Emile, or On Education

ter, its extension becomes vertical again. It is the same with the inclinations of men. As long as one remains in the same state, one can keep those that result from habit and that are the least natural to us; but as soon as the situation changes, habit ceases and the natural returns. Education is certainly only a habit. Now, are there not people who forget and lose their education? Others who keep it? From where does this difference come? If one must limit the name of nature to habits consistent with nature, one can spare oneself this gibberish.

We are born sensitive, and from our birth we are affected in various ways by the objects that surround us. As soon as we have, so to speak, the consciousness of our sensations, we are disposed to seek or to flee the objects that produce them, first according to whether they are agreeable or unpleasant to us, then according to the suitableness or unsuitableness that we find between ourselves and these objects, and finally according to the judgments that we form about them based on the idea of happiness or perfection that reason gives us. These dispositions extend and strengthen as we become more enlightened: but constrained by our habits, they are altered more or less by our opinions. Before this alteration, they are what I call nature in us.