works must be read backwards, beginning with the last, by those who
would understand him. Indeed, his function was, in a deeper sense than
is imagined by those who take the parable called the _Contrat Social_
for a solemn treatise of political philosophy, to give the lie to
history. In himself he pitted the eternal against the temporal and grew
younger with years. He might be known as the man of the second childhood
_par excellence_. To the eye of history the effort of his soul was an
effort backwards, because the vision of history is focused only for a
perspective of progress. On his after-dinner journey to Diderot at
Vincennes, Jean-Jacques saw, with the suddenness of intuition, that that
progress, amongst whose convinced and cogent prophets he had lived so
long was for him an unsubstantial word. He beheld the soul of man _sub
specie æternitatis_. In his vision history and institutions dissolved
away. His second childhood had begun.

On such a man the historical method can have no grip. There is, as the
French say, no _engrenage_. It points to a certain lack of the subtler
kind of understanding to attempt to apply the method; more truly,
perhaps, to an unessential interest, which has of late years been
imported into French criticism from Germany. The Sorbonne has not, we
know, gone unscathed by the disease of documentation for documentation's
sake. M. Masson's three volumes leave us with the sense that their
author had learnt a method and in his zeal to apply it had lost sight of
the momentous question whether Jean-Jacques was a person to whom it
might be applied with a prospect of discovery. No one who read Rousseau
with a mind free of ulterior motives could have any doubt on the matter.
Jean-Jacques is categorical on the point. The Savoyard Vicar was
speaking for Jean-Jacques to posterity when he began his profession of
faith with the words:--