Dominated by his senses, Rousseau never knew how to *
resist them. The most insignificant pleasure, he says,
so long as it was present, fascinated him more than all
the joys of Paradise. In fact, a monk's dinner (Father
Pontierre) led him to apostasy, and a feeling of repulsion
caused him to abandon cruelly an epileptic friend on the
road.
It was not only his passions that were morbid

and violent ; his intelligence also was affected from

his earliest days, as he shows in his Confessions :

\ " My imagination has never been so cheerful as when I ^

] have been suffering. My mind cannot beautify the really '

' Brewster's Memoirs of Sir /. Newton^ vol. ii. p. 94.
7



V



82 THE MAN OF GENIUS.
pleasant things that happen to me, only the imaginary
ones. If I wish to describe spring well, it must be in
winter." Real evils had little hold on Rousseau, he tells
us ; imaginary evils touched him more nearly. " I can
adapt myself to what I experience, but not to what I
fear." It is thus that people kill themselves through
fear of death.
