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AppendixII Fragments TheNeuchdtel Preface to The Confessions ofJ.-J. Rousseau Containing the detailed account of the events of his life, and of his secret feelings in all the situations in which he has found himself. P.31 I have often remarked that, even among those who pride themselves the most for knowing men, each hardly knows anyone but himself, if it is even true that anyone knows himself; for how can a being be defined by means of the relationships that are inside itself alone, without being compared with anything? Nevertheless , this imperfect knowledge that one has of oneself is the only means one uses for knowing others. One makes oneself into the rule of everything, and this is precisely where the double illusion of amour-propre is waiting for us; either by falsely attributing to those we are judging the motives that would have made us act as they do in their place; or—in that same assumption—by deceiving ourselves about our own motives for lack of knowing well enough how to transport ourselves into a different situation from the one in which we are. I have made these observations in relation to myself above all, not in the judgments that I have delivered about others, since I soon felt that I was a separate sort of being, but in the ones that others have delivered about me; judgments that are almost always false in the reasons they give for my behavior, and usually all the more false the more intelligent those who delivered them were. The farther their rule was extended, the farther they were pushed from the object by the false application they made of it. Based on these considerations, I have resolved to cause my readers to make an additional step in the knowledge of men by pulling them away, if possible, from that unique and faulty rule of always judging someone else's heart by means of their own; whereas, on the contrary, even to know one's own it would often be necessary to begin by reading in someone else's. In order for one to learn to evaluate oneself, I want to attempt to provide at least one item for comparison, so that each can know himself and one other, and this other will be myself. Yes, myself, myself alone, for I do not know any other man up to now who has dared to do what I am proposing. Histories, lives, portraits, characters! What are all those? Ingenious novels constructed upon a few external actions, upon a few speeches that relate to them, on some subtle conjectures in which the Author seeks much more to shine than to find out the truth. One grabs hold of conspicuous features of a character, one links them by means of invented features, and as sss S86 Appendix II long as the whole makes up a physiognomy, what difference does it make whether it resembles? No one can judge about that. In order to know a character well one would have to distinguish the acquired from what is by nature, to see how it was formed, what occasions have developed it, what chain of secret affections have made it the way it is, and how it changes, sometimes in order to produce the most contradictory and most unexpected effects. What shows itself is only the smallest part of what is; it is the apparent effect whose internal cause is hidden and often very complicated. Each one guesses in his manner and portrays at his whim; he is not afraid that someone might confront the image with the model, and how would we make known this internal model, which the one who portrays it in someone else does not know how to see, and which the one who sees it in himself does not want to show? No one can write the life of a man except himself. His internal manner of being, his genuine life is known only to him; but he disguises it when he writes it; under the name of his life he makes his apology; he shows himself as he wants to be seen, but not at all as he is. At most, the most sincere are truthful in what they say, but they lie by their reticence, and what they keep silent about changes what they pretend to admit so much, that by saying only a part of the truth they do not say anything. I put Montaigne at the head...

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