ABSTRACT
As we have seen, Rousseau would classify the whole period of life up to the fifteenth birthday as either infancy or childhood, and he would restrict the term ‘adolescence’ to the years of life between fifteen and twenty. To make sense of the views he puts forward, we must here acquiesce in applying the term ‘adolescence’ to this period of human life, though reserving our right to disagree firmly with any of his suggestions which may seem inappropriate to this span in our day and age. However, Rousseau offers us some striking sentences which stir our thinking and Book IV of Émile, which deals with this span, opens thus:
How swiftly life passes here below! The first quarter of it is gone before we know how to use it; the last quarter finds us incapable of enjoying life. At first we do not know how to live; and when we know how to live it is too late. In the interval between these two useless extremes we waste three-fourths of our time sleeping, working, sorrowing, enduring restraint and every kind of suffering. Life is short, not so much because of the short time it lasts, but because we are allowed scarcely any time to enjoy it.
