When he plunged into reflection, he did not deal with the objects of reflection at first hand and in themselves, but only with the reminiscences of objects, which he had never approached in a spirit of deliberate and systematic observation, and with those reminiscences, moreover, suffused and saturated by the impalpable but most potent essences of a fermenting imagination.

Instead of urgently seeking truth with the patient energy, the wariness, and the conscience, with the sharpened instruments, the systematic apparatus, and the minute feelers and tentacles of the genuine thinker and solid reasoner, he only floated languidly on a summer tide of sensation, and captured premiss and conclusion in a succession of swoons.

It would be a mistake to contend that no work can be done for the world by this method, or that truth only comes to those who chase her with logical forceps.

But one should always try to discover how a teacher of men came by his ideas, whether by careful toil, or by the easy bequest of generous phantasy.
To give a zest to rural delight, and partly perhaps to satisfy the intellectual interest which must have been an instinct in one who became so consummate a master in the great and noble art of composition, Rousseau, during the time when he lived with Madame de Warens, tried as well as he knew how to acquire a little knowledge of what fruit the cultivation of the mind of man had hitherto brought forth.

According to his own account, it was Voltaire's Letters on the English which first drew him seriously to study, and nothing which that illustrious man wrote at this time escaped him.