ABSTRACT
J. J. Rousseau shared with the Stoics, the calm which associate with that school was not one. The eccentricity of his manners, the strangeness of his opinions, his morbid sensitiveness, all tended to separate him from the crowd. Such a man makes many enemies, and the evidence or appearance of hostility towards him begets a deeply felt resentment towards whole classes of men. Alone with an imagination which can drift whithersoever it will, Jean-Jacques can compensate himself for all that life has denied him. He can see lake and wood and mountain and the heaven above in a light which other men have never known: he can see all things with the eye of one who looks upon them for the first time. He can be the perpetual pioneer, the first among mortals to have seen things as he sees them.
