ABSTRACT
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s relations with the Scottish Enlightenment, it has seemed, can be limited to his quarrel with David Hume, a quarrel in which he showed rather little detailed knowledge of Hume’s published writings. Even prior to gaining Rousseau’s notice, Julie von Bondeli already stood as a central figure of an intellectual and personal web in which she was recognized as a woman of sense, wit, analytic rigor, and sharp powers of observation. Julie von Bondeli and J. G. Zimmerman’s correspondence about Rousseau ranges from assessments of his philosophic and literary ideas and aims to friendly concern and interest in his political difficulties and personal circumstances. The immediate cause of Rousseau’s effusive praise was a letter Bondeli wrote analysing his novel, Julie. Rousseau himself says that he had written La Nouvelle Heloise with a secret object which was to show religious people that a sceptic could be moral and to show sceptics that a religious person could be tolerant.
