Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/159

VII.

Prisoners.

⁠"Rousseau is to this Revolution what the germ is to the tree.
He who thoroughly probed Rousseau's life would see the Revolution,
in good and evil, enveloped in it; he bequeaths it not merely his
ideas, but his temperament. He professes that all is good in man:
he ends by finding mankind 'suspect.' A philanthropist, he daily
advances towards an implacable misanthropy. Not a friend whom
he does not immolate to his idol, suspicion. . . He lost himself in
a vision of mysterious spots in which his reason totters."
⁠—QUINET.