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FIRST DIALOGUE Rousseau What incredible things I have just learned! I can't get over it. No, I will never get over it. Just heaven, what an abominable man! How he has hurt me! How I am going to detest him! A Frenchman And take note that this is the same man whose pompous productions charmed you so, carried you away with the beautiful precepts of virtue he displays in them with such ostentation. Rousseau Say with such strength. Let's be just, even with the wicked. At most, ostentation elicits cold, sterile admiration, and will surely never charm me. Writings that elevate the soul and enflame the heart deserve another word. The Frenchman Ostentation or strength, what does the word matter if the idea is the same, and if this sublime jargon, drawn out of an impassioned head by hypocrisy, is no less dictated by a soul of mire? Rousseau This choice of a word seems less indifferent to me than to you. For me it greatly changes the ideas, and if there were only ostentation and jargon in the writings of the Author you portrayed, he would horrify me less. A perverse man, whose heart hardens listening to dry sermons and preachings, might examine himself and become a decent man if one knew how to seek and revive in his heart those feelings of rectitude and humanity which nature places there in reserve and which the passions stifle. But someone who can coldly contemplate virtue in all its beauty, who can portray its most touching charms without being moved by them, without feeling struck by any love of virtue, such a being, if he can exist, is hopelessly wicked; he is a moral cadaver. The Frenchman What do you mean, if he can exist? Given the effect this wretch's writings have had on you, what do you mean by this doubt after the discussion we have just had? Explain yourself. Rousseau I'll explain what I mean, but it will be either the most useless or most First Dialogue (PL, I. 667-669) 9 superfluous ofefforts, since everything I will say to you can be understood only by those to whom there is no need to say it. Picture an ideal world similar to ours, yet altogether different.6 Nature is the same there as on our earth, but its economy is more easily felt, its order more marked, its aspect more admirable. Forms are more elegant, colors more vivid, odors sweeter, all objects more interesting. All nature is so beautiful there that its contemplation, inflaming souls with love for such a touching tableau, inspires in them both the desire to contribute to this beautiful system and the fear of troubling its harmony; and from this comes an exquisite sensitivity which gives those endowed with it immediate enjoyment unknown to hearts that the same contemplations have not aroused. There as here, passions are the motive of all action, but they are livelier, more ardent, or merely simpler and purer, thereby assuming a totally different character. All the first movements of nature are good and right. They aim as directly as possible toward our preservation and our happiness , but soon lacking strength to maintain their original direction through so much resistance, they let themselves be deflected by a thousand obstacles which, turning them away from their true goal, make them take oblique paths where man forgets his original destination. Erroneous judgment and the strength of prejudices contribute a great deal to our being thus misled. But this effect comes mainly from weakness ofthe soul, which—effortlessly following nature's impulse—is deflected on colliding with an obstacle, just as a ball takes the angle of reflection, whereas something that pursues its course with more vigor is not deflected, but like a cannonball pushes the obstacle away or is destroyed and falls on contact.7 The inhabitants of the ideal world I am talking about have the good fortune to be maintained by nature, to which they are more attached, in that happy perspective in which nature placed us all, and because of this alone their soul forever maintains its original character. The primitive passions, which all tend directly toward our happiness, focus us only on objects that relate to it, and having only the love of self as a principle, are all loving and gentle in their essence. But when they are deflected from their object by obstacles, they are focused on removing the obstacle rather than reaching...

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