I should have been happy in my condition, perhaps I might have honoured it; and after living a life obscure and simple, but even and gentle, I should have died peacefully in the midst of my own people.

Soon forgotten, I should at any rate have been regretted as long as any memory of me was left."[22] As a man knows nothing about the secrets of his own individual organisation, this illusory mapping out of a supposed Possible need seldom be suspected of the smallest insincerity.

The poor madman who declares that he is a king kept out of his rights only moves our pity, and we perhaps owe pity no less to those in all the various stages of aberration uncertificated by surgeons, down to the very edge of most respectable sanity, who accuse the injustice of men of keeping them out of this or that kingdom, of which in truth their own composition finally disinherited them at the moment when they were conceived in a mother's womb.

The first of the famous Five Propositions of Jansen, which were a stumbling-block to popes and to the philosophy of the eighteenth-century foolishness, put this clear and permanent truth into a mystic and perishable formula, to the effect that there are some commandments of God which righteous and good men are absolutely unable to obey, though ever so disposed to do them, and God does not give them so much grace that they are able to observe them.
If Rousseau's sensations in the evening were those of terror, the day and its prospect of boundless adventures soon turned them into entire delight.

The whole world was before him, and all the old conceptions of romance were instantly revived by the supposed nearness of their realisation.