopes, we need not bewail alike his life and death, we shall
not have the added grief of knowing that we caused him pain; we will say, "His childhood, at
least, was happy; we have robbed him of nothing that nature gave him."
The chief drawback to this early education is that it is only appreciated by the wise; to vulgar
eyes the child so carefully educated is nothing but a rough little boy. A tutor thinks rather of the
advantage to himself than to his pupil; he makes a point of showing that there has been no time
wasted; he provides his pupil with goods which can be readily displayed in the shop window,
accomplishments which can be shown off at will; no matter whether they are useful, provided
they are easily seen. Without choice or discrimination he loads his memory with a pack of
rubbish. If the child is to be examined he is set to display his wares; he spreads them out,
satisfies those who behold them, packs up his bundle and goes his way. My pupil is poorer, he
has no bundle to display, he has only himself to show. Now neither child nor man can be read at
a glance. Where are the observers who can at once discern the characteristics of this child? There
are such people, but they are few and far between; among a thousand fathers you will scarcely
find one.
Too many questions are tedious and revolting to most of us and especially to children. After a
few minutes their attention flags, they cease to listen to your everlasting questions and reply at
random. This way of testing them is pedantic and useless; a chance word will often show their
sense and intelligence better than much talking, but take care that the answer is neither a matter
of chance nor yet learnt by heart. A man must needs have a good judgment if he is to estimate the
judgment of a child.

Book Four Age 15 to Age 20

The origin of our passions, the root and spring of all the rest, the only one which is born with
man, which never leaves him as long as he lives, is self-love; this passion is primitive,
instinctive, it precedes all the rest, which are in a sense only modifications of it. In this sense, if
you like, they are all natural. But most of these modifications are the result of external
influences, without which they would never occur, and such modifications, far from being
advantageous to us, are harmful. They change the original purpose and work against its end; then
it is that man finds himself outside nature and at strife with himself.
Self-love is always good, always in accordance with the order of nature. The preservation of our
own life is specially entrusted to each one of us, and our first care is, and must be, to watch over
our own life; and how can we continually watch over it, if we do not take the greatest interest in
it?
Self-preservation requires, therefore, that we shall love ourselves; we must love ourselves above
everything, and it follows directly from this that we love what contributes to our preservation.
Every child becomes fond of its nurse; Romulus must have loved the she-wolf who suckled him.

25
At first this attachment is quite unconscious; the individual is attracted to that which contributes
to his welfare and repelled by that which is harmful; this is merely blind instinct. What
transforms this instinct into feeling, the liking into love, the aversion into hatred, is the evident
intention of helping or hurting us. We do not become passionately attached to objects without
feeling, which only follow the direction given them; but those from which we expect benefit or
injury from their internal disposition, from their will, those we see acting freely for or against us,
inspire us with like feelings to those they exhibit towards us. Something does us good, we seek
after it; but we love the person who does us good; something harms us and we shrink from it, but
we hate the person who tries to hurt us.
The child's first sentiment is self-love, his second, which is derived from it, is love of those about
him; for in his present state of weakness he is only aware of people through the help and
attention received from them. At first his affection for his nurse and his governess is mere habit.
He seeks them because he needs them and because he is happy when they are there; it is rather
perception than kindly feeling. It takes a long time to discover not merely that they are useful to
him, but that they desire to be useful to him, and then it is that he begins to love them.
So a child is naturally disposed to kindly feeling because he sees that every one about him is
inclined to help him, and from this experience he gets the habit of a kindly feeling towards his
species; but with the expansion of his relations, his needs, his dependence, active or passive, the
consciousness of his relations to others is awakened, and leads to the sense of duties and
preferences. Then the child becomes masterful, jealous, deceitful, and vindictive. If he is not
compelled to obedience, when he does not see the usefulness of what he is told to do, he
attributes it to caprice, to an intention of tormenting him, and he rebels. If people give in to him,
as soon as anything opposes him he regards it as rebellion, as a determination to resist him; he
beats the chair or table for disobeying him. Self-love, which concerns itself only with ourselves,
is content to satisfy our own needs; but selfishness, which is always comparing self with others,
is never satisfied and never can be; for this feeling, which prefers ourselves to others, requires
that they should prefer us to themselves, which is impossible. Thus the tender and gentle
passions spring from self-love, while the hateful and angry passions spring from selfishness. So
it is the fewness of his needs, the narrow limits within which he can compare himself with
others, that makes a man really good; what makes him really bad is a multiplicity of needs and
dependence on the opinions of others. It is easy to see how we can apply this principle and guide
every passion of children and men towards good or evil. True, man cannot always live alone, and
it will be hard therefore to remain good; and this difficulty will increase of necessity as his
relations with others are extended. For this reason, above all, the dangers of social life demand
that the necessary skill and care shall be devoted to guarding the human heart against the
depravity which springs from fresh needs.
Man's proper study is that of his relation to his environment. So long as he only knows that
environment through his physical nature, he should study himself in relation to things; this is the
business of his childhood; when he begins to be aware of his moral nature, he should study
himself in relation to his fellow-men; this is the business of his whole life, and we have now
reached the time when that study should be begun.
As soon as a man needs a companion he is no longer an isolated creature, his heart is no longer
alone. All his relations with his species, all the affections of his heart, come into being along with
this. His first passion soon arouses the rest.
The first sentiment of which the well-trained youth is capable is not love but friendship. The first

