The extreme inequality of our ways of life, the excess of idleness among some and the excess of toil among others, the ease of stimulating and gratifying our appetites and our senses, the over-elaborate foods of the rich, which inflame and overwhelm them with indigestion, the bad food of the poor, which they often go withotu altogether, so hat they over-eat greedily when they have the opportunity; those late nights, excesses of all kinds, immoderate transports of every passion, fatigue, exhaustion of mind, the innumerable sorrows and anxieties that people in all classes suffer, and by which the human soul is constantly tormented: these are the fatal proofs that most of our ills are of our own making, and that we might have avoided nearly all of them if only we had adhered to the simple, unchanging and solitary way of life that nature ordained for us.

Moreover Rousseau advocated the opinion that insofar as they lead people to virtue all religions are equally worthy and that people should therefore conform to the religion in which they have been brought up. Following the French Revolution other commentators fingered a potential danger of Rousseau’s project of realizing an “antique” conception of virtue amongst the citizenry in a modern world (e. Although in this state he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature he gains in return others so great his faculties are so stimulated and developed his ideas so extended his feelings so ennobled and his whole soul so uplifted that did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever and instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal made him an intelligent being and a man.

Rousseau's novel Émile: or On Education is a treatise on the education of the whole person for citizenship. His sentimental novel Julie or the New Heloise was of importance to the development of pre-romanticism and romanticism in fiction. Rousseau's autobiographical writings—his Confessions which initiated the modern autobiography and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker—exemplified the late 18th-century movement known as the Age of Sensibility and featured an increased focus on subjectivity and introspection that later characterized modern writing.