imagination. Instead of urgently seeking truth with the patient energy,
the wariness, and the conscience, with the sharpened instruments, the
systematic apparatus, and the minute feelers and tentacles of the
genuine thinker and solid reasoner, he only floated languidly on a
summer tide of sensation, and captured premiss and conclusion in a
succession of swoons. It would be a mistake to contend that no work can
be done for the world by this method, or that truth only comes to those
who chase her with logical forceps. But one should always try to
discover how a teacher of men came by his ideas, whether by careful
toil, or by the easy bequest of generous phantasy.

To give a zest to rural delight, and partly perhaps to satisfy the
intellectual interest which must have been an instinct in one who became
so consummate a master in the great and noble art of composition,
Rousseau, during the time when he lived with Madame de Warens, tried as
well as he knew how to acquire a little knowledge of what fruit the
cultivation of the mind of man had hitherto brought forth. According to
his own account, it was Voltaire's Letters on the English which first
drew him seriously to study, and nothing which that illustrious man
wrote at this time escaped him. His taste for Voltaire inspired him with
the desire of writing with elegance, and of imitating "the fine and
enchanting colour of Voltaire's style"[92]--an object in which he cannot
be held to have in the least succeeded, though he achieved a superb
style of his own. On his return from Turin Madame de Warens had begun in
some small way to cultivate a taste for letters in him, though he had
lost the enthusiasm of his childhood for reading. Saint Evremond,
Puffendorff, the Henriade, and the Spectator happened to be in his room,
and he turned over their pages. The Spectator, he says, pleased him
greatly and did him much good.[93] Madame de Warens was what he calls
protestant in literary taste, and would talk for ever of the great