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work of his rising imagination is to make known to him his fellows; the species affects him
before the sex. Here is another advantage to be gained from prolonged innocence; you may take
advantage of his dawning sensibility to sow the first seeds of humanity in the heart of the young
adolescent. This advantage is all the greater because this is the only time in his life when such
efforts may be really successful.
Man's weakness makes him sociable. Our common sufferings draw our hearts to our fellow-
creatures; we should have no duties to mankind if we were not men. Every affection is a sign of
insufficiency; if each of us had no need of others, we should hardly think of associating with
them. So our frail happiness has its roots in our weakness. A really happy man is a hermit; God
only enjoys absolute happiness; but which of us has any idea what that means? If any imperfect
creature were self-sufficing, what would he have to enjoy? To our thinking he would be wretched
and alone. I do not understand how one who has need of nothing could love anything, nor do I
understand how he who loves nothing can be happy.
Hence it follows that we are drawn towards our fellow-creatures less by our feeling for their joys
than for their sorrows; for in them we discern more plainly a nature like our own, and a pledge of
their affection for us. If our common needs create a bond of interest our common sufferings
create a bond of affection. The sight of a happy man arouses in others envy rather than love, we
are ready to accuse him of usurping a right which is not his, of seeking happiness for himself
alone, and our selfishness suffers an additional pang in the thought that this man has no need of
us. But who does not pity the wretch when he beholds his sufferings? who would not deliver him
from his woes if a wish could do it? Imagination puts us more readily in the place of the
miserable man than of the happy man; we feel that the one condition touches us more nearly than
the other. Pity is sweet, because, when we put ourselves in the place of one who suffers, we are
aware, nevertheless, of the pleasure of not suffering like him. Envy is bitter, because the sight of
a happy man, far from putting the envious in his place, inspires him with regret that he is not
there. The one seems to exempt us from the pains he suffers, the other seems to deprive us of the
good things he enjoys.
Do you desire to stimulate and nourish the first stirrings of awakening sensibility in the heart of a
young man, do you desire to incline his disposition towards kindly deed and thought, do not
cause the seeds of pride, vanity, and envy to spring up in him through the misleading picture of
the happiness of mankind; do not show him to begin with the pomp of courts, the pride of
palaces, the delights of pageants; do not take him into society and into brilliant assemblies; do
not show him the outside of society till you have made him capable of estimating it at its true
worth. To show him the world before he is acquainted with men, is not to train him, but to
corrupt him; not to teach, but to mislead.
By nature men are neither kings, nobles, courtiers, nor millionaires. All men are born poor and
naked, all are liable to the sorrows of life, its disappointments, its ills, its needs, its suffering of
every kind; and all are condemned at length to die. This is what it really means to be a man, this
is what no mortal can escape. Begin then with the study of the essentials of humanity, that which
really constitutes mankind.
At sixteen the adolescent knows what it is to suffer, for he himself has suffered; but he scarcely
realises that others suffer too; to see without feeling is not knowledge, and as I have said again
and again the child who does not picture the feelings of others knows no ills but his own; but
when his imagination is kindled by the first beginnings of growing sensibility, he begins to
perceive himself in his fellow-creatures, to be touched by their cries, to suffer in their sufferings.

