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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 give them,” he nevertheless resolves that we must “give up the apparent good which imitation can produce” (104; 4:338–39). He uses imitation to solve a problem—that there is no other way to begin to teach children to be virtuous—but then rejects the solution. However, he continues to proceed as though the problem were solved. His rejection is therefore somewhat disingenuous. But it points to a larger, recurring issue. To overcome the difficulty generated by the requirement that the child be a completed whole before education can begin, Rousseau shifts the burden onto the tutor, demanding that he be a completed whole before he can begin the education of another. In other words, wholeness must somehow precede the very educational process that is supposed to produce wholeness. Moreover, the idea that the child would at some level emulate the wholeness of the tutor in order to achieve wholeness himself leaps over the need to educate someone to be an independent self who does not imitate others—in other words, it leaps over the possibility of what Rousseau would consider a genuine education and resorts instead to something that could just as easily produce the “virtues of apes.” Either the child imitates the adult who gives alms, for example (and therefore does not develop virtue but only the appearance of it), or he does not merely imitate because he is already virtuous—and therefore does not need to develop virtue. Education is either absent or superfluous. The fundamental question that remains is how virtue might come into being if it is not already there. Once again, as we saw in chapter 1, Rousseau’s argument founders on the question of origins.

      The ambiguity in Rousseau’s treatment of imitation suggests why even the early part of Emile’s education cannot, despite Rousseau’s rhetoric, be a purely “negative” education. It is noteworthy that one of his strongest statements about the need to “put off, if possible, a good lesson for fear of giving a bad one” (96; 4:327) is followed by an admission that one cannot avoid lessons altogether and must therefore choose carefully. A pattern is beginning to emerge, in which Rousseau adds a caveat to what he initially presents as an absolute rule. Rousseau “breaks” his own rules against imitation and positive lessons. This pattern continues well into book III, in which he lifts his supposedly absolute ban on books and allows Emile to read Robinson Crusoe, “since we absolutely must have books” (184; 4:454). In the chapters that follow, we shall explore the ways in which this tendency to qualify absolutes extends also to the poetic images (such as natural man and citizen) that function as absolute standards in Rousseau’s thought as a whole.

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