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(آندرو نجيب؛ الصفحة الشخصية)

Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man. He forces one soil to nourish the products of another, one tree to bear the fruit of another.

He mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave. He turns everything upside down; he disfigures everything; he loves deformity; monsters. He wants nothing as nature made it, not even man; for him, man must be trained like a school horse; man must be fashioned in keeping with his fancy like a tree in his garden.

Mind how Jean roasts a child who disrespect their mother.

But if on any occasion whatsoever a child were unnatural enough to lack respect for his mother– for her who carried him in her womb, who nursed him with her milk, who for years forgot herself in favor of caring for him alone– one should hasten to strangle this wretch as a monster unworthy of seeing the light of day. Mothers, it is said, spoil their children. In that they are doubtless wrong– but less wrong than you perhaps who deprave them.

When it is only a question of going against the wind, one tacks. But if the sea is heavy and one wants to stand still, one must cast anchor. Take care, young pilot, for fear that your cable run or your anchor drag and that the vessel drift without your noticing.

Living is the job I want to teach him. On leaving my hands, he will, I admin, be neither magistrate nor soldier nor priest. He will, in the first place, be a man.

He among us who best knows how to bear the goods and the ills of this life is to my taste the best raised: from which it follows that the true education consists less in precept than in practice.

This is not teaching him to bear suffering; it is training him to feel it.

One things only of preserving one's child. That is not enough one ought to teach him to preserve himself as a man, to bear the blows of fate, to brave opulence and poverty, to live, if he has to, in freezing Iceland or on Malta's burning rocks. You may very well take precautions against his dying. He will nevertheless have to die. And though his death were not the product of your efforts, still these efforts would be ill conceived. It is less a question of keeping him from dying than of making him live. To live is not to breathe; it is to act; it is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence.

Civil man is born, lives, and dies in slavery. At his birth he is sewed in swaddling clothes; at his death he is nailed in a coffin. So long as he keeps his human shape, he is enchained by our institution.

Their first sentiment is a sentiment of pain and suffering. They find only obstacles to all the movements which they need. Unhappier than a criminal in irons, they make vain efforts, they get irritable, they cry. Their first voices, you say, are tears. I can well believe it. You thwart them from their birth. The first gifts they receive from you are chains. The first treatment they experience is torment.

It is claimed that children in freedom could assume bad positions and make movements capable of hurting the good conformation of their limbs. This is one of those vain reasonings of our false wisdom that children who, among peoples more sensible than us, are reared with complete freedom of their limbs, not a single one is seen who would force to make them dangerous; and, when they take a strained position, the pain soon warns them to change it.

We have not yet taken it into our heads to swaddle little dofs or cats. Do we see that they have any problems as a result of this negligence?

Do you wish to bring everyone back to his first duties? Begin with mothers. You will be surprised by the changes you will produce. Everything follows successively from their first depravity. The whole moral order degenerates; naturalness is extinguished in all hearts; family aborning is no longer attaches husbands, no longer imposes respect on outsiders; the mother whose children one does not see is less respected.

There are no longer fathers, mothers, children, brothers, or sisters. They all hardly know each other. How could they love each other? Each things only of himself. When home is only a asad solitude, one must surely go elsewhere for gaiety.

Here we are, from the first steps, outside of nature.

One leaves it by an opposite route as well when, instead of neglecting a mother's care, a woman carries it to excess; when she makes an idol of her child; when she increases and nurses his weakness in order to prevent him from feeling it; and when, hoping to exempt him form the laws of nature, she keeps hard blows away form him. She preserves many mishaps and perils she is thereby accumulating for him to bear later, and how barbarous a precaution is which adds childhood's weakness to mature men's toils. Thetis, to make her son invulnerable, plunged him, according to the fable, in the water of the Styx. This allegory is a lovery one, and it is clear.

so the analogy above references Achilles water of Styx which basically made him all strong except his ankle which remained weak because he was held by one foot when dipped into the river of Styx.

The cruel mothers of whom I speak do otherwise: by dint of plunging their children in softness, they prepare them for suffering; they open their pores to ills of every sort to which they will not fail to be prey when grown.

Experience teaches that even more children raised delicately die than do others. Provided the limit of their strength is not exceeded, less is risked in employing that strength than in sparing it. Exercise them, then, against the attacks they will one day have to bear. Harden their bodies against the intemperance of season, climates, elements; against hunger, thirst, fatigue. Steep then in the water of the Styx.