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It is at this time that the sorrowful picture of suffering humanity should stir his heart with the
first touch of pity he has ever known.
Emile having thought little about creatures of feeling will be a long time before he knows what is
meant by pain and death. Groans and cries will begin to stir his compassion, he will turn away
his eyes at the sight of blood; the convulsions of a dying animal will cause him I know not what
anguish before he knows the source of these impulses. If he were still stupid and barbarous he
would not feel them; if he were more learned he would recognise their source; he has compared
ideas too frequently already to be insensible, but not enough to know what he feels.
So pity is born, the first relative sentiment which touches the human heart according to the order
of nature. To become sensitive and pitiful the child must know that he has fellow-creatures who
suffer as he has suffered, who feel the pains he has felt, and others which he can form some idea
of, being capable of feeling them himself. Indeed, how can we let ourselves be stirred by pity
unless we go beyond ourselves, and identify ourselves with the suffering animal, by leaving, so
to speak, our own nature and taking his. We only suffer so far as we suppose he suffers; the
suffering is not ours but his. So no one becomes sensitive till his imagination is aroused and
begins to carry him outside himself.
What should we do to stimulate and nourish this growing sensibility, to direct it, and to follow its
natural bent? Should we not present to the young man objects on which the expansive force ofhis
heart may take effect, objects which dilate it, which extend it to other creatures, which take him
outside himself? should we not carefully remove everything that narrows, concentrates, and
strengthens the power of the human self? that is to say, in other words, we should arouse in him
kindness, goodness, pity, and beneficence, all the gentle and attractive passions which are
naturally pleasing to man; those passions prevent the growth of envy, covetousness, hatred, all
the repulsive and cruel passions which make our sensibility not merely a cipher but a minus
quantity, passions which are the curse of those who feel them.
I think I can sum up the whole of the preceding reflections in two or three maxims, definite,
straightforward, and easy to understand.
FIRST MAXIM.--It is not in human nature to put ourselves in the place of those who are happier
than ourselves, but only in the place of those who can claim our pity.
If you find exceptions to this rule, they are more apparent than real. Thus we do not put ourselves
in the place of the rich or great when we become fond of them; even when our affection is real,
we only appropriate to ourselves a part of their welfare. Sometimes we love the rich man in the
midst of misfortunes; but so long as he prospers he has no real friend, except the man who is not
deceived by appearances, who pities rather than envies him in spite of his prosperity.
The happiness belonging to certain states of life appeals to us; take, for instance, the life of a
shepherd in the country. The charm of seeing these good people so happy is not poisoned by
envy; we are genuinely interested in them. Why is this? Because we feel we can descend into this
state of peace and innocence and enjoy the same happiness; it is an alternative which only calls
up pleasant thoughts, so long as the wish is as good as the deed. It is always pleasant to examine
our stores, to contemplate our own wealth, even when we do not mean to spend it.
From this we see that to incline a young man to humanity you must not make him admire the
brilliant lot of others; you must show him life in its sorrowful aspects and arouse his fears. Thus
it becomes clear that he must force his own way to happiness, without interfering with the
happiness of others.

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SECOND MAXIM.--We never pity another's woes unless we know we may suffer in like
manner ourselves.
I know nothing go fine, so full of meaning, so touching, so true as these words.
Why have kings no pity on their people? Because they never expect to be ordinary men. Why are
the rich so hard on the poor? Because they have no fear of becoming poor. Why do the nobles
look down upon the people? Because a nobleman will never be one of the lower classes. Why are
the Turks generally kinder and more hospitable than ourselves? Because, under their wholly
arbitrary system of government, the rank and wealth of individuals are always uncertain and
precarious, so that they do not regard poverty and degradation as conditions with which they
have no concern; to-morrow, any one may himself be in the same position as those on whom he
bestows alms to-day. This thought, which occurs again and again in eastern romances, lends
them a certain tenderness which is not to be found in our pretentious and harsh morality.
So do not train your pupil to look down from the height of his glory upon the sufferings of the
unfortunate, the labours of the wretched, and do not hope to teach him to pity them while he
considers them as far removed from himself. Make him thoroughly aware of the fact that the fate
of these unhappy persons may one day be his own, that his feet are standing on the edge of the
abyss, into which he may be plunged at any moment by a thousand unexpected irresistible
misfortunes. Teach him to put no trust in birth, health, or riches; show him all the changes of
fortune; find him examples--there are only too many of them--in which men of higher rank than
himself have sunk below the condition of these wretched ones. Whether by their own fault or
another's is for the present no concern of ours; does he indeed know the meaning of the word
fault? Never interfere with the order in which he acquires knowledge, and teach him only
through the means within his reach; it needs no great learning to perceive that all the prudence of
mankind cannot make certain whether he will be alive or dead in an hour's time, whether before
nightfall he will not be grinding his teeth in the pangs of nephritis, whether a month hence he
will be rich or poor, whether in a year's time he may not be rowing an Algerian galley under the
lash of the slave-driver. Above all do not teach him this, like his catechism, in cold blood; let him
see and feel the calamities which overtake men; surprise and startle his imagination with the
perils which lurk continually about a man's path; let him see the pitfalls all about him, and when
he hears you speak of them, let him cling more closely to you for fear lest he should fall. "You
will make him timid and cowardly," do you say? We shall see; let us make him kindly to begin
with, that is what matters most.
THIRD MAXIM.--The pity we feel for others is proportionate, not to the amount of the evil, but
to the feelings we attribute to the sufferers.
We only pity the wretched so far as we think they feel the need of pity. The bodily effect of our
sufferings is less than one would suppose; it is memory that prolongs the pain, imagination
which projects it into the future, and makes us really to be pitied. This is, I think, one of the
reasons why we are more callous to the sufferings of animals than of men, although a fellow-
feeling ought to make us identify ourselves equally with either. We scarcely pity the cart-horse in
his shed, for we do not suppose that while he is eating his hay he is thinking of the blows he has
received and the labours in store for him. Neither do we pity the sheep grazing in the field,
though we know it is about to be slaughtered, for we believe it knows nothing of the fate in store
for it. In this way we also become callous to the fate of our fellow-men, and the rich console
themselves for the harm done by them to the poor, by the assumption that the poor are too stupid
to feel. I usually judge of the value any one puts on the welfare of his fellow-creatures by what

