This movement may be natural to me, and I believe it is so; but the profound recollection of the first injustice I suffered was too long and too fast bound up with it, not to have strengthened it enormously."[13] To men who belong to the silent and phlegmatic races like our own, all this may possibly strike on the ear like a false or strained note.

Yet a tranquil appeal to the real history of one's own strongest impressions may disclose their roots in facts of childish experience, which remoteness of time has gradually emptied of the burning colour they once had.

This childish discovery of the existence in his own world of that injustice which he had only seen through a glass very darkly in the imaginary world of his reading, was for Rousseau the angry dismissal from the primitive Eden, which in one shape and at one time or another overtakes all men.

"Here," he says, "was the term of the serenity of my childish days.

From this moment I ceased to enjoy a pure happiness, and I feel even at this day that the reminiscence of the delights of my infancy here comes to an end....