By his writings Rousseau acted more powerfully upon posterity than upon his own times: his personality had ceased to do his genius injustice.
He belonged moreover and by anticipation to a new era; from the restless working of his mind, as well as from his moral and political tendencies, he was no longer of the eighteenth century properly speaking, though the majority of the philosophers outlived him; his work was not their work, their world was never his.

He had attempted a noble reaction, but one which was fundamentally and in reality impossible.

The impress of his early education had never been thoroughly effaced: he believed in God, he had been nurtured upon the Gospel in childhood, he admired the morality and the life of Jesus Christ; but he stopped at the boundaries of adoration and submission.

"The spirit of Jean Jacques Rousseau inhabits the moral world, but not that other which is above," M.Joubert has said in his _Pensees_.

The weapons were insufficient and the champion was too feeble for the contest; the spirit of the moral world was vanquished as a foregone conclusion.