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he seems to think of them. We naturally think lightly of the happiness of those we despise. It
need not surprise you that politicians speak so scornfully of the people, and philosophers profess
to think mankind so wicked.
The people are mankind; those who do not belong to the people are so few in number that they
are not worth counting. Man is the same in every station of life; if that be so, those ranks to
which most men belong deserve most honour. All distinctions of rank fade away before the eyes
of a thoughtful person; he sees the same passions, the same feelings in the noble and the
guttersnipe; there is merely a slight difference in speech, and more or less artificiality of tone;
and if there is indeed any essential difference between them, the disadvantage is all on the side of
those who are more sophisticated. The people show themselves as they are, and they are not
attractive; but the fashionable world is compelled to adopt a disguise; we should be horrified if
we saw it as it really is.

Far from being a hindrance to education, this enthusiasm of adolescence is its crown and coping-
stone; this it is that gives you a hold on the youth's heart when he is no longer weaker than you.
His first affections are the reins by which you control his movements; he was free, and now I
behold him in your power. So long as he loved nothing, he was independent of everything but
himself and his own necessities; as soon as he loves, he is dependent on his affections. Thus the
first ties which unite him to his species are already formed. When you direct his increasing
sensibility in this direction, do not expect that it will at once include all men, and that the word
"mankind" will have any meaning for him. Not so; this sensibility will at first confine itself to
those like himself, and these will not be strangers to him, but those he knows, those whom habit
has made dear to him or necessary to him, those who are evidently thinking and feeling as he
does, those whom he perceives to be exposed to the pains he has endured, those who enjoy the
pleasures he has enjoyed; in a word, those who are so like himself that he is the more disposed to
self-love. It is only after long training, after much consideration as to his own feelings and the
feelings he observes in others, that he will be able to generalise his individual notions under the
abstract idea of humanity, and add to his individual affections those which may identify him with
the race.
When he becomes capable of affection, he becomes aware of the affection of others,1 and he is
on the lookout for the signs of that affection. Do you not see how you will acquire a fresh hold
on him? What bands have you bound about his heart while he was yet unaware of them! What
will he feel, when he beholds himself and sees what you have done for him; when he can
compare himself with other youths, and other tutors with you! I say, "When he sees it," but
beware lest you tell him of it; if you tell him he will not perceive it. If you claim his obedience in
return for the care bestowed upon him, he will think you have over-reached him; he will see that
while you profess to have cared for him without reward, you meant to saddle him with a debt and
to bind him to a bargain which he never made. In vain you will add that what you demand is for
his own good; you demand it, and you demand it in virtue of what you have done without his
consent. When a man down on his luck accepts the shilling which the sergeant professes to give

1 Affection may be unrequited; not so friendship. Friendship is a bargain, a contract like

any other; though a bargain more sacred than the rest. The word "friend" has no other correlation.
Any man who is not the friend of his friend is undoubtedly a rascal; for one can only obtain
friendship by giving it, or pretending to give it.