Observe nature and follow the path it maps out for you. it exercises children constantly; it hardens their temperament by tests of all sorts; it teaches them early what effort and pain are. Teething puts them in a fever; sharp colics give them convulsions; long coughs suffocate them; worms torment them; plethora corrupts their blood; various leavens ferment in it and cause perilous eruptions. Almost all the first age is sickness and danger. Half the children born perish before the eights year.

Before the obdy's habit is acquired, one can give it the habit one wants to give it without danger. But when it has once gained its consistency, every alteration becomes perilous for it. A child will bear changs that a man would not bear; the fibers of the former, soft and flexible, take without effort the turn that they are given; those of the man, more hardened, change only with violence the turn they have received. A child, then, can be made robust without exposing its life and its health; and if there were some risk, still one must not hesitate. Since there are risks inseparable from human life, can one do better than shift them to that part of its span when they are least disadvantageous.

A child becomes more precious as he advances in age. To the value of his person is joined that of the effort he has cost; to the loss of his life is joined in him the sentiment of death.

Keeping a child in his original form

Do you, the, want him to keep his original form? Preserve it from the instant he comes into the world. As soon as he is born, take hold of him and leave him no more before he is a man.

Let them be in agreement both about the order of their functions and about their system; let the child pass from the hands of the one into those of the other.

Let us not be surprised that a man whose wife did not deign to nurse the fruit of their union does not deign to raise him. There is no picture more charming than that of the family, but a single missing feature disfigures all the others. ***If the mother has too little health to be nurse, the father will have too much business to be preceptor

The children, sent away, dispersed in boarding scools, convents, colleges, will take the love belonging to the paternal home elsewhere, or to put it better, they will bring back to the paternal home the habit of having no attachments. Brothers and sisters will hardly know one another. When all are gathered together for a ceremonial occassions, they will be able to be quite polite with one another. They will treat one another as strangers. As soon as there is no more intimacy between the parents, as soon as the society of the family no longer constitutes the sweetnes of life, it is of course necessary to turn to bad morals to find a substitute. Where is the man stupid enough not to see the chain formed by all these links?

I no longer let him out of sight for a moment until, whatever he may say, he has no longer the least need of me.

A child's governor ought to be young and even as young as a wise man can be. I would want him to be a child himself if it were possible, to be able to become his pupil's companion and attract his confident by sharing his enjoyments. There are not enough things in common between childhood and maturity for a really solid attachment ever to be formed at this distance.

Children sometimes latter old man, but they never love them. One would wish that a governor had already educated someone. That is too much to wish for; the same man can only give one education. If two were required in order to succeed, by what right would one undertake the first.

You distinguish the preceptor from the governor; another folly! It is that of man's duties. This science is one, and whatever Xenophone says about the education of the Persians it is not divisible.

I would not take on a sickly and ill-constituted child, were he to live until eighty. I want no pupil always useless to himself and others, involved uniquely with preserving himself, whose body does damage to the education of his soul. What would I be doing in vainly lavishing my cares on him other than doubling society's loss and taking two men from it instead of one?

I am not able to teach living to one who things of nothing but how to keep himself from dying.

A frail body weakens the soul. This is the origin of the empire of medicine, an art more pernicious to men than all the ills it claims to cure.

I do not know of what illness the doctors cure us; but I do know that they give us quite fatal ones: cowardice, pusillanimity, credulousness, and terror of death. If they cure the body, they kill courage.

What difference does it make to us that they make cadavers walk? It is men we need, and none is seen leaving their hands.

Science which instructs and medicine which cures are doubtless very good. But science which deceives and medicine which kills are bad. Learn, therefore to distinguish them.

Explicitly commenting on the following paragraph:

I do not, therefore, dispute that medicine is useful to some men, but I say that it is fatal to humankind.

This lying art (referring to medicine), made more for the ills of the mind than for those of the body, is no more useful for the former than for the latter.

Do you want to find men of a true courage? Look for them in the places where there are no doctors, where they are ignorant of the consequences of illnesses, where they hardly think of death.

The wise John Locke, who spent a part of his life in the study of medicine, strongly recommends never using drugs Medication on children either as a precaution or for slight discomforts. I shall go farther, and I declare that, never calling a doctor for myself, I shall never call one for my Emile, unless his life is in evident danger, for then the doctor can do him no worse than kill him.

When an animal is sick, it suffers in silence and keeps quiet. now one does not see more sickly animals than men.

Temperance and work are the two true doctors of man. Work sharpens his appetite, and temperance prevents him from abusing it.

