The History of Pedagogy

by Gabriel Compayré

331. Moral Education.—Rousseau is more worthy of being followed when he demands that the moral notions of right and wrong have their first source in the feelings of sympathy and social benevolence, on the supposition that according to his system he can inspire Émile with such feelings.

“We enter, finally, the domain of morals,” he says. “If this were the place for it, I would show how from the first emotions of the heart arise the first utterances of the conscience, and how, from the first feelings of love and hate arise the first notions of good and evil. I would make it appear that justice and goodness are not merely abstract terms, conceived by the understanding, but real affections of the soul enlightened by the reason.”

Yes; let the child be made to make his way gradually towards a severe morality, sanctioned by the reason, in having him pass through the gentle emotions of the heart. Nothing can be better. But this is to be done on one condition: this is, that we shall not stop on the way, and that the vague inspirations of the sensibilities shall be succeeded by the exact prescriptions of the reason. Now Rousseau, as we know, was never willing to admit that virtue was anything else than an affair of the heart. His ethics is wholly an ethics of sentiment.

332. Religious Education.—We know the reasons which determined Rousseau to delay till the sixteenth or eighteenth year the revelation of religion. It is that the child, with his sensitive imagination, is necessarily an idolater. If we speak to him of God, he can form but a superstitious idea of him. “Now,” says Rousseau, pithily, “when the imagination has once seen God, it is very rare that the understanding conceives him.” In other terms, once plunged in superstition, the mind of the child can never extricate itself from it. We must then wait, in the interest of religion itself, till the child have sufficient maturity of reason and sufficient power of thought to seize in its truth, divested of every veil of sense, the idea of God, whose existence is announced to him for the first time.

It is difficult to justify Rousseau. First, is it not to be feared that the child, if he has reached his eighteenth year in ignorance of God, may find it wholly natural to be ignorant of him still, and that he reason and dispute at random with his teacher, and that he doubt instead of believe? And if he allows himself to be convinced, is it not at least evident that the religious idea, tardily inculcated, will have no profound hold on his mind? On the other hand, will the child, with his instinctive curiosity, wait till his eighteenth year to inquire the cause of the universe? Will he not form the notion of a God in his own way?

“One might have read, a few years ago,” says Villemain, “the account, or rather the psychological confession, of a writer (Sentenis), a German philosopher, whom his father had submitted to the experiment advised by the author of Émile. Left alone by the loss of a tenderly loved wife, this father, a learned and thoughtful man, had taken his infant son to a retired place in the country; and not allowing him communication with any one, he had cultivated the child’s intelligence through the sight of the natural objects placed near him, and by the study of the languages, almost without books, and in carefully concealing from him all idea of God. The child had reached his tenth year without having either read or heard that great name. But then his mind found what had been denied it. The sun which he saw rise each morning seemed the all-powerful benefactor of whom he felt the need. He soon formed the habit of going at dawn to the garden to pay homage to that god that he had made for himself. His father surprised him one day, and showed him his error by teaching him that all the fixed stars are so many suns distributed in space. But such was then the disappointment and the grief of the child deprived of his worship, that the father, overcome, acknowledged to him that there was a God, the Creator of the heavens and the earth.”[175]

333. The Savoyard Vicar’s Profession of Faith.—Rousseau has at least attempted to retrieve, by stately language and an impassioned demonstration of the existence of God, the delay which he has spontaneously imposed on his pupil.

The Savoyard Vicar’s Profession of Faith is an eloquent catechism on natural religion, and the honest expression of a sincere and profound deism. The religion of nature is evidently the only one which, in Rousseau’s system, can be taught, and ought to be taught, to the child, since the child is exactly the pupil of nature. If Émile wishes to go beyond this, if he needs a positive religion, this shall be for himself to choose.