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him, and finds he has enlisted without knowing what he was about, you protest against the
injustice; is it not still more unjust to demand from your pupil the price of care which he has not
even accepted!
We have reached the moral order at last; we have just taken the second step towards manhood. If
this were the place for it, I would try to show how the first impulses of the heart give rise to the
first stirrings of conscience, and how from the feelings of love and hatred spring the first notions
of good and evil. I would show that justice and kindness are no mere abstract terms, no mere
moral conceptions framed by the understanding, but true affections of the heart enlightened by
reason, the natural outcome of our primitive affections; that by reason alone, unaided by
conscience, we cannot establish any natural law, and that all natural right is a vain dream if it
does not rest upon some instinctive need of the human heart.2 But I do not think it is my business
at present to prepare treatises on metaphysics and morals, nor courses of study of any kind
whatsoever; it is enough if I indicate the order and development of our feelings and our
knowledge in relation to our growth. Others will perhaps work out what I have here merely
indicated.
Hitherto my Emile has thought only of himself, so his first glance at his equals leads him to
compare himself with them; and the first feeling excited by this comparison is the desire to be
first. It is here that self-love is transformed into selfishness, and this is the starting point of all the
passions which spring from selfishness. But to determine whether the passions by which his life
will be governed shall be humane and gentle or harsh and cruel, whether they shall be the
passions of benevolence and pity or those of envy and covetousness, we must know what he
believes his place among men to be, and what sort of obstacles he expects to have to overcome in
order to attain to the position he seeks.
To guide him in this inquiry, after we have shown him men by means of the accidents common to
the species, we must now show him them by means of their differences. This is the time for
estimating inequality natural and civil, and for the scheme of the whole social order.
Society must be studied in the individual and the individual in society; those who desire to treat
politics and morals apart from one another will never understand either. By confining ourselves
at first to the primitive relations, we see how men should be influenced by them and what
passions should spring from them; we see that it is in proportion to the development of these

2 The precept "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" has no true
foundation but that of conscience and feeling; for what valid reason is there why I, being myself,
should do what I would do if I were some one else, especially when I am morally certain I never
shall find myself in exactly the same case; and who will answer for it that if I faithfully follow
out this maxim, I shall get others to follow it with regard to me? The wicked takes advantage
both of the uprightness of the just and of his own injustice; he will gladly have everybody just
but himself. This bargain, whatever you may say, is not greatly to the advantage of the just. But
if the enthusiasm of an overflowing heart identifies me with my fellow-creature, if I feel, so to
speak, that I will not let him suffer lest I should suffer too, I care for him because I care for
myself, and the reason of the precept is found in nature herself, which inspires me with the desire
for my own welfare wherever I may be. From this I conclude that it is false to say that the
precepts of natural law are based on reason only; they have a firmer and more solid foundation.
The love of others springing from self-love, is the source of human justice. The whole of
morality is summed up in the gospel in this summary of the law.

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passions that a man's relations with others expand or contract. It is not so much strength of arm
as moderation of spirit which makes men free and independent. The man whose wants are few is
dependent on but few people, but those who constantly confound our vain desires with our
bodily needs, those who have made these needs the basis of human society, are continually
mistaking effects for causes, and they have only confused themselves by their own reasoning.
If it were only a question of showing young people man in his mask, there would be no need to
point him out, and he would always be before their eyes; but since the mask is not the man, and
since they must not be led away by its specious appearance, when you paint men for your
scholar, paint them as they are, not that he may hate them, but that he may pity them and have no
wish to be like them. In my opinion that is the most reasonable view a man can hold with regard
to his fellow-men.
With this object in view we must take the opposite way from that hitherto followed, and instruct
the youth rather through the experience of others than through his own. If men deceive him he
will hate them; but, if, while they treat him with respect, he sees them deceiving each other, he
will pity them.
I would have you so choose the company of a youth that he should think well of those among
whom he lives, and I would have you so teach him to know the world that he should think ill of
all that takes place in it. Let him know that man is by nature good, let him feel it, let him judge
his neighbour by himself; but let him see how men are depraved and perverted by society; let
him find the source of all their vices in their preconceived opinions; let him be disposed to
respect the individual, but to despise the multitude; let him see that all men wear almost the same
mask, but let him also know that some faces are fairer than the mask that conceals them.
It must be admitted that this method has its drawbacks, and it is not easy to carry it out; for if he
becomes too soon engrossed in watching other people, if you train him to mark too closely the
actions of others, you will make him spiteful and satirical, quick and decided in his judgments of
others; he will find a hateful pleasure in seeking bad motives, and will fail to see the good even
in that which is really good. He will, at least, get used to the sight of vice, he will behold the
wicked without horror, just as we get used to seeing the wretched without pity. Soon the
perversity of mankind will be not so much a warning as an excuse; he will say, "Man is made
so," and he will have no wish to be different from the rest.
But if you wish to teach him theoretically to make him acquainted, not only with the heart of
man, but also with the application of the external causes which turn our inclinations into vices;
when you thus transport him all at once from the objects of sense to the objects of reason, you
employ a system of metaphysics which he is not in a position to understand; you fall back into
the error, so carefully avoided hitherto, of giving him lessons which are like lessons, of
substituting in his mind the experience and the authority of the master for his own experience
and the development of his own reason.
To remove these two obstacles at once, and to bring the human heart within his reach without
risk of spoiling his own, I would show him men from afar, in other times or in other places, so
that he may behold the scene but cannot take part in it. This is the time for history; with its help
he will read the hearts of men without any lessons in philosophy; with its help he will view them
as a mere spectator, dispassionate and without prejudice; he will view them as their judge, not as
their accomplice or their accuser.
To know men you must behold their actions. In society we hear them talk; they show their words

