It remains for me to speak in the following books of the cultivation of a sort of sixth sense called common sense, less because it is common to all men than because it results from the well-regulated use of the other senses, and because it instructs us about the nature of things by the conjunction of all their appearances. This sixth sense has consequently no special organ. It resides only in the brain, and its sensations, purely internal, are called perceptions or ideas. It is by the number of these ideas that the extent of our knowledge is measured. It is their distinctness, their clarity which constitutes the accuracy of the mind. It is the art of comparing them among themselves that is called human reason. (157–58; 4:417)
The “sixth sense” links a conception of human reason as independent of the senses with the senses themselves, functioning as a middle ground. Reason emerges as neither reducible to the senses (as it is for Helvétius) nor independent of them. If “the child whom one wants to make wise” must first learn how to see, this is why. Rousseau may insist that the child be preserved as a primarily physical being who interacts with the world around him on physical (not moral) terms, but this goal is not opposed to the goal of teaching the child to reason. It in fact lays the groundwork for the independent exercise of reason. A child whose senses have been properly developed can become an accurate judge within the context of the physical world around him. “Now we are well informed about the character of foreign bodies in relation to our own, about their weight, shape, color, solidity, size, distance, temperature, rest, and motion” (150; 4:407). In other words, the child, understood as a strictly physical being, has become a good judge of physical reality insofar as it relates to his immediate surroundings; “he judges, he foresees, in everything immediately related to him” (119; 4:361). Having learned to run well and to see well, he has thereby learned to judge well within the limits appropriate to childhood.
Learning to Learn
Of course, the human child is not meant to remain forever a purely physical being, and arguably the goal of childhood education is preparation for adulthood. While, as I noted in chapter 1, Rousseau is critical of those who see children only as future men, he is also critical of the tender mother who thinks only of her child’s present happiness. “That is not enough,” Rousseau counters. “One ought to teach him to preserve himself as a man” (42; 4:253). Thus, by Rousseau’s own admission, childhood education must prepare a child for adulthood, even as it aims toward the “maturity of childhood” rather than full maturity. To what degree does Rousseau succeed in meeting this challenge? The education he lays out in the first half of book II may suffice to teach a child how to move in a physical sense, but does it teach a child to move in the sense of learning, growing, changing?
To address this question, we might consider Rousseau’s argument that adults must refrain from encouraging children to consider what lies beyond their immediate physical existence, putting off moral lessons until much later. The goal at this point, he insists, is to prevent vice from developing, rather than to encourage the development of virtue. Rousseau’s claim, however, is not simply that children are not far enough along the path of development to be genuinely virtuous, for such a claim could easily be countered with the argument that they should therefore be encouraged to “practice” virtuous behavior as they grow. Rousseau rejects the assumption that going through the motions of virtue produces virtue; such attempts at habituation, he maintains, encourage a discrepancy between the internal state of mind and external behavior—inadvertently cultivating an insincerity that begets vice, not virtue. Thus, for the same reason that it is wrong to try to reason with children, it is futile at best to coax children to do virtuous deeds in an effort to habituate them. A child who is trained to go through the motions of being charitable, for example, does not become charitable; he becomes an imposter. Coaxing such behavior from children cultivates “virtues by imitation,” which is to say, “the virtues of apes” (104; 4:339). In Rousseau’s view, the child who imitates adults only appears to learn and mature; the maturation is a superficial veneer. The child learns not how to become virtuous but how to hide his lack of virtue. This is one origin of the false front that civil man wears. At stake here is the ability to distinguish between true learning and false (merely apparent) learning, such as that exhibited by the child who chatters precociously. But Rousseau makes it easier for us to discern the mark of false learning. He insists that children at this age should be made to “taste” their lessons, rather than be taught the names for things. But this “tasting” is characterized as unconscious conditioning. We are left with two inadequate models: tasting without knowing, on the one hand, and superficial knowledge (knowing names without tasting), on the other. The question remains, how does one achieve real knowledge? How does one actually and truly learn?
Teaching inappropriate lessons produces false learning (or worse). Fables are out, and so is coaxing certain behavior. What, then, are appropriate lessons? Rousseau offers two pieces of advice on this point, both of which raise more problems than they answer. First, he counsels his readers to “know well the particular genius of the child in order to know what moral diet suits him” (94; 4:324). This suggests that the child’s unique character must be known before we can know what education suits him; but by the time his character is fully formed, it may be too late to educate him. Still, Rousseau recommends taking the time to allow the child’s nature to reveal itself before one begins, which strikingly recalls the paradox we saw in book I: that nature (in this case the child’s innate temperament) must guide the process of discovery even as it is what is discovered in the process. Here, Rousseau generates a similar paradox by advising educators to “spy out nature for a long time; observe your pupil well before saying the first word to him. To start with, let the germ of his character reveal itself freely; constrain it in no way whatsoever in order better to see the whole of it” (94; 4:324). We are back to the difficulty of knowing when the whole is a completed whole, to say nothing of the more immediate difficulty of how one might manage to say nothing to a child until his character is fully revealed.
Rousseau acknowledges that this requirement may present an insurmountable hurdle. “I sense these difficulties; I agree they are difficulties. Perhaps they are insurmountable. But it is still certain that in applying oneself to overcoming them, one does overcome them up to a certain point. I show the goal that must be set; I do not say that it can be reached” (94–95; 4:325). At this point, perhaps in order to resolve this impasse, he introduces the idea that there is in fact a place for imitation in this otherwise “negative” education. “Remember that before daring to undertake the formation of a man, one must have made oneself a man. One must find within oneself the example the pupil ought to take for his own” (95; 4:325). A governor should lead by example rather than try to coax virtuous deeds from the child. “Be virtuous and good. Let your examples be graven in your pupils’ memories until they can enter their hearts. Instead of hastening to exact acts of charity from my pupil, I prefer to do them in his presence and to deprive him of even the means of imitating me in this, as an honor which is not for his age” (104; 4:339).
The proposition that one must lead by example is perplexing, however, in light of Rousseau’s scathing critique of “the virtues of apes.” Is he for or against imitation? On the one hand, he contends that if Emile begins to imitate the tutor’s acts of charity (behaving like the rich man that he is not), he must be forbidden to do so. However, Rousseau goes on to add that he would not mind if Emile should steal some money from him in order to give it away covertly. “This is a fraud appropriate to his age, and the only one I would pardon him” (104; 4:339). Rousseau would pardon this fraud because it is committed with a view to being good, not with a view to appearing good. Only if the act is covert—if it does not appear—is it truly virtuous rather than an empty gesture.10 A good deed done in secret avoids the superficiality of imitation and becomes in some sense genuine. Still, imitation seems to play an important role in motivating the behavior.
Imitation is both problematic and necessary, it seems. While Rousseau at first allows that “at an age when the heart feels nothing yet, children just have to be made to imitate the acts whose habit one wants to
