Fresh air affects children's constitutions, particularly in early
years. It enters every pore of a soft and tender skin, it has
a powerful effect on their young bodies. Its effects can never
be destroyed. So I should not agree with those who take a country
woman from her village and shut her up in one room in a town and
her nursling with her. I would rather send him to breathe the fresh
air of the country than the foul air of the town. He will take his
new mother's position, will live in her cottage, where his tutor
will follow him. The reader will bear in mind that this tutor is
not a paid servant, but the father's friend. But if this friend
cannot be found, if this transfer is not easy, if none of my advice
can be followed, you will say to me, "What shall I do instead?" I
have told you already--"Do what you are doing;" no advice is needed
there.
Men are not made to be crowded together in ant-hills, but scattered
over the earth to till it. The more they are massed together, the
more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of
over-crowded cities. Of all creatures man is least fitted to live
in herds. Huddled together like sheep, men would very soon die.
Man's breath is fatal to his fellows. This is literally as well as
figuratively true.
Men are devoured by our towns. In a few generations the race dies
out or becomes degenerate; it needs renewal, and it is always
renewed from the country. Send your children to renew themselves,
so to speak, send them to regain in the open fields the strength
lost in the foul air of our crowded cities. Women hurry home that
their children may be born in the town; they ought to do just the
opposite, especially those who mean to nurse their own children. They
would lose less than they think, and in more natural surroundings
the pleasures associated by nature with maternal duties would soon
destroy the taste for other delights.
The new-born infant is first bathed in warm water to which a little
wine is usually added. I think the wine might be dispensed with.
As nature does not produce fermented liquors, it is not likely that
they are of much value to her creatures.
http://www.online-literature.com/rousseau/emile/1/
You will tell me I am going beyond nature. I think not. She
chooses her instruments and orders them, not according to fancy,
but necessity. Now a man's needs vary with his circumstances. There
is all the difference in the world between a natural man living in
a state of nature, and a natural man living in society. Emile is
no savage to be banished to the desert, he is a savage who has to
live in the town. He must know how to get his living in a town,
how to use its inhabitants, and how to live among them, if not of
them.
http://www.online-literature.com/rousseau/emile/3/
O man, whatever country you may belong to, whatever your opinions may
be, attend to my words; you shall hear your history such as I think I
have read it, not in books composed by those like you, for they are
liars, but in the book of nature which never lies. All that I shall
repeat after her, must be true, without any intermixture of falsehood,
but where I may happen, without intending it, to introduce my own
conceits. The times I am going to speak of are very remote. How much
you are changed from what you once were! 'Tis in a manner the life of
your species that I am going to write, from the qualities which you
have received, and which your education and your habits could deprave,
but could not destroy.
http://www.online-literature.com/rou...-inequality/1/
Authors, I know, are continually telling us, that in this state man would have been a most miserable creature; and if it is true, as I fancy I have proved it, that he must
have continued many ages without either the desire or the opportunity
of emerging from such a state, this their assertion could only serve
to justify a charge against nature, and not any against the being
which nature had thus constituted; but, if I thoroughly understand
this term miserable, it is a word, that either has no meaning, or
signifies nothing, but a privation attended with pain, and a suffering
state of body or soul; now I would fain know what kind of misery can
be that of a free being, whose heart enjoys perfect peace, and body
perfect health? And which is aptest to become insupportable to those
who enjoy it, a civil or a natural life? In civil life we can scarcely
meet a single person who does not complain of his existence; many even
throw away as much of it as they can, and the united force of divine
and human laws can hardly put bounds to this disorder. Was ever any
free savage known to have been so much as tempted to complain of life,
and lay violent hands on himself? Let us therefore judge with less
pride on which side real misery is to be placed. Nothing, on the
contrary, must have been so unhappy as savage man, dazzled by flashes
of knowledge, racked by passions, and reasoning on a state different
from that in which he saw himself placed. It was in consequence of a
very wise Providence, that the faculties, which he potentially
enjoyed, were not to develop themselves but in proportion as there
offered occasions to exercise them, lest they should be superfluous or
troublesome to him when he did not want them, or tardy and useless
when he did. He had in his instinct alone everything requisite to live
in a state of nature; in his cultivated reason he has barely what is
necessary to live in a state of society.
http://www.online-literature.com/rou...-inequality/2/