Excerpt from Rousseau and Naturalism in Life and Thought A more serious dificulty in dealing with Rousseau than that presented by the multifarious and often conflicting materials to be considered, inheres in the character of the man himself, and the nature of many of his confidences. What a charm ing frankness through the Confessions! Wrote Samuel Rogers once to his friend Sharpe. Of the frankness there can be no question, though whether it is always charming will be a matter of individual taste. Rousseau has gained, as everybody knows, an unenviable kind of notoriety from his morbid habit of tearing aside the veil which men habitually keep drawn across their evil motives and actions, and of indulging in reminiscences and revelations which outrage all common feelings of decency and reserve. His autobiography is full of things which, in Pliny's phrase, must be introduced with an apology, even if they are touched upon at all. Now, to leave such matters out of our account alto gether is necessarily to give an incomplete, and there fore false, idea of Rousseau's character; to treat of them even briefly, is to run the risk of giving offence. More than once, I will admit that, face to face with the problem of what to include and what to avoid, I have felt the full force of a remark which the late Mr. Grant Allen once made to me - that it is impossible to give an absolutely accurate picture of Rousseau in any book written in English for popular perusal. I feel that it is only fair to myself to call attention to this difficulty. My own policy has been to err more on the side of reti cence than of outspokenness, and to imply rather than to particularise. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.