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and hide their deeds; but in history the veil is drawn aside, and they are judged by their deeds.
Their sayings even help us to understand them; for comparing what they say and what they do,
we see not only what they are but what they would appear; the more they disguise themselves the
more thoroughly they stand revealed.
Unluckily this study has its dangers, its drawbacks of several kinds. It is difficult to adopt a point
of view which will enable one to judge one's fellow-creatures fairly. It is one of the chief defects
of history to paint men's evil deeds rather than their good ones; it is revolutions and catastrophes
that make history interesting; so long as a nation grows and prospers quietly in the tranquility of
a peaceful government, history says nothing; she only begins to speak of nations when, no longer
able to be self-sufficing, they interfere with their neighbours' business, or allow their neighbours
to interfere with their own; history only makes them famous when they are on the downward
path; all our histories begin where they ought to end. We have very accurate accounts of
declining nations; what we lack is the history of those nations which are multiplying; they are so
happy and so good that history has nothing to tell us of them; and we see indeed in our own
times that the most successful governments are least talked of. We only hear what is bad; the
good is scarcely mentioned. Only the wicked become famous, the good are forgotten or laughed
to scorn, and thus history, like philosophy, is for ever slandering mankind.
Moreover, it is inevitable that the facts described in history should not give an exact picture of
what really happened; they are transformed in the brain of the historian, they are moulded by his
interests and coloured by his prejudices. Who can place the reader precisely in a position to see
the event as it really happened? Ignorance or partiality disguises everything. What a different
impression may be given merely by expanding or contracting the circumstances of the case
without altering a single historical incident. The same object may be seen from several points of
view, and it will hardly seem the same thing, yet there has been no change except in the eye that
beholds it. Do you indeed do honour to truth when what you tell me is a genuine fact, but you
make it appear something quite different? A tree more or less, a rock to the right or to the left, a
cloud of dust raised by the wind, how often have these decided the result of a battle without any
one knowing it? Does that prevent history from telling you the cause of defeat or victory with as
much assurance as if she had been on the spot? But what are the facts to me, while I am ignorant
of their causes, and what lessons can I draw from an event, whose true cause is unknown to me?
The historian indeed gives me a reason, but he invents it; and criticism itself, of which we hear
so much, is only the art of guessing, the art of choosing from among several lies, the lie that is
most like truth.
History in general is lacking because it only takes note of striking and clearly marked facts which
may be fixed by names, places, and dates; but the slow evolution of these facts, which cannot be
definitely noted in this way, still remains unknown. We often find in some battle, lost or won, the
ostensible cause of a revolution which was inevitable before this battle took place. War only
makes manifest events already determined by moral causes, which few historians can perceive.
The philosophic spirit has turned the thoughts of many of the historians of our times in this
direction; but I doubt whether truth has profited by their labours. The rage for systems has got
possession of all alike, no one seeks to see things as they are, but only as they agree with his
system.
Add to all these considerations the fact that history shows us actions rather than men, because
she only seizes men at certain chosen times in full dress; she only portrays the statesman when
he is prepared to be seen; she does not follow him to his home, to his study, among his family

