As the continuation of the former paper on Rousseau, (Philosophy, ed. by Mita Philosophical Society, No. 56, 1970) I try to study here two letters in verse and a letter by J.-J. Rousseau written between 1740～1742, namely in his days in Lyon. In his Letter in Verse to Ch. Bordes, his friend then, his adversary later, Rousseau discusses the theme of poverty and wealth, and has no sympathy with the stoic notion that there are advantages in poverty and that the poor ought to be happy. Young Rousseau suggests that there is no wisdom where poverty rules. "Tant de pompeux discours sur l'heureuse indigence m'ont bien l'air d'etre nes du sein de l'abandance." In his Letter to F. J. Conzie, his friend in Chambery, Rousseau criticizes "An Essay on Man" by A. Pope, the representative English poet in the 18th Century. Rousseau attacks Pope's key concept that there is the chain of beings between Creator and creatures. Rousseau shows, however, his approval to Pope's words on human happiness that no man can not make happy life without virtue, but at the same time, no man can not make happy life with virtue alone. Rousseau regards virtue, health and the necessities of life as three components of human happiness, but in this period he has no exact and deep sense of the necessities of life. In his Letter in Verse to G. Parisot, a surgeon, young Rousseau confesses the continued anxiety caused by the world with which he would have to come to terms. He can not forget the ideal of an state which is made up of equal citizens, all shareing in the exercise of sovereign power. But before his eyes the very different pleasures of taste and all attractions of an opulent life in the big industrial city are paraded. He begins to reject the stoicism and semi-jansenistic rigidities of his moral view and his Genevan upbringing. " Longtemps de cette erreur la brillante chimere, seduisit mon esprit, roidit mon caractere " But in spite of the doubts and giddiness besetting him, he continues to form his own thought concerning real happiness, good society and good education.
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