The milk of a herbivorous females is sweeter and healthier than that of carnivores. Formed from a substance homogeneous with its own, it preserves is nature better and becomes less subject to putrefaction

Not sure on what references is jean basing the argument above. But, it's sounding to know that even back then, almost 300 years ago, carnivores were a controversial argument.

Separated or curdled milk is feared; that is foolish, since it is known that milk always curdles in the stomach. It is thus that it becomes a food solid enough to nourish children and animal babies. If it did not curdle at all, it would just go through; it would not nourish them.

At the beginning of life whe memory and imagination are stil inactive, the child is attentive only to waht affects his senses at the moment. Since his sensations are the first materials of his knowledge, to present them to him in an appropriate order is to prepare his memory to provide them one day to his understanding in the same order.

As long as children find resistance only in things and never in wills, they will become neither rebellious nor irascible and will prserve their health better. Here is one of the reasons why the children of the people, freer, more independent are generally less firm, less delicate, more robust than those wh are allegedly better brought up by being endlessly thearted.

When the child stretches out his hand without saying anything, he believes he will reach the object because he does not estimate the distance. He is mistaken. But when he complains and screams in reaching out his hand, he is no longer deceived as to the tdistance; he is ordering the object to approach or you to bring it to him. In the first case carry him to the object slowly and with small steps. In the second act as though you do not even hear him. The more he screams, the less you should listen to him. It is important to accustom him early not to give orders either to men, for he is not their master, or to things, give orders either to men, for he is not their master, or to things, for they do not hear him. Thus, when a child desires something that he sees and one wants to give it to him, it is better to carry the child to the object than to bring the object to the child. He draws from this practice a conclusion appropriate to his age, and there is no oteher means to suggest it to him.

Thomas Hobbes called the wicked man a robust child, he said something absolutely contradictory. All wickedness comes from weakness. The child is wicked only because he is weak. Make him strong; he will be good. He who could do everything would never do harm.

The comment I am about to lay here is out of context, but the last sentence can be connected more or less to Leibniz on the Problem of Evil

Of all the attributes of the all-powerful divinity, goodness is the one without which one can least conceive it (also argued in Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason).

But an abuse of an entirely different importance and one no less easy to prevent is when one is in too much of a hurry to make them talk, as if one were afraid that they will not learn to talk by themselves.

Accentuation is the soul of speech. It gives speech sentiment and truth. Accentuation lies less than the word does. This is perhaps why well-brought-up people fear it so much. From the practice of saying everything in the same tone came the practice of mocking people wihtout their being aware of it.

A man who learns to speak only in his bedroom will fail to make hmself understood at the head of a battalion and will hardly impress the people in a riot. First teach children to speak to men; they will know how ot speak to women when they have to.

The child who wants to speak should hear only words he can understand and say only those he can articulate.

The first words they say have no meaning for them, but that they have another meaning htan ours without our being able to perceive it; so that, appearing to answer us quite exactly, they speak to us without understanding us and without our understanding them.

It is ordinarily due to such equivocations that we are sometimes surprised by their remarks; to which we lend ideas that they did not attach to them. This lack of attention on our part to the true meaning which words have for children appears to me the cause of their first errors; and these errors, even after they are cured of them, have no influence on their turn of mind for the rest of their lives. I shall have more than one occasion to clarify this by examples in what follows

Restrict, therefor, the child's vocabulary as much as possible. It is a very great disadvantage for him to have more words than ideas, for him to know how to say more things than he can think. I believe one of the reasons why peasants generally have clearer minds than city people is that their lexicon is less extensive. They have few ideas, but they are very good at the comparison of ideas.

We do not know what absolute happiness or unhappiness is. Everything is mixed in this life; in it one tastes no pure sentiment; in it one does not stay two moments in the same state. The affections of our souls, as well as the states of our bodies, are in a continual flux The happiest is he who suffers the least pain; the unhappiest is he who feels the least pleasure

Therefore, do not fancy that in extending your faculties you extend your strength. On the contrary, you diminish your strength if your pride is extended farther than it. Let us measure the radius of our sphere and stay in the sufficient unto ourselves; and we shall not have to complain of our weakness, for we shall never feel it.

O man, draw your existence up within yourself, and you will no longer be miserable. remain in the place which nature assigns to you in the chain of being. Nothing will be able to make you leave it. Do not rebel against the hard law of necessity; and do not exhaust your strength by your will to resist that law.

The only one who does his own will is he who, in order to do it, has no need to put another's arms at the end of his own; from which it follow that the first of all goods is not authority but freedom.

