Emile, or On Education

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.

It is therefore to these primitive dispositions that one should relate everything, and that could be done if our three educations were only different: but what is to be done when they are opposed, when instead of raising a man for himself, one wants to raise him for others? Then consistency is impossible. Forced to combat nature or social institutions, one must choose between making a man or a citizen; for one cannot make both at once.

Every partial society, when it is narrow and well-united, alienates itself from the greater one. Every patriot is harsh to foreigners: they are only men, they are nothing in his eyes (3). This inconvenience is inevitable, but it is minor. The essential thing is to be good to the people with whom one lives. Abroad, the Spartan was ambitious, avaricious, iniquitous: but selflessness, equity, and concord reigned within his walls. Beware of these cosmopolitans who go to great lengths in their books to search for duties they disdain to fulfill around them. Such a philosopher loves the Tartars so that he may be excused from loving his neighbors.

(3) Thus, the wars of Republics are crueler than those of Monarchies. But if the war of Kings is moderate, it is their peace that is terrible: it is better to be their enemy than their subject.