in being devoid of the capacity for feeling awe, and the taste for
objects inspiring it. Nature was a tender friend with softest bosom, and
no sphinx with cruel enigma. He felt neither terror, nor any sense of
the littleness of man, nor of the mysteriousness of life, nor of the
unseen forces which make us their sport, as he peered over the precipice
and heard the water roaring at the bottom of it; he only remained for
hours enjoying the physical sensation of dizziness with which it turned
his brain, with a break now and again for hurling large stones, and
watching them roll and leap down into the torrent, with as little
reflection and as little articulate emotion as if he had been a
child.[87]

Just as it is convenient for purposes of classification to divide a man
into body and soul, even when we believe the soul to be only a function
of the body, so people talk of his intellectual side and his emotional
side, his thinking quality and his feeling quality, though in fact and
at the roots these qualities are not two but one, with temperament for
the common substratum. During this period of his life the whole of
Rousseau's true force went into his feelings, and at all times feeling
predominated over reflection, with many drawbacks and some advantages of
a very critical kind for subsequent generations of men. Nearly every one
who came into contact with him in the way of testing his capacity for
being instructed pronounced him hopeless. He had several excellent
opportunities of learning Latin, especially at Turin in the house of
Count Gouvon, and in the seminary at Annecy, and at Les Charmettes he
did his best to teach himself, but without any better result than a very
limited power of reading. In learning one rule he forgot the last; he
could never master the most elementary laws of versification; he learnt
and re-learnt twenty times the Eclogues of Virgil, but not a single word
remained with him.[88] He was absolutely without verbal memory, and he