The only one among his books which still attracts readers, and that simply because of its occasional flashes of passionate enthusiasm, is the famous _Du Divorce_, undoubtedly the most entertaining of them all.
It begins with a long jeremiad on the sad condition of the world since authority was overthrown. Modern philosophy, which originated in Greece, among that people who remained children to the end, and who ever sought wisdom by other paths than those of reason (_sic!_), began by atheistically or deistically (!) denying God. Now, Hume and Condillac, with their doctrine that all our knowledge is derived from the impressions of the senses, have turned man, who is "a reasonable being, served by his organs," into an animal pure and simple, an ordinary product of nature. The universal dissolving tendency has penetrated into family life, and instead of the old relation between parents and children--authority and submission--we have the spirit of revolt in the young hearts and ideas of equality in the young brains; the children regard themselves as the equals of their parents, actually permitting themselves to address them as "thou"; the parents, conscious of their own weakness, no longer dare to assert their authority, but try to become their children's "friends" or "confidants"--only too frequently their accomplices.
The enervated conception of life is imaged in an equally enervated conception of death. It has been proposed to preserve the ashes of the departed in glass or porcelain urns, and, horrible to relate! a mother has actually been permitted by the authorities to burn the corpse of her daughter in heathen fashion. There has been universal agitation for the abolition of capital punishment, that precious institution, _ce premier moyen de conservation de la société_, and in some countries it is already abolished. Governments have had attacks of "the sudden madness which goes by the name of philanthropy." The so-called natural sciences ("so-called" is amusing), which ought really to be styled the material sciences, because they treat of the material world alone, have ousted the higher, the intellectual sciences, beginning with that of metaphysics, so renowned in days of old. In poetry noble tragedy has had to make way for the light and humorous style. In fiction, which so clearly mirrors the spirit of an age, love used always to be sacrificed to duty. Now the reverse is the case; and it is Rousseau who has written the novel "which more than any other has misled the imagination and corrupted the hearts of women," namely, _La nouvelle Héloïse_. The principle of authority has been overthrown even in the art of gardening: "The rural uncultivatedness of the English garden has taken the place of the symmetrical splendour of the art of Le Nôtre."