I have seen a man who honored me with his friendship taken, at a rather advanced age, to be a limited mind by his family and his friends. This excellent head ripened in silence. Suddenly, he proved to be a philosopher, and I do not doubt that posterity will give him an honorable and distinguished place among the best reasoners and the most profound meta-physicians of his age.

..one could say that he has done everything when he has taught them well how to enjoy themselves.

Human intelligence has its limits; and not only is it impossible for a man to know everything, he cannot even know completely the little that other men know.

A choice must, therefore must be made of the things that ought to be taught as well as of the proper time for learning them.

Think of it as a branching strategy through the tree of knowledge. For obvious reasons, we cannot exhaustively explore the tree and it's not efficiently solvable.

Make your pupil attentive to the phenomena of nature. Soon you will make him curious. But to feed his curiosity, never hurry to satisfy it. Put the questions within his reach and leave them to him to resolve. Let him know something not because you told it to him but because he has understood it himself. Let him not learn science but discover it.

Jean continues later in this chapter…

…after having let him chat about it at his ease (the sun rising), keep quiet for a few moments like a man who dreams, and they say to him, "I was thinking that yesterday evening the sun set here and that this morning it rose there. How is that possible?"

Even latter in the chapter…

… for in human society, the greatest instrument of man is man, and the wisest is he who best makes use of this instrument.

Do not make speeches to the child which he cannot understand. No descriptions, no eloquence, no figures, no poetry. It is not now a question of sentiment or taste. Continue to be clear, simple, and cold. The time for adopting another kind of language will come only too soon.

…whether is is fitting to enlighten children early concerning the objects of their curiosity, or whether it is better to put them off the trail with little falsehoods? I thinkon eought to do neither he one nor the other.

explitily emphasizing on the next sentence

It is better to impose silence on him than to answer him by lying. He will be little surprised by this law if care has been take to subject himto it in inconsequential things.

and even more importantly

There is much less daner in satisfying the child's curiosity than there is in exciting it.

I have always seen that young people who are ocrrupted early and given over to women and debaunchery are inhuman and crule. The heat of their temperaments made them impatient, vindictive, and wild. Their imaginations, filled by a single object, rejected all the rest.

And continues, read it in capital letters

They would have sacrificed fathers, mothers, and the whole universe to the least of their pleasures.

Suffused with the sense of my inadequacy, I shall never reason about the nature of God without being forced to by the sentiment of His relations with me. These reasonings are always rash; a wise man ought to yield to them only with trembling and with certainty that he is not made to plumb their depths; for what is most insulting to the divinity is not thinking not at all about it b thinking badly about it.

While the sentence "he is not made to plumb their depths" is so…beautiful, I am afraid that it can be used to manipulate people, I would rather choose the word "ready" than "made".

By these measures and other similar ones I believe he will be so well protected against external objects and vulgar maxims that I would rather see him in the midst of the worse society of Paris than alone in his room or in a park, given over to all the restlessness of his age. No matter what one does, the most dangerous of all the enemies that can attach a young man, and the only one that cannot be put out of the way, is himself. This enemy however is dangerous only thorugh our own fault; for as I have said countless times, the senses are awakened by the imagination alone. Their need is not properly a physical need It is not true that it is a true need. If no lewd object had eve struck our eyes, if no indecent idea had ever entered our minds, perhaps this alleged need would never have made itself felt to us, and we would have remained chaste without temptation, without effort, and without merit.

Even more worriedly,

I am persuaded that a solitary man raised in a desert, without books, without instruction, and without women, would die there a virgin at whatever age he had reached. But we are not talking here about a savage of this kind. In raising a man among his fellows for a life in society, it is impossible, it is even counter to my intention, to keep him always in this salutary ignorance, and the worse situation for chastity is to be halfway knowledgeable. The memory of objects that have mae an impression upon us, the ideas that we have acquired follow us in our retreat and people it in spite of ourselves with images more seductive tha nthe objects themselves; they make solitude as fatal to the man who carries these images to his retreat as it is useful to the man who has always remained there alone.

Advice

Therefore watch the young man carefully. He can protect himself from everything else, but it is up to you to protect him from himself. Do not leave him alone, day or night. At the very least, sleep in his room.

It must not be destroyed, but it must be regulated, and that is perhaps more difficult than annihilating it. It would be very dangerous if instinct taught your pupil to trick his senses and to find a substitute for the opporutnity of satisfying them.

Consequence

He will suffer until his death the sad effects of this habit, the most fatal to which a man can be subjected.

A criticism, or rather an arbiter as the author, Glen Baier, called it: A PROPER ARBITER OF PLEASURE: ROUSSEAU ON THE CONTROL OF SEXUAL DESIRE