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and his friends; she only shows him in state; it is his clothes rather than himself that she
describes.
I would prefer to begin the study of the human heart with reading the lives of individuals; for
then the man hides himself in vain, the historian follows him everywhere; he never gives him a
moment's grace nor any corner where he can escape the piercing eye of the spectator; and when
he thinks he is concealing himself, then it is that the writer shows him up most plainly.
The time of faults is the time for fables. When we blame the guilty under the cover of a story we
instruct without offending him; and he then understands that the story is not untrue by means of
the truth he finds in its application to himself. The child who has never been deceived by flattery
understands nothing of the fable I recently examined; but the rash youth who has just become the
dupe of a flatterer perceives only too readily that the crow was a fool. Thus he acquires a maxim
from the fact, and the experience he would soon have forgotten is engraved on his mind by
means of the fable. There is no knowledge of morals which cannot be acquired through our own
experience or that of others. When there is danger, instead of letting him try the experiment
himself, we have recourse to history. When the risk is comparatively slight, it is just as well that
the youth should be exposed to it; then by means of the apologue the special cases with which
the young man is now acquainted are transformed into maxims.
Book 5 After Age 20
We have reached the last act of youth's drama; we are approaching its closing scene.
It is not good that man should be alone. Emile is now a man, and we must give him his promised
helpmeet. That helpmeet is Sophy. Where is her dwelling-place, where shall she be found? We
must know beforehand what she is, and then we can decide where to look for her.
SOPHY, OR WOMAN
Sophy should be as truly a woman as Emile is a man, i.e., she must possess all those characters
of her sex which are required to enable her to play her part in the physical and moral order. Let
us inquire to begin with in what respects her sex differs from our own.
But for her sex, a woman is a man; she has the same organs, the same needs, the same faculties.
The machine is the same in its construction; its parts, its working, and its appearance are similar.
Regard it as you will the difference is only in degree.
Yet where sex is concerned man and woman are unlike; each is the complement of the other; the
difficulty in comparing them lies in our inability to decide, in either case, what is a matter of sex,
and what is not. General differences present themselves to the comparative anatomist and even to
the superficial observer; they seem not to be a matter of sex; yet they are really sex differences,
though the connection eludes our observation. How far such differences may extend we cannot
tell; all we know for certain is that where man and woman are alike we have to do with the
characteristics of the species; where they are unlike, we have to do with the characteristics of
sex. Considered from these two standpoints, we find so many instances of likeness and
unlikeness that it is perhaps one of the greatest of marvels how nature has contrived to make two
beings so like and yet so different.
These resemblances and differences must have an influence on the moral nature; this inference is
obvious, and it is confirmed by experience; it shows the vanity of the disputes as to the
superiority or the equality of the sexes; as if each sex, pursuing the path marked out for it by
nature, were not more perfect in that very divergence than if it more closely resembled the other.

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A perfect man and a perfect woman should no more be alike in mind than in face, and perfection
admits of neither less nor more.
In the union of the sexes each alike contributes to the common end, but in different ways. From
this diversity springs the first difference which may be observed between man and woman in
their moral relations. The man should be strong and active; the woman should be weak and
passive; the one must have both the power and the will; it is enough that the other should offer
little resistance.
When this principle is admitted, it follows that woman is specially made for man's delight. If
man in his turn ought to be pleasing in her eyes, the necessity is less urgent, his virtue is in his
strength, he pleases because he is strong. I grant you this is not the law of love, but it is the law
of nature, which is older than love itself.
If woman is made to please and to be in subjection to man, she ought to make herself pleasing in
his eyes and not provoke him to anger; her strength is in her charms, by their means she should
compel him to discover and use his strength. The surest way of arousing this strength is to make
it necessary by resistance. Thus pride comes to the help of desire and each exults in the other's
victory. This is the origin of attack and defence, of the boldness of one sex and the timidity of the
other, and even of the shame and modesty with which nature has armed the weak for the
conquest of the strong.
Who can possibly suppose that nature has prescribed the same advances to the one sex as to the
other, or that the first to feel desire should be the first to show it? What strange depravity of
judgment! The consequences of the act being so different for the two sexes, is it natural that they
should enter upon it with equal boldness? How can any one fail to see that when the share of
each is so unequal, if the one were not controlled by modesty as the other is controlled by nature,
the result would be the destruction of both, and the human race would perish through the very
means ordained for its continuance?
The mutual duties of the two sexes are not, and cannot be, equally binding on both. Women do
wrong to complain of the inequality of man-made laws; this inequality is not of man's making, or
at any rate it is not the result of mere prejudice, but of reason. She to whom nature has entrusted
the care of the children must hold herself responsible for them to their father. No doubt every
breach of faith is wrong, and every faithless husband, who robs his wife of the sole reward of the
stern duties of her sex, is cruel and unjust; but the faithless wife is worse; she destroys the family
and breaks the bonds of nature; when she gives her husband children who are not his own, she is
false both to him and them, her crime is not infidelity but treason. To my mind, it is the source of
dissension and of crime of every kind. Can any position be more wretched than that of the
unhappy father who, when he clasps his child to his breast, is haunted by the suspicion that this is
the child of another, the badge of his own dishonour, a thief who is robbing his own children of
their inheritance. Under such circumstances the family is little more than a group of secret
enemies, armed against each other by a guilty woman, who compels them to pretend to love one
another.
Thus it is not enough that a wife should be faithful; her husband, along with his friends and
neighbours, must believe in her fidelity; she must be modest, devoted, retiring; she should have
the witness not only of a good conscience, but of a good reputation. In a word, if a father must
love his children, he must be able to respect their mother. For these reasons it is not enough that
the woman should be chaste, she must preserve her reputation and her good name. From these

