It is perhaps no frantic effort of generosity in a philosopher
with ten crowns in his pocket when he offers to make common stock with a
neighbor who has ten thousand of yearly income, nor is it an uncommon
thing to see such theories knocked clean out of a man's head by the
descent of a thumping legacy. But, consistent or not, Rousseau remains
permanently interesting as the highest and most perfect type of the
sentimentalist of genius. His was perhaps the acutest mind that was ever
mated with an organization so diseased, the brain most far-reaching in
speculation that ever kept itself steady and worked out its problems amid
such disordered tumult of the nerves.[166] His letter to the Archbishop
of Paris, admirable for its lucid power and soberness of tone, and his
_Rousseau juge de Jean Jacques_, which no man can read and believe him to
have been sane, show him to us in his strength and weakness, and give us
a more charitable, let us hope therefore a truer, notion of him than his
own apology for himself. That he was a man of genius appears unmistakably
in his impressibility by the deeper meaning of the epoch in which he
lived. Before an eruption, clouds steeped through and through with
electric life gather over the crater, as if in sympathy and expectation.
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