mother her life," he wrote, "and my birth was the first of my woes."[3]
Destiny thus touches us with magical finger, long before consciousness
awakens to the forces that have been set to work in our personality,
launching us into the universe with country, forefathers, and physical
predispositions, all fixed without choice of ours. Rousseau was born
dying, and though he survived this first crisis by the affectionate care
of one of his father's sisters, yet his constitution remained infirm and
disordered.

Inborn tendencies, as we perceive on every side, are far from having
unlimited irresistible mastery, if they meet early encounter from some
wise and patient external will. The father of Rousseau was unfortunately
cast in the same mould as his mother, and the child's own morbid
sensibility was stimulated and deepened by the excessive sensibility of
his first companion. Isaac Rousseau, in many of his traits, was a
reversion to an old French type. In all the Genevese there was an
underlying tendency of this kind. "Under a phlegmatic and cool air,"
wrote Rousseau, when warning his countrymen against the inflammatory
effects of the drama, "the Genevese hide an ardent and sensitive
character, that is more easily moved than controlled."[4] And some of
the episodes in their history during the eighteenth century might be
taken for scenes from the turbulent dramas of Paris. But Isaac
Rousseau's restlessness, his eager emotion, his quick and punctilious
sense of personal dignity, his heedlessness of ordered affairs, were not
common in Geneva, fortunately for the stability of her society and the
prosperity of her citizens. This disorder of spirit descended in
modified form to the son; it was inevitable that he should be indirectly
affected by it. Before he was seven years old he had learnt from his
father to indulge a passion for the reading of romances. The child and
the man passed whole nights in a fictitious world, reading to one