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principles there arises not only a moral difference between the sexes, but also a fresh motive for
duty and propriety, which prescribes to women in particular the most scrupulous attention to
their conduct, their manners, their behaviour. Vague assertions as to the equality of the sexes and
the similarity of their duties are only empty words; they are no answer to my argument.
I am quite aware that Plato, in the Republic, assigns the same gymnastics to women and men.
Having got rid of the family there is no place for women in his system of government, so he is
forced to turn them into men. That great genius has worked out his plans in detail and has
provided for every contingency; he has even provided against a difficulty which in all likelihood
no one would ever have raised; but he has not succeeded in meeting the real difficulty. I am not
speaking of the alleged community of wives which has often been laid to his charge; this
assertion only shows that his detractors have never read his works. I refer to that political
promiscuity under which the same occupations are assigned to both sexes alike, a scheme which
could only lead to intolerable evils; I refer to that subversion of all the tenderest of our natural
feelings, which he sacrificed to an artificial sentiment which can only exist by their aid. Will the
bonds of convention hold firm without some foundation in nature? Can devotion to the state exist
apart from the love of those near and dear to us? Can patriotism thrive except in the soil of that
miniature fatherland, the home? Is it not the good son, the good husband, the good father, who
makes the good citizen?
When once it is proved that men and women are and ought to be unlike in constitution and in
temperament, it follows that their education must be different. Nature teaches us that they should
work together, but that each has its own share of the work; the end is the same, but the means are
different, as are also the feelings which direct them. We have attempted to paint a natural man,
let us try to paint a helpmeet for him.
When I consider the special purpose of woman, when I observe her inclinations or reckon up her
duties, everything combines to indicate the mode of education she requires. Men and women are
made for each other, but their mutual dependence differs in degree; man is dependent on woman
through his desires; woman is dependent on man through her desires and also through her needs;
he could do without her better than she can do without him. She cannot fulfil her purpose in life
without his aid, without his goodwill, without his respect; she is dependent on our feelings, on
the price we put upon her virtue, and the opinion we have of her charms and her deserts. Nature
herself has decreed that woman, both for herself and her children, should be at the mercy of
man's judgment.
Worth alone will not suffice, a woman must be thought worthy; nor beauty, she must be admired;
nor virtue, she must be respected. A woman's honour does not depend on her conduct alone, but
on her reputation, and no woman who permits herself to be considered vile is really virtuous. A
man has no one but himself to consider, and so long as he does right he may defy public opinion;
but when a woman does right her task is only half finished, and what people think of her matters
as much as what she really is. Hence her education must, in this respect, be different from man's
education. "What will people think" is the grave of a man's virtue and the throne of a woman's.
What is, is good, and no general law can be bad. This special skill with which the female sex is
endowed is a fair equivalent for its lack of strength; without it woman would be man's slave, not
his helpmeet. By her superiority in this respect she maintains her equality with man, and rules in
obedience. She has everything against her, our faults and her own weakness and timidity; her
beauty and her wiles are all that she has. Should she not cultivate both? Yet beauty is not
universal; it may be destroyed by all sorts of accidents, it will disappear with years, and habit

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will destroy its influence. A woman's real resource is her wit; not that foolish wit which is so
greatly admired in society, a wit which does nothing to make life happier; but that wit which is
adapted to her condition, the art of taking advantage of our position and controlling us through
our own strength. Words cannot tell how beneficial this is to man, what a charm it gives to the
society of men and women, how it checks the petulant child and restrains the brutal husband;
without it the home would be a scene of strife; with it, it is the abode of happiness. I know that
this power is abused by the sly and the spiteful; but what is there that is not liable to abuse? Do
not destroy the means of happiness because the wicked use them to our hurt.
This is the spirit in which Sophy has been educated, she has been trained carefully rather than
strictly, and her taste has been followed rather than thwarted. Let us say just a word about her
person, according to the description I have given to Emile and the picture he himself has formed
of the wife in whom he hopes to find happiness.
Let us give Emile his Sophy. Sophy has only a good disposition and an ordinary heart; her
education is responsible for everything in which